I’ve always been thankful for that gift. Being able to write the history is almost as important as being able to write the story itself. Even if you never tell anyone else the history of a world they’re going to be getting a glimpse of, it’s allows the writer to keep the common things in mind.

To that end, one can even call it a laziness. If you’re a genre author, you may find it easier to write in one given world, galaxy, or even universe. One common history or scientific legacy instead of having to generate a new one constantly. How much or how little of the history, overall, that you share is decided upon by the motivations of the story.

However, that isn’t to say that this history is for your characters. The history itself is for the writer. There is a series of novels that I absolutely adore, written in batches over two decades. The story within the series covers thousands of years, and it was not written chronologically. In fact, it started off about 3/4 to the “end” of total series, then jumped back and forth in time.

Because of this, the history of the world being written about is not consistent. There are times when even personal histories are, by the end, completely different than what had been stated. That isn’t to say the series isn’t enjoyable, and there are actually in-novel reasons given for some of these “discrepancies”, however, it would have been a moot point if the author had simply written the history of the world before she put her characters in it.

Of course, you never know when the simple trilogy of novels you’re writing is going to turn into a successful series ten times that size or more! No one can predict how the market is going to take to your world. That’s not the point. It doesn’t matter if anyone else needs to know the information you’re writing down, or if your characters will ever be effected by it. It just helps make the world more real to you, and I’m sure you’ll find, like I do, having that history known makes it far easier to write about the present.

It’s amazing how often I’ve had the conversation with people regarding money of monthly versus yearly. The fact is, we see a big number and we get intimidated, but a small number is okay. It’s actually amazing how few people stop about how it all adds up in the end. I mean, picture that you have a coffee habit of $5 a day, and you might think that’s not all that bad. However, if I tell you to do the math and you realize that this amounts to $1,825 a year, it suddenly dawns on you. For that couple of cups a coffee you buy a day, saved up, you could go on a cruise.

It’s what I hear from my clients sometimes. They tell me that they’re moving their account or their web hosting to someone and they list how they’re going from yearly to monthly payments and how much more inexpensive it will be for them. Sometimes there is truly a savings. However usually there is not. There are cancellation and transfer fees, setup fees, and if they get a special introductory rate that would increase in a few months and are locked into a year contract at a higher rate thereafter, whatever initial savings they had are now gone.

Where this gets especially frustrating for me and for my clients are the web host clients that don’t realize that the quick response they get from us in times of technical problems is not what they are going to get from the “cheaper” company they are moving to. We serve local clients, we have a variety of specialists, we host our own servers on-site. Having used one of the “cheaper” web hosts for years, I can tell you that they you don’t get anywhere near as personal as a response from them, nor as quickly, if you get any response at all.

I’ve had someone tell me that the $14/month web host they were going to was cheaper than the yearly fee they were paying us. However, their yearly fee was actually $13 less a year than the plan they were going to. It wasn’t just bad math; it was fatal math. It was the math that gets us into all sorts of trouble in our daily lives because spreading out a payment makes it look so much smaller, so much safer, that we allow ourselves to be tricked by it.

However, there is a way to use this to your advantage as a writer. If you feel that the word count of a novel is daunting, break it down into smaller numbers. Break it down to words per chapter, per section, or per page. Break the novel itself into segments like short stories, if you find that easier. Use the way our brains are programmed to see smaller as better or easier. Even as you remove yourself from the logical fallacy regarding money, move it into the category of your writing, and you’ll find it helps your work get finished, and stave off that feeling like you’ll never get that work long enough.

I remember this one time I sought this one particular type of butterfly that had the most gorgeous blue colouring.

The colouring was only on the inside of the wings, though. I tried for a good hour to get into a position to snap a picture and by the time the camera was ready, it would have closed its wings or flown away. Frustrated, I took pictures of other butterflies until my memory cards were full and it was time to go. On the way out, that elusive butterfly landed right on the leg of my jeans and opened it wings wide. I actually had to get help to get it off because it would have stayed that way until I left had I not, but my camera was still unusable.

Call it irony or Murphy’s Law or what-have-you, but it’s a perfect example of the frustration of being an author. Sometimes, you can push and push for an idea to come, push and push for content and be left disappointed. Finally, when it is least convenient, the perfect moment comes, and you know that when you can capture it, it will only disappear again.

I imagine it is a lot easier for those writers who can live by their pen. Who don’t need to sleep a regular schedule or can spend all day drifting for story to story spreading their genius. Some of us aren’t that lucky. I’ll go so far as to say that most of us aren’t. It took a very long time, even, for me to realize you didn’t have to write a story chronologically, so it is possible that I just haven’t figured out how to capture my butterfly yet, and I one day will.

However, until that time comes, I’ll be wondering what flights of fancy I miss in the times my camera isn’t pointed at just the right spot at just the right time, yet marvel when it is.

