Five personal fiction writing questions

Q&A With Shay Each Sunday

This week I have a brief answer series of random questions related to fiction writing. These don’t necessarily require long enough answers for a whole blog post on their own, and all of these pertain to my personal fiction writing habits (methods?).

Q: When you develop characters do you already know who they are before you begin writing or do you let them develop as you go?

A: I have a clearer understanding of who my characters are before I start writing now versus when I was writing a few years ago. I start with an idea of the type of person they are, but I definitely don’t know everything about them yet, and then I work on making them a full three-dimensional character rather than a “type” of a character. It takes a few drafts and lots of editing to really nail down what they would do in every situation and how they would interact with other characters, but it’s usually there at least somewhat from the start. One thing I do now that I didn’t do when I started writing fiction many years ago is to make sure the character has unique quirks or habits so they are fully real from the start even if not fully imagined yet.

Q: Do you base characters on yourself?

A: Yes and no. I am in all of my characters to an extent because they are part of me. I never write them with the intention of creating myself, though. In my upcoming YA novel Fractured, I had initially based the secondary character on parts of myself, though she wasn’t meant to be me fully. We share a lot of similarities, but it helped that she wasn’t supposed to be me and act in all the ways I would act because I think that would have made her much more difficult to write and put more confines on creating her. I’m running into this problem right now in my “current” (used loosely) work in progress because I feel like the characters I have created are too close to the truth and I’m unable to tell who exactly they should be and where the story is going at the moment. So, basing a character fully on myself or anyone else would make writing them much more difficult.

Q: How do you come up with names for your characters?

A: I never used to put much thought into character names, but I do much more now. I still don’t give a ton of attention to secondary character names, but the main 2-3 characters now have more meaning behind their names. In my first book I didn’t look up what any of the character names meant when I chose them, I kind of just typed them out when I started writing the first scene, so I guess it was the first name that popped into my head. I may go back and change those names since that book still hasn’t been published. For, Fractured, I started giving more thought to names, but I still didn’t look them up until later drafts—and even changed a few names. I just knew from the start that the main character was going to be Mason, intuitively, and it remained a very suiting name for him through all the drafts. I changed the secondary character’s name to fit who she was as a person, and the overall theme. I now look up names to some extent when choosing them, whether it be to fit personality traits, messages, or even for irony (which is why I chose the main character’s name in my “current” very early stages work in progress).

Q: How do you choose a setting?

A: Setting tends to be a little difficult for me sometimes because even though I have travelled to many places I haven’t lived in a ton of places that I’d want to use as the setting for a book. I basically always end up setting my stories by the ocean. I only realized recently that I do this, but every single story I’ve written from starting out until now has been by the water and I guess it’s because that’s so familiar to me, even when I didn’t live nearby I always connected to the ocean in a big way having grown up there. I set the first book I wrote in California and as the title Crashing Waves would suggest the ocean is a big part of it, but I haven’t really spent much time in California. The town is fictional and everything but I feel I need more of an understanding about the general location to be able to write the setting properly. So, Fractured is set on Long Island, not in the town where I grew up but in a town I’m very familiar with. And my “current” book is also set on Long Island, but the opposite end, more near where I’m from.

Basically, setting is difficult for me because I feel like I need to have a very full picture of the place and that’s hard without having spent tons of time there. So, I tend to choose setting that I know, unless it’s entirely made up.

Q: How long does it take you to write a book?

A: Forever, because I put it aside SO often and keep picking it back up to edit even when I’m supposedly finished. I want to try to aim for more set deadlines in the future, but I also feel like that’s a lot of added pressure because I like to perfect things and think through as many possible angles as I can and that takes time, sitting and analyzing. Depending on how much I actually write while I’m drafting I can usually get a first draft out in a few months, but a lot has changed in the amount of time I dedicate to my writing during the day. I write really fast in a stream of consciousness way, but I know that I’ll go back and end up cutting most of what I’ve written because I have to get it out of the way to figure out where the story is going. And knowing this can make the first drafts feel daunting to start at all, which is another part of being a writer to struggle through. I wish the ideas came clearly and fully formed—I’m sure we all do!