Category: Character

Posted in Character, Heroes

Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda…

Posted on by beckylevine

Okay, let’s talk characterization. Or, more specifically, hero-ization.

At any given moment, what does your hero do? You’ve opened a scene file, you’re stuck her in a setting, with a few other characters around, and you’ve presented her–via story–with a choice. She’s facing a path with two or three forks in it. Which way does she go?

If you’re lucky, she tells you herself. She looks down that road, sees that one route offers her exactly what she wants (or what she thinks she wants), and she takes off. Your only job is to follow along, get it all down, then take a look later–during revision–to see if she really had a clue about what was best for your story. Or whether she didn’t but has taught you something you needed to know anyway.

What do you do, though, if she stops at the divergent ways, studies the options, then turns back to you and shrugs with that “Huh?” expression you hate so much. FYI, it’ll look a lot like the raccoons who wander around my house (or into it) and wonder why I’m yelling at them.

What do you do if your hero expects you, at the moment, to make a decision?

Try going back to these questions:

  • What could she do?
  • What should she do?
  • What would she do?

Could pretty much reflects the story you’re telling (so far) and the parameters set by the world you’re reflecting or creating. My hero cannot, in 1913, jump into a space shuttle and take off into the stratosphere. Okay, I guess she could, but this is (so far) realistic historical fiction I’m writing. She also cannot get a job without her parents permission.

Or can she? This is the power of could.  You don’t actually want your hero to always be doing something that’s easy for her, that you know she could, without even having to work for it. You want her, a lot of the times, to do the things that–at first–seem impossible, but that, with a bit of creativity, imagination, manipulation, or direct confrontation–she can make happen. In other words, what would my hero have to do so that she could get that job? 

Should is just fun. In real life, I’m not a big fan of should–loaded as it usually is with way too much social judgment and way too much power to make me worry and fret. In writing, though…oh, yeah. Because a should for your hero is pretty much an invitation to conflict. (Okay, maybe it’s that for us, too, but there’s the whole manners thing…) So when you ask what your hero should do, make sure you’re asking it from the perspectives of all the characters around her. What does she want to do, but only to make them all happy? And then dig deep and find out what she can do that goes against those shoulds–that make life harder for everybody else and for her, as well.

Would is the hardest. Because this one’s all about how well you know your hero. This is where you (I think!) strip away all the things around her, even if they’ve helped make her who she is, and concentrate on who she is, in and of herself. What are her goals? What are her strengths and weaknesses? Does she move slowly toward what she wants or explosively? Is she likely to succeed or trip herself up? When she’s presented with a choice, which is she–with detail of her personality that you can learn–most likely to choose. Will my hero go along with what her parents wants, will she compromise, or will she out-and-out lie to go her own way.

Yep. You guessed it. That’s what I’m thinking about today.

Because it’s most likely when you don’t know the answer to these questions, or your version anyway, that your hero is going to turn and greet you with that shrug. And this is the time when you may need to step away from the writing, even from the plotting, and spend some more time getting acquainted with this person.

This person who called you to write the story in the first place.

What do you still need to learn about your hero?

Posted in Character

What Does Your Hero Carry With Her?

Posted on by beckylevine

In case you aren’t YET a fan of Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden series, and you aren’t aware that the newest book, Changes, has been on bookstore shelves for a while, I’m here to let you know about it. I’ll also mention that I haven’t read it yet. It’s just come out in hardback and, while sometimes I don’t buy hard-cover booksbecause I’m cheap trying not to break the house budget by spending all our food dollars on book, that’s not why this time. I’m not buying it yet, because I, my son, and my husband reread and reread the Dresden books, which means I will be storing them all for decades. If I bought hardcovers of all the books I was going to keep and reread, I’d run out of space. Like tomorrow. Not to mention, when I truly want to disappear into a book, to just curl up and escape, I really like a light, bendable paperback that doesn’t break my wrist.

So I’m like #3,282,619 on the hold list at the library, and meanwhile, I’m rereading the series to catch up. Again.

And I’m realizing something new. Harry  has stuff.

He’s got magical powers, too, but that’s beside the point. No, he’s got several things that he takes pretty much everywhere with him. I’m not going to get them all, but some are:

  • His wizard staff, which he has carved himself and which gets beaten up and scarred as he goes along
  • His silver pentacle necklace, left to him by the mother he never met, which he can use to bring magical light into any dark situation
  • His blasting rod, which helps him fine-tune his sort of brick-bashing power
  • His black leather duster, given to him by his ex-girlfriend (now disappeared out of his life after she was bitten by vamps and turned into an ALMOST vamp who loves him to much to be with him).  He magicks the duster so that it resists stuff like fire and bullets. Pretty much beats Kevlar hands down.

