character as plot

You’ve probably heard this before but I’ll say it again:

     The way to a character’s heart (and isn’t that where we, as writers, are trying to get?) is through the things he or she wants/needs/desires and the things he or she fears. The acts that the character does in order to get what he or she wants and to avoid what he or she fears create character. These acts in the main characters also often drive the story.

     Kind of a big deal, really.

     Throw in an antagonist or two, mix well, and you’ve got a story.

     Thinking about this in early drafts might help you decide what happens next or how a scene should work.  SO you focus on character desire as a way of moving plot and not just as a way of developing character. Thinking about this in later drafts might help you select what should stay and what should go. You can see where you wander away from the struggle and need to cut.

     Another huge advantage to this approach is the story evolves from the inside out and you aren’t looking at it from outside and trying to make it fit some outline or formula, which never works for me. The story evolves organically. 

Some days it’s not about how many words you write but about what you figure out about a character or a story. You have some new twist to the story that comes out of what you’ve been writing or you discover an aspect of your character you hadn’t seen before, something that seems to open up other possibilities. This is a good day.

I think writers sometimes get too caught up in word count. I don’t ever count the words. I do write every morning at roughly the same time. I try to write for a few hours but some days that’s not possible. Other days, especially in the summer when I’m off from teaching, I may write for more than a few hours. That daily habit has been really important to me. It keeps me involved in the story and it keeps the story moving forward. Some days I write crap and some days I write very little and some days it goes so well it’s hard to stop. But I’m there ever day regardless of how it goes.  That’s what works for me.

E.M. Forester School of Writing

I'm of the E.M. Forester, "How can I know what I mean until I see what I say?" school of writing.  Sometimes it sucks but I can’t write any other way. One discovery leads to another discovery leads to another and I have to trust that these will lead me, eventually, to a story. Of course, I’m thinking about structure as I do it. I’m thinking about characters desires and I’m thinking about how all the various elements fit together, but I’m always trying to be open to any and every possibility that comes into my mind. Especially when I’m writing a first draft.

I’m discovering my story. I get immense satisfaction from this struggle to discover my story.

And this is why I find outlining and, particularly outlining that involves formulas ( a lot of these out there) for writing ineffectual.  They do work for some writers. There is no one way to write, of course. But for me when I try to fit my writing into some preconceived structure, I limit it. I force my story and my imagination to conform to a certain path and this limits the possibilities of my story. I diminish my story.

I need to think it all out on paper.  Discover the story and the characters as I go and allow that first draft to wander aimlessly in places. This means a lot of wrong turns and a lot—a lot—of rewriting.  I look at my first drafts with suspicion and embarrassment, but that is my process and the more I revise the closer I get to the real story I’m trying to tell.  I need that embarrassing first draft to get to my story.

It’s messy. I abandon manuscripts after thirty or forty pages sometimes because I can see that my story doesn’t have the spark that draws new discoveries. But once I get going, once I make discoveries that lead to other discoveries, the errors, the wrong turns, the wanderings, eventually reveal my story to me.

Three secrets--also pub. on my agent's, Sara Crowe's blog

W. Somerset Maugham once wrote, “There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.” Right. Thanks for nothing, Somerset.

Sometimes I really, really want to know what those fricking three secrets are.  I want it to be easy. I want to live my adolescent vision of writerdom.  Wild parties full of interesting people, travel around the world, days in the sun and maybe surf or climbing mountains, and somewhere in there a quick coffee while I pound out five or ten pages. Of course, being older, I might skip the all-night parties etc… but the quick pounding out of wonderfully astute and insightful pages using powerful and arresting language that perfectly expresses what I’m trying to say—yeah, that sounds pretty good. If I just knew those three secrets, I think, wouldn’t life be great.

But here’s my reality. I’ve written many novels and every time I sit down to start a new novel I feel a wave a panic. What do I do now? How do I get going? Why is all that white starring back at me? I start to sweat. I sigh. I grumble. I have a kind of amnesia.  Not like Gregory Peck in MIRAGE, not  the “who am I and what have I done?” kind of amnesia, 

but the  “how did I ever write a novel?” kind. How could I manage to bang out so many pages, keep characters straight, make it all go together—mostly anyway? What have I forgotten?

Time to walk the dog. This is not code for some memorization technique or therapy. No, I mean when I feel this way I always think it’s time to walk the dog, watch a TV program, pick up a familiar book,  check my email, facebook, twitter (thank you social media) or do anything to put off facing the blank page that is as blank as my mind. Anything not to face the fact that I have lost whatever it was that made it possible for me to write a novel the last time I wrote a novel.

I always feel this way when I start a new manuscript. Every time.

Maybe if I were an outliner type of writer the panic would be less. Maybe. Though the outliner types that I  know seem to suffer from the same problem. They just suffer when they’re trying to get to their outline

If I knew the three secrets though. If only.

In spite of this initial panic, I do, eventually, get started. I write the only way I know how. One word after another. Sometimes the words fall out of me and sometimes I have to pull them out. Usually they make sentences as awkward as a middle school dance. But eventually one paragraph is made and then another and another. I tell myself that I’m writing a first draft and I need to let it be ugly and let myself think that I can make it more beautiful in revision. I urge myself on. Slowly, a story starts to emerge and once that happens the panic fades and I’m writing. I’m just telling a story, struggling with tone and character and setting and plot and all the things I struggle with as I try to become the story, try to be there in what’s happening moment to moment.

