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In Which Emmie Has a Very Ambitious Goal
Yesterday when I had to go to work (the beer-slinging work), I was in the middle of my writing work. 4:30 crept toward me like a cartoon villain tip-toeing down the hall in front of where I sit. I can hear the music now.
Probably this guy.
That guy feels a song coming on.
The tidings of 4:30 were very unwelcome. I typed frantic words, flipped back and forth through pages, and stared at the clock as if I could will it backward. Eventually the green guy in a cape came, grabbed me around the waist and pulled me kicking and screaming out the door.
“Nooooooooooooooooooooo!”
As if going to work when I was in the writing zone was bad enough, it was Jack W. Tweeg that made me leave home. How embarrassing.
Anyway, through a scheduling mishap, I didn’t get scheduled at work today. While at first that made me really excited, I then got grumpy about it because everyone who works is going to make money (our restaurant got bought out for the day). Now I’m excited again. It means I have a whole day that I don’t usually have off to write. Which brings me to Emmie’s Very Ambitious Goal.
He's ready to hear it. Are you?
My goal is to finish my second draft today.
Why is that so very ambitious? Well. I still have twenty single spaced pages to rewrite. That takes a while. A lot of it needs to be tweaked, which takes longer. But I think I can do it. In fact, I know I can do it. The reasons I want to get this done today are as follows: it’s my last day off before NaNoWriMo officially starts, I don’t want it hanging over my head like a villain in a hot air balloon, and it just needs to get done so I don’t go insane and start cutting off body parts for Halloween.
Alrighty. Time for me to get to the old drawing board. Wish me luck. I’ll report back here later.
“I feel……….I feel a song coming on!”
Like this:
Fuel Up
Most writing advice will tell you to just write every day, no matter what. I don’t always work that way. I go through cycles of immense productivity. There was a night last year where I wrote 12,000 words. That is a lot of words. I’ll plow through whole chapters in a sitting. I finished my novel and got halfway through the second one that way.
Then I burnt out.
Dead.
Not completely, and not in the sense of never wanting to write again, but it happened. I noticed in the three years that followed that when that would happen, I would go through a period where I wouldn’t even look at my book. I wouldn’t touch other books. I would just slog along. That wasn’t very magical, nor was it productive at all. I then realized that when I started craving words and ingesting them at the rate of two 1,000 page books a week, I was coming up on another spurt. Last year, I had an idea. No matter how I feel, I make myself read.
Reading, you see, fills my tank. It renews my love for writing and wordcraft. It comforts me in the presence of old friends or introduces me to new ones. Lately, I’ve had the itchy fingers all the time. Even when I had a two week hiatus for my wedding and honeymoon, I wanted to write. I thought about writing. I read whenever I had a spare second. The tank was full, but I had no outlet.
Since I’ve been back, I’ve been reading constantly. I bring a book with me wherever I go, in case I have to wait for something. Reading fuels me for writing. This harkens back to Stephen King’s advice to writers: Read a lot, write a lot.
Last night I decided to do a short 20 minute writing sprint before bed. It turned into 40. I took that last bit of my novel that has been bothering me so much, highlighted it, and hit delete. It disappeared, and I sighed a sigh of relief. I started over. I made the story more succinct and a bit darker. I cut through all the useless preamble and got to the meat of things. It’s one part resolution, one part introduction, and another part foreboding — and all parts propel the story to the end much more effectively than they did before I deleted those ten pages. It was a freeing thing.
As novelists, we have to try to produce hundreds of pages of manuscripts. That sentence alone looks rather daunting. It might even make you say eek. The point is not to burn out. The point is to create new stories and characters that contain bits and pieces of your Self and Soul without scraping those two things out of your core and leaving you empty and listless. The point is to not look like this at the end:
You don't want your brain to look like this.
Find whatever it is that makes you itch to write. If it’s reading, surround yourself with good books. If you’re like me and a big fantasy/urban fantasy nerd, the Science Fiction Book Club should be your new best friend. Joining gets you a gaggle of books for a dollar, and their membership terms only make you (make, pfffffffffffffft) buy four more books in a year. Even if you’re broke like me, you can handle it. Go you.
