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Keeping a writer’s journal

Having a place to store your notes and ideas is very important because no matter how many times you tell yourself you won’t forget something, there’s a very high chance you will. Your brain has to process and recall lots of information every day, many of it won’t be related to writing, this is why it’s only natural to forget things.

A writer’s journal gives you a fun and comfortable space to look back at and add more and more detail to along your writing journey. You should make your notes in a way that suits you, there’s no specific way it has to look. Make it a place you enjoy and something you’d like to do wherever you are – on trains, buses, in café’s, at home or work.

You might use:

A traditional notebook

Lined/plain paper collected and arranged in a file

Your phone, tablet/Ipad, laptop or computer

It doesn’t matter what you use as long as it’s whatever works best for you. If you use something portable and easy to carry around, take it with you wherever you go and jot down things that strike you as interesting, unusual, useful and anything else you may want to come back to later. If what you usually use isn’t portable, write your notes in your phone and copy them into your preferred journal later.

A writer’s journal or writer’s notebook can be used to collect facts, fictions, observations from everyday life and anything else you come up with.

Your notebook can become a testing ground for trying out ideas, phrases, short-stories and scenes, bits of dialogue – all with the freedom and knowledge that if things don’t work out no one sees these trial runs but you; it does not have to be perfect. Overtime you may come to realise your journal can form a kind of personal ‘running-commentary’ to yourself, on your thoughts about your own work.  

Keeping track of useful details:

Taking notes of the details of people’s appearances who you find interesting or recognise as a source of inspiration can become a habit that will help you with describing what your characters look like or coming up with new ideas for characters. You can jot down any interesting or unusual things you see or hear. The same can be done for places – writing down things you notice while you’re at the park, on the train or bus, in a house, a café, a museum, on the beach etc, will all help you write about them in your story.

Your journal might include:

General notes and sensory observations of the world around you

Things you have seen or heard, felt, or read – perhaps a passage of other people’s writing, or phrases that you admire

Words, synonyms and word-derivations that are new or interesting to you

Facts you may want to remember

Lines or phrases that you might use in your work

Images: postcards, pictures, photographs, mood boards that are in some way significant to you, perhaps because they conjure up a scene or story you might write about

Descriptions or sketches of characters and places you might wish to write about

Notes about periods in recent or distant history that you’re interested in

Ideas and plot lines that might be useful in the future, or that you are gathering for particular pieces of work

Anything you write down, even a single line, can be the foundation for a greater story.

Happy Writing!

Instagram: kim.always.writes

[kim-always-writes]

Gender of Characters

I’m part of a writing club and during one of our meetings we were discussing something I thought I’d share with you.

The topic was the Gender of Characters, specifically the gender of the main character/s.

My lovely writing teacher had analysed excerpts from stories we’d written outside of our club and WIPs we’d started during the meetings. She said some people were typically drawn to writing male while others wrote female characters. For my writing, she said she felt like I instinctively wrote male protagonists. 

At the time I wasn’t sure how accurate her analysis was, however after looking at my WIPs I’ve noticed most of my stories revolve around a male character and only a handful of ideas and WIPs were centred around a female protagonist. Of course there is nothing wrong with what gender you choose your main character to have. I do understand there are other genders people/characters can identify as but this was the focus of the discussion and it’s what I have first-hand experience writing about. 

You might be wondering what the point of the discussion was. Well, our characters are one of the key building blocks of our stories. Their gender is something we choose during character building, this might not seem like an important step for some. But in our discussion we delved deeper into how our characters gender can influence their development, redemption, backstory, mannerisms, voice, actions and even the story’s plot and side characters. 

Even if you don’t realise it, subconsciously you may try to portray a character in a certain way due to their gender. While some writers might choose to portray them differently to how society typically views/viewed them to act, for example, the male protagonist isn’t always strong and shows his emotions openly without trying to hide it. 

During the meeting we looked at an extract from a story. Any pronouns or indicating words were crossed out. Without trying to find it online I would like you to read it and based on the text, choose whether you think the character is male or female. 

