Keeping It Real - How to Write Vivid Characters

Surprise! GOING UNDER has been translated into Italian and is now SEXY GAMES over there. Don't you just love the cover? I want those shoes. Shouldn't I get to have them, as part of my contract?

This week at the Bordello, we're wrestling with a topic every writer fears - Character Cloning: How To Avoid Reusing the Voices, Mannerisms, and Bad Habits of Characters. At least, I hope every writer worries about this because falling into ruts like this can lead to a major decline in quality of the work. As a character-driven writer, I especially focus on making each character as unique as possible.

However, I'm not entirely sure how I do it.

I'm a very organic writer in many ways, and regarding characters most of all. My (perhaps overly simplistic) answer to how to avoid Character Cloning is to write characters as real people. But how do you do that?

Let me tell you a little story. I once took a directing class (as you do) and, for the final project, we staged one-act plays for real audiences over two nights. It was fascinating to listen in on conversations about the play I directed - because I was simply an invisible part of the crowd, people did not censor at all. What I learned was that at any point in the play where I had not been crystal clear on what was going on, what my two characters were thinking and feeling, the audience had been unclear. The actors simply relayed my ideas. The whole play became a kind of physical manifestation of my thoughts - both clear and muddy.

It's a kind of magic that I don't really understand. I just know it's true. And it works for characterization in books, too.

Jeffe's Tips for Keeping It Real

1. Know Their Offstage Lives - Characters should have lives that have been going on before they walk onto the page and after the walk off again. Even the most minor characters. You don't necessarily need to write this out, but you do need to know it. Some writers find it helpful to write all that out, but for me that's displacement activity and energy I could be using to write the actual book. Your mileage may vary. However you get to it, having this understanding in your head will come through on the page. You don't have to spell it all out on the page (in fact, please don't!) - I promise it will come through. Like Magic.
2.  Know What They're Not Saying - We all have internal monologues, the thoughts that run through our heads that we don't vocalize. What your characters DON'T say is perhaps more important than what they do say. And no, you don't have to give this insight into their thoughts either. Like with their offstage lives, there's no need to detail this on the page (again, please don't!) - just trust that the magic makes it happen.
3.  Know Them In All Their Beautiful Complexity - So, this goes against A LOT of writing advice and Common Wisdom. The GMC method (Goal-Motivation-Conflict) can be a useful way of condensing the plot. When we're asked to create loglines for queries or back-cover copy, we have to do this. What do they want and what keeps them from getting it. But remember that this is about plot, about picking out the visible actions of the characters, the salient high points. If you think about a real person - yourself, for example - it's nearly impossible to condense to a single goal, motivation and conflict. If I asked you what you want out of life, it would be a long list. (Or a very short, umbrella one, like "to be happy.") Likewise with whatever is getting in your way. With the exception of people who've done tons of self-examination, few of us know what issues are keeping us from having everything we want. Thus, while you might find it useful to reduce your characters to a single, straight-line GMC, keep in mind the hugeness of who they are beside that. For the third time (do I really have to say it?), don't put it all on the page. But do know it. 

Trust in the magic. 

I Don't Speak Subplot - Do I?

I'm using my mom's laptop this morning. It's kind of a longish story, but she bought this snazzy ASUS on my recommendation a couple of years ago and she just HATED it. We could never adjust the cursor to a good speed and, though I looked up solutions to the strange cursor-jumping she experienced, none seemed to definitively solve the problem. I even disable the touch pad and set her up with an external mouse. Finally, in March, we bought her a new laptop for her birthday and she is SO much happier with it.

Big win!

So, a couple of weeks ago, she gave me her ASUS. Just in time, too, since my much-beloved ASUS netbook is receiving each new Windows Update like an octogenarian being tossed in the pool to swim twenty laps.Gasping and drowning, yes. Not to mention the cramps. It remains to be seen if I have the same troubles my mom did. The damn cursor *does* randomly jump. I've turned off the precision select options, so if anyone has other ideas, please let me know!

At any rate, the point of this long story is that I now have the unexpected bonus of accessing all of my mom's photos - including ones like this that I didn't know she took. I feel all spy-ish and am fascinated by the different point-of-view - something I explored in a similar way last week on Word Whores.

All of which has little to do with this week's topic: Subplots - to compare or contrast.

Actually, I'm not entirely sure what this means. Are we meant to compare and contrast subplots or discuss how subplots can be used to compare or contrast... something?

The thing is, and you all know this about me, I'm just not Plotter Girl. Not only do I not pre-plot, I really don't think in terms of PLOT at all. Sometimes my plotter friends ask me questions like "what's the purpose of this scene?" or "how will this fit into the overall arc?" These kinds of questions fill me with panic because I simply *cannot* answer them. I don't KNOW what the purpose of the scene is - it's just what happens. (Every time someone repeats the writing advice that all scenes must have a purpose and move the plot forward, I kind of giggle to myself. How do you know?? But, so far, no one has told me to delete a scene, so I figure I'm doing okay.)

Whenever someone asks me where something fits into the overall arc, I want to say this:

Yeah, my crit partners pretty much hate me.