If it’s hiking or yodeling, go do those things. If you’re a writer, it’s because something in you says you must write. Don’t fail to listen to that. Fuel up your tank and gear up for the next month, whether you’re going to dive into NaNoWriMo or not.
How about this: a challenge for you, my lovely gentle viewers. My turn to be the gorse bush in your bum. Let’s all of us take the month of November by storm. It can be your birthday present to me that also benefits you! The perfect gift! The challenge is for you to write 1,500 words a day for the month of November. Snap a pic of your word count to show me. Once a week, whichever day you choose, spend an hour or more doing something you love that refills your tank and tell me about it — and send or post a picture (as long as it’s not that kind of picture). I’ll do the same.
We’ve got a week for me to work out the details of this challenge, but I’ll figure out some sort of little prize for winners if you decide to participate. (It will probably have to be little…but who says little can’t also be awesome?)
What do you say? You have a week to mull it over and get your oogly booglies out for the upcoming holiday. You know where to find me.
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Round and Round the Mulberry Bush
I was doing quite well at posting every day for most of September. Then the wedding happened, and now it’s mid-October, and a lot of my posts daily have been from The 25. That’s not a bad thing, but I feel like the last few have made me talk around in circles and saying a lot of the same things over and over. So today, I will just give a blurb on the topic and move on to greener pastures so as not to send you monkeys chasing a weasel indefinitely.
Here’s today’s:
10. Rhythm is the subliminal soundtrack in writing. To explore options for moving a reader along, choose a dramatic passage from a published piece you admire. How do you feel when you read it? (Notice your breathing, heart rate, posture and emotions.) How did the writer provoke this response? How do word pairings and sentence and paragraph structures contribute to its momentum? How do these rhythmic choices serve the piece’s meaning?
Now, write a passage that echoes the patterns you’ve discovered. If the first sentence is three short words, yours should be, too. Where a descriptive image blossoms for a paragraph, let yours do the same. Communicate emotion through your rhythm. You might let rage stutter through the syncopation of words and halting punctuation, or stream through run-on sentences. Notice how these choices support or squelch the surrounding narrative. Just as a musician practices scales until they become second nature, your attention to the mechanics of rhythm will help you improvise over time.
—Cohen
You can probably see how I feel I’ve covered this already. Between pace and my post on sentence structure, I think I’ve about beaten that horse to death. Hurrah.
So let’s take that half-dead horse to a nice green pasture and talk about something else, no?
I have to admit, I’m a wee bit stuck on my novel revision. Part of it is because I feel overwhelmed with just how much I need to fix. Draft two is so close to the end, yet I have this litany of stuff going through my head every time I think about sitting down with it. (Cut chapters from the end-where the hell is Lily-texture Cam’s character-scene with John McLeroy-pacing, pacing, pacing) Not to mention all the tiny things, the polishing things like buffing out the adverbs and passive voice. It’s a daunting task sometimes, revision.
(Half-dead horse agrees. I think she likes her green pasture.)
What do you do, gentle viewers? When revision gets painful, how do you bust down that wall? I might have to bite my fist and just take out some of the more complex plot details, but I like my story having depth and texture. I don’t think they take away from the pacing; they just don’t come to fruition till the second or third book sometimes. I blame Robert Jordan for that — stuff he mentioned in books two or three of the Wheel of Time has come up in books eleven or twelve. Anyway. I’m curious to hear how you fellow writers work on revision in longer works when the going gets tough. Any comments or thoughts or advice?
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I Said I’d Be Back
Thus quoth Arnold the Governator on the Terminator 2 3-D experience at Universal Studios Orlando on my honeymoon. And whaddya know? Here I am, gentle viewers. I’m back.
