Tag: Heroes

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Problems: Don’t Forget to Blame Your Hero

Posted on by beckylevine

We all know our heroes have to encounter problems along their path–obstacles, detours, crises. But sometimes we forget that some of those problems, sometimes the most important, have to be created by the hero herself.

Sure, you can throw all sorts of stuff at your hero from outside–betrayal from a best friend, a parent who holds the reins too tightly, even a stick of Acme dynamite from some random bad guy. And your hero can fight through these obstacles, conquer them, and march through to the other side. Victorious. Strong.

And not so real.

Remember that flaw? The big character one with which all our heroes are supposed to come equipped? It’s important. It’s not enough for a flaw to be part of how a character thinks, or that shows up in the words he says. We need to show this flaw in action. We need to show this flaw making things worse for the hero. Partially because we all have those kinds of flaws, and we’re trying to create heroes that feel, at least a bit, like someone we could meet on the street. (Okay, more interesting, more fun, more tragic, but…just a little like us.) If you don’t believe me, go to 4:15 in this video and listen to Stan Lee. You’re not going to argue with Stan Lee, are you?

There’s more, though. The other reason we need to see this flaw in action is that it sets up our hero for change. Growth. That other all-important factor in a story our readers can relate to. If your hero starts out perfect, or even just perfect in action, where are they headed? To an ending in which they’re exactly the same as they started out. Why change when you don’t need to? Why change when your behavior keeps you safe and lets you easily tackle anything from an irritating fly to a massive avalanche?

BUT…if your hero is causing problems for himself–if he’s tripping on his own straggly hem, so to speak–then he’s got an important path to follow. He needs to gain strength, access his intelligence and imagination, step up to the plate. Otherwise, he’s going to stay stuck in the same story, with the same problems. You know the saying, you can’t run away from your problems? Just as true in fiction as in real life–only in fiction, you end up with a boring story as well as an unhappy person.

So, as you’re setting out to create those obstacles, the ones that add tension and excitement to your storyline, keep your hero up front in your planning. Yes, let the locusts swarm, let the bad guys drop the bombs. But don’t be satisfied with just letting things happen to your hero. Make sure she makes things–bad things–happen as well.

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Breakout Novel Workbook: Getting Back to the Hero I Started With

Posted on by beckylevine

“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”

Okay, not THAT long ago. But long-enough ago, I knew who the protagonist of my YA historical was. I had an image of her walking at high-speed down the streets of 1910 Chicago, going fast, because that was what she did, how she moved. She was antsy, energetic, and I loved that about her.

Somewhere in the drafting process of this novel, I lost her. She’s become a worrier, a fretter, someone who–well, you might decide to take the time to get to know her and find out if she was more, deep down, but then again–you might NOT take that time. In other words, not much of a hero at all.

The good news is, I think I’ve found her again. I’ve been working through the exercises in the first two chapters of Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook, which focus on–guess who–the hero. Yes, when I first opened the files to answer Maass’ questions, I was drawing a blank. I was staring at the computer screen and back to the workbook, and thinking, “Yeah, if I could answer your questions, I wouldn’t be having these problems.” But I gave myself the chance to let my brain empty out a bit, let some of the frustration I’ve been feeling just drop away, and then I thought about who I feel Caro is, separate from all the confused actions and thoughts I’ve been putting on the page.

And I got it. Somewhere out of the silence, I got an adjective.

Restless.

Oh, yeah. That’s MUCH better than worried or stressed or unhappy. And, guess what? The adjective came with a WHY. I know at least one reason behind Caro’s restlessness. It’s a reason tied to a goal.

If you’ve read my blog for long, you’ll know that I like goals. Big time.

It’s not enough yet, but, hey, I’m only two chapters in. I’ve got some more time this afternoon to spend with Caro and with the workbook, and I’m moving forward. Forward to remember all the other things I already knew.

Posted in Books, Character, Point of View

Looking for an Unlikeable Hero You Love? Read CRACKED UP TO BE

Posted on by beckylevine

I hear about this all the time–either in question or statement: Can you create a non-nice hero that your readers like? You can create a non-nice hero that your readers like. And I always find myself searching through my memory for an example.

No more. I just finished Courtney Summers’ Cracked Up to Be, and she’s done it. Brilliantly.

Parker Fadley was perfect–all through high school and, I suspect, for years before. So perfect that she pushed herself to the point of cracking…and past. As the book opens, she is “recovering” from months of switching gears big time–doing everything wrong, everything she could possibly think of to mess up her world. She is on probation at school, with piles of conditions to meet if she wants to graduate from high school. And she is still on a rocket path of self-destruction, although that manifests itself as apparent attempts to destroy everything around her–her friendships, her relationship with her parents, and those chances at graduating. She is angry, cold, sarcastic, rude–you name it. And, on the surface, all for the pleasure of it.

