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In a world where megalithic corporations funnel us all toward becoming oafs who eat burgers, it is not surprising that we clamor for entertainment that presents a new take on things. Yet the insidious pull of sameness affects novels as well, with formulaic plots helmed by cynical mavericks who really, deep down, are good people. How does an author devise characters who could intrigue us? You might want to start by thinking of the main characters you want to include and write them down in a list. Then, off the top of your head, name one stereotypical quality that would describe them. Once you have jotted down a list of those attributes, then play a kid’s game with yourself. Draw a line to connect the names not with the quality you assigned, but on a diagonal, at random, with another quality. So the librarian, for instance, does not win the “mousy and quiet” label but the “muscles hard as steel.” That would be unusual: a librarian who lifts weights. The point of the exercise is not to create weirdos that no reader would believe in. Rather, it’s a way of shaking you out of your habitual ways of thinking about people. We all have our slants; they’re a variant of reaching for the burger, only intellectually. But what would happen if, in that library scene you were scheming about, the librarian was glancing down at a muscle mag behind the counter while helping a helpless patron? What if they started tripping out on a fantasy about a particularly statuesque body builder while answering questions about the gardening section? That scene is sparky, not the same old grind. At the same time you can free-associate between the labels and different characters. The ardent gun lover who makes sure they always dress in vogue might be a bridge too far for you, but not for the student who marches for our lives. In the midst of mismatching, new traits may spring to mind that are fresh but align better with the core of what you want for the character. Maybe the librarian, rather than bulking up, gains the attribute of being worried about the nutrition of the food served in their local soup kitchen. Shaking up your preconceptions at the start will produce more unique characters than your discovering more of what they’re like as you work through the draft. That way is more prone to following your unconscious slant. A flatter character, despite all that you’ve added, may be the inevitable result. Exercise: Examine your notes for a character and ask yourself if you have experienced that type before: in a book, movie, or television show. If you have, why are you going in that direction? Somebody else already did that. Instead, flip the attribute on its head and choose the exact opposite. How would the character look turned upside-down? “Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.” —Hermann Hesse Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
When years have passed since the last English class, an adult, like this editor, can forget useful tools taught in the classroom. One of them recently came back into the view finder, and I was struck by its elegant simplicity. That is the practice of linked rings. You place a character in each ring and draw lines between them. Then you write what qualities each possesses that influences the other. Elena Ferrante may have been aware of this tool when writing My Brilliant Friend, because she does such an incredible job of building character relationships. That practice relies on intuition and the flow of the developing manuscript, to be sure, but why not give yourself a head start by clearly delineating major points you want for a pairing of characters? What I see so often are buddies that bumble forward side by side rather than establishing a relationship foundation that can be deepened. Objectives are not defined; they grow closer only because they share so many scenes together. I know one reason why: an author thinks, “My best friend X would say such a thing,” and that rings true. But does an outsider share that feeling? When you list how Sydney and Peyton relate to each other, you can move beyond “extrovert” and “introvert” very quickly. You can start listing instances of their interactions. Consider early behavior first. What classroom antic of Sydney’s caused what reaction from Peyton, and then vice versa? Who made the good grades, and how did that affect the other? Which had the more stable parents, and how does that play out in higher education? These are not character traits; the trait matters only in its effect on the buddy. People in real life are shaped forever by childhood friendships, and you can use your particular memories to create a special bond. Even better, you can then write in implied aspects of the relationship—and don’t have to explain anything. The initial notes can be supplemented by a second phase of consideration: what happens to them during the course of the book. This can be a crucial exercise, because in limning their in-book development, you can sense how important the relationship will be. Is the childhood friendship going to morph into one that is more distant? If so, why spend a lot of time writing about it? Is the relationship going to reach a crisis point that packs an emotional wallop? How important is that—i.e., when will that occur in the novel? By the use of the rings, you can shape what appeals to you without spending months lurching down a blind alley. Exercise: Links between two characters can also pinpoint what quality of a character will emerge most sharply with whom. If you have two friends who bring out the same quality, you have duplication of function. Separate out each character so that they show a different quality. That way the character’s companions won’t be an amorphous scrum. “One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.” —Lucius Annaeus Seneca Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
One problem that I encounter frequently with first-time novelists is their patchy use of minor characters. By and large, authors do understand that their protagonist should show up on a regular basis. Yet the supporting characters often are regarded as chess pieces to be moved in order to advance the plot or, worse, an author’s themes. This occurs for a variety of reasons. One stems from the organic nature of building a novel. When you first start off, you usually have only a broad idea of how the plot is going to turn out. As the story moves forward, you find that characters you like, or realize you are writing well about, become more important. But others remain on the level of plot functions—they move the plot forward. Sometimes they are better drawn (let’s say, adorned chess pieces) and move the plot forward several times. Another reason might be termed the totem character. That person exists in the novel to exemplify a particular thematic point. For example, in a novel about the Vietnam War era, a character might show up, shoot off his big toe in order to escape draft induction, and then drop out of the book. As a reader, how am I supposed to react to that? I do know that people injured themselves in