Plot dilemmas and a villain

On December 13, 2013, this came into the website from Alyssa: I reached a point in my book where I needed an explanation for something, but I couldn’t think of one, so I just put something down so I could keep going. I don’t really like the explanation, but it was the best thing I could come up with. Do you have any advice for moments like that?


Also, I feel like there are large parts of my book where I am just making things up as I go along. Is this normal for you, or do you have a general idea of how your story is going to end when you finish your book?


My third question was, when you create a villain, how much cruelty do you consider enough to convince your reader that the character is no good? Because in my story, the main character’s mother is the main villain in my main character Lara’s life, so I want to convince the reader that the mom is awful and cruel, but Lara still loves her mom, I just don’t know how to show that. I want her to seem evil, but Lara sticks around for about 18 years, so I can’t make her that bad. Do you have any advice for this kind of problem?

Eliza responded with these ideas: I’ve heard lots of writers describe themselves as pantsers, meaning they go off the seat of their pants and just make stuff up. Almost as if they’re reading it instead of writing. For me, I need to have at least a general idea of how it will end. “Villain gets killed. Heroine is reunited with her boyfriend. Character breaks out of prison.” But I don’t know who will kill the villain or how the character escapes. It helps if I know the next five events. By the time I’ve written those I’ve come up with something else. If you feel lost you may need an outline. But if you’re comfortable making stuff up? Go ahead.


On villainy: It’s remarkable-and more than a little sad-how people stay loyal to real life villains. Lara’s grown up with her mother. She’s seen her good side too. But show her doing something awful and cruel and readers will recognize her as a villain. I wrote a story where my character’s parents were mean, though not the main villains. It helped to have her brother call out the parents for being cruel when she’s too afraid to stand up to them.

And Elisa weighed in with, On the out-of-the-blue-temporarily-staying-like-this-fix-later thing: Write something that makes sense, sort of, then leave it like that, then come back and elaborate on it. Change some things earlier on and later on to fit with this scene, (Such as Q: How does the MC escape prison? A: He has a file and a parachute. Now you figure out WHY he has a file and a parachute. Add them into the parts of the story you’ve already written.)

A lot of my writing comes from my subconscious. I toss things into my stories without any idea of where they emerged from. In The Two Princesses of Bamarre, for example, I made Addie skillful at embroidery, probably because I wanted her to be good at something, and embroidery seemed like a hobby that a shy person might take up. Basically, I was just rounding out her character. I didn’t know what I’d do with this accomplishment, but I kept it in mind, and it came in mighty handy when she was captured by the dragon Vollys.

So that would be my suggestion. We come up with an explanation, the best we can think of, and soldier on, remembering the explanation as we go and looking for spots where it will support our plot. Maybe it will create tension, make our MC unhappy, or get her out of a jam.

I also like Elisa’s idea and her example. When we throw in that parachute and file, we create interest and stimulate our ingenuity. We can also make the reader worry. She knows about the parachute and the file. What if a guard finds them? What if another prisoner steals them for his escape?

In Two Princesses, the embroidery might not have turned out to be useful. Addie may have needed something else. As my plot revealed itself, I could have gone back and exchanged embroidery for pottery, or I could have revised her into a supremely strong swimmer. I may have wasted pages and time with the embroidery, but lost time and words for me are just the price of being a writer. And, often, I have fun writing the parts I wind up not needing.

Generally, before I introduce anything into a story, I make a list of possibilities, and the element I bring in isn’t the first one I thought of. So there’s another suggestion. We can make a list of explanations, five at least, and then choose the one we like best. If that one doesn’t work out in the end, we can go back to our list and add to it or see if one of the rejects really fits the bill.

Like Eliza, I, too, usually know in a general way where my story is going. If a plot seems to be meandering or lurching from crisis to crisis, it’s time to stop to consider what the main problem is. To figure that out, we can ask ourselves some questions: What’s most important to our MC? What problem resonates with her personality? Which challenges those aspects of her character that most need to grow?

When we know the main problem, we can list ways to resolve it. We don’t have to work out the resolution in detail, and our decision can be tentative; we’ll know better if the ending is right as we approach it. Once we have an inkling of the ending, we can craft our crises to jibe with it. We can make achievement of our MC’s goal harder even while giving her the tools that will eventually enable her to get there.

Now for the villainous mother. I have just one suggestion: Be subtle. Mrs. McMeanie doesn’t have to beat her daughter. The havoc she wreaks can be psychological, and the reader will still recognize the misery she’s inflicting. She can make her daughter feel inferior with constant put-downs. She can persuade her child to fear the world outside her family. Going the other way she can even cripple her daughter by giving her the idea that she’s better than everyone else. Or she can burden her daughter with impossible expectations. I’ve mentioned on the blog before that I once knew a man whose mother persuaded him that he was unlucky, and he played that belief out in his adult life. That mother, probably unintentionally, became the villain in her son’s story.

Here are four prompts:

• Your MC sets off on a new endeavor, which could be a new school, a battle, camp, a job as unicorn trainer in a zoo. Before she leaves, her mother gives her a few words of advice, which make everything harder. Write the advice and the scene that follows. If you like, continue and write the story.

• A good friend of mine believes that moms have gotten a bad rap in literature for children. In this scene, your MC is spending the day alone with her father. She’s thrilled because he rarely has time to dedicate to her. Make it all go wrong and reveal the dad as less than a great guy.

• Along the same lines, retell “Hansel and Gretel,” and make the father the major baddie instead of the mother–or the witch!

• Our MC, who’s been captured by the enemy, is held in a stone fortress. She has a candle and a lady’s fan. Have her escape using one or both of these.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Different peas in a pod

Great news! My forthcoming writing book, Writer to Writer, has a subtitle, and it comes from you wonderful blog writers, who galloped in with your excellent ideas when I appealed for help. The powers that be at HarperCollins loved (and I love it too) one of Eliza’s suggestions. The subtitle will be–imagine a drum roll–From Think to Ink. Thank you, everyone, and special thanks to Eliza!

Eliza, if you’d like the acknowledgment in the book to include your last name, please write to the guestbook on my website with that information. Your email address would also be helpful. I won’t display anything you send. Unlike the blog, I see comments on the website and approve them before they’re posted.

On December 4, 2013, Bug wrote, I am worried that all my characters are too similar, and I have tried adding quirks, but I still feel like they are still really really close to each other. Does anyone have any way to help? Maybe my quirks aren’t quirky enough…

An assessment of the traits we usually give our characters may help. We can make a list. For example, suppose our characters’ virtues tend to be friendliness, an easy-going nature, and a sense of humor. We put these on our list. Their flaws seem always to include difficulty trusting, sarcasm, and laziness. We list these too. As soon as we look at our list we see possibilities for variation.

