Love’s labor

On Feb 4, 2012, Clare wrote, Romance can be difficult for me to write variations of. My romance is generally all the same, with two people starting out as friends who tend to smack each other a lot and then they fall madly in love through a series of unfortunate events. I currently have an idea for a really good story, but the plot is going to need to be moved forward by unlikely romance.
    The relationship between hero and heroine starts out when they need to pretend to be engaged to save the hero from being embarrassed in front of his whole hometown. How could I painlessly move them into actual romance? Would a meddlesome minor character be a good idea?
    I really want it to be realistic, and not tacky. I guess it’s difficult when you’re young and inexperienced when it comes to romantic situations. It looks and sounds so good in my head, but I’m having trouble figuring out the execution.

The situation you describe sounds plausible. Van is vulnerable because he’s embarrassed that he doesn’t have a fiancee. We see that Nell is kind because she’s willing to help him out. Pretending to be in love leads naturally to thoughts of actually being in love. And if they’re pretending to be engaged, they would have to be physically close. Let’s imagine the event that occasioned the charade is a high school reunion. Van would probably put his arm around Nell’s shoulder. She might adjust his tie or dab chocolate sauce off his chin. If there’s any physical attraction, these little intimate act, will get the romantic wheels turning. If there’s no physical attraction, the whole thing is probably sunk, so you’re going to need to get into the physical side at least a little. Depending on the kind of story you’re writing, a few hints may be enough: a racing heart, trembling hands.

What’s set up so far may actually be too easy if this story is to be a happy-ever-after romance. If falling in love is just a prelude to separation – they’re divided by war, kidnaping, natural disaster, whatever – and the real story is the adventure that ultimately will end in tragedy or reunion, then you’re set. But if you’re writing romantic comedy or straight romance, then you need to create trouble between the two.

What are some of the possibilities?

A bad romantic history. Maybe the love of Van’s life broke up with him a month ago. Or Nell keeps falling disastrously in love with law school students, and Van is a law school student, so the red flags are up.

Unrealistic expectations. Van’s romantic ideal is an artist, and Nell is as practical and un-artistic as toothpaste. Nell wants her man to be athletic, and Van is gangly and apt to trip crossing a room.

Bad timing. Nell is leaving for two years studying agriculture in Siberia. Van thinks he won’t have time for romance until he finishes grad school.

Or something intrinsic to the situation. Nell helps Van, but she’s a tougher character than he is. She thinks he’s weird for needing to pretend to be engaged. Why can’t he just tell the truth? And he’s so embarrassed by his pathetic plight that he just goes through the motions and doesn’t focus on Nell at all.

The options are endless. Van might need Nell because an old girlfriend will be at the reunion. The girlfriend renews her interest in him, and he dumps Nell. Or another man at the reunion gets interested in Nell and she dumps Van or he behaves badly. It’s fun making these up! There are eggs in the canapes. Nell is allergic to them and breaks out in huge hives, and Van laughs. To make conversation, Van tells Nell about a constitutional case he’s studying, and she feels unintelligent. To combat the feeling, she spouts about agricultural practices in Siberia in the most technical terms.

It’s a juggling act, because, although matters aren’t going well, the mutual appeal has to remain. You need to keep the two apart until the climax when the misunderstandings are untangled or when some event causes the eureka moment that finally unites the two.

For romance to work, we (readers) have to enter the inner life of Van or Nell or both. We have to know their thoughts, feelings, physical responses, and the rationales for the irrational things they’re driven to do. For the POV character, if you’re writing in first person, you have direct access to all of these. For the non-POV character you have actions, dialogue, emails and text messages between the two and maybe Van can glimpse Nell’s diary or something she’s written.

The romance is likely to fall apart if we come to hate one of them. If Nell deliberately disregards Van’s feelings, we’re going to want him to get together with his old girlfriend or to turn into a frog. They can be foolish or awkward or misguided and we’ll probably go along, but hateful or obnoxious behavior may make us jump ship.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that we the readers upon encountering two single characters will speculate about, and most likely wish for, romance between them. A lot of your work is already done just by putting Van and Nell in the story. The suspension of disbelief writers work for is willingly bestowed by readers. When we pick up a book and start reading, we’re eager to enter a new world. If you’re inexperienced at real-life romance, you can lay that inexperience on your characters and we’ll buy it. Van or Nell or both can be doofuses about love.

Here are three prompts:

∙ Write about Van and Nell. Use any of the scenarios that Clare and I laid out. Van doesn’t have to be a law student, and Nell doesn’t have to be an agricultural expert.

∙ Invent a romance between Gretel of “Hansel and Gretel” fame. She’s smart and fearless. He can spin straw and who-knows-what-else into gold.

∙ The craziest romance in all of fairy tales, I think, is in the traditional telling of “Snow White.” He falls in love with her although he thinks she’s dead. She wakes up madly in love with him. In Fairest, I gave them a back story to make it work, but in this case, just try writing their meeting when she wakes up.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Character clamor

On February 3, 2012, CallMeAddie wrote, I also have the problem that I’m trying to make too many of my characters important, and my main characters aren’t feeling so MAIN anymore. Any advice?

The great aspects of this problem are that you (and anyone else in the same pickle) have set up a story world with a lot of complexity and a cast of characters that interests you. You have a problem of abundance, which is much better than a problem of scarcity – but no less frustrating.

(When I say story world I don’t necessarily mean fantasy. Every story, even an utterly realistic one, exists in its own world.)

Of course I understand the impulse to make everybody interesting. We don’t want stick figures walking across our pages. Suppose your characters include five companions, the mother of one of them, the little brother of another, an instructor in the art of making singing puppets, the owner of a lumberyard that sells the wood for the puppets, and a villain who wants to destroy all puppets. The major characters are two of the companions, the instructor, and the villain. Try giving the others no more than two identifying qualities; just one may do. The little brother has a genius for saying the wrong thing. The mother interrupts the companions’ work to offer creature comforts – pie, cookies, pillows, blankets – that nobody wants. The lumberyard owner shortchanges her customers, and the companions always have to check they’re getting the kind of wood they asked for. Etc. Each of these is enough to hint at depth for the reader. We don’t have to do more.

If your secondary characters are stealing the show, could be that the plot as well as your mains is being undermined. After all, it’s the mains’ troubles that drive the story car. If you’re caught up in the miseries and quirks of your secondaries, the car may be wandering on flat side roads rather than climbing the mountain to the story summit.

For most stories mains mean one or two or conceivably three characters. I have two mains in my novel Ever: Kezi, a mortal girl who may soon die, and Olus, the god of the winds, who loves her. The narration alternates chapter by chapter from one to the other. The thrust of the story is the effort to save Kezi. A second very important strand is their growing romance. But some of the other characters intrigued me, especially in Olus’s pantheon of gods, several of whom sleep their immortal lives away, out of boredom. There’s also Puru, the god of fate, who wishes for happy outcomes but can do nothing to bring them about. They’re tragic figures, and I would have liked to explore them, but if I had, my story would have seeped away.

