writerjenn

My characters' motivations are becoming tangled.  I have to keep each character's perspective and desires straight, and have everyone interacting, and for some reason that's more difficult than usual at this stage of the book.  Usually I'm good at seeing scenes from multiple perspectives simultaneously, but it's getting rather thorny in here.  Perhaps because I'm at the book's climax, and characters with different levels of knowledge are coming together in new combinations, and things are changing rapidly.

I've been generating lists.  Lists of threads to follow, lists of scenes, lists of characters, lists of things to focus on in future passes through this revision.  I've always been a list maker.  There's something so satisfying about taking a tangled mess out of my brain and putting it in a concrete list.  Then I can arrange it in some kind of sensible order, and I no longer have to carry it around in my head.

The same neighborhood as described by four different characters:

1. There's the house with the scary dog. There's the house with the car that's the color of a lime popsicle. Here's the sewer grate where I lost my ring. That's the school bus stop on the corner . . .

2. Over there is the house where the cute guy lives. There, that blue house, is where the other cute guy lives. Ick, don't even go over there! That's where the creepy guy who snapped my bra strap lives. And this is the house where I babysit the twins . . .

3. The people next door blast blast their stereo all night. They never shovel the walk when it snows, either. On the other side of us, that man is always home and in his sweats. Doesn't he have a job? Behind us somewhere is a house with a dog that never stops barking . . .

4. There's the smell of cut grass, and dog turds baking in the sun. There's the sound of the ice cream truck, "Pop goes the weasel!" tinkling all day until you could go insane. I'm saving up to go to Rome.

These characters aren't part of any WIP of mine. This is just a brief exercise in point of view, and the relationship of character and setting, based on some voices that came to me while I was walking down the street. If I were going to turn the above into a story, I would work to make the voices even more distinctive. But here's what I wanted to get at with this exercise: what each character notices about the setting is related to that character's identity. Once when I was blogging about description, cedunkley of the blog Ten Thousand Years left me a brilliant comment about "describing what the specific POV character would notice. This allows me to personalize the description or choose even what gets described."  I think today's exercise helps illustrate that point.

Sometimes we think of setting as static, a backdrop into which we plunk our characters.  But setting changes depending on who's experiencing it.  Characterization and setting play off each other; we learn about both through their interaction.

 

I've been told not to protect my characters too much--that is, not to be afraid of letting bad stuff happen to them.  Because after all, if the characters aren't in jeopardy, where's the tension?  If they don't suffer, who can relate to them?  Another piece of advice I like: to let the characters do bad stuff.  Sometimes we like our characters so much, we don't ever want to let them be cruel, selfish, or vain.  But there's forward momentum in their flaws, as well as realistic depth.

I've been working with character motivation.  My favorite way to do this is by turning the keyboard over to my characters and letting them tell me what they want.  Even if my story is told first person from the POV of Character A, at some point I will let Characters B, C, and D have the mike.  That doesn't mean I put their first-person narrations into the book, or even use everything they tell me.  At least not explicitly.  I like to think that information leaches into the book in a subtle way.

I don't usually ask my characters to answer specific questions, beyond this big one:  What do you want?  (or sometimes, Why did you do that?)  I let them ramble.  I let them talk about what interests them.  Sometimes they tell me their bios; sometimes they just go over a critical scene in the book from their POV.  Sometimes they tell me about scenes that happened in between the scenes in the book.  I find that no matter how long these characters have lived in my head, they can still surprise me.  No matter how much I think I know about this series of events, this fictional town in my head, the characters still let me in on a few new secrets.

Now I'm off to take a walk, and let them whisper more in my ear.  There's a character in my WIP who does a very generous thing and a very nasty thing.  I love his complexity, but I'm working on a scene where he plays a big part, and I need to channel his voice more.  There's nothing like moving feet to turn the gears in my brain.

I recently finished reading E. Lockhart's THE BOYFRIEND LIST.  What I specifically want to mention about this book is the way it showed the events from multiple perspectives, even though it was told in the first person.  This parallels the development of the main character.  At the beginning of the book, we view things from one position.  By the end of the book, the vista has opened up so that we see things from many different angles; we can understand better why characters act the way they do.  Part of comes out in dialogue--that is, a couple of the characters explain things in their own words, but much of it is done through the main character's increasing ability to observe others and consider multiple interpretations for what she sees.  This is a good example of how to stretch the limits of first-person narration, how to get into other characters' motivations without making an awkward POV shift. 