We can make add other personality traits, like this: shyness, too much energy, seriousness, a trusting nature, quick anger, hesitancy, impulsiveness, nervousness, sweetness, optimism, pessimism. That’s eleven. Go for eleven more. Return to this list and add to it when you think of additions, and keep the list handy as you develop your characters.

Of course it’s not enough to have a list. We have to show the traits in action, dialogue, thoughts, and feelings. Suppose our MC Jenna is waiting at a bus stop along with three strangers. It’s winter; snow is falling lightly; the bus is late. One stranger is so wrapped up against the weather that Jenna can see only his or her amber-colored eyes. Let’s call him or her WU, for wrapped up. The other stranger, whose name will turn out to be Ivan, is approximately Jenna’s age (fifteen), and, like Jenna, he’s wearing just a light jacket over a hoodie sweatshirt, no gloves, and sneakers rather than boots. Ignoring the swathed person, he starts a conversation with her. What does he say?

We cast an eye over our list of characteristics. Since Ivan started the conversation, let’s imagine that he’s not shy. And let’s pick impulsive and too trusting from our list. What might such a person say to Jenna? We write three possible lines for him. If all of them look like the sort of dialogue we always write, we write three more. When we get something that feels unfamiliar, we give it to him. Once he speaks, we know him a little.

Now we have to decide what Jenna does or says. Again we go to our list, then write down possible responses. Since she’s our POV character, we can tell the reader what she’s thinking and feeling, too, so our possible response list may be longer.

It will help if we have an idea of the kind of story we’re writing, so we can stop now to decide. If this is going to be a romance, we’ll go in one direction, probably, and WU may even turn out to be one of Ivan’s parents. If we’re writing an adventure story, we may have the dialogue go another way, and the missing bus and WU may take on more significance. If we’re writing horror, we may start to suspect Ivan as well as WU. Science fiction or fantasy may lead us in another direction.

The roles our characters are going to play in our story will help us make each unique. Let’s take one of my favorite novels when I was little, the classic Bambi by Felix Salten as an example. We’ll probably be writing a more complex story than this one, but its simplicity helps to show what I mean, because the characters aren’t much more than their roles. If you read the book when you were much younger, or never read it at all, you can go to Wikipedia for a plot summary, as I just did to refresh my memory. If you go to Wikipedia, make sure the page you’re on is for the book and not the movie.

Let’s look at just a few of the characters:

Bambi is our MC, brave, intelligent, inexperienced but promising at the beginning, thoughtful.

His mother is motherly, solicitous, expert in the ways of raising a fawn.

Faline, the love interest, is alluring and charming.

The old Prince is solemn, wise.

Gobo is weak and gullible.

The tale spans the life of a deer in a forest where hunters hunt. Man is the main villain, but carnivores in general don’t come off very well. Gobo, for example, is the way he is so that a point can be made about the danger of trusting humans. There are other turns in the story, but his undoing affects everything that follows. When Salten wrote Gobo, he must have known the role he would play in his plot.

Of course, we want major characters with more depth than a couple of salient characteristics. If our character is weak and gullible, we need to ask ourselves, Weak how? Physically? Is he ill or out of shape or exhausted? Emotionally weak? Is he unable to resist the slightest temptation? Gullible how? What else can we give him? Maybe he’s physically weak and also embarrassed to ask for help. As a result he often gets along without. Maybe he’s gullible because he always believes the best of people.

So we differentiate our characters by first thinking about their parts in our story and then by dreaming up ways to complicate their personalities without derailing our plot.

We can also see if we can eliminate characters we don’t need. For instance, if I had been around when “Cinderella” was first concocted, I would have argued against two stepsisters. We don’t need two! In the fairy tale they’re indistinguishable. And why seven dwarfs? They clump together into a formless mass of short characters. At least Disney had the good sense to name each one after a distinguishing characteristic. I couldn’t remember all the names, so I looked them up in Wikipedia, where the dwarfs’ monikers in various “Snow White” productions are listed. Here’s the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_names_of_the_Seven_Dwarfs. The strange names they’re given from production to production are funny.

In our story, if we have a group of friends who all seem to be running together, we can practice character economy and drop a few.

But we may need them all. My novel The Wish is about popularity, and I had to have a bunch of teenagers. It was hard work to make each one stand out! In a mystery we need enough suspects to confuse the poor reader, and we must differentiate between them so the reader can follow the plot.

Here are four prompts:

• Write the romantic version of the Jenna and Ivan story.

• Write a version of the story in which WU is the villain. Ivan knows him or her and is terrified.

• Have the bus come. Inside are five passengers and the driver. Jenna, Ivan, and WU get on. Turns out WU has been waiting for this particular driver to come along. You make up the reason. Write the bus ride and make the driver, each of the passengers, WU, Jenna, and Ivan distinct. Give each a role to play in the plot.

• Rewrite “Cinderella,” changing the plot so that the second stepsister has a real part to play for good or for ill. You can bring the story to its usual conclusion or change it entirely.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Beautiful wickedness

On November 19, 2013, J. Garf wrote, I was wondering if anyone knows how to make evil beautiful. I don’t mean making the villains physically beautiful, that’s relatively easy. I mean the act of evil itself. For example, in the Phantom of the Opera, the phantom calls light “cold, unfeeling” and “garish”, while he calls darkness and evil “sweet intoxication.” Is this simply his mad opinion, or could you write something like that? I plan to read the book soon which will hopefully give me some ideas, but does anyone have any advice? Also, how difficult is it to write a protagonist as a villain?

Bibliophile commented, I would say, pretty difficult. I mean, we all want to root for the protag, but can we if they’re evil?


I think that good examples of this on TV are Breaking Bad and definitely Dexter. Don’t watch those shows if you’re squeamish. But in general, if the evil is backed by some good, then we might be able to relate. Like when we had to read Mein Kampf by Hitler, he kept stating his mission over and over again. It’s a good read, there were some things in there that you wouldn’t have expected of him. 


If you were to write a story like that, it would definitely need to be in first person. Otherwise, the character wouldn’t come across as well as he could have.

In the nick of time, Bibliophile clarified: Reading that over, it sounds like I agreed with Hitler, I DO NOT!!!!! It just was interesting to see how his mind worked.

And Michelle Dyck weighed in with, I’m not sure if you can make evil TRULY beautiful. I think you can make it understandable, or beautiful from the perspective of the evil character. But at some point in the story, the readers will begin to see the evil for what it really is.

