Blog Post #3: Get to Know Me (Part III)

Oh boy, I knew I’d be bad at this. Let’s hope I can improve with the new year.

When the writing began, and the creations starting flowing, I remembered a piece of advice from a fellow writer of non-historical fiction. A piece of advice that helped with the flow of what would become Ashes of Ruin. “When forming an outline, never use ‘and then.’ Instead, use ‘because of,’ and write your storyline that way. If you follow that, the stories won’t sound like events that happen in occurrence with one another, but because of them.” It’s still one of the best pieces of advice I remember getting. So I started writing the outline and what I wanted to see happen. I wrote down my A to Z plan, and found that I was writing the outline backward. But even further, I found that I was writing a story that linked itself instead of having to create transition material to get from A to Z.

And since the story was to be cathartic for me, I didn’t focus on what was selling on the market at the time. I wanted to write my story, and if I followed what others were doing, it wouldn’t be true to myself. Surprisingly, I found that the more I hand wrote the story, the more I found a change in my writing style. Because the hand writing version of the story was helping me, I would only input any of it onto type until I was at least ten chapters ahead. By the time I put Chapter One onto a word processor, I found things I wanted to change, discussions that I needed to expand, and more. To this day, there are moments when I have to hand write a scene when I’m not sure how I need it to go. And in this process, I found something.

The narcissist who found power within themselves to continue their abuse toward me, even though I was slowly starting to heal in therapy, had deeper issues than what was projected onto me. Now I know what you’re going to say. “That’s usually how narcissists operate.” But I was young and thought people could change their ways for the better. I put narcissism in some of the characters in the book, and the deeper their stories were told, the more I understood the pain they had gone through. In many ways, the characters I created soon took on lives of their own, and when I wrote them, I didn’t have to think hard about how they would interact with the world around them.

But what about our heroes? What do they offer for their character growth? Most of what the heroes go through is a philosophy I’ve always found fascinating. The world is gray. There are very few people in my life that live on morally white or black end of the spectrum. I think I’ve met one person in my life who I can say is truly good. Others are in the gray, even those close to me. Our heroes don’t always do good things, but that only means they’re flawed individuals. I found my own issues that I was working through with therapy, seeping out and entering their lives. Our main character, Joshua, goes through a journey of self-discovery that grows into an overreach of his power. It goes to his head. When I thought I was finally healing through some of the therapy sessions, when I started to take my life back, there would be an incident with the narcissist, and I was thrust back down. It was almost a punishment for standing up against them. And so I wanted to create that for my main character.

There are characters who deal with issues in their past, or the lack of a past, and others who suffer because they try to be too good. It’s one of the reasons I find these characters living in my own life. But as I began to flesh out these characters, I also noticed that some of their problems were also within me, and I embraced them. It helped me learn more about how to move forward in my life. And in the end, my therapist told me I was making great strides. Still, to this day, I think the writing of Ashes of Ruin is what saved me from myself.

Next time, I’m not going to promise weekly, I’m going to change it up to talk about profiles of some of the characters you find in the book.