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How many times have you read what Character B says about the protagonist and thought, “I didn’t realize that.” You’re accepting her opinion as the truth. In a nutshell, that shows you how powerful connections are. When you use your characters in a way that shines light on others, the reader is the beneficiary. You’ve let us in: we are in the know. If Malcolm is sullen, for instance, who in the book knows why? Who has been exasperated by it, and what consequences has Malcolm suffered because of it? Already you realize: a parent was likely the starting point—that’s one connection. How has that played out in his romantic involvements—that’s possibly several connections, each different. Regarded by itself, sullen is an unapproachable island. Regarded in terms of connections, Malcolm is being pulled in all sorts of directions—and he may well wish he was less sullen. That is complex, interesting. An equally important function of connections is creating relationships with staying power during the course of the book. Too often I ask an author to address sullenness, and he responds with a quarter-page back story about an abusive mother. I can almost see the author as he finishes: with a smile, smacking his hands—job done. Yet a connection means that the abusive mother would participate in the novel: calling the hero about some persistent issue, getting in his way when he has important stuff to do, disrupting his sullen contemplation, and best of all, forcing the author to reveal how the hero relates to his mother. Now we’re getting somewhere. How do you talk to your mother? What secrets does she know that reveal how you tick? What are the most salient memories you have of her? For what did she praise you? About what did she complain bitterly, unceasingly, about you, or maybe your father (and thus you by association, you male lout). That connection does not have to be a mother, of course. But you see what I mean. When you are forced to make the hero interact with others, on an ongoing basis, he’s going to reveal scars and warts that make him stand out. Exercise: Sit back in your chair, close your eyes, and think of the three most important traits your protagonist possesses. Write them down, leaving space below each to fill out. Do you have a supporting character who can help reveal that trait? Could you find 7-10 places during the course of the novel where that trait could be displayed, commented upon by the other character, etc.?
If the character who dominates your novel is a cardboard cutout, you are forced to resort to action on every page. Your readers won’t form much emotional connection to him—because the mind we are inhabiting is one-dimensional and we are not. What you end up with is a gang of vigorous children with adult attitudes. After a first review of a manuscript, I will ask an author with this problem to stop any further writing on the story. Instead I request a 5-10 page character sketch that focuses not on what he does, but who interacts with him. That is the heart of the matter: the connections between characters. No person is an island, even though an inexperienced author may write as though this is the case. She has issues with her father, whether he is around or not. You need to think through the different stages of how her feelings toward him evolved. You should be able to capture at least 2-3 significant events that define her growing-up with him. The same goes for her mother. If the character is a guy, sketch out his partner. What is she (or he) like, and why did he fall in with someone like that? What are the three things she does that really annoy him? Does he have a group of male friends, or does he spend most of his time just with her? What are the 2-3 most significant events in this relationship? I’ll point out, in this instance, that these don’t have to be background stories. They might be placed within the present-day story line. Then they would add to the novel’s mounting tension. How about a particular sibling? Did she have a profound effect on the heroine as a child? Whether someone is the oldest or second-oldest child can have a profound impact on how she tried to get the attention of her parents—and how she still acts today. Again, try to sketch out 2-3 major events between them. What’s happening throughout this process is that you’re touching off sparks from your own past. Angry words that were flung at you by your mother 20 years ago may still smolder in your mind today. An observation by your best friend as to what you’re really like may be a beacon that guides your actions today—even if you haven’t seen him in 10 years. This is how we really act: as social creatures. So, don’t you want to define your characters that way? Exercise: Don’t forget to write down striking encounters with strangers. Sometimes in a conversation with someone we have never met, we make profound observations about where we are in our lives or where others are. You didn’t know you were that smart until you confessed to someone you will never meet again.
The distance between a page of research and a page in your novel can be bridged when you approach the material the right way. That is: from the inside out. If you have two characters that are acting like the statues in their distant town squares, that’s because you haven’t thought through the implications of the information you’re using. Let’s say your protagonist visits Nathan Hale the night before he is to be hung, giving the only life he had. You have found out from your research that the two characters went to college together. Yet the story reads like those two inhabit separate planets. Nathan Hale lives in that history book you read, and your protagonist, well, he’s still fuzzy and goggle-eyed, emerging from the shell after you’ve given him life. During the American Revolution, most people attended college between the ages of 15 and 18. Today’s high school ages, in other words. Nathan Hale was famous for not being able to keep his trap shut. So if your protagonist knew him, you can practice transference. Did you know a guy in high school like that? Could he have been one of your gang in high school? (Note: “she” works just as well.) What stories do you remember about high school that involved that tongue-flapping friend? Write down that story. Could it be retold back in the era when the only pollution we had to worry about was horse dung? Sure, it can. Social progress of the human species, in the sphere where characters live, moves as slow as (sorry) molasses. That process of transference works with all sorts of relationships, including your most important ones of all. In this case, you don’t have to worry about being constrained by the real-life models for your characters. Your brother didn’t live 200 years ago. Your mother doesn’t wear one of those fetching bonnets of yore. You’re mining your memory to infuse life in a fictional relationship that exists only as dry bones of research. That’s why you’re having so much trouble making them real friends. Exercise: Find a character with whom you are dissatisfied. Think to yourself: what role is she playing in the book? What characteristics do you want her to possess? Now start thinking of people you know. Who is the character like? Once you’ve located the model, try to imagine how you (because you’re always the protagonist) relate to that model. What stories do you share? Pretty soon you’ll have a foundation of facts and impressions. Go on and fill ‘er up.