First off, I want to mention that Dexter and Breaking Bad are both TV series for adults, and for adults with stronger stomachs than mine!

Villains are fascinating! But I’ve never tried to create beautiful evil or an evil protagonist, so what follows is just speculation.

Say we have a species of intelligent cockroaches locked in a war with humans for dominion over the earth. The roaches hope to wipe humanity out, except for a handful who will be kept in zoos. Our MC, Hunneeha, is a young roach lieutenant, who has risen in the roach ranks by dint of her enthusiasm, skill, and team spirit. She and her squad have been assigned to infiltrate an elementary school and kill all the adults and children. In the first scene Hunneeha and her squad are getting ready for their mission. Let’s say the story is written in the first person, and it begins like this:

We gathered in the basement sink. Eleven of them looked at me, waiting for my orders, but Jujo, youngster that he was, sucked on the end of a feeler. I waited for him to come to attention, grateful for the time to think of what to say, how to prepare them. Pretty Panay’s carapace sparkled. She must have spent half of yesterday polishing herself, thinking, perhaps, that cleanliness might contribute to victory. Gross feet thundered overhead. What chance did a shiny carapace have against the filthy soles of a human shoe?

Can we make these cockroaches beautiful? I bet we can, although we may have to get past our own revulsion first. We may write about shine, delicacy, big eyes–and not highlight the icky aspects. We’ll have to individualize the bugs. Some are probably better looking than others. Hunneeha may obsess over her skinny legs.

Are they evil? Suppose we alternate chapters from Hunneeha’s POV with chapters from the POV of Marcy, a high school student who has a part-time job in the school cafeteria, which is the roaches’ target; they’re intending to poison the food. Marcy and the children suspect nothing. We make the reader admire Marcy, too, and his brain somersaults whenever the chapters shift.

The point is, everything depends on perspective. We have to get inside our evil MC’s world, understand his goals, discover what he treasures. As an example, let’s make a hero of a tyrant, one who practices genocide, who by any reasonable standard is evil. His most important characteristic is that he’s an extreme nationalist. At the beginning of our story his people are poor and divided into factions. He realizes that the economy needs a war and that people won’t come together without a common enemy, so he, quite deliberately, picks out a tribe of his own people to demonize. Let’s call them the Bup tribe. Suppose he shines a spotlight on the wealthiest Bups. He publicizes their wealth and contrasts it with the plight of the poorest in the other tribes. As the writer, we don’t show members of this tribe who are poor or charitable or struggling or sympathetic in any way. Instead, we highlight the slow steady improvement in the economy. Maybe we zoom in on a delightful family that’s benefiting from the tyrant’s policies. We show violent acts by Bups but not the treatment that led to the fighting back. For the beauty part, we show a ceremony that unifies the other tribes. There are marches with candles and children singing in enormous rooms with vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows and banners. There is an air of solemnity and purpose and occasional joyous laughter.

I think we can make this evil beautiful. In addition to perspective, we’ve been selective. We’ve chosen not to show the whole picture of the Bups. By selection, we can make the tyrant sympathetic and heroic. We can make him handsome and even lovable. I bet we can even confuse ourselves.

If we write something like this, are we evil? Maybe not. Are we doing something wrong? I think so.

And I’m not sure we can produce great stories this way, because we may have to try too hard to make the point. We probably have to make our tale less complex in order to force the readers’ feelings. We shift closer to propaganda than to true story-telling. It’s not very different from writing a moralistic story. In both cases, the subtle grays that make fiction thrilling are sacrificed. It’s why I prefer MCs who are a little flawed and villains who are somewhat sympathetic.

Having said all this, we always stack the deck to some degree in our stories. We definitely want the reader to like certain characters more than others. But we also let our stories find their own way and surprise us sometimes.

Here are five prompts:

• Write the scene in which pretty Panay is killed by a first grader. Make the reader feel terrible. Make him hate the child who killed her. For extra credit (ha!), make the child seem as disgusting to the reader as roaches usually feel to us.

• Decide who wins the school battle. Write the final scene. For more extra credit, make the reader have mixed emotions about the outcome.

• Write “Little Red Riding Hood” from the POV of the wolf. Make him more than likable. Make it a tragedy when the hunter kills him.

• If you’re in the mood for historical research, read up on the American Revolution. Pick an MC on the side of the British, and make the reader root for the cause of the monarchy.

• Write “Sleeping Beauty” from the POV of the angry fairy who wants the baby to die. Make her sympathetic. Make her even correct.

This turned out to be a pretty serious post. But have fun and save what you wrote!