I apologize for the pre-during-post-wedding absence, as well as the confession that I teared up during the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride at the Wizarding World in Orlando. Yet that all happened, and now I’m here again, watching the leaves selectively change on the tree outside my balcony and jealous that my now-husband has a job where he is appreciated and paid for a valued skill and I don’t.
Now where was I? Pity party aside, I spent the last couple weeks thinking a lot about my second draft in spite of the honeymoon. Part of what has prodded those thoughts along has been my re-reading of the Anita Blake series. I’ve been reading the books over very critically, turning my eye to things I do myself (that I consider failings) and watching for things that are done particularly well (that jump off the page and rip my throat out).
The first book in the series is mired in the passive tense. Mired. Caught in sludge and almost drowned. I remember not being able to get into it when I first read it and that it took several tries to get through. The rest aren’t like that — if you watch for those things, you can see Ms. Hamilton’s evolution as a writer in even the first few books of the series.
Reading is fuel. It fills up my tank and makes me want to write when I get stuck in the sludge myself. Right now, Anita Blake is hauling me back to the keyboard to start typing again. I may have limited time and a lonely sense of helplessness pouring out of my professional life, but the determination is still there.
The holidays are approaching, and I know they can be hectic, but part of what the fledgling stage of marriage has impressed upon me is the need to move forward. The need to contribute, to do something I am passionate about. And so I write. I will write. I will read. I will publish my stories and market them to the best of my ability.
I have more than one horse to climb back up on post-honeymoon. A lot fell by the wayside in the past couple weeks and months as the wedding sort of took over everything. I was warned (correctly, it seems) that the doldrums may await our return from Orlando’s sun and playtime. That, if nothing else, is a nice spur in my behind that might succeed in getting my feet back in the stirrups. There are goals to meet, agents to win over, and a bright shiny novel to polish till it blinds you.
On the subject of the novel, I have a great deal to commit to paper. The night after we flew back in, my husband (yep, still sounds weird) and I went to see Thrice play in Towson. One of the other bands that opened for them marvelously formed a backdrop for some deep pondering as I listened. Their sounds haunted me, pulled forth tendrils of the conclusion of my story. It is a trilogy, you see, so the third book is rather important. I hadn’t thought much into it before, aside from a few forays and snippets, but as O Brother played, for the first time the protagonist of the third book sunk her fangs into me. She’s a cool wind from a dark, dark cave. She is lovely and strong and somehow more important than the other two main women who lead the first two books and their narratives. She is the key to everything that unfolds. A guardian and a protector. A survivor. She sacrificed everything to be that person, and she did it without thinking twice. She is stunning and bright and one of the most interesting characters I’ve met from this world. I can’t wait to start putting her on paper, seeing what flows out.
There was a clarity that came through that music. I think I might just be forced to get their CDs on my computer so that I can listen to them when I start my first draft of book three. I have a feeling it’ll be useful to open up those gates again. Music can be a mysterious muse, but a reliable one. Sense memory is a powerful thing.
Aside from returning to my trusty constipated dinosaur of a computer, I also need to return to the workout world. I may or may not have eaten my weight in burgers over the course of the honeymoon, and let me just say that yes, the calories still count when you’re celebrating. At least to the scale. Yikes. I met a fabulous pair of gingers at the Maryland Renaissance Festival a couple weeks ago, and they fight with swords. They said I could be their medium ginger (not often that I would be called medium at five foot ten — large ginger tops six feet), and that I could come play with pointy objects with them.
That came out wrong.
Anyway, if I’m to swing claymores and other swords about, I need to get my body back to the condition it was in a couple months ago before the wedding stress dove down my throat in the form of ice cream, more ice cream, pizza, and more ice cream. But I digress.
The stories have returned to swirl about my brain, my fingers are itching to let them out, and life is supposed to return to whatever state of normal it hovers near. I’d say it’s about time I get my bum in gear, don’t you, gentle viewers? As Rafiki would say to his little fingerpainted lion on the inside of his treehouse, “It is time.”
Or perhaps he’d just run around banging me on the head with his staff and singing, “Asante sana, squash banana, wewe nugu mimi hapana…”
The honeymoon is over. Now the real work begins.
