I don't know about you, but I hate novels that have anticlimatic fight scenes. My husband says it's like having the foreplay but no climax. For example, did anyone else hate the fight scene at the end of Twilight (the novel, not the movie) when she doesn't give any details about the fight? It really bothered me.

For lack of a better example (because I have only one example published) I'm going back to Prophecy. Sorry if this bothers anyone else, but when Forbidden and Legacy are published, I'll have more to go from without giving stuff away. In Prophecy, my hero and my villain meet up twice. I wanted big blowup fight scenes for both with the second being the biggest of the two. To make this more believable, I got out wooden spoons and a fly swatter (I'm not kidding either. Just picture it in your mind) and I played both sides of the fight. I wanted to see what the body would actually look like in battle. It was so much fun.

It was like choreographing a dance. Every movement had to be planned out, each counter movement slid into place alongside it. I wanted to know how the body looked when a wrist was bent with a sword (spoon, fly swatter, whatever) or how someone would stand when counterattacking. By making my body move like that (or as close to that as I could manage) I could describe it accurately.

What would you do to make a fight scene believable? How would you prepare for it? Would you just write it out and then edit later? Or would you choreograph it to make sure it all fit together?

Yesterday I talked about character mapping. Today, I want to continue on that path. It's important to change your character map with each book you write about that character. Seems simple right? Well I forgot about it. I'm sure other people forget about it too.

Currently I'm writing a series (unless you live under a rock or don't read the other posts, you know about that) and I have the same characters revolving through each novel. But they aren't really the same characters. Seven, my vampire king, isn't the same guy in Awakening that he was in Prophecy. If he was, I would stop writing. So when I map out characters for each novel, I have to remap him.

When you think about it, are you the same person you were yesterday or last year? Absolutely not (well maybe from yesterday, but definitely not from last year). Your characters are the same. Things happen to them in each novel. They lose people or have major life changing events. Those kinds of things change people. Your characters aren't any different.

I made this mistake when I went from Prophecy to Forbidden. I thought Seven was Seven and he wouldn't change. What a mistake. It took awhile to change that in Forbidden when I went through the editting process. If I had done my homework when I started, I would've saved myself some time.

However, if you aren't using the same characters, then you're not in the same boat. But the more lifelike a character, the better the story. At least, as lifelike as you can make them. Since vampires don't really exist (or do they? I'm not going there) I have to do the best I can.

Hopefully this is helpful for someone. I hate making big mistakes.

Since yesterday we talked about plot mapping, today I want to talk about the next obvious step. This is something I love doing and I picked it up from my friend NP (You can find her at the coffee stained writer. Here's a link: http://coffee-stainedwriter.blogspot.com/) and from a great book I read called How Not To Write A Novel.

Character mapping is again my term because I have no idea what it's really called. I did not attend college for writing, so I have to make up my own terms. Anyway, character mapping is when you take your character and you go through his or her personality traits.

I have quite a few homemade templates for this. I ask myself questions like "What would my character do if he were a high school boy? What music would he be into? Who would his friends be? What are his parents like?

If he's the Vampire King (just paying homage to my own character), what was his family like? What kind of history has he lived through? Has he done things he isn't proud of? What would he be interested in now? What kind of person is he? What does he do for fun? What does he do to wind down from an evening? What kind of movies does he watch?

See what I mean? You go from trivial stuff to important stuff and back again. I go through and list a physical description, why they are called what they are called (if it's significant), what kinds of clothing they wear, whether or not they want pets. I go on and on. I don't recommend that everyone gets as into it as I do.

Why does this help when you're getting started? If you end up not knowing what your character would do in certain situations, that character map is a lifesaver. I don't know how many times I got lost in what my vampire king was doing and I fell back to that map.

The character map is also constantly evolving, but I'll talk about that in a later post. For now, enjoy your weekend and write your three pages on Monday.

I'm in a love/hate relationship with plot mapping. Now I realize that might not be the technical term for it, but that's what I call it for lack of something better.

Plot mapping is when you write out the points you want to hit in your novel. For instance, if I want to make sure that certain characters fall in love, I put that in the plot map along with the journey they have towards falling in love. If my hero is going to fight the villain three times, those scenes are in the plot map. You get my point right?

I have written books with a plot map (Prophecy, Forbidden, Legacy, the third version of Awakening) and I've written one without it (the first in the spinoff series) and I really hate plot mapping. After writing without it, I thought I didn't need it to do it anymore. I was so wrong.

Now that I have to rewrite the first novel in the spinoff series, I wish I had a plot map. I wish I had something to guide me in putting characters in the right places without leaving something out. I'm on page seventeen and I know I'm doing stuff that didn't happen until page twenty before. What's missing in those three pages? It's driving me crazy.

The moral of this post is this: just because you can doesn't mean you should (thank you Acheron). I will never again write without doing the tedious plot map, even if I hate it and just want to get going already. Thank goodness I have the plot map for Awakening saved after my computer fiasco last week. After writing that twice, I really feel better looking at a third rewrite with some kind of guidance.