The Old Writer Who Lived in a Shoe

On April 11, 2015, capng wrote, What if you have too many characters? My novel takes place on a ship, with the MC being the captain, and while I have all the secondary characters developed and planned out, I feel like there are too many to give them the page time they deserve. Any ideas, please?

Kenzi Parsons answered, I just started reading “The Hound of Rowan” Series (which everyone should read–it’s amazing!!), which has tons of characters. However, the author keeps the reader from getting confused or losing track of characters by bringing them up when they’re needed, or keeping them in the background. Even with only a few interactions, those moments are enough to solidify the characters so that when they go “back on the shelf” (not being used at the current scene), the reader still knows they’re there and isn’t surprised when they are pulled back out again once they are needed. Basically, you only need a few good interactions to get the characters known to the audience. If they’re fleshed out and unique, the reader won’t confuse them and will keep them in the back of their minds. Even one interaction is really all it takes.

My first thought is to wonder whether all these characters are needed. A ship is such a temptation to imagine characters! The crew, the passengers, a stowaway or two, the pirates who will board the ship, the pirates’ prisoners. They all have their own stories. Who can resist? Sadly, just because we invent characters and get drawn in by our own brilliance doesn’t mean they all belong in our story.

If not in every book I’ve written, then in almost every one, I’ve had to give up complexity for the sake of a coherent plot. In early drafts of Fairest, for example, I gave Queen Ivi a mother and a brother. The mother’s character came from Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice–superficial, grasping, less than clever–and I planned for her to account for Ivi’s behavior. The brother, decent but moody, was to be a love interest for Aza. But they slowed down my story, as did my many scenes between Ivi and Skulni. (This was in the third-person omniscient version.) Ivi fascinated me, and I had fun exploring her insecurities and Skulni’s ways of exploiting them. The story grew, mushroomed, put out tentacles, became unwieldy. Finally I had to sharpen my machete and chop. The mother and brother landed on the cutting room floor, and, most painful of all, I had to simplify Ivi and Skulni.

When I think about it, I’m still sad about the loss. Maybe a more accomplished writer could have woven in all the characters and all the scenes and made them work. On the other hand, I still have both in earlier drafts, and–maybe this is weird–but I think the material I deleted remains in a ghostly way and adds depth to my story.

Also on the plus side, I like a plot that moves along. Extraneous bits seem self-indulgent. I can get away with a little extra embroidery, if it’s charming or funny or emotionally rich, but not a lot.

In capng’s story, we need to think about what our Captain MC’s problem is and who’s needed to help him and hinder him. If we’ve dreamed up a cast of characters, we have a treasure trove to dip into. We reread our pages of character descriptions. Who will be useful? How? When we choose the ones we need, their personalities help shape the progress and reversals that make up our plot.

The ones who are left over, whose traits and back stories cry out irresistibly to us can get their own separate stories, can form the Ship trilogy or seven-book series.

When we’re writing any story–when, for example, our MC arrives in a new place, say, a castle, where many characters live, we can try not to name the minor ones. If we have to stick with one through a few paragraphs or pages, we can pick one of the very few traits we’ve given him to refer to him, like we can call him the tall man. It’s kind of like the Thanksgiving turkey, which I never name, because I don’t want to be tempted to imagine its life before my oven. A big vegetable-eater, I don’t name the carrot I’m about to chomp down on, either. And, as much as possible, we can avoid naming characters we’re not going to have a story relationship with, either. Sometimes we have to, when repetition of the trait becomes awkward. But once we’ve named a character we’ve burdened the reader a little. She thinks, Am I going to have to pay to attention to this Maximilian and remember his name and who he is?

Many writers start with a character and what he wants and grow the plot from there. I generally begin with an idea and dream up characters who’ll work as a vehicle for it. So far, I’ve never started with a bunch of characters clamoring for a story. Might be fun, though, and if I did, I’d start by looking for a unifying problem. Maybe I’d have seven MCs instead of one–or more than seven. I think of Bat 6 by Virginia Euwer Wolff, which has–count ‘em!–twenty-one first-person narrators. However, the story has a strong and simple plot, organized around a girls’ softball league playoff. It has strong themes: prejudice, war, guilt. A wonderful book, appropriate for upper elementary school kids and up.

If our plot does call for a big cast, Kenzi Parson’s advice is excellent. We want our minor players to be memorable so they’ll be, yes, remembered. We can give them a speech mannerism, for example. As soon as Uri says, “…doo wickety,” he returns to life for the reader. Or he can have a visible trait: wild hair or extreme fashion preferences or big gestures. When this characteristic pops up, the reader knows him. He can always make our MC laugh, or he can always say the wrong thing. But, if Uri is a minor character, no matter how much we love him, no matter how much we know about him, we have to keep it simple or he may derail our story.

We can use setting to separate characters. You know how we recognize real people by place, and how confusing it can be when they show up in the wrong spot? In the supermarket we recognize the cashier who moves his line along faster than anyone else, but if we see him walking his dog in the park, he just looks familiar and he drives us crazy because we can’t remember who he is. In Fairest again, there’s the library-keeper, and I don’t let him leave his area. When Aza goes to the library, he’s there, and he rises right up in the reader’s mind. We can use that to help our readers. Uli, say, grooms the horses at the riding academy. The reader associates him with the stable. In the ship story, a certain character can keep to her stateroom. Our MC goes in, and there she is.

Or one minor character may never appear unless a particular major one is present. Uri’s grandmother may never be in the story unless Uri is in the scene. When Uri is there and an old lady comes along, the reader remembers the grandmother.

Or a minor character may show up when there’s a certain kind of action afoot. Suppose there’s an angry minor character, and there’s a mutiny. This angry fellow appears only to stoke the other characters’ fury. Oh, there he is, the reader thinks. I know him. We’re in for an argument.

Here are four prompts:

∙ Mysteries often demand a big cast. Try one on a ship. The steward brings the first mate his morning coffee and finds him dead at the rudder and the ship far off course. Write the story and solve the mystery. If this is a cruise ship, for example, you’ll need to find a way to narrow the number of suspects.

∙ Choose six secondary characters from your finished stories or story fragments and find an idea that will work for all of them. Then put them together in a story.

∙ Pick six secondary characters from books you love and put them together in a new story.

∙ Use some or all of these fairy tale characters in a story: the hunter from “Snow White”; the third youngest dancing princess; the enchanted prince who is her dance partner; the genie of the ring from “Aladdin”; the miller in “Rumpelstiltskin”; Little Red Riding Hood herself; the North Wind in “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” (one of my favorite fairy tales); and the farmer’s wife in the nursery song, “Three Blind Mice.”

Have fun, and save what you write!

Weepy

On April 16, 2015, this came into the website from Yulia in the old blogspot days:

My main character is VERY moody. She is rather oversensitive and gets easily upset. I reread my manuscript and she’s crying in every other scene. I don’t want a main character who’s making mountains out of, well, let’s say, gnome’s hills, but that’s her character.