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The Chopping Block
I went back to my story yesterday for about a half hour. I realized part way through that little chunk of time that everything I had there could be condensed into one chapter instead of three. That will be my next project. That goes back to the “omit needless words” advice. A lot of what I had there isn’t strictly necessary. What is necessary is to a: resolve the story in an effective manner and b: hook the reader into book two. What I saw is probably the closest thing to a growly bit as I have seen in my first draft — which is to say a part that made me growl. It also made me bored. If it bored me, it will bore readers, and that’s just silly.
The chopping block has to do with the next bit of advice from The 25. Observe:
6. Pace
Much of screenwriter William Goldman’s wonderful Adventures in the Screen Trade can be applied to other types of writing. Goldman advises getting into each scene as late as possible, and out of it as early as possible. Faulty pacing in almost any work can be corrected with this advice.There’s no need to begin scenes by laboriously explaining how characters arrived there, or to open an article or essay with excessive setup or introduction. If you find you’ve done this, chances are a more interesting way to begin follows just after what you’ve written. Similarly, many writers put an empty paragraph at the end of a scene or section. When revising my novels, I experiment by cutting the first and last paragraph of each scene. Suddenly, a sequence that dragged can become speedy. Arrive late in a scene and leave early. The reader will fill the gaps.
—Morrell
A lot of time, the chopping block can solve pacing issues. The pace of a story is what keeps the reader turning pages. It adds momentum or gravity — how much extra junk you add in determines which of those it is. The end of my story is weighed down by excessive words, and taking it to the chopping block will cut down on the extraneous forces keeping its velocity low. It has enough strength to propel itself where it needs to be.
I’ve said this before, and I will say it again now: trust the reader. The reader can fill in the gaps. A few well-placed comments in the narrative can help them connect the dots without having to do a full detail sketch of everything around. This goes back to precision in writing — an artful choice of words instead of an avalanche.
I realized reading the last few chapters that I had inserted things I just wanted to get out there. Which is fine. That’s what a vomit draft is for — getting things out instead of holding them in. The point of the second draft, however, is cleanup. It’s weighing and deciding if you’ve tied a few extra pounds of words to your story that will sink it to the bottom instead of allowing it to move forward.
Stephen King says that when he writes the second draft, he cuts the first by ten percent. I think that is fair, and it’s my goal to do just that. It’s not always easy, but there is a certain amount of relief that comes with it. A sense of freedom rises when you finally understand that you’ve had long passages hanging on each of your arms and legs for so long that you’ve forgotten how movement was supposed to feel. Cutting them off brings about a euphoria of weightlessness that allows your story to go where it wanted to go anyway.
Let your story run. You just follow it — the readers will too.
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Blueberry Pancake Afternoon
Well, gentle viewers, life finally caught up to me. I’ve managed to post every day for several weeks now, but this week some things stuck out their feet and tripped me up.
Wedding. One week away. Suddenly less time than I have stuff to do. Work. Always that. And most importantly, though not a happy thing, I lost a family member this week. I won’t speak much about that, because this isn’t the venue, but I will say he was loved and will be remembered by all of us. Suffice it to say that my reasons for not posting are simply that I hadn’t much to say I cared to share with the world.
My writing work has dwindled to the side for the past few days, trailed off listlessly like I ran out of fuel. Which it feels like I did. So today I am back to the blog, trying to get the tank filled again. I started today with copious amounts of blueberry pancakes after getting up at 1 PM — haven’t been sleeping well due to an intrepid little unidentified critter who lives on my roof and spends his time scritching about above my head as I try to sleep.
There are a great many things happening at the moment in my little life, and while they’re not going anywhere in the immediate future, I am going to get back to work. I’m almost to the end of draft two. I’ve been reading a couple of my favorite authors lately and picking apart their work — and have been surprised to find a lot of the same little foibles I tend toward. Namely, a lot of adverbs and passive voice. I find that I can write effective work just like they can — assuming my readers aren’t lying to me — so that gives me some hope. Until tomorrow, gentle viewers. Please do forgive the scattered nature of this post and the brain that formed it. Please refrain from eating brains, unless you are a zombie.
