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Murder, Tea, and Piggles
This week I began another rewrite for my first book. For the first time, I feel like my protagonist has something going for her. I’ve probably rewritten the same first chapter twelve times over the past six years, trying to reinvent the wheel over and over and over again. What I needed was for someone to come along, look at it, shake their head and say, “Nope. You’re facing the wrong way. Look over there.”
Last week, the lovely Julie Kenner did just that for me. The result has been oddly liberating. Not only do I feel able to better express a more fully-realized protagonist, but the new goals I wrote for her can be woven seamlessly into the rest of the book. Instead of feeling like I’m reinventing her, I actually feel like I was able to peel back her exterior to figure out exactly what it is that she needed to be. It works — she is much better this way. There are so many little Easter eggs to sprinkle through the book now, and I think that will ultimately make it a more satisfying read for people. I’d love to tell you about them, but as a whole one or two of you have actually read the thing, it wouldn’t make any sense. So you’ll just have to wait. Until I find an agent, sell the book, and it someday gets published.
Yesterday, Karen McFarland hosted New York Times Bestselling Author Bob Mayer on her blog for a great guest post about creating unforgettable characters. I would highly recommend that you check it out. There were some nuggets in there that I definitely intend to keep in mind when I continue this rewrite.
What struck me most about the advice and feedback I’ve gotten lately is that people need motivations for things. They may not be positive things — in fact, I think that often people are more motivated by the threat of something negative than the possibility of something positive — but they have to be present. Whether it’s trying to get your reader to accept why your protagonist is trusting that stranger or why she is so determined to keep something secret, the reader has to be able to say she understands even if she wouldn’t make the same choice.
So as I strike out on this new path (hopefully not in the baseball sense of the phrase), my protagonist has a few new things in her backpack, including a cat named Piggles. My friend has a cat called Miggles, and when I was thinking about her cat, I was thinking of him going hungry and being mad about it, and voila — Piggles was born. He should be an interesting kitty to play with.
This is about how I picture Piggles. A dog kitty (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The past few weeks, I’ve been acting as a beta reader for three friends. It’s been a really fascinating experience, both because it has shown me some amazing writing from three people who will certainly be big names in fantasy/paranormal fiction before long AND because it’s helping me to look more critically at my own work. All four of us are unpublished writers, and I think we’ve all felt the frustration of running into walls with our work. Sometimes you just get too close to something to be able to see what needs to be fixed. None of us are professionals, but we all have completed novels and all have the goal of being traditionally published. I think we’re all happy to have the chance to get feedback on our work from writers in the same genre.
I think we’re all guilty of getting too close to things, whether you’re a writer or not. Sometimes we get so focused on whatever goal is floating in front our faces that we get lost in that metaphor about seeing the forest through the trees. It’s hard to see the forest when your nose is stuck between a couple creases of bark.
Forest? What forest? Bark of a Pine tree showing normal sloughing of plates of bark. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Sometimes we can get perspective on our own, but other times we need that gentle readjustment in our thinking to come from the outside — or sometimes we just need a bap on the head with a yardstick. I’m setting out on a new journey with some new goals this month. Instead of completing book three by April 15th, my goal is to have a submission-ready book one by June 1.
What have you needed perspective on in your life lately? Yardstick or gentle turn? Have you had to reevaluate your goals?
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Monday Man: Xander Harris
The last few days have seen me curled up in bed alone after long days of work with only a book for company. I’ve been sick and sniffly and generally full of snot, so my husband has opted to sleep in the living room, where it’s more quiet and he doesn’t have to wake up with his face in one of my dirty tissues — the living room is also free of the pirouetting raccoons that live in our ceiling.
I’ve taken three books to bed with me this week: Kushiel’s Dart, the Buffy Omnibus, and a deliciously sturdy hardback compilation of Tales of the Slayers and Tales of the Vampires, just called Tales. The latter two are graphic novels, so I’ve had Buffy on the brain.
Which brings me to today’s Monday Man: Xander Harris
There's two of him. But only sometimes. Image via Wikia.com
Xander is the very first of the Scoobies that Buffy encounters at Sunnydale High. He subsequently sticks his foot in his mouth, where it remains on and on for the next seven years. Xander’s character has always fascinated me. Of all the characters on Buffy, he is the one who most noticeably lacks any superpowers. It rankles him that he gets told to stay behind when Buffy and Giles and Angel (and progressively, Willow) go off to fight the baddies, and for much of the first few seasons, you can see him poking around looking for a place to call his own.
Xander is that awkward guy with an uncomfortable home life who the cool kids like to pick on, then pick on more when he stands up for himself. In other words, he’s me at age 13. He’s not super-student, nor is he into sports or anything that might make him stand out. The one thing that does make Xander a cut above the rest of the guys in Sunnydale though, is that he is an intensely loyal friend.