The baring of self causes many authors to shrink back from developing their protagonist fully. That instinctive need to guard against exposure also extends to our nearest and dearest. An author may have a character that is based on his older brother, and yet he dares not set forth identifying details for fear that his sibling will later read the book and condemn him. This fear is not misplaced. I remember more than one discussion with my older brother when he firmly, like a politician, averred that our parents weren’t so damaging to us. I got the hint. Does that mean you have to wait until your parents are dead and your siblings are so addled they won’t care? I’d like to suggest a way out for the more true-blood members of the writing tribe. What is initially set out as background about a character does not mean that everything the relative did in the past is then recorded in the character’s arc. The character will be carried along in the novel to a place that your sister, for example, would never go. The events of a novel are too exaggerated for that. This is where true character penetration takes place. As you are writing a scene, forget about what your sister would say. Your sister would never be out on the limb where you’ve placed that character. For example, in real life the dissolution of a marriage occurs over a period of straitened years. Yet for your purposes, your “sister” in the novel has an affair because of all of the reasons her marriage is falling apart. Her husband’s finding out then causes a crisis. Now, your sister never had an affair. It might even be that, in real life, your brother-in-law is the one who cheated. But that doesn’t matter. Your story revolves around the characters you are featuring. If you realize that the sister character needs to have an affair in order for her story to keep developing, then the actual reasons for the breakup are twisted to your purposes. You’re not writing about your sister anymore. She started as your sister, yes, but she has morphed into a character, one who can control her destiny. Exercise: Review a character that is based on a family member. Are you really capturing what they are like, or is the character fairly bland and unremarkable? Write down in a separate file the features of a sibling, say, that truly stand out. What are the incidents in his life that are most telling? Put in a few of those as back stories. Keep returning to them as you embellish the character. You’ll see the character become more vivid, even if he never did the stuff you’re relating.
Recalling moments from your life will spark some of your most original writing. As in any field, nothing beats hands-on experience for knowing the nuances of how a relationship or a plot event evolved. Yet adhering to real life does not work so well in the larger scheme of a novel. Life has so many nuances that you could write a thousand pages about a single week. That means the events of a novel have to be compressed. You need to relate just the interesting stuff. The compressed nature of a novel in turn squeezes its inhabitants into exaggerated creatures. True to life, yes, but within a novel’s inherent distortions of life. Trying to write from experience causes a common failing: the writer fails to separate his characters from their real-life models. People you know can be extremely limiting when building a novel. You need the freedom to discover where a character wants to take a plot thread. When the character is your sister, however, she will bend your plot to go in the direction that you know she would demand. That may be fine in some instances, but you can see the problem. The character has placed shackles on your imagination. In many cases, an even worse outcome ensues. Your sister, because what she wants is so realistic, makes your novel ordinary. You come back a few days later to a run of dialogue you’ve written and think, “OMG, this is so terrible. Even my sister is more interesting that that!” You can use both approaches. Before you start the novel, write a character sketch that includes the realistic attributes you want a character to have. But once you start writing, listen to what the character wants. Let your fingers do the walking until you see where the next scene ends up. What frees a good character of his shackles is when he goes where he wants to go—not because that is what the real-life model would do, but because that serves your story best. Exercise: Pick a character and track how she is developing in any scene. When she talks, are you thinking of a specific person in your life? If so, dig deeper. What point has the character’s developmental arc reached at that point? What should she be doing for the plot at that point? Immerse yourself in what your fictional situation calls for, and pretty soon you’ll find that she is telling you—like magic—what she wants.
