Monthly Archives: April 2010

30 Before 30

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I’m going to be 29 in two weeks. And I’m not lying. (Next year, I might lie and say I’m turning 29 again. But this year, it’s true.)

I’m getting a little panicky about it, to be honest. There are things I always told myself I’d do when I was a grownup, and I’m a grownup now. In fact, I am so much a grownup, that I’m going to be THIRTY. NEXT YEAR.

In that spirit, I’m starting my own 30 Before 30 List. There are tons of these out there on teh Internets. Just Google “30 before 30.” (Trust me, I did.) From what I’ve seen, most people have done surprisingly well with their lists! And why shouldn’t we, really? These are all things we want to do and they’re on our lists so that we’ll have an excuse to do them.

I’m still working on mine, but here are the first 24:

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My Top 10 Action Movies

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Cover of "Jaws (30th Anniversary Edition)...

You all know I’m a big fan of Alexandra Sokoloff and her writing tips. One of her first tips is to come up with 10 movies to study. Here, I’ll just paste it from her blog:

To teach yourself story structure, you start by making a list of 10 movies and books in the genre you’re writing in and/or that you feel are similar in structure to the story you want to write. From this list you are going to develop your own personalized story structure workbook.

So here are the movies on my action genre list, and my attempt at log lines for those:

**SPOILER ALERT**

These log lines are spoilers, so skip down past the list if you don’t want to see.

10. Double Jeopardy, 1999 – A woman is framed for murder and loses everything, including her son, but now that she’s out of prison, she can really kill her husband, without risk of further consequences.

9. Jaws, 1975 – When an insatiable great white shark terrorizes the townspeople of Amity Island, a police chief, a grizzled shark hunter and an oceanographer seek to destroy it.

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Hateable Heroines (and How to Avoid Them)

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Over the weekend, I finished a book that I really liked, Surrender of a Siren. It was a book I’d read for a book club, and some of the other members of the book club didn’t like it. Why? They didn’t like the heroine.

Maybe this hits a little too close to home for me because I’ve been told that some of my heroines are a little hard to love. I personally thought that the heroine in this particular book definitely made some poor decisions at the beginning of the story, but she changed, grew up, and ended up making good decisions by the end, so I was ok with her. Obviously, other rational readers didn’t necessarily agree with me. (Perplexing!)

After a similar shop-talk discussion about likable heroines a few months ago, my friend Katharine Ashe sent me a document she’d found with a list of ways to make your characters sympathetic (or likable).

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