Hi, I'm a total Chick Lit newbie! I just took out some chick lit books from the library to get familiarized but I've never read chick lit before. My plan was to write my novel in first person, but I'm having doubts. My first question:
1) How do you keep from a first person POV from sounding whiny or depressed if the story is going "badly" for the main character during conflicts, etc?
Secondly, I am a native French speaker and whenever I write, I tend to make my sentences very passive. For example I would usually write: Alice was swept away by the breeze and her feelings melted into the sun. I thought writing in first person would solve this problem, but I guess I'm just not sure how to go about it... So any tips for...
2) How do you keep your sentences active?
Thanks for all of your help! I've learned so much from this forum already. In fact I'm in the middle of doing the Snowflake Method to outline my book!
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With love, light and laughter
http://www.BillionaireWoman.com
80,078 / 50,000
oct. 24, 2007 - 16 04
Have you tried reading Sophie Kinsella's Shopaholic series, or my favorite The Undomestic Goddess? She does a great job of doing first person present tense. Another good author for first person past tense is Judy Baer or Camy Tang.
Michelle
50,021 / 50,000
oct. 24, 2007 - 22 46
That's a good question about how to make the main character not sound whiny... I think (maybe?) that during the difficult times authors often use the mc's close friends to help convey the stress of the situation. I think that's the beauty of best friends in books, is that they have a deep enough understanding of the mc that you can use them to talk about how she feels when you don't want her to say it herself. Don't know if that really make sense. lol But hopefully it's kinda helpful!
----------Instead of fear of failure, maybe we'd do better to fear the death of dreaming.
50,991 / 50,000
oct. 25, 2007 - 07 34
For NaNo, I'd say just write however you're comfortable so that you can get the words down on paper... and later when you edit, you can go back and change things to active verb tenses when necessary. It might make the writing process quicker for the sake of time constraints in November...?
118,026 / 50,000
oct. 28, 2007 - 02 27
I've seen many child lit authors make their MC's extremely... independant and strong so that the bff of the MC is the one who pushes the MC into telling her what happened... so on so forth.
----------I iz teh Batman. I haz built-in pecs.
2007: Waddle 118K
50,695 / 50,000
oct. 28, 2007 - 05 36
One way to keep away from soundy whiny or depressed is to use snarky humor when things get rough. If you haven't yet, you should read Bridget Jones' Diary just for some inspiration (believ me, the movie doesn't do it justice). Helen Fielding is very good at that. The Shopaholic series is good at that as well.
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"Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." ~Sylvia Plath
like a nice dose of babble?
cursinginheels.blogspot.com
10,190 / 50,000
oct. 31, 2007 - 02 00
I think the best bet to make it al the rants pan out is to create humor in it. That works, I suppose. I'm definitely adding doses of humor to my novel.