In between posting about National Poetry Month and Chuck-shaped Cheetos, and taking care of actual business during this incredibly long week, I've been writing.  It's a first draft, a meandering mess, full of brackets and notes to myself and other flotsam and jetsam. I like the narrator's voice. I suspect that's what is carrying me through. I have an idea where the story is going and where the characters need to end up, but they're still surprising me. They keep saying and doing things I didn't expect, and revealing motives I didn't know about.  I'm just letting them run, to see where they take me.  If you see them dragging me off in a cloud of dust for parts unknown, don't worry.  I'll be back, brushing the dirt off my shoes and pulling the briers out of my hair.

I usually focus on the craft side of writing in this blog, more than the business side of publishing.  But I must tell you about this blog post on query letters by Emily from Author2Author, if you're looking for advice on querying.  Queries should be targeted to the specific guidelines and preferences of the person you're querying, but Emily gives some good general tips to follow in addition.  

Now for the dose of craft.  Last night I was working on a new piece, very new, first draft in fact, so that I'm not sure exactly what is coming next.  I have a basic idea of what is going to happen to the main character--let's call her Character A--and I know how Character B is helping to change her.  But it occurred to me that I didn't know how Character A would change Character B.  And Character B should change.  He's far too major a character, and he has too strong a plotline, to just stay stagnant.  Also, there has to be a reason for B to have gotten involved with A in the first place.  I knew A's motivations, and I knew why A needed B, but I had to ask myself why B needed A.  So I mulled it over, and I think I know the answer now.  Also, I discovered something new about B that should have been obvious to me long before. 

Reminder to myself: Every character needs motivation, not just the main character. 

I've been admiring a technique that Susan Taylor Brown is using to learn more about her characters and her story.  She's been writing letters to the characters . . . and they've been writing back.  If you haven't seen this already, follow the link to her blog, and look for the sidebar links "Letters to Characters."  They're excellent examples of the background work we often need to do, and of how characters can come to life, and of how character and plot interact.

You can thank Lisa Schroeder for putting today's topic in my head. Until I read her recent post on shoe shopping, and the comments on it, I thought I was the only woman in America who doesn't think that buying footwear is just the biggest thrill ever. 

I am not a girly girl; I'm not stereotypically feminine. I don't think of shopping as recreation, I don't scream when I see a spider, and I never ask my husband if this dress makes me look fat (I don't wear dresses anyway, unless absolutely forced to). Sometimes stereotypes are thrown in our faces so repeatedly, it's easy to forget that there are huge numbers of people to whom they don't apply--even when we ourselves don't fit the mold.  How else would I, of all people, have bought into the mindset that "women love to shoe shop" so I must just be some kind of aberrant freak?

And now, watch this deft transition as I explain what the heck my shopping habits (or lack thereof) have to do with writing . . .

Our characters shouldn't fit a mold either.  We are free to mix things up, to build characters by pulling some behaviors and traits from Column A, some from Column B, and others from thin air.  I mentioned some good examples of 3-D characters in my recent post on Sara Zarr's SWEETHEARTS.  I'll also mention another recent read, Diane Les Becquets's SEASON OF ICE--not only because the female MC races cars on ice and is probably a character you haven't seen much before--but also because this story of a girl's search for the truth about her father is so compelling.

So, if I can choose a pink flower to decorate my blog, and like to watch football, and adore dark chocolate, and like to hike, and hate to wear makeup, and love reading about Himalayan mountaineering, and excel in science and math, and enjoy dressing up like a princess on my wedding day, and also rejoice in the fact that I never have to dress up like a princess again, then I think my characters can have multiple facets too.   I just need to keep reminding myself of that truth.

After a couple of years of hearing editors say, "I'm looking for a great voice," I think I finally understand what they mean.  I've noticed that when I'm faced with a choice of other writers' opening paragraphs--say in an online contest or a "First Pages" at a writers' conference--my preferences tend to skew toward whichever voice I like the best.  Even if it's not my usual genre, even if the topic is something I never would've guessed I'd want to read about, a compelling voice will draw me in.  My favorite books tend to have strong and appealing voices, too, as you'll see if you follow my "recommended read" tag.  