I tried making her more unemotional, but then she seems bland. I want her to be passionate and vibrant like she is, but what kind of reader wants to sit through a crybaby heroine?

I suspect that Yulia has finished this story and written a dozen more by now. Here are my thoughts anyway:

I had the same problem in one of my Disney Fairies books. Gwendolyn, one of my few human characters, was forever weeping and my editor was, too–in exasperation.

This was years ago, so I don’t remember what I did, but I remember her frustration whenever one of my characters threatens to become lachrymose. Here are some possibilities that don’t create blandness:

∙ Our MC can sometimes express her sadness physically in ways that don’t involve actual weeping. She can swallow back the tears, blink them away, cram her fists into her eyes. She can be cried out or be too exhausted to cry.

∙ She can recite a few words that she’s memorized to help her through hard times. If we introduce the words as her tear stoppers, the reader will know she’s sad whenever she invokes them.

∙ Likewise, she can visualize something that comforts her: a beloved face, her pet frog, a flower.

∙ She can have developed a defense against crying. Habitually, she converts her tears to laughter or to a joke. In this case, the reader may come to wish she could experience the relief of tears, so that when she finally does weep, the reader is actually happy.

∙ We can change her character in this regard. She can be someone who almost never cries. Maybe she converts her sadness to action, say, to good works that make her feel better.

∙ Or she may deflect sadness by becoming angry, which can be her most serious flaw, or which may give her the energy to keep going in the face of tragedy.

∙ She can encounter so much misery that she becomes hardened and stops weeping. Going back to the physical, she can develop other symptoms instead, sleeplessness, for example.

∙ By nature she may not cry much. A certain kind of trigger may be needed. I’m that way. I hardly ever cry, although I can feel very sad without tears. About a year or so ago, though, I had a health scare (I’m fine), and it seemed like the doctor had turned on a spigot. I wept non-stop from his office to the emergency room.

Taking another tack, we may want to look at our plot and see if we’ve created tragedy overload. Our problem may be a sad sack story rather than a crybaby heroine.

We need bad things to happen to keep our story moving. As you all probably know, I advocate making our characters suffer. But suffering can take many forms and call forth many responses.

In a chapter in Ella Enchanted, for example, Ella has to try to kiss a parrot, who keeps flying away from her. It’s absurd, not weep-worthy, though she is suffering, and the reader sees the crazy lengths she has to go to to satisfy her curse. I hope the reader suffers with her–and laughs, too.

In The Two Princesses of Bamarre prequel I’m working on, I drop my MC, Peregrine, as a very young child into an environment where she has to earn every shred of affection that comes her way–love seems to be entirely conditional. She works harder than a child should have to and suffers without understanding. Tears bring her only disapproval, so she learns not to cry.

In Anne of Green Gables, Anne breaks a slate over Gilbert Blythe’s head. She’s furious and stays furious and has to endure her own anger, another form of suffering.

We can disappoint our MC or frustrate her. We can give her the hiccups at absolutely the wrong moment, which can be funny or serious, because she can be on a first date or performing brain surgery.

Let’s say our MC’s friends turn on her. She can: cry; desperately try to win them back; over-explain herself; beg; look for other friends, and the pickings can be slim; be unhappily alone. The point is that in most situations there are lots of options. Even the death of a loved one can evoke a response other than weeping.

It’s also possible to write a weepy but likeable heroine. In my Disney Fairies books, Rani is a water-talent fairy. She’s forever weeping, because her nature is largely water. No one holds that against her. Our MC can be known for her waterworks. Her father says the family should buy stock in Kleenex. She’s weeping but she carries on. The crying doesn’t stop the action. She does what needs to be done with streaming eyes and a red nose. The people who love her, love her anyway. If they don’t mind her crying and they’re likable, too, the reader will probably go along, too. There are opportunities for humor as well. She can weep before dessert at every meal, because it’s her favorite part, and she won’t have it to look forward to once she eats it. The reader doesn’t need have to be told every time. He’ll understand and imagine a downpour. Then, if we like, when something really sad happens she can be dry-eyed, which will have an impact.

Here are four prompts:

∙ Create a hiccup crisis. Invent a situation and a character, and make him suffer. Write the scene.

∙ Create a hiccup crisis in your WIP. Make the consequences serious.

∙ In a test of her strength of will, your MC is injected with a serum designed to make her weepy. She’s taken to a laboratory. Tragic images are projected on the walls; sounds of misery blast from speakers. If she gives way and weeps, something dreadful will happen, whatever suits the needs of your story. Write the scene. If you like, keep going and write the story.

∙ Write a scene in “Snow White” that includes the eighth dwarf, Weepy.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Objective: objectives

On March 26, 2015, Kenzi Parsons wrote, How do you brainstorm a non-cliche plot when you have the characters and situation already? I find I have a really hard time coming up with a plot if I already have characters–I LOVE my characters but struggle with the story. Any ideas?

These two responses came in:

Erica Eliza: Look at the relationships and the conflicts that will arise between characters. Sort through other story ideas that never took off because they weren’t big enough to carry a whole book by themselves, and see how your characters would handle them.

Tracey Dyck: If you have your characters in place, they can help drive your plot. Look at their individual goals (which might conflict with each other!) and what obstacles, both personal and physical, might stand in their way. The Rafe-Stella situation Mrs. Levine invented in this post kind of touches on that. (March 18, 2015)

Kenzi Parsons answered: These are all great!! Reading these, I think my problem is that my character doesn’t have an objective to motivate the plot. Huh… I’d never thought of that before! How do y’all come up with goals/objectives for your characters if you created them before the plot?

More ideas followed:

carpelibris (Melissa Mead): I almost always come up with character before plot. (I have a dickens of a time with plot!) Usually who the character is helps determine what she wants, whom she hangs out with, what she will or won’t do, etc., and the plot grows out of that. For example, a lot of my characters are loners/misfits, which tends to make them either want to fit in, stand out, or get out of where they are.

Tracey Dyck: What are their strengths and weaknesses? What are their desires–what they want more than anything? What do they want almost as badly, something that may run contrary to the primary desire? Could be situational, personal, etc. Maybe one person wants to feel needed, another wants to gain confidence, someone else wants to fix a relationship, and yet another person wants to stop an impending disaster.

These are wonderful.

In case Kenzi Parsons’ concerns weren’t completely resolved, here are some more thoughts:

It’s hard to believe any idea is good if we’re worried about cliches. My entire writing career–my whole body of work– wouldn’t exist if that were much on my mind. A Cinderella story? Fairies? Dragons? Princesses? They’ve been done repeatedly. I’d be sunk!

We all build on old ideas. We have to. Originality comes from what we do with those tired tropes. Yes, sadly, it is possible to write a story that sounds like a dozen other stories, and we don’t want to do that. My strategy for avoiding such a fate is notes, and within notes, lists. It’s a strategy that can help in plot-from-character creation.

