Backstories and world building

 Last night I wrote a character's backstory. It was interesting. I wrote a character who was around for hundreds of years prior to the start of the book. It's always important to write the backstory of characters. I'm planning to write another character's backstory today. Yesterday was an ally of my main character, today will be an ally of the antagonist. My goal is to make this second character into one that my readers can understand. The best villains are ones that you can truly see how they ended up the way they did. The ones you almost, almost want to root for. The ones who you can see truly human traits in. The ones that while being an antagonist they aren't just some random evil, they slowly ended up that way.

Having done the basic backstory for one of my "good" characters prior to this I'll have more world information to go off of. Since the character I did last night has been around so long, the glimpses of his world will help shape the past of this other character. While this second character is younger than the one I did last night he also has been around quite some time before the book starts. Oh the joys of working with non-human creatures. Long life-spans mean I can have a lot happen to them, or have them watch parts of history happen.

It's fun to create more and more of my world. I learn more about the world as I dive into the characters in it. Understanding them, writing their pasts, all of it helps shape and build the world I'm writing. It adds age to it, it adds more depth to it. I'm hoping to have a basic world timeline by the time I finish with these backstories. It'll help with writing the book itself if I know what happened in the world in the past. Especially when dealing with characters who to them it's not history, it's part of their own personal pasts. The main character is younger than most of my other characters.

I think that's all of my update and ramble today.

As always:

❥ Stay safe

Writing, school, and mental state update

Okay, so I've been really bad at posting updates. With school having started this month, I ended up writing really late at night and going straight to bed. Trying to stay on top of online classes, stay relatively sane, and write a novel is definitely an interesting juggling act.

School started up, and my mental health plummeted. I used my various hobbies to help build my mental state back up enough that I could write. Once I got to where I could write again, things got easier. As a creative, if I don't do something creative periodically, I tend to feel useless. It doesn't matter how busy I am, how much I've gotten done if I haven't put some time into my creative outlets, it feels like I've done nothing.

Part of what made my mental state become such that I couldn't write is the fact that I have what is called an adjustment disorder. Basically, it means that when there are many changes and adjustments in my life, my anxiety and depression get triggered. As long as I stay aware of it, I'm usually able to keep on top of it enough to reduce the negative effects.

Now for the writing update. I crossed the 10,000 word mark! I've also completed up through Chapter 5. I'm hoping to write Chapter 6 later today, but first, I need to do more planning. I usually do more planning at the start so that I don't run into this situation where I'm trying to figure out what comes next. Somehow I ended up writing in a more by-the-seat-of-my-pants style since I normally do a combination of both the planning and just going with it styles it's been interesting.

Something else I'm struggling with is making one of the villains come across as a good guy. It's easier to make a good guy seem like a villain than it is to make the villain seem good. I've got to make this character I know is bad news for my main character seem likable, trustworthy, and intriguing. It'll be even better if I can get this character to seem so good that the main character is romantically inclined to them would be even better. This kind of thing is going to take some planning. I have to make this person seem good enough that the character likes them, but I have to manage it in a way that while it'll surprise readers if they go back and reread, they'll see the hints I left.

Someone once told me that I'm really good at developing character relationships. That the romance, the development of character interactions, was my strong point. As this is something I love in the books I read, I'm not entirely surprised. What makes a book good to me is that the characters grow, change, and develop relationships with the characters around them. I hate when the book gives no foundation for a romance. I need to watch the characters grow together. The other frustrating thing for me is when a character falls madly in love in three days. I just want to yell at them. Lust happens that fast. Love does not. Not if your characters have any life experience at all. If they can't tell the difference between love and lust, they may think they are in love, but later they realize that it was nothing other than lust. When an author tries to pass lust off as love, I feel like I've been deprived of all the potential the story had.

Love is something that takes work. Lust happens quickly. Without lust, the relationship won't develop beyond friendship, but lust is not love. Love is a combination of friendship and lust. It is seeing your partners faults, knowing they aren't any more perfect that you are, and still caring, still wanting to spend time with them. Love is the perfect blend of the loyalty and compatibility of true friendship and the heat, chemistry, and fire that comes with lust.

This version of love is what I try to portray in my stories. No relationship is all sunshine and rainbows. No one can have a lasting relationship with someone with any depth to it and not fight occasionally. How those fights go and how quickly they are resolved or defused is what shows the love in the relationship. I don't want to portray a fairy-tale relationship that has no realism to it. The combination of fantasy and real struggles are what make fantasy novels great.