When I'm writing a first line myself, I sometimes think I have the cleverest plot idea in the world.  I'll write this supposedly great line, and it will sit there in a computer file forever, with no story ever growing up behind it.  Writing a story takes energy, and it turns out I don't have that energy unless the voice in the line has a full, complex, interesting character behind it.  (Not that those clever plot ideas always look so clever upon rereading . . . but my topic here is voice, so I'm not going down the plot road just now.)

So what makes a great voice?  I don't think I can write a formula, but here are some things I like:  Humor (though I can also get into a dark, serious book).  Thoroughness and consistency (actors would call this "committing to the role.")  Vulnerability.  Complexity.  Creative language.  A voice that's familiar enough to be believable, but with some unexpected quirks to keep things interesting. 

I was editing some dialogue in my WIP last night, in a majorly important scene.   And one of the characters said something I hadn't expected at all.  She attributed some extremely dark motives to another character.
My reactions:
Where did that come from?
Does she really believe that?
Is she right?
I don't know yet if this new line will stay in the book, but if it does, I'm going to have to answer those questions.  This whole scenario makes me look at three characters in a new light.  Mostly, I have to know if the bad things that happen are caused by people thoughtlessly passing on their own pain, or is there some malice aforethought here.
Because of surprising moments like this, I've been around the "85% done" mark with this draft of the WIP for a little while now.  That's okay.  I don't want to serve it undercooked.

Last night, I wrote several pages of material that won't appear in the book I'm working on.  In revising this book, I realized (thanks partly to some questions from critiquers) that I wasn't as in touch with the motivations of an important character as I should be.  So I rewrote several key scenes from her point of view, and I learned a lot about her.  I learned why she does a few things that some of the other characters don't expect.

I don't know yet exactly how this knowledge will permeate the manuscript, but I believe it will.  The story is told first person from the main character's point of view, and some time ago I did an autobiographical sketch of the next most important character.  So I had already been inside the heads of the two most important characters.  But the character I dealt with last night is the third most important, and I understand her more now.

I first started using this POV-switching technique years ago when I took a writing workshop, and people commented that I had an unsympathetic authority figure in one of my stories, who came off as cardboard.  I was very very young and definitely did not identify with the auth. figure at all!  The teacher suggested that I write the story from the auth. figure's point of view, just to bring more depth to that character.  Now I use this technique a lot, and I really like it.

But tonight, back to the main manuscript.

I've been thinking about character motivation, as I work on some new WIPs and get ready to revise another older WIP.  One of the things I look for (and getting critiques can help with this) is an indication of where the character's motivations aren't clear.  As in, "Why is he doing that?"  Or, "It doesn't seem like the sort of thing she would do."

I hasten to add that we don't always want readers to know exactly why every character is doing everything--at least not immediately.  There are times when we want to establish a mystery.  We want the reader to ask, "Why is he doing that?" in order to read on and find out.  We want there to be a few surprises along the way.  

But there's a difference between the revelation that leads to, "Aha!"  and the revelation that triggers, "I don't buy it!"  Some things that help me get in touch with the motivations of my characters--the secret and the not-so-secret motivations:

Asking myself, "What does this character really, really want, more than anything?"  (sounds obvious, but I can't  believe how far into a first draft I can get before I remember to ask this!)
Writing some scenes from different characters' points of view
Writing scenes that don't appear in the final manuscript, but that help me see how characters interact in other situations
Rewriting scenes with different endings (I thought the scene went this-a-way, but what if it went that-a-way instead?  What if the character said this, not that?  Then where does the scene go?  What am I learning about everyone?)

I don't do this myself, but I know there are writers who fill out "character sheets" on which they list all sorts of things about their characters that never appear in the actual story, such as favorite foods, favorite clothes, music they listen to, worst day of their lives, etc.  I have also heard of people conducting "interviews" with their characters.

Once we as writers know where the characters are coming from, it's easier to be consistent throughout the story.  Knowing how much to reveal, and when, is the next challenge.

Writers need to "read like writers," which means studying the work of others to see "how they did it."

In that spirit, I want to visit the issue of Characters. On an earlier post, I listed 4 characters that I've found especially well-drawn:

Curt in FAT KID RULES THE WORLD, K. L Going
The Colonel in LOOKING FOR ALASKA, John Green
Russel in GEOGRAPHY CLUB, Brent Hartinger
Jason in RULES, Cynthia Lord

Now for a little more analysis on what I think works about these characters.

