{"id":980,"date":"2018-08-01T08:27:42","date_gmt":"2018-08-01T12:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/?p=980"},"modified":"2018-08-01T08:27:42","modified_gmt":"2018-08-01T12:27:42","slug":"more-than-you-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/2018\/08\/01\/more-than-you-know\/","title":{"rendered":"More Than You Know"},"content":{"rendered":"

On June 23, 2018, Samantha wrote, People always say \u201cMake your characters feel pain!\u201d In general I agree with this. Your character has to suffer throughout your story or it will be flat out boring\u2026but how do you make his\/her suffering unique? I\u2019ve also heard that you should write about what you know, do you agree with this? And if you think that is good advice, do you have suggestions of how to stretch my knowledge and experiences to 1) sound unique\/less boring and 2) not completely copy my life?<\/em><\/p>\n

Lots of you flowed in to help.<\/p>\n

Song4myKing: About pain. I think readers will care more about a character whose suffering seems in some way like their own, than about a character whose trouble is so far out there that they can\u2019t really imagine it. If a character loses her best friend, it could strike a closer chord than if she is the only one in her town to survive a bombing. Not that you can\u2019t use the bombing. But if you want the reader to care about the character\u2019s loss and not just about her new plot challenges, you\u2019ll have to narrow her grief down to one lost person at a time. Then make THAT person, and THAT pain become as real as possible.<\/em><\/p>\n

Probably the key to making the character\u2019s suffering unique is to make sure the people and things involved are 3D and unique. I talked about loss of a loved one as an example; that may be a common theme, but it becomes unique if the one gone and the one left are both well-rounded and their relationship was unique to them. Things like fears are the same way\u2013if the character isn\u2019t flat, and the fears have a believable basis, the suffering it causes will be just as interesting.<\/em><\/p>\n

But whatever you do, don\u2019t make the suffering random. Don\u2019t kill the dog just to make the readers cry. They won\u2019t. They\u2019ll just be mad at you unless you have a very good reason. Think what in your story could naturally cause pain, then milk it for all it\u2019s worth.<\/em><\/p>\n

About writing what you know. I try not to write about things in the real world that I know nothing about. I probably will never write a story that has a public school as a major setting, because the school I went to was a very small church school. But I might sometime write about a homeschooler even though I was never homeschooled. I can more easily imagine what it would be like, because several of my siblings homeschooled for a year or two, and so did a number of my friends.<\/em><\/p>\n

But notice I said \u201creal world.\u201d In the real world, someone will call your bluff if you really didn\u2019t know what you were talking about. But in a made-up world, you are the creator, and you have the opportunity to get to know your world better than anyone else knows it.<\/em><\/p>\n

And don\u2019t forget that you CAN stretch your knowledge and experiences, even turning them into something a little different. I can\u2019t really wrap my mind around the idea of losing my parents, but I did write a story that included that. I remembered the pain of losing my grandfather, and I put that pain into the story.<\/em><\/p>\n

Christie V Powell: Well, suffering is tied to both fear and pain, so what does your character fear? What hurts them? That\u2019ll be different for different people. Put me on a crowded dance floor with music so loud it hurts your ears\u2013to some, that\u2019s fun, but to me it would be suffering. I was watching a movie recently where a baby was rushed to the hospital. Everyone else enjoyed it, but I have experiences that made watching it painful. So experience will color the suffering too.<\/em><\/p>\n

Real people are more complex than characters. Even if you were writing a memoir, your character self would not be a carbon copy. In some ways, all of your characters are based off of you and things you\u2019ve experienced. My character Keita Sage is an introvert like me, but I also identify with antagonist Donovan\u2019s desire take control and simplify government. Some of my real-life experiences got twisted into fiction: I once euthanized a baby chick that was born with fatal problems. It was a shocking, traumatizing experience. I twisted it into my first book, when Keita charges into battle and accidentally kills someone. In the final chapter, she discusses her complicated feelings about a gray character who did terrible things, yet she still cares for him as a person. It came straight from my feelings about one of my good friends from high school being arrested. You\u2019re a unique human being. You\u2019ve had different experiences than everyone else. That will come through.<\/em><\/p>\n

