♦Welcome to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop!♦
Topic #175
Do you hide any secrets in your books that only a few people will find?
Welcome back to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop! If you’re new to the series, the authors included are grateful for your reads and appreciate, even more so, when you share our writings with your friends. If you’re new to the series, welcome aboard. The authors engage and impress weekly. Be prepared to become a regular reader.
The act of writing is about undressing secrets in an intricate striptease–whatever those secrets are—be they character details, social struggles, the author’s private thoughts, psychology, and drama. Write what you know is the adage of all creative writing classes. It’s a keystone. It causes authors to have to research topics that sound insane, because writing what you don’t know shows. So we look it up to maintain authenticity.
philm1310, Pixabay.com
Not all authors are hung up on researching, or valuing what information they do find, for many reasons, including that it upsets their beliefs (cognitive dissonance). If that works for their writing, they shouldn’t just go and upset the apple cart for the sake of some instructor in a cw class. As much as that pains me to say, because I value research and facts, an author is entitled to make their art by their own means. That’s a secret that is written into every book.
A writer cannot avoid writing themselves onto the page.
When you write what you know, a good portion of your life will end up on the page, even if it is unrecognizable in this new form. You’d have to know a person intimately to piece it back together. Often what happens is the details that reveal the author are scattered, like tossed pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Not everything is needed at every moment or in every character. The puzzle is shared across that tapestry, and in exciting ways.
The release of my book series, The Trailokya Trilogy, came with posts highlighting the many interesting details of the words contained in the pages. The thread running throughout is about the connection to my personal life, both what I have learned and experienced. There are details that I will discuss, and then there are others that I am reluctant to explore outside of what I put into the pages.
I urge readers to take a look at the books before asking me what are my secrets in the pages. If I told, the experience wouldn’t be as interesting, and the discovery not nearly so satisfying. Much of it, also, would lack context.
One secret I will leave you with is that the series exposes the experience of a domestic violence victim and how that abuse is ongoing through a lifetime, regardless of the abusers presence. It illustrates the leveraging of others to commit violence against a target. Toxic behavior is dragged into the light, but not before it unpacks the ways that society and individuals passively work to entrap victims.
The repercussions of abuse extend out for a lifetime. Survivors are never the same again.
Let’s hop on over to find out what secrets the other authors are revealing in their work…
https://fresh.inlinkz.com/p/2f4117f330f74779aa220a1ddf6669d1
As I write my mystery series, I keep finding myself referring to tidbits from earlier books. I hadn’t planned it that way, but as I keep finding more of my overall story arch, it makes sense. I don’t know if any but the most observant reader will notice, but I know it strengthens the story so it works for me1
Interesting, I guess there’s a little of me in my work, instead of travelling the world, my characters travel the worlds! They certainly have the same adventures that I either had or wish I had experienced.
Research on facts can be a lot of fun – right now, I’m reviewing how to fly a GA aircraft. I haven’t been right seat in a decade or more and so for believability in the scenes in my latest book, I need details that are just no longer in my foremost memories. A couple of books ago, it was a lot of research on corn – things I never knew before and will never need again, but my characters needed to know because they were dealing with a lot of corn.
Research on philosophy, history, economics, faith (just to name a few) — those go into my books too and they always challenge me to (sometimes) find characters who support differing viewpoints and (often) to accurately portray people who espouse those viewpoints without making caricatures based upon my or society’s bigotry of those viewpoints. And, then to make it seem as if I didn’t actually research it … that these are people just living their lives in the culture they inhabit.
I think the greatest expression of our art is when we create believable characters who embody certain ideals without seeming to be archetypes. Good writers can do that and they make it seem effortless, but it really isn’t.