THEY WANT SOMETHING
Writers are told that main characters must want something--so that's a given, the motivation that drives the story. But most of the characters I've listed above (Russel excepted) are not the main characters in their books. One way these writers make their supporting characters round is by acknowledging that they have their own desires and ambitions. The Colonel wants to make good in the world and do his mother proud. Jason's desire to experience the sensation of running (which he physically can't do) drives a key scene in RULES. Curt's conflicting desires for music and drugs set up a conflict for his friend Troy.

THEY HAVE PROBLEMS
Nobody wants to read about perfect people who lack for nothing and never deal with adversity. Curt is homeless, ill half the time, and seems to have a drug problem. The Colonel loses his girlfriend to a breakup and one of his best friends to death. Russel is coming to terms with his homosexuality in an intolerant environment. Jason is physically challenged and also has to deal with Catherine's ambivalence about their friendship.
If there are no problems, there's no conflict, and no engine to the book.

WE CAN JUDGE FOR OURSELVES (SHOW, DON'T TELL)
These authors don't tell us what to think about these characters. They show them acting, thinking, doing. I especially admire the way Cynthia Lord manages to show us the rich and full personality of Jason, whose movement and vocabulary are physically limited.
Russel is a first-person narrator. This can draw us in and make us feel close to the character, but it's also fun when we can step back and see more about the character than he meant to tell.
For an exaggerated example of an unreliable narrator, I could add Keir in Chris Lynch's INEXCUSABLE to this list of memorable characters.

UNIQUE NEVER HURTS
These characters aren't "types" who show up in every other book I've read. The Colonel: Short, hard-drinking, pragmatic, prank-loving. Curt: Exasperatingly unreliable, charismatic, passionate about his music, seeing something in "fat kid" Troy that nobody else has seen.

FUNNY NEVER HURTS
Even the darkest of these books, LOOKING FOR ALASKA, has humor. As many problems as these characters have, they don't mope or cry all the time. Real people experience the full range of emotions, and so should our characters. Sometimes you just gotta laugh.

Some writers like to know all about their characters before they start writing.  I have seen some of the charts they use.  Before starting the story, these writers know each character's height and weight, birthday, favorite food, mannerisms, dark secrets, pets' names, etc.

I'm the other kind of writer.  I start with a name or even just an image.  Some of my characters have started their lives called "C" or "S" or some other initial, until I can find them names.  And right away these characters start doing things, and I see it unroll in my head, and I write it down.  I have tried those character charts, but I'm not really interested in those details.  I like different details, and I can't even tell what's going to be interesting about a character until I see him or her in action.

Sometimes I do a diary or short autobiography for a character, but it's all in the character's voice and it only covers the things that character wants to tell me.  I am constantly learning things about my characters as I write the first draft.  "Oh, he's gay, how about that."  "Hmm, I didn't know she was adopted."  "Holy cow, he once tried to kill himself!"  Sometimes romances spring up that I didn't originally intend.  Secondary characters elbow their way to the front of the stage, and characters I thought were important drop out of sight.

In subsequent drafts, I have a better idea who all these characters are, and I can watch for consistency and prune my story accordingly.  But the first draft is a discovery.

There's no wrong way to do it.  The planners and character-chart writers have just as valid an approach as I do.  Whatever works, I say.  And if the way you've been doing it hasn't been working, you can always try the other way.

For learning by examples of effective writing, I recommend the following.  Some are older titles and "classics;" some are recent (but possibly destined to become classics).  The target audience ranges from middle-grade (or even slightly younger) to YA / adult.

Character
Curt in FAT KID RULES THE WORLD, K. L Going
The Colonel in LOOKING FOR ALASKA, John Green
Russel in GEOGRAPHY CLUB, Brent Hartinger
Jason in RULES, Cynthia Lord

Plot
TWILIGHT, Stephenie Meyer
HOW TO EAT FRIED WORMS, Thomas Rockwell
HOLES, Louis Sachar
SUMMER OF FEAR, Lois Duncan
INEXCUSABLE, Chris Lynch

Voice
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, J. D. Salinger
THE CAT ATE MY GYMSUIT, Paula Danziger
SLOT MACHINE, Chris Lynch
THE LATE GREAT ME, Sandra Scoppettone

Setting
TWILIGHT, Stephenie Meyer
LORD OF THE FLIES, William Golding
BELOW THE ROOT, Zilpha Keatley Snyder

Full disclosure: I have no personal or professional relationship with any of the above-named authors.  The above list is based solely on my personal opinion.