Secondarily

Happy new year to all!
November 2, 2013, Kenzi Anne wrote about her difficulty with secondary characters: Usually I get pretty unique main characters that I feel satisfied with, but I feel like the secondary characters in every one of my stories fit the same mold–like I plop the same character into four different stories and just change the looks. “This is the funny one,” or “this is the brooding one,” or “this is the one that has trust issues and betrays everybody else.” I guess I feel like all of my secondary characters are cliche. When I tried to make them unique, they became too main. How do I make secondary characters interesting and unique, while still keeping them secondary?
Elisa suggested that giving quirks to secondary characters can help distinguish them, and J. Garf wrote, I used to have that problem too, until I started thinking about people I really know. Think about your friends. What makes them different from everyone else? Maybe one of them is really tall. Maybe another only has a sense of humor when it comes to horses or hot air balloons. Maybe one enjoys math and is a total nerd…. I have one character who was the standard, funny and supportive secondary character, and it didn’t take me very long to realize that he was way cliched. So, I edited him and made him seem different from the very beginning. He is part of a group of men that has to be very strong, which he is, but I made him really short for a man. He now has one of those odd personalities that’s so positive that you have a hard time believing that they’re serious, which would be weird if he was the main but he’s just a secondary, so it just makes him interesting. He’s very friendly, immediately. He’s still supporting, and is the funny one, but he’s different enough to make him a unique character. Just make sure that you don’t give too much detail, or too much uniqueness if you want to keep the character secondary.
These are interesting ideas. Something along the lines of J. Garf’s suggestion comes up in Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande, a book I found helpful when I started writing. As an exercise, Brande has her reader think of a story she knows well and plug into one of the main characters a real person she also knows well and imagine the result. I thought of Pride and Prejudice and my sister as Elizabeth. In my imaginings my sister would find Darcy way too stuffy. The story would have to find a new direction.
This technique works equally well with secondary characters, and your story doesn’t have to be derailed in the process. Think, for example, of “Snow White.” We have a rich cast of secondaries here in the hunter and the seven dwarfs. Try this prompt: Pick three of the dwarfs and the hunter. Think of four people you know and endow the characters with their personalities. The real four don’t all have to be male. Neither do the dwarfs or the hunter, for that matter. The four are walking through a forest and discussing what to do about Snow White, how to protect her, how to keep her occupied and happy, what the hunter should tell the evil queen. In the middle of the discussion some crisis arises, which could be exterior, like a bear, or interior, like a disagreement–or both. Let your characters show themselves as they would in real life. Be sure to include dialogue. For example, one of the dwarfs could be a person I know who says everything more than once. The dwarf who stands in for her would do the same, and might get interrupted by another dwarf who’s impatient and a tad rude. In the exchange they will each distinguish themselves for the reader and as the scene progresses the reader will be able to pick out each one.
Obviously, we can use this technique on any secondaries who’ve entered our story with nothing more than a stereotype.
I love quirks for secondary characters, who often don’t have to have the depth of mains. They can be all quirks, sometimes just one. For example, I was able to nail King Lionel in The Two Princesses of Bamarre just from his habit of consulting The Book of Homely Truths whenever he has to make a decision or respond to someone. Or in Fairest the library-keeper speaks mostly in book titles.
Often, secondary characters can be as peculiar as we want to make them because the reader isn’t likely to identify with them as much as with our MCs. The reader won’t see herself in the secondary. And they don’t have to carry the full weight of the plot, either. We can fool around. So, for example, Kenzi Anne’s brooding character–let’s call him Hamletti–doesn’t have to worry about ordinary problems, like personal failures or relationships. He can stress out over the danger of plankton eating their way out of the ocean and becoming an invasive terrestrial species, and he can be really despondent over this. If he’s sympathetic, the reader can pity him.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem to have more than one story with a secondary who has trust issues–as long as the reasons are different and the manifestations are, too. For example, maybe Johanna, when she feels threatened, retreats into long sessions of Monopoly, playing in her imagination against the person who’s frightened her. But Thomas expresses his fear by writing long letters to the editor of the local newspaper.
I like to make lists of possibilities in my notes. It could go like this: Why does Johanna mistrust?
1. Her parents lied to her about what happened to her puppy.
2. She went to sleep when she was eight in her own bedroom and woke up stretched across two seats in a bus bound for Pittsburgh.
3. The first time she tasted tofu she lost her hearing for a week.
And so on. Maybe whenever a new character meets her, Johanna feels obliged to tell her sad history as a way to protect herself.
If our secondaries threaten to take over our story it may not be because they’re too interesting. More likely it’s because we’re giving them too much stage time. The thrust of the story, the major problems belong to our MCs. The secondaries appear once or intermittently. To keep them from stealing the show, we need to remember what the main problem is and how our MCs are approaching it.
But, if we do fall in love with Johanna and want to tell her story, well, we can change our mind. Or we can finish this story and write a sequel about her.
Here are five prompts:
• List five more reasons for Johanna’s trust issues.
• List eight ways Johanna shows her mistrust.
• List seven other reasons that Hamletti finds to fuel his despondency.
• Both, Johanna and Hamletti, are persuaded by friends to go ice skating. Have them collide, meet, and set each other off. Write what follows.
• Make Johanna and Hamletti into dwarfs in “Snow White.” Write a scene with the two of them and Snow White, but keep Snow White and her problem central to the scene. They’re preparing her, because they suspect the queen is going to show up, and they want her to survive, but their advice is filtered through their own quirky perspectives.
Have fun, and save what you write!

Personhood

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all!

Lately a lot of questions have come in about person. This one came into the website in October from Anna Baber: I’ve been working on a book and even though I usually use first person, I decided to try third person/second person. However, my characters seem so dead. So dead even I didn’t care about them. Do you know how I should fix this???

An exchange followed with carpelibris, who wrote, A few offhand thoughts:


Do they face challenges?
Do they do things, as opposed to having things happen to them?


Something I read once, although I can’t remember where or who wrote it: “Think of what 9 or 10 people would do in a given situation. Have your character be #10, who does something different.”


Random thought: Why do you usually write in 1st person, and what about this story made you choose to write it in 3rd?

Anna Baber responded, I love reading first person and it’s easy for character development. Aside from that, I’ve been writing for about four years and I’ve written around twenty “novels”–almost all in first person! So I’m much more comfortable in first person. What about you?

From carpelibris: I’ve tried both (even a short story in second once, but that felt weird.) I mostly default to third for novels For short stories (Runs off to do a quick check). Ok, I just did a rough, arbitrary count of my submissions in the last 6 months that weren’t Drabbles. (100-word stories.) 3 were in 1st person and 6 were in 3rd. When I do 1st it’s usually because the character comes into my head that way and their voice is a big part of the appeal, or the story’s mostly about what the POV character’s thinking and feeling.

First off, kudos to carpelibris for putting your work out in the world. And thanks for sharing your success on the blog. I’ve enjoyed reading your stories. The last one made me cry!

And congratulations to Anna for your productivity!

Next a definition: in second person, the main character, instead of being I, is you, as in, You look up from your meal. You swallow, although the gooey mass sticks in your throat and the ton of hot sauce makes tears well up. “Tastes great, Dad,” you say and put your hand in your lap to cross your fingers.

I’ve never written more than this little sample in second person. Seems hard to pull off in a longer form. The only book I’ve read in second person is a young-adult novel by A. M. Jenkins called Damage (high school and up). We need a reason to choose second person. In this case MC Austin Reid is depressed, and second person is a great way to put across his isolation, even from himself.

I love the distinction carpelibris makes between characters doing “things, as opposed to having things happen to them.” When characters are active in the face of the crises in their lives, rather than the passive recipients of events, they come to life. If our MC is hit over the head by a two-by-four, she has no choice but to go down, no matter who she is–-unless she’s a mutant with an extraordinarily thick skull. But in most disasters, our characters face choices. Suppose a tornado rips through town, cutting a narrow swath of destruction. Our MC Jacqui was visiting a friend whose house was untouched. As soon as the twister passes, she races for home. It’s a weekend, and both her parents were there, along with her older brother and the family dachshund. When she gets to her street, she hears sirens, and the house is flattened.

This is where carpelibris’s suggestion comes in, to have our character act surprisingly. What does Jacqui do?

Here’s a prompt: Write nine likely responses from Jacqui at the scene. Write one unlikely response. Write five more unlikely ones.