order to avoid being shipped overseas. While vaguely horrified, I feel no emotion toward such a cameo character. A third reason originates from an author’s personal background. A common figure from our gloaming past is the bully. She rules her corner of the playground and woe betide anyone she selects for torment. Or, she shames the otherwise engaging heroine in a furtive act, such as smoking dope in high school. The bully can be carried on for hundreds of pages as a brooding malign presence, but if she has no other defining characteristics besides slobbering sadism, is the reader really going to care? It is your job to assign dramatic weight. If someone is going to commit a significant act, give that job to a major supporting character. That character isn’t a pawn; because you give him regular coverage, he’s a knight. Better yet, align the character with the protagonist. Have your heroine react to that blown-off toe. Luke, what the hell were you thinking? By the same token, give the bully insecurities. If I know he fears his father, I might want virtue to triumph—for the bully’s own good. Exercise: Examine your manuscript with an eye out for distractions. That’s what pawns often are: they distract attention that might be devoted to your protagonist. Could you pull a scattered incident more closely to your main characters? Could you elevate that pawn by providing more coverage before and after the incident so that we get to know that character—and care what happens to her? “Without heroes we're all plain people and don't know how far we can go.” ―Bernard Malamud Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
Satire can make for a wonderful read when placed in capable hands. So many social conventions as well as belief systems are absurd. Yet what starts as a barrel of laughs can be doomed in the long run if an author does not employ a variety of tools to keep the novel’s turns fresh. The first is to keep one primary plot aim true. While it’s fun to read about characters taking constant swipes, the story can devolve into a puppet show of tricksters and fools if someone is not staying on the beam. That character may well be the most slashing maverick of them all as long as her cause is meaningful, such as curing malaria. The reader then can keep rooting for justice to be served through all the mayhem. Second, provide enough plotting so that the novel does not remain on the same starting premise. An arrogant bully can lose swagger if he keeps dissing the same characters about the same topic. A satire about the development of a miracle drug, say, had better move beyond the laboratory and the boardroom, or you’re done in 80 pages. A further stage in this scenario might be a hypochondriac in a trial phase, the head of the FDA review board, a member of Congress agog about the benefits of a side effect, etc. A third asset is a large cast of characters. What seems extremely funny when one character takes a beating can start to look like meanness after repeated blows. A hedge fund raider, for instance, can beat up on a hapless CEO only so much before we start wishing the CEO had some redeeming quality. That’s not to mention the repetition factor. Even a running gag needs new circumstances to remain vibrant. If you advance the plot steadily, that will entail adding new characters. You can not only use them in new settings. You can also insert new players into the matrix of old slings and arrows as a way add new variety to what seemed tired. You might also consider starting with a subplot from the beginning, headed by an absurd character. In the running example being used, this might be a mad scientist working for a second biogenetics company who comes at the malaria issue with a patently quack solution. This personage also provides a break from the main plot, and that is helpful because switching back and forth by itself helps to keep plot lines fresh. That, in essence, is the entire ballgame: keep showing us new tricks. Exercise: An outline can be valuable before starting a satire. You can lay out the characters in opposition at each stage. Not only that, you can sense from afar when a plot thrust is losing gas. That’s when a new plot line/character needs to be introduced. You can also sketch out how old and new characters can intertwine for new twists on old gags. “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” —E. B. White Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
The internet is a boon for any author seeking information about a topic, but the very multiplicity of information sources can lead to hours of wasted research time. A Google entry can call up dozens of websites that contain variants of the same information. That’s because so many online writers are amateur historians or scientists or what have you. How can you dig down deeper to find stuff that really will interest readers? Not surprisingly, one fruitful method stems from an age-old practice, back when writers would comb through books. At the bottom of an article you will find the footnotes’ sources. This is true of any Wikipedia article, for instance. The writer of that article is likely more of a specialist than you are, and the sources used therefore have more substance. A search for “Five Corners,” a notorious New York City slum of yesteryear, will yield an article wherein one source is the book Five Corners. Within its 441 pages you can find all sorts of information, some of which can occasion new research forays. While that particular book needs to be purchased or borrowed from the library, there is plenty of other source material that can be found right online. Many older books and journal articles of any age are compiled on scholarly websites such as JSTOR. While some demand a fee to sign up, these prices can be nominal, and many times you don’t have to pay at all. A scholarly journal article may run only 10 pages, but you might find 10 facts that illuminate what you want for your fictional world. Depending on the age of the books cited, many of them belong in the public domain. That is, anyone can reproduce the book. It’s extremely helpful for all readers that big tech companies have decided they should use that right to make the books available online. The Google Books site has hundreds of books available for free, and the same is true through applications like iBooks. Even books that are still under copyright can be available to read if you merely register for a website. All of this hunting for books for free bypasses the fruitful avenue of buying used books. After assessing how germane a book is to your subject, you may decide that spending 10 or 15 bucks is a wise investment. You can find nearly new books on sites such as Book Finder and Alibris. I should point out that I’m not dismissing the attractive option of purchasing a new book. If it really interests you, don’t you want it for your library? Another option, which I’m leaving for last only because it is the most traditional, is using your local libraries. All of them have online catalogues these days, and a number of the websites you’ll find expressly have a box to enter your zip code to find a local library that has your book. You may still spend many happy hours in the stacks even you come to them from your laptop. “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” —C. S. Lewis Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
