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My friends are, generally, nice people, but they do laugh at one particular handicap I have.

I can’t for the life of me describe anything to do with fashion.

For a teenage girl it was fairly crippling. “Elizabeth, what are you wearing to Cotillion?”

I’d pause. “It’s blue.”

You can imagine the tittering that followed. :)

When my bridesmaids asked me what types of dresses they’d be wearing, I said, “They’re pretty inexpensive. They’re sundresses.”

It wasn’t what they’d asked. I did notice that when they were describing their own Cotillion dresses or wedding gowns or bridesmaids dresses, they’d use terms like “tea length,” and “V-neck” and “tulle.”

I don’t care much about fashion, and it’s pretty obvious. :)

I’m not writing catalog copy (thank goodness), but I am writing books that women will read. And I know many women like at least some sort of an idea what characters are wearing. Plus, clothing can be an indicator as to a person’s profession or give some insights into them as a character (I’m wincing wondering what my clothes say about me…).

So I’ve spent a good deal of time reading ad copy and catalog copy for clothing companies.

I’ve also gone to paint store sites to read their descriptions of color and texture.

I’ve visited curtain manufacturer websites, oriental rug websites…you name it. I’ve tried to get a feel for descriptive language from people who use it to sell products.

There are also sites like The Bookshelf Muse which help connect writers with descriptive terms for colors and textures.

The important thing, I think, is knowing where our writing weaknesses lie. Because there are so many ways we can learn how to overcome them.

Got any writing weaknesses? How are you addressing them?

I’ve noticed in the past that my mood influences my writing.

It’s been a really busy last few days, as I mentioned yesterday. I’m trying to take things a little slower now and plan some of my day ahead of time.

But it’s still busy. And that, unfortunately, makes me cranky. I don’t really like to be busy. But busy is a way of life for me.

I noticed my crankiness coming through a character a couple of days ago. The scene involved a neighbor’s visit and was intended to be a springboard to set up a murder.

My protagonist, though, didn’t want to be visited. She wanted to be very still and drink herbal tea. She was decidedly grouchy when she answered the door and ungracious during the course of the visit. And she wasn’t supposed to be!

I stopped writing the scene and worked on another part of the book—a section where there was real tension in the room and the characters were all angry with each other.

I could write tension and conflict perfectly. :)

Some books I’ve written straight through from start to finish. If I run into a block, though, or if the writing gets too close to me (because I don’t write myself into books) , it’s better to just open another Word document, save it under a scene description, and write the scene I’m in the mood to write.

Fortunately, most books have as many different types of scenes as there are moods.

Sometimes I’m in a really peppy, lighthearted mood and comedy comes easily to me. If I’ve got excessive amounts of energy, then I’ll write an action scene. If I’m not feeling particularly creative, I’ll revise a book (I usually have a book I’m revising and one that I’m writing.)

My muse and I have never been on speaking terms. Luckily, I can work around her.

Do you write out of order sometimes? Do you ever feel your mood leaking into your writing?

Life is usually pretty fast-paced here.  Recently, it’s been faster-paced than usual.

Today is the first day of school for my children.  The last week has been a blur of preparations for school, celebrating a family birthday, and other activities.  One of my babies is going to high school today…and I really don’t know where the time has gone.

On Tuesday, there was an earthquake in Virginia.  The tremors were felt as far away as Georgia. 

My dad felt them in South Carolina.  “I was reading on the porch,” he said.  “I felt them for about ten seconds.”

I’d been driving at the time, focused on the task so that I could check something else off my list to get to another thing on my list…and then another.

Several other people asked me if I’d felt anything.  I think, on Tuesday,  the ground would have had to have opened and swallowed me up  before I noticed.  No, I didn’t notice an earthquake. If I felt anything, I probably just attributed it to uneven pavement under the car.

But if I’d been reading on a quiet porch in South Carolina?  Sure. I’d have felt them then.

This makes me think that I need to give myself a little more breathing room each day to just observe. 

Whenever I’m not running frantically, I’ve noticed that I get more ideas for my writing.  I might get a character idea or a bit of description, or a plot twist.  It might even be something big, like an idea for a series.