If Jacqui picks one of the unexpected ones, she will stop seeming dead. The reader will get interested and wonder about her character, feelings, thoughts, motives. We can then selectively reveal her inner life.

And that inner life can be as surprising as her actions. Her feelings may be something other than distress. Her thoughts may be about the neighbor’s house rather than her own. Physically, her heart may not speed up at all; tears may not well up. In third person, we can go into this with our POV character. If Jacqui is a secondary character, we can see that her eyes remain dry, but we won’t have the direct experience of her inner life. She can let us in on some of it through dialogue and whatever she may write, plus other exterior physical clues and further actions.

Of course, if our narrator is omniscient (all-knowing), we can dip in and out of everyone’s mind and heart.

To continue the prompt, write nine likely thoughts and six unlikely ones. Write five common emotional reactions and three incongruous ones.

Trying different POVs is great practice. I’ve suggested before that if a scene isn’t working in third person, rewrite it in first and then translate it back into third, including the material that made it come to life. This translation will probably lead you to see how to use the new POV effectively. You can keep doing this as you go along until third person becomes as easy as first.

More prompts:

• Translate a scene from a story you’ve been happy with in first person into third-person omniscient, bringing in the thoughts and feelings of your secondary characters. If your story takes off in a new direction, go with it.

• Translate the beginning of one of your first-person stories into second person. See if you can go all the way to the end that way.

• Maisy looks out her bedroom window. On the street below, a motorcycle strikes what seems to be one of Santa’s elves, who falls and hits his head on a fire hydrant. The street is empty. Maisy runs downstairs and does something surprising, thinks something unusual, and feels something downright strange. Write the scene in third person. If you like, write the story. You can begin with the accident or you can go back to an earlier moment. Switch back and forth from third person to first if you need to.

• Write Jacqui’s story in third person, but, again, if you need to put parts of it into first, do that, and then change back.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Thinking in Person

Oh, my! Many, many thanks to everyone who sent in subtitle suggestions! I can’t say enough how helpful they’ve been. I’d been stuck in a rut of subtitles that varied by only a word or two and weren’t very interesting. You blew the rut away by going in directions I hadn’t dreamed of. My editor likes several ideas, and she’s taking them to the all-important sales team for their judgment. I’ll let you know when there’s a decision. Alas, I don’t know how long that will take.

This came into the website from Sophie in October: My problem is that when I write in third person, I don’t think I get into my characters’ heads enough. I talk about their actions, their conversation, and their instincts, but not their thoughts. Or if I do get into their heads, I often jumble up their thoughts, confusing both myself and them.


On the other hand, when I write in first person I’m afraid I’m showing their thoughts far too much, giving too much sarcastic commentary and showing too many of their likes and dislikes.
Ideas? 

Early in my writing days I took a wonderful workshop class and took it again and again for several years. Every week our teacher, Bunny, would read student work without identifying the authors and we would discuss and praise and critique. Often, when a chapter of mine was read, people said I had neglected to show what my MC was feeling. After a while, I’d hear the voices of my classmates in my mind while I was writing, telling me to include emotion. Then, when I worked with an editor for the first time, after nine years of trying, the criticisms I heard most often from her worked their way into my brain, too, and joined the helpful refrain.

We can install our own helpful voices even without a workshop or an editor. The most important word in the last sentence is helpful. We don’t want the drumbeat to go, What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I remember to show feelings? It should be more like, Let there be feelings! Feelings will bring out the terrific stuff I’ve got going.

If we already know we’re not putting in thoughts enough when we’re writing in third person, we can set up ways to remind ourselves and to get in the habit of remembering. Some writers edit the work from their last session before writing anything new. If this is what you do, you can start by looking for places to add thinking. Or, as you write, you can remind yourself every half hour to think about thinking. You can make a poster for yourself that says, Think about thinking, and pin it up in your workspace. You can put reminders on your phone or set an alarm to go off. When it rings you have to edit for thoughts. As you drift off to sleep, you can chant, Into their heads! These techniques will help you create a routine, and eventually you won’t need them.

You can use the same approaches when you’re writing in first person, reminding yourself to limit the thoughts when you’re writing a first draft and also to trim them in revision.

Here’s another technique to try: When you have a third-person scene that lacks thoughts, rewrite it in first person. And vice versa. Yes, this is time-consuming and word-consuming, but who’s counting? I toss out tons of pages on every book. I learn by trying. Writing isn’t efficient.

To recognize what warrants thoughts and what doesn’t, we keep an eye on our story elements. For example, say our MC Sharyn falls off her bike and a new character, Willard, stands over her and says, “Some hedgehogs run away instead of using their needles. I mean, spines. They’re really called spines.” Third person or first, Sharyn has got to think something. For example, she may think first about her bike and whether it’s been damaged. She may notice what this stranger is wearing. She may remember how bad her whole day has been. Or dozens of other possibilities. After the thought, but only after the thought, we can have her say something. Her thoughts contribute to the reader’s understanding of her character. If she notices what Willard is wearing, we also get more development of his character. If the bicycle or her bad day or this new character has anything to do with our story’s trajectory, we advance the plot.

But if Sharyn is merely biking along and not falling, we may want to keep her thoughts to a minimum and just get her there. Not always, though. The ride may give her a chance to mull something over and come to a decision that will move the plot along.

In my opinion, usually reactions belong with events. Suppose we delay Sharyn’s thoughts after she falls. Willard appears, says what he says. She replies. He says some other disconnected thing and wanders away. She brushes herself off and rides on and starts thinking about the experience. As a reader, while events unfold, I’m thinking, What does Sharyn make of this? What’s going on with her? Is she in shock? When she finally does start thinking, I may be satisfied. No. I won’t be. By then it’s too late for me.

On the other hand, we don’t want to interrupt an exciting moment like the fall and the introduction of Willard with a paragraph of thinking. We can drop in just a quick thought here, another there, as the dialogue develops. Then, when Willard leaves, we can have Sharyn think more expansively.

A note about sarcasm: In my opinion, a little goes a long way. If a character is sarcastic by nature, a few salvos in dialogue or thought when we first meet her will establish that characteristic. In future scenes, just one will be enough to remind the reader.

If our MC is a sarcastic-by-nature person, we’ll have to work harder to make her likable, if we want her to be likable. It certainly can be done, but we’ve added a hurdle.