If your minor characters are screaming to be brought to full life, you have options. You can promise them their own stories if they’ll shut up. Then trim them back to definite secondary status in the one you’re working on. If you have to, in order to satisfy them, write a page or two of the story for each. Or you can write these stories completely. There’s no law dictating the sequence of your creation. However, the deal is that in these new stories, the less important characters remain so.

Or consider whether some of the fascinating aspects of these lesser characters (lesser only in terms of your story) can be loaded onto your mains. Maybe the lesser guys appeal to you because your mains aren’t developed enough. Suppose Puru, the god of fate in Ever, bows compulsively in a vain attempt to appease the forces that cause bad outcomes. Imagine Olus picks up this odd practice. He’s seen Puru do it and figures there must be a value, and what harm can it do? Now that the gesture belongs to Olus, we don’t ever have to see Puru do it, we can just be told in a sentence that he does. And Olus’s bowing can become more frequent, deeper, and more frantic as he gets increasingly worried about Kezi. (I didn’t do this in the book; it never occurred to me.)

Or you can press on. Let the minor characters do their things and discover in the writing what you need and what you don’t. Then fix and trim in revision. Maybe you’ll discover as you keep going that you’ve picked the wrong mains, and your story really is about Jeff and Judy, not Marie and Mark.

Can you have more than three mains? Maybe. If you have a proliferation of important characters, you may want to frame the story in another way. Imagine a theater tale, and suppose the issue at issue is the production, not the lead. Maybe this is a community theater and the soul of the town is at stake if the theater goes under. So we see that the director is having a creative crisis and the great lady of the troupe can no longer memorize her lines and may be on her way to dementia. And the male lead, who is really good, has lost his job and may have to relocate. And the set designer and the costume master are feuding. And the building itself that houses the theater needs electrical work and is a fire hazard. Somehow they all have to pull together to save the day. Any group activity will work for this approach. Bat 6 (upper elementary school and up) by Virginia Euwer Wolff is an example of a novel with a big cast of main characters that works amazingly well.

Here are three prompts:

∙ Write the puppet-making story. What do the mains want? What’s the purpose of the singing puppets? Write enough of the story to introduce the mains and at least some of the secondaries, who may not all come into the story right away. You can use the distinguishing qualities I suggested or make up other ones. If you like, keep going.

∙ An interesting aspect of The Wizard of Oz, book or movie, is that the wizard, a major character, doesn’t appear until late in the game. Before then, he’s spoken of, and his effects are felt. Write a story along the same lines. A main character is evident by her absence, but her influence is ever-present (or frequently present). She can be villain or heroine.

∙ Write a collaboration story, like the theater one I suggested. The problem could be an underdog team (any sport, ice hockey, swimming, laser sword fighting) winning a championship. Could be the survival of the human race against aliens, a pandemic, robots. Could be whatever. Introduce quirky main characters, at least five, who have issues that may both help and hurt the joint effort.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Character block

On December 30, 2011, Tisserande d’encre wrote, I’ve been having a problem with my MC. Some time ago I discovered I didn’t know my character at all. We have tried reactions to problems, thoughts and things she likes, but I still can’t discover her personality! Because of this, I’m unable to say how  she will react to the situation or how she relates with other people. Nothing comes up to my mind. The first pages were easy to write because I knew her feelings, and ten pages ago I still did. But now she has closed to me. How can you get free from character’s block? I still have a plot, but it feels like I’m having the script in my hands and an uncooperative cast! I thought I knew her, but now it seems I don’t. And that doesn’t thicken the plot, it thickens my worries… Any advice, word, help on this?

Character block! A wonderful expression!

These two terrific responses came in to the blog at the time. This one was from Julia:

Sometimes when I don’t really know a character’s personality very well, I take this personality test (http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp) and answer the questions the way I imagine my character would answer them. At the end of the test, it links you to a detailed description of the character’s personality. I’ve found the results to be amazingly accurate. I hope this helps!
And this from writeforfun:

I have two suggestions that worked pretty well for me when I’ve had that problem before. In one version, I knew the personality at first, but it sort of slipped away as I wrote. So, I read from the beginning to the point that I thought I knew her best, and I tried to get a fuller picture of her at that point, and then I did a little writing exercise with her that was completely different from my story, so that I could see what she was like in a different environment. The other time, I didn’t know my character in the first place, so I decided to pick a stereotype and use that as the personality. The stereotype can be whatever you’re familiar with; I chose a dog. You may laugh, but I made the particular character friendly, optimistic, easily distracted, energetic and forgetful. It worked great, because I love dogs, so whenever I thought “what would he do?” I could think, “What would my dog do if he were human and in this position?”

You can also ask your character directly, in writing, of course, what’s going on. You can say, Bonnie, speak to me. Why are you holding back? What do you think of the story I’ve set out? What are your feelings? And give her time and space to answer.

Another possibility may be to bring in a secondary character to move things along. *SPOILER ALERT* In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, for example, the high-handed Lady Catherine visits Elizabeth, and one consequences of this visit is that Darcy declares himself. In an ancient movie version that I despise, she’s a deus ex machina, but in the book, her effect is believable, subtle, and character-driven.

What pushes a character or anyone to action? Often an intolerable condition, which can be serious or not. We write letters to the editor usually when we’re annoyed. Your secondary character, rather than offering pep talks, can so offend your MC that she flies into high gear.

Or, dropping the secondary character, the intolerable condition can be the driving force of the story. Tisserande d’encre, you may not have hit on the problem that will energize your MC, and you may want to think about what that might be. In my The Two Princesses of Bamarre the intolerable condition is the illness of Addie’s sister Meryl, which so motivates Addie that she sets off to find a cure despite her near crippling timidity and shyness. The intolerable condition doesn’t have to be as big as an alien invasion or a kidnaping. It can be a little thing. Bonnie’s Uncle Steve can call her younger brother Lenny “unpromising,” which can set her off on a campaign to prove him wrong.

In Ella Enchanted, the intolerable condition is internal: Ella’s curse of obedience. When Ella tries to persuade Lucinda to rescind the curse she’s treating it as external, which doesn’t work because the problem is inside her.  In Fairest, it’s Aza’s appearance and her own self-consciousness, which is borderline inside/outside. In your story it could be a character trait. Bonnie may be a perfectionist; anything below her standards is a goad to action. Or she may have a super-hero complex; if there’s a wrong, she has to set it right.

As a plot-driven writer, I look for characters who by nature will go in the direction of my story. For example, in The Princess Test, my take on “The Princess on the Pea,” I had to come up with a character who had a shot at a lousy night’s sleep in the lap of luxury, so Lorelei is hyper-allergic and super-finicky. This isn’t very restrictive. She can be overly sensitive and mean or overly sensitive and kind, and smart or stupid and humorless or funny and anything else. She can be as complex as anyone else who has allergies.

Tisserande d’encre, you started with an MC who was defined in your mind. She and the plot meshed at the beginning but then it all blew up. So take a look at your plot. Did it develop in a way that moved away from her inclinations? Maybe you need to redefine her so she can continue to act in your story. Or maybe you should redirect the plot to satisfy her needs that you’ve already established. You may have a character-plot logjam rather than a single character block, and you may have to shift back and forth between the two to bust it open.