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.)
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Roadwork
In Montana, people joke that there are four seasons: Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter, and Construction. In the summers, those dreaded bright orange cones make their appearances all over the state. Everyone learns to keep an anxious lookout for the color orange when they drive, because they know the color signifies delays, bumps, and possibly a few hours of banging your head against the steering wheel until your horn honks in time with the music on your radio.
My novel right now is surrounded by the color orange. Parts of it have more than others. For instance, the beginning is mostly smooth sailing. Maybe one lane is closed, but traffic manages to move along right around the posted speed limit. In other parts, it’s down to one lane with a flagger who has to direct you through.
Most of that is taking care of itself with the rewrite, and at the end of all of it, I’ll set up the final cones to re-tar and pave the way until it’s smooth and an easy drive from beginning to end. Before that can happen though, I have some plot holes to fill. There aren’t too many, and some of the few I’ve spotted don’t even have relevance to the first book in the trilogy, but one I noticed yesterday was deeper than the others. Luckily, it proved to be a quick fix that actually served to both further the story and develop three different characters — two protagonists and one antagonist — a wee bit better. Goody!
I’m of a mind with several prominent authors who are in the camp against plotting. I have never plotted a story in the sense of saying “this is going to happen, and then my character is going to do this, and then something will happen to her that will make her do this, which will bring the book to a climax and then I’ll resolve it with this.” If that’s how you write, kudos to you, because you probably feel more in control of the situation.
My lovely Great Dane of a muse is the one who normally takes care of where the story goes. He bursts into a gallop off toward that new smell or the Pomeranian down the block and I just hang on for dear life. My switchboard operator hooks me up with the characters and they tell me what they’re like as the Great Dane drags me through the story. The old granny with her butter cookies and tea? She adds the texture, the grit. She coughs in her gravelly voice and wipes crumbs from her jean jacket as she shows me which details form the picture best.
The road through the story gets laid wherever the Great Dane decides to go, and it evolves from gravel into asphalt into expressway because of the others. During the revision process, I think I expected that goofy shapeshifting muse of mine to be more silent than during the gravel road stage, but instead she’s been all over the place, sniffing about or blinking owlishly through those Mason jar spectacles.
The muse is there just as much through the revision as through the birthing stage — and as crazy as he is (or she, depending), I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Gotta go now, gentle viewers. The Great Dane is tugging me toward that mountain pass, and he sees something exciting up ahead.
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:
Writing the Big Bad
There’s always gotta be the bad guy. Whether they’re downright evil or just your run of the mill schoolyard bully, creating a believable antagonist is as essential to a good story as say…the stuf to an Oreo. They’re a source of motivation, angst, plot propellers, and wicked fun. If you can build antagonists that are fully three dimensional, it creates an intensity to the story, a tension that drives your protagonists and curiosity in the readers. They’ll want to make sure the bad guys get theirs, or at the very least see what they do next. Who is the bad guy? What are his or her motivations? Why does he persist in pestering your hero? Why should we care?
Because we should care about the antagonist. It should matter to us what happens to him or her, because ambivalent fuzzy feelings about the driving force against your protagonist will make a reader toss your book aside in search of more interesting foes. Think of Bellatrix Lestrange in the Harry Potter world. [SPOILER AHEAD!] She is a phenomenal antagonist. You can see her motivation to please Voldemort, her sheer malice toward Harry. You hate her for what she did to Neville’s parents. And I’m probably not alone when I say that when Mrs. Weasley screamed, “NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!” I let out an unstoppable roar of delight and pure glee, coupled with some rage. [END SPOILER]
J.K. Rowling created many memorable antagonists. I will probably hate Dolores Umbridge until my dying day. It’s why even now, I got chills and — let’s face it — a few welling tears when I wrote the above. They’re important. I write urban fantasy, so the ones that come to mind the most for me are out of that genre. Torak, the evil god in David Eddings’s Belgariad, the Forsaken in the Wheel of Time. One of my favorite antagonists of all time is Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He’s a true gray area baddie. One you love, you hate, and you pity all at once. His transformation as a character is one of the crowning jewels of television in my humble opinion. (Joss Whedon, Marti Noxon, David Fury, Jane Espenson, and the rest of the Buffy writers — I love you. Just sayin’.)