He saves Buffy’s life at the end of season 1, and he defends Willow when he thinks anyone is putting her in danger — even herself. He does discover his strengths later in the series and puts them to use, settling himself nicely with a career and a new home even though he didn’t go to college. He slowly evolves into a patient sort of person you want around after a crazed monster attack.
Xander also has some serious weak spots. He loathes Angel (founded a lot on jealousy), and he has a few big hypocrisies that he somehow manages to keep a blind spot about. (No pun intended.) Though he dates and almost marries Anya, an ex-vengeance demon who murdered hundreds — perhaps thousands — of people for pleasure for a thousand years, he remains staunchly critical of Buffy’s choice of men, to the point of insulting her about it and bringing it up whenever he has a chance. When Anya turns demon again, he berates Buffy for the choices she has to make until she has to remind him of the massive sacrifices she made to protect the world from the people she loves. It’s a fun little irony, his griping about Buffy dating demons — because throughout the seasons, it’s Xander who’s the real demon magnet in Sunnydale (in one episode, literally).
In spite of his prejudices, Xander sticks by Buffy and the Scoobies to the end, risking more than the rest of them because he lacks the power and experience that his friends have. In one of his shining moments in season 7, he tells Dawn that he sees more than everyone else does because no one is watching him. He is the heart of the Scoobies, and that’s why he is today’s Monday Man.
Xander: Yeah, I get that. It’s just — where else am I going to go? You’ve been my best friend my whole life. World gonna end – where else would I want to be?
Willow: Is this the master plan? You’re going to stop me by telling me you love me?
Xander: Well, I was going to walk you off a cliff and hand you an anvil, but it seemed kinda cartoony.
Xander Harris, I salute you.
Related articles
- Best of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (popculturetales.com)
- 30 Days of Buffy Day 8: Favorite Friendship (essaysonbuffy.wordpress.com)
- Wednesday Woman: Dawn Summers (emmiemears.com)
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Then and Now (omg.yahoo.com)
- Thrilling Thursdays: A Buffy Halloween (thedilettantista.com)
- 30 Days of Buffy Day 6: Favorite Male Character (essaysonbuffy.wordpress.com)
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She’s a Hero: Writing Female Characters
In order to give myself some time to focus on my family and some much needed rest and comfort, I’ve decided to repost a few of the most popular blog posts from the last few months, to share with my newer readers as well as bring up some favorites of those of you who have been in lock-step with me this whole while.
Since writing this, I watched the documentary Miss Representation, which I highly suggest as an addendum to this post. It operates on the idea that while women may be proliferating in media, their portrayal is still unjust and stereotypical as well as grossly over-sexualized. A prolific demeaning image does damage. As creators of media, we writers hold a massive responsibility to represent women and other minorities in ways that break down social barriers and stereotypes, not reinforce them. We owe it to our readers, who are diverse and vitally important, to create strong characters from all walks of life and to endow our work with a sense of humanity and equality. This is more than possible to do without being trite or simpering. Write real people. Write real women. Words can change the world.
As I sat pondering what to blog about today, my gentle viewers, a little fork appeared in front of me. The one tine led to writing about language and completing the penultimate installation of The 25, and the other led down a rocky and somewhat divisive path. Naturally, I chose rocks and division.
So, gentle viewers, here we are. Notice how I chose to title this blog. Some of you might have remarked to yourselves that I omitted the -ine at the end of the word “hero.”
I did that on purpose.
I was watching The Hangover 2 yesterday with my husband, and I remember being struck not only by how not funny the whole movie was, but (again) by how the women were portrayed. You have the Nagging Wife: “Where are you? What have you done this time?” You have the Hot Fiancee: “I love you even though you disappeared, lost my brother who in turn lost a finger, and nearly crashed into the wedding in a boat. You’re perfect even with the stupid tattoo on your face!!!!!” …and that’s about it. The women in that movie fall into two categories: completely obnoxious naggers or obsequious fawning hot chicks. I’m sorry. That’s disgusting.
I read this article a while back, and while I don’t feel like going into it in huge detail, one point I wanted to bring up here was this: when women ask for strong female characters in books and film, we’re not asking for a stick-thin paper doll who has a few “masculine traits” (like fixing cars, fighting, or drinking dudes under the table) but eventually ends up being the damsel in distress all over again. We aren’t asking writers to inject their female characters with super-strength just to make the shlubby everydude look even better when he rescues them at the end of the book or movie. No. And the more I see that, the more frustrating it is.
While some dudes might be looking for this:
Strong female, not a strong character.
What I want to see more of is this:
Because the above image comes before Buffy does this:
Strength is coming back to beat what beat you before.
Want to write strong characters who are women? Get to know Buffy Summers. Hell. Get to know some women. This is what I know about women. For a moment ignore the stereotypes, ignore the media. If you want to write women well, especially if you want your female character to be a hero, listen up.
The same things that make male characters strong are found in women. Real women.
Perseverance. Courage. Intelligence. Ability. Resilience.