You may question if your plot is unified. Is there an intolerable condition that runs through the whole? If it bumps from incident to incident, Bonnie may react to one and be indifferent to another.

Writing isn’t efficient, at least for me it isn’t. You can try a scene one way and then another. Bring in a new character, Charlie, and see what happens. Have Charlie provoke Bonnie. Or make him so appealing that she wants him to think well of her.

Try changing the setting. She may be activated by unfamiliarity, or you may be.

Here are three prompts:

•    Bonnie is depressed. Action seems hopeless. Nothing will do any good. Her alarmed parents start making her wishes come true in order to cheer her up, with results that are temporary at best. Give her an intolerable condition that activates her. Write the story. At the end she can be depressed again, or not.

•    Allie’s father is arrested for shoddy building practices. People have died at his construction sites. Angry citizens are picketing the house. No one can leave without being hounded by the press. Bonnie wants to live her life, go to the local swimming pool, take in a movie, walk the dog, visit her dad in jail. She has a mother, Mrs. Miscreant, and her brother Lenny. Give her an objective and write her story.

•    Bonnie wins the lottery and the prize is in the millions. She is a do-gooder. Get her in trouble with her new life as a helper of others.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Adjective advice

On December 28, 2011, FightingIrishFan1111 wrote, I am one of those people who loves to use adjectives, but I think I use too many adjectives! For example, is it better to say: “Her hair was brown”, rather than “her luscious, long hair was auburn with flecks of dark mahogany”? I think I over-write some characteristics of my characters! Any suggestions about how to approach looks, personality, and other descriptions would be great!

So, “her hair was brown” is dull. “Her luscious, long hair was auburn with flecks of dark mahogany” is over the top, in my opinion. How can we make both of them work?

Marnie is dressing for a party and feeling a shade insecure about her appearance. When she’s done she asks her two goldfish what they think and narrates their answers. Goldfish #1 says, “The bedroom light brings out the flecks of dark mahogany in Marnie’s luscious, long auburn hair and reflects the twinkle in her sky blue eyes.” Goldfish #2 says, “Nothing to write home about. Brown hair, blue eyes like a million other girls at a thousand other parties.”

What’s happened? We hauled in character development. Marnie is balanced in her uncertainty. There’s that positive side that thinks she may actually look great and the negative that’s blaring Ordinary! This is, as they say, relatable.

If we see Marnie from the outside only, whether she’s gorgeous or unremarkable, we’re unlikely to connect. Most readers (not all) want to know what a character looks like, but they want to get acquainted with her inner life as well, and they’ll probably welcome a peek into the intersection of the two.

The adjectives work in this example, too. They’re not coming from an author piling them on, they’re issuing from the mouths of goldfish.

Notice I don’t put Marnie in front of a mirror. She probably does look in one, but mirrors as a vehicle of physical description (and as portals to another world) are so overused that we want to stay away from them unless we can come up with something fresh (as I hope I did in Fairest).

How to introduce appearance?

You can do it directly in narration. When your main character first encounters another character she can note her impressions in her narration. Here’s how Elodie does it in Beloved Elodie when she meets the only other child in the book, Master Robbie:

    An artist could have sketched his face almost entirely in straight lines: the head a triangle ending in a pointed chin, smaller triangle for his nose, a horizontal slash for his unsmiling mouth, two angled strokes for the shadows under his cheeks, roof peaks for his eyebrows, curved lines only for his dark blue eyes and for the dot of pink that bloomed at the tip of his nose, caused by chill or a cold or weeping. Weeping, I thought. He wore mourning beads, too.
Take a look at the adjectives here: straight, pointed, smaller, horizontal, unsmiling, angled, roof, curved, dark, blue, mourning. Eleven words out of eighty-five, over ten percent. I don’t know if that’s a lot or not. And the adverbs: almost, entirely, only. Just three. When I started becoming a writer I often read that writers should keep the adjectives and adverbs to a minimum and that verbs and nouns are the strong parts of speech in English.

It’s good advice when it isn’t followed slavishly. We need all our words.

Let’s distinguish among adjectives. Generally I prefer ones that convey information. In my description of Master Robbie mine do; straight, pointed, etc., show him to the reader. I never call him handsome or ugly. I don’t say those dark blue eyes are attractive. Handsome, beautiful, attractive, luscious are adjectives I rarely use unless they’re spoken by goldfish or goldfish equivalents. If a narrator tells me, Marnie was beautiful, I want to know in what way? Who thinks so? What does her beauty mean for the story?

If the story requires it, we may need to tell the reader about Marnie’s beauty. If her beauty is important for developing character, plot, or setting, go for it. You can start your story with her pulchritude, as in, Marnie was Helen-of-Troy beautiful. Paul, owner of the Venus Modeling Agency, stood up unsteadily when she came in. If there was a manual for perfection she’d meet every standard: tall but not a giraffe, thick wavy hair that glowed like polished mahogany, a nose that Da Vinci would have paid millions to paint, and eyes the color of spring. He stuttered, “The d-dermatologist is t-two d-doors d-down, sweetheart.” Even if he couldn’t control his voice he didn’t want her getting ahead of herself with him. Then we see how she reacts to this, and we’re in.

We just saw Marnie through Paul’s eyes, delivered by a third-person narrator. If Marnie is the first-person narrator, Paul can say his bit, and his mother, who’s visiting the agency, can set him straight with, “Are you blind? She doesn’t need a dermatologist. She’s stunning.” The mother can then catalog her characteristics. In this instance, the description is conveyed in dialogue.

In my The Wish, main character Wilma is drawn by a caricaturist and this is what she thinks when the artist shows her the drawing:

    The first thing I saw was my teeth, popping out of my mouth, big and squared-off as piano keys. My whole face receded behind those teeth, except for my lips, which smiled insanely around my bicuspids and incisors and molars and fangs and tusks.
    Then I saw my shoulders. In themselves they were fine. But they cradled my head. No neck. None. My head was like a golf ball resting on a tee. Like an egg in the palm of your hand. Like a horror movie.
I was mighty proud of this, which is an imaginative description through thoughts.

These are the three description delivery methods I can think of: thoughts, narration, dialogue. Using these, the description can be given by the POV character, by another character, or by a third-person narrator.

Sentence variety also helps to make description interesting. The verb in the two sentences, “Her hair was brown.” and “Her luscious, long hair was auburn with flecks of dark mahogany.” is to be, which gets boring pretty quick. In my The Wish example the verb to be is in there, but I’ve also used receded and cradled.

Here are some prompts using the three methods:

∙    Rebecca has been cast in a play, and she and a few other actors are meeting with the costume director. Show in dialogue the appearance of each. For a twist, if you like, imagine that the entire cast are aliens or mutants, anatomically different from us. Make the reader see them through conversation (they speak English).

∙    Ingrid has a little trouble with her temper, and she’s been sent to a program for teens who need anger management. She doesn’t want to be there, and she isn’t the best-natured person on the planet. Write her thoughts describing the others in her group.

∙    Your narrator is introducing the reader to the Shandler family. As the narration proceeds, reveal character along with appearance. Think about what each one is doing during the introduction.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Hatred, Yay!

