Which Comes First? The Character or The Plot

Some writers live to outline. They shudder at the thought of writing without the scaffolding. That would be, gasp, deadly.


Other writers love to live dangerously and write by the seat of their pants.


Each method works. And each comes with pros and cons. I’m curious though. How many writers come up with a detailed plot first, and how many focus on characterization before anything else?


For me, I’ll have an idea for a book and jot down notes. Maybe even the logline. I’ll then work on the characterization for the main characters (the protagonist and the key secondary characters). I have an extensive questionnaire, but I also work through a personalizing exercise described in Getting into Character: Seven Secrets A Novelist Can Learn From Actors by Brandilyn Collins. (Check out this post for more info)


It’s during this process that I come up with more ideas for my story. Then I organize my outline based on these. The end product might be different from what I’d first envisioned, but that’s okay. It still works with my logline and the story is way better than what I’d originally planned.

So for me, I definitely have to outline. But characterization comes mostly before plot. Of course, I still need to have some idea of the plot before I start; otherwise, the characters would be all over the place.


What about you? Do you outline? Do you figure out your characters first before the plot? Or do you just jump in and worry about your characters and plot as you write?

ps. This cool picture was created on Photoshop Elements. Now you know what I do when I'm procrastinating.

Spreading the Love

Check out the blog Shooting Stars. My friend Suzette Saxton and her sister, Bethany Wiggins, are hosting a contest. It’s a chance to get your first two pages critted by this wonderful (agented) duo.

Good luck to all who enter!

Tip # 63: Mirror Mirror On The Wall

If there’s water in the scene, see if there’s a way to make the most of it in your photo. Just watch out for the glare of the sun reflecting from it. Sometimes the effect is cool, sometimes not. Depends on the look you’re after.

Assignment: Locate a body of water (pond, lake) near where you live, and experiment by taking photos at different times of the day and under different conditions. A blue sky will give you different results compared to a cloudy or windy day. And the time of day will affect how much glare you’ll have to deal with. Remember to take notes of the conditions to keep with your pictures for further study.

And The Awards Go To . . .

Wow, I feel like I’m at the Academy Awards. And the blogging awards go to . . .

The Sugar Doll Award





First, I’d like to thank A.L. Sonnichsen for this beautiful award. To claim it, I have to tell you ten unusual and/or unexpected things about myself. So here goes:

1. My middle name is Louisa, after Louisa May Alcott. Even before I was born I was destined to be a YA writer. *grins*


2. I lived in Jyväskylä (central Finland) for a semester in grad school. The university there has one of the top sport research centres in the world.


3. I have a physical education degree but I’m a klutz when it comes to sports.


4. I’ve studied French, Spanish, and Finnish and suck at all of them. But hey, at least I tried.


5. I used to live not far from Jane Austen. Well, where she lived when she was alive.


6. Me and high heels are not a good mix.


7. I’m a chocoholic and proud of it.


8. I used to test the fitness level of elite athletes. And boy was it fun yelling at (motivating) them to keep going. Just give me pom-poms and I’m all set. (No pyramids, though).


9. I once wanted to be a historic romance writer, but then discovered YA novels. There was no turning back after that.


10. If there was a time in history I would love to visit, it would be the early to mid 1800’s. Especially if Mr. Darcy really did look like Colin Firth.

I also have to pass this award on to five other bloggers I’d love to know more about. So I’m passing this great honor on to the following (and believe me it was hard to choose since I want to know about so many of you):

Roni Griffin atFiction Groupie
Melissa at I Swim for Oceans
Keri Payton at Cinnamon Quill
Karen Denise at I’m Always Write
Kat O’Keeffe at Words, etc

The Sunshine Award

Steena Holmes from Chocolate Reality awarded me The Sunshine Award. In this case I was supposed to pass it onto twelve bloggers, but I ran out of steam after doing the previous one and the one from last week. So here are my nine choices.

Wendy Sparrow at Where Ladybugs Roar

C. Lee McKenzie at Write Game

Angela Ackerman at The Bookshelf Muse. You really have to check this one out. She’s like a living thesaurus, only better.

