I tend to have a really hard time with titles, but I have yet to find a muse so I limp along on my own. I've been having a little better luck recently, with titles like these:

Don't Roll Your Eyes When You're Undercover (YA murder mystery)
Up, Down, and Strange (YA sci-fi)
Champagne Death Wishes (murder mystery)

I love titles. A title is what catches my eye when I'm browsing for books. Some of my favorites: Eating the Cheshire Cat, The Pleasure of My Company, The Disapparation of James, The Cheese Monkeys.

--Sarah

I have a bunch of stuff going at once right now. My YA murder mystery is the main one. Another YA that I guess could be construed as urban fantasy. At the risk of sounding derivative, it's kind of Harry Potter-meets-the-X-Men-and-Mulder-and-Scully. Another urban fantasy. What the heck? I didn't realize I wrote so much urban fantasy. I'm starting to lose track of what's what. I mostly write murder mysteries, but I like having something in a completely different genre on the side. And apparently that genre of choice is urban fantasy.

--Sarah

I don't think influence is something you should be afraid of. The only time it's a problem is if your work becomes derivative or plagiaristic. And if you're serious about writing, there should be enough people looking at your work (including you) to catch things like that. Influence is good. Influence is part of inspiration. I think if you push away what you love in order to write what you love, you're distancing yourself from it, and that's not good. If you're writing something close to what you're watching/reading, etc., you just need to have your antennae up and pay a bit closer attention to your writing.

--Sarah

To my mind, that just makes it a more interesting challenge. Protagonist of my current primary WiP is going to be a fun sell on that account, because he is a highly trained, highly motivated person, committed to making the world a genuinely better place, and vehemently anti-democratic; he reckons a feudal system just needs people to keep their word in order to work, whereas a democracy needs them to be wise as well, which seems less plausible to him.

But do flat and completely boring have to go along with not likable ?

No, that's just how it happened for me. It was just this whiny girl who never did anything except react. The fact that I didn't like her either certainly didn't help. I have another main character who is extremely abrasive, just grouchy and sarcastic and not very nice. I wouldn't want to spend a lot of time with her in real life, but she is oh so fun to write about.

[quote[
I mostly write murder mysteries, and when I read other murder mysteries, it drives me crazy when the writers tries to get inside the villain's head because most of the time they don't get it right.


In what sort of ways do you feel they get it wrong, then ?

[/quote]

Well, if a villain is a flat character, it's just not going to work to try getting inside their head. I think that's the case in Mary Higgins Clark mysteries (which I mostly like--don't get me wrong). She has this bad guy who is a very minor character and has little dimension or backstory, and then when she writes from that person's point of view, it's just cliche after cliche. I think if someone's going to spend the time writing the villain's point of view too, they should spend a little more time making that character three-dimensional enough to warrant his own point of view.

I've been trying to think of books written strictly from the villain's point of view, and I'm not coming up with much.  The ones I do think of, the villain could arguably be seen as the hero, such as Elphaba in Wicked, or Dexter in Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Yeah, it's the Wicked Witch of the West, but she's kind of the hero of her story. Same with Dexter.

I'd love to know if anyone has any examples of stories written from the villain's point of view. Undoubtedly someone will mention something totally obvious and I will feel stupid, but I can take it.

--Sarah

Nothing of mine has sprung directly from music, but I find it very helpful when I write. It blocks out other noise, and when I find something with a mix of fast and slow songs, intense and light, it's good background. I've taken to burning CDs for every novel, sort of like a soundtrack. Thinking about the kinds of music my characters would listen to, or the songs that might describe them, gets me a little deeper into their heads, and that's always a good thing.

--Sarah

Wow, lots of writers and wannabe writers hanging around here. (And I say "wannabe" in the nicest possible way.)

I am 28. I've known since I was 13 that I'd be a writer, but I didn't have a finished novel until I was 25. NaNoWriMo kicked my butt all over the place, but it's gotten me two finished novels and a huge chunk of a third. I started writing bad poetry in seventh grade. In college, two of my classes were poetry workshops--very scary, but I have a style now, thanks to them. After a couple of embarrassing longer stories in high school, I started churning out short stories in high school, but they are mostly crap. I'm better at novels.

I tend to write murder mysteries, not always by design. So many times I start writing, and then someone trips over a body, and it's all downhill from there. But I also write some sci-fi/fantasy, and really bad literary fiction. Right now, I'm working on a teen murder mystery, a sort of fantasy-literary hybrid, something that is a bit of a Doctor Who rip-off just for fun, and I'm running to finish a couple of short stories before a contest deadline rolls around. And somehow I have to find the time to edit, rewrite, and submit. Ha. I eat deadlines for breakfast, with bananas.

--Sarah