Let’s start with what we’ve come up for our character, whom we’ll call Tamara. On the good side, she’s loyal, kind, and funny. On the bad, she has a one-track mind. When something captures her attention, all else sinks in importance. At those times, she’s irritable or even angry with anyone who tries to divert her. She has curly hair, long fingers, a wide smile, and small eyes. Kenzi Parsons may have gone much further than this, but for our purposes we have enough to get started.

We review Tamara’s attributes and think what her objectives might be. Her one-track mind suggests possibilities, so in our notes for this story we list what she might be obsessed about right now, and we keep in mind all the other things we know about her. We pledge to ourselves that we’re going to come up with at least ten possibilities, and, further, that we won’t judge any of them. Nothing is stupid or cliched when we write a list:

∙ She’s raising money for a daycare center in her town.

∙ She’s working on a stand-up comedy routine.

∙ She’s determined to rescue her best friend from a bad romantic relationship.

∙ She’s researching plastic surgery to make a person’s eyes bigger. Once she finds out what she needs, she’s going to devote herself to making it happen.

∙ She’s preparing to join the army (real army or fantasy army).

∙ She’s preparing to rescue the child hostages from their captors in the warring kingdom of Kuth.

∙ She’s developing plans for a flying machine.

∙ She’s trying to save from extinction a species of tiny frogs that still exist only in her rural county.

∙ She’s deep and dark into magic books to cure her brother of the mysterious condition that caused him to stop speaking.

∙ She’s plotting revenge against a relative who sabotaged her frog project.

There. Ten. But if nothing pleases us we can go for fifteen.

Tied up in her obsessions are objectives. She wants to succeed! We can move the plot forward by placing obstacles in her path, some that come from within her, some from circumstances, and some from our other characters, who may want her to fail or may bungle helping her. We can list possible obstacles.

I chose her one-track mind to concentrate on, but I could have picked another of her qualities, although long fingers might be hard, but I bet we could do it. Anyway, her loyalty is suggestive, too. Here’s a prompt: Think about where her loyalties lie. List ten possibilities. Then think about how they might morph into objectives. Create a story around one possibility.

Kenzi Parsons has created more characters. If we have more, we can keep them in mind as we invent our lists, and we can give them the list treatment, too, remembering as we do that their objectives need to relate to Tamara’s in helpful or unhelpful ways.

I love lists. If you read the notes for any of my books, you’d find lists cropping up every few pages (I often have over 200 pages of notes for a novel).

After we we’ve come up with our objectives and have thought of obstacles, we start imagining how they might play out in scenes. And we’re off with a starter plot!

More prompts:

∙ Pick one–or more–of Tamara’s obsessions and use it in a story.

∙ I decided to go with Melissa Mead’s misfit idea and imagined ten ways in which Tamara might be different. Pick one and use it in a story. Melissa Mead already suggested a few objectives, and you may think of more. Here are the ten ways:

She has only one arm (with those long fingers)
She has the same genetic condition that caused Abraham Lincoln to be so tall and ??? At the age of twelve she’s a foot taller than everyone she knows.
Her family have been farmers for centuries. She lives in a farming community. Nobody cares about anything but the size of pigs and pumpkins. She hates all of it. She has a brown thumb, and the livestock hate her.
She has a different fashion sense than everyone else. She looks wrong on every occasion.
She’s way smarter than everyone else around her, off-the-charts smarter.
She’s the stupidest in her family and her school.
She can’t pronounce the long i.
Her brain is oddly wired. Psychologists keep diagnosing her with an alphabet soup of acronyms, but nothing really fits.
She sees other people as numbers. People who appear as long numbers scare her, but she feels close to people who have a 9 in their number. (Look! This is the ninth in my list! What a coincidence!)
She’s an identical twin, but although she and her sister look exactly alike, that’s where the similarities end.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Mixing It Up

On March 11, 2015, Tracey Dyck wrote, Does anyone have advice on varying sentence structure? I’ve discovered that I overuse a certain structure in my novel. (I forget what that type of sentence is called–bad me–but it looks like this: “Bob drove to the market, whistling along the way.” It’s the “ing” phrase that keeps cropping up.) It sounds like a basic problem, easily solved, but I’ve started highlighting every use of that structure in my manuscript…Chapters one and two have almost 50 uses each. Sometimes there are half a dozen in the space of a few paragraphs, and other times I go a whole page without one. Anyway, tips/thoughts would be helpful! 🙂

Kenzi Anne sympathized: I have this exact same problem–and it’s driving me crazy!!! I’ve been trying to switch up my sentence structure, but my brain always defaults back. I have no idea how to stop it, either 🙁

Elisa suggested: Well, this may sound cliche, but read an author whose writing structure is very different from your own. I would probably suggest reading Austen, because she has a very unique, very distinct writing structure. I find myself talking and thinking in Austenese (as I call it) after I read anything by her. Maybe try reading PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. Then start writing. This always helps me. Her writing is so vastly different from my own that when it takes over my mind it warps my writing structures and my writing comes out very different from what it normally is. Later I come back and edit through it to make it my own again, but the structure is different, and it helps me unstick from my repetitive tendencies.

I reread Pride and Prejudice (for the jillionth time) in the middle of writing Ella Enchanted, and, without realizing, fell into Austenese. My writing group was sure I’d gone nuts. I stopped and revised, but I still think Ella has the right sensibility for Austen! Elisa’s strategy worked for me.

We writers are often permeable, by which I mean that writing styles infiltrate us and come out through our fingers, so I love Elisa’s idea. Here’s a prompt: Read a chapter of a book you love. And another. Read something by Dickens, by Emily Bronte, by her sister Charlotte. Then write, and don’t analyze your sentences until your writing session is over. Then look back and see what happened.

We can also imitate directly. Here’s another prompt: Look at a paragraph in a book you admire and analyze it. In poetry school, I had to do this with a poem last semester and then write a new poem following the exact pattern of the old one, which took me way out of my usual writing style. If you’re writing narration, choose a long narrative paragraph. If you’re writing dialogue, a speech paragraph, or several, in the case of dialogue. Use the pattern you’ve discovered when you write the next paragraph in your WIP.

Below is the beginning of Peter Pan by James M. Barrie:

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, “Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!” This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.

Let’s analyze. I’m not a grammarian, and I will probably mess up the technicalities in my description. Please forgive me.

Short first sentence, six words, two commas. Except restricts the word all that starts the sentence. Second sentence: two independent clauses joined by and. We can count the words if we want to. (If I were writing that sentence, I’d end with a colon, so that the second and third sentences would be joined.) Third sentence, same as the second. (Barrie seems not to have worried about variety!) Fourth sentence: independent clause followed by dependent clause that incorporates an exclamatory sentence of dialogue. (In my opinion, Barrie was a very supple writer.) Fifth sentence: two independent clauses joined by but. Sixth and seventh sentences: short and declarative without clauses. Notice that the sixth sentence ends with the same word that the seventh begins with, two. That repetition of two gives the paragraph ending punch. We can adopt the same strategy, not always, but occasionally.