A standard line in a rejection notice is that the agent or editor didn’t find the lead character compelling enough. That charming piece of boilerplate can be interpreted in many ways. The narrative approach might be too distant with its characters. The protagonist might have too many bouts of internal monologue, clogging up the action. Yet one possible reason stems from the simple fact that they didn’t like the main character. Dostoevsky had the right idea: as readers we are more interested in evil than good. From a character standpoint, good is dull. We spend the 800 pages of Brothers Karamazov enjoying Dmitri’s recklessness and Ivan’s coldness, not so much Alexei’s morality. When regarded from a writing standpoint, good leaves a character with no engaging flaws. People trying to write a novel are understandably confused by this conundrum. I frequently encounter books in which the hero is the baddest of the bad. The impulse to do this makes sense. Being an outright rebel is distinctive. In terms of a plot arc, someone who starts off bad can then make progress toward becoming good. So what’s the problem? In a nutshell, we may not want to spend an entire novel with her. The acts that a heroine commits add up in the reader’s emotional calculus. If we become repulsed enough by too many acts of wickedness, the book goes down on the night table and may never be reopened. How do you incorporate both good and evil? The answer lies in another facet of human nature: the hope that things will turn out all right. I’m all for evil, in terms of setting a character apart. That’s the fun part of life (just in novels, mind you). Yet I also want a lead character who has redeeming qualities. Maybe he is abrasive to his parents—but he is kind to a younger sister with ADHD. Your heroine may cast aspersions on her idiotic male work mates—but she looks up to a mentor who is helping her prepare for grad school. As readers, we just want someone to root for. If the protagonist already possesses a kernel of goodness, we know that can grow. A character, like a person, isn’t all one way. If a heroine has four defining qualities that are bad, make sure the fifth one is good. Exercise: Early on in a novel is the best place to plant seeds of hope, and because of that, a two-step strategy can be effective. Start by inserting a short back story that displays the character’s goodness. Even if that encounter soured the character supposedly forever, the reader’s moral faculties are already whirring. Hey, that was a nice thing to do. If you then follow up with a glimmer of that same impulse in the ongoing story, you’ve cemented an article of faith.
Some novelists scorn the use of notes. They want the writing process to be organic. As more pages are written, the vague whorl of a book inside the writer’s mind takes better shape. A protagonist gains his stride. A plot starts to follow a logical sequence. Pretty soon, as the toy maker Geppetto declared of Pinocchio, the author exclaims: “It’s a real boy!” While I advocate working organically, I also believe in being economical. Writing a novel can be likened to exploring a medieval city, with many crooked blind alleys that, while interesting along the way, lead to nowhere. For my first novel, I wrote 200 pages before I finally realized who my main character was—and then had to start all over again at the beginning. Do you really have that much time to spare? You can work from notes and still be organic. Good notes help a character gain definition right away. I have read debut novels in which I vaguely sense where the main character is coming from—but she doesn’t have enough unique qualities to stand out. The author has not put her idiosyncrasies on the page—because she hasn’t stopped to think what they are. You can do this deliberately. Write a character sketch that is focused entirely on finding out her little tics. You want to stay away from generalities. Focus on specific attributes. She can’t help stealing little things while shopping, for example. A pack of gum, a cellphone car jack, etc. Not worth much, but she loves that thrill of having it in her pocket as she goes through the checkout line. How long has she been doing this? What was it like the first time? Has she ever been caught? You can go deeper than that too. Did she have a special talent early on that her mother suppressed because it was antisocial? All of these questions have specific answers. When you consider this aspect of your heroine before the book starts, your notes will ensure that it frames your writing about her. Exercise: You can also use these notes as a way to reject what at first seems like a promising idea. Perhaps you decide that your protagonist eats Cheerios for breakfast. He’s done that since childhood, indicating a conservative bent that marks his overall personality. That’s not a bad idea, but then ask yourself: is that really the best way to indicate his conservatism? If you, for instance, had him insist on paying the check when eating out, then you might be able to write a scene in which his girlfriend yells at him in a restaurant.
Legends have been spun about authors who write hundreds of pages that don’t end up in the actual book. That sounds like a nice ideal, but really, how much extra time do you have in your day? I’d like to suggest a more targeted approach, based on that page of general notes about Len. Let’s take getting thrown down the stairs as a child. You can, of course, write out that scene—a five-page flashback that makes your hair stand up. Yet what will help you know Len better comes from the framing circumstances of that incident. In the first place, why Len? The psychological literature shows that usually only one family member is chosen by an abuser. So why Len? Does he have siblings? What are their ages in respect to him? How does the father’s abuse of him affect their feelings for him? Why does his mother allow it to happen? You can see how many questions can be generated simply from that one incident. Now we’ll break it down further. Let’s say that you decided Len is the oldest in a family of three. In your experience, what is an oldest child like? Bossy or introspective? Does what you think about an oldest child align with how your protagonist acts? No? Maybe he acts more like the fourth child lost in a brood of six. What is your own personal experience of feeling passed over by your parents in favor of another child? Now, you see, Len is no longer an abstract notion. Feeling passed over by your parents hurts. You could write a page just describing what a pair of selfish jerks they are because they always gave Bobby the biggest Christmas present. Can you focus on one incident like that where you really wanted recognition that never came? A page of general notes can be multiplied into 20 pages of detailed explorations. Are you wasting valuable time? Not to my way of thinking. Just consider this fact: you will wait months for a literary agent to pick you up and then more months for a publishing house to buy the book. If they turn it down for the hoariest of all rejection letter reasons—“I didn’t fall in love with the character”—you may wish you had spent more time exploring at the start. Exercise: Focus on one note, such as that staircase incident. Don’t write about the action: the pain of the tailbone, the scraped wrist, the broken arm. You’re trying to go deeper into the psychological scar. What led up to that attack? What happened as a consequence? What turning point in Len’s life occurred that night? Isn’t that why you’re bothering to write about it in the first place?