All of this is a long way of saying that I simply don't speak subplot. I suspect a lot of this comes from me being such a strongly character-driven writer. I mean - do you think of your life in terms of subplots? Sure, we all have to prioritize and focus energy on some tasks and goals above others, but do we think of our children's problems as subplots to our own lives? If we had a plot built, say, around a divorced woman seeking a better life, then her adult daughter's infertility issues and desperate struggle to become pregnant might be a subplot to that, but in real life, it wouldn't feel like that to the mother. It would feel to her like One More Thing to worry about.

That's as much as I can wrap my head around it. I'd be curious, though, to hear from those of you who've read my stories if you think I've used a subplot. I kind of think I don't, but I'm willing to be taught!

Hey, it could happen...

In Service to Story

The tales we tell are broken down into chunks. A novel. Chapters. Scenes. This, presumably, is done to make the whole of the story easier to consume.

It's also useful for working through a narrative line. None of which should be construed as support on my part for any kind of extensive story plotting. I, too, am a totally character driven writer. As such, I require something slightly different of my scenes that my plot-driven counterparts.

To survive in a book a scene has to:

• Touch on the external conflict - preferably via action and/or dialogue
• If no external, then it must hit the internal conflict - also via action or dialogue
• Challenge the protagonist and make things MUCH worse unless we're in the last few pages of the book
• Advance the over progression in the overall story arc

But above all things, the scene must serve the protagonist. Note I didn't say 'serve the story'. For a character driven writer - or at least, for me, it's the same thing. Everything rises from character - the conflict, the motivation, the goals, the arc, all of it.

My secret weapon for figuring all of this out is a book/workshop called Break Into Fiction. It's heavy with templates asking you questions about your protagonist and what drives him or her. It's invaluable. The book (with all the templates) is available, too. Taking a few days to work through the templates gives me enough information that I know what my characters MUST face in order for them to change - to morph into the people they need to be to face the antagonist.

From that point, I have a vague notion of what scenes need to happen where. I say 'vague' because inevitably scenes I think happen near the climax of the book are actually necessary within the first third of a book. And then everything thereafter has to shuffle to adjust.

That said, I want scenes to work as hard as possible. I really want them doing at least three things at once (see list above). During rewrites, that's what I shoot for - taking two lazy scenes that only do one thing each and finding a way to merge them so they DO more. Cherry Adair likes to say 'what the fuck's the point of the scene'? She also advises getting into scenes late and then leaving them early - meaning, I think, that you want to keep your scenes packed with action. I like to keep those comments in mind - both while writing scenes and editing them. I *want* my scenes tight and filled with tension. Of one kind or another. That doesn't happen if I'm allowed to meander. It's alarming to me how someone who claims to be a writer (me) so instinctively wanders away from conflict rather than headlong into it when she's allowed to putter about in her scenes. Thus - short, tight, and jammed full of stuff that has to happen.

All of that said, it's fascinating to me how other people approach their work. So more please. Has there been something left unsaid about scenes this week? What do YOU require of your scenes?

Pantser or Plotter or...

My post it a little late this morning because the calls for Golden Heart and Rita finalists went out this morning. After the butterflies and angst over whether Enemy Within was good enough or not good enough, the phone rang once at 8:02 and then again at 8:09. :)  The book finaled in Best First book and in Paranormal. I'm still shaking. Now, however, I'm supposed to think clearly and work.

My answer to the panster or plotter question is: yes. I do an odd amalgamation of the two. There's another question that I have to ask in order to explain what I do. Are you a character driven or plot driven writer? If you're plot driven, what happens in your story defines who your characters are. If you're a character driven writer, who your characters are defines what happens in your story. I totally made those definitions up. But it really is how I think about story. I'm distinctly a character driven writer and up until the start of Enemy Within, I was 100% pantser. Which is to say, I had no clue where a book was going or why. I knew where it began and I know vaguely how I wanted it to end, but everything in the middle was a mystery. The result was a series of events that happened to my characters simply because I said so, or because I thought 'hey, this would be cool'.

Not a one of those books is publishable, much less published. By coincidence, just as I began Enemy Within, I took a Break Into Fiction workshop given by Mary Buckham. That's where I realized how very character driven I am and how desperately my storylines need to come from the strengths and failings of my characters.

So. I'm a plotter in that there's a huge set of templates (directly from Break Into Fiction) I work through for both hero and heroine before I can start writing. This puts me directly into their conflict and dilemma set. I have a good grasp of their emotional start points and of the arc necessary for each of them if they are to achieve their HEA. That, then, leads to situations and scenes that must occur to challenge the pair. But you'll note there's no actual plotting happening. That's because like several of my fellow Word Whores have already said, if I know too much about what happens, why should I write the book?

On the other hand, I can't know too much about the characters. The more I know, the better the book becomes. The more I know my hero and heroine, the better the chances that they'll start running scenes in my head without any input from me. Usually at night. As I'm trying to get to sleep. That's when I know a book has taken on a life of it's own. When it begins spontaneously generating, the characters and their story have begun living and breathing in spite of me. But I still don't know what's going to happen. I do sometimes wish I could be a plotter. I'd like to be a faster writer. This driving off into the fog thing isn't the most productive method around and I have a twisted desire to be insanely prolific.

So there you go. Panster? Yep. Plotter? Kinda - from a character arc standpoint. But now, to accommodate my wish to be prolific, it's time to go to work.