So how does Summers make me like–love–Parker? I think she does it in two ways:

  • Point of View
  • Need

Point of View
Parker is fast. Her brain zips to the smart-mouth response, to the perfectly cruel thing to say (and, yes, the real delight she does get in saying it). At the same time, she’s clamping down on the panic that continually threatens her and scanning for escape routes. And snapping her fingers to get herself out of obsessive-mode or keep the nausea from turning into actual vomit. The book races, and Summers achieves this speed by getting us deeply into Parker’s point of view. Not the technical 1st person, present that is Summer’s tool, but the complete and total connection to the way Parker sees the world. As a threat to her goal, a trigger to her loss of control, a series of potentially devastating attacks. All from people who say they wish her well and have no clue, in her mind, what she truly needs. This is the point of view that Alicia Rasley talks about in her book The Power of Point of View.

Need
What Parker needs is to be left alone. Her quest for perfection and her (self-assessed) inability to achieve it pushed her, somewhere in the past, into an action that had horrible consequences. (No spoilers, and–on a side note–Summers did a wonderful job of trickling in the clues without once frustrating me.) Since then, Parker has decided that the thing she needs to do to save herself is to be alone–to be so horrible and damaging that everyone she has ever cared about, and who cared about her, will just give up on her and leave her to herself. She believes she is that bad-that this is the best thing they can do for themselves and that this is the only thing she can do to keep from destroying anything else. She’s, honestly, willing to totally destroy herself to reach this goal.

And you believe it. You believe in her self-hatred–totally woven into the hatred of everyone else that she projects. You believe in the absolute desperate power of this goal, that she cannot see past it to the help that she actually needs. You believe in the logic that makes her behave as she does, speak as she does, push…push…push as she does. There are so many kind people in this story, and Summers gets you to believe in the shallowness, stupidity, and danger that Parker sees in all of them. At the same time as you know she’s wrong.

There were so many times that I winced as I read this book, that I cringed at the nastiness coming out of Parker’s mouth, that I empathized with the friends who are ready to leave her to her own path, with the not-friends who are ready to help her along it. And so many times that I laughed at the wit with which she delivers her poison and ached at the moments when she almost reaches out.

If you want to see how to do this–how to create the mean, nasty, painful hero your readers can’t resist, pick up a copy of Cracked Up to Be. And enjoy. 🙂

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 Books

Jordan Sonnenblick: Perfectly Imperfect Heroes

Posted on by beckylevine

My son and I have recently discovered Jordan Sonnenblick’s books. It wouldn’t be wrong to say I’ve/we’ve been on a Sonnenblick-binge of reading. Here are the books we’ve fallen in love with so far:

The heroes of all three books are middle-school boys, in a very real middle-school world. This puts these books in the category my son doesn’t usually hook into. He’s not that big on reality or angst when he reads. But Sonnenblick caught him-and me–with one of the most important qualities for my son’s reading–humor. It is pretty much impossible to read a chapter in these novels without laughing out loud. Yes, sometimes, you want to cry, too, but the laughter is always coming along. At the perfect time.

As a writer, though, there’s another aspect of Sonnenblick’s books that I truly admire.

I have a critique partner who is brilliant at reminding us all to “make bad things happen” to our heroes. And Sonnenblick has skill down pat. He takes it a step further, though. He makes at least half of those bad things the hero’s fault.

San and Alex and Steven mean well. They mean soooo well. It’s an absolutely beautiful character flaw. Every time these boys get into a mess, and they get into plenty, they try to fix it, to clean it up. They have perfected the art of digging themselves deeper into a hole. They could dig through to China. None of the heroes are stupid or naive. They are great kids, with huge hearts, but life throws them a wrench, and–pretty much–they use that wrench to knock themselves over the head.

And here’s what that does to the reader. It has the reader completely rooting for San and Alex and Steven. I decided today that it’s kind of like that whole I Love Lucy feeling, when you know that another bad thing is going to happen, except you can only root for Lucy so much, because–you know–her goal is to get on Ricky’s show, so mostly you just get a stomach ache worrying. No stomach ache in Sonnenblick’s books, because the kids’ goals are always great ones, and you are just so proud of them for going after those goals, no matter how hard things get.

Okay, maybe that’s the Mom reaction–the pride. I’m pretty sure the feeling I get of “Oh, Honey,” and wanting to pull the kids into a big hug is also just the Mom reaction. My son? I think  he’s feeling a complete camaraderie with these boys—watching them put themselves out there, risk making fools of themselves, and often succeeding—and thinking, “Oh, yeah. Definitely yeah.”

Which, really, is what books for kids and teens should be all about.

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?