Strong characters have weaknesses. I can’t stress that enough. The best male characters in literature and film have all had their weak spots. Maybe it’s arrogance or unrestrained candor. Maybe it’s a stutter or some weird psychological blind spot. They all have them. Strong female characters have them too — and no, if you want them to be real people, they shouldn’t be stereotypical weaknesses like fainting at the sight of blood or crying constantly with little provocation. If you’ve ever known a mother, you should know that women can handle blood. And shit. And vomit. Because yours cleaned all of the above from your squalling body at some point.
We’re writers. We’re responsible for what goes out into world in print. Which means we have a lot of power. A lot of it. What we choose to show the world of women can change things. It can create role models for young girls and boys. It can teach girls that they can be scientists, fighters, mathematicians, professors, astronauts, soldiers, or whatever else they want to be.
My challenge to you is this: read through your work and look for things that are blatant tropes. Some very common tropes are damsels in distress, naggers, or fawners. Look for women who are only placeholders. If any of those exist, I implore you to think about real women. Think about the Maya Angelous of the world, the Harriet Tubmans, the Eve Enslers. Think about mothers. Think about single women making it on their own, paying their bills, getting ahead. Think about their qualities and how your placeholder can become three dimensional. Remember that in great fiction, women aren’t simply tools to make the men look better. Remember that women conquer obstacles in their lives every day.
It’s okay for the men to save the women sometimes, but remember that it’s also okay for women to save men. It doesn’t make men less to make your women strong and well-rounded. The key to writing female characters is writing them as people. As human beings. They should have strengths and weaknesses, goals and purpose.
Make them courageous. Make them dogged. Make them persistent. And whether you’re male or female yourself, if you write women, put the best parts of yourself into their characters. You won’t be sorry.
Related articles
- Wednesday Woman: Dawn Summers (emmiemears.com)
- Poll challenges female stereotypes (autonetinsurance.co.uk)
- How to write a strong female character (manbehindthecurtain.ie)
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Realism and Urban Fantasy
Last night I wrapped up the second book of my trilogy and began on book three. While book two definitely posed some challenges and obstacles (hell, I stopped in the middle and wrote book one when I realized the story didn’t really start there), this last one is going to be the most involved in some ways.
For starters, my primary POV protagonist (though it will switch between Sarah and Anna as well) is a 400-year-old vampire. Her back story is fascinating to me as well as being integral to the progression of the series, so last night I wrote upwards of 3,000 words of historical fiction.
I already know some stuff about 17th century Poland — or more correctly, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that existed at the time. I know in 1655 the Swedes invaded (that’s when her home was burned to the ground and she ended up becoming a vampire), but other things I had to look up, like this dude:
Fabulous hat, sir.
Regardless of the fashion of the times, I want to create little forays into the past that pluck the reader out of the 21st century and punt them backwards, so they feel the grit, the reality of a life back then.
For my dear little Ewunia, she has a rough go of things. So there are a good number of things I need to look up and figure out. For instance:
What would have been the role of a widowed merchant’s only daughter? Would she have been educated at all? What sort of practical skills might she have, if any?
How exactly were women of the day treated? Would she have been on the cusp of being married to someone twice her age? Probably.
What would an invading army do with stray women? (I think I already know the answer to that — it hasn’t changed in five thousand years since the dawn of time.)
Muskets or arrows or bolts?
What would Ewunia have worn given her sex and social class? What did 17th century Poles eat?
In spite of the relatively short amount of time my book will spend in the 17th century, I need to go back there to hunt myself. I need to learn more about this world Ewunia is at the mercy of once her father is dead and her home burned to the ground. Because ultimately, I want readers to understand why she makes the choices she does, and her background will determine a lot of that. Not to mention the vampire who makes her one — he is very important to the story, and his development gives me some chills to think about. He’s a little bit like Anakin Skywalker, but with fangs and an old Swedish name instead.
Speaking of him, his name is the one I had to change, as was Ewunia’s, to protect the validity of their characters. They’re supposed to be centuries old, so his name wouldn’t be Damon. Plus, Ewunia begins to go by Elaine later, and I realized the Polish version of that is Elena (and not common)…Elena and Damon? Dammit, Vampire Diaries.
So yeah, they’re now Ewunia and Einarr, circa 1655. I like “Einarr.” It means one warrior, which suits him. And his chosen replacement name later will be nice and ironic.
I’ll probably have a wee bit more to say on this as I continue to write, gentle viewers. Until then, love your characters, love your story, and be true to it however you know best.
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She’s a Hero: Writing Female Characters
As I sat pondering what to blog about today, my gentle viewers, a little fork appeared in front of me. The one tine led to writing about language and completing the penultimate installation of The 25, and the other led down a rocky and somewhat divisive path. Naturally, I chose rocks and division.
So, gentle viewers, here we are. Notice how I chose to title this blog. Some of you might have remarked to yourselves that I omitted the -ine at the end of the word “hero.”