Nisa at Word Play Sword Play

Lisa And Laura Write . This dynamic duo makes me wish I had a sister instead of a brother.

Katie Salidas at My Immortal Stories

The girls at YA Highway

Susan R Mills at A Walk in My Shoes

Gretchen at Seanchai

Abby Annis

Rules to Accept the Awards:
Put the logo on your blog in your post.
Pass the award onto x bloggers.
Link the nominees within your post.
Let the nominees know they have received this award by commenting on their blogs.
Share the love and link to the person from whom you received this award.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Hail to the Query Ninja

Last week I volunteered to have Elana Johnson (aka the Query Ninja) from the Query Tracker Blog do some spectacular moves on my query. I’d bought her e-book FROM THE QUERY TO THE CALL (brilliant book by the way, especially with the examples) and wanted to take her up on her offer to crit the query.

This is the before version:

Ten months ago, Calleigh Clarkson was a star on the high school swim team. But after a fan assaulted her, she quit swimming. Unwilling to tell anyone the truth, she buried herself in her studies. Now it’s summer vacation. She wants to be the fun-loving girl she once was, the one her friends miss.

Great plan, except her nightmares are growing more intense and frequent. And now she’s experiencing flashbacks. So not part of the plan. Calleigh’s determined to deal with them on her own, before anyone figures out something’s wrong. Fail that, and her mom will drag her to a shrink. And that’s the last thing Calleigh wants.

Then she meets Aaron. He’s a former competitive swimmer, haunted by a secret. As a romance develops between them, Calleigh discovers Aaron’s sister committed suicide. She realizes that for them to heal, they both need to return to the sport they love. But before she can do that, Calleigh has to push past her fear, and find the courage to swim again. Only someone doesn’t want that to happen.

LOST IN A HEARTBEAT is a 76,000-word young adult contemporary novel, which will appeal to readers who enjoy books by Sarah Dessen and Sarah Ockler.

I’m not going to rehash her comments here, but do check them out on the QT blog. You can learn tons from them.

I love her examples in her e-book, and really wanted to make mine sparkle just as much. So after much thought—and rewriting—I came up with the following:

Seventeen-year-old Calleigh has a plan for summer vacation, and it totally doesn’t include burying herself under the truth of what happened ten months ago. Once a star on her high school swim team, Calleigh quit when a fan assaulted her. Now she wants to be the fun-loving girl she once was. The one her friends miss. Great plan, right? Too bad her nightmares are growing more intense and frequent, and now she’s experiencing flashbacks. So not part of the plan.

To top it off, her best friend’s seriously hinted this’ll be their summer for romance and guys. And gasp, she’s even lined up a guy for Calleigh. As a romance develops between Calleigh and Aaron, he tries to help her deal with the disturbing dreams while also trying to convince her to start swimming again. And geez, is he ever persistent. But when Calleigh discovers his sister committed suicide, she realizes that for them to heal, they so need to return to competitive swimming. Only thing is, Calleigh and Aaron’s sister are linked in a way she could never have imagined—a connection that could be deadly for Calleigh.

LOST IN A HEARTBEAT is a 76,000-word young adult contemporary novel. It will appeal to readers who enjoy the character-based stories of Sarah Dessen and Sarah Ockler, and also to those who love the romance and danger in PERFECT CHEMISTRY and the VAMPIRE ACADEMY series.

See the difference? As you can tell, voice played a big part in it. Plus the ending is way better. That part was driving me crazy. Elana’s book really helped me there. (There’s my not so subtle hint that you need to check out the book if you’re planning to write a query soon).

The best part is I’ve modified the query slightly (I don’t want the reader to know about Aaron’s sister just yet) and turned it into a blurb for the novel. That and the first three pages can be found under the tab MY BOOKS at the top this blog.

Thanks Elana for your help!

PS. my new query landed me my first request yesterday. Okay it helped that I did major rewrites on my voice in the novel, but Elana made sure it came out in my query.

More Fabulous Contests!