On December 28th, 2011, Maybeawriter wrote, How can one portray hatred? It’s such a strong emotion, but so often senseless and illogical. How does one show the difference between, say, dread of talking with somebody hatred, and all-out hate-your-guts Romeo-vs-Tybalt wish-you-were-dead hatred? …How do we justify hatred? Do we even NEED to justify it? Does it make a character less appealing if they can hate?

The tools we have for portraying hatred are the usual: actions, dialogue, thoughts, and feelings. Thoughts and feelings can be directly revealed in only the POV character, if we’re writing in first person, and in anyone if we’re having an omniscient third-person narrator tell the story. It’s okay to state the feeling directly, as in, Annabelle hated Nevin completely. Even her blue-and-yellow striped socks hated him.

Or she can confess her hatred to her pal Wesley: “I hate Nevin so much even my socks hate him, and they’re usually very sweet.”
Notice that bringing in the socks adds liveliness and humor to what would otherwise be a bald, maybe too stripped-down way of putting it. We don’t need humor, though; more serious embellishment will do too, as in, Annabelle hated Nevin completely. If he had grandchildren someday, she’d hate them, too. Or, even stronger, Annabelle hated Nevin. She hoped his dog would die.

Same sentiment can be revealed in thoughts, as in, Annabelle thought, I despise that boy. Every bit of me hates him. Even my socks hate him. Everything that belongs to me hates him.

In action, we can show Annabelle drawing a picture of Nevin then giving him a moustache, then a red rash, then scratching him out with an orange crayon, then taking a scissors to the drawing. The reader gets the message.

What I’ve described so far is that wish-you-were-dead hatred, although our Annabelle might feel bad if Nevin really did bite the dust. Or might not.

A weaker hatred will be revealed by the same means, through actions, dialogue, thoughts, and feelings. For example, the narrator can say, Annabelle hated Paul, but not all the way down to her socks. She hated him down to her knees, maybe, and if he’d stop teasing her, she wouldn’t hate him in the slightest. If she draws a picture of him and gives him a rash she might toss it and redraw it, giving him just a single red spot.

And feelings can be temporary or prolonged or eternal. Even the most powerful emotions can be temporary, maybe especially the powerful ones. Most of us get angriest at the people we love.

Which brings us to the character of the hater. If Annabelle holds a grudge, her hatred may never be temporary, not even if Nevin apologizes and reforms. Nobody gets crossed off her despised list.

Or her feelings may always be in flux. She may be overwhelmed by a flood of hatred one moment and love the next. She may segue in a flash from tears to laughter. Or she may be a more measured character. After the apology she may put Nevin on probation and grant him provisional forgiveness.

Annabelle’s hatred will usually match Nevin’s offense. If he borrowed her pencil and failed to return it, the reader may think it extreme to hate him down to her socks, although she may be an extreme character. Maybe unending hatred is warranted if he wrote something nasty on a Facebook page that will linger forever in cyberspace, definitely warranted if he put Annabelle’s sister in a death camp and annihilated her. If Annabelle can overcome her hatred after that, even if Nevin shows believable repentance, she becomes a truly sterling character. If she can’t, we’ll probably forgive her.

On the other hand, she may hate Nevin for a reason that does her no credit, that makes her the villain. She can hate him because of his skin color or his religion or his tribe. If we leave realistic fiction, she can hate him because he’s a mutant or not a mutant or an alien or friends with an alien or because he’s defending the rights of aliens.

Or she can be entirely evil and hate everyone. The dragon Kyto in my Disney fairy book Fairies and the Quest for Never Land hates everybody until the fairy Vidia comes along. Kyto is almost entirely villainous. Motivation isn’t always necessary, and Kyto has none. He just hates. A character can be purely evil. Usually, this is best set up right at the beginning, as in, Annabelle was born evil. During her first week of life she didn’t cry out of misery, she cried to make everyone else miserable. As soon as she had teeth she bit; as soon as she her nails were long enough she scratched.

The appeal of a particular character who hates depends on the elements we’ve discussed: the reason for the hatred and her response to it and how generally likable she is. The reader can love a flawed character. If Annabelle nurses her grudges but is otherwise delightful, she’ll worm her way into the reader’s heart. Even her flaw may charm us. She holds a grudge against Nevin and wishes him ill: wants his toe jam to build up, his breakfast cereal to taste like fried toad, his dental fillings to transmit Morse code. Is that her worst? Yes.

Strong feelings are interesting, exciting, lively. I don’t want to read about a milquetoast character whose most powerful negative feeling is dislike. I want Annabelle to hate or envy or fear Nevin. Anything less makes me sleepy.

Maybe I went too far. Annabelle’s flaw might be that she can’t hate or can’t feel deeply. Her quest might be for hate. That would be interesting.

Here are some prompts:

∙    Nevin apologizes to Annabelle. (You make up his offense.) Write the apology scene two ways, one as if Annabelle holds grudges endlessly, one as if she’s totally changeable.

∙    Hate can sometimes lead to love. Anne’s hatred of Gilbert in Anne of Green Gables is a fine example, likewise Elizabeth Bennet’s disdain for Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Imagine that Annabelle and Nevin are on opposing debate teams and he keeps wiping the floor with her by fair means and foul. Turn that situation into a romance. Write the story, and, please, let Annabelle get in a few debate licks of her own.

∙    Write Annabelle’s rant about how much she hates Nevin. She can rant alone or to her friend Wesley. Have her go over the top, way over.

∙    There are a couple of fairy tales about a boy who can’t feel fear and wants to. In the more lighthearted one, he marries a princess who pours a pail of wet fish on him, which does the trick. In the more realistic version, he marries a princess and becomes frightened of his new responsibilities. Write a fairy tale about Annabelle who can’t feel hatred and wants to. What happens when she finally does? If you like, expand it into a novel.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Detailing

December 28, 2011, writeforfun wrote, …the thing that I struggle with the most is detail (how much is too much, when do you use less, when do you need more, what details are good, etc.).

While I reread writeforfun’s question, a public service announcement was running on the radio, advising people about licensing their dogs. It was a very short spot, and then the news resumed. But if the organization that sponsored the ad, the ASPCA or whatever, had the air time, details might have sent dog owners flocking to register their dogs: a hundred signs all over the neighborhood for a lost dog, some carefully crayoned by a seven-year old, the sightings (“I could tell people love her, with that poodle cut on a mutt.”), mention of a floppy ear or an exclamation-point tail, the reunion after eight days of worry, how her collar jingles with a shiny new license, and look how cute it is, shaped like a fire hydrant!

This is detail designed to engage our emotions. Advertising is full of ploys like this. I just looked online at historic ads for cigarettes. Predating the Marlboro man was the Marlboro baby, saying, “Before you scold me, Mom, maybe you better light up a… Marlboro.” Doctors appear in tons of ads. In one, a dentist. In another, Mickey Mantle. If you look, you’ll also find scientists, romantic moments, even a young Ronald Reagan.