I did that on purpose.
I was watching The Hangover 2 yesterday with my husband, and I remember being struck not only by how not funny the whole movie was, but (again) by how the women were portrayed. You have the Nagging Wife: “Where are you? What have you done this time?” You have the Hot Fiancee: “I love you even though you disappeared, lost my brother who in turn lost a finger, and nearly crashed into the wedding in a boat. You’re perfect even with the stupid tattoo on your face!!!!!” …and that’s about it. The women in that movie fall into two categories: completely obnoxious naggers or obsequious fawning hot chicks. I’m sorry. That’s disgusting.
I read this article a while back, and while I don’t feel like going into it in huge detail, one point I wanted to bring up here was this: when women ask for strong female characters in books and film, we’re not asking for a stick-thin paper doll who has a few “masculine traits” (like fixing cars, fighting, or drinking dudes under the table) but eventually ends up being the damsel in distress all over again. We aren’t asking writers to inject their female characters with super-strength just to make the shlubby everydude look even better when he rescues them at the end of the book or movie. No. And the more I see that, the more frustrating it is.
While some dudes might be looking for this:
Strong female, not a strong character.
What I want to see more of is this:
Because the above image comes before Buffy does this:
Strength is coming back to beat what beat you before.
Want to write strong characters who are women? Get to know Buffy Summers. Hell. Get to know some women. This is what I know about women. For a moment ignore the stereotypes, ignore the media. If you want to write women well, especially if you want your female character to be a hero, listen up.
The same things that make male characters strong are found in women. Real women.
Perseverance. Courage. Intelligence. Ability. Resilience.
Strong characters have weaknesses. I can’t stress that enough. The best male characters in literature and film have all had their weak spots. Maybe it’s arrogance or unrestrained candor. Maybe it’s a stutter or some weird psychological blind spot. They all have them. Strong female characters have them too — and no, if you want them to be real people, they shouldn’t be stereotypical weaknesses like fainting at the sight of blood or crying constantly with little provocation. If you’ve ever known a mother, you should know that women can handle blood. And shit. And vomit. Because yours cleaned all of the above from your squalling body at some point.
We’re writers. We’re responsible for what goes out into world in print. Which means we have a lot of power. A lot of it. What we choose to show the world of women can change things. It can create role models for young girls and boys. It can teach girls that they can be scientists, fighters, mathematicians, professors, astronauts, soldiers, or whatever else they want to be.
My challenge to you is this: read through your work and look for things that are blatant tropes. Some very common tropes are damsels in distress, naggers, or fawners. Look for women who are only placeholders. If any of those exist, I implore you to think about real women. Think about the Maya Angelous of the world, the Harriet Tubmans, the Eve Enslers. Think about mothers. Think about single women making it on their own, paying their bills, getting ahead. Think about their qualities and how your placeholder can become three dimensional. Remember that in great fiction, women aren’t simply tools to make the men look better. Remember that women conquer obstacles in their lives every day.
It’s okay for the men to save the women sometimes, but remember that it’s also okay for women to save men. It doesn’t make men less to make your women strong and well-rounded. The key to writing female characters is writing them as people. As human beings. They should have strengths and weaknesses, goals and purpose.
Make them courageous. Make them dogged. Make them persistent. And whether you’re male or female yourself, if you write women, put the best parts of yourself into their characters. You won’t be sorry.
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The Wee Hours
Well, to me it is. I seldom see this side of noon excepting when I sneak up on it from behind, or if I have to be at work at 10. And even then, I repress any morning experiences for the first two hours — by then it’s afternoon, and all is right with the world.
Me.
I am not a morning person.
I used to be sort of passive about it. “Yeah, I don’t like mornings, la dee dah…” and then I got a job where I regularly had to be at work by 7:30 and still could never sleep until 3 or later, and it stressed me out to the point that the mere sound of my alarm triggered a stream of expletives and near-panic attacks. Sleep. I value it. It’s one of the reasons I don’t have a “real” job right now.
But lo, it’s 9:41, and I’ve been awake for about an hour and a half. Strange miracle, but here we are, with the opportunity to blog today when I thought I wouldn’t have the time. Once I go to work in 45 minutes, I won’t be home till almost 11.
Gentle viewers! We are almost done with The 25! In fact, we are on…
22. Objectivity
The perils of subjectivity arise largely from overidentifying with a subject, narrator or character in a narrative, and making it (or him or her) the vehicle for a thematic point in which the author himself is overly invested. The antidote is at least as old as the New Testament, specifically Matthew 5:43–48, where Christ instructs his followers to love their enemies. If what I have to say seems old hat, therefore, I’ll be neither disappointed nor surprised.If you find yourself overidentifying with a topic or character, try to identify within the sympathetic subject, narrator or even oneself a trait or belief or habit that is repellent or inexcusable or just plain odd. In doing so, you’ll enhance the psychological or moral distance between yourself and the object of familiarity
or allegiance.Another possible strategy is to rewrite the scene or section from the point of view of someone other than the object of sympathy. This forced disconnect can achieve a similar effect.