The genesis of a new story is one of the most refreshing interludes in a career of writing. A new idea comes to you. It concerns a topic that stirs your fancy. You know you could write about it with passion, because certain elements—on the broadest of thematic levels—speak to you. You start writing notes, and the idea seems even stronger once you’ve laid down a few basic parameters. At the end of a writing session, or several, you are beaming inside with happiness. This one, you know, is going to be great. Before you go too far, however, let’s consider a practical point. A great idea without a great central character isn’t going to take you too far toward the goal of being published. That’s because a publisher wants a unique product above all. If that sounds crass, welcome to the way trade publishing really works. A publisher is thinking in terms of the copy that fills the back cover. Inside a publishing house, the marketing department plays an important role in whether a book is accepted for publication. Let’s return to the glorious freshness of the new idea. Ask yourself at a very early stage: what characteristics does my main character possess that are unique? That requires you think through their situation in life. Single? Married? With children and how many? What about the parents, perhaps with problems that still plague the main character during the course of the novel? Do you have any back stories about their upbringing that has an impact on how they act during the course of the novel? Try to see if you can write 10 pages on what this person is doing before the novel starts. Above all, what is distinctive about all this stuff? What sets your character apart from all of the hundreds of other main characters that you’ve loved reading about? The reason to start thinking this way from the beginning is that the peculiarities of the protagonist can have a strong influence on how you shape the novel. For instance, I can’t imagine Into the Woods by Tana French without the haunting back story about the protagonist losing his two best friends as a child. You too can use the three or four prime ingredients that make your character special as a way to give your novel a flavor that no other novel has. Exercise: From form comes action. Once you have decided on several defining characteristics, think about the possible outcomes of such a trait. Then exaggerate those outcomes to the very outer edge of believability. If the character likes to appease others, because her parents fought constantly when she was a child, think of the absolute worst situation in which his appeasement could place her. See if you can design that sequence so that she has to wallow in that position for as long as possible. “Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day.” —Ray Bradbury
When an author comes from a 9-to-5 career of any sort, the dictum to write what you know can have pitfalls. Experiences that either you have had or that happened within your profession can stand out in your mind like shiny baubles. Who wouldn’t want to read, for instance, about that gas explosion that rocked the manholes down on 14th Street? Or that really crazy one on the Magnificent Mile in Chicago? The characters in such planning may seem vivid to you, but already I’m thinking: how is a fireman in New York connected to an explosion in Chicago? In other words, are the characters following the action or orchestrating it? The answer better be the latter, or they’ll be pawns in your game of fictionalized real life. At the same time, I like excitement of any sort, like most readers. So how can you fold disparate incidents into a cohesive evolving whole? The first step is to write down all of the ones floating in your mind. Let’s say you want to include 10 of them. Rank them in a list that roughly places when you’d like to feature them in the book. If you’re smart, you’ll put the less exciting ones early and the catastrophic ones later. That way they will help build the drama. Next, write down a list of your main characters—no more than five. Rank them by number, 1-5. Now return to your list of incidents and think to which character you’d like to assign them. Write their number down with that entry on the list. When you’re done, how many incidents do you have for how many characters? Your protagonist had better be associated with more of them than anyone else. How about the #2 character? Maybe three of them? Could you work out a way that #1 and 2 appear together at some of them? Third, consider the before and after. If an explosion comes out of the blue at the reader, it will seem random. Sometimes that’s okay, but most of the time you want to set up a plot logic prior to the incident—to make it believable, if nothing else. So draw up a list of beforehand scenes that are attached to each incident. Which characters are appearing in that scene? In some cases, you’ll want the villains planning the incident. In others, you might have the good guys worrying about the next explosion. Try to assign all beforehand scenes to a main character. You can do the same with the after scenes. What are the repercussions of the incident? The more you have your main characters react, the more the reader will feel included in the story. That’s because your main characters should be the threads connecting the incidents. Then you’ll have a novel that hangs together. “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” —Joan Didion Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
When you are writing a draft, you may become uneasy about the lack of tension the plot events are generating. For example, you thought at the outset that, based on personal experience, a drama between a college student and her drunk father would produce solid combustion. Maybe the father swings by a few times a week to see if she’ll buy him a few drinks. So she drinks with him with the goal of eventually saving dad. You set off on that path for 100 pages. Lots of scenes of dad and roommates. Then you decide to read all of the chapters so far—and find that you have merely a variation of the same adolescent rebellion you’ve read or seen a million times. You decide that can’t be the main plot. It is relegated to a subplot. Instead, you pick another leading foil, a boyfriend who is too charming and slashing. You start writing scenes of mutual interest at a frat party and other venues, and you feel a nice tension brewing. That wolf is no good for her. Yet you still have those father scenes that you wrote before. Does all of that good material have