Halloween

Hey everyone!

As you know today is Halloween!
So in the spirit of this awesome holiday let's dress up in our witch, vampire or zombie costumes and write scary stories! :)

Alright, so writing a scary story actually isn't as easy as it sounds (I tried). People get scared a lot, some people get scared all the time. But there are different kinds of scaries (Yes I said scaries lol).

There is the scary feeling you get when you have a test.
Or the feeling you have just before the big drop on the rollercoaster.
Or the scary feeling of asking the person you've been crushing on for a date.

And then you have the haunting, terrifying, oh my god a ghost is haunting me while there is a vampire knocking on my window scary.

I'm actually pretty good at scaring myself and creeping myself out. For instance if I'm walking on a perfectly summer evening, all alone, I can really creep myself out by getting all paranoid and imaging people walking behind me or something stirring in the shadows...

If you actually do want to write a scary story (or just have something frightening happen in your novel) make a list of all the things that would scare you. It can be anything. Here are some of mine:

Creepy clowns.
Spiders.
Ghosts standing next to you while you're trying to sleep O.o
Manikins (they creep me out)

being trapped in a tiny room, with no way out, while the walls are closing in (yes I'm a bit claustrophobic)

Writing stuff like this down can help you think of things to happen in your story. But you should remember that things that scare you, don't scare everybody. For instance some people weirdly enough find manikins exceptionally ordinary. And they love clowns and their balloon animals.

But we can pretty much state that most people won't like ghosts or for instance being buried alive.

Anyway now that you've figured out some scary stuff it's time to make a story.

First of all the main character. It should be someone the audience can relate too. So make them a normal average person. If people can relate to the character they can actually see it happening to themselves--which makes the story all the more terrifying.

think of the setting. Make it something perfect for odd and scary stuff--but reasonable. For instance the main characters bedroom can be a perfect setting, or maybe a cinema. Again the reader will relate to it more than for instance a hidden tomb in the basement.

Now it's time for the scary stuff! There has to be a "villain", someone or something who will do the creepy stuff. It can be a ghost, or a person, zombie, vampire (Oh yes I totaly put that up there so I can post a Brad Pitt vampire pic haha) , werewolf, mummy, hypnotized-suddenly-creepy-killer-friend. etc. Think of how the villain gets to the main character and what he'll do. let the creeping out commence!

The important thing is to convey a feeling of primal fear. Of need to survive, a threat against your live or your very soul. Put scary feelings into the readers mind.

For instance my friend told me this terrifying story which took place in the kids bedroom (a place we can sympathise with) and he feeling for his dog under his bed .... only what was under his bed ... what he kept touching every time being reassured ... that wasn't his dog.

This was an amazing story and maybe I should tell it here... it was so creepy... I don't know yet. Anyway what made it so amazing was the comforting setting--our bedrooms. The place we sleep, are vulnerable yet always somehow feel safe. And the kid was comforted as well, being with his dog. But then all that comfort is taken away and replaced by pure fear--which makes it all the worse.

If you are actually going to tell scary stories tomorrow night, make sure the setting is right and make your voice low, like you don't want to be heard by anyone. Try to be creepy and conspiratory, like you are telling them an actual story that shouldn't be told. And raise your voice at all the right bits) Have fun!

haha ok I hope that actually made sense haha. I was going to write something else but then decided I wanted to do something Halloween-ish :)

So I hope you all have a wonderful halloween! Personally I'm not really doing anything special. I'm going shopping at day and then at night I'm gonna watch scary movies with my sisters, and eat candy and maybe tell some scary stories to freak them out hahaha.


What are you doing on halloween? What are you dressing up as? Please let me know in the comment! :)

(It occurred to me that some people may not know how to comment. You either press the tiny comment  thing below or you click on the title of this post, which will take you to a separate page where jus this post is on. Scroll down and you can comment :) Please do people I love reading them!) 


Happy Halloween! 


And Keep Writing!

Xx LordKiwii

Kiwi Time #5

Hi everyone!

How are you all?
I have been busy, busy, busy.
I'm really enjoying my year here in England so far. My host family is great and so is my EF sister (who I share rooms with).

Let me tell you a little bit about the school.
It's completely different from what I'm used too. First of all, you only have 3 to 4 subjects. Back home I had about 9 of them so that's a big change. Then it's not just one big building but separate buildings. The younger students have to wear uniforms (sixth form doesn't!) and we have our own common room, where only year 12 and 13 can come.

I choose only three subjects namely: Art, Design & English Literature.