So while I’m not setting out to emulate a particular character in someone else’s work (that would be rude), I am seeking to achieve the same force of attraction to my bad guys. I want readers to hate them with fiery passion most of the time. Pity them on occasion. Ultimately, the Biggest Big Bad in my stories isn’t the most important. He’s behind the scenes, much like Sauron in Lord of the Rings. While he’s the driving force, it’s the ones on the front lines that inspire the most pathos in my readers.
The central villain in my trilogy for the first two books is Damon (name subject to change…damn you, Vampire Diaries), a 300-year-old vampire. He’s capricious, power hungry, and he has spent three centuries biding his time in the shadow of his “boss,” Bern. Bern is more brute than brain, a sadistic psychopath who hurts others just because he can. Damon, on the other hand, takes satisfaction from orchestrating scenarios and taking credit for his “messes.”
Damon’s character is in some ways similar to that of Anakin Skywalker. He lost everything he cared about at an early age, and he believes those things were stolen from him. He sees the world as owing him, and he takes pleasure in power because he thinks that it will make him invincible. He thinks becoming harder makes him less likely to break, but in reality, it makes him brittle and unpredictable.
Bern’s character is more easy to pinpoint, as historically he prefers a full frontal assault. He comes at you, and you know it’s him. Damon, on the other hand, likes to tease. He likes to line up his opponents and pull their strings. He’s most dangerous when he’s been beaten, because humiliation causes that brittleness to snap into unpredictability. Once his plans are in place and executed, he glories in letting his victims know who was responsible. He believes he gets the full effect that way.
A third bad vamp in the lineup is Chase. Her unpredictability comes from the fact that she is psychotic. And insane. She will tear someone apart just to see how they react, and she flies into a rage if they die too quickly for her tastes. She works with the others because someone scarier than her tells her to, but her loyalties are about as deep as a sidewalk mud puddle.
Crawling into the minds of the bad guys is never fun. To write the more disturbing scenes, I have to access the darkest parts of the human psyche. I feel like a detective trying to suss out a profile on a serial killer. Unfortunately, I don’t have to look much further than human history to see what people do when they think there are no repercussions. A big part of my current revision is making sure that I understand the motivations and backstory of these characters. I don’t feel like discussing that here yet, because of the spoiler effect, but if I don’t understand it and fully know it, no reader will be able to figure it out. One scene in particular was very difficult for me to write. It’s in the second book, Elemental, and when I discovered where it was going and what was about to happen to my protagonist, I almost started crying. I did start crying when I wrote it and reread it. Oddly, it’s one of the most effective scenes I’ve written. I think.
I had to go back and rewrite the entire first fifty pages of Primeval, which I think I’ve mentioned before. I knew a certain plot event was less meaningful than it could be, and that I’d written it that way in part to spare myself from having to torture one of my characters. Now that it’s rewritten, I think that character is sufficiently brutalized. It’s a big part of her development, and I realized that readers wouldn’t be as affected as she is if they didn’t go through it with her. Sorry in advance for that. It was going to happen anyway, but now it cuts deeper. Suffice it to say that it’s not gratuitous, that it advances the character development of many players and serves to invest readers more in my protagonist — and my antagonists.
Any book written without the protagonist experiencing conflict, pain, or struggle is poor, lazy writing. Good conflict has gray areas — it’s never black and white. While there may be sides, readers should feel a spectrum of emotion in regards to any type of character just as they would with a person they meet in life. That’s what I’m working on.
100 pages left to go in draft two. Wish me monsters.