Now look at a narrative paragraph of your own and recast it, following Barrie’s example. You may not succeed entirely, but I suspect you’ll substantially change up what you’ve been doing.

For expert help, we can do an online search on sentence structure to see what we have to work with. But we don’t want to get too academic. Sentence fragments, for example, are okay in fiction if they work. Exclamations are fine. The comma splice (independent clauses connected by only a comma) are a device that writers sometimes use, especially if each clause is short and meaning is clear. Almost anything goes in dialogue if the character speaking really would talk the way we’ve written–and if the meaning is clear.

Let’s take Michelle Dyck’s sample sentence and fool around with it. I understand that it’s meant just as an example and not deathless prose. Here it is:

Bob drove to the market, whistling along the way.

What are the possibilities?

Bob whistled as he drove to the market.
As he drove to the market, Bob whistled.
Bob drove to the market. He whistled the entire distance.
Bob drove to the market and whistled the entire distance.
Whistling “Clementine,” Bob drove to the market.

There may be more, and I’m not claiming that any of these are better than the original. The two-sentence solution is definitely worse. But they are alternatives.

We can incorporate the previous or the following sentence into our revision, the one that comes before or after the whistling. Suppose that, just before he drives off, Bob receives a kiss. We might then write: Molly planted a kiss on Bob’s astonished lips and sent him off in his car, where he whistled “All You Need Is Love” from her house to the market, where he bought a bouquet of long-stemmed roses.

Or we can use what’s going on in the scene, like this: Bob whistled the old repertory–“Home On the Range,” “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” “The Bear Went Over the Mountain”–while his daughter stared stonily out the window. When they pulled into the market parking lot, he grinned. “You used to love those songs, sweetie.”

This strategy uses liveliness to introduce variety into our prose. Again recognizing that our sample sentence is just an example for discussion purposes, when we really write in our story, it’s usually (not always) better to name the song being whistled, which will tell us a little data point about our character. If Bob is whistling tunelessly, it’s good to know that, too. And in most cases, it’s good to name the store. In my part of the country, Whole Foods has a different ring from the A&P. Or it may be a purely local store, and then the name, whatever it is, will add local color. We can make up the name if we like, to give an indication of setting.

Here are four prompts:

∙ Use this in a story: Bob whistled as he drove, his favorite tune, of course, the anthem of his cult: “Rising Star Shining.” And the bug under his seat picked up every note.

∙ Pick a paragraph in a book you love that isn’t from this era, could be one of the authors mentioned above. Modernize the sentences.

∙ Pick a section of dialogue by one of these authors and transform it into modern speech. You may have to break up long paragraphs to do this.

∙ Try my Barrie example above. Use his paragraph as a template for a revision of one of yours.

Have fun, and save what you write!

P. U. S.

On February 15, 2015, Melissa Mead (formerly carpelibris on the old blog) wrote, I’m having trouble figuring out who the story I’m telling is really about. (Gail, it’s the version of “Sleeping Beauty” that I told you about at the book festival.) It’s not the title character. I thought it was the Eldest Fairy’s story, but then the Youngest Fairy started to come to the forefront. The usual “Who has the most to lose?” trick isn’t working, because there are different ways to “lose.”

Any suggestions for figuring out whose story this is?

Michelle Dyck responded with this: Whose story is the most interesting/exciting? (I guess that’s pretty similar to the “Who has the most to lose?” question.) Whose personality or voice grabs you the most?

Just a random thought: could you compromise and pick a few POV characters? Or do something like the movie HOODWINKED, in which the same story was told multiple times from multiple points of view, and each one fleshed out the tale a little more. That might be cumbersome in book form (or might be better suited to a series rather than a single book). But maybe that idea could be modified.

Melissa came back with: That’s the problem. It’s a tie!

This is just a short story, so I don’t think there’s room for the Hoodwinked treatment. (I did have fun trying to pick that movie apart, though!)

I had trouble choosing the POV in Fairest, and I tried out three–zhamM, Ijori, and an omniscient narrator–and wrote hundreds of pages I couldn’t use. Finally I figured out how I could write from the first-person POV of Aza, my Snow White character, even while she was out cold from the poisoned apple. The problem with zhamM and Ijori as narrators was that they weren’t present for a lot the story. The trouble I had with the omniscient voice was that I couldn’t resist dipping into the minds and hearts of everybody, and the story slowed to a slug’s pace.

But for those of us suffering from POV Uncertainty Syndrome (PUS!), an omniscient narrator may be the way to go. If we do, we can delve into the thoughts and feelings of those characters who particularly fascinate us, in Melissa’s case, the youngest and oldest fairies. Of course, we have to avoid my failing of getting too interested in everybody and losing control of our story.

Another advantage of trying an omniscient narrator is that it can be diagnostic; we may naturally find ourselves dwelling more on one character than the others, and, voila!, without tearing out a single strand of hair, we’ve discovered our POV character. We can switch then and there to that POV and clean up the omniscient voice when we revise. In Fairest, the omniscient narrator came right before I figured out that Aza should be my POV character, so it worked for me.

Similar to an omniscient POV is the POV of a character who is not our MC. We could choose the median fairy, for example, the one halfway between youngest and oldest, to tell the story. She wouldn’t be as impartial as an out-of-the-tale narrator or as partial as the oldest or youngest, because she’d be on the periphery of the action. A magnificent example of this kind of narrator is Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby (high school and up). And if you want to read prose that’s marvelous enough to cause heart palpitations, this is the book for you.

My idea with zhamM as narrator was to have him be in love with Aza and have it be a doomed love, because he’s a gnome and she’s human. But I didn’t know how to work him into all the scenes I needed. If I had decided to keep him as my POV character, I would have had to make the story belong to him, with many of the “Snow White” events happening in the background.

Mostly, I’ve gone with the obvious choice of MC: Cinderella; Snow White; in my Princess Tales with Sleeping Beauty, the “Princess on the Pea” princess, the “Golden Goose” lad, and so on. But I didn’t in A Tale of Two Castles, which is sort of a retelling of “Puss In Boots.” The miller’s son is a character, and there are many cats, but Elodie, my MC, and the dragon detective Meenore don’t exist in the original fairy tale. Since Aza, Meenore, and the ogre are at the center of my plot, I had to invent a new story arc and many scenes.

As I think about “Sleeping Beauty,” I notice how full of feeling the story is. Sleeping Beauty is an infant, but her parents experience horror when they first hear she’s going to die young. After the terrible gift is ameliorated, they still have to wrap their minds around the hundred-year sleep.

