C.A. Jacobs

Several years ago, I fully accepted that I am a tangible person. I like having proof that I accomplished something during my day, instead of just saying that I showed up to my life and did the same things everyone else does. This became a bigger source of frustration as I realized more and more that I really do want to spend my time being involved in books. I enjoy reading and I have a lot of stories that I want to share with the world. But if your goal is to make a living at writing, how do you prove to yourself every day that you actually went to work and accomplished something? Sure, it’s super easy during the days when you’re just working to crank out that first draft because then it’s all about producing and not necessarily about the product itself. Once you have that first draft in your hand, that’s when the real trouble starts.

So I started making lists. Not just a random selection of lists that would be stored on whatever napkin or piece of paper I happened to have nearby when I thought of something I needed to do, but a genuine and dedicated list. I went out and found a great spiral notebook on clearance and now that notebook is home to the ongoing “To Do” list that helps me make progress in all aspects of my life. As a writer, I can add things that are tangible to me, especially during the revision phase. During the first draft phase of writing, all I have to do is jot down something I need to look at later so that I can see that it’s something I’ll need to take care of, but I won’t have to stop my forward momentum in order to stop and fix that one section, which could then turn into problems for a different section. Instead, I put a line on the list that says, “insert appropriate wounds into Chapter 10” or “research mythological legends closer for more authentic back story during the trial in Chapter 6.” I even put in what books I’m reading and that way, I can put a check next to something I read and wrote a review about, which helps me prove that I did something useful with my day.

The spiral notebook that lives on my desk has many pages of lines with check boxes, since I started this notebook back on 28 February 2009. It’s kind of gratifying to be able to flip back that far and see how much I’ve accomplished. Some of the check boxes have marks in the box and a completed date at the end, and some whole pages have been crossed through with a single diagonal line which indicates that I have completed every task on that one page. There are still pages that have just that one unmarked line left that shows that I still haven’t shredded my old and unneeded CDs from September of 2009 or made a backup of one of my laptops that I intended to create in February of 2010, but the things marked off far outweigh those things I have not checked off.

It seems a bit weird, I suppose, to keep such a dedicated and thorough log of my life, but I truly do find that it’s helping me to make tremendous progress with keeping track of my life, as well as with improving my word count, revision capabilities, motivation to keep moving forward on so many ongoing projects, and generally just making sure I feel like I can prove that I did something worthwhile at the end of my day. Which now means that I can cross off “update blog for week of 09-13 April.”

Sometimes, my work environment forces me as a writer to look at a lot of the things that make us who we are. A person, just like a character in a novel or story, isn’t just hatched. We’re built by thousands of tiny details created through the course of our entire lives, most of which we’re probably not even aware exist.

I came in to work and two men were discussing their children, which is normal for just about any work environment. I was a bit tired and cranky, and I only came in at what appeared to be the last part of their conversation. They both have young children under the ages of 7 and both have at least one son and one daughter. They discussed how they wanted their children to participate in other activities, which I applaud, but one of them made the comment about how he would probably put his daughter into gymnastics and his son into martial arts. Being tired and cranky, I mentioned to him that he was being remarkably sexist. He replied with a comment about how it’s his choice what his kids do and I snapped back that maybe it ought to be their choice.

The whole conversation got me thinking about the little attitudes that we as a society perpetuate that only increase our behavior, and how you would have to take every small nuance of what makes us who we are into account when creating characters for stories. Character is in the details, the sense that you can build something major with a bunch of little parts. If you go to the ice rink in Minnesota, you’ll see most of the little boys wearing hockey skates and most of the little girls wearing figure skates. You walk down the toy isles in any retail stores and you find each aisle is themed, especially the dreaded “pink” aisle. Sometimes, there’s more than one pink isle, but these are the aisles I avoid because I’ve never been a fan of pink and also because it’s filled with society’s unrealistic expectations of the behavior we want our young daughters to emulate. But then there’s more of a “dark blue” isle where you’ll find the action figures, which are really just dolls designed for boys.

It’s probably a good idea for me to mention at this time that I don’t have any children, nor do I ever intend on having children. I brought up the conversation with the two guys I work with to another woman at work and I expressed my thoughts that it would probably be beneficial for young children, regardless of gender, to participate in both gymnastics and martial arts. Her response was that if you let your daughter do martial arts when she is little, that she’ll be more butch and she wanted her daughters to be princesses. I would think, given all that I know about the world around me, that you would want to prepare any and all of your children to actually deal with the real world as they grow up, not just be a victim of someone else’s whims.

It seems to me that by teaching our daughters to be princesses, we’re really just teaching them how to be attractive to other people, and how to be spoiled and entitled. The historic role of a princess is to look beautiful to attract the eye of a handsome, charming, dashing, and courageous prince so that the princess and prince can get married so she could bear him male heirs. And this is what we as a society are still instilling in our next generations. Instead of wanting our daughters to not wind up in a human trafficking ring, we are encouraging them to believe that if they are pretty enough, a nice man will come along, marry them, and they’ll never have to do anything again.

I write horror. The real world and the world of my stories is not a very nice place. I sometimes describe my job by saying that I have seen the best and worst that humanity has to offer – usually at the same time. I have seen men who treat everyone in their family as property and abuse them all, physically, emotionally, and mentally. I have seen true families in the same land with the same hardships love each other dearly and sacrifice everything, including their lives, to save their spouses and children. I would think that any advantage you could give to your children to provide them the physical skills, mental discipline, and moral courage would be sought after to give your children the best advantages.