to be thrown out? Thinking in such absolute terms is a mistake. A novel is about as far from all or nothing as life gets. Your first step should be: leave those scenes alone for now. Instead think in terms of competition. Those 50 pages of daughter-dad scenes have to be balanced with the new girl-boy scenes. As the latter proliferate, you’ll be able to assess how frequently the dad scenes should appear. Maybe they are inserted every fourth chapter, so the reader doesn’t forget him. Once you reach page 150, you will be better able to make astute judgments. One element to watch for is how much background material was previous given to dad and daughter. How much do you have for the boyfriend? If the daughter is the protagonist, maybe the back stories should be rewritten so that she is highlighted more. Dad’s stuff is trimmed, and Mom stuff and Sis stuff, etc., are added, in order to better round out your hero’s past. More to the point, you need to recognize that your pole stars have shifted. If the central drama is the hero being sucked in by the guy, who are the people telling her that he’s no good? If that’s primarily the mother, she should included in more background stories. She might also be added to the already written dad-daughter scenes. In other words, the characters engaging in the present-day scenes become part of the rebalancing. If only half of those 50 dad pages end up remaining, you should regard them as the best of those pages you wrote. “The idol of today pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of tomorrow.” —Washington Irving Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
A major nonfiction field consists of books filled with the opinions of experts. This sort of narrative uses a rhythm that I roughly call “theory, proof.” The author advances an idea and then verifies it by referring to another source. Often that is an example that shows a person or company in an illustration of the point being advanced. Other times the proof is supplied by the writing of another expert in the field. The author is not just going out on a limb; there are others who support the theory. The marshaling of these other voices can provide great pleasure to an author inclined to read widely. The discovery of a case study focused on the trauma caused by a lost limb, say, can fit wonderfully into a chapter on a like subject. Given enough time and diligence, an author can find sources that back up every theory in the book. So many, in fact, that the book can start to feel like a rocky passage between a multitude of expert voices. I have read books where the theory aspect frequently consists of a short paragraph, outdone on the same page by a lengthy quote from an apparently more knowledgeable soul. In this case, the collector has been crowded out by their menagerie. An author may protest such an idea. Of course it’s their book; they’re in control of what’s being presented. Yet a reader may not feel the same way. The motive behind reading the book usually is gaining knowledge of a subject. An expert collator of greatest hits might be better termed an editor. A worse fate yet might befall the too deferential author. One reason authors become known in a field is their ability to write well. That’s what separates an Atul Gawande from all the other doctors. The reader may experience great pleasure while reading a long passage of his and decide they really should read that book, not yours. Your book may be put down while the other is explored—and never be retrieved again. Put bluntly, you wrote the book so you could become an expert. That happens when the reader is caught in the sway of your words. You need to balance the amount of text you compose with the quotations produced by your chorus. Otherwise, you may be merely a guide that introduces readers to all of those better writers. Exercise: The easiest way to reduce the amount of text supplied by others is to paraphrase part or all of a quotation. That method keeps the narrative more in your voice, with your rhythms, making the points you are directing the reader toward. It also shows the reader that the quote is merely a cog in your greater design. “There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.” —Mark Twain Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
A technique that helps brings an author inside a character’s head proceeds in a curious fashion: from outer to inner. The curiosity factor stems from where a writer usually starts a scene: from a chosen point of view. That is, from already inside the character’s head. So why would anyone consider going to another character’s thoughts? Won’t that disrupt the intimacy with the reader? To explain, let’s examine how a scene is actually written. At the beginning, you don’t know exactly what will emerge from your pen. You know which characters will dominate the scene. You may have some notes sketching an intended plot advance, along with possible text pieces that you wrote previously, knowing they would fit somewhere in the book. But you still have to write out what happens in that scene. Let’s assume that a young woman wants to ask permission from her father to go out with her best friend. She knows he thinks the friend is a bad influence. That is the first level of interior monologue. I know Dad is going to say no. How do I get him to yes, because I really want to go? You write out some dialogue, and sure enough, Daddy-o says no. The teenager does some plot-related thinking. When you read over the scene, you feel it’s pedestrian, something out of a Nickelodeon show. How do you get deeper? You add qualifying factors. One of the best sources for them lies with the father. What happy time might she remember when he was tickled by the best friend? What about her made him smile? What deed did he praise her for? What concern does he have, such as being really smart in math but not applying herself? When you jot down some of these memories, you give your chosen character some ammunition in her argument. You can go beyond that, using the dad foil. When does she know he is most receptive to her asking a favor? After a few drinks or a bowl of chocolate ice cream? She might also consider using citing her mother as an ally, as in mentioning something she did that always raises his hackles? The anger gets directed onto the mother, and the daughter looks like an angel because she totally supports everything her father says. In other words, by considering the supplementary character’s views on subjects that will be raised in the scene, you can discover how the lead character will manipulate or react. You’re still writing from inside her head. You just took a detour to find out nuances that would never occur to you from the inside out. “A lie does not consist in the indirect position of words, but in the desire and intention, by false speaking, to deceive and injure your neighbour.” —Jonathan Swift Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