He also picks up a foo-dog puppy along the way. How cute are these?

Okay, back to the stuff. You can see that each of these items has some symbolic meaning. Butcher does this all much better than my list shows–each of these items is a tool that, most of the time, he uses to accomplish some piece of magic. Yes, sometimes a staff is just a… (couldn’t resist!) But here’s the thing, somewhere in each book, at least one of those tools takes on extra meaning, and–when this happens–Butcher packs the tool and the whole scene with an beautifully emotional wallop that makes the reader sit up and say, “Wow.” And “Oh….”

I want to do this.

Dresden has a lot of things that help him out, but Changes is something like Book 12 in his series. I’m looking for one item, one thing with room for that kind of emotional punch. I’ve been playing with the idea of a photograph in my WIP that will seem to tell one story and, by the end of  the book, reveal a truth that hits my hero hard. On the one hand, this feels a bit trite, but look at my descriptions of Butcher’s symbols–the way I’ve written them, they read as pretty trite, but in Butcher’s stories they feel anything but. So once again, it comes down to craft–it’s only cliché if you let it stay that way. Whether I have that level of craft yet…well, that’s the $10,000,000 question.

Step one, though?

This is a scene I’ve already 1st-drafted, and the photo was nowhere to be seen. It may be too late in the story for an intro, and I may need to find an earlier spot to seed that picture. Or it may turn out that the photo doesn’t work, that I need to dig further, past my first idea, for something that has more inherent meaning, more possible layers. For now, though, I’ve done what’s important. I’ve taken the idea, the initial piece of stuff, and I’ve given it to my hero.

Let’s see what she decides to do with it.

What does your hero carry with her? Why? What meaning does the object have at the start, and how does that meaning change over the story arc?

Posted in Character, First Drafts

First Draft: Peopling the World or Who ARE These Characters?

Posted on by beckylevine

WARNING: You’ll be getting a lot of posts about first drafts in the next few months. But don’t worry, those revision posts will be coming along after that!

My friend Jana McBurney-Lin talks about a character in her book My Half of the Sky who came out of nowhere. I think, if I remember right, it’s the woman who tells fortunes in the park and who becomes a central part of the main character, Li Hui’s, life. Jana talks about how this woman started out as a small, secondary character and then grew–of her own accord, pretty much–into someone critical to the story and to Li Hui’s character arc.

Yesterday, as I wrote, four new characters stepped into my story’s pages. Without even so much of an “Excuse me.” The words kept flowing from and around them, so I was kind of like, what the… as I typed their dialogue and actions. I didn’t argue with them, I didn’t try to push them away, I just sort of let them tell me what they were doing there and what they wanted to say.

Jacob, Goldie, Sonia, and Mary, where the heck did you come from? (I’m having a lot of fun naming my secondary characters after some of the gazillion great-aunts and great-uncles I had, some of whom I knew, some of whom I never met, but who definitely seem to have been given the right names for this era!)

Okay, it wasn’t quite all that muse-driven. I did stop typing. I did look at these characters for a minute and try to figure out where and how they fit into the story I had already plotted without them. I thought about the fact that these people might not stay in the book (I mean, I already have two love-interests planned for Caro; what in the world is she doing flirting with this new guy?), and I thought about how these characters might take my story in directions I haven’t foreseen. And I realized that, at this point, either of those factors could turn into a bad or a good thing.

Now is not the time to make that decision.

Now is the time when there do need to be more people in my MC’s life, more people who are just part of who she is, part of the world through which she moves on a daily basis. The scenes I was writing yesterday mostly take place at Caro’s school (let’s not even get started on how little I know about public schools in 1913 yet!), and that school will be a big part of the choices she makes along her path. There have to be students in that school, and there have to be friends and acquaintances and apparently at least one boy with whom she has an ongoing competition to be the best math student. (???!!)

So for now, these folk stay. It’ll hurt, I know, to get rid of any of them, because they came into my brain and into the scenes, if not fully-fledged, with habits and personality traits that I’m already hooked on.  And it’ll be tricky, challenging, even frustrating to build them into something stronger than they are now, if they do need to stay, if they convince me they truly have a role in this story.

But it’s the first draft. It’s the time to scatter ideas and characters onto the page and see where they fall and what they want to do. Yes, I question them. Yes, I stop for a minute to really look at them and ask them, “What are you doing here?” Hello, I’m Becky, and I’m a control freak. I’m getting better, though, at letting go, at keeping my mind open and trusting that these people have something to tell me, something to add to the story.