Rain and thunder and storms. I’ve watched them all my life. When I moved as a child to a house surrounded by the fields of local farms, I could sit up in my room at night and watch the storms raging without the city’s short horizon blocking my view. Even ‘small’ storms seemed epic without buildings and streetlamps to hide them.

Beyond the inspiration of watching them, storms at night cleared the night air. No matter how humid the day was, or how humid the next day might be, a storm meant that the night air would be clear and crisp. The scents on the air were intoxicating, and the lightning seemed to power my creative juices.

There is something for me in that is so elemental in writing; by that I mean the classical elements of fire, air, water and earth. Be it the beauty and clarity of storms, or the driving fire, or the pounding surf, or the solid ground, there is just something about it all that gives a piece of strength to me. For all that, there is also the conundrum The of my current life. Everyone has a rhythm and my rhythm is that of a night owl.

My most creative self sparks at around 1:30 in the morning. Perhaps it was all that time I spent sitting up watching the storms that did it or the low fight I fought against insomnia through-out my teen years and into my mid-twenties. It just seems to me there is a stillness at night, even in a house with a tv on, that can never happen in the day. The day always seems so loud to me. It isn’t my neighbourhood or anything else like that. Maybe it’s some kind of “noise” that the day makes, I’m not sure.

However my life circumstances don’t allow me to stay up all night as I’d like, so I end up going to bed and just drifting off to sleep as my creative mind starts to come out to play. While it makes for very interesting dreams, sometimes it frustrates my inner writer into silence during the day. The life of a writer is ever a precarious balance, like the elements of a storm coming together.

No, truly!

Back on Friday with a discussion on world building!

In the novel “The Thorn Birds”, there is a very poignant section early on that deals with a lice infestation on a little girl and the loss of her hair. There are scenes in both the movie and novel “Flowers in the Attic” that also deal with the loss of long hair. All of these scenes are an example of this type of mysterious empathy I seem to have that I never actually looked into until just recently.

It’s the scene from the Thorn Birds that touched the most deeply; pulled on the memories and brought them back in a pang of shared experience. As a little girl, I had gorgeous, wavy, golden hair that from birth had rarely felt the bite of scissors, even for trims. By the age of five or six, it was down to my hips. While I found the daily routine of brushing annoying, especially since my hair was so thick and so wavy it tended to tangle very easily, my hair was my pride.

I remember the day very clearly when my mother got a call from an adult cousin who had been over earlier that day. She had gotten home only to find a louse on her daughters head. My mother checked my hair and found that I, too, had an infection of lice. This happened to be in summer, and I had been playing with a large family that had recently moved into the neighbourhood. My mother called them and confirmed their daughters had, just that day, been discovered to also have lice. My mother than forbade me from ever playing with that family again, despite that they were one of few set of young folk nearby.

What follows was less painful but equally as traumatic as the young girl goes through in the Thorn Birds as far as treatment. My mother, who, if my memory serves me correctly, was nearly in tears, cut my hair to make it easier to treat. It went from being at my hips to a little below my shoulders. I don’t know if I cried as hard as I remember or harder, but I know I cried. I might as well have been shaved completely bald for all the pain it cost me to have my hair cut “that short”.

Like me, young Meggie Cleary in the Thorn Birds had her hair cut short. Also like me, she found herself ostracized from the friendship of the girl she got the rather common childhood ailment from (albeit in a far more violent fashion). Perhaps it was that loss that makes that part of the novel one that gets me each time in the same place of dreadful empathy for the main character that I want to cry.

A walk through my neighbour is a walk through converging paradigms. It’s a neighbourhood that started during the end of WWII, and continued being built into the 1960s. The architectural styles change, from house to house, telling the stories of the owners and different times just in detail alone. However, that’s not the only conflicting story to be told.

I’m not trying to sound old or wise, nor cliché or trite, when I say that my town has changed. The whole world has “moved on” since I was my sons’ age. I’m not simply talking of technology, either. With a memory as clear as mine for how far back it goes, It amazes me some of the things I used to be able to do as a child that I can never imagine my son will share.

I grew up in a neighbourhoodon the other side of town quite like the one we live in now. Both are on quiet streets sandwiched between busy roads; one faces east, the other west. There is a corner store a few minutes walk away from each. In fact, even in the age and construction of the houses, both are very similar.

When I was a little girl, not much older than my eldest son (who is five years old), I would be sent on Saturday mornings to pick up milk at that corner store. I was given just a little more money than I would need, and told to spend the change on whatever I wanted as “payment” for doing this chore. Usually, it was just a quarter or two, sometimes it was as much as a dollar. I feel so old saying it, but back in those days, that could buy you a small bag filled of assorted candy, chips and a pop, or a couple of chocolate bars.

My parents never worried about me coming home safely. It was simply understood that I would be fine. It wasn’t a far walk, after all and it wasn’t as if we lived in a place like Toronto. Their thought was that ours was a small, safe town. Even back then, the town had something akin to 100,000 residents or so; nothing compared to Toronto or even Hamilton!