In high fantasy, the whole world might be at stake. However, I just read and loved \u201cThe Losers Club\u201d by Andrew Clements, and the only thing at stake is the main character\u2019s summer vacation and maybe his friendship with a girl. It\u2019s based on a realistic 6th grade bookworm. His character wasn\u2019t really unique\u2013he reminded me a lot of myself.<\/em><\/p>\n

Maggie R.: So then, do you think that I can still get the reader to feel sad if it\u2019s like ten people who die? Is it too many people do you think? Maybe I could give instances where they are each given a personality. What do you think?<\/em><\/p>\n

Herolass: It depends on who the people are who die and how they die. If ten unnamed soldiers die in a battle I will not be too sad, but if those soldiers are all friends who died to save someone (e.g. the MC or another important character), I will be very sad.<\/em><\/p>\n

Raina: I once heard somebody say that when writing tragedy, you should focus on the small things. Instead of writing about the horrors of war, write about a child\u2019s burnt socks lying by the side of the road. If you want a good example, watch Les Miserables. A dozen people dying violently in a battle isn\u2019t nearly as sad as the scene where Fantine gets arrested. (For me, at least.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Also, I tend to find that tragedy\/death feels sadder when the reader\/story has some \u201cquiet time\u201d for it to really sink in, instead of a big action scene where the reader\u2019s (and characters\u2019) adrenaline is probably rushing. If you look at Blake Snyder\u2019s Save the Cat beat sheet, the ALL IS LOST moment is usually a big dramatic (and action-packed if you\u2019re in one of the more action-oriented genres) scene where something major happens, while the DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL moment is more internal conflict, where there\u2019s not necessarily a lot going on outside but the MC is struggling inside.<\/em><\/p>\n

Song4myKing; They might not all need to be named, and have personality shown, but if a few of them are in some poignant way, we\u2019ll get it. We\u2019ll understand that they were all people, not just pawns.<\/em><\/p>\n

Wow! You guys are fabulous! I agree with everything!<\/p>\n

As I\u2019m thinking about this, I\u2019m guessing that we can even make readers care about aggregates of lives lost\u2013though I\u2019ve never attempted it. I think the burnt socks at the side of the road is super effective, but we can also be cerebral about death statistics. One of the reasons, I think, that people continue to care about the Holocaust is the sheer enormity of Jewish deaths: six million. Statistics have power. We can compare the death toll to other death tolls. I haven\u2019t done this, so I\u2019m making up statistics: Jewish deaths in the Holocaust compared to deaths in our Civil War, compared to deaths from cholera, compared to deaths from malnutrition. (I don\u2019t know how any of these would come out.) We might look at innovations by population and speculate how many advances all of humanity was deprived of by the losses. In real life, I have thought along these lines. Naturally, in our fiction, we would stack the deck\u2013make comparisons that point up the magnitude of the tragedy. And then, to bring it all home, we can show the effects of realizing the seriousness of the event on our beloved MC.<\/p>\n

Suppose our MC\u2019s tribe loses a battle with the gnomes of Mount Pothinay, and only three out of a thousand soldiers survive. Our MC reacts with shock and deep depression. She thinks of the impact on the tribe going forward. She listens in on the survivors\u2019 descriptions of the debacle. They supply the detail that everyone above talked about. We may not know any of these characters well\u2013either the dead or the living–but their stories will affect our MC and through her, our readers.<\/p>\n

Underlying all this, of course, is emotion. We have to connect the deaths of the few or the many with a feeling response. If we set it up right, we can do it. Writers have super powers!<\/p>\n