Art has been great. I never took art at my old high school so it's a little demanding for me, but luckily I haven't sat still all those years and drew a lot in my own time (mostly places and characters from my story. Drawing a character, or details of a building, a scene, can help me describe it better. Does any of you do the same?).

Design isn't at all what I thought it would be. I thought it would be more like designing objects and maybe fashion and stuff like that. We are designing some things like chairs, but it's a lot more technical and we're working more with wood & metal, not fabrics. But it's still fun!

English Literature is great, of course! :) I'm pretty much taking A levels in subjects that I've never had before haha. We never really had literature as well (we had Dutch literature at our old school but not English). We're working on Much ado about nothing (my favorite Shakespeare play!), Measure for Measure and Wuthering Heights. I've read two of those books, only measure for measure is new to me, so I think I can handle it. (Yes I was a weird child who liked reading classical English books when I was about 14 lol)

I've also joined the gym and just came back from a morning session of body balance, all stretched and relaxed. Perfect for writing!

I'm still working on the rewriting of my first novel. It's hard and kinda boring work (I'm a first draft person). And I don't like chipping bits off, but I can't wait to see it finished! How is your writing going? Good I hope :)

OK I won't bore you for much longer.
It's just that I wanted to write something, but don't have many idea's at the moment for a post.

So please!! If you have any questions, things you don't really get about writing, problems, or maybe just something you understand but think I can make an interesting post about for others please leave a comment! I need your help guys because I'm temporarily out of ideas! :)

Well I'm going to write some more! I hope that all of you who have a week off for half term right now enjoy their holiday! And do lots and lots of writing!

Xx

LordKiwii

Show Don’t Tell

Hi everyone!

I’ve good good news: My computer is alive! Someone at school managed to fix it even though my pc is in Dutch, so I am amazed.
I’m settling into my life here at England and thought it was well time for me to post something new :) Sorry for the long wait guys.

So let’s talk about a piece of writing advice that you’ve probably all heard about, and which no one really agrees on: Show don’t tell.

By show don’t tell, is usually meant that the reader is supposed to experience the story through the characters thoughts and feelings; through the things they do and say. You’re supposed to “see” what is happening, instead of having the narrator (the writer) tell you what is going on by describing or summarizing.

Let me give you an example:

So with tell is meant that you for instance tell the readers how someone is feeling.

“Peter was feeling sad”.

With show you don’t have to tell the readers that Peter is sad, because they can come to that conclusion themselves by “seeing” how Peter acts:

“Peter curled up in the corner of the room. He was shaking uncontrollably and big tears rolled down his cheeks, soaking his shirt.”

Ok so I’m just making these up as I go along, but I think you can tell that Peter is either really sad (or scared out of his mind, but you would be able to make that out of the context).

The second sentence is more elaborated than simply “Peter was feeling sad” and can show us just how said he is, and tells us more about Peter himself. For instance if Peter is sad we know he likes to be alone—he goes to his room—and that he curls up in a corner so he feels more safe and secure. You can learn a lot more about the characters by showing the reader what is going on, because you’ll need the characters to show them.

In the words of Janet Evanovich: "Instead of stating a situation flat out, you want to let the reader discover what you're trying to say by watching a character in action and by listening to his dialogue. Showing brings your characters to life."

Don’t worry this doesn’t mean that it is not allowed, or frowned upon or completely terrible if you use telling in your stories. Some famous authors use mostly telling instead of showing. Like Jane Austen for instance. And in first person narrative you’ll always tend towards more showing than in third person narrative.

But personally I think that both showing and telling are important in any novel. You shouldn’t show everything to the reader. Some parts of the story just aren’t interesting or important enough to show. For instance: two guys are travelling to the mountain of snow. On the second day they encounter a terrifying wizard. They escape. All this is great to show the readers. But then they travel for three days more and absolutely nothing happens until nightfall of the last day. Then it’s alright to say: The next three days were exhausting but uneventful. We saw no trace of the wizard and the forest seemed peaceful and quiet. Still we hardly slept and couldn’t help glancing back every now and then. For the feeling of fear that the wizard would return was fresh in our hearts. It wasn’t until night fell and we made camp in the shadow of the mountain that we saw him again.
And now is the perfect time to switch back to showing, and show the reader how they met the wizard again, how they were feeling and what happened.

If you would show absolutely everything, you’d end up with a 500.000 word manuscript that is impossible to get through.

Showing is important to make the action scenes more vivid, to make the characters more real and to make the story come to life in your imagination. To make the story interesting and compelling. Telling is important to cut to the more exciting and important scenes. Telling is important to give the reader a breather from all the showing, and describing. It’s important for progress in the story. Plus, it makes the important scenes (that are shown) stand out in the text.

