Category: Character

Posted in Character, Plot

Who is your Hero…Now and Then?

Posted on by beckylevine

Recently, on Twitter, Susan Taylor Brown tweeted about character traits she was considering for her hero. She tweeted about pairs of traits, because she was contemplating which of each set of two traits was true for this hero. I wish I could remember them now, but what struck me was the very subtle difference between the two qualities. I don’t think this was one of hers, but think about a pairing like “shy/reserved.” Close, similar, but with a difference–an important difference.

Susan’s tweets and staying away from my story for a couple of weeks got me thinking about my hero and who she really is. (Along with who goes why, but that’s the next step.) So this afternoon, I cleaned off the whiteboard, set Pandora to Pat Metheny, and got out the marker. Here’s what I came up with.

whoisshe

I didn’t work in pairs, like Susan did. (I also found nouns, verbs, AND adjectives popping out of the marker & just went wit that.) I broke the story up into who Caro is at/after four big plot points:

  • At the beginning/pre-beginning
  • After the early crisis
  • After the secret reveal/revelation
  • After the ending crisis (for Caro, “the march”)

Still, even without consciously thinking about pairs of character traits, I did end up with words that “go together.” I started out by thinking she was determined at the beginning, then realized she might not get there until after the first crisis. Even then I realized there was a difference between determined in the 2nd column and focused in the 3rd. I added narrowly to remind myself that she’s heading into a bit of tunnel-vision here. Which goes with furious. Originally, I had anger in that 3rd column, but realized she has plenty to be angry about already in the 2nd column, and she’d better be amping up in response to that revelation.

  • anger/fury
  • determined/focused

Yep. Trait pairings. Contrast, change, growth. What’s on your list?

Thanks, Susan!

You can follow Susan on Twitter at http://twitter.com/susanwrites.

Posted in Character, Conflict, Scenes, Tension

Amping Up Character Tension

Posted on by beckylevine

This summer I will turn forty-mumble-mumble years old. At this time in my life (says the old, wise one), I have built up a community (or a tribe, as my friend Terri Thayer calls it) of friends with whom I am comfortable and happy, and who help me keep my life interesting and my brain active. When we get together, there’s lots of talking back and forth, sharing of family stories, and laughter. I feel connected and supported.

And if you wrote us into a scene of your book, your readers would be yawning and heading off for a nap. (Well, okay, not right away–we are pretty funny.)

There just isn’t a lot of conflict.

Yes, we’re realistic. Unfortunately, that’s not enough when you’re writing a scene in a story. You need emotion, tension, and some serious problems to deal with. And the characters can’t just be talking about problems; they need to be experiencing some. At that moment.

How do you add conflict to character interaction?

  • Give your characters conflicting goals. I’m not just talking about their big, story goals, but their goals for the scene. What does each of them want right there and then, and where do the goals clash?
  • Add a third character to a scene. Remember how, when your child was small, you were wary of setting up a “triangle” playdate? Guess why. The goals/needs of two people have equal weight. A third person can pick a side, making the scale off-balance. They can give supremacy to one person and put the other on the defensive. Nice!
  • Give one character authority over the other. Bosses, parents, teachers, venture capitalist—they hold the power and can “make” another person do something they don’t want. Anger and resentment, much? Go for it.
  • Weave in a secret. If you want complicated dialog, with some tension, let one character know something the other doesn’t. Are they using it to bribe the second character? Are they desperate to keep that character from finding out? Does the second character suspect the secret? Push/pull…conflict.
  • Add a deadline. People with all the time in the world to talk, accomplish something, or make a plan can, well…take all that time. They can be relaxed, chit-chatty, patient. If they’ve got five minutes to make a decision, though, and they don’t even have all the facts they need—they get rushed, impatient, frustrated, and argumentative. Can you hear the dialog?

We all know the “rule”–no scenes with characters sitting around a table at the coffeehouse, talking. Frankly, I’m okay with a scene (or maybe two) like this, if it doesn’t send the story, or me, into a slump of slow-pacing, frivolous dialog, and happy friendship. As much as I want that in my own life these days, I do not want it in the books I’m reading. Or writing.

Neither do you. 🙂

What do you do to make your characters less happy with each other, more at odds? Leave a comment and share the tip!