I have to admit that I don’t really understand this behavior at all. I guess I was just remarkably lucky that my parents raised me to be me and have always been supportive of me no matter what kind of crazy stuff captured my interest. I think my parents worked hard to make sure that my brothers and I were allowed to follow our hearts instead of attempting to make us into a mold decided by them.

When creating characters for novels or other stories, we as writers must know every detail about how our characters were raised and how the unspoken details would affect their ability to function inside the society in the worlds we create. Most of the heroes and heroines in the stories I tend to read for enjoyment do not function well within the boundaries of societies such as ours, which is perhaps what makes them into the heroes of the story. Behavioral and societal disagreements are part of what creates interesting conflict in a story, but is frustrating when presented in our actual world. I would have hoped we would be beyond these perpetual behaviors by now, but that’s just not how the world really works. I guess that’s just another reason I’m a writer so that I can create different societies and then prove the faults of those as well, because no system is perfect.

The idea of any writer is to push their characters above and beyond their perceived ability to deal with the world they live in. When you’re doing character development on your characters, learning about them and their personalities, you try and find that one thing that your character would never do and then somehow find a way to force them to confront that situation. Can you push your character that far? Can you create a believable story where your character develops so much that when that moment of truth presents itself to them, after you’ve battered and abused them beyond the point of reason or sensibility, will the readers believe that they’re finally willing to do that one last thing that they would have never done before the story occurred?

I can think of several examples of this in some of the reoccurring series I read. David Weber’s Honor Harrington books started out with Honor Harrington’s first command and the character disavows politics only to find herself a key political figure as the series continues. She said early on that she would never like or understand politics, and yet she becomes a trusted political advisor. The transition is so gradual through the books, and Harrington’s character goes through so much that the progress is believable and a logical progression for her development. Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville series starts out with a very passive, follow-the-pack character who becomes the leader of her local pack through a series of events that forces her to push herself and do the right thing. When Norville finally becomes the pack leader and constantly gets put into a situation where she must defend her pack from enemies she doesn’t even understand, her character development has been so strong that you still see echoes of where she came from in a lot of her solutions to the problems that face her pack.

I believe that every genre faces this turning point for their characters. In romance, it could be the pivotal moment where the main characters finally realize they are perfect for each other. In horror, it’s the moment when the main character does exactly what the antagonist did first – that moment when she chops up the man who murdered her into tiny little pieces and feeds those pieces to her ex-boyfriend who watched the rape and did nothing. In young adult, it’s the moment when the main character realizes that all the bullies were wrong about them and that they are special and can do amazing things.

So what does it take to find out how much your character can take before you finally find that one extra step? In an earlier post, I spoke at length about how to make your characters suffer. It’s all about physical, emotional, and mental abuse. This is made much easier when you then exhaust your character. People who are exhausted make mistakes – sometimes big ones. It’s harder to think when you’re beyond exhausted. It’s harder to do simple things. It’s easier to hallucinate and create comic moments for your characters at entertaining times.

I’ve read a lot of books where unconsciousness becomes a lazy way for a lot of writers to do some sort of scene switch. One of the first drafts of my novel actually had my character getting beaten up fairly solidly on a regular basis, but she also then demonstrated the signs and symptoms of attempting to focus with massive head trauma. It’s harder than you’d think. Your cognitive functions slow and basic things that you know should make sense simply don’t. Your body doesn’t move the way you think it should. Exhaustion is somewhat similar.

So while you’re looking for ways to push your character to their breaking point, you might also consider exhaustion and how that will affect your character’s ability to make the correct decisions. Or perhaps what happens after your character has passed their breaking point and done that one thing they swore they would never do, and look at the exhaustion that would come after that pivotal moment in their life.

I posed the question: What are some of the potential economic ramifications of the U.S. Government passing a bill that does not pay U.S. military active duty retirement benefits after twenty years of service until the veteran reaches 65 years of age? To which, I received several comments about possible ramifications, including “Mandatory military service instead of the current system of voluntary service….”, “a military full of people who don’t give a shit because ‘what’s in it for me after all I’ve sacrificed?'”, and “as for economics sounds like a horrible downward spiral.”

The reason I asked this questions is to get writerly brains like mine thinking about world-building. You might ask what economics has to do with writing, especially something as sensitive as the pay of soldiers who volunteer their lives and their freedom in order to protect their country. Here are my thoughts on that.

Every writer, no matter the genre or the timeframe, must create entire societies. Even if you write romance, urban fantasy, horror, or stories that are based in the real world which we all live in, you still have to build a society for your characters to live in. Think about it – your lead female character in your romance novel has to have the ability to get food and fancy clothes from somewhere. Even if she’s the typical trapped damsel in distress, perhaps it’s her family that has the money, or she’s a prostitute and that’s how she earns her keep. Regardless of whether you can see it or not, money plays a part in her world. Either the abundance or the absence creates her world.

So now that you’ve got an idea of how money can affect small aspects of a character’s world, think about what kind of society you would start to build if you stopped paying or providing for the soldiers in your created world. I’m going to use the current U.S. economics situation as an example of how we, as writers, can use the world around us to improve our written worlds.

Towns and cities near military installations tend to be very financially stable, with a lot of room for growth. You’re more likely to find a plethora of different restaurants, electronics stores, car shops, and other places that cater to people who have a dedicated paycheck and want to spend their money on entertainment purposes. By creating stable sources of revenue for the local stores, the employees at the local stores can feel free to use their money to invest, provide for their families, and also invest in entertainment and a higher standard of living. This also increases construction and development throughout the area, as people will want to live there because there are jobs nearby.

So what happens if you take that away? All the construction goes away, the jobs fizzle, and go away. And I’ll leave you to ponder what that can do to the society and the character’s lives.