Reflection is a major theme of my latest Chandler's Ford Today post called As Autumn Approaches.  (Well, this is true for the UK and Europe anyway!).

What would make your characters reflect on their actions to date/their attitudes to life?  Being made to confront the consequences of what you are doing would be one major reason to take time out to reflect, especially if there was time to reverse matters or limit any damage done.  Love, as they say, changes everything and can be a major influence in making people change their behaviour (usually for the better, but this isn't always the case).

Sometimes a character will take time out to reflect before heading out on their adventure/quest etc.  What is interesting here is how that period of reflection influences what the character then does.  If your characters do this, how do they reflect?  On their own or do they have a mentor?  Do they look up books (especially history) to find out how others in their world's past handled certain situations?  If the characters themselves will be setting a precedent, are there general guidelines to give them pointers as to what they should be doing?

Last but not least, are the characters themselves willing to learn from the reflections of others?

I find being in the company of writers from all genres, as I was when I was at the Swanwick Writers' Summer School recently, to be a great way to unwind.  I talk about other benefits of good writing conferences in my latest CFT post - The Benefits of a Good Writing Conference. 

But this led me to wonder about how characters unwind.  When your characters are in the thick of the action, what favourite memories of special places and people help motivate them to keep going and get through it all?  I always loved the Rivendell sequences in The Lord of the Rings.  (This for me is where the films were particularly fantastic, being able to visualise Rivendell like that). Just ahead of the quest, Frodo particularly needed that time there.  So what do your characters need to prepare them for whatever hell you are going to put them through (all in the name of entertaining fiction of course!)?

Knowing what really makes your characters tick will enable you, as the writer, to know what will spur them on, what will discourage them, what is the right way to motivate them etc.  A really well written villain in your stories will do exactly the same and tweak the strings of your lead like an evil puppetmaster.  Result?  A villain worthy of your hero/heroine.  Drama.  Conflict.  Story, story, story!  What's not to like about that?

Coming Back to Earth is the title of my latest Goodreads blog (where I do suggest a cure!).  I wrote a lighthearted post for CFT this week, Books That Should Have Been Written,  partly as a "gentle" way of coming back to earth after my return from the Swanwick Writers' Summer School.

But how do your characters come back to earth?  They've experienced perhaps great adventures, now there's a lull in the action as they come to terms with what they've just gone through.  How do they handle that?  I love The Lord of the Rings  for many reasons but the portrayal of Frodo becoming more and more tired as the stress of what he has to do becomes more and more of a burden is realistically shown.  On the assumption your characters are not super heroes who never get tired or out of sorts, how do your characters handle setbacks, tiredness, illness etc?

How do they pick themselves up from "earth" to get back to their "mission"?  Who helps them and how?  Plenty to think about there!

Getting Away from it All is my title for this week's Chandler's Ford Today post and my latest Goodreads blog.

What do your characters do to unwind?  Where would they go to get away from it all?  If your fictional world has a hierarchy (and frankly most will have something), are there places where the "commoners" can't go?  How is that enforced?

I am about to head off to the Swanwick Writers' Summer School for a wonderful week of courses, catching up with writer friends, and making new ones.  A marvellous time is had by all.  For your longer stories, where would your characters go to catch up with friends and family they can't see often (and how did that situation happen)?

In my Goodreads blog, I talk about my holiday reading.  What would your characters read?  Does your fictional world have a good literacy rate?  If not, is anything being done about it?  I've mentioned in previous posts that a totalitarian world will seek to restrict/ban books (as sadly is seen too often in this world!) but is there an underground system that bypasses/overcomes those restrictions? 

Plenty of story ideas there!

I've written about this in a post for Chandler's Ford Today (Fiction -v- Non-Fiction? No Contest!) a while ago, but it is a topic close to my pen so thought I'd bring it up again here.  Why does reading non-fiction matter to fiction writers then?

1.  If you are writing material which means you need to world build, finding out how this world works/has worked/has made blunderingly colossial historical mistakes/created some fascinating engineering etc can directly inspire you for how your fictional world carries out these things.  (Sometimes it can be the direct opposite of how we've done it but you need to know how we did it first to be able to do that!).

2.  Ideas spark off other ideas and non-fiction is full of them.  What did make an inventor come up with their revolutionary new designs?  What made them come up with a new system for, say, transport when nobody else had realised a need for it?  There are ideas for characters here too...

3.  When anyone comes up with something new, there will be opposition.  Sometimes it's justified, sometimes not.  How does your hero/heroine overcome that?  Or if they are the ones behind the opposition, do they achieve their objective?

Plenty of story triggers there!