Tag: Characterization

Posted in Character

(Good) Reasons for Combining Characters

Posted on by beckylevine

And, no, combining characters so you can finish up sooner with the Secondary Characters exercise in Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook, does not count as a good reason.

Still…that’s when I ended up doing it.

I’ve been working for a while now on the Secondary Characters exercise in the workbook. Maass only requires that you do the exercise for a couple of characters, but I’ve been pushing myself to do it for all of them–all the ones I know at this point, anyway. And I was down to what I thought was the last one–a resident of Hull-House that, up till now, has been only that–a resident. Not anyone with a distinct personality or goal, just someone who linked my MC to the settlement house and popped up whenever I needed someone to do a Hull-House function. In fact, this character has been sort of multiple-personality up till now, because I hadn’t focused in on her yet as one person. Coherence? Continuity? Not so much.

As I started working on her exercise, I realized I was possibly getting her mixed up with another character–a visiting nurse. Who, no, I hadn’t done the exercise for yet, because I forgot about her. Or was thinking about her as a very minor character. As I started to think about the primary trait for the resident, I said to myself, “Self, you can’t use that trait. That’s the trait of the nurse.”

Unless…

What if the visiting nurse is the resident. Of course, this took me off on some all-too fascinating research about connections between the Visiting Nurse program in Chicago, started–yes–by Hull-House and Jane Addams (seriously, what wasn’t started by those people?!), and about the nurse who did live there for a while, and the visiting nurse who didn’t live there but had a station at Hull-House from which she managed operations, and Dr. Harriet Rice, one of the first black women doctors, who lived at Hull-House for a while…and on and on and on.  Good times.

Did I find a concrete, absolutely 100% certain answer. No. Did I find enough to tell me that I can take the idea of a visiting nurse as a resident as a possibility, a likelihood, that I can write into the story. Which means, yes, I can combine the two characters?

But should I?

I’m thinking yes. Why? What are the good reasons?

  • One less storyline/arc to develop and, more importantly, to weave through the story. Which means one less path to weave into my MC’s story, and one less path for my readers to have to keep track of.
  • Giving this one character the qualities I was going to distribute among two means, I think, more layers and depth for one person, rather than two characters who would be uninteresting, flat.
  • Crowding up a character’s life makes things more busy, more complicated. For this story in particular, that’s a good thing–because everyone involved in Hull-House did have a busy, complicated life. If she’s got so much to do that she’s running around like the proverbial headless chicken, well…that’s realism. And, hopefully, engaging.

What about you? Have you got a couple of characters who are thin on the page? W ho don’t have enough to do, who only show up once and haven’t told you when they want to show up again? Is it possible for you to combine then? What will it add to your story, even as it takes away one of the bodies on the stage, one of those names you sweated over? Good idea or bad?

Here’s to writing progress, however it comes!

Posted in Character

Characters: When Do You Listen & When Do You Give a Little Push?

Posted on by beckylevine

I’ve got this protagonist.

Well, actually, I don’t yet. She’s a good kid, she’s trying to be active, and, overall, I think she’s a likeable hero. The thing is, she isn’t coming onto the page–YET!–as I want her to.

She’s a little young. And a little naive. Which might be okay, if I were writing a middle-grade novel. Okay, the naive still wouldn’t be okay, not for me, but she could be a little less aware at the start of the story, a little less–yes, I’ll say the word: edgy. But I’m writing YA: She’s sixteen years old, and she’s not feeling like the sixteen-year-old I want to see on the page.

The key words in that last sentence are, I think, “I want.”

I have a vision for this story. It’s changed since I started the book. In my first first draft (yes, I consider that I’m on my second first draft, and you don’t want to argue with me), I pictured my hero, at the end of the book, really coming into her own–eyes being forced open and taking a huge step into growth and commitment. Then, when I realized I was working on two books, and that I had to pick the one I wanted to tell now, that hero changed for me. At least in my head. She became someone who was already more used to living a certain way, in a world that had constraints for her–constraints she’d learned to work around, constraints she’d developed a pattern to deal with. She became someone for whom–because of a big event at the start of those books–the constraints tightened, to the degree that she couldn’t work around them anymore, to the point where she and the constraints are headed for a big confrontation.

I think this hero is who my character, not just me, wants to be. But she hasn’t yet come through and told me that, or talked to me about how that makes her act, what choices it makes her face and take, what voice (and that’s the biggie) she should be telling her story in.

And, frankly, I’ve gotten a bit tired of waiting for her to do that. I think it’s time for me to do a little bit of forcing my vision onto the character.

This goes against a lot of what we hear writers talking about–those exploratory drafts in which the characters (hopefully, ideally) talk themselves onto the page in fits and spurts, those brainstorming sessions where we sit with a clean sheet of paper and listen to our characters, to what they have to say about themselves. It goes against that really hard thing to be: patient.

And yet. Maybe we have to give our characters some help. I swear, every now & then, I do hear the voice of this older, more aware hero in my head. I see her in glimpses–with a bit more attitude in her shoulders, a bit more tension in her face, a bit more of that here-we-go-again feeling in her heart. Maybe it’s not her. Maybe it’s that the work to bring her out, to let her out, is a new skill for me, one I haven’t yet developed as strongly as I need to. In my last book, the hero pretty much rolled onto the page–it was a lighter book, with humor, and my hero’s flip, impatient, cocky words came easily. Okay, maybe not easily, but compared to this book? Oh, yeah.

So maybe this is a craft thing for me. Maybe the hero of this WIP is in there, for real, just waiting for me to find the key and open things up. Maybe she wants me to push.

Well, I think she’s going to get it.

I’m working this week on letters to my protagonist and my antagonist, a la Susan Taylor Brown’s technique. I’m also going to just take some notes on attitude, on voice, on the “normal” world that both these characters are living in when the book opens. I don’t know how much of this will get into the draft I’m working on, but I’m hoping doing this work will at least get rid of the floundering feeling I’m having as I write –that sensation that, sure, I’m writing structured scenes with some setting and conflict, but that I have no clue what their base is, where they fit into the bigger world I’m creating.

How much do you listen and how much do you direct, or choreograph, your characters? When do they talk freely, and what do you do when they’re closed down and incommunicado? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

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

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?