The oldest fairy is mired in rage. She may have other emotions as well, like loneliness, jealousy, and hurt for being left out. The youngest fairy may be frightened, because she’s going against an elder. She may be worried, too, that she’s going to mess up the spell. She could be ambitious, a meddler, a very kind soul.

When we choose our POV character, we can decide which feelings we want to explore from the inside out. This is like Michelle Dyck’s wondering about which character is the most interesting, in this case most interesting from an emotional standpoint.

We can ask which character is most like us and which is most different. Then we can decide if we want the security of the familiar or the risk of the unknown. (Both choices are fine.)

Here’s another metric we can use: Which character is most likely to be talky inside her head? A character who isn’t introspective may be more challenging than one who is. Do we want that challenge?

Also, one of them, may lie to herself about herself. If we’re in her mind, we have to see past her self-deception. Do we want to always be on our guard?

We can try one way and then another. As I’ve said many times, writing isn’t efficient. Wasted pages are a small price to pay for the right POV.

I’ve never written from the POV of a non-human. Regardless of which POV is chosen, it’s fun to consider how a fairy might think. She has to think in words or we can’t write her, but can we introduce an element or two into her thought process that will reflect her alien-ness?

When Melissa Mead first posted her question, I wrote a note to myself that I still think is worth thinking about, and it was that maybe this should be a novel as Michelle Dyck suggested and not a short story. It’s possible that the idea is too complex for short story treatment. Or not.

Here are four prompts:

∙ Write a scene from “Sleeping Beauty” in the voice of an omniscient narrator. Delve into the thoughts and feelings of everybody, even the baby.

∙ Write the story of “Aladdin” from the POV of the genie of the lamp.

∙ Using “Aladdin” as backdrop, tell the story of the genie and his imprisonment in the lamp. This means moving away from the original fairy tale and creating something new.

∙ Write the thoughts of any one of the “Sleeping Beauty” fairies when she first sees the baby princess. Give the thoughts an inhuman quality. Do this one way, then another, and another.

∙ Try “Sleeping Beauty” from the POV of a minor fairy, who has opinions but is more observer than actor in the story. You can make her a busybody, so she insinuates herself into all the major moments.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Like falling in love… and out… and in…

Before I start, I posted this in comments within the last blog: I asked my tech support, AKA my husband David, about photos or images appearing with names as they often did in Blogspot. This is completely optional, but if you want to, you just have to follow his instructions below:

The blog uses gravatars. Very easy to set up.

Go to http://en.gravatar.com/.
Establish a free account using the same email address as is used on the blog.
Gravatar will send a confirmation email.
Click on their confirmation email.
Log in to Gravatar.
Upload a photo or other image that will be the avatar.
After a brief delay, the Gravatar will appear next to the comments on the blog.

Now for the post. On February 14, 2015, iowareadsandwrites wrote, Does anyone have the same problem where you start a story (with a good plot and characters that are ready to go) and you write one or two chapters, but then the story doesn’t sound that fun or interesting, so you don’t want to finish it.

Am I the only one with that problem? How can I stop that?

Several of you sympathized and chimed in.

From Erica Eliza: Writing a story is like falling in love. It’s fun in the beginning, but then the honeymoon’s over, and you just have to push through until things get fun again. When I’m bogged down, it’s usually because I have it outlined too well and there’s no wiggle room. So I change something up. Make a new character walk in the room, have a fight scene end with a compromise instead of an easy victory, let some fun, far-off event happen earlier than I planned.

From journaladay: I’ve found the easiest way to stay on track with writing a story is to get a friend who is willing to read it as you write it. If you feel like you have an audience it tends to bring out the motivation for writing SOMETHING because you have people waiting on you.

From Elisa: Hah, I have the very same problem a good deal of the time. When that happens I usually either 1. Start working on one of my three “Main” stories, or 2. Work on the geography of the story (I LOVE geography, I also LOVE drawing maps, I would like to become a cartographer someday). Drawing out my maps helps. I get to decide where the mountains are, what the boundaries are, deciding where the towns are, drawing mountains (I totally recommend drawing mountain ranges. It is calming), drawing rivers and deltas, etc. Once I do that, I frame the map (if it’s the right size) or I roll it up and tie it with hemp string (because I think it looks more interesting and story-ish than yarn, although some maps I use color coded yarn ties, to keep track of which are for where.) Then, once that is done, I pull the map out again and use any of my various fun paperweights and place armies strategically with chess pieces, or I decide where my characters go, or stay. I make lots of possibilities and when I find an interesting placement of armies/characters, I form the story around it. I know it’s kinda odd, but it helps me, so I decided to throw out the idea, in case someone else might find it helpful.

P.S. I also listen to music without words and then come up with lyrics and weave them into the story. That’s also kinda weird I guess.

From Melissa Mead (formerly carpelibris): I have that problem with books AND short stories. My hard drive is full of opening scenes. Sometimes I can combine a couple to make something new. Sometimes I leave them for a while and come back to find the spark reignited. Sometimes they just sit and get dusty. 🙂

These are great ideas as well as lots of company for iowareadsandwrites’ misery.

journaladay’s suggestion has been useful to me sometimes, but my reader has to be encouraging. I don’t do well if I imagine my editor, for example, disliking everything I’ve come up with. But if I know he’s a fan, lights start popping in my brain. I think, He’s going to love this! And this!

We can stack the deck in our favor by letting our reader know that we are just a tad fragile about our WIP and we’re looking for encouragement, not the reverse. If a reader can’t do that, he’s not the one for the job. Later, when we’ve soldiered all the way through and have a complete draft, we can ask him to take a more critical approach–critical, not destructive. We never need a bulldozer of a reader.

Before I was published, I lucked into an adult-ed writing class taught by a woman who had once been a children’s book editor. Every week I submitted my new pages, and she responded with a few paragraphs on blue paper and line edits right on my pages. I slaved to have something to hand in every week. If I felt like I was getting lost in my story, I could let her know and she’d respond. Once or twice a semester she’d choose one of my chapters to read aloud for the entire class to comment on.

The class was heaven, and I wrote Ella Enchanted while I was in it, but we can get similar help from a writers’ group. Before that class, I joined several writers’ groups. Most of us were beginners, but we were all good readers, and we did our best to help each other. We can all set something similar up. If our fellow writers are eager to find out what’s going to happen next in our story, we’ll be helped to keep going.

I agree with Elisa that switching tracks can work. Most of you know that I struggled through writing Stolen Magic, and I took two big breaks in the middle. One was just a pure vacation. I gave myself a month of no writing to see if my head would clear. This works for some writers, and you can try it, but it didn’t work for me. My story mist failed to lift. I also took time off to write Writer to Writer, which I think did help. For one thing, I felt productive because I was still writing, and some of what I was writing was about plot, which was my problem with my novel. My advice to readers helped me figure out what to do.

Notes work that way for me, too. I write about what I can’t figure out, and often figure it out in the process. We can all do that.