Sarcasm is easy to write. For example, the first thing that may jump to mind for Sharyn to think after Willard speaks could be something like, Thanks for helping me up. In the circumstances, the thought is justified, but it isn’t the most interesting way to go. Instead, she might wonder where he lives or if he owns a hedgehog or if he knows how strange he seems. In dialogue we can resist a sarcastic comeback and consider other possibilities. Sharyn may say, “Yes, and foxes are really easy to domesticate.” If she’s kind she might say, “I didn’t know that.” If she’s mean, she could say, “Well, you’re a freak.”

Going back to the problem of including the right amount of thinking, the solutions I’ve proposed are mechanical, which I see nothing wrong with. We’re learning a skill, writing, and we need protocols to help us. When we train ourselves to play an instrument, we play scales. When we train in a sport, we practice. Same with fiction writing. And if we’ve identified the difficulty, we’re way ahead.

Here are three prompts:

• Continue the scene with Sharyn and Willard. If you like you can introduce additional tension in the reason Sharyn fell off her bike. After you’ve written the scene in first or third person, look it over and decide if you’ve included the right number of thoughts. If not, revise. If you like, keep going with the story.

• Your MC Paulette has to decide between two kingdoms. Both want her for the magic sword that she alone can wield. She’s meeting with both rulers in a neutral place, and each is trying to win her allegiance. Write the scene in first person, including her thoughts. Make her suspicious and angry. Rewrite, making her feel honored and loved, with thoughts to go along with those emotions. Rewrite again, and this time give her a secret desire.

• Try the scene with Paulette again but this time in omniscient third person. Include the thoughts of each ruler.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Help!

Not a post but a plea. My new writing book, which is based on the blog and which will be out early in 2015, will be called Writer to Writer. That’s settled, but it needs a subtitle and all the minds involved, mine and my editor’s and her team’s, are struggling. I would appreciate ideas. The subtitle of Writing Magic is Creating Stories That Fly. This subtitle needs to be different. If you work on this, keep in mind that the book covers poems as well as stories. One more thing: the subtitle probably shouldn’t mention the blog, although I talk about the blog throughout the book, except for the poetry section.

If you come up with the subtitle we use, I will be delighted to acknowledge you and your contribution in the book.

Thank you, thank you, those of you who give this a try!

Never Ever Ever Ending Story

To the NaNoWriMo writers: How did it go?

At the end of October, McKennah wrote this on my website: How do you know when to stop writing stuff for a certain story? I mean you could keep writing a story forever, but how do you know when enough is enough?

E.S. Ivy commented, Hmm… I get what she means because when I read a book, I always think about the story that goes on after it ends. 🙂


Maybe: Think in terms of an obstacle, task, or main milestone for the main character to achieve. Then your story is about how they go about getting there and the failed attempts. The story ends when the goal is obtained. I find that looking at early MG or chapter books are a great place to start picking out how to plan a story arc.

I piped in with: Just a definition for anyone who’s uncertain: MG is middle grade, which would include books and stories for kids roughly in the eight-to-twelve-year-old range.

And Nikitah Luse added, Think of your over-arching story: Maybe you have such a long idea that it “may never end”, but find places where you could cut a logical ending while still leaving it open for future stories. Example: Your story idea might be about a group of questers whose destiny it is to save a kingdom. Unfortunately, that can go on forever and ever with all of the side quests and problems. So you find that in your head the story has three main moments: the questers meeting, learning to work together, and fighting the bad guy at the end. That’s three stories right there! Conclude the first after they have all managed to find one another and figure out what the problem to be overcome is, the second after they have bungled through many problems and are finally a team (maybe even one of their own is threatened–great cliffhanger!), and the third when the bad guy is defeated, the heroes are figuring out what to do to clean up the mess and what is next for them. And then you can keep going with another foe in your next story, but by this time your readers will know the characters and how they work together, so the hard part is done.

And Kenzi Anne contributed this: I used to have the same problem, and I felt like my stories were becoming never-ending rants. I decided to choose my endings by finding a point in the story when I could wrap up all my loose ends, especially the main problem that my story revolved around. That way I could find my ending. If I wanted to write a second book, then I could also use this method to separate the first story from the second but leave enough strings “untied” to still have an ongoing plot.

I think all these ideas are right. I’d like to highlight E. S. Ivy’s suggestion about looking at other books to help figure out how writers keep from nattering on forever.

Let’s do that together, using Peter Pan by James M. Barrie as an example. If you’ve never read it, Aaa! I don’t know what to suggest for reading this post, because it’s going to be full of spoilers. Maybe you should read it and come back. In my opinion, there’s a treat in store for you. It’s one of my favorite books.

Usually, a book introduces a problem somewhere near the beginning and solves it somewhere near the end. In Peter Pan, there are a few problems. One starts in the backstory when Peter runs away from home and becomes the enchanted character we know and love. His problem, which we pick up from hints that Barrie drops, is the conflict between his wish to stay a child and his desire for a family. Next, Wendy, Michael, and John lose their parents and their Nana (their dog) by flying away from home. And the Darlings and Nana lose their children. We’ve got three problems that are central to the plot. Important also is Captain Hook’s ambition to defeat Peter. That’s Hook’s problem; Peter doesn’t think about Hook all that much.

Peter’s problem is temporarily solved when Wendy and her brothers take up residence with him and the lost boys. He has a family and he doesn’t have to grow up. The Darlings and Nana are miserable. The story returns to them now and then but they don’t do much more than wring their hands or whimper.

The middle of the book, which isn’t very long, not long enough for me, brings the children to Neverland, introduces the island and its inhabitants, establishes a way of life there (which suggests time passing), and puts the boys and Wendy through an adventure on the lagoon. A single adventure! Unless I’m forgetting something. Maddeningly, Barrie dangles an array of adventures but chooses only one.

Then the beginning of the end begins. In the course of evening story time, Wendy’s brothers, John and Michael, reveal that they’re forgetting their original home. Wendy is alarmed, and a decision is reached to return. Then Hook attacks, which launches the book’s crisis .

With Hook’s demise and the return of the children all the problems are solved, not happily for Hook. Peter remains young but alone, so the ending is mixed for him, and possibly also for the other children, who, in my interpretation, have a little lingering regret.

What an economical story it is! Barrie could have invented other adventures and threatened Peter and his merry band in myriad ways. The Darlings could have taken action, too, set out from the mainland or hired detectives or whatever else. Nana could have started swimming. Maybe Barrie did write more and cut those extra parts when he revised. The point is, he made a decision. He said, Enough!

And because he left us wanting more, stories have spun off his for a hundred years.

It’s up to the writer. Our story may not announce that it’s finished. We get to make that determination.