The opinion that our town, St. Catharines, was a safe haven from the dangers of the “big city” wouldn’t really change until I was in grade five, when we had technically moved away from it to be further into the country (about 15 or 20 minutes from where we had lived previously by the highway). However, that changed in the early 1990s when a couple were found living in our town that were serial killers. In fact, they killed a girl that was a family friend of my mom’s boss. Everyone’s reaction seemed to be the same; how did this happen so far from the “big city”?

I’ve heard people say that since our town became a “commute suburb” of Toronto (an hour and a half away), it’s gone steadily downhill. I don’t quite think that’s accurate, however. I think, more than likely, that a major crime took place in our area opened our eyes to the fact that we’re not immune from “big city” problems as we had supposed. Can it be said that more hard drugs, prostitution and homelessness are far greater now than they were when I was a little girl? Of course! Those statistics have been universally getting greater for decades; this place is really no different.

We just see it more now that our eyes were opened. When you hear things like “hometown, close-knit community torn apart by tragedy” you don’t understand how accurate that truly is. How safe we felt in our own homes changed. My parents still pale sometimes when we discuss the kind of freedom I had a child. Buses drive children to school from as close a kilometer away so they don’t have the danger of having to walk; none the less the two or three I used to walk to get to school! I don’t think the town ever truly recovered that innocence it had before all this happened.

That could, of course, be my childhood impressions. We’re talking about events almost two decades past. However, I don’t entirely think so. That’s not to say that I didn’t know my stranger danger lessons by heart! However, I remember being one of the few children during those lessons that ever took it seriously. I remember overhearing one angry parent after school ripping into the teacher for “scaring” her little girl; how these weren’t lessons that we needed to know in our safe, small community. In retrospect, we weren’t even in all that good a neighbourhood!

So this is the world I now know; a place once safe for kids to be shoved outside for free reign in their entire neighbourhood now tied down to their own backyards if they, like my sons, are lucky enough to have one. Yet that backyard is gated and secured, and even then, it’s hard for me to get over my engrained fear of something happening to them.

A walk around the neighbourhood with my sons is done with my youngest holding on to my hand firmly, and my eldest only a few feet in front of me, even in the quietest part of the area; strangers that look too long are eyed with suspicion. That’s the world I now know. I don’t think I–or they–are the better for it.

I was lost in my own mind, in my hall of windows, if you will, and simply streaming out of my fingertips what I had been seeing within them. At such times, what I was listening to or watching with my outside body had little meaning. It didn’t make any impact on the subject; quite the opposite.

Personally, I think the best time to write is when I keep my body occupied with something else so my mind is free to create. To see with my inner eyes clearly, I need to find them something else to look at. To hear with my inner ears, something to listen to. Sometimes, I’ve created entire stories by playing a repetitive puzzle game on the computer or a game system. I think that has to do with turning off all the parts of my mind other than the part that needs to channel the creative path.

Mini cassette players (and now, digital recorders) are a must for me. It allows me not to be concerned with my hands when the story is demanding all the attention and focus possible on the very simple act of creation. Those are the days when distraction of the outer self is most important, so that I can tap into that inner sanctum of imagination without distraction. My muse is a jealous creature; my existence in the outside world a travesty to her.

That is the place where time has no meaning. That is where the very best writing comes from. Within, the with-out distracted, my mind free to create.

Everyone has a motivation for what they do. The only difference between a “good guy” and a “bad guy” is what side of that motivation “line” they fall on. That is not to say that there are not truly and completely horrible people out there; truly evil ones. I do not play devil’s advocate for the sake of playing devil’s advocate to excuse the monsters of actual history for any reason. However, when I’m writing, I like to know what makes my “bad guys” tick.

What I like is having an antagonist that I can get behind. I want to be able to look at different perspectives. The best enemies are the ones that, when everything is taken from their side of the motivational line, have a perfectly legit reason for doing whatever they’re doing. It is not simply that they have an “evil laugh” or shifty eyes. The best is when they truly believe in what they’re doing, and if you were reading the novel from their perspective, you wouldn’t fault them for what they’re doing at all.

I have one character in my short fictions who is a knight for a deranged king. The king was driven insane by the grief of losing his only child. In his delusion, he believed that she was not dead, merely kidnapped, and the conspiracy to keep her away from him had roots everywhere. The knight is incredibly loyal to his king. He remembers when his king was a good man, and he believes that it his duty to try and help the king, do the king’s bidding, even if it means that he does some things that hurt others. He’s also a very religious man. At one point, he has to destroy a temple to convince a very devote and powerful priestess to come and try to heal the king. In his reasoning, he knows what he is doing is evil, yet this is his duty so he does it. It makes him such an interesting character to write the internal monologue and stream of consciousness for.

All such characters my candles in the dark. Just because they are the “bad guys” doesn’t necessarily make them “bad”. I find fiction far more interesting when there are complex gray tones instead of black and white. It’s what I try to achieve in my antagonists.