—Corbett
I find it rather appropriate that this is today’s. In my frantic writing sprint (or spring, as Twitter would have it) last night before bed, I wrote a scene that bothered me immensely. The protagonist from my first book becomes….sort of an anti-hero if not a downright antagonist in the second. Basically, she starts acting like a massive twit. It drives me nuts, and I want to smack her. I found myself last night trying to put words in her mouth, make her more sympathetic in a scene where she is downright cruel. And I knew that as I was trying to do that, it wasn’t true to her behavior. She has a lot of reasons for acting the way she does — some of them more valid than others — but the bottom line is that she’ll get over it eventually, and until she does, I have to let her be a bitch. I find the whole concept exhausting. It’s like putting up with a temper tantrum because you know your child will eventually grow out of them.
It’s one reason I like different POVs in fiction. I love seeing a story told from different angles and getting inside different heads. I also enjoy a good first person POV, but there’s something to be said for different POVs. Sometimes a big story just needs to be told that way.
It all boils down to one little sentence, in my opinion: tell the truth. Listen to your story and your characters, and let them drive your story forward. If you want to give it a shot, find a scene in your story where things fall a little flat and subjective and rewrite it from the viewpoint of an antagonist, or even someone who just doesn’t like your main character very much. See what happens. If you’re NaNoing, just keep plugging along at your word count. 
Also me.
I was going to post a picture of a pretty morning to enhance the objectivity of this post, but then I changed my mind. Google gives mornings some damn good PR. So instead, I give you Garfield.
Happy Sunday!
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You Little Snowflake You
After the lovely warm fuzzy fest of yesterday’s award/challenge interlude, I give you:
The return of The 25!
Google. *Loving head shake.* You make it so easy to find pictures.
Today’s addition to that list has a rather familiar smell, gentle viewers. It smells a lot like #2 on the list, which is precision. By following my nose, I deduct they started struggling to come up with new bullet points. Regardless, I’ll try to say something new and exciting, and barring that, I’ll just throw some more confetti at you so you can go, “Ooooh, preeeeeetty!” Deal?
14. Effective Details
The key to effective description is to realize the importance of contradictions. The telling detail is almost always one that at first glance doesn’t seem to fit, but by its being there creates the unique whole that the object or action or person represents.Go to a good people-watching spot or a place you want to describe. What’s the thing that doesn’t quite belong? Pair one or two more typical attributes of the thing/person/scene with this anomaly, and judge the impression. If it differs from what you meant to describe, figure out what’s missing. Add as few details as possible.
A related point: Often, we read a description and think, If this is there, then that has to be there as well. Many writers then think that both details must be included, but usually the opposite is true. Provide the stronger, more typical of the two, and the other is implied; the reader’s mind supplies it automatically.
—Corbett
Having read that again, it does bear suspicious similarity to stuff I’ve already discussed here. Harumph. Regardless, here’s the part where I drink my tea anyway and buckle down.
I’ve heard many times that it’s fine to say something that’s already been said as long as you say it in a way no one has said it before. Keep it fresh. Keep it honest.
Since my last post on effective details (Cough. I mean precision.) focused on setting, I think this time I’ll turn the spyglass on characterization. What makes a good character? What makes a memorable character?
A good writer can take a Joe Schmoe character and make you like him. A great writer can take Joe Schmoe and make you love him. Make you cry for him. Make you seethe with anger when something doesn’t go right. Make Mr. Schmoe so real you can feel him next to you as you read. The great writers out there make characters into your friends — or barring that, make them a worthy and hated enemy.
They do that by building their characters with effective details. Much like my diatribe on setting described my home with a couple unique details (the bed for a sofa and the two plastic skulls on the entertainment center), you have to pick the two or three details about a character that make them stand out, even if they are Joe Schmoe or one of his more slack-lipped relatives.
David Eddings does an excellent job with that. I’ve read and re-read his fantasy series probably ten times or upward by now. I keep going back to them because his characters are so familiar I can see them clearly even now. Garion with his sandy hair and rather serious nature, who has a tendency to take things too literally. Belgarath, the ancient sorcerer who wears mismatched shoes because the right one of that pair fits better, and the left one of this pair is much more comfortable. Aunt Pol has one white streak in her raven dark hair and a secret love for the fairytale extinct Wacite Arends. Beldin, an ugly and misshapen little man who can turn into a blue-banded hawk and who eats jam straight from the pot. Ce’Nedra is a tiny, copper haired Dryad who has a temper far beyond her hair color and a heart bigger than she is.
There are many more characters in those books, and yes, all of them have those little details that make them unique. Your characters ought to mirror life.
Not like this mirror.