It’s this struggle that makes writing so exciting to me. It’s the struggle that makes it one of the great passions and wonders of my life.

I taught a workshop last week and a participant stayed after to talk to me. He was a businessman who had an MBA but had started writing fiction. He didn’t even know why exactly, but he’d written and written and now he’d finished a novel, and he said it made him feel something he’d never felt before. He couldn’t talk to his business colleagues about it. He’d had a hard time expressing what he felt to anyone.

He said, “It gives me a sense of fulfillment. More than getting my MBA, more than business. It’s hard to explain. It makes me feel alive.”

I offered him my sympathies. “You sound as if you might be a writer,” I said.

And I offered him congratulations, too. Unlucky lucky guy.

Maybe it’s not unfortunate after all that I don’t know what those three secrets are.  If it was easy, if there weren’t the moments of doubt and desperate struggle then there wouldn’t be the moments of elation and discovery.  I’m an unlucky lucky guy, too. 

My ideas, after the first idea—often situational—come out of character. So I had an idea that began my novel ALIEN INVASION & OTHER INCONVENIENCES. I wanted to write an alien invasion novel, but the situation I saw was a story about the survivors. So I made the invasion take ten seconds. A radical departure from most alien movies and stories. And then I started thinking about European countries that arrived in places where native populations were primitive. For example, Cortez landed in Mexico with something like 150 men and a couple of cannons. He conquered the Aztec empire—over a million people—because he had guns. What must it have been like to the indigenous population? At first they thought the Spaniards were gods.

So, let’s say we’re on the loosing end this time. The invasion takes ten seconds. That’s how I started my novel. “It takes less time for them to conquer the earth than it takes for me to brush my teeth.” The second line just came to me and it creates tone. “That’s pretty disappointing.” Is tone an idea? I don’t think of it that way but my tendency is to write serious humor stories, so this tone fits.

         Okay, so that’s the start of the my novel. But then what? If that’s all I’ve got, then I’ve really just got a few lines.

         Ideas have to grow out of that first idea. Or as Patrick _Ness said, if you prefer to see it this way, an idea has to attract others. So I have my main character and he survives the initial invasion. He becomes a slave. But what are the particulars of this? These big ideas are good for situations and setting up story but we need details to develop the story. So for that I’m going to my character. I need to start figuring out what he wants and desires to help find my way to the story.

         What does someone who has lost his freedom want? One thing, of course, is he wants that freedom back. But the situation in the beginning is dire. The world has been taken and people killed and the alien masters threaten at every turn. So freedom isn’t really an option yet. Revenge? Not possible. Survival? That’s the first thing. He wants to survive and he wants to, even if he doesn’t know it, somehow start the process of rebuilding his life. To do that he needs friends, allies.

         Okay, so I didn’t think about all this as I was writing. I’m analyzing it now. When I’m writing I’m just thinking about character and situation and pushing that character to develop to create new situations which in turn create scenes. But this is the way I begin to build a story.

major/minor characters

"Major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed."-Graham Greene

         I think this is an important point. I also think this is something we all struggle with. We try to get everything about a major character out right away and the result is the beginning of our manuscript becomes summary rather than scene. Too much of a rush. The major characters should be revealed little by little, as fits with the story, and they should slowly emerge into complex rounded characters. This is where SHOW instead of TELL does apply.

         Minor characters are often snapshots. They may not evolve except in a way that promotes the advancement of story. They might just be a quick sketch that is useful to develop main characters or story. 

         Beware the manuscript that has no minor characters. If all you have are major characters then most likely something is wrong.  I’m a big believer in equality but not in fiction. If all your characters are equal then something is probably wrong. The reader needs main characters to focus on and identify with.

         Character is everything. If a reader identifies with a character she will


  excuse a lot. But one aspect of this is understanding that a major character 


will emerge through the engagement of that character with the story.

Roughly three years ago I started blogging. Here is my first blog reprinted. In that time I've had one novel published and two others accepted--all by Candlewick.  Not bad.

Last week (three years ago) my Old English Sheepdog, Merlin, pulled some of the manuscript pages of my latest WIP from my desk and began to eat them. Merlin, like most dogs, is adept at non-verbal communication. Of course he is also, another noble trait of the canine, notoriously good-natured and non-judgmental. I wondered what could have driven him to such uncharacteristic and extreme criticism.

     After I managed to wrench the somewhat chewed but readable manuscript pages out of Merlin’s toothy grip, I started to read them. A growing uneasiness began at the nape of my neck and spread and that uneasiness became queasiness and that queasiness became despair. It was, alas, all wrong. Started in the wrong place. Went on too long here and not long enough there. Most importantly the life, somehow, had been squeezed out of it and the characters moved as if they were clueless stick figures rather than living creatures.

     Merlin was right.

     So though I am going to write about writing in this blog, and though I’ve written a lot of words and sentences and pages and have learned, maybe, a few things that might be of some small use to beginners, the truth is no writer, on any given day, really knows more than a sheepdog happily chewing away on a manuscript. And what we know on any given day is sort of a stab at the truth. Another day we might feel differently. I should probably end everything I say about writing with—Or so I think today.

     That’s a good idea.

     Or so I think today.