Of course we need the right details to get the message across. In a dog licensing promotion, we wouldn’t mention that the missing dog snarls at old people or that, Oops!, her owners forgot to get her her last rabies shot, and we wouldn’t put in anything emotionally neutral either, like that she bites her tail.

If a book or story is theme driven, detail delivers the message. For example, Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty to persuade people to treat horses better. The emotional details make the reader identify with a cast of mostly ill-treated horses. After the book became a bestseller, use of the checkrein was abolished.

We use detail not only to engage emotion, but also to reveal setting and character and move plot along, and sometimes, when we’re really cooking, to do two or three at once. For instance, when Addie is taken to Vollys’s cave in The Two Princesses of Bamarre, we discover that the cave is luxurious. We see carpets, cushions, chests, and wardrobes, and we learn that a former captor was a carpenter. Vollys says that his “remains remain” with her. The cave details show us the setting, but also tell us what Vollys’s taste is, and we’re horrified, and in a creepy way we start to like her – our emotions are engaged.

So how do we pick the details?

We think about the purpose of the scene. In this case it’s to reveal the setting, to continue the introduction of Vollys that began in the chapter before, and to make us afraid for Addie. We don’t want details that will work against these goals. We won’t put anything in that makes us feel better, like we won’t mention the shovel that Addie might use to dig herself out (in the book there is none). We won’t let Vollys say anything soothing.

And we won’t lay it on too thick. Once the reader has seen the scene, has formed an impression of Vollys, has gotten thoroughly scared, we can move on. We don’t have to watch Vollys deliberately incinerate a mouse or Addie count the number of human skeletons. But it’s okay if we go over the top in early drafts. It’s usually better to trim in revision than to bulk up, although we can also add detail later.

When I’m looking for the right details I often make lists. Let’s say Val has accepted a dare to enter a haunted house, and we want this not to be a stock scary house, so what can we do? For starters, it doesn’t have to be a house. What else can it be? I just made a little list:

library
museum
tunnel
bedroom
drugstore
airport
dress shop
garden

Each locale suggests a different kind of haunting. I particularly like the museum, drugstore, and airport, because of the variety in each. In the museum, for example, the suits of armor could be jousting. If our character, Simon, gets caught in the wrong spot, he could be skewered. In the next gallery, the Chinese ceramic dragons can spring to life, and, several rooms over, Picasso’s disembodied Head of a Woman can bounce after Simon, clacking her nail-like teeth.

The details we come up with may lead us to discover the reason for the haunting, or vice versa: our knowledge of the reason can determine the details. In the museum example, the haunting might be the doing of a mad art collector who, in life, felt priced out of buying the works she loved. As a ghost, maybe her targets are the new acquisitions, which she believes sold for outrageous sums. Following this thread, who is Simon? Did he merely take a dare, or is he a detective employed by the museum to find out why attendance has fallen off and why more museum goers enter every day than exit.

In Beloved Elodie, many of the characters are suspects, so I use detail to keep the reader off balance about them. For instance, Brunka (defined in the book) Poldie expresses concern for Elodie, who appears ill. A few minutes later, Brunka Poldie is discovered to have stolen three valuable lapis beads.

Sometimes a detail solves a plot glitch. The setting of much of Beloved Elodie is the Oase, a brunka establishment built into a mountain. There are few windows, almost no natural light. People have to shlep lamps everywhere, which get in the way, and sometimes I forget, so I brought in glowworms.

When we introduce details, we should be recruiting all our senses, not merely the visual. Picasso’s Head clacking her teeth is auditory. In Vollys’s cave, the most tense detail is thermal. How hot is it? How much is Addie in danger of boiling? I haven’t mentioned any scent details, but smell goes straight to the emotions.

You can question yourself on your use of detail: Am I making my readers feel an emotion? Am I making them see, hear, smell, feel, touch? Am I making them care? Am I solving a plot problem? A single detail may not produce the desired effect. You may need a bunch working together.

Here are three prompt:s:

•    Your villain, who wants people to act a particular way for her nefarious ends, can afford a national publicity campaign. Write a public service announcement putting forward her position on whatever. For instance, maybe she wants to persuade the populace that child slavery is beneficial. Incorporate emotional details that are hard to resist. Write how it works out for her.

•    Describe the bedroom of a girl who will one day be the first female president of the United States. If you find it helpful, write a list of possible items to include. Through your details, guide our opinion of her. Write a scene or a story about her early effort to act like a politician. Show how that turns out badly. Keep going.

•    Pick one or more of the haunted locales I mentioned above. Describe it. Include all the senses. Begin a story in it. Keep going.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Surprise!

Mending my ways and letting you know a little sooner – I’ll be in Providence, Rhode Island, on June 16th because the library system has chosen Dave at Night for its Kids Read Across Rhode Island. I am so honored! Here’s a link: http://www.newportlibraryri.org/npl/2012/05/06/kids-reading-across-rhode-island/.

Last December M.K.B. wrote, I was curious about surprises in stories. Do you have to give hints of what surprise (I’m talking about in non-mystery stories)? Like in that movie “Tangled” (well, they actually told you she was a princess in the beginning but I couldn’t really think of anything else) they let her see a picture of the baby princess and she recognized her eyes as her own. Do you have to do something like that or can I just hit my readers with the frying pan of surprise?

I love that, “the frying pan of surprise” as an expression! And I love surprises in stories.

There are two kinds of frying-pan surprises. The good kind smacks you, astonishes you, and knocks all the preceding plot elements into place.

The bad kind slams you and leaves you gasping, “Whuh?”

The most effective use of the good frying pan comes throughout the original (I haven’t read the later books) Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov. The series was written for adults, but I’d say the three books I read are appropriate for middle school kids and above. The surprises keep whamming you between the eyes and yet they make perfect sense.

The bad frying pan, in my opinion, is epitomized by the TV series Lost (high school at least). Time travel, smoke monsters, polar bears in the tropics, good guys who turn bad, bad guys who turn good, why did I watch this? Nothing adds up. There’s an LOL video summary of all seasons but the last on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC6jcj3V53E, also with adult content. The last season, alas, resolves nothing.

This has come up before on the blog: the temptation, which I feel, too, near the end of a story, to drop a bomb on all the characters or to have an asteroid hit the earth and wipe it out. This is the bad frying pan at its worst.

So how do we achieve the good fp and eschew the bad?

We drop in hints and bury them.

Things happen in real life that are unbelievable, that you can’t put into fiction because suspension of disbelief will fall apart. Here are two minor examples. If you have better ones, please post them.

In the first, my husband, David, was walking in the winter in New York City, icicles hanging from skyscrapers above. He saw a clock in a store window and drew back to look at the time just as an icicle crashed down from thirty stories above. If he hadn’t pulled back, that icicle would have clocked him, so to speak. In fiction, this would seem contrived, the surprise of the icicle canceled by the contrivance.

In the second, my parents and I many years ago visited a sick aunt at her apartment. I was grown up and married by then. David had shortly before had a job interview during which he filled out a psychological questionnaire aimed at revealing his management style. Thoughtfully thinking I’d be interested, he asked for extra copies. When I visited Aunt Harriet, I brought the copies with me to entertain everyone. The test was long, maybe five or six pages. My father took his to another room and spent forty-five minutes on it. My mother breezed through hers in ten minutes, sitting right in the room with me and my aunt. The two of them, my father and my mother, answered every single question the same way, although my parents had such different personalities: my father sunny, my mother worried; my father stubborn, my mother persuadable; my father an appreciator of humor, my mother actively funny. Not credible in a story.