A good novel is encyclopedic in its coverage of so many different realms. Chief among them are the attitudes of the lead characters toward each other. When you’re writing truly from one point of view, an entire history of a relationship can be revealed in what a character assumes about another—without the author having to expressly comment on what either of them is like. Where does this history come from? From the nether regions of your brain. Even if you are basing a fictional relationship on a real one, you still have to cull from the complexity of those years certain ways of interacting that can form a cohesive bond within the confines of your book. That’s where your reliance on knowing how you and your best friend, say, work(ed) together can lead you astray. That’s because your characters are going to be more extreme than the real-life models. That means their past history will have correspondingly sharp highlights. As you’re writing, this altered past comes into play. Let’s assume you have made real-life teenage drinking and drug escapades more serious. You know you want the friend to be more hardened, maybe having served time in prison or in a dry-out clinic. Yet how, if the two were supposed to be buddies, can you keep your protagonist savory enough that a reader isn’t turned off by their evil? Unless you sketch out this grimmer past, you won’t know. You’ll have a vague notion of how a plot turn might go, but because your made-up version of the past still is swimming in the ether of the real past, you’ll end up continuing to put off having to decide. Chapters may be written down, in which the two have solid dialogue, attitudes about plot events that ring like a bell, etc., but underneath—where you have the opportunity to really make them distinctive—you’re still undecided about their roles. You have to stop working on the story. Forget about making headway. Figure out what the two did in your fictional past. Start with character notes: what are the buddy’s family and environmental impacts that made them the bad influence on the protagonist? What was the first bad thing the two did together? How, as they got older, did they start to drift apart? How did the hero escape going to prison, as a for-instance? Then write out several scenes that you know probably won’t make it into the novel. How did the two interact when the evil was committed? Was one intent on malice while the other was talked into it? After it happens, what are the two divergent reactions? How does that impact the way they approach another act of evil a month/year later? Write out that next scene. What you’ll find is that you will learn the answers. Once you know, then you can write implicitly about their interactions in the present day. “My father had a profound influence on me. He was a lunatic.” —Spike Milligan Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
Authors are constantly looking for ways to involve a reader in their story, and one of the devices is asking the reader a question. It works, since a reader likes to get inside the head of a lead character. Plus, a question breaks up the rhythm of the narration, which is usually dominated by a point of view that is trying to make the fictional seem real. Yet the device tends to be used sparingly, and there are good reasons for that. The best one is that it can appear to too transparently gin up tension. What can be done to avert such terrible misfortune? might sum up the general drift of such usage. The reader is, like, come on, do you expect me to go for that? In other words, it amounts to another form of foreshadowing: Myra couldn’t know the terrible consequences of that simple decision. Yawn. Much better is placing the question within a character’s thoughts. What am I going to do now? feels authentic, because that is what the reader is asking at that moment. In addition, we frequently ask ourselves questions within our real life. They are part of our everyday inner monologue that patters so incessantly. Even here, though, an author can easily overstep by asking questions back to back. What am I going to do now? Could I really steal a car? Again, the reader starts to become offended. Okay, okay, enough with the questions. Why don’t you get out there and do something? One variety that I like to see is the philosophical query. The fact is, categorical statements about life are bunk. As a male teenager you might be awed by Henry Miller’s statement that all women are whores—so deep, dude—but further reflection about your own experiences makes it laughable. If you voice a concern as a question, though, you leave the thought open-ended. If she says I’m cute, does that mean she thinks I’m a joke? leaves it up to the reader to decide. Exercise: As you review a draft, look for the occasional spot where a rhetorical question could form a point of emphasis. It can be effective, for instance, when it counters the narrative flow in a paragraph that contains heightened tension. You can also look for statements that seem overbearing. If you reversed the subject and verb, would the intent to provoke remain while not seeming so ponderous? “Art has always been this—pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric—whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear.” —Samuel Beckett Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
