Characters Need Motivations—make them real

 My characters get very cranky when I try to make them do things because of plot. Worse than rebellious teens. They will mess things up just to get back at me. They will lead me in all the wrong directions. Solution: you need to give characters real motivations for what they do, say, think. 

 

Too many formulas tell you to have your characters do things at specific places in the novel in order to follow a certain plot strategy. It just doesn’t work in my opinion.

 

You tell a character she has to act a certain way on page 33 because 3 is a lucky number, and if you have two 3’s well, double the luck, and you’ll for sure write a bestseller.  

Your character says “I wouldn’t act that way.”

You say, “I need you to because I’ve been told you need to on page 33.”

So after some argument she does. Then she falls into an identity crisis. Then she acts out or shuts down. This has a domino effect on your other characters and story. Things go wrong. Very wrong.

 

Your characters aren’t going to seem real because they’re doing the wrong things at the wrong time and your story is going to seem forced because it goes in the wrong direction at several turns and pretty soon you’re lost in the swamp.

 

You know where I’m going  with this.

 

It’s not a pretty ending.

 

Quicksand.

 

Work on plot, always. Story is important. But be true to your characters. Give them clear motivations. Readers will read even if they’re reading about terrible characters doing terrible things if the readers feel like they’re doing them out of real motivations.

How to Write a Novel: Part 1: How to get started

 I'm going to write a series of posts on how to write a novel from beginning to the final revision and try to give some tips on how to keep going. I'll try to keep the entries fairly short. Hope at least some of these tips will be helpful. Brian

There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.” ― W. Somerset Maugham

Martial Art of Writing

• Similarities to martial arts and writing: both require skills and art. Training is similar.

• Break-down movements to understand what you’re trying to do. Then practice. Then put movements together. Then practice. Repetition will build muscle memory. Same in writing. You will learn habits (through reading a lot and writing a lot) that will help you write without thinking about how you’re doing what you’re doing.

• You have to get to a place where you are writing without thinking about writing. You’re just trying to live within the scene. You’ll have revision to be more analytical.

 YOU NEED BOTH

• TELL A STORY/ USE LANGUAGE WELL. Be a story teller and a good writer and you’ll write novels and stories people want to read. These do work together, of course, but you need to understand that the skills come from different places in your mind. You have to see with different eyes.(Need specifics for this to be clear but step 1 is realizing these two essential skills come from different places)

• Language—tone, pacing, dialogue, character building, especially through dialogue.

• Story: plot, structure: various layers of plot and structure. These can be sentence level sometimes but are definitely: scene, chapter, complete novel. Character development as linked to story

• Theme is important: you need to figure out what you’re writing about but it’s not something you have to know right away.

And also

• Language and story are partners.

• Language usage can create emotions by the choice of words and by creating word images (like the camera does in film) for the reader. They see what’s happening and become involved with it. Characters become real.

• Story-plot and structure-hacks the mind of the reader to pull them along with action that keeps them turning the page but also involves them in the bigger story that makes for a satisfying read. Your reader needs to have a strong narrative and feel a sense of progression toward the end.

Excellent short short example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iFWyihDvCE

 

Why is this short-short good?

• Boy kicks dog...conflict established...

• Audience sympathetic for puppy—engaged because of this sympathy and how the boy is treating him.

• The puppy keeps trying in DIFFERENT ways. The boy keeps resisting. Engages the reader with a question. Will the boy give in?

• We’re still pissed and irritated by boy (I’m a dog lover)

• BUT we want the boy to be won over by the puppy. We want it for the puppy but we also sort of want it for the boy, hope that it might make him less of a punk.

• Then we see the boy. The twist/surprise/changes the story that makes us see everything we’ve already seen in a different way.

• As the British says, Brilliant.

ALAS, FIRST DRAFTS SUCK. BE READY FOR IT. I ADVISE, LOW EXPECTATIONS. Keep writing your way through good and bad days.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mVZtujY2G0
  

• Failing—being willing to fail—is essential to whatever success you eventually come to with your work

PROCESS (FOR ME) BEGINNING

• Character in a situation...and the situation must have potential for CONFLICT

• A boy and a girl from warring families fall in love. (this may have been done once or twice)

• A boy’s father dies and he suspects it’s murder— worse that his uncle is involved and maybe his mother.

A girl wakesonashipthatseemstobeonthesea but realizes that she is dead. (Zevin, Elsewhere)

TO OUTLINE OR NOT TO OUTLINE: Are you a discovery writer or an outliner or a little of both? Most people are probably a little of both. 

John Irving is the ultimate outliner. Brandon Sanderson is also a big outliner. Stephen King is a discovery writer.  There is no one way to work. You have to find out what works for you. Experiment. 

• A character in a situation is how I usually begin. This may include a setting idea along with story. This will get you started but you need more to keep going. If all I have is a cool situation, it’s hard to move past the opening.

• I do one page of outlining to have a very general idea of what might happen in the novel. At least this way I can move beyond just the first twenty/ thirty pages.

• Then I do a POINTS ON THE MAP—four or five points—from beginning to end that will help me move from point to point. Next step, I’ll try one sentence summary of some scenes in-between the points. All of the above will change in revision

• I do outlining as I go along.

• Sometimes I will try to just write what I want to do in a scene and write some dialogue as a way to get started on a difficult scene

• I try to follow my own advice and keep writing and not let myself be stopped by the messy and ugly first draft.

  
  

  
  

Exercise

• Do an outline-–a points on a map outline for a story you’re working on (at least five points). Or if you don’t have a story, do an outline for one of the following:

• A girl volunteering in an assisted living community notices that people die when they’re befriended by one of the women who lives there.

• A policeman owns ten cats and comes home one night and they’re all gone.

• A boy and his girlfriend (who cheated on him) meet at a party.

• A father and his son, who have never gotten along, have to learn to live together after the boy’s mother/father’s wife dies. One scene that shows them trying to cope together—maybe after the funeral.

• A boy suddenly realizes he has some kind of supernatural ability. Maybe he can read minds. He talks to his parents about it. They reveal a secret.

                              

story

It's hard, at some point in a manuscript, to see its weaknesses. As a writer it's hard sometimes to see your own weaknesses. I'm lucky to have an editor who has a strength that is my weakness. One of her strengths is story structure which is always a struggle for me, though I think I'm getting better at it. She has been part of that improvement. Of course I don’t agree with everything she thinks needs work. She wouldn’t expect that. But I’m struck by how many times she’s right. She asks the kind of analytical questions that lead me to plot answers that improve the work.

These kinds of plot questions need to be asked. Not in my first draft since my first drafts are mostly a way for me to enter the story, but in later drafts. Here’s a big plot question (when you’re focusing on that aspect of story): What does this scene accomplish? Just that simple and just that difficult. It’s easy to fool yourself. Well, you might say, the scene reveals my character’s love of meatloaf. But is that really important to the story? If not, even though there’s some good writing in that scene about metaloaf, maybe some very funny and entertaining sentences, you have to consider cutting it. That is very hard, especially when it’s a scene you like and enjoy.

Because we’re writing novels we don’t have to be quite as merciless as the story writer. We have a little room, now and then, in my opinion, to wander slightly, perhaps for humor or to make a general statement about life, but I think my editor’s very smart questions about what is accomplished, scene by scene, to advance the story need to be asked at some point. It’s easy for a story to lose its momentum.