Let’s look at my The Two Princesses of Bamarre for a minute. It’s longer but simpler. There are two essential problems: the Gray Death and Addie’s timidity. When she sets out on her quest for the cure the middle of the book begins. There are three kinds of monsters in this world, and I wanted her to contend with each of them and with her fear. But I could have gone on longer. I could have made the disease develop more slowly so that other adventures could happen. I didn’t think it out that clearly, but I guess I felt that more would have been overload.

As we continue to write, we get better at sensing when we’ve reached a satisfying point in our story. For now, try the rule of three, which we often find in fairy tales. Cinderella goes to three balls and loses her slipper after the last one. The evil queen in “Snow White” makes two attempts on Snow White’s life before she finally seems to succeed on the third. The miller’s daughter gets three chances to guess Rumpelstiltskin’s name.

Success on the first or second try can seem too easy. On the fourth or twelfth, readers may be yawning or thinking our MC is useless. But we do want to vary the number in our stories sometimes. If we always follow the rule of three, we can become predictable.

Not all books introduce an overarching problem and then solve it. Some just cover a period of time with smaller problems along the way. I’m thinking of Little Women, for example. In the course of the book the girls face challenges and grow from little to big. Louisa May Alcott decided how many incidents to include at each stage in the lives of her MC’s. When they’re big, the story ends.

Here are three prompts:

• Your characters are shipwrecked on an island inhabited by unfriendly dwarfs and fierce pirates. There’s a traitor among the survivors. Staying alive is the problem. Endanger them three times before they establish themselves safely or escape.

• Your MC is at summer camp or boy or girl scout camp. The story ends when camp does. Create a series of problems as the camp experience progresses. Develop supporting characters, who can be other campers, counselors, the camp director, parents. Decide how many incidents you need to make the story feel complete.

• Cinderella and her stepsisters are just backstory. Your MC is the prince. At midnight, in the middle of the third ball, Cinderella runs out. Your MC chases her, trips on the stairs, tumbles down, hits his head, loses consciousness, and wakes up, holding one glass slipper, his memory gone. The only clue he has to his identity is the slipper. Take the story from there. He can wind up with Cinderella, or not.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Mind Reading

To all you laboring on your NaNoWriMo novel: Happy writing! May words pour out of you like water over Niagara Falls! May ideas crop up like dandelions in July! And if you have questions, think of this blog.

This question came into the website in September from Rebekah: I recently reread Writing Magic and the section on POV to see how I could make it work with my own story, but I didn’t find anything. 
My story is in 3rd person, but I wanted to try it in 1st person. I really love being in my MC’s head, but it’s also hard because then I can’t let the reader know what some of the other characters are thinking as well, and that makes it really hard on me. Do you have any suggestions for me on a way to compromise?

Athira Abraham responded with this: If your story is fantasy, maybe she has magical powers of reading people’s mind. Or she might have an object that helps her, like Gail’s magic book or spyglass.

And Eliza added:
1. Have more than one protagonist.
2. Don’t let the other characters take over as protagonists, but let them speak for little snippets. I’ve read some books that switch over to other characters at the beginning of chapters, usually in italics.

These are great ideas. I invented the magic book in Ella Enchanted so that Ella, who’s the first-person POV MC, can have an idea of what’s going on with other characters when she isn’t present. She can’t hear thoughts, but she gets a hint of the action. But you could invent a device that can receive thoughts, or you can make your MC telepathic, as Athira Abraham suggests. Or you can alternate among a few first person POV characters, changing perspective from chapter to chapter or between  sections within chapters, which should be clearly marked because we want the reader to always know whose head he’s in.

Along the lines of Eliza’s second suggestion, I’ve seen bits (clearly marked) of diabolical narration from the POV of the villain in a Terry Pratchett novel or two, and, in my opinion, whatever Pratchett does is worth imitating.

When we write in first person, we lose direct access to the feelings of other characters, in addition to their thoughts, so whatever we come up with to bridge the gap can include feelings (the racing heart, the churning stomach, the tension headache).

Telepathy, magic spyglasses, and magic books are possibilities. What else is there?

Let’s imagine that Julie, the best friend of our MC Marcy, has been unusually quiet lately, hasn’t wanted to hang out. She’s dropped out of the chorus at school. A planned sleepover happens, but Julie is too uncommunicative for it to be fun. Marcy is worried about her friend and also about their friendship. What can she do?

Of course what she does depends on her personality, but let’s think about what she might do:

• She can ask Julie and may find out what her friend is thinking and feeling through dialogue.

• She can get angry and possibly learn the information through an argument, again dialogue. Or she may not succeed, but she’ll know her friend is mad at her, at least for that moment.

• She can ask other people what’s going on and possibly find out that way.

• She can think about Julie, remember when the strange behavior started, consider everything she knows about her friend, and maybe arrive at the answer.

• She can snoop,  read Julie’s journal. If she has real snooping skills, she can bug Julie’s phone and conceal a camera in Julie’s room. Or, if she’s wealthy, she can hire a detective.

• With our authorial power, we can show the reader Julie’s journal so that he knows but Marcy doesn’t.

You may think of other ways. You’ll find a masterful example of one character discovering what’s going on with another in the young adult novel The View from Saturday by E. L. Konigsburg.

We’re all the first-person MC of the story of our lives, and we’re probably not mind-readers, but in order to get along with other people, to have friends, to be decent students and family members – to do many things – we have to make assumptions, and sometimes we know with a high degree of certainty what other people are thinking and feeling. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to make others feel good or to push their buttons not in a good way. We do it by some of the methods I suggested above, by knowing our friends and family over time, by understanding ourselves and figuring that others are at least somewhat like us.

When I wrote the beginning of this post I was on the train on my way to New York City. A man across the aisle behind me talked loudly on his cell phone in a thick voice. I looked back, nosy writer that I am, to get a fix on him, and, instantly, he snapped, “Mind your own business.”

It didn’t take mind reading to know he felt angry. My guess is that this guy is always on the edge of anger and almost anything can push him over. It’s also possible that he felt guilty for being so loud – although that didn’t stop him from taking three more calls and it didn’t make him lower his voice. Guilt can make people angry; you may have noticed this.

As for me, I was a little scared, which he probably knew, because I’d imagine he wanted to intimidate me. Total strangers and we knew each other’s feelings! And only one sentence passed between us. Fortunately, he got off the train soon – which I knew he would, because he announced his stop on the phone.