The point is that, despite Erica Eliza’s charming analogy (which I agree with), our long marriage is more to writing than to a particular story. If we switch to a different tale, we’re still writers. And I agree with Melissa that letting a story lie fallow while we dive into other projects can give our subconscious room to bring up fresh ideas.

I love the idea of crossing over to another art form for inspiration. I haven’t yet tried drawing my way out of a plot impasse, but I will keep the idea in mind. Drawing is more completely right-brained than writing, I think, and the shift may open our inner eye.

Music distracts me, but it does work for lots of writers, so that’s another strategy to try. We can invent lyrics, as Elisa does, or we can just let the music relax us or fire us up. You can experiment with what sort of music is most useful for you.

I’m generally up and down all the way through a novel, and with some novels, alas, it’s more down than up. It may help to remind ourselves, when things go south, of our story’s delightful dimple, our characters’ lovable quirks, the transporting qualities of our setting.

I love the idea of moving a plot point up. Sometimes I delay making a bad thing happen out of a misplaced unwillingness to harm a beloved character. The result usually is that the pace turns to molasses, and I get bored. Of course, if we’re going to jump ahead, we need to make sure that we’re not omitting something essential.

It’s possible that when we have characters who are “ready to go,” they may be too formed, and their rigid shape may restrict our exploration. Say we’ve imagined our character to be courageous, selfish, enthusiastic, and blunt. When a plot point arrives, she may not be able to develop organically, because she has to hold onto the qualities we’ve imagined for her. I don’t do a lot of character description in advance. Mostly I toss ‘em into situations, dream up how they might respond, and they evolve. That approach may keep a story interesting and allow us to move forward.

Finally, there is the little matter of self-criticism. It’s not useful to wonder if our story is fun or interesting. We need to ban those questions. It will never be either one if we don’t write it, and that kind of thinking just slows our fingers. The time to worry about that is really never. We write the story; we edit our first draft and however many drafts follow. Then we put it out into the world, for publication or for friends and family. We let our readers decide about fun and interestingness. If we’re sensible, in my opinion, we don’t ask anyone except the members of our critique group or our special readers to weigh in. Other people will tell us if and when they feel like it.

Here are three prompts:

∙ Expand the story of the three little pigs. Develop their characters. Take the one who builds with straw, for example. What’s his attitude toward the future? How does he spend his time? What’s his take on interior decorating? What are family gatherings like among the three of them? If they argue, how does each one express himself? How do their voices sound? In what ways are they all pigs? In what ways are they different?

∙ Turn the pigs into people, the three daughters of a king who has impoverished his kingdom. The three are homeless, but they still have subjects who depend on them. How do they resurrect their economically depressed land? The daughter who ultimately builds in brick may not necessarily be the heroine, or she may be. Write the story!

∙ Move your pig princesses into the universe of Jane Austen’s novels. The girls are now the daughters of an impoverished parson. They have to go forward, too, and at the end each one has to be paired up with someone. Turn “The Three Little Pigs” into a period romance!

Have fun, and save what you write!

Rainy Day Misery

Thanks for weighing in on the changed blog! If you have more thoughts, please post them. By the way, what used to be called labels are now categories.

Now a little pre-post before the main event:

Without being specific, a writer recently asked on my website about advancing controversial opinions in stories that might offend some readers. This has come up before, and I’ve written a couple of posts on the subject. Basically, I’ve said that we shouldn’t stifle ourselves, and we don’t know whom we’re going to offend or not offend, anyway. The most seemingly bland scenario may trouble someone.

A fresh idea has occurred to me, however. I still don’t think we should worry about our readers. There is literature in the world putting forth every take on every topic in the universe. But we may want to protect ourselves.

Something like this was addressed not long ago in my poetry school in a master class about writing about actual people in one’s life (which I’ve also written about here). One of the poets teaching the class had published a collection that revealed troubling family history. The response from his relatives was less than positive. I think he had every right to publish, but he also had the right to not publish and shield himself if he felt that he wouldn’t be able to deal with the hurt.

This doesn’t apply just to life experiences. If we put forward an unpopular position, whether our readership is broad or narrow, we need to be prepared to accept the response. I’m not saying not to do it–maybe we should do it–but we should brace ourselves. If we’re not ready for criticism or even anger, we can hold off and wait for a better moment.

Now for the regular post. On January 15, 2015, KLC wrote, I had been writing short books that had good ideas, but were not suspenseful at all and leaving me with absolutely no reason to turn the page. Then I started planning for other books and as I started to write them, I realized that the only way I knew to make my books suspenseful was to add in lots of drama and people dying. The problem is that that’s not how I want my books to be like, so how do I make a good, suspenseful book without making it a blood-and-gore horror story. (Perhaps I have been taking your advice “make your characters suffer” a bit far…)

At the time I wrote, I’m adding your question to my list, but it will be a while before I get to it. In the meanwhile, readers will be in suspense if they care about your main character and if he or she needs something or wants something or is in trouble. No one has to die.

And this is what I’m writing now: I love to walk but not in the rain. On most Tuesdays I commute to New York City and while I’m there I like to get in a long walk of about three miles, because I especially enjoy striding through the bustle and along the interesting architecture. The endorphins kick in after a while, and I feel like the healthiest old lady on the planet. Starting on the previous Wednesday, I anxiously watch the weather predictions. It’s silly. My health won’t be damaged if I miss a walk or two, and it’s not my only form of exercise. Usually I’m lucky and get sun, but I worry that I’m wasting my wishes on weather, and when something really important comes along, they’ll all be used up. Still, I care a lot. If I were a character, and the reader sympathized with me, he would want the sun to shine whenever I wanted it to.

Could this desire for a sunny day be a suspenseful part of an interesting story? I think so. Let’s make me a lot younger than I am and let’s call our MC Abigail, since no modern young person is named Gail, alas. Abigail is an outdoorsy person, and things haven’t been going well for her lately. Let’s say her Geology teacher seems to have it in for her and she’s failing, even though she loves the subject. Her best friend has texted her with accusations that make her feel awful, even make her feel that their friendship since they were toddlers may have been a sham. Oh, and let’s top it off: The friend’s accusations are true, because the most misery comes when we are guilty (and, I think, the most reader sympathy).

Abigail needs a break, so she plans one for the next day, because today is shot. It’s spring. The dogwoods are in bloom and she hasn’t seen them yet in her city neighborhood. She packs a picnic lunch the night before and decides to leave early for the big park a mile from her house. If the day is clear, she’ll be able to outstrip her unhappiness or walk into it and figure out some strategies. She goes to sleep visualizing sunshine.