Of course, if they’re fibbing, I can always—ouch!—bring out that red pen and kill off a few darlings. 😦

Posted in Character

Valentine’s Day: Why I Love My Main Character

Posted on by beckylevine

I got back into writing a new scene for my WIP this week, and fell in love all over again with my MC. For a quick, semi-random Valentine’s Day post, here’s why:

1. She is totally antsy. If she isn’t doing something, she’s not happy–she gets impatient and frustrated and just starts looking for something to dig into. This is SO different from me–I’m just happy finding another book to read. 🙂

2. She has power. She takes steps to be in charge of her own life and, frankly, she’s not against being in charge of other people’s lives, if she thinks they need her. She acts.

4. She’s smart. Probably academics-smart, too, but in the important way–clever. She can see what needs to be done and find a way to do it, even if she has to be sneakily cunning to get there. I LOVE her being sneaky.

4. She loves busy-ness and energy and crowds and noise. Again, me–I’d rather just curl up away from it all, with that book.

5. She loves her family. She wants to take care of them. She’s going to have to learn to take care of herself, though.

6. She’s got some BIG control issues. So does her mother. Can you just see the crash coming?

7. Most of all, what I love about her this week? Well, I’ve found that the best way for me to write a scene these days is to identify my MC’s goal and then look for obstacles to that goal. Well, she has such definite goals, that the obstacles are just popping out at me–in fact, she creates a good many of them herself. Does she back away from those obstacles? No, she does not. She’s strong, and she’s a fighter.

Little does she know how big the fight is going to get.

Are you in love with your MC? Why? Let’s hear what makes this Valentine’s Day special for you and your characters.

Posted in Character, Plot, Uncategorized

Making Connections, Deepening Story

Posted on by beckylevine

When I went away to college many, many years ago, I moved about 5 hours away from home. Not far, probably, compared to some of you, but for the shy kid I was, it was a good distance. It meant that coming home for weekends was not a given, and it meant one miserable trip that involved a city bus to a greyhound bus to another greyhound bus that made 1.32 gazillion stops (I counted!) in Los Angeles and many hours beyond that. And the return trip.

Which is why I was more than grateful that I knew someone at the school from my hometown, someone with whom I could grab an occasional ride up the state.

She was a friend of my older sister’s. She was two years older than I was and, I’d bet, pretty darned close to as shy as me. She drove a car I fell in love with–a 1960-something Mercedes Benz with seats out of a Pullman car and a steering wheel that, if you held onto it 10 & 2, you got a nice yoga stretch.  Anyway, this friend would call me up if she was going home & offer the passenger seat, and I would check with her at holidays to see if she was heading home.

Why am I going on about this? Because this was not just someone I knew, a college-mate I’d met and developed my own, one-to-one relationship with. This was my sister’s friend, the daughter of neighbors that (probably) brought one of their pets to my parents’ veterinary clinic. She was the middle sister, like me, with an older brother we all had crushes on, and a younger sister, as well. If you drew lines between all the people we both connected to, it would look like a spider web of interlacing strands. And, frankly, it was these connections that made it possible for the seriously-shy me to accept (and ask for) rides from this woman and for her to offer. We knew we had something, at least, to talk about for those hours driving along the Pacific Ocean. The connections added layers to our interactions.

Just like in a novel.

I just solved a plot problem tonight. I knew what my MC should do next, but I could see it taking her down a path that would be a problem later. Not a problem for her, but a problem for the story–this one action was going to make her step in and out of just one too many opportunities, with the bouncing out making her feel like a quitter. Which she is not. This has been a stumbling block for me every time I looked down the line at upcoming scenes. Tonight, I worked it out. If the opportunity I set up for has a connection to the next opportunity, a connection with the people involved, then she doesn’t have to quit. Instead, she’ll move forward on that path.

To be more specific, I gave one character another role–which gives that character another link to my hero. Instead of two separate people with whom my hero has to interact, on totally different planes, she now has a single person with whom she interacts on two levels. Deeper. Stronger.

When you’re working with your plot and thinking about paths for your hero, look at who’s hanging around on that path. Are they isolated from each other, or connected? Take two characters who do know each other–who else can you bring into the mix? As you connect, as you braid more lines together, what overlap do you see between worlds? What extra ripples does someone’s action start…in how many ponds? Who opens up to whom and who tells takes on who else? How much more interesting does your story become?