On to writing what we know or what we didn\u2019t (past tense) know. As I\u2019ve said here, my WIP is a historical novel about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. I knew little when I started. Many learned tomes later, I\u2019m, if not an expert, at least a knowledgeable amateur, and, finally, I\u2019m starting to feel comfortable moving around in this long-ago world, which may be more different from our own than any of the fantasy universes I\u2019ve created, not withstanding dragons, fairies, and elves. For example, cities had their own fueros, charters of rights granted by the monarch. But the king (and occasionally the queen) could\u2013and did–change his mind any old time. If a subject didn\u2019t like something, he could appeal to the king, and the king might act in his favor. But when another objection came along, he might reverse himself. A subject could depend on nothing! For most of the medieval period, the Jews had their own courts, but if a Jew was unhappy about a judgment, he could move on to the Christian courts and hope for a better outcome. I\u2019ve never thought about introducing such chaos\u2013but I might in a future fantasy, because, in addition to writing what we know, we can write what we\u2019ve learned.<\/p>\n

My book, The Wish<\/em>, is set in the eighth grade. When I wrote it, junior high (no middle schools then) was decades in the past, and, due to a special program in New York City at the time, I skipped eighth grade. So I spent a day with an eighth grade class and talked to the kids. When I wrote The Two Princesses of Bamarre<\/em>, I needed the help of my shy friends to get Addie right, since I\u2019m an extrovert\u2013but being an extrovert didn\u2019t stop me from writing her.<\/p>\n

We may have to step outside ourselves to write what we don\u2019t know, but plenty of resources are available. For this historical novel, in addition to reading academic books, I\u2019ve googled countless things. I had a long phone conversation about boats with an expert at the South Street Seaport in New York City. I\u2019ve reached out to scholars specializing in the Middle Ages on the Iberian Peninsula. No one has been unwilling to help.<\/p>\n

(For any of you who are using Wikipedia for research, I’ve found the references at the bottom of the article to be enormously helpful. Some link to other online resources and some to books that go into the topic, whatever it is, in geeky depth.)<\/p>\n

One of the charms of writing what we don\u2019t know is that we build bridges to what we do. In the case of the expulsion of the Jews, not all the discoveries have been happy. Prejudice then and prejudice now, if not exactly the same, resemble each other.<\/p>\n

I encourage writers to write what we don\u2019t know. We get bigger.<\/p>\n

And I don’t want you readers of this blog to limit your ambitions. Whatever you want to do in your writing, I say, go for it!<\/p>\n

In the case of writing about the late fifteenth century, I can\u2019t get it entirely right, and not merely because records are spotty. For one thing, I don\u2019t have twenty years for this one book, the time it would take to truly know the period. For another, the way events unfolded then has convinced me that people at the time were in some respects fundamentally different from twenty-first century humanity: the sense of self was less individuated; the stories folks tell themselves about their lives has changed; and the relation of self to society has shifted. I\u2019m hoping to write characters who aren’t exactly like us, just dressed up in gowns or doublets and hose. But if I manage to represent them as they would recognize themselves, they may not be comprehensible to modern readers. I’m looking for a middle ground. We can\u2019t entirely get away from what we know.<\/p>\n

This extends to all kinds of writing. My shy Addie is unlikely to reflect everyone\u2019s experiences of being shy. Whether we write what we know or what we learn, our words won\u2019t precisely match what our readers know. This is all to the good. How dull it would be otherwise!<\/p>\n

Here are three prompts:<\/p>\n

\u2219 Take the defeat against the gnomes of Mount Pothinay when only three out of a thousand survive. 997 people have been killed. Resist the urge to make any of them individuals. Write a scene, and make the reader sad.<\/p>\n

\u2219 Research a historical defeat. Make yourself care, and then, using your research, write a scene and make the reader care. For this, Wikipedia and Google are your friends, but you can also interview people you know who may be veterans or may have been in any kind of physical fight.<\/p>\n

\u2219 Take a tall tale or a myth about an out-size individual. Make that person believable. Adapt the story. Write it all or a scene.<\/p>\n

Have fun, and save what you write!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On June 23, 2018, Samantha wrote, People always say \u201cMake your characters feel pain!\u201d In general I agree with this. Your character has to suffer throughout your story or it will be flat out boring\u2026but how do you make his\/her suffering unique? I\u2019ve also heard that you should write about what you know, do you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11,186,315,110],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/980"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=980"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":982,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/980\/revisions\/982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}