If our story has been very tense up to now we may give her a break and blue skies. If not, we make it pour. She’s cooped up at home because it’s the weekend. What does she do? She obsesses about her friend. She composes an answer, then thinks it won’t do, tries again, gives up. Next, she picks up her geology textbook, reads a paragraph without comprehension, shuts the book with a thud. Desperate to do something positive, she decides to cook dinner for her parents and make her favorite recipe, which they also like, but it turns out that a crucial ingredient is missing, and the deluge is still going on. We’ve set it up that she doesn’t deal well with frustration. So far she’s been cautious and positive, but we know that isn’t going to last. She starts curling her hair around her finger, always a bad sign. The reader wonders in what way she’d going to go off the rails–and keeps reading.

So what have we done? We’ve taken a trivial wish and surrounded it with unhappiness, because we do need to make our characters suffer, even if the suffering is unlikely to kill or maim them or anyone they love. I don’t think I’ve made Abigail sympathetic enough in just this summary, but we need to do that, too, to persuade the reader to turn the page. One possibility for that would be to put her in the presence of her friend, who’s ignoring her. We reveal her thoughts, as she wonders about the right approach, as her friend smiles and talks with other people, maybe even glancing in Abigail’s direction and looking away.

A great example of all of this is Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery. Nothing more violent happens than Anne cracking Gilbert Blythe over the head with her school slate. There’s death, but it’s not the focus of the story, and a baby gets the croup, but Anne saves her. What draws us in is how unloved Anne feels herself to be, with some reason, her ardent desire for whatever she wants at any point in the story, her wry self-awareness, and maybe five other things I can’t think of. Certainly the voice of the narrator is engaging. If you haven’t read it, I hope you will. You don’t have to be eight years old; it’s worth studying.

Although no lives are at stake, the themes can and should still be big. In my example of Abigail and the sunny day it may be friendship, self-worth, self-understanding, empathy, personal growth, honesty. That we touch these grand motifs will also keep readers reading.

Here are three prompts:

∙ Make the reader care about your character’s wish for one of these: a melted cheese sandwich, eyeglasses, quiet, a single good idea, a set of watercolors. Write a scene or the whole story.

∙ Show Abigail at home after receiving the hurtful text. Make her sympathetic through her thoughts and her preparations for the longed-for sunny day.

∙ Write the argument between Abigail and her friend when it finally comes. Make the emotional wounds deep, as if this were a battlefield and the words were swords. If you like, then bring about a reconciliation. If you don’t like, use the argument and the injuries sustained to launch your plot, in which the pain is never physical. You can end finally with renewed friendship or separation and growth, or, tragically, just separation.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Announcement!

A short interim announcement: We’re snatching the blog away from Blogspot and moving it entirely into my website, so that people who don’t have gmail accounts can comment, too. This is an experiment for now. My worry is that unwelcome comments may come in. I’ll delete them, of course, but they’ll be there until I check. If that happens even once, I may moderate comments before they get posted, as I do on the Guest Book, or I may go back to Blogspot.

You’ll find differences, and I want to know what you think. Please say if you’re happy or unhappy, because that will make a difference in how we go forward. My feelings won’t be hurt if you say something negative.

If you signed up as a follower of the blog, your follower-status will move over, so you won’t have to do it again.

I’m eager to hear from you as you give the new blog site a spin. And, as always, I look forward to your writing ideas and questions.

Ready, set, beginnings

On August 5, 2014, nevvawinter wrote, I have a question about beginning a story. I often come up with elements for a story, such as a setting and a character or some dialogue and a conflict, but I have trouble putting these elements together and adding elements to make a complete story out of my initial slightly-fuzzy vision. Any advice would be appreciated.

I have all those problems, too!

End of post.

Just fooling–about it being the end of the post.

I started The Two Princesses of Bamarre prequel that I’m working on right now by telling the reader something my main character doesn’t find out until much later. It’s a dramatic revelation, and it provides instant interest. I’ve been sending my editor fifty-page chunks of the manuscript to keep me from getting seriously off track, and she disagrees with my choice. She thinks the reader shouldn’t learn this truth until my MC does. Maybe she’s right. I won’t be sure–if I ever am sure–until I finish the book and go back and probably try it the other way.

In Two Princesses itself I didn’t get the beginning right until after the advance reading copy had gone out to reviewers–for which the book suffered in the reviews. Then I finally figured it out, and the published beginning is fine, or so I believe.

Before I was a writer I used to paint, and I loved using watercolor. But in watercolor you cannot correct mistakes–or you can, but to a very small degree. Oil is more forgiving; still, in all of painting that isn’t done digitally, earlier versions are covered over. It’s hard to go back.

Writing is infinitely forgiving, especially writing on a computer or laptop, but even pen-and-paper writing is, too, as long as we don’t destroy what went before or cross out so mercilessly that the earlier version becomes indecipherable.

I love that. It takes all the worry out of beginnings. I often start in one place then realize that important scenes precede my beginning, so I add them to the front, sometimes more than once.

Or, going the other way, I may discover that my beginning presents information that the reader doesn’t need. It’s back story that helps me develop my character or my plot, but it doesn’t come into the present adventure. When that happens, I move the unnecessary part into a document called Extra, in case I discover a use for it later.

When I’m fooling around with an idea for a book or a story, I write a lot of notes. Many writers think without writing. They may stare out their window, daydreaming productively.. I can do a little of that, but usually my mind really shifts into gear when I’m typing. I write about where my idea might take me, what characters I need to put it in motion. I may think about the setting, the world it will be in. Often I wonder if there’s a fairy tale I can use to help me with my plot. During this process a beginning usually comes to me. The way that it generally comes has to do with the conflict at the heart of my idea. When that happens, I write my tentative first scene and then go back to my notes.

One way to begin is to start with the central conflict at its height and take it from there. For example, suppose we have a village under some sort of threat, and the village is divided about how to address the threat. Let’s imagine that the danger is seasonal flooding, which seems to get worse every year. The villagers, some unwillingly, have raised their houses and public buildings on stilts. We start with a flood. Alas, the stilts aren’t strong enough, and several houses are swept away, including the home of Skye, our MC. In the disaster her father, Quinn, is killed.

That’s a fine way when it works. We tear into the problem and then we present the difficulties with solving it, revealing character and setting as we go. In my historical novel, Dave at Night, I begin with the death of Dave’s father and plunge the story into the central problem right away.

I tried this with Two Princesses, too, less successfully. In one of my attempts to get the beginning right, I introduced Meryl’s illness immediately. As soon as the book opens, she gets sick. It was a powerful start–too powerful, because the reader couldn’t focus on all the other things I needed to set up: Addie’s timidity, monsters, and the epic poem that features Drualt.

In Dave at Night and my example of Skye and her dear departed dad, the beginning may succeed because these beloved characters are dead and done with, and the story can move on. But suppose Skye’s father doesn’t die. Suppose he’s last seen clinging to a ceiling beam in a rushing river. The reader may be unable to pay attention to anything else because she’s so worried about him, and yet we need to set up the rest of the story.