Try mixing things up and take a look. I predict you’ll be pleasantly surprised! 🙂

Posted in Character, Heroes, Plot, Scenes

What Would Caro Do?

Posted on by beckylevine

Today, I will get closer to Caro, the hero of my YA WIP.

Well, that’s the plan.

I’m still plotting into the middle. I’d say “through” the middle, but not yet feeling that optimistic. And I’m realizing that part of the problem I’m having with the current mish-mash of scenes is that I haven’t honed in enough on my hero’s active goal. I know her emotional goals, but those don’t really drive her choices and actions–not with her knowledge, anyway. When I was plotting my mystery, I could always ask, “What would my hero do to…solve the mystery?” (And then, of course, I’d ask, what someone else could do to PREVENT his solving it!). That MC had a very concrete, active goal to work toward.

I am not going to sit and stare at my computer or out the window until I come up with the equivalent, active goal for Caro. Because, yes, I could do that until the cows came home and, frankly, had a good laugh at my expense. Instead, I’m going to take it scene by scene for a while. And I’ll look at these elements:

  • What did Caro do in the previous scene or few scenes?
  • What were the consequences of those recent actions?
  • How does she feel about what she did and about what happened?
  • Who did she set up a conflict with?
  • What other character has a strong goal at this time?
  • What story element have I not dealt with in, perhaps, too long?

And out of that, I’m going to give myself a kinder, gentler question to answer.  That question will be, “What would Caro do to…solve some problem.”

This problem may not be the one she actually needs to work on at the time. It may turn out to be a problem that, in the end, I (and Caro) decide to throw away completely. It almost certainly won’t, yet, be the problem that is her equivalent of solving a mystery.  Hopefully, though, it’ll be a problem that lets Caro and I move her plot forward and grow a deeper understanding of what it is she truly wants.

What does YOUR hero want? And what step could she (possibly!) take today to achieve that goal?

Posted in Character, First Drafts

Friday Five: Hey, Mama!

Posted on by beckylevine

One of my wonderful critique partners pointed out the other day, in a very nice way, that my MC’s mother is NOT very clearly drawn. Yes, I’m still writing that rough first draft, so this is to be expected. BUT…the mother is also the main antagonist. So, really, it would help if I understood her a little better than I do, to keep moving forward with all the scenes she’s in.

Today, the five questions I’m going to ask my MC’s mother.

1. What is your goal for each of your three children?

2. What is your definition of safety?

3. Why did you marry your husband?

4. What do you do, after your son’s accident, to make sure the rest of your family stays safe?

5. Are you glad, now, that you left Russia to come to Chicago? Why?

She’s been awfully quiet up until now. Let’s hope she’ll speak up and give me some answers.

Which character have you been letting hide away in the background? What do you need to find out about them before your story can be told?

Posted in Character, First Drafts, Heroes

Keeping My Hero’s Story HER Story

Posted on by beckylevine

So I’ve been doing a lot of research this week. Finding out more about the world my MC lives in–the places she’ll go and the things, and people, that she’ll see. It’s helping, I think, as I hone in on problems she’ll face and scenes she’ll act out & through.

It does, however, keep bringing up the biggest challenge I think I face with this book–and that is how to keep my MC’s story at the fore, with the history playing an important background to her choices and paths. This is very important to me, because one of the frustrating things to me about some historical fiction is when the hero’s story is secondary, or worse, lost.

What’s happening, at least at this point in the draft, is that my MC is taking the first steps that will, I think, turn her into a true hero—the rescuing kind, not just the protagonist kind. She is going to have to make some big choices for herself, but along the way, she’s going to make some big choices for others. Which is good. She needs to do that. But it can’t be ALL for everybody else. The choices she does make for her own path have to, in the most important way, be for HER–her growth, her change, her life. Otherwise, I don’t see it as her story.

So what I’m trying to keep in mind is:

  • What mistakes/negative choices my MC could make that risk hurting/do hurt those others around her
  • What selfish choices my hero can make for herself, before the big choice and–maybe–mixed in with that big choice
  • How to show those choices–as truly wrong, bad–not just accidental or innocent
  • How to have her recovery from those bad choices not be simple or perfect or completely redeeming. How to have that recovery be part of the true, flawed person she has to be

I swear, at this point, my MC goes back and forth between being just a selfish teenager and being too good to be true. First draft, I keep telling myself. First draft.

Posted in Character, Conflict

Conflict AND Connection

Posted on by beckylevine

Here’s what I worked on this afternoon.

conflict_connection

Okay, well, I filled it in, too.