That means that your characters should have quirks and pouty moments or a tendency to get knocked in the head. No one is perfect all the time, and sometimes even good traits can hit that magical part of the spectrum and become bad traits. A zealous nature could turn to fanaticism. A desire for justice could turn into a witch hunt. Generosity could beggar a person. In fact, I’ll wager that the best characters show exactly that — how a character’s strong points can also be their downfall.
For my protagonist, her anger is what helps her survive at first. It’s what enables her to get back up after the first giant shock and move forward. But later it begins to eat at her and poison her. It’s not fleshed out as fully as I want it yet, but she’s shaping up to be a damn fine character. The good protagonists can inspire love or frustration or hair-pulling with equal facility, and they should inspire the full spectrum at some point in the book. Just as every writer is unique, the characters we create should each be unique. Mirror life, and find your unique details that create art from clay, you little snowflake you.
That's you.
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Dialogue, Dialect, and Diatribe
See what I did there? I made an alliteration. Huggles.
During the revision process, I’ve found myself digging through my dialogue with a sort of painstaking determination. I got a great piece of advice from Stephen King via his book On Writing (I just finished reading it for a second or third time), and as I believe knowledge gets stronger when it’s shared, I’ll paraphrase it here.
Write well and tell the truth.
In my collegiate days when I thought of myself as the evangelical sort of cross follower (something that I realized midway through said collegiate days was pointless, because I no longer believed), I went through a period of reading a lot of Christian fiction. While some authors like C.S. Lewis are just plain good, I did come across some works that were astonishing in their badness. One I would even describe as marvelously, miraculously awful. Awful in the sense that reading it inspired this strange, fascination-driven awe. I just spent a few minutes rooting around in a cardboard box looking for this particular monstrosity to prove the point.
Without taking the trouble to retype the first three pages, suffice it to say that within those pages, the protagonist falls in spectacular love with a perfect, handsome, fashion magazine cover man (her genealogy teacher), uses about three adverbs per paragraph to describe this infatuation, and turns into a sullen raincloud when she finds out he’s a Christian.
Even at the time I first read it, I almost flung it across the room. The first line of dialogue?
“Yes, I’m going in. Of course I am. Why else would I be standing out in the cold in front of the library?”
After her infatuation fades, she watches his “broad-shouldered form saunter away with all the appeal and confidence of a male model on a runway.”
Ouch. Just…ouch. The protagonist at this point is not a Christian. What is clear in the opening three pages is that by the end of the book, she will be. I entered that world around age fifteen and exited by twenty-two, so most of my life has taken place outside of that label. Audrey’s character is such a walking cliche that I almost cried. During that literary stint in college, I discovered the following formula:
clumsy and awkward non-Christian + flawless and beautiful Christian x theological angst + big life lesson + verb: adverb ratio of 1:1 + tearful conversion + marriage = happy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(Whoa…I just realized that sounds kind of like Twilight, if you replace Christian with vampire — though to be fair, whatever you think of Meyer’s writing, she did enthrall millions and thus did something right. Ponder that.)
Big fat anyway.
The point of all that diatribe (I warned you) is that someone was not being honest — or rather that the author didn’t take the time to find out if that’s how real heathens would behave and act. It’s the perfect picture of an insider’s view of what the outsider might think and feel.
If you tell the truth, it’s going to piss people off. Honest writing always pisses people off, even if it’s not particularly good writing. Dishonest writing is hollow and trite, much like that entire book, which would better be employed as a door stop than a source of reading material. In spite of that, it is a perfect example of what not to do in writing. If you write to please the League of Anti-Vulgarity Blowhards, chances are you won’t be writing very good stuff. Write to the readers, not the censors.
When writing dialogue and narration, if you’re true to the characters and true to how people actually behave and talk, it’ll resonate with readers. Stephen King used the example of profanity — the average blue collar carpenter would not say, “Oh, sugar” if he smacked his thumb with a hammer. If he’s going to say that, he better have a good reason (his great aunt Matilda is watching him, the neighborhood preacher is drinking sweet tea on the porch swing while he works on the railing, etc.). Even then, he’d be more likely to say, “Oh, sh…sugar.”
This isn’t to say that all carpenters have potty mouths, but even the very churchy folk I used to associate with would drop the occasional profanity bomb if they whacked their funny bone or dropped the potluck casserole. There’s a release that comes with cursing that alleviates a bit of frustration.
Characters should speak in a way that flows out of who they are, where they came from, and what the situation dictates. You wouldn’t have a Caucasian farmer from the 20s with hay all over his overalls sounding like Winston Churchill. If that’s who they are, that’s what they should sound like. If they have any idiosyncrasies, a quick sentence of exposition can explain them and even build the character. For instance, my protagonist’s best friend spent a semester in London during university, and she adores throwing around words like git, bollocks, and wanker — but for the most part she still sounds like a girl in her mid-twenties who graduated from university and made an effort to tone down her Southern twang when she left Texas.
Who are you, and what have you done with Tigger?