A review of your latest draft can result in a decision to strengthen certain character arcs or plot lines. Commonly, you realize that you have gaps in coverage, or a character/plot ends uneventfully and too soon. You can make a conscious effort to plug those holes. First, draw up a chart to find out exactly when a character participates in which plot concerns. Let’s say you have four plot lines that need to be shored up. They can be divided into four columns. Write down the page numbers for each scene and a few words about what happens—as a reminder to yourself. When you read vertically, column by column, the true structure of that concern will emerge. For example, there is an 90-page gap between appearances for the divorced dad. If you give him an extra scene, you could divide that number by two, and now he would have only two 45-page gaps. If he is ranked third or fourth in your plot lines, that is fine. You look for the page number halfway in between, and you’ll find a suitable place roughly about then for the insert. Should he be raised to more importance? You may decide to have him appear in two new scenes. Now he would appear every 30 pages or so. Yet that may raise a different issue, because you may not want to break up that 90-page stretch two full times. You may be alternating nicely, say, among your top three characters. In that case, see if you can slot him into an existing scene. A divorced dad can show up unexpectedly, and if only the kids are around, they likely will be glad to see him. So you give him some stage business as well as a few lines commenting on the extant action in a way that furthers his character portrayal. You’re not interrupting anything now. The same technique works in extending a plot line. Ending anywhere from the 50-page mark to the end of the novel will feel satisfying, again depending on the plot’s importance. In order to give the last scene some pop, truly finishing things off, you may have to devise a chart-topping conflict. That can involve writing two scenes: one to set up the final obstacle and one to resolve it. Or, if you already have a scene you like as the subplot’s finale, move that scene later and insert a new scene in its place. Exercise: One option that shouldn’t be overlooked is: spacing out your present scenes with longer gaps. A plot column may reveal that a plot line is all bunched up in a certain sector of the book. That makes sense, because you were focused on it then. Is the story’s time element, though, so crucial? Could secondary-plot scenes from later be inserted in between several if not all of those scenes? “When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” —George Orwell Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
A scene in a novel begs to be filled up with details, whether they be lines of dialogue, pieces of the setting, or a character’s point of view. The wealth of them determines how much the scene comes to life. It is hard for a reader to care much what happens until you fill out a run of pages—let’s say three double-spaced manuscript pages at a minimum. Anything less can be considered a narrative summary or a partial scene designed to set up a later full-fledged scene. Why does some arbitrary length matter? Why not just jump into a scene and let it rip? The reason I raise a caution flag is the effect of these blocks of scenes in the aggregate. While you’re immersed in a single scene, the juices are flowing. All is right with the world. Yet what happens when you’ve written 50 pages and you decide to read over those blocks in sequence? What can happen is a growing disenchantment with the larger direction of the novel. Your initial impulse to follow, for example, the dissolution of a meth addict starts off crisply, but soon the story is so depressing, you want to die. Just lay me out on my keyboard—that’ll be fine. Worse than the momentary gloom is the thought of all the work you put in. All those scenes with such well-plumbed details, and I end up with this? Depending on how misguided the project seems, you can pull back from writing more for weeks at a time. You have to make better choices about the blocks you immerse yourself within. You might have thought at first that the older sister would serve as a good measuring stick for the addict’s fall, and so you wrote out a seven-page scene when she first notices he’s acting psychotic. The idea is solid, but maybe that scene should have waited until she feels compelled to do more than the older-sister lecture that, frankly, sounds like a lot of other older-sibling lectures. You might be better off drawing up a plot chart. Write out a synopsis of each scene you’ve written in five lines or less. Then look at your initial notes, whether on characters or plot, and write down the gist of scenes based on those points. See if you can work out several hundred pages of projected material—or 20 chapters in your chart. That way you can more clearly tell how the steps into hell really progress. You can see if the sister really is going to matter later in the book. An outline changes as a novel grows. You’re not being pinned down. What you’re doing is setting forth relative dramatic weights of plot events and characters. That way you won’t be stumbling in the dark when a character suddenly grabs you by the lapels and demands that more be written about them. “The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.” —Willa Cather Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
When you wish to use touchstones from your own life in a novel, the most common come from relationships. In the early stages of a draft, you realize you want your best friend from high school, say, as a main character. If you keep a journal to capture haphazard thoughts—a highly recommended idea—you can jot down different episodes or shining moments or comments involving your friend. These can have emotional value for the book because the reason you remember them so clearly is you have deep feelings about them. The notes are a fine start, but at some point you reach a common hurdle in novel writing. Feelings are random unless they are placed in a plot matrix. A plot must be original, and that means going beyond what really happened. That is, you have to inject artificiality into the proceedings. Two kids lighting up a doob behind the barn contains a modicum of danger, but if they start laughing hysterically, the reader will become bored. Oh, yeah, I did that too, back then. Moving out of the comfort zone of memory lane may freeze your pen. No, your friend really wasn’t mad enough at their father to light the barn on fire, so how could I write about that? And I (I mean, the protagonist) am not the type of guy who glories at finding a can of gasoline. It’s a conundrum: how do you merge real with interesting? One answer is to focus on details. Any effective scene is buttressed by micro-fine images and at-the-moment thoughts. You take an idea jotted down: Lee said I would never become a rebel because I played by the rules. What if that becomes what the friend says to the protagonist when they find the gasoline by the wheels of a tractor? Lee really did say that, so it shores up the improbability of a sudden impulse to splash gas around. If you go on to describe the piercing foul smell, maybe the odd way that wet hay sinks to the floor, you have intertwined the familiar into the made-up proceedings. Exercise: When you review your initial notes, be ready to abstract them from their original context. What was a thought might be spoken aloud in the novel and vice-versa. The crisp lines of the moon witnessed while stoned might be used in contrast to flickering flames. Better yet, once the germ of a story idea seizes you, write down the extension of your note right on the journal page. Keep blasting away with how it could work until the glow of inspiration is spent. When you look at it later, you may have paragraph or a page that will work just fine. “Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.” —Simone Weil Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