As a novel is being written, stray thoughts about characterization can come unbidden to an author. You realize a key background fact about a relationship, say, could be told in a certain way, and you write it down. You don’t know where it will go, but you do know it is worth keeping. That then prompts a question: where do you place the observations about characters? Let’s use a concrete example by way of illustration. Let’s say that an older brother, Carl, has come back from being away for an extended time, such as to college, and a younger sibling, Reid, feels Carl has somehow changed and that their relationship will never be the same again. Nice thought, but what can you do with it? You have to make a decision about where it belongs in the arc of the relationship. If placed early in a novel, it becomes a setup piece. Reid, to use the example, realizes it when the novel still has hundreds of pages to go. What is it setting the stage for? Or, it could be one of a number of setup pieces that will form a mystery about why the change has occurred. What has Carl been doing while he’s away, and how will that impact Reid later? If it is placed later, it becomes more of a plot stake. A bunch of setup work was leading up to this realization. The revelation could proceed onto a climactic break, such as Reid’s finally breaking free of her older brother’s domination. He’s already checked out of the relationship, so why can’t she? You can also use it as an end point in order to lay out a step-by-step process during which the change is discovered. A further consideration is: how important is it to the story you are developing? Maybe it should be relegated to just another one of the dozens of insights that hopefully enrich the novel. You have to assess whether this sibling relationship is worth building as a major arc, or is better ranked as an incidental factor in Reid’s larger wave of rebellion. Maybe bad-girl friend Deloris deserves a larger share of attention. In other words, you know you like the sterling nugget you wrote. Yet it will remain minor if you don’t allow your mind to roam over the possibilities. Maybe the process of your subconscious brought you to the nugget for a reason. Exercise: One good practice is maintaining a separate notebook or electronic file specifically for these jottings. Unless every single word you write sparkles effortlessly, these stray bits can become studs that tone up the novel. Even better, they can force you, when writing a new draft, to craft all of your sentences to match their standard. “From a little spark may burst a flame.” —Dante Alighieri Copyright 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
In a world awash in forensic details, a writer who wishes to include mystery elements in the story can forget a basic lesson from the days of yore. DNA is good, ViCAP is good, hacker tricks are good, but such technical advances tend to appeal to us because we are too dumb to understand that stuff. They serve as points of instruction, if you will. Yet myths and other tales from the distant past found other ways to tantalize. At the heart of many of them was an object of great power. These days readers won’t accept a protagonist who meets a mermaid holding a golden ring, but you can use the ring. Anything unique and valuable has an intrinsic fascination. Such objects serve as touchstones in our subconscious, relying on a more primal urge. If a woman hungers for a golden amulet, we instinctually understand why she could go mad in the pursuit of it. So how does that notion work practically? Let’s say a contractor steam-shoveling the foundation of a new house uncovers a skeleton. By all means bring on the crime technicians. But if one bony finger is adorned with a gemstone with obscure runes engraven on it, the subconscious lust within us for such a talisman commands our attention. Who is this person who would possess such an object? What are those runes all about? Why didn’t the killer seize the gemstone? You heighten the reader’s powers of concentration with such an age-old feature. The pragmatic detective will try to link the object to the slain victim’s nearest and dearest. When the divorced husband claims to know nothing about it, his ignorance causes outrage. You fool, how could you not know about the stone? You can devise an expert in runes who studies the object and comes up with an obscure phrase: At midnight rises the chariot, or whatever you like, as long as it can be explained when the proper context is finally provided. As new clues turn up, the investigator can keep asking how they relate to the gem. In this era of zoned to a cell phone, we have merely submerged our primitive desires. In everyone’s heart lurks the wish for a rich relative who will die and leave us a pot of gold. Layer on the cool tech, but you may find that what the reader remembers after putting down the book is the scrawl on the gemstone. Exercise: Finding a suitable object of rabid desire is easy. Just start reading a body of myths that spark your interest. Christian lore, Irish lore, Egyptian lore, are filled with stories of Aladdin types. Once you find an idea that intrigues you, think of how the talisman can be fitted into your book as a twist: the secret underlying the glow. “The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.” —H. P. Lovecraft Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
All of the preliminary notes in the world cannot prepare an author for the pull that a character will exert on a novel. Even a heavily plotted story needs a core of distinctive characters. The ability of an author to let go of the reins on those characters in large part determines whether they will be compelling to the reader. As the notes gain life in actual scenes, the personality traits that the writer at first thought would govern a character’s actions are laid bare on the page. Let’s say the original intent was to create a young man who is given to fighting because he has to survive in a rough neighborhood. Environment produces trait: that makes sense. As a consequence the earliest scenes consists of different fights, as well as reactions by those around him to his fighting. Then out of nowhere you write a scene where the young man meets someone he likes, and she has no interest in such a thug. After you write it, you like it—you like the chemistry between them and know you can write it well going forward. But she won’t accept him the way you’ve written him. Does the character have to change from fighting to wearing flowers in his hair? In the first place, it is not a yes/no question. Characters can have opposing thoughts at the same time. So maybe his being proud of hitting changes to his knowing he has to protect himself, but he becomes ashamed of himself when he loses his temper. Maybe he goes on fighting and tries to hide it from her, until she’s fed up and leaves him. Maybe her curtailing