If you have a character who likes to use big words to show off his Ph.D, by all means. Have at it — just be sure to clarify the more obscure words if your main character’s vocabulary isn’t on the same level (and if you expect your readers to feel the same). While there’s nothing wrong with using a hearty variety of words, you also don’t want to alienate your target audience by making them feel stupid. I remember the humbling experience of learning the word pedantic — my Polish tandem partner nit-picked an email I’d written in Polish and used the word, making me feel about as big as a flea for not knowing a word in my own language when a non-native speaker used it. For about a half an hour, I despaired of my education, my language ability, and my goal of ever learning Polish. Then I busted out my dictionary, learned the word in Polish, and got back to work. (In case you’re wondering, in Polish it’s a cognate — pedantyczny — and it’s used with much higher frequency in Polish than it is in American English, thus explaining why he knew the word.)
That brings me to the subject of dialect. Part of being truthful about how your characters would speak has to do with dialect. You wouldn’t expect the average Canadian from Toronto to say, “Hey y’all! Come on over sugar so I can hug your neck!” any more than you’d believe an Oxford professor would say, “Get out mah face, bitch. Who d’you think you is?” Dialect can open up a new world of character development and lend credibility to your characters — and it can destroy that same credibility if you don’t take the care to listen to people talk.
Whenever I’m stuck on a point of dialogue, I think about my characters. If I can’t be clear on who they are and what their personalities are like and where they came from (social class as well as geography), I won’t be able to write convincing dialogue for them. The best dialogue I write feels like I’m transcribing instead of writing. It feels like my switchboard muse hooked me up directly with my people, and all I’m doing is listening to them do their thing. Going against the grain can work if you’re trying to show irony or some other divergence from an already-established persona, but all in all, you have to tell the truth the way your characters would tell it.
The best way to do that is just to listen to people. Wherever you go, just listen. If you’re trying to write a foreign dialect, like British English or Scots, you can do that well if you take the time to listen. Listen to news interviews with people from the area and try to pinpoint key phrases and pronunciations that can be phonetically rendered. If it’s a native speaker of another language, see if you can find examples of people speaking English. Note what little grammar pitfalls they make. How they construct their sentences and which verb tenses are problematic. Polish learners of English often omit definite and indefinite articles in the early stages because those little words (a, the, an) don’t exist in Polish at all. In later stages, they use them but might put them in the wrong places.
When I was in the early stages of learning Polish, I was told I was speaking English with Polish words, and they were right. At that stage, all I knew how to do was translate — I couldn’t construct real Polish. Language learners all do that when they first start learning, so unless your foreign characters are completely fluent, adding those little foibles adds charm and truth to their dialogue. It takes some research and time, but it’s worth it as much as any other research you do for your story.
Characters make or break your story — you can have all the explosions and drama you want, but if readers think your characters are cardboard or unconvincing, they won’t keep turning those pages. And that’s all I have to say about that.
(Except one more thing: everything I say in this post, I am preaching to myself. I want my characters to be as textured and truthful as they can be. They can say shit if they want to.)
Like this:
Character Torture
To branch off from the topic of the Big Bads that infest our stories, “character torture” is a phrase I’ve heard many times to describe the misfortunes that befall our characters. Writing them feels like torture sometimes. It’s a fine line to walk — while conflict is central to a good story, if you over do it, readers will detach from the story and refuse to connect with the characters. You have to make the conflict painful enough to evoke a reaction both in your characters and in readers without crossing that line of the suspension of disbelief or alienating readers to the point that they can no longer trust you as a narrator.
I stopped reading a prominent series of historical fiction for that very reason. The main character went through so much in the six books — torture, rape, broken bones, sheer terror over and over again — that finally after one more capture, I snapped. I couldn’t do it anymore. I loved that character and her husband, and it was just too much for me to keep seeing her get beaten into a pulp. I was invested in the character and the series, but I put it down four years ago and haven’t picked it up again. The same thing happened with a fantasy series I was reading — after they killed off half the point of view characters in by the third book, I couldn’t make myself keep reading because I couldn’t let myself get attached to characters I thought were going to arbitrarily get the axe within a few chapters.
If you write fiction that involves bloodsucking vampires (as opposed to the fluffy kitten sort of vampires), or shapeshifters that have to eat internal organs to survive, or witches who can’t be killed except for burning, beheading or dismembering — there’s going to be some violence. Your main character will probably not escape that violence, and mine certainly doesn’t. However, that doesn’t mean I’m going to have her captured, hog tied, and tortured every chapter. I try not to make my character torture gratuitous; it has to serve a purpose for her development and the furthering of the plot. Not one or the other. Both. I think the pitfall the aforementioned historical fiction series fell into was that the series had gotten so long (each book is around a thousand pages, and at the time there were six of them) that the author ran out of other ways to steer the plot. And after six thousand pages, her character had been to hell, chopped into handbasket sized chunks, and sent back in the basket. If you have to torture your character to squeeze another book out of a series that could be wrapped up, you should probably find a new idea to write a book about. A new character to torture who isn’t already covered in scars from your writing.