XXX heart pounded away when XXX was back in the hall and XXX hands trembled so obviously that XXX hastily hid them behind XXX back. At first XXX was tormented by shame and XXX feared everyone knew XXX had just been embraced and kissed... But when XXX had convinced XXX that everyone was dancing and gossiping just as before, XXX gave XXX up to a totally different kind of sensation, one that XXX had never experienced before in XXX life. Something strange was happening to XXX. On XXX left cheek there was a faint, pleasant, cold, tingling sensation; the more XXX rubbed the spot the stronger the tingling became.

When I first read this, I was stuck at a crossroads, on one hand I believed the character was female due to the way they acted, on the other hand I felt the author may have tried to portray a male character differently. In the end we had to choose one and I went with what I’d instinctively thought was being portrayed, a female character. 

I’m sure you’ve made your guess by now. This extract is from a short story called The Kiss by Anton Chekhov and the character is a man called Ryabovitch. This portrayal was interesting for us because when we discussed it, we had to make an assumption of the characters age, personality and appearance before the gender was revealed.

When you first begin to write you might not think every part of the story is important, this idea changes as you read, write and analyse stories, you’ll soon find that the words, phrases and sentence structure can change the image readers have in their head of the character, scene or overall story. From this short extract the reader can create their own idea of Ryabovitch’s personality, character and even appearance. It was an interesting portrayal because Chekhov had shown the character to have a different reaction to the situation than what’s usually seen by male characters in media.

I thought it was a female character because of how flustered they seemed after a kiss and how they felt “shame” and only took the time to think about the way they felt when they were sure no one else was watching. This is often how I’ve seen female characters shown in movies, series and books. They’re usually the one that’s shown to be flustered, blushing and even embarrassed after an encounter like this. Historically women were told to “save themselves” for their husbands and not talk about intimate encounters. Whereas men aren’t shown to blush and “freak out” often over something like a kiss, in fact they’re shown to boast to their friends, not hide what happened.

The stereotypes attached to gender because of society and different media changes the way we may show our characters. I would like to emphasis that there is nothing wrong with being/having a character that acts the way they are socially expected to. 

This was a topic I’d never really given much thought to. But after looking through my work I realised I drifted towards writing male characters. At first I didn’t know why this was, I felt as a female writer I should’ve found writing female protagonists easier and wrote about them more. When asked why I might stick towards writing male characters more, I realised it was influenced by the media I consumed. Many of the shows or books I’ve seen/read growing up and still to this day, were centred around a male character/s, their development and story. 

The choices you make during the character building stage are all very important, especially things that are considered the base of creating a character like gender, race, appearance etc. They will all impact how you write or describe your character throughout the story. 

I think going through all your stories every once in a while and analysing your own writing can be very beneficial, especially for those who still don’t know their writing style that well. Also, comparing your work to the work of other authors can be hard, but you might actually learn a lot more than you think if you see the differences and similarities in how different writers show their characters. This discussion helped me notice a process I had when choosing a character’s gender. Sometimes I get ideas for stories or poems by listening to music or daydreaming/dreaming.

These ideas sometimes come with the character’s gender already decided. For the ideas were the gender isn’t something I’ve already thought of when coming up with the idea, I look at the genre and the direction I want the story to go in. For example when writing crime, detective, thriller or horror stories I tend to have a female protagonist and for dystopian or action stories I usually have a male protagonist. Sometimes I think from a gender neutral perspective without a clear image of what the character looks like or who they are. I decide on the gender when I work through the climax point of the story or the emotional, tense and fight scenes (if there are any). I might even look at the antagonist, how I would want to portray them, would I want them to have the same or different gender to the protagonist, things like that. 

To summarise, the gender of your character might not seem as important at first glance, it might even be something you haven’t thought of in depth before, but it’s one of the bases to creating a character and a building block of your story, as well as something that draws readers to your book. It influences how you show your character in different scenes, the way they develop throughout the duration of your story and the direction you want their arcs to go in. Gender of a character can influence their appearance, actions, mannerisms, goals, voice, tone, personality and so much more. 

Take some time to go through your own works, and ask if you tend to stick to writing male or female characters. Do you know why this is? And does your choice influence the way you write about your character’s personality, their emotions, actions and appearance? Does this choice effect the plot of the story and the direction it goes in? If you were to write your story but with a protagonist of the opposite gender, would anything change? And does it influence the choices you make when creating the antagonist or side characters?

Happy Writing!

Instagram: kim.always.writes