Posted in Character, Heroes, Somebody Else Says, Writing Books

Somebody Else Says: Nathan Bransford (and Me) on Redeemability

Posted on by beckylevine

Okay, I know it’s starting to feel like this is a bit of a cheating week for me. First, I the WONDERFUL and BRILLIANT Shrinking Violets guest post for me. (I know how much you all loved that, though, so no guilt here!). Then I resort to a visual image, no words, about my workday, and I didn’t even find that image myself–Nastassja Mills did! And now, I’m sending you over to read Nathan Bransford’s blog.

Still, no guilt. Because Nathan is always worth listening to, and also because I am going to throw my own two cents into the pot here. Nathan’s basically talking about how to make it work that your hero does something horrible or has a pretty nasty flaw. And his basic idea–although he says it much better and in more detail, so you MUST go read the post–is that you do this by redeeming your hero.

What I started thinking about, though, as I read the post is that this implies another need, perhaps. And that would be the need to have our hero do something “bad” to start with. Yes, I’m still buried in Donald Maass’ workbook and theories, but this seems to me to fall under that big umbrella of pushing our heroes past our their limits.

I am having the sense as I think about my fiction WIP and draft out a few early scenes that I’m making my hero pretty darned, well…heroic. That’s okay. In fact, that’s good. Some pretty nasty things happen to her, and she’s going to have to be strong, or to repeat the highest praise I’ve ever heard about any heroine from literaticat—kick-ass. But…

She can’t be Wonder Woman. (For one thing, the story is set in Chicago, 1913–in MARCH, and that outfit would be completely inappropriate.)

One of my goal for this character is to find out what she does wrong. It has to, I think, be a necessary wrong and one that is ultimately a critical part of her quest and growth, but it does have to be bad.

What about your heroes? Do they wear cloaks because they’re hiding something? What’s really under that mask? How bad can you make them? And how will you, as Nathan says, redeem them?

Posted in Character, First Drafts, Plot, Scenes

Scenes: Writing in Sequence or…Not

Posted on by beckylevine

I’m getting started on another WIP (work in progress). It’s a historical YA, set in Chicago in 1913, just before the suffragette march on Washington, D.C. I’ve been reading and researchng and mulling for a while now, and I’ve even done a bit of basic plot and character work. And I’m thinking about writing.

The question is: Do I plot in more detail, at the scene-by-scene level, so I can write in sequence and develop the connections and transitions as I go? Or do I go at it a bit more randomly, picking a scene that’s calling to me and putting words on pages, a bit more isolated from what may come before or after?

Confession: I already did the second one. I’m developing a critique workshop for the Redwood Writers branch of the California Writers Club, and I needed a writing sample for the participants to critique. I played with just making something up out of the ozone, but a scene from the WIP kept pushing at me. It’s one of the first scenes in the book that I visualized, and it’s one of those crux moments (I think!). So, being as I had eaten too much chocolate that night, I got up out of bed and wrote it.

Whee!

Yes, it felt great. And it started me thinking about the friends I have who write–well, randomly isn’t the right word, but they certainly don’t worry about writing scenes in sequence. Should I? Could I? (Have I mentioned here yet that I’m a bit of a control freak?)

So I’m thinking about the pluses and minuses of both methods. MY pluses and minuses. I really want to hear from all of you–about how you write, WHY you write that way, and what you think are the benefits and problems. Susan Taylor Brown has a post up today about why she chooses to write out of order.

Keep in mind, I believe that you need to have some kind of basic plot developed before you start with either of these methods. I’m also talking about a first draft here, although–if I thought about it–I could probably find applications for revision, also. (Another post, folks!)

Writing Scenes in Sequence

Pluses

  • When you finish a scene, you already know what’s coming next. Given that you’re writing as close to every day as you can, this means you’ve got a roll going and can move on to the next scene without that gaping void of what now? staring at you.
  • You can get a feel for the rising  tension of the story as you write. Yes, you’ll have to go back and tweak it, but you’ll be watching for it and have a sense of where each scene needs to fall in the pattern.
  • You feel the balance, as you write, of when and why various characters are appearing in your story.

Minuses

  • You may (will!) find yourself writing scenes you aren’t interested in at the moment, ignoring another scene that’s really calling to you.
  • You can get yourself pointed too strictly in one direction, a direction that may or may not be the best one for the story.
  • You may focus too tightly on the plot and not see the character that you really need to develop.

Writing Scenes out of Order

Pluses

  • You get the freedom to write whichever scene you’re excited about, which probably increases the joy of your writing.
  • You get more surprises, because you’re writing in less of a constricted “space.” Having less plan means there’s room for more spontaneity. (Okay, just WRITING this bullet makes me anxious!)
  • You will see connections as they appear, rather than trying to assign connections you’ve already decided on.