Let’s take the first real-life event and see if we can make it work in fiction with the buried-hints approach. David’s clock radio wakes him to a meteorologist’s warnings about an ongoing ice storm. At breakfast he and his wife (not me, this is fiction now) quarrel about the family finances. The wife’s work hours have been cut back, and David’s been unemployed for a year. Money fights keep cropping up. He’s pawned his watch, and she gave her heirloom china set to the consignment shop. After the argument, they stop speaking to each other. He opens the local paper and reads his horoscope, which predicts a lucky day. Encouraged, he shows the prediction to his wife. They make up. He sets off for his job interview, where he’s given the management style questionnaire, which I’m dragging in from my other anecdote. His style turns out to be emotional, but the company is seeking someone with an intuitive bent, so he doesn’t get the position. He leaves the office building in a black mood, even thinking of tossing himself in the icy river. But more sensible thoughts prevail. He pauses to check the time in a store window to see if he can catch the early train home, and the icicle descends exactly where he would have been if he hadn’t stopped, fulfilling the prophesy and enabling him to apply for another job another day.

The icicle still drops out of a clear blue sky. It’s still a surprise, but now it satisfies, now that we’re set up for it by the horoscope and the pawned watch, which are buried by the details of the argument and money woes. If you were really writing this as a story and not merely a summary, you would do the burying more effectively by including the actual dialogue during the argument, showing the receptionist at the job interview, the office itself, David (poor man) liking what he sees, getting his hopes up, feeling that he’s connecting with the HR person who’s describing what his future duties might be. With all this, the watch recedes to nothing but a trivial detail, and the horoscope hovers pleasantly as a question mark that we hope will take us to a happy ending.

With preparation surprises satisfy. Without, they fall flat. In Fairest (SPOILER ALERT), for example, the creature in the mirror comes as a surprise, but the reader is prepared for something about that mirror for a long while. If the mirror hadn’t been performing tricks, Aza’s arrival inside it would be just weird.

It’s total fun to drop in the hints and set up the surprises, so here are some prompts:

∙    Take one of your own improbable, real-life experiences and fictionalize it so that the surprise works. If you don’t have one, ask friends and family for anecdotes.

∙    Three students at a school for odd children love table tennis and are the most enthusiastic members of the school ping-pong club. Sonja’s special skill is the power to force her voice and words out of the mouths of hamsters. Tom can make his hair stand on end at will. Raymond turns to stone when he’s bored and liquifies when he’s excited. These traits have so far been useless in their game. Raymond even dissolves into an orange puddle at tense moments. Drop in and bury hints that lead to a surprise victory when the team plays against the reigning non-odd champions.

∙    This is your chance to use that asteroid. The Monot tribe and the Hurlens have been at war in the mountains of Ael for decades. Make it satisfying when the asteroid hits and destroys them all (or all but two, if you’re tenderhearted).

Have fun, and save what you write!

Entitled

On December 2, 2011, writeforfun wrote, …my writing buddy and I were talking about names, and since she’s not a blogger, I thought I’d ask and see what you and the other bloggers thought on the subject. How important do you think the name of your book is? On one hand, it’s just a name. But on the other, when you’re at a library or bookstore, all you see is the spine of a book – just the name and the author, no description, no picture. How important do you think the name of a book is if you’re going to have it published, and how do you come up with the title? I loved the names of The Wish because it made me want to know what the wish was, and Fairest because it gave me the idea, right away, that it was a fairytale, probably snow white. But I have a lot of trouble figuring out good titles, and so does my friend. Your thoughts?

Yes, titles are important. They help sell books. In libraries and bookstores they contribute to a reader’s decision to lift the cover.

I just had fun googling “original titles of famous books.” I’m quoting from the internet, so I can’t swear to complete accuracy, but here are a few examples of what I found: Impressions for Pride and Prejudice; All’s Well that Ends Well for War and Peace; Trimalchio in West Egg for The Great Gatsby; Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice for Mein Kampf; The Last Man in Europe for 1984. For a few minutes’ entertainment, you can google more titles.

The worst title of any book I’ve read, in my opinion, is War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (for adults). Interesting book, but, whoa!, that title. I think Chris Hedges, the author, tried to cram his entire thesis into those few words. If you look at the first titles above, some of those early attempts may have had the same problem. Too bad Hitler thought up a better title for his opus! The course of history might have been different if he’d gone with his first impulse!

Let’s analyze a little what makes the good titles work. Alliteration helps a title along. Pride and Prejudice and The Great Gatsby have it. Ella Enchanted, too, although I think short vowels make the weakest kind of alliteration and hard consonants, like p and k or hard c, make the strongest. Peter Pan is better than Silas San would have been, not that James M. Barrie ever thought of Silas for his hero.

Short titles pack a punch, which is why 1984 is better than The Last Man in Europe. Same for Great Gatsby. I like the title of Katherine Hepburn’s autobiography, Me, although it may be a tad egotistical. The movie makers shortened The Invention of Hugo Cabret (which I prefer) to Hugo, I suspect to power up the punch.

War and Peace is conceptual because the terms are opposites, obviously. Pride and Prejudice is conceptual too, but the meaning of both words has altered somewhat over time, so the title probably doesn’t convey the sense of the book the way it must have in the early 1800s; still, the alliteration makes it work. I’m spinning here, but Sensibility in Sense and Sensibility also has had a meaning shift, and I don’t think that title is as successful anymore because the alliteration isn’t as strong.

1984 is intriguing, or was when the year was in the future. What will life be like then? The Great Gatsby intrigues too. Who or what’s a Gatsby, and what’s great about him or it? As writeforfun says, The Wish makes the reader wonder. In the young-adult novel The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, it’s the Nothing that revs up the curiosity more than the Astonishing. A made-up word can work if the sound of it is satisfying – and if there’s a reason for it within the book.

I’ve suggested a few hallmarks of a successful title that you can use in crafting your own: alliteration, punch, intrigue, conceptual interest. For punch, try a one-word title or two short words. You can get intrigue with a title of any reasonable length, like The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, the novel by Carson McCullers (high school and above, if I remember correctly), a terrifically appealing title.

Try a title with emotional appeal, too. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter has that too. Or your title can have psychic or psychological interest, like the word “mad” in the title (if it applies) will get the imagination going. Of course any title we come up with has to connect with the story. A clever title out of left field will infuriate the reader.

Legions of books are eponymous: Harry Potter, Peter Pan, Heidi, Bambi, Emma, Zorro (good one!), Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Eragon, Forrest Gump. They’ve lasted. A name is always an option, even a plain name. Names fascinate us. They’re portals to the person within or the book within.