his fighting becomes a long-range plot line, until they finally move across the river to a nice town in New Jersey. No matter what you decide, the intent of the original character note has changed. Proto boxer has become more interesting. You have to figure out how to reconcile competing imperatives. In the process the character will also become more original, able to stand out in the teeming crowd of angry young men in other books. What may also change is the prominence of the new character. Maybe on that initial list of character notes she was buried way down on page 7. She was supposed to be merely a foil for the hero. But when you start writing about her, you realize you are connecting with her, in that strange alchemy that produces magic in writing. It may be time to take another look at your notes and think through how she will affect the assignments for more featured characters. Exercise: Notes are not graven in stone. They are supposed to be guidelines. It is a useful habit to set up a weekly time when you review your notes. Read them over and see what still pertains and what can be jettisoned. In the process, write new notes that better fit how the story is evolving. “The only thing I fear more than change is no change. The business of being static makes me nuts.” —Twyla Tharp Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
Churning out dialogue is the easiest technique for a writer to master. Not surprisingly, that is also the way a first draft may come out of your head. You imagine a setting, so the descriptions come forth, but mostly the conversations are what pour out. To a large degree, you fill in the other scene pieces around the dialogue. Yet dialogue also is the most opaque of writing methods. The same line spoken by a different character may take on a wholly different meaning, and the line can be interpreted various ways even if spoken by the same character. If you are interested in fuller characterization, you have to accept that your rat-a-tat scene is only the first step toward the one that will appear in your final draft. You must convert dialogue into narrative. How is that done? One way is to isolate a block of dialogue. Let’s say a homeowner and his son want to tar a driveway. After a trip to their friendly Home Deep for a barrel of tar and some brooms, the father instructs his boy on how to do the job. Lots of dialogue, some pithy adolescent snark, stern dad you know the way they get. That runs on for several pages. Your goal is to reduce that by half, maybe more. The first step is picking the point of view. Whose thoughts are running through the scene? Let’s choose the son, since sarcasm is fun in thoughts as well. Rather than talking through all of the steps of tarring—are you writing a manual?—try to summarize the basic points and then apply the son’s feelings about the procedure in general. Does he want to help in the first place? Is he physically uncoordinated? Is a part of him secretly terrified that, at some point, he is going to accidentally tip over the entire barrel of tar? Now go further. When does this scene occur in the book? In other words, what has happened between father and son prior to the scene, and where do you project they will end up? The son’s thoughts are also a step along that continuum. What did dad do earlier that week, or even that morning, that really pissed him off? Has the son just learned a shocking revelation about his dad? Bring that into the proceedings while he’s sweeping out the stupid tar like dad says. At the same time, you want to modulate the tone to fit the stage in the book. Do you really want an explosion on page 40 that leads to days of petulant silence? You may need to have them talk during those days. Stalking off in anger after the son has ruined the lawn would allow the two to cool off by that evening. When you start writing out all of the feelings, you’ll find that the dialogue shrinks to merely prompts for the next string of thoughts. The two pages might be broken up into interludes of a few lines apiece. Now the scene has become an exploration of character. “Grave silence is far more powerful than the same old voices yapping away.” —Carolyn Chute Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
The dictum “Show, don’t tell” is solid in principle, but authors can stumble when trying to apply it in practice. Usually, the trouble stems from the distance between the author and the character narrating the scene. The author is merely pretending to be the character, and so when a new subject—most often a new character—comes up, the author tells what they “know” about it. Let’s use the example of a drunken father. The character shows up on the family doorstep looking to cadge money, and the scene is narrated by the son. The author writes a paragraph about how the father used to be a respectable butcher but hit his wife while drinking, to the point that she left with her two boys. She has an income, and she is contemptuous but also fearful of her former husband. So far what you’ve learned about the character are merely notes. The author is trying to devise who the heck the guy is. Once the basic premise is set, the notes have to be made active. You can start with easy stuff: descriptions. A man who drinks too much has it stamped on his face. He may smell like the liquor he drinks. How does he walk? Does he have a nervous tic because he needs a drink? All of that can be shown without any commentary needed. Now see if you can dig a little deeper. If the son answers the door—let’s say he’s 16—he has a long relationship with dear old dad. The son knows a good chunk of the marriage history, and he has likely been burned by his father before. How he interacts with Dad and what they say to each other can make all sorts of points about their relationship. Say, the father hates his wife for taking his children. He is going to try to persuade his son of the truth the way he sees it. But hasn’t the son heard his father complain dozens of times in the past about her? You construct the dialogue so the kid says, “Dad, you’ve told me this story a hundred times. I know she’s a terrible person.” Nuff said. You’ve made the point implicitly. Do you want to show that the son still needs his father’s love? Have the father, subtly or not, ask his son for money. Don’t you think that will bring tears to his son’s eyes, seeing his father stoop so low? Examine every sentence of your notes about a character and decide: is there a way to make this idea active? If you have to go further than you want to show a point, such as the son driving by the store the father used to own, maybe that is relegated to told history. But even there, it is not hard to devise a paragraph in which the son is being driven somewhere in town. “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” —Benjamin Franklin Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
