Character and Connections

Characters are the heart of fiction. If they aren't breathing, people can't connect to your writing. So how do you get them to breathe? That's the problem and the struggle. There are plenty of books that will talk about creating elaborate character sketches or filling out this form or that questionaire about your characters. These may, in fact, help some people come to know their characters better and so help them breathe life into them. But by themselves they aren't enough to create living, breathing characters. Why not? Because they are working from the outside. They're trying to force the character to move and act from a set of characteristics the author has created. But unless the author can use these methods to actually create a character who is living in the story the character will make the wrong choices and she won't come to life.

What the writer has to do is find a way to be inside his character and move the character forward with the story. To do that the writer needs to create a kind of circulation connecting the character with the other elements of writing fiction: setting, plot and subplot, narrative drive, language, other characters etc...all of these need to work together, each scene adding to what was before it and connecting to what will come after. It's helpful when writing to keep thinking about making connections. Characters do things for reasons. Sometimes the writer doesn't see these clearly. Fortunately, unlike life, writers get to revise their work. In the revisions the connections will become clearer and clearer and by working to discover these reasons and linking them to the other characters and the story, the characters will begin to breathe.

Or so I think today.

  

Just Begin It

You have to start a manuscript to finish one. And, as I've said before, finishing a first rough draft is how I begin to really see the structure of my novel and understand what it's about. But before that I have to stumble through rough territory. A lot of that first draft my characters are the walking dead, but I keep pounding away on the keyboard and trying to give them life. A lot of the story is clumsy as a drunk trying to walk a straight line but... And the language--painful to look at in places. BUT there are moments of joy and enjoyment in all this and some good writing, too.

Still.

Rough.

You have to get through that first draft though. Enjoy the discovery moments and force yourself to write even if you know it's not that good. You have to finish that first draft to have a second and third. Not all of you will work this way but many of you will; I do. You can go back while you're writing the first draft and improve sections and tinker with ideas and plot and make that first draft a little better. I do. BUT don't allow yourself to do this INSTEAD of pushing on. Your goal each day should be to push on and move the story and characters forward so that you can get to the moment where you type THE END. Keep thinking about making connections in the work to help you keep it on track but know that you will wander off sometimes.

I think there is nothing more important for an inexperienced writer than finishing work.  Know that the first few months of writing something new are maybe the toughest because the writing is so rough and you're discovering your way. Force yourself through it.

Allow yourself to write badly in order that you may write better.

JUST END IT

     I had a student ask me how to begin her novel. She kept trying to begin it in different places and it wasn’t working. She’d tried and tried and tried.  She was discouraged. She felt lost.

     “Just end it,” I said.

     “It’s not as bad as all that,” she said.

     “You have to just end it,” I insisted.

     “No really. I’d prefer not to. I’m only nineteen.”

     “You have to it.”

     “I could always be a lawyer, ” she said.  “A lot of my friends are going to be lawyers.”

     “You can do this.”

     “I don’t want to die.”

     “The book,” I said.

     “Oh.”

     The above is a fictional dramatization, of course, because I’m a fiction writer and sometimes it’s just more fun to write the scene you want than what really happened. But the gist is there. Like a lot of writers this writer keeps starting over because she knows the beginning isn’t right and she’s worried about starting in the wrong place. But here ‘s the thing. We mostly start in the wrong place. It might be almost right or it might be very wrong. We can’t know until we get to the end. You have to just write it and then see what you have-- in my humble opinion.

     Here’s something else I’ve noticed being around writers and it is also something true of myself. Most writers write for years and years before they’re published. Most writers have written two or three or five or six unpublished manuscripts. Maybe you’ll be lucky and find your way faster. Maybe not. You learn how to write by writing and paying attention to what works and what doesn’t and doing more of the former and less of the later . YOU HAVE TO FINISH A NOVEL to finish a novel and learn from it and go on to the next. So don’t worry so much about the beginning. Worry about the end. You can do many things to improve your writing, but nothing will improve it more than finishing your work. End it.