Earlier this week, Jenn Hubbard blogged here about reading actor Jeff Griggs’ book Guru. You should read Jenn’s post to see all she got out of the book, but the thing that stuck with me was her realization that our characters need to work together at times, not always be in conflict. 

I started thinking about this as supporting each other, or at least having a connection. And I started asking myself what connection and conflict each of my main characters have with each other.

Enter the chart.

The biggest struggle was, honestly, creating the chart. I am chart-o-phobic. Flow charts are totally beyond me, and even this “simple” one that you see here got me all confused as I started entering info. Had to back out, look at it again, slap myself in the forehead a few times, and restart.

I don’t know if you can read this very well, but the main characters’ names repeat across the top and down the left. Basically, the rows show conflict and the columns show connection. I think. Or maybe a better description is that all the cells UNDER the shaded stairway show connection, while the cells ABOVE the shading show conflict.

To give you a clear (?) example, Nate (formerly known as Love Interest #1) and Gideon (formerly known as Love Interest #2) have the last two rows and last two columns. If you follow Nate’s row all the way across to where he meets Gideon above the shading, you can probably guess their conflict I typed in there—they both want Caro. On the other hand, if you follow Nate’s column all the way down to meet Gideon below the shading, well…you tell me what their connection is. I’m being generous (and wimpy) at this point and saying that they actually do both want Caro to be happy.

I’m not sure where this’ll take me, and I’m pretty sure (I see you nodding) that the info in the cells will change many times during the writing of this story. But for now it’s a reminder that the dynamics of a story work at many levels and that characters, like us, have complicated motives for their actions.

Some of which they’ll actually share with their authors.

Posted in Character

I’m a Wimp. Who’s Going to Grow a Spine.

Posted on by beckylevine

The last few days have been traumatic ones for my WIP, my characters, and me. I’ve been whining (or whinging!) about it on Twitter & FB, and today it’s going to stop. Not the trauma. But definitely the whining.

After this explanation.

It’s not that I don’t want to do the work when I write. It’s that, honestly, I don’t like the pain. That the characters go through. I have this problem often as a reader, with books that really (even necessarily) take their characters through the wringer. Even as I am glued to the page, wanting to find out what happens, loving the story, I’m worrying. Fretting. Wincing. Wiggling around in my chair & wishing I had a magic wand and could make them (and the real people they represent) happy.

Which may be why my first book was a fun, light MG mystery. That kind of problem–a mystery problem–a kid can solve. And while he gets in danger along the way–along with being totally humiliated AND busted by parents–well, I knew he was going to solve the crime, catch the bad guy, AND get to ride the roller coaster. My  mystery MC and I, we have fun together. I love the book and think there are a lot of kid readers out there who would love it, too.

Working on my new WIP is, well…it’s exciting. It’s scary. It’s shocking. And, yes, it’s gut-wrenching.

I’ve been talking to my characters. What with the research trip coming up and summer vacation still going strong, I had stalled out a bit on writing forward. So I thought I’d use my more piecemeal time to get to know these people better (suspecting, too, that NOT knowing them quite well enough might have contributed to the stall).

Wow. Okay, first of all, these people all have BIG troubles. Some in their presents, some in their pasts, but throw it all into the mix, and you get this bubbling, simmering soup of pain, loss, and holes that need to be filled. If they even can. And, of course, everybody’s soup is bumping up against everybody else’s and just making things worse. There are, apparently, no happy people in this story, and everyone’s got a heck of a lot of work to see if they can even make things better by the end.

I know, that’s a GOOD thing.

Here’s what’s been trickiest for me, I think. It’s not just the bad things that are rocking my boat. It’s something about learning all this new stuff at this stage. In my other writing–the mystery and other books I worked on before–I usually made these discoveries during revision. When I could see–yes, with some work–where the new details fit, how they played out in the story. I could weave the changes into my existing story, plant new seeds early in the book, play with resolutions at the other end. This time around, for some reason, I need to know this stuff NOW, before getting very far into the story. Why is the pattern changing now? I have no idea.

I’m going to go with it, though. This is a totally different kind of book for me, so why should the old techniques work? And I was stalled, so maybe this change is a gift from the muse or my pysche, or just from the stage I”m at on my writing path. I’m going to look at it that way–as a gift, a plus, a positive.

And I’m going to stop whining. Really. From now on, I’ll be doing the happy dance, waving bright banners, and tossing glitter at all of you out there on FB & Twitter.

With maybe an occasional eeep! of panic.