So instead we start with something not quite so intense but that introduces elements of the conflict to come. In Skye’s story, we might start with a town meeting where Quinn argues loudly against raising the houses and in favor of a system of dams to control the water. Meanwhile, Skye wishes her father weren’t so confrontational. Then we move into the work to raise the house, which Quinn does with all the skill at his command. He disagrees with the town’s decision, but he’s going to do his best. We show the relationship between him and Skye and anyone else we decide to put in the family. Maybe we show that Skye is her dad’s opposite. She’d rather not get what she wants than argue. Since, in my mind, the village is kind of a character in the story, we introduce a few of the residents: the mayor, Skye’s best friend, the horse doctor, the owner of the inn. We produce weather reports. We don’t send in the flood until at least a few scenes take place and establish this world and its inhabitants.

Specifically, our beginning can be presented just about any way: through dialogue, action, thoughts, emotion, more than one. Setting is harder, but that can work too. In this story, which has to do with the natural world, setting may be just the thing. We may want to start with rising water. Or with how beautifully the village has recovered, finally, from the last flood twenty years ago.

And, of course, we can change our mind. We can start with a few lines of dialogue and then decide that the dialogue should come later or isn’t needed at all.

Here are four prompts:

∙ Write Skye’s story beginning with Quinn’s death in the flood.

∙ Write Skye’s story beginning with Quinn being borne away by the rushing water. See if you can make it work.

∙ Write Skye’s story beginning, as I suggested, with the village meeting.

∙ Start the story several ways and just write a few paragraphs. Start with dialogue, then with setting, then with action, then with thoughts, then with emotion. Keep writing from the beginning that interests you the most.

Have fun, and save what you write!

The Twisting, Turning Way

I have two events coming up post-tour! Next Saturday, May 9th, I’ll be at Byrd’s Books, 126 Greenwood Avenue, Bethel, Connecticut, at 11:00 am. And the following Sunday, May 17th, I’ll be participating in the South Carolina Book Festival at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center located
at 1101 Lincoln Street. I’ll be speaking there from 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm and then signing books. Hope to see some of you at one of these events!

If you don’t already know, Stolen Magic came out on April 21st, and I just finished my tour. I met a few of you, and I’m so glad I did!

On December 27, 2014, Elisa wrote, How does one make intricate little side-plots? To add interest and mystery to a story what must one do? I have one story that I’ve written quite a bit in and I know just about everything that is gonna happen, etc., but it is kinda boring me because there is one and only one plot that plods on and on, no interesting little side-plots to add color and depth, just a very simple, straight forward story that goes neither to the left nor the right. How do I fix this? I’ve tried to add more action to the Main Plot (which is, essentially the ONLY plot) but it just adds weight and burden, not necessarily interest. I’m bored at the one-wayness of the story. Any ideas for fixing this?

I tend to have the opposite problem: I over-complicate. So maybe we can find a place in the middle.

Sometimes when stories are hurtling along a single track, the track is single because we haven’t slowed down enough for side tracks to appear. Let’s take the fairy tale “Snow White.” Not much complexity there. The plot mostly revolves around the evil queen, and Snow White herself is just a pretty doll of a character who’s acted upon by others, again mostly the queen.

If we don’t slow down, nothing is very interesting. The queen is motivated by jealousy, the hunter by pity. The dwarfs take her in because she can clean and cook. The prince is love-struck by Snow White’s seemingly lifeless beauty.

Let’s pretend I never wrote Fairest and look at the story fresh.

We can pick any of the characters for the slowing down, so let’s start with the prince and make him our MC. Why is he traveling through those woods? Is he looking for the dwarfs? For something else? Is he on the run? Does he have a sweetheart at home?

More slowing down. We go back to the moment of his departure from his parents’ castle. What sort of family does he leave? Who says goodbye to him? With what feelings does he depart?

What happens on his way to the dwarfs? Does he encounter anyone? Does he run into trouble? Is he bringing trouble with him, or behind him? Are the dwarfs and Snow White in danger because of him?

I’ve never bought it that he falls in love with a dead body, or what he thinks is a dead body. So what is it about the apparent corpse that appeals to him? There’s lots of room for complexity here.

Then, when she wakes up, what happens? Are they really instantly in love?

In the fairy tale, they invite the evil queen to their wedding. We can explore the gaps there. She has to be dealt with, because what’s to stop her from attacking Snow White again? In the fairy tale she goes to the wedding. Why? She could decline the invitation. The mirror has told her that the new queen is more beautiful than she is. Won’t she be dangerous if she shows up? If she doesn’t come, she’s out there being evil. If we slow her part down, we can introduce all these considerations and make complicated things happen based on them.

Let’s move on to another character, the hunter, who risks his life for Snow White. That’s extreme kindness. When I’m kind to someone, if it’s more than a quick thing, I become involved. I want to know what happened. Is the hunter going to just let Snow White go, or is he going to interest himself in her future? If we want to complicate our story, we may decide to answer yes and give him a bigger, slower role.

Snow White’s father doesn’t come into the fairy tale in any significant way, but we can bring him in. Does he know what his wife is up to? What’s his relationship with his daughter? Does he know she’s left the castle? What does he want? What’s going on with his kingdom and affairs of state? How’s his health? We keep asking ourselves questions and consider possible answers, looking for threads we can weave into our story.

This is fun!

And the dwarfs can add more complexity. Are they all glad Snow White is living with them? Do they all like her cooking, for example? Do they all like her? Have any of the dwarfs fallen in love with her? Do they get along with each other? What do they think of the queen? Might one of them be in league with her? What do they think of the prince when he comes along? Do they all think she should marry him?

What about Snow White herself? What does she want? What are her hopes for herself? What was her relationship with the evil queen before the mirror declared her more beautiful? What’s her relationship with her father? With the hunter? Did she know him before he took her into the forest? What does she think of the dwarfs? Does she like them all? Does she like living with them? Is she trying to figure out where else she could go? Or does she want to spend her life in their cottage? I’ve never understood why she lets the evil queen in, even the first time. So why does she do it?

We can keep in mind that our story doesn’t have to end where the fairy tale does. It can go into the future, or we can tell just a fragment of the story that we’ve expanded into a multi-faceted epic.

We can develop plenty of intricacy with just one POV, but if we want still more, we can try multiples or omniscient third person. The hunter and a dwarf, for example, can have their own POVs.

The key to subplots is our characters and their conflicting desires and circumstances. We discover these when we slow our action down, enter our characters’ hearts and minds, and get into the details.

Here are a bunch of prompts:

• Pick out five to ten–or all!–of my questions about the characters in Snow White and write a paragraph or two about what you might do with them.

• Write two more questions about each character. Explore them in a few paragraphs of notes.

• Write an argument between two dwarfs over Snow White. If you like, she can overhear it.

• Write a scene that causes the prince to leave home. Could be an argument, a quest he takes on, whatever.

• From the hunter’s POV, write the scene that follows the moment he lets Snow White go in the forest.

• Write a scene between Snow White and her father.

• Write the whole story!

Have fun, and save what your write!