Psst. Have you heard? There’re some fabulous contests this week you definitely don’t want to miss. Trust me on this!

Check out Elana Johnson’s blog (aka the Query Ninja). Among the great prizes, you could win a query critique by one of five agents. How cool is that?

And watch for tomorrow’s blog (here) to see how she ninjafied my query last week on the QT blog.

And that’s not all! Check out Shelli Johannes-Wells’ blog for info on her contests this week. More amazing prizes! And in case you missed it, Monday’s clue was Start. But you’ll have to keep watching her blog to discover the rest of them.

You do need to follow both blogs to enter. But that shouldn’t be a problem ‘cause they’re seriously worth following.

Good luck to everyone who enters!

Tip # 62: Monochromatic Beauty

Just because the weather is blah doesn’t mean your photos have to be. Look for interesting textures to make up for the lack of color. In this picture, the removal of the snow from the street created cool patterns on the road, and the evergreens added additional texture. The result is a beautiful picture that you might not have otherwise expected.

The Happy Award!

Squeal! Last week Roni Griffin from Fiction Groupie gave me the Happy 101 award. So first, here are the ten things that make me happy:

1. My husband
2. My three adorable kids
3. Books, books, books (especially the YA kind)
4. Exercising (especially running)
5. Chocolate (especially dark chocolate)
6. Blog comments (I love checking my inbox because of them)
7. Research (I love learning new things)
8. My writer friends
9. Spring
10. Movie night with my family

And now I’m passing the award to blogs that make me happy.

1. Suzette Saxton & Bethany Wiggins at Shooting Stars
2. Elana Johnson
3. Steena Holmes at Chocolate Reality
4. Jenn Johansson
5. Abby Annis
6. Shelli at Market My Words
7. Chimera Critiques
8. Windy Aphayrath
9. Sarah at Confessions of the Un-published
10. The Musings of Christine Fonseca

I also received the Sunshine award, which I’ll pass on to some of my other favorite blogs next week.

Have a great weekend!

Body Part Workout

Two weeks ago, Kate Testerman (agent) posted on her blog about smirk and other words to avoid. Now the problem wasn’t so much the words, but how often they might show up in a manuscript. For example, I read one popular YA paranormal novel in which the main character or one of her friends rolled their eyes for a grand—and painful—total of between 100-200 times. Sometimes eye rolling occurred twice on the same page. Fortunately, for the next book in the series, the author found some other gesture to overuse.

It was really Jodi Meadow’s comment that got me thinking. She mentioned that some writers get obsessed with a particular action—say breathing—and use it way too many times in order to demonstrate emotion. Gulp. Guilty as charged. Since I have a background in physiology, especially cardiology, and spent eight years prompting cardiovascular drugs and ones for asthma, I have a bad habit of relying on anything to do with breathing and the heart when describing emotions.

After reading Jodi’s comments, I used the FIND function in Word to see how many times I’d abused the terms. I’m not going to tell you the exact numbers, but it was way beyond embarrassing. I then highlighted them using a different color for each body system I used. Determined to cut the number to something I could count on one hand (and I mean major cutting), I systemically went through the pages. Anything I thought was important, I kept. Anything I knew wasn’t a big deal was either cut or rewritten. I did this several times till I was able to negotiate my way down to my goal. And the best thing is, my writing’s much stronger for it.

So give it a try. Is there some word or phrase you think you might be abusing? Do what I did. You’ll be shocked at how many times you can remove the offending item and not even miss it. I promise.

Note: dramatization of Lost in a Heartbeat was brought to you by Wordle.

Another Great Contest!

Yes, it's time for yet another contest for writers who have finished writing either a YA or MG novel. Check out the fabulous Guide to Literary Agents for a chance to win a 10-25 page critique by Jennifer Laughran (Andrea Brown Literary Agency) and some other fantastic prizes.

To enter, you need a logline and the first 150-200 words of your completed manuscript. There’re some other requirements, so please check out the blog.

For help on writing your logline, check out this and this great advice from the Query Tracker blog.

Good luck!

PS. Photography tips will resume next week. I was super busy this weekend, so I didn't have a chance to write the post.