Basically I think you shouldn’t worry about it too much. If you’re not sure if you’re using the right balance between showing and telling, re-read your story a bit and see if there are pieces that are hard to read through or boring—why is that? Is it because you describe too much? Or is it because you tell everything?
If you feel like your character is too flat and you don’t really get to know him that much in the story, see if maybe you need to do a little more showing. Because showing, makes your character breathe magic and come to life.

I really hoped this helped you a bit. And thank you guys for sticking with me, it means a lot. Any questions, random comments and/or suggestions for new posts are very welcome!! You’d be helping me out!

Keep writing!

Xx LordKiwii

sorry!

Hi everyone!

Sorry for the lack of posts! But I'm adjusting to my new life in England. To top it off I have a virus on my laptop, so I can't use it at all.....
But a new post will be up soon about Showing not Telling.
questions & idea's about new blog posts are always welcome! :)
Thanks for waiting so long

Keep Writing,

Xx LordKiwii

Avatar the Last Airbender

(Sorry about the different fronts, blogspot is acting weird on me today :S Please ignore that! )


A few days back, I went to see Avatar the Last Airbender. I’ve been a big fan of the nickelodeon show ever since it first aired and I was really excited. Unfortunately the movie was disappointing—for several reasons.

Don’t worry I won’t spend the entire post whining everything I think is wrong about the movie, but I will list some of the things that irritated me and give you some advice on how to avoid them in your writing.

(There are some very minor spoilers ahead. If you don’t know the series and haven’t watched the movie yet, you might want to wait until after you’ve saw it!)

1. 1. Characters make the story.

One of the reasons why the movie was nothing like the series was because the whole light tone, the humor of the series, was nowhere to be found. I’m really wondering if the makers of the movie actually saw the original series. Of course they would change several aspects of the story to make it fit the movie—but to change entire characters?

Anyway, Sokka was all serious and was portrayed as this warrior, while in the series he’s silly and clumsy and the comical relief. If something gets too serious, Sokka will be there to do something funny, often at his own expense.
Aang was also this serious avatar, while in the series he’s just this cheerful child. And because he’s portrayed as a kid, just like the kids watching the show, it makes the burden of being the avatar and the things he has to go through even worse. All this was missing and it changed the story.

What I’m trying to say is that your characters are the most important thing in your story. If you take two identical story lines and change the main character from serious to cynical or funny you’ll have three completely different stories.

So try to find out as many character traits as you can about your characters. Do they fit with the way they act? Is there someone for comical relief? Does the story need that? Try to figure out of the characters serve the story or if they slow it down and ruin it a bit.

2. 2. Bad lines = bad acting.

I’m sure that the actors did their very best, but to be honest I thought their acting pretty much sucked most of the time. In my opinion that’s mostly because the lines just weren’t right. Writing a script is different than writing a book. Some lines that work on paper just don’t work when said out loud. Most lines and often reactions of the characters were just too unnatural in the movie.
This in turn made the actors say the lines without much emotion. They sounded empty and really, really played. More like you were watching a play than a movie. And movies should make you feel, if just for a moment, that what you’re watching is real.
In novels you can get away with a lot, but try to make the lines your characters say as realistic as possible. Try to say it out loud and see if it works or not. The reactions of characters are also very important.

It might serve you as a writer to have the main character immediately accept something terrible about her boyfriend, but it doesn’t mean that it’s realistic and your readers won’t believe it. Or won’t understand your main character (which is bad).

If your characters don’t act like most real people would, it’s hard to see them as “real” people.

3. 3. Show don’t tell.
I’m planning to do a more elaborate post about this, but for now I’ll tell you in short what I mean. One thing that bugged me (yes I’m really hating on this movie right now, sorry! I actually didn’t mind seeing it, but it could have been sooo much more better) was that they told you so many things about the story instead of showing. One part that comes to mind is when they went to the North Pole and met the princess. You heard Katara’s voice saying something like “Sokka and the princess became friends right away”. This probably had to explain to us why they were suddenly in love. Never tell like this! Show us that they are in love. In fact they did show in the movie. Telling it as well was really unnecessary and kind of ruined the moment.
You had “the look” between Yue and Sokka. Then you saw them together a lot. Sokka even wanted to be Yue’s bodyguard. We get it! We understand that they like each other (or at least that Sokka likes here, there would have been a slight suspension to see if Yue liked him too, if they hadn’t told us already).
I’ll tell more about showing and telling in another post!