A good novel is stuffed full with details. Hundreds of narrative sentences contain a pinpoint observation or physical reference point for the characters occupying the setting. A casual reader may well wonder: how could the author come up with so much great minutia? While it is true that good writers are observers, you can avail yourself of a more practical method: actively minded research. You can choose the topic you want to illuminate and then go hunting. Let’s say you want to write about life in Chicago during the Depression. Any number of history books and websites contain photos and drawings that you can peruse. You can flip through them, looking for a detail that catches your eye. In particular, you want details that cement that place and time. You won’t find anyone today carrying a sandwich board, for example. A Hooverville by the railroad tracks can pin the reader to the 1930s. Such details can be amassed in several ways. The first one is jotting down items on a list. You see a detail, it looks evocative, and you write it down. Later on you may have to sift through dozens of pages, looking for it, but even that random process can be invigorating. As you read through the list, new ideas can be sparked in your mind, leading to more details. A second variety consists of details you select for specific characters. You might be curious, for example, about what details of clothing separated a destitute woman from one unaffected by the Depression's economic fallout. As you file through photos or written accounts, you can target your specific concerns and then jot them down under a list for each character. Another fruitful source comes from watching movies. Forget about the story lines; you want to pay attention to the scenery, the costumes. As long as you watch them on a streaming device, you can freeze frames when a telling detail leaps out at you. Your involvement in poor Nell’s pathos may be restricted, but you can write down that great image of the laundry being hung across the living room window. Throughout the process, you are not a passive note taker. By putting images and ideas into your own words, they are also crafting how you want to use the material. One writer might focus on the tattered hem of a dress, in the example above, while another contrasts a man’s pants with his child’s socks. In your accumulating embarrassment of riches, you can apply any interpretation you like. Exercise: The process undergoes a second infusion of creativity once you place the detail in the manuscript. At that point you not only know which character is affected by the detail, but what they are doing in that specific scene. How the item is judged changes accordingly, and you may find that the end result is quite unlike what you originally wrote down. “The truth is in the details.” —Stephen King Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
Many authors carry away from their studies in higher education, sometimes for decades, a disdain for commercial fiction. When they finally sit down to write that novel that has been brewing inside, they know one thing: they’re not writing any slam-bam piece of trash. What they might not realize is how far the gulf between a popular and literary novel really is. The project begins the way they have read in countless great books: from inside the main character’s(-s’) head(s). They try to connect with their feelings while recording the supposed feelings of the character they have chosen. What emerges is heartfelt, strong enough swelling in the breast to command several read-throughs immediately afterward, even causing tears. Pages fly by this way until the author decides to review a chapter or several chapters. Given the distance of time, head scratching may follow. Yes, plenty of emotions but they seem so precious and . . . so ordinary. A common reaction is to hone the writing. More exactitude will certainly help, but the key element in elevated prose is: perspective. Great writers have greater thoughts, greater insights, greater concentration. How can a mere mortal possibly reach that high? You can start with sweeping statements. “All my life . . .” is a useful way to think of the matter. Sharon didn’t just have a thought in reaction to what Lisa said; she has thought that way since she can ever remember. Take a thought that you think is suitable for such grandiloquent treatment, and make it into that sort of declaration. If you weren’t your vain self, would you believe it? You may wince inside: man, that is disregarding so many qualifiers you could name. But that’s what great writers do. They put on their Norman Mailer hat and proclaim: There, that’s a universal truth. If you, reader, don’t like it, put down the book. I dare you. When you start writing that way, you’ll find that you have to become a bigger thinker. A bold claim can’t be dopey, or at least not consistently. You may be forced to think all the time about your book, waiting for eureka moments to pop out of nowhere. That’s what I meant to say! Or you’ll be conducting research, and reading about one fact makes a connection subconsciously to a completely different part of the book. That’s because an author has to be larger in order to fashion a larger-than-life character. Exercise: You can work to make the ordinary sublime. If you focus on a thought that you want to become larger, and carry it around in your head as you go about your day, you will find that variations will come to you. You can keep jotting them down, over a course of months if need be, until you reach the higher plane you desire. “Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.” —Margot Fonteyn Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
When writing nonfiction that has a historical aspect, many authors prefer to focus on a person as a narrative thread. This strategy makes sense for several reasons. First, it gives the book, or section of it, a focal point around which other material can align. For instance, information on the growth of intercontinental missiles, or ICBMs, can be attached to an account about John F. Kennedy. Second, readers like to read about famous and/or heroic people. In the previous example, the draw of a historical figure like Kennedy is self-evident. Most nonfiction books also contain dominant themes, and in many cases the main theme is the new prism through which a historical period is viewed. To continue with JFK, think of all the books that have been written about Camelot. Each one has to contain a new prism, because the amount of new research any new author can uncover by now is fairly slight. So, one new prism might be along the lines of “The Nuclear Strategy of John F. Kennedy.” The problem is, you can get lost in the details. Because material about your lead figure is often plentiful—since so many comments have been made about her—you can get lost in the minutia about the person. If she kept her cards close to the vest, say, instead of delegating responsibilities and contacting other players for points of agreement, then the narrative may get caught up in personal spats she had. While such altercations are entertaining, the theme of “she listened to too few people on nuclear arms policy” may get lost for pages at a time. Your new book is not so special now, particularly if you have used older books as a source for those spats. Even worse, getting too involved in personalities can lead