Like I said, it’s a fine line to walk. Especially in the supernatural genres where the bad guys want your characters dead. But it can be done masterfully so that you love the characters and know they’ll pick themselves back up and come back with more fortitude the next time they’re tested. That’s the tightrope I’m walking with this second draft. Let’s see if I make it to the other side.
Less than 100 pages left to polish up. I also fixed my prologue issue and closed a couple plot holes. Not a bad week’s work so far. Bring it on, gorse bush.
Like this:
“I Like Your Waist”
One might wonder why I decided to title this blog the way I did. Very well; I’ll explain.
Today I went to the post office to mail the thank-you notes from my bridal shower, return some books from the Science Fiction Book Club that were mistakenly sent to me, and get my Netflix rolling again. While buying my stamps, the woman helping me suddenly said, “I like your waist.”
My first impulse was to say, “I beg your pardon?” I didn’t think I’d heard her right. My waist? What does that have to do with…anything? She repeated herself, and I discovered that yes, she was indeed complimenting me on my waist. I don’t think anyone has ever specifically done such a thing before, at least in regards to me. I was torn between my fascination with the compliment and a slew of thoughts that flooded me right on its heels. What intrigued me so about her little declarative statement was that it was very specific, and that it’s not a body part many people would single out. Sort of like saying, “You have lovely kneecaps” or “I admire your shoulder blades.”
It also brought up something that was sparked a few days ago when I read an article regarding how we as a society talk to little girls. How often are the first words out of our mouths something about a little girl being pretty, cute, or beautiful? How often do we comment on her adorable little dress or her shiny shoes? Her perfect hair? How often would we say most of that to a little boy? I realized that it doesn’t really change. If a stranger speaks to me, nine times out of ten it’s to remark on my looks. I can’t remember the last time I was approached with a legitimate question about the time or directions or hell, to sign a petition.
I currently work as a cocktail server. Yes, server, not waitress. I serve drinks. I am a server. It’s gender-neutral, and I prefer it that way. I know I’m expected to look put together when I work, and though I find it a little degrading (especially because I have to dress up like a Pauli girl in two weeks), I’m more or less okay with it, because I recognize that my job right now is a means to an end. It’s a way to pay the bills while I concentrate my mental faculties on getting my novel published until the time comes that I can make my living that way. The way people treat me, however, is constantly a point to ponder. There are those who don’t even use basic niceties like “please” or “thank you.” There are plenty who ask me personal questions that they would never ask someone who they didn’t perceive to be a lower social status. I’ve been grabbed, harassed, and even bullied.
I rarely get questions about my life beyond work, even from tables who try to engage me in active conversation. Even then, it can feel very condescending. To an extent, the men I work with get it too, but the women have to put up with that and much, much more.
It all sort of ties in to how women are still viewed. I’m a writer. I’m an intellectual. I love to think, to analyze, to evaluate. Very few people bother to find out what is going on in my brain, or the brains of many women, if not most. I could read when I started kindergarten. If I can manage it, my children will too. I will make sure that male or female, my kids are intellectually stimulated at home and in the world. It saddens me that women are still viewed as being something pretty to look at. Women are beautiful; I’m not denying that or demeaning it. What I’m saying is that we’re even more beautiful on the inside. What’s in our minds, our personalities. How we try and how we learn.
My challenge to you is this, gentle viewers. Next time you meet a young girl, hold your tongue on the compliments. What’s on her head or those dimpled cheeks are just the wrapping. Instead, ask her questions. Does she like books? Which one is her favorite? Why? What makes those characters special? If nothing else, what’s her favorite movie? Why? Why is the bad guy bad? How are the good characters smart? Ask her if she wants to know what makes a rainbow. Most adults can tell a child that much science. Ask her if she noticed that her puppy grows up like she does. Ask her what she likes and why. Ask her what she likes to do, what sports she plays, what her favorite games are. She might be shy at first, but keep trying. Show her an adult who expects little girls to think, to use their insides as well as their outs.
It’s what’s inside that matters. Just like a good, well-written character has faults as well as strengths, the value of humanity isn’t in what we look like. It’s the whole picture.
I write urban fantasy. Many of my characters are vampires, shapeshifters, seers, witches. I purposely did not describe them all as inhumanly beautiful. They sometimes have big noses or awkward brow lines. Most of them age, even if it’s more slowly than those of the human persuasion. They’re not perfectly good or perfectly evil. Sometimes the good guys act awfully shitty. Sometimes the bad guys surprise you. All the ones in between act like people going through life and making choices. I wanted it gritty. I wanted it real. And I don’t want to flood the market with more perfect-looking characters none of us can really relate to.
Here’s to vampires after the glitter has worn off.
(Progress note: I am almost at the halfway mark of draft two. I will write a post about that tomorrow, I hope.)