4. 4. A story needs suspense.
And this movie had none what so ever. Which made it kind of boring to watch. I still liked watching because I’m a fan of the series, but if you don’t know it, then I wouldn’t be surprised if you fell asleep…
There was no suspension at all! The only real bad guy was commander Zhao and we never saw him do something more evil than taunting Zuko. (and that with the moon spirit but that was only at the end of the movie) We just had to accept that he was the bad guy. There was no suspense there.
Then you had Zuko, but the biggest threat about him is that he’s so strong headed that he’ll never give up on capturing the Avatar. And most of his evil-ness is taking away when we see him as the blue spirit.
The last thing that could have given the story a bit of suspense and danger was the battles. But again—disappointing. The bending was way too slow for it to be really dangerous. You saw an attack coming hours before it would hit. There was no danger. Plus it was more like a dance off with all those moves they had to do before the actual bending even begun.
In your story, suspense is one of the most important things. You need to keep secrets from your readers, you need to make it dangerous for your character. Make sure the stakes are high. Make your readers care about them, make them want to know for sure that your main character will be alright. Make them need to read on, because they want to find what happens next.
If you don’t you risk them putting your book away!

Well that was what I thought about Avatar the Last Airbender. There were also some small mistakes like using extra’s twice in a scene, looking the exact same like they did the first time, while in the story days have passed. And I couldn’t stand how they kept mispronouncing names of people and things, while they have the example of the series and how they pronounce it there.
The only good thing about the story was that though the bending wasn’t fast, it was pretty to watch. Plus the costumes and the sets were amazing, really breathtaking at times. Those guys really did their job well. The entire mood of the movie was well done and I really enjoyed watching that.

If you saw the movie, tell me what you think. Did you enjoy it? Perhaps I’m just way to analyzing whenever I watch a movie and none of this bothered you at all :-)
I hope this helped you with your stories a bit! Please comment and tell me what you think! Should I do more posts like this from time to time when I’ve watched a movie?

Oh one more thing! If you guys saw the movie what did you think of Iroh? He was nothing like the original, but I thought he was pretty cool!

Keep writing!

Xx LordKiwii

WriteOnCon

This is just a quick post to inform you that WriteOnCon has started!
I actually just learned of it today and I haven't gotten around to reading and watching a lot yet, but I'm definitely planning to.

WriteOnCon is basically this online children's writers conference where published writers and agents and perhaps even publishers (not sure) talk about writing and give advice on writing. It's really fun and very helpful for wribies like us. Even if you're not writing children's novels I still suggest you check it out.

It takes place from Tuesday (which is today) till Thursday. So August 10 till 12.

(2010 in case you were just abducted by aliens and would like to know. Ever wondered how to say that in Latin? Here it is: Hostes alienigeni me abduxerunt. Qui annus est?
Which roughly translates to: I was kidnapped by aliens. What year is it? Taken from the book "Latin for all occasions" which for some reason I have on my bookshelf)

Here is the schedule for the next days: http://writeoncon.com/about/schedule/

And here is the site: http://writeoncon.com/
And their Twitter page: http://twitter.com/WriteOnCon

Have fun & learn lots!

Keep writing!

Xx LordKiwii

Be Inspired

Hi everyone!

Because clearly I don't have enough to do, I started a second blog!
It's a bit more random and personal. It is called Be Inspired Today, and I'm planning to upload something every other day that inspires me.
It can be anything from a picture, to a painting or perhaps a quote. Anything.

The reason I made this blog is because I wanted to have a blog for you guys where I would post something nearly every day, instead of every week... or two weeks .... or ... well you get the idea.

Also, I have been having trouble finding inspiration for my story and I know I'm not the only one. So I hope that in a while I'll have a blog full of little quotes, stories and pictures where people can just browse and hopefully find what they are looking for.

It's not going to be centred about writing, but I will post a lot of things related or helpful to writing. Simply because I can't help it; I love writing.

So please take a second and visit it!

http://beinspired2day.blogspot.com/

If you like it feel welcome to follow (I feel so lonely with zero followers atm ) and leave me a comment telling me what you think! If you think I'm doing it all wrong, or if you have any criticism, that's always welcome as well! Or if you want to get inspired for something. Like getting back to school. Or writing a fantasy story. Or getting a story idea. Just let me know!

This was it. I hope you like my new blog as much as this one (or better). I won't be neglecting this one! Don't worry. Any requests and questions about writing are still very much welcome! Because I have no ideas yet what to write my next post about.

School's starting again soon. Everyone enjoy your last days of freedom!

Keep Writing

Xx LordKiwii