In the previous post I covered some guidelines for researching on the web. In my own experience, the internet is broad but it is not deep. That’s fine if you merely need to establish a point here and there—e.g., a silk dress 100 years ago was likely worn by a rich woman. Yet if you are trying to present facts that are truly eye-opening, you need sources that go beyond what is commonly known. The first step in that direction comes from the back of a book. Within that term I’ll include the footnotes along with the bibliography, since many times they are aggregated in an endnotes section. A book you research in the early days likely is an overview of a topic. By now you probably already have initial probes in your notes that indicate what you really want to learn more about. The back matter of a general book will break down the categories covered into subsets. Professors rarely write broad books: they pick some aspect for which they can show more diligence than other professors. They’re in their own race to the top, and you are the beneficiary. Let’s suppose that you want to study 19th-century New York City theater. If you merely want to know technical aspects of what happened backstage, it’s possible that a book on a theater in Philadelphia is worth exploring. The guys who built that theater drew on British models, just like their confrères 100 miles northeast. Likewise, any book on theater gaslights will suffice. That’s because the specifics of one bygone theater you have settled on as a setting may be lost in the sands of time. The problem you may run into on a broader topic—let’s say, how a lower-class worker fared during the city’s rapid expansion up Manhattan island—stems from a lack of discernment in terms of the author’s discipline. A sociology professor will write a different book than a women’s studies professor. What is really right for the characters you are considering? Then too, many books on a topic, such as policing during that era, may focus more on the growing organizational apparatus of the police force rather than: how did a detective pre–Sherlock Holmes solve a murder? That’s because the author can access data recorded by the long-ago organization’s officials. You may be better off searching the footnotes for memoirs and magazines written at the time. Sure, you have to forge through the archaic language. Yet such accounts reveal more of how life was experienced at the street level. Just in their casual observations you may find a wealth of interesting details that would never be included in a top-down study. And, because memoirs are just on the other side of the nonfiction line, you may find that novels are the richest source of all. You want to know how thieves operated in that century? Try Herman Melville’s Confidence-Man. Mind you, I’m not advocating plagiarism, but a detail from a paddle wheel can be put into your own words. “The knives of jealousy are honed on details.” —Ruth Rendell Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
Authors need to find the facts about a subject before including it in a story. That seems like a straightforward proposition until you start trying to find the information. What sort of research is being conducted, and how will the facts you discover be of any help to you? This post will cover the internet, since that is the first place anyone looks these days. Your better choice, books, will follow in the next post. The internet is right there at your fingertips. You don’t even have to get off your ass. You type in “New York City theater 19th century,” for instance. What such a search is likely to find breaks into several categories. The most common one is history attached to a travel guide. You read one all-too-short article on the difference between the theaters on Broadway and the Bowery. You click to the next entry, and you find pretty much the same stuff. Hey, the start of class warfare: Broadway vs. the Bowery. Beyond that, you may find sites that really are about New York theaters in the 20th century, but they do have one mention of the 19th century, in 1898. So that’s a waste of time. Luckily, you may become skilled in skimming the contents of the teasers on the search page. Before moving on to the most fruitful category, I will point out that pictures on any site can be valuable to you. Just looking at a drawing inside the Bowery Theatre gives you a sense not only of the entertainment offered but the audience adoring or hating it. If you compile a file of drawings and sepia photographs alone (in this example), you will have material you can study at a later date. Your best guess for info that will actually help you imagine your fictional world comes from the scholarly realm. A site like JSTOR is an incredible resource for articles that have appeared across a wide spectrum of academic journals. These professors are all digging in deep, so you may find such interesting material as: when did respectable women start attending the theater? Looking up the relevant topics isn’t easy, because their AI is a vast vacuum cleaner too, but at least when you do make choices, you get something out of your reading. Better yet, those articles have footnotes and bibliographies. You might discover the memoir of an actor who appeared often with 19th-century star Edwin Forrest. That gives you an on-the-ground view of someone who lived through those times. Florid language aside, you may discover all sorts of interesting nuggets. While it’s very possible that a site like Google Books will allow you to read such an ancient tome online, you may find yourself hopping in the car and driving to the library. (To be continued.) “A room without books is like a body without a soul.”― Marcus Tullius Cicero Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
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