an author to make an unsupported case either for or against the historical figure. Plenty of examples can be found to make any argument. If you’re down at the level of spats, the failure to delegate starts to look like a real problem. But that’s not the point. The theme was: what was the impact on U.S. nuclear policy during that era? Journalists are known for finding opposite views for an article. While this in itself can create bias (e.g., giving scientists on either side of the global warming debate equal weight), it is a useful corrective for a nonfiction author. If you find you are ganging up personal facts on one side, you have stop yourself. Don’t get carried away in your own tide. If you’re accenting the negative, deliberately look for positive examples. That will allow you rise up once again to more of the helicopter view, where you can see the entire landscape of your project. Exercise: Write a list of the themes you want to emphasize. Now read through a chapter, keeping that list right next to your screen. Are your examples aligned with the themes, or are they burrowing down into personal trivia? Look in particular for personal interactions. Are you displaying theme or a personality trait? “A bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn't allow it to spoil your lunch.” —Kingsley Amis Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
Writing historical fiction entails blending what is real with what is made up. Because, even today, so much that happens in a historical figure’s private life is unknown, a writer has plenty of room for the imagination. One bedeviling issue that can arise early in a book’s plotting is: how much dramatic weight should a defining historical event have on the story? I’ll throw out an example to put the matter in more concrete terms. Let’s pick the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Let’s further postulate that your original story germ was a tale of two brothers who live on the big island of Hawaii: one for whom love goes good and the other where it goes bad. You were thinking it would happen in or around the 1930s because that’s a period in Hawaiian history you find intriguing. Yet Pearl Harbor is a draw for readers, who otherwise might shrug at a novel written during an obscure time in Hawaii. Once you decide to include it, a logical first impulse is to make the attack the climax of the book. I mean, how can you top Pearl Harbor as a plot event? You can’t get a more bang-up finale than that. Yet in your initial plot notes, you don’t have either of the brothers going to Oahu at all. Maybe one of the themes of the novel is the islanders’ resentment of the encroaching Americans. Do you really want to warp the entire book just so it includes an event that, admittedly, would be very attractive to readers of historical fiction? You decide: one of the brothers could decide to sign up as a sailor in the summer of 1941. He’s rebellious, and he’s going to lose in love anyway. The more you mull over the consequences, though, the more you realize that you don’t want to research Honolulu, don’t want to research the requisite military history—heck, you hate that your tax dollars are wasted on the bloated military budget. So, does Pearl Harbor have to go in the trash can? A marketing concern does not have to be a novel’s main concern. You could devise a scenario where the #3 male character in the book—say, a rival for one of the women—enlists only to be killed that day. The attack happens “offstage”—that is, not covered in a live scene. The fallout of public opinion would still wash over the book, but now the event is confined in the private sphere where you’d like the story to take place. Exercise: A good way to achieve both aims is to feature the selected character (the #3 in the example above) showing repeatedly their interest in your historical event. If that character talks in multiple scenes about proving himself as a man, or really hates the Japanese merchants in their Hawaiian town, you are guiding the reader toward the public aspect of the novel. “What is history but a fable agreed upon?” —Napoleon Bonaparte Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
Any author who receives a rejection letter that says “I couldn’t connect with the characters” feels the bewilderment of what they’re supposed to do. While that stock response can refer to the lack of depth in the narrative voice, what about a novel that is filled with action? This type of book usually is written in the third person, and multiple points of view are used. So you’re not going to achieve that much depth with any one of them anyway. You can, however, make your characters more distinctive. When I suggest specific places where an author could better fill out a character from the inside, what I often find in response is a surface-level reaction. When, for instance, a detective reacts to the sudden appearance of a figure on a dark city street, the author's reaction might be: “He knew he had to steel himself for the worst.” While that might be fine, it is also typical. You can almost hear the trumpets blare before the two jousting knights charge toward each other. What was the agent’s/editor’s comment? Not connecting. Maybe it’s because of typical reactions like that. Right, what any male would think. Click to open a rejection notice. To extend this example, you should try to go deeper than the noble guy. Stop and shut your eyes, not looking at the character out there on the screen. Take a minute and sort out what you would feel. Write three separate options: one noble but one the opposite of noble, and then one that is a tangent of the opposite of noble. If the opposite is “He felt an urge to stain his pants,” then jump from there. One thought might be: “He was really offended . . .” Then choose one and keep writing for maybe another quarter page. How is that working out? Does it feel like a TV rerun? Then select another and write out a quarter page. If you feel you need to explore the third option, write out a quarter-page skein for that. As you’re writing each one, keep thinking about alternatives. What did the character do earlier in the novel? Say, he found he actually understood the problem his daughter had in her math homework. He is the same guy in both situations. Could the homework helper influence the thoughts of the tough detective? In other words, the way to be different is to reach for another gear, one that is unexpected but also makes sense, because we liked him when he was helping her with the homework. You may find, by the time you have finished the third alternative, that you have another idea altogether: one that’s truly unique. What you’re doing is bringing all parts of your character to bear on that moment. That’s depth. “My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.” —Paulo Coelho Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