     Or so I think today.

What's in a name?

What’s in a name? A lot. The names we give our characters mean a great deal. I saw two short youtubes while searching for some back up on this topic. One was Keith Gray who gave the great example of Luke Skywalker, which is a great name for a savior of the universe.  The guy can walk on the sky. You feel immediately that this guy is destined for great things. He also brought up Harry Potter and how Harry is supposed to be a kind of everyman or, in this case, everyboy. All around him are characters with exotic and striking names. Lord Voldemort, Sirus Black, etc… but Harry is the perfect name for our hero. It makes the reader identify with the average side of him, the vulnerable side. He has an extraordinary past already. It’s very helpful for him to have this ordinary name .

The second youtube I saw was from Michael Connelly and he was talking about the character Harry  (Harry short for Hieronymus) Bosch.  He got the name from the painter  whose work is  complex, convoluted and disturbing and unforgivingly distinct.

By giving the name to this detective who works the streets of LA he not only makes him stand out but he gives the impression of complexity of both character and setting.  Even if the reader doesn’t get this, MC does and it becomes part of how he thinks about the character and inspires him to write a more complex and layered hero.

A lot is in a name.

Write!

All a writer can do is work on the various aspects of craft and write a prodigious number of words, struggling (because without the struggle the writing is as useless as recitation) to find the right words to be used in the exact right way. And the rest, as the great Henry James wrote, “is the madness of art.”

But showing up and giving honest effort, dreaming big when you can, gives the writer the opportunity to write well, the chance to be in the right place at the right time. Randall Jarrell, the poet, once compared writing poetry to standing out in the rain, hoping to be struck by lightening. Sounds a bit ominous, but you get the idea. Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn’t, but if you’re never out in that rain, you will never be struck by lightning. Okay, Jarrell’s quote. Good for poets. They’re notorious street-corner and outdoor café loungers. But what about novelists? We’re the grunts, the worker-bees of literature.  We need things to happen. We can’t simply stand out in the rain and hope for the best; we need plot. We need to go places, do things, MAKE things happen. We need to move! And you can bet a lot of our traveling will be to far away places. It will not only be soggy but treacherous and unforgiving and very, very hard. 

Read, of course.

Work on craft, of course.

But above all write. You become a better writer by writing. You can't learn it any other way. The people who become writers aren't necessarily the ones with the most talent or best connections--they're the ones who keep at it.

Or so I think today.

SCENE AND SUMMARY/ SHOW AND TELL

If you’re looking for a warm-up exercise here’s a good one that I use to get my creative writing class started sometimes. I think I got it from Pamela Painter’s book WHAT IF. Start with a sentence that begins with A. Then make the next sentence begin with B. Work your way through the alphabet. Sometimes this kind of forced writing path will give  interesting results. At any rate, fun warm-up.
Some thoughts about Show and Tell:

 Novels are made of scene and summary. If you think about a novel in this way, simple though it is, you see that it is the interplay of showing and telling that gives your novel its rhythm and structure at both the local level of a scene and the global structure that begins with word one and ends with THE END. There is summary between scenes and summary within scenes. So it’s complete nonsense to say a writer must always show.  A writer must show and tell and it’s the choices the writer makes—when to show and when to tell that contribute to the work’s success or failure.

Show the interesting moments, the dramatic ones, the ones that reveal character and push plot along in a dynamic way. Show what needs to be shown. Good. Show the boring, show too much. Not so good.

Tell character back-story or summarize some bit of action that isn’t important and so on. Often in first drafts I summarize too much. I'm telling because I'm trying to figure out bits of my novel. I try to be aware of this so I can cut in revision. 

Picking the right time to show and the right time to tell is essential to pacing and rhythm and many other aspects of writing a good story.

Or so I think today.

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.