My titles generally arrive without much thought, but they’re not always the final title. Originally I called Ella Enchanted Charmont and Ella. Then Char stopped being quite as important as Ella and it became Ella. The HarperCollins people thought that wasn’t good enough (I agree), and asked me for other suggestions. One was Enchanted Ella; they switched the words, and voila! The Wish was The Wish until my editor asked me for something else and I came up with a long and trendy title, which I also liked and no longer remember. She took it and then returned to The Wish again. Originally I called Ever Dancing the Wind, which works for the story. HarperCollins people said that title wasn’t “big” enough, so I suggested a title that also went with the story – Gone With the Wind! Everyone laughed, and I had to think of something else.

In my mind Beloved Elodie has always been that, except for a while there when I didn’t know what the title would be. Originally when I thought of it, my idea was that all the people in her life love her but no one does what she wants. The book evolved, and that’s no longer the case, but the title still applies. However, my editor has already expressed doubt about the title. It’s emotional, simple, powerful, but it may suggest a love story, which the book isn’t.

So I’ll make lists. After writing this post I’ll think about alliteration, punch, intrigue, meaning, emotional and psychic appeal and I’ll probably tear out some hair. I may ask for help here as I did with A Tale of Two Castles and got it from lots of you, and April came up with the final title. So you can ask for aid. Your editor will help, too, will probably make suggestions, and, at the very least, will tell you if your title isn’t working.

I just looked at the spines of a few books. Even though there’s little space, the publisher uses that narrow strip to great advantage. There’s type, type size, relative size of name to title, color, a logo, maybe even a smidgen of art. Your title doesn’t have to go it entirely alone. I’ve pulled out books on the strength of the appeal of the spine. Then the words have to take it from there.

Here are some title prompts:

∙    Retitle a book you love. Some classics have beloved titles because they’re established and it’s hard to think of them by another name. But can you? For example, maybe you can improve on Little Women.

∙    Write the flap copy (the description that appears on the flap of hard-cover books and on the back of paperbacks) for a book called Evil. Make up what it’s about without writing the story. It’s fun to write flap copy. You get to throw in all the adjectives and adverbs that you avoid in your actual stories. The more hype the better.

∙    Without writing the stories, jot down a dozen great titles.

∙    Pick one of the titles and write the first chapter. If you like, keep going.

∙    List ten titles for the story you’re working on now, even if it already has a title.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Open-ended

For anyone in the area and able to come, on Saturday I’ll be at the Children’s Festival of Reading in Knoxville, Tennessee. Here’s a link to the event: http://knoxrooms.sirsi.net/rooms/html/KCPL/calendar.html#/?i=2. I’m speaking at 10:45 am and 12:45 pm and signing books after each presentation. If you come, please let me know you heard about it here.

On to the post topic, on November 27, 2011, Jenna Royal wrote, Does anyone have any thoughts on open or unresolved endings? I’ve been fascinated with endings lately that don’t end up where you think they do, or that don’t really end at all. How do you make one that’s still satisfying, even though it’s unexpected?

I’ve written one unresolved ending. It was in my short story “Little Time” that was published in an anthology called Unexpected, which is probably long out of print, but you may be able to find a copy somewhere. It’s one of my favorite of my few short stories. Here’s the gist: Erica, a middle schooler, recently moved to a new school where she has no friends. Her parents are super busy with their careers and not interested in her. In fact, in the first scene she overhears them saying she bores them.

On her spring break she walks on open land not far from her house and follows a sign that reads Hidden Village. In a barn she discovers an enormous town of doll houses complete with dolls and animals, dogs, a zoo. Turns out that the dolls and animals are alive, shrunken, and that the village is a benign utopian experiment. (Among other things, these tiny people and animals age very slowly.) Erica is invited to join by being shrunk too.

At the end I don’t reveal Erica’s decision, although it’s clear to me, but I didn’t want to tie the story up with a bow.

The key to a satisfying ending lies long before the end is reached. In “Little Time” the seeds are sewn in that first scene; Erica is unmoored to her life. Most of us would be sorely missed if we vanished; we’d be irresponsible and cruel to just go. Not Erica. But I didn’t stack the deck so the reader thinks, You have to join. I wish I could. It’s a real choice.

In a mystery series, the mystery itself is usually tied up with that bow by the end of the book, but the larger, ongoing story of the detective is left open. This is a neat way to end. The reader gets the satisfaction of a solution and the sizzle of no solution. We remain attached to the heroine and her troubles. She may be lonely, afraid of the dark, uncontrollably honest, whatever. She may not even have troubles, but the future course of her life isn’t established. Elodie at the end of A Tale of Two Castles is happy, but we know she’s going to have more adventures, and we don’t know whom she’s going to marry (if she’s going to marry), where she’s going to live, whether she’ll stay a dragon’s assistant. And we haven’t found out if the dragon Meenore is male or female or if the ogre Count Jonty Um can find a place among humans where he’s accepted and not feared.

In my opinion, this kind of series (not just mysteries) doesn’t ever have to be resolved for the main characters. I’m thinking of comic book characters, and I’m sure there are legions of other examples. We don’t want Superman or Spiderman to achieve permanent happiness. If they get a break from their troubles, we enjoy it with a little lump in our throats. It’s all the more beautiful because their moment of relief is fragile and certain to end.

A mystery series is kind of an ending cop-out, I guess. The author has the (somewhat) easier task of solving the mystery and never has to face the more difficult work of finding an ultimate ending. Nancy Drew sleuths on with new authors.

In the classics, there are no absolute final endings either. Writers keep going back and resuscitating established stories. I assume James M. Barrie thought he’d finished Peter Pan, but writers, including me, are forever spinning new takes on the original. William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and many more get the same treatment. Even the Greek myths, which generally end in death, are revivified.

If you haven’t read the young adult novel The Giver by Lois Lowry, spoiler alert! Skip this paragraph. The book ends in uncertainty. We don’t know if Jonas makes it to safety, but I wouldn’t call the story unresolved. Jonas leaves the security of his home and acts morally. The problem that the book raises is answered whether or not Jonas survives.

This was a prompt from my post of January 26, 2011, which was also about endings: You may know the story, “The Lady and the Tiger.” If you don’t, it’s basically this: A princess, whose nature is jealous, falls in love with a man below her station. The king finds out and arranges a punishment for him. The man is thrown into an arena with two doors. Behind one is a beautiful maiden and behind the other a tiger. If he picks the maiden door, he lives, but he has to marry her. If he chooses the tiger door, he gets eaten. In the arena he looks to the princess, who knows what’s behind each door, for a signal. She has to decide whether to endure his marriage to someone else or condemn him to death. The story has no ending; the reader is asked to decide what the princess will do. So the prompt is to write the ending. If you didn’t do it then, you can now.

“The Lady and the Tiger” is certainly unresolved, and it does this curious and marvelous thing: it turns the problem around to point at the reader. Until we get to the final question mark it’s about the princess and her forbidden love. When it finishes without an answer, the problem, jealousy, becomes us. What do we think of human nature? How would I behave in this situation? How do I believe others would act?

The strangest non-ending I’ve ever read was Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (adult), which the author, Thomas Mann, never finished – he died the next year. If I remember correctly (which I may not – I read it many decades ago), it ended mid-sentence. I had loved the book up until then, and I knew this would happen, but it was still a teeth-gnashing experience.