Most writers intuitively grasp the need for conflict in a novel, because strife between characters creates obstacles for the main character. Yet the logic often extends only to protagonist and antagonist, leaving gaps of tension strewn through the story. When plotting out a scene to be written, an author is better off looking for sharper edges among characters of all stripes. A common scene type that falls flat takes place between characters in a buddy pair, usually with the protagonist and a friend or relative. Such scenes can be filled with jokes or exchanges designed to show the personal side of the main character. Any danger posed by malign characters is forced to lie in wait, and any tension created before the scene fizzles out as shots of tequila or what have you are exchanged. Somehow the most basic truth we know—everyone lives their life alone—melds into a sort of relationship glop that could only exist in a book. The lie in that artifice can be easily exposed. While you and your partner, say, are aligned on many issues, you also bicker constantly because you have differing views as well. If you are trying to create conflict, why are you writing kumbaya scenes? At the very least, doesn’t familiarity breed contempt? Another factor should contribute to that feeling of being set apart. If Stanley Elkin is correct when he says, “I would never write about anyone who was not at the end of his rope,” how does your protagonist’s desperation look to others? If she commits a major faux pas, why would you think her friend would rush to her aid? Even if your sister does something embarrassing in public, your first reaction will be to join the crowd and shun her. Or, at a minimum, stay silent and leave her to dangle on her lonesome. Recognizing when close binds fray can aid in devising scenes that show those tears. If the hero is acting so badly that even friends make themselves scarce, the reader realizes how unusual the situation is—and that adds tension. It also requires that you think through all of the characters’ personal agendas so that they don’t align. How can you set competing interests in play all through the book and still devise reasons for them to appear together? You can go deeper into characterization as well. If the main character is going wrong, and that rubs a friend the wrong way, what is being rubbed? You have to think through what the baseline of the character’s traits are. If he is shy, a hero’s insistence that he clear their name will cause resentment. I don’t do that stuff, so why are you asking? Then follow that thread—how can you keep rubbing that sore spot in new and interesting ways? Now you have friction abroad and friction at home. “One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.” —Euripides Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
Writers are lucky that the human species does not wake up instantly. Instead, we lounge in bed, even after the alarm goes off. In those minutes before fully awakening, thoughts about your story can come to you. Like a cyclone, a ball of thoughts about a scene can spin out of the nether regions. Soon enough, you find yourself trying to lock down the ineffable so that you can include it in the book. What ends up happening, unless you possess a preternatural ability to access your subconscious, is that you concretize only a small portion, maybe a paragraph. Lying in bed, you keep repeating the words, over and over, until you remember them well enough that you can jump up, rush to your desk, and record them. Repeating also helps you to judge whether you really have discovered a bon mot. Many times the thoughts tumbling inside your head can glow because the general direction seems so promising. When you actually pull one of the lumps out into plain view, you may find that it is really dross. That realization may occur while you’re still in bed, when you write it down, or when you review it later, thinking you were so damned smart and . . . wazzz this thing? Once you have written down your eureka thought, don’t set it aside and trot off to breakfast. Dwell with it awhile longer. You may not be able to recapture the glowing whorl, but you may be able to tack on thoughts to what you have. What are the possible consequences of that sentence or two you wrote down? Let’s say the line is: “She didn’t mind that he wasn’t smooth, that his chin scratched her. She was pleased he had tried at all.” What do you know about that woman character? Does this new thought turn up a new trait of hers you hadn’t considered? Bear in mind that you don’t have to write follow-on text. You could simply make a note about her in her character-notes file: I want her also to be like “that.” When you dwell in the pursuit of what pulled you out of bed, you may find, while drinking a cup of coffee to keep waking up, that you are tingling with the promise of a good writing session to come. Maybe the page you write that morning is more pedestrian than your eureka sentence, but it still a page of writing you put down on paper. Especially if you had been building up to a new breakthrough over the past few days, the one thought bursts open a dam of other thoughts. Brilliance doesn’t only come in spurts. Once you have material down where you can work with it, you can rewrite until that entire page shines as well. “The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.” ―William Faulkner Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
Most authors writing a series are aware that each of the books must stand on their own. That means a new plot and new characters, since the one usually requires the other. Yet a series does feature the same protagonist and often a core cast of characters. They all have rich backgrounds once the first book is written. So what is the dividing line between starting a new book from scratch and borrowing too much from a past book? A first guideline is: use narrative summaries. You shouldn’t be borrowing parts of scenes from a previous book. Anyone who read that book will experience deja vu—didn’t I already read this stuff? No one likes to read repeated material, even if they haven’t read a book in a while. When you use narrative summaries, you can then follow a second guideline. Write out any background information from a previous book in the same way you would write background info for a new character. You write a paragraph or two, maintaining a narrative distance because you’re trying to get through the material quickly. If you have backgrounds for multiple characters in a core cast, you can drop in the compressed back stories at opportune times for each (that is, not all stuffed in one place). That’s the way you would do it if you were starting off fresh. There is an additional consideration. What if the first book is not picked up by an agent or doesn’t sell to a publisher? You may need to be flexible. The second book you write may end up being the one that sells first. All that time you lavished on background material for the second book now has to be tossed. You have to write new material to insert in what you thought was the first book. How much time do you want to spend on stuff that is not moving the story forward? That leads to a third guideline: write the narrative summaries as though they would fit for any book in the series. That means in particular that you shy away from referring to specific events in a previous book. If you feel that the character’s history must contain them, leave a few sentences in that paragraph(s) blank. That way you can fill in the events once you know in which order the books will appear in the store. That last point touches upon a very common problem with writing sequels. You can be trapped by what happened in a previous book, to the point that you get stuck and can’t devise new plot events for the new book. Forget what happened. Just relate how the characters related to each other. That’s all the series reader will remember, anyway. “The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.” —Salvador Dali Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