Minuses

  • When you run out of scenes that you really want to write, you’re still looking at a whole lot of scenes that still need to be written. 
  • You may end up with a bunch of scenes that have no connection, that are episodes, not part of an actual story.
  • You may struggle for ideas about what a scene needs to be doing.

Okay, Confession #2. I honestly thought when I started this post that I’d come down hard on the side of writing in sequence. Um…NOT. I was struggling to think of pluses for that method. Whereas when I got to writing scenes out of order, all of a sudden I was thinking…oh, yeah!

Now, this may be because, honestly, I don’t have 100% of my writing time to dedicate to this WIP right now. I’m over halfway through The Critiquer’s Survival Guide, but still have some serious work to do in the next few months. I’m trying to give as much evening time as I can to the story, but…family time, housework, all the life thingies need their minutes, too. As usual. So it’s very possible that the idea of picking scattered scenes to write just sounds more doable.

I’m also, though, looking back at the revision passes I made on my last book, the one I’m sending around to some agents. I can’t truly say that writing things in sequence gave me anything but the appearance of control (not that that’s a BAD thing!). And I’m seeing that, possibly, writing scenes out of order may actually let the story develop as it needs to, not just in the pattern I’ve decided it should follow.

CONCLUSION: I’m going to try it. I’m going to do a bit more plotting, focused on the most important scenes I can think of right now, and then I’m going to write them.

Until, at least, I go crazy trying. 🙂

What about you?

Posted in Character

Characters: Getting to Know Your Hero

Posted on by beckylevine

My son’s 7th grade English class just read The Outsiders. In the back of the book were some questions S.E. Hinton had written answers to. My son doesn’t remember the specific question, but in one answer Hinton said, basically, that she knew everything about her characters before she started writing the story.

Then yesterday, I went to an SCBWI conference and heard editors and agents talk about what really “grabs” them about a submission. They didn’t really apply the label of “Character” in their talks, but here’s what I “heard.”

An editor or agent has to fall in love with your work to take it on. Really fall in love. And to do that, there has to be something “there” for them to attach to. Something very, very specific. And I took that to be something specific about your main character.

How many times, when someone asks you about your book, have you said, “Well, it’s about a woman who…” or “It’s the story of this guy who…”

I decided yesterday that our stories can’t be about “a woman” or “this guy.” Our stories have to be about Ponyboy or Jane Eyre or Anne Shirley or Sam Spade. What happened in your brain when I put the names in that sentence. You knew just who I was talking about, you recognized each character. You responded as if I was talking about a real person. Because, when you read one of the names, you instantly–I’m betting–focused in on one or more specific, concrete details about that character. You also went right back to the feeling that person raised in you when you read about them on a page.

That’s our character goal, I think. To write someone who almost literally walks off the page and grabs the reader, who says, “Here! Right here! I’m ME!” And who shows you just who that ME is.

So, for today–how far do you have to go in knowing your characters before you start to write about them? Do you do character sheets? Do you draw pictures of them or cut out photos from magazines? Do you build a collage of all the things that make up that character? Or do you just write and write and see what grows off the page, what calls to you to shape and mold and highlight as your revise.

I cannot do character sheets. I’ve tried and tried. I need to start writing about a character to learn who he/she is. In many ways, character is defined by action and reation, so–writing down hair color, or age, or even the character’s secret, never feels real to me, unless I’m playing with it on the page of a story. Also, frankly, I get bored filling out this kind of details.

There are certain questions I do need answers to, though, before I can start telling my hero’s story:

  • What does my hero want? Here, I’m talking about a concrete, specific THING, not the big, global dream ideal
  • Why does he want this thing?
  • Why doesn’t my hero already have it?
  • What does my hero plan to do to get it?
  • Who will try to stop my hero? How will they try and, most important, why will they try?
  • What about my hero will work against his getting his own goal?

Do you see all the “whys” in that list? I think this is the layer of characterization that makes our characters unique, special enough to come close to any of those I listed above, to make a big splash with an agent, an editor, and a reader.

I don’t know all the whys when I start writing. As I said, I have some idea, or I couldn’t get started. But the more I write and the more I revise, the deeper I push myself for fuller, more detailed answers. People often ask, how do you know when your story is done. There are a hundred answers, but one has to be, “When you have the answers to all your whys and, together, those answers produce a strong, cohesive, captivating character.

Here are a few links I found to show you some more thoughts on characterization:

What about you? What have you tried and what’s worked best for you?