Although I don’t see life getting any quieter in the next couple of weeks (the opposite is true, actually), I think I’m going to get up earlier to get prepared for it all so that maybe I can fit in my breathing space between it all.  I usually get up at 5—I think I’m going to make it more like 4:30. And maybe do more list-making the night before I turn in.  That way I won’t be playing catch-up each day.

How do you fit some quiet time into your day?  All ideas welcome. :)

I was at a local amusement park with my children last weekend and was put in an uncomfortable situation a couple of times in a row.

We were in the water park when a family took it upon themselves to have a humongous, awful argument about five feet away from me. They were calling each other names (the children as well as the adults), being passive aggressive, being openly aggressive, and being overall very loud. The dad was a bully, the mom was shrill, the teenage son was accusatory. I tried to escape.

Shortly after that, a large lady in an inner tube floated up to me in the shallow area and stayed right there next to me, less than a foot away. I’ll admit to having some personal space issues, but I think even someone who doesn’t would think that was a little close when the rest of the shallow area had no one in it at all. (The arguing family had moved on to another section of the pool.)

It all made me think about creating discomfort in our books.

Putting our characters in uncomfortable situations can be a way to create humor. It’s fun to put a character in an uncomfortable situation and see what happens. My character, Myrtle, gave a disastrous dinner party and she was so serious about trying to make everything perfect. When it all backfired on her, it made the scene funny.

By making our protagonist feel uncomfortable, we can pull our reader into the tension that she’s feeling. This will evoke sympathy for our character.

This discomfort can be used as a way to keep readers turning pages….readers want our friendly protagonist to get out of the situation she’s in.

Lend a sense of realism to a scene. We’ve all been in situations where we feel uncomfortable. Readers can relate to it.

Do you like making your characters uncomfortable? How have you done it in the past?

I usually have a good time naming characters, but I’ll admit that sometimes I have to go back and change names later. Or add them.

My editor for the quilting mysteries called me a couple of weeks ago. “Does your victim have a last name?” she asked.

I blinked. Did she? I told my editor I’d email her, then went through the manuscript, searching for it. Nope, she sure didn’t. The victim didn’t really need one at the time, but my editor needed a last name for the back cover copy. Oddly enough, I did have a last name in my brainstorming notes but it hadn’t come into play in the book…I guess I just used it to set the character in my brain when I was drafting.

This kind of last-minute change or addition of names has happened to me before.

One book I submitted needed a character name change in the 11th hour—the name was already taken by a real person…an actual author at another publishing house. We didn’t want to step on any toes or make it look like I had a vendetta against that poor author (I didn’t even know them, but it would have looked bad.)

Here are some things I’ve learned about naming:

Not everyone should be named. Bit characters can usually just remain unnamed and just tagged.

We should avoid naming characters names that start with the same letter. I’m editing a book I wrote a long time ago and I’m amazed that I have 3 characters whose names start with B. Really? I’m changing them.

Sometimes character names alone aren’t enough to place a character with a reader. A short reminder of who the character is when they come back onstage might be a good idea (especially if they have a smaller role). It’s helpful to have a ‘Jenny hopped in the car, still wearing her scrubs from work.’ Really, you don’t even have to be that vague with the reminders: sometimes a ‘Jenny, Cameron’s sister, got in the car’ is fine to slip in. I think this is becoming even more important with ereaders, since it’s a bit more of a pain to type in a name to search for it, instead of just flipping (or it is to me, anyway.)

Using nicknames as well as regular names can be tricky unless we make it clear or we’re fairly consistent with the nicknames (one character uses it all the time to refer to another character, etc.)

I try to find appropriate names for my characters. Right or wrong, there’s definitely baggage that comes along with certain names. If I were going to write a beauty queen, I probably wouldn’t choose the name ‘Gertrude’ unless I was trying to be funny. Trudy, though, might work out well. I wouldn’t name my intellectual Biff…again, unless I was trying to make a point. It would be too much work to try to undo the readers’ quick leap to stereotype.

Every book I seem to change a character name at least once. After eight chapters, they may not be the same person I thought they were in chapter two. By chapter eighteen, they might have changed again.

Do you enjoy naming characters? Do you always stick with a character name or have you changed them in the past?