One common issue in story structure concerns the balance between the ongoing story and the background pieces that fill out the characters’ past. Since authors tend to insert background work early in a novel, the problem is made more acute. So much time can be spent in the past that the present-day plot never has a chance to generate the momentum needed to pull the reader through the book. While the imbalance can be be addressed partially by paring back the background stories, I find as an editor that most of that sort of work is worthy of inclusion. It is important to make characters as distinct as possible, and limning their childhood, for instance, is a solid way to do that. So how can these two imperatives work in better harmony? A first step is reviewing the background pieces, especially entire chapters. How many do you have? Using a rough count, add up the number of pages devoted to background as well. Then count the number of present-day chapters during that same early stretch, along with its aggregate number of pages. If the count is roughly equal, one method of lessening the drag of background pieces is seeing if you can combine them to create fewer of them. This is particularly effective if you are trading back and forth, one for one, between present and background chapters. When you make longer chapters by ganging them up, you are jerking the reader back into the past fewer times. That raises a new issue, of course. Aren’t I creating more emphasis on the past by allowing the reader to dwell there longer? That can be addressed by several strategies. First, increase the length of your present-day chapters, ganging them up if necessary, in order to maintain a preponderance on that side. Also, because you generate more tension in chapters in which readers don’t know the outcome, you can create stronger momentum in the present-day chapters by making sure they end on a tense note that the reader wants to see resolved. You leave them hanging, in other words. When you create a tense chapter ending, the reader will have a strong desire to return to the present. Once you have done that, return to the background pieces with an eye toward cutting them down. You’ll find that the background chapters want to be more compressed, not covering a flashback second by second, because you know the reader is waiting for you to get back to the good stuff in the present. Exercise: An efficient way to parcel out background information is use a ladder concept. That is, which character is highest on your ladder in terms of importance? The protagonist should get the greatest volume of background work early on. If you have stories about supporting characters, they can be pushed back later in the book. Just look for stretches where their roles in the present become more important. “The past is always tense, the future perfect.” ―Zadie Smith Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
The process of building a novel layer by layer is harder than it might seem. I regularly review books in which the author ramps up the tension toward a bang-up ending, but as a reader I’m not that energized to see how everything turns out. Sometimes the characters involved in the climax have dropped out of the book for a while. Sometimes they reached a high point earlier on, but by the time the climax sequence starts, they’ve been drifting for a while, waiting for the hero to get done with other necessary business before their turn to shine comes. I’m not engaged with them because, frankly, the author has shuttled them off to the side. How do you build a story so that the climax has the reader sitting on the edge of their seat? One useful technique is starting from the end of a draft and working backward. What is your high point for a character arc? Let’s say you have a black widow, with three husbands dead in mysterious circumstances, who tries to seduce the hero from the very beginning of their relationship and will seduce him finally in the climax. How do you get from the one point to the other in a way that keeps building? You work backward. In the end, let’s say she ties him up and lays him on a pool table, ready to plunge a syringe into him. Okay, nice about that. I could get tensed up about that. Now look at what she was doing in the scene prior to that. She was at the hardware store, buying the rope. Okay, that produces what I call anticipatory tension. What about the scene before that? Oh, she’s milling around the bad guys’ mansion, not performing. Meanwhile, the hero is busy—trying to slip onto the grounds outside. What is the effect on the reader? While she’s waiting around, I’m losing interest in her. If the hero is otherwise occupied, she has to have things to do on another front. Better yet, she needs to be taking active steps that will combat the inroads that the hero is making on the villainous operation. Part of making her more vital is clearing the deck of other characters—focusing on her. More to the point, though, is looking back to the beginning and examining what she was doing when she met the hero. How can you build scenes from that starting point? Or, if you do have a good run of scenes that continue to build sexual tension for a while, where does she run out of gas and go into a holding pattern? Could she be assigned other nefarious duties as part of the villainous operation? In other words, seduction is good. Deception is good. Are those qualities going to be enough, however, to sustain her all the way through the book? If not, you have to buttress her role with other activities, such as building a scam to defraud a partner in evil. You can best decide how to do that by viewing all that you have built and working backward. Exercise: Focus on a single character and put that name at the top of a chart. At the top of the first column, write #—the chapter numbers where they appear. In the next column, write down Pages—which pages that scene occupies (e.g., 43-48). In a wide third column, write Synopsis—you’re going to summarize in a few sentences what the character does in that scene. Now start at the bottom—say, row 20. Work your way back from the end of the novel and see, in reverse, how you have built that character arc. You’ll be surprised at where you are failing that character. Now give them something to do all the way through. “Never confuse movement with action.” —Ernest Hemingway Copyright @ 2021 John Paine. All rights reserved.
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