Voice Envy

Not long ago, I started sending out queries for Lost in a Heartbeat. I didn’t expect a lot of agents to jump on it since it deals with a tough issue. It really isn’t for everyone. Fortunately, among the form rejections were two personalized ones. The agents liked the concept (yay!), but my voice was an issue. Groan.

I also entered last month's Miss Snark’s First Victim Secret Agent Contest (see her blog for more info on future ones). The Secret Agent was intrigued with my first 250 words, but thought the voice was bland. Talk about a left hook to the ego. Luckily, one of my brilliant crit partners had also read the entries. She told me the ones that grabbed her attention were the ones written in a chick lit voice. She was envious because that wasn’t her natural voice—it was mine.

Now the thing is, I'm jealous of her voice. I also love the voices of Sarah Dessen, Alyson Noel, Lisa McMann, and Richelle Mead. The trouble is I love their voices so much I lost sight of my own. It wasn’t like I was trying to emulate them. Now that would have been a huge disaster. But my Voice Envy had seriously hurt me.

Finding your voice is tricky, especially when you’re a new writer. It’s so easy to want to write like someone else. But even when you’ve established your voice, it so easy to let Voice Envy sway you. Sometimes it works. And sometimes the results are disastrous—as I’ve proven.

For more information on finding your voice, check out the blogs of Mary Kole (agent with Andrea Brown Literary Agency), Elana Johnson (contributor of the Query Tracker Blog), and Christine Fonseca for their brilliant insight.

Has anyone else struggled to find and keep their voice? Or is there an author whose voice you envy? Just beware of that nasty old Voice Envy. You never know when it might strike.

So I’ve learned my lesson. I’m now storing my voice in a safe place so I don’t lose it next time. Somewhere safe from Voice Envy.

The Link Between Writing and Photography

Yesterday, Carolyn Kaufman (Query Tracker Blog) posted a great article on what writer’s could learn from photographers. Naturally, I started to think about other connections between the two disciplines.

Stories have themes. It’s the unifying thread that ties everything together. Great pictures have themes, too. Like in stories, sometimes they’re obvious, and sometimes they’re not. If you haven't already, figure out what theme you're going for when you take pictures. It doesn't have to be complex. Maybe just a word like friendship. And definitely make sure your stories have a theme.

And what about detail? I love doing close up photography. It’s the attention to detail that gets me excited. For example, in the above shot, I zoomed close to the plant so the only thing you see are the leaves and the rain drops. Those are the important details. Not the ground or my home. It’s the interaction between the two that'll stick in your mind. Same thing with writing. By focusing on the important details, relating to the setting or character, a more vivid image is painted in the reader’s mind. Specific is easily remembered. General is quickly forgotten. But like in the plant picture, keep the number of details presented at a time to a minimum so not to overwhelm your reader.

And then there’s perspective. Remember how changing the angle from which you take a photo gives you a completely different picture. Same deal with fiction. Maybe your story could be told from a different point of view than from what you’d originally envisioned. For example, Cinderella is told from her point of view. But what if you retold the story from the fairy godmother’s point of view? Or better yet, the fairy godmother’s really a teenage girl attending the Academy of Fairy Godmothers, and Cinderella’s her first class project. The story would be very different, right?

So there you go, some more things to dwell on as to how you can make your pictures and writing even better. And thanks, Carolyn, for inspiring this post.

Stay tune for tomorrow’s topic. I’ll be discussing that dreaded condition that writers fear—Voice Envy.

Tip # 61: Sneaky Effects

To me, there’re two types of photographers. There are those—like me—who prefer to spend their time before snapping a shot to make sure everything’s perfect. That’s when we’re at our creative best. We tend not to like wasting our time on Photoshop. But it’s during the post production work (editing) when the creativity of the second type of photographer really shines.

So how did I turn the sky purple? Simple. I held a transparent piece of colored plastic in front of my camera lens. True, the Photoshop loving photographer would be able to create all kinds all different effects on her computer. But to each her own.

So what kind of photographer are you?