Holidays!!

Hi everyone! :)

As the holidays approach I've decided to do some fun activities on not only this website but as well as my Tumblr and my YouTube pages. Starting Sunday I'll be making a new post for every day of the week in honor of Thanksgiving holiday! I'll talk about things I'm thankful for within the Cassadine series and things I'm thankful for in my life too. I'm super excited for holiday season this year and I can't wait to see where everything goes!

Self Evaluate

Eight years ago I picked up a pen and wrote carelessly in an old notebook. I didn't know it then that this would become the most important part of my life. Writing has never simply been a hobby to me. Writing is my way of coping, it's my safety zone, it's my comfort, and it's my soul. That's why it can be such a constant form of self evaluation. The reason the Cassadine trilogy is written in multiple perspectives was because at the time I was still exploring multiple sides of my personality. I didn't think I had a right to be writing from one solid perspective of thoughts and emotions when I don't have one solid personality trait or one solid emotion, I wouldn't be human if I did. It's because of my layered personality that I've written a range of characters from a proper good girl like Arbri to someone with a bit of a bad influence like Claire. I have to give a lot of thanks to my characters from the Cassadine trilogy for guiding me through a lot of different emotions and thoughts as a young teenager, it was through writing their stories that I found a way to express my own in different areas. Now that I am no longer a young teenager and I'm a young adult I'm still self evaluating. I believe that writers have this ridiculous freedom in what they get to do with a story or character. A writer can choose to lie through the whole story, tell the whole truth, or mix between the two. Sometimes you have to balance a truth and a lie to properly bring a piece of work together, but for me I want to be able to one day write about myself for not only my own self cleansing but for readers who may have similar feelings. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend a Halsey concert last night and it was a truly beautiful experience. I cried about four times during the concert during songs that hold a personal meaning to me and watching how there were so many different people gathered around to sing and dance I became emotional. I think it's easy to become emotionally attached to a song, but it's a completely different thing to be emotionally attached to an artist. What makes me love and admire Halsey is her honesty about her life experiences and her flaws, because it takes a lot of courage to openly talk about your flaws especially in this time period. I bring up the Halsey concert because I want to be that open with my readers. I want to be able to be honest about myself with anyone who takes the time to read and enjoy my writing. I think I've done a pretty decent job at being candor when people ask me questions, but it's the questions that don't get asked that I hope I'm brave enough to one day speak up about. I hint in a lot of my writing that there's some issues in the world that bother me and I think if anyone knows me well enough they could probably pick out sections from any of the three novels of the Cassadine trilogy and know that it's no longer just the character speaking, but Dasia speaking as well. Take the time to self evaluate once in a while, not too often because that can become harmful instead of helpful, but take the time to know yourself and set goals to improve yourself one step at a time because not only does your work become more passionate and genuine, but you as a person grow too.

Creating Characters

People often ask me what my process is for creating characters. I used to give a short simple answer because I didn't know if the longer version would come off as boring or confusing so I've decided to post about how I choose to create characters and different backgrounds for them. The first character I ever created was Rosalia from my Cassadine series. Through writing out ideas for her I learned that the first character that you ever create is going to have a lot of similarities as you. I gave Rosalia qualities I was aware I had, qualities I wished I would never acquire, and I gave her some traits that I wished I would grow up to have. Through this I learned a really important lesson that led to me making a reminder for myself about creating characters.

Reminder: Never put too much of yourself into a character to the point where you self-criticize, self-analyze, and form self-hatred.

This reminder has been critical for me and I think it's important to remind other writers, especially young writers, that it's okay to put yourself into your characters but you should set some personal boundaries for yourself. You're always going to find a little bit of yourself in anything you write because that's part of who you are and if you're truly passionate about what you're writing and why you're writing it then you're going to invest some of yourself into that. That's one of the beautiful parts of being some form of an artist, you learn a lot about yourself through your work and that's amazing! I support that completely because I know that writing has helped shape who I am. However, if you start making your story or your character(s) your whole being then you're either losing who you are or start putting up a block to all the potential of who you can be. It's significant for your mental and emotional health to learn how to share your experiences, thoughts, and emotions in your writing while also being able to separate yourself so you still feel like you have some privacy and some room to grow.

After I realized what my personal limits and boundaries were about how much I wanted to share about myself through characters and story lines my process for creating characters became easier. I began to think more about how those characters suit the story and less about if I was somehow over sharing or not sharing enough with readers. Sometimes I build characters based off a story idea or sometimes I build a story off of a character depending on the situation. When I begin a new story I think about my goal with that story. What is it about at it's core? How do I want to present that message? What types of characters can help create and support that idea? Once I've thought through those questions to myself I start writing down personalities that I think would suit that particular story and I pull a lot of inspiration from the people I surround myself with. I think about my close friends, people I went to school with, and my family. I look at who they are as people and what qualities I love about them or what situations in their lives I wish were easier and I use some of that to start drafting the basic ideas and traits for the characters.

Example: I want character A to be sweet, funny, smart, loyal, ect.

Once the basic traits are laid out for characters I go back to give them physical characteristic so I can visualize what this person looks like. It makes it easier for me just because I have a face in mind to associate with but there are times where I don't even write down the physical characteristics until the very end of character planning. Then I get to the more detailed part of building characters, I start adding details that make the character more like an actual person you could meet in real life. I don't like my characters being perfect because that's not realistic and I don't want any of my readers to ever think that I support the idea of being perfect when it's intangible which is why I give them quirks or issues that are realistic. I should mention that if you have a friend or family member who has had a particular experience you want to write about then I suggest politely asking their permission to write that experience and even letting them read that particular moment so they know what's been said and to ensure that they're comfortable with it.

Example 2: Character A is sweet but has a temper when pushed too far, they're funny, smart but don't realize it, loyal, has friends but may still feel lonely, they have a nervous habit of tapping their foot, maybe they have anxiety, they aren't too loud mostly because they already find themselves annoying and don't want to give people more reason to feel agitated with them.

I start putting deeper emotions and thoughts into them as well as figuring out which other characters I want them to interact with and what they're relationships are. I decide early on who is already friends, who will later become friends, who are meant to be enemies, and who may have a love story and whether or not that love story ends in happiness or heartbreak. Then I can go back and figure out how I want that to intertwine with my story, if there's anything that I don't like anymore or I think won't help the story or character I can go through and cross things out, add things in and go on to start actually writing the first few chapters or pages of the book. As people we can only do our best with the life we have, but we can learn so much from the other people we share this lifetime with. Inspiration can come from many different places, but it's challenging to make realistic characters for readers to be inspired by and feel connected to without engaging with real people daily. For me I learned if you want to improve on character development start with really paying attention to the real characters in your life story.