In the example above, Marcy knows Julie isn’t happy, because people signal their feelings, smile, frown, stamp, cross their arms. The clues are legion. What we lose by writing in first person is the texture of others’ thoughts and feelings, the insider perspective, and I sympathize, because I love that, too. If a first person single POV best suits our story, that’s what we should use, but there’s nothing to stop us from writing a scene in third person in our notes, or from a different first-person POV, also in notes. We’ll have the pleasure of doing it, and we may learn something that we can work into our first-person narrative. Nobody ever called writing efficient!

Here are three prompts:

• From Marcy’s first-person POV, write the story of Marcy and Julie, and have Marcy try a bunch of methods to find out what’s going on with her friend. Surprise the reader with the answer.

• Marcy is the friend everyone goes to when they’re unhappy. She’s keeping more secrets than she has fingers and toes combined. But two secrets don’t add up. Someone is lying. Have Marcy delve into the thought and feeling life of her friends to find out what’s really going on.

• In the myth, “Pygmalion and Galatea,” Pygmalion is a sculptor who falls in love with a statue he creates. The goddess Venus takes pity on him and brings her to life. Write from Galatea’s POV the scene when she wakes up . She used to be marble; she has no past. What does she think and feel? What does she make of Pygmalion? How does she figure out what he’s thinking and feeling when she has no experience to guide her?

Have fun, and save what you write!

Memorable MC

Because you should get something out of my poetry school, here’s a link to a beautiful poem: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175780. Let me know what you think. Have you ever had a similar experience? Have you ever felt the way the speaker of the poem does?

I want to let you all know that an audio version of Writing Magic is now available, and I’m the reader. So, if you’ve never gotten to a signing and would like to hear my somewhat scratchy, old-lady voice, now you can. What a recommendation!

In August, Rebekah wrote, When I’m writing, I can’t seem to make my MC believable. My other characters all have memorable qualities, voices, and such (or I hope so, anyway), but I can’t seem to find my MC’s voice! Any suggestions on making her more memorable?

In response, Bug wrote, I may be misunderstanding a little, but when I had trouble with this, I switched the POV (not for the whole book) and wrote a scene from one of my minor character’s eyes. I then discovered what I had not realized about my main character-he was a lot more sarcastic then I had thought; he was funny, etc. 

Bug’s suggestion is excellent. Anyone with this problem is likely to benefit from trying it. I’ve had this kind of trouble myself, and I’ll keep Bug’s idea in mind if it crops up again.

The root of this particular evil lies, I think, in reliability, and it crops up most often, I suspect, when we’re writing in first person. The reader sees our story through the eyes of our MC, so we want the lens to be clear. Sometimes, though, that clear lens washes out our MC’s distinguishing qualities. She’s showing everyone else to the reader, but how do we reveal her?

We may have to step back and consider her. She has a problem or a situation, or there would be no story. How does she approach solving it? At this point we may want to revisit our better defined secondary characters. How would each of them attack the problem? How is our MC’s method different?

If we don’t know, we can decide.

Let’s say our MC, Leona, is in a theatrical troupe that’s been sent to a neighboring kingdom to promote goodwill between the two, which have been at war intermittently for generations. In the production they’ll be performing, Leona plays the younger sister of the female star, and she’s also assistant stage manager. Her mother, the prime minister of the kingdom, has impressed on her that if this mission fails, war will result. Things are not going well. The star, who shares a room with Leona, keeps sneaking out at night. Will she cause an international scandal? The male lead hasn’t learned his lines. The director directs mostly by yelling.
The stage manager is disorganized. The first performance, which will be attended by the king, is three days off.

Oy! This is hard! I don’t know what I would do. But the situation suggests lots of questions we can ask ourselves about Leona:

• Is she direct with people?
• Or subtle?
• Is she a good judge of character?
• Or does she tend to trust the wrong people?
• Is she cautious or reckless?
• Does she worry about hurting people’s feelings?
• Does she give up easily?
• How talented an actor is she?
• Is she organized?
• Does she get along well with the other cast members?
• Can she cultivate allies?
• Does she annoy people?
• Is she shy or outgoing?

You can think of more questions. A benefit of asking them is that we see choices. We can also come up with flaws in Leona that distinguish her and make her task harder, and we’ve given her ways she can grow in the course of our story. Probably we’ll want her first attempts to go badly. If she trusts the wrong people, for example, she’s bound to make mistakes.

That’s the big picture. Now we want to know how she expresses the character that we’re beginning to develop, so that the reader will recognize her easily.

If she’s our POV character, we have direct access to her thoughts. She can seesaw between despair and hope. On the page she can think, This will never work. Then, Bad attitude, Leona. It will work! There. A few pages later she can get discouraged again and pep-talk herself out of it. Or she can pepper her thoughts with anxious questions, like, What am I doing? How can I say that? Will he hate me? Or she can recite a phrase to calm herself, like, The ground is solid, the sky is always there, and I am here. If she is a talented actor, she’ll probably be thinking about her art. If she’s not talented, if she has a role just to help her mother, she may be worrying about ruining the show. Or she may not be a worrier. Her thoughts may be exceedingly organized. Plan A attempted. Move on to Plan B.

Of course, we don’t want to overdo these thought tics. Occasionally is enough.

Feelings help the reader relate, so consider Leona’s inner life. She may be homesick or delighted to be on this mission, which she regards as an adventure. She may be confident or a worrier. She may cry easily, or she may hold her feelings in, and the reader discovers them through her thoughts and clenched jaw. She may be cheerful or depressed, or her feelings may swing from one to the other.

Distinguishing dialogue will also make her interesting. I’ve gone into this in Writing Magic and in dialogue posts. We all express ourselves uniquely, and Leona can, too. How does she speak? Slow? Fast? In bursts punctuated by silence? What kind of vocabulary does she use? What body language accompanies her speech? Again, dialogue tics, once we establish them, should be used sparingly.

And, of course, how does Leona look? Aside from her face and body, how does the inner person affect the outer? I bet you know people who look worse than they could, and vice versa, those who, through fashion sense or posture or flair, always look great. What does she wear? Does she know which colors are best on her, or does she not have a clue? How does she move? Is she graceful? Always rushing? Are her gestures big? Or do her arms stay tight at her sides?

Here are four prompts:

• Write a scene in which Leona and the entire troupe have an audience with the king the day they arrive. Have Leona do or say something that does not go well. Make sure you include her thoughts and feelings.

• Write the first rehearsal, with Leona juggling her time onstage with her stage managing. Be sure to include dialogue. Make things go badly in this scene, too.

• Using Bug’s suggestion, rewrite the first rehearsal from the POV of one of the other characters: the director, the leading man or lady, the stage manager. Show Leona through the eyes of the character you pick.

• If you like, write the whole tale.

Have fun, and save what you write!