The only real ending sin is failing to respond to the problem a story sets out. I don’t know how that failure could be made to work and satisfy; maybe if you’re writing humor it could be done. The conclusion of Ella Enchanted, for example, had to be about the curse. The end of all Jane Austen’s books had to be about a young lady unraveling her own character flaw that stood between her and a suitable match. The finale of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca had to be about innocence, although that problem is wonderfully disguised in the novel.

Here are a couple of prompts:

•    The Giver succeeds, I think, because, while the surface ending is uncertain, the deeper problem is resolved. You do the same thing. Simone is preparing for a competition, whatever kind you like, real world or fantasy. Write the story and end it without the reader finding out how she fares. However, decide on the real issue underlying her struggle and solve that. The real issue could be gaining self-confidence, winning someone’s approval, or something else.

•    I’m not a fan of Alice in Wonderland because I think the story lacks a problem. One fantastical thing happens after another without any reason. Rewrite the beginning, giving Alice a problem or something she desperately wants. Then write your own ending and anything in the middle that you need.

Have fun, and save what you write!

And a reminder: please share any writing success you’ve been having on the blog.

Pop!

On November 14, 2011, writeforfun wrote, …I’ve already read your extremely helpful section in Writing Magic about developing characters and I’ve filled out a character questionnaire for each of my characters, but they still seem sort of flat and Mary-Sue like, especially compared to the ones in my last book. I think part of my problem may be that they don’t have lots of quirks and faults, despite my efforts to think up some and apply them. Any ideas on how to make these characters pop?
  
Despite the troubles I’ve been having with Beloved Elodie, which I’ve written a little about here, a bright spot has been the secondary characters. The key has been getting inside their heads, and each head is different. Let’s take Mistress Sirka, for example. She’s a barber who’s secretly in love with Brunka Dror. Brunkas are people who pledge themselves to helping others and to never marrying and who drink a magic potion that sharpens all their senses. Sirka has done something extreme in pursuit of her love, and that’s the key to her: she’s impulsive, feels everything very strongly, takes risks, and doesn’t care what people think of her. She’s not one of the POV characters, so we get to know her through her dialogue and through Elodie, the POV character in the scenes Sirka is in. Whenever it’s time for Sirka to talk I mentally run through her qualities and decide what such a person would say. I think about what gestures she’d make. She has this amazing smile, the kind of smile you might wear when you’re merrily riding a roller coaster.

So that’s one approach. When you’re writing dialogue, consider who the speaker is. Keep his personality in mind. When would he chime in? When would he keep mum? If he’s silent, have your narrator notice and speculate why. Sometimes you may need your dialogue to carry exposition. Certain things must be said and it doesn’t matter who says them, so there may be patches where the speaker can be identified only by attribution, by Nadia said or Ondine said. But mostly your dialogue should reflect the nature of the speaker.

I haven’t given Sirka any speech mannerisms, but I have given them to other characters. Master Tuomo often ends his sentences with, “I tell you.” He makes pronouncements. He’s just a tad angry, and he’s sure he’s right on every subject. Master Albin, a theatrical personality, often speaks as if he were the narrator of the play of his life. So there’s another suggestion: dream up speech mannerisms for some of your characters, not all. All is too many. And don’t use them every time the character opens his mouth. Now and then is enough.

Most chapters in Beloved Elodie are from Elodie’s POV, but a big minority are in the voice either of the dragon Masteress Meenore or of the ogre Count Jonty Um. And when they’re from Jonty Um’s POV, well, he’s a shape-shifter, so when he’s shifted his chapter would be in the POV of whatever animal he is. Meenore, Jonty Um and his shape-shifts, and Elodie all have quite different voices. This question came up in the comments on last week’s post, about identifying the narrator of a chapter without having to refer to the chapter heading. I hope the reader will be able to figure out to whom the chapter belongs from the voice. I hope reading a single paragraph will reveal all, although I do identify the narrator under the chapter heading. Meenore uses the biggest words I can think of, and I rely a lot on my thesaurus when I write in ITs voice. Jonty Um uses short sentences and simple vocabulary with the expressions “Fee fi” or “Fo fum” sprinkled here and there. The thoughts of the animals are as simple as I can get. Elodie is the least distinctive voice, she’s the Everyman of the story. Each narrator focuses on what he or she or IT would most naturally notice.

Which leads to another suggestion, an early prompt: If a character is refusing to emerge, write a chapter from his POV. Afterwards, consider what you learned. What caught his eye, his ear, his nose? What was different from the way the chapter would have unfolded from your chosen POV character? Then write it again in the POV you’ve been using but incorporating the insights you’ve gained.

Here’s another early prompt to make characters “pop.” Think of a few of the most complicated people you know. Start a new story and put one of them in, under an assumed name, in a different body and changed circumstances, the circumstances of your story, but herself nonetheless. See if someone else you know can go in as well. These characters are likely to “pop.” Their complexity, which you know well, will influence their actions, decisions, speech.

Or you can mix and match, a quality from this person, a fault from that one, a virtue from another.

Or choose a fictional character you feel you know well. In my mind, although I never told my editor, the ogre Jonty Um in A Tale of Two Castles is sort of Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. He’s eleven feet tall and inarticulate, but he seems stern and haughty while he’s really kind and decent. The secret Darcy helped me get Jonty Um.

Think of how real people make an impression on us, through their clothing, their hair style, their mannerisms, the choices they make when they present themselves to the world. Many physical attributes are given to us – height, beauty or plainness, eye color, hair (curly, straight, thick, thin) – but we adapt them uniquely to ourselves. I took the train to New York City this morning. A woman sat next to me and went to sleep, but she didn’t relax into sleep, didn’t slump, didn’t lose her grip on her magazine. Her feet were planted neatly side by side. When I woke her because I had to get by her to exit, she didn’t jump. She segued smoothly from sleep to wakefulness. In fact she might be anything but, but my impression was of a gentle, conforming, pleasant, somewhat predictable person. Her clothing added to the impression. She was dressed for business, nothing flashy, muted colors, small earrings, low-heeled shoes. She was a miracle of ordinariness.

You’re writers. You probably already watch people. If you don’t already, take notes. If you’re among strangers, draw conclusions from the superficial (not a good character trait in life, but fine for fiction). If you’re with family, friends, or schoolmates, imagine what a stranger would make of them – and of you! Keep your discoveries in mind when you write.

There are prompts sprinkled in above, but here are a few more:

∙    Take my miracle of ordinariness and make something happen on the train that reveals her. It can be something big, like a terrorist attack, or little, like a loud cell phone talker. Is her mild persona camouflage and she’s really extraordinarily brave or angry? Or is she just as she appears?

∙    Keep going with the train event. Develop the other characters. A delay in public transportation is a catalyst for people to get to know each other and to rub against one another.

∙    So is a jury. If you’ve never been a juror, draw on movies and books. A bunch of strangers are thrown together to evaluate a situation and make ethical choices. Your courtroom drama can be contemporary or fantastic or historical, a murder trial or a trial about the treatment of unicorns. Write it.

Have fun, and save what you write!