I'm feeling very flattered as of late. Lots of people have been writing me to ask for advice on thier writing. I found this quote the other day, and it really caught me. Monet is right. The only way to learn how to write is to just do it. Take that pen and put down your thoughts on paper. I can't tell you how to do it, it's something that you'll just learn for yourself. I'm not adverse, however, to giving you some general tips!

WHAT TO WRITE

• Write whatever you want! This is your story... pretend you're god and the world is a big old Chess board!
  
• A good way to start off is to just write a page or two about what you're feeling... it tends to lead the imagination to rove, and maybe will help you come up with a plot.
  
• If this fails you think about something that you're really interested in. Maybe that thing will be Hanson, maybe that thing will be Llamas. When you're passionate about something it shows in your writing! This isn't a school paper, there's no assigned topic. Just write about whatever strikes your fancy.
  
• Still don't know what to write about? Think about your day... does anything exciting happen? Anything not exciting? Do you go to visit your grandmother? Do you hang out at the park? Do you go to school? What interesting things could happen there? Could Hanson show up to... oh, say... play at your Spring Fling Dance? Whether you know it or not, every minute of every life is a story waiting to happen!

HOW TO WRITE

• In one of my classes at school we recently read a book called The Big Sleep. It was pretty cool... one of those 40's detective mysteries. What really intregued me about it, however, was how the author had written it.  Instead of just sitting down and writing on regular old paper he would write on index cards.  The small size forced him to keep his work tight... this was not a man who rambled off on random tangents about nothing. Each of these bits of paper had to have an impressive scene on it, a big moment or some really choice dialogue.  These were the things that mattered to it's author (uh... Raymond something), and so he worked on them extensively. The oddest part? An interviewer once asked him something about the murderer in one of his books, and he couldn't remember who did it!  To him the plot was only secondary; the writing style and the flow of his prose were what really counted.  This is not something I think I'm ready to try, but it sure sounds pretty cool!
• There are those little technical things that I'm not so hot with myself. Semicolons? What are those? Spelling? Pshah. That's what spellcheck is for! It makes you look a lot smarter when you have them right, though. I don't want to share how a misplaced coma can ruin an entire sentence for me :(
  
• Show or Tell? This is the question. When you read a book what do you perfer? For the author to tell you, "oh, they were very in love," or for the author to write a beautiful scene in which the concerned characters have a sharing moment? Hmm... let me think! So if you can show something in a conversation, a look, or a touch, do it! Don't rely on summations all the time. My online bud jamiebball reminded me of every English teacher's favorite quote from Mark Twain: "Don't just say the old woman screamed, bring her out and let her scream!"
  
• Sometimes begining writers do something that people call "bed to bed stories." This is when you follow your character all day... She brushed her teeth, took a shower, put on her red jnco's. Remind me agian why I care? Every scene that you write should have a purpose! When you're writing a story (uh, most of the time) you should know where you want to go, or at least have a general idea. Does this scene you want to write tell the reader something they need to know? Does it help make your characters more understandable? Is it a scene used to further the plot? If the answer is no to any of these questions, why do you want to insert it?
  
• To avoid this I like to think of my scenes as snapshots; if you arrange snapshots in a certain way they can tell a story. Take the tree house scene in "Glint." Purpose: to show how Marissa and Taylor feel about each other. How I did it: Because the scene was shown through Marissa's eyes it's okay to talk about how she is feeling. She doesn't know, however, what Tay is feeling. So she can't tell you. Taylor has to do this himself, through his words and actions. The snapshot spanned only a small amount of time, an hour at the most, from when Marissa came out of the Hanson house to when she had to leave. If you want, however, the snapshot can be longer... like Ike and Clio's date in Just One Of Those Things; that scene took place over a whole evening.
  
• When you have a snapshot, or scene, finished, set it aside. You don't have to write scenes in the order which they happened, you can do them whenever you want. For example, right now I have three snapshots written up for Just One of Those Things. The scenes are as good as I can make them, they tell the reader something important about the plot and the characters, but they aren't attached to anything yet. They're just floating out in space, awaiting the time for which they will be needed!! I never write more than one scene on a peice of paper, that way I can move the snapshots around as much as I need to to make the most sense.

How to annoy this llama

Lately I have been seriously excited about a lot of the new fanfic out there.  I also have to admit, however, a good deal of dismay at a certain segment of them.  First thing's first: beginings.  Here are two:

1. Brianna is a pretty girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. Bri's best friend is pretty too.  Her name is Skye.  They live in Tulsa, just like that cool new band Hanson. Brianna (15) and Skye (14) would do anything for each other.  They look alike too... both are five feet two inches tall and like to wear clothes from Delila's.  (author's note: just like me! Only my eyes are green and I don't live in Tulsa... but I wish I did!)

2. Steph stood in front of the large auditorium filled with her classmates, shaking.  She couldn't believe this had happened, that she had actually won an award from the music department.  The smile on Mrs. Packard's face was so wide it seemed to destort her features, and made the generally hardly noticable lines around her sharp blue eyes seem to stand out more than usual.  "I'm so proud of you, Steph. I knew you could do it!" Mrs. Packard whispered in a conspirational tone, clutching Steph's sweaty hand in her own. "Your songs have always been amazing, those Hanson boys are going to be lucky to have 'twisted'!"

They say that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a first step, and I agree withever the heck "they" are.  So these two first steps... they're different, yes? Which would you rather read?  I know what would happen if I came across them, that's for sure. I'd read number one, sigh, mutter something along the lines of "oh goodie, just what the world needs. Another teenie." Then I'd close the page and forget about it for all time.  The second one would probably make me cringe a little, just out of personal bias. The stories based on the non-hanson characters being amazing musicians who end up touring with them tend to leave me cold, but this first paragraph would without a doubt get me to read on to the second. Why is that?  

Well, the author of the second paragraph (in this case, me. These little ditties were written for instructional purposes) is showing, not telling.  Number two is a scene, things are happening, characters are interacting. Number one is... well... nothing. There's nothing to visualize except these two pretty girls who are best freinds in Delia's clothes, floating in some wasteland of the mind. Where are they? What are they doing?  *Show* us that they're best friends, have them share a secret or take a risk. Don't just tell us they live in Tulsa, put them on a bus driving down its main road. Do something with them!  This is almost a feminist notion, when you get down to it.  One noted woman (whose name has totally slipped my mind) said: "I would like girls to be nouns rather than adjectives."  Here we go.  Bri and Sky are adjectives. They're things to be described, not people to know.  Keep that in mind.

Another iratible spot with me, and I beleive many writers, is the name issue. Cutsy names like "Skye" or "Brianna" are played out, at this point. Not all stories with Briannas in them are bad, and not all bad stories have Briannas in them.  But there's a corolation, I'm pretty sure.  This point is totally personal taste, though, and maybe you have an amazing story with the lead character bearing this name.

Some technical things can get annoying, too.  For example, pages that have funky backgrounds are almost always impossible to read (heehee.. check out my defense of fanfiction for proof of this fact!), and text that is gargantuan makes looking at it for long uncomfortable. I guess the font size on this page is probably pretty good -- it's big enough but not so big that you have to scroll down every five seconds.  Chapter length can be another problem.  Making each chapter an individual page is very cool, but when you have shorter chapters it can be annoying. Which is why I, for one, put more than one chapter per page. It spares y'all loading time.

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