on writing – Bennett North

March 25, 2015March 25, 2015

See You Next Tuesday

There’s been some discussion today about a new app called Clean Reader, which will allow you to read your favorite ebooks with the profanity edited out. Not surprisingly, some authors are vehemently against the idea, seeing it as, at best, censorship of their work, and at worst, unlawful editing of a copyrighted text. Others point out that the app doesn’t actually change the text in any way; it simply blanks out the offending word, and the app user has the choice to read the uncensored book if they want. The Clean Reader blog says that customers, having paid for a book, should be allowed to consume it however they want.

It reminds me of the controversy a few years back when an Alabama publishing company decided to replace the n-word with ‘slave’ in their reprint of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. The publishing company argued that some people can’t get past the word in order to grapple with the actual issues of the story, and their edition allowed more schools to add the books to their summer reading lists. Critics pointed out that making the book more palatable was missing the point. Pretending people didn’t use that word meant ignoring the very reason the word is considered harmful today.

It’s twee to say that good writers don’t need to use profanity, or that clean writing is quality writing. Authors use words for specific effects, and the words people use can tell a lot about character and setting and class. Anyone who has seen movies edited for television can understand the comical effect that the sanitized language can have on a story. Words are tools to be used, and there are some effects that can only be achieved with the use of profanity.

On the other hand, I can see good reason why people should be allowed to convert the media they consume into a more accessible format. Many video games have colorblind mode for gamers who wouldn’t be able to distinguish between the default colors of the game. Visually impaired movie viewers can watch movies with audio description tracks that sometimes change dialogue. Abridging stories for audiobook is a common practice. Publishers translate books into other languages to make them available to larger audiences. The Harry Potter series was edited to make it less British for American readers.

A dislike of profanity doesn’t exactly constitute a disability, but I can appreciate that some people have a far greater distaste for dirty words than I do. If they prefer to read bowdlerized versions of their favorite books, even knowing that the edited content might be inferior or even incomprehensible, then that’s their choice. Perhaps Clean Reader should allow authors to opt out of having their text available, and let readers read the rest however they like.

Further reading:
Joanne Harris’s post, “An Email from Clean Reader”
Chuck Wendig’s post, “Fuck You, Clean Reader: Authorial Consent Matters“

Talent is a myth

Late last week, an article on The Stranger made the rounds on Twitter, shared among furious writers of all kinds. The article, “Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach In One” purported to have advice for aspiring writers, by a former professor who had seen it all.

It wasn’t great advice. The very first tip said that writers are born with talent, and the odds were that you don’t have it. It went on to say that if you didn’t start writing as a teenager, it was too late now. If you don’t read the hardest, densest prose you can get your hands on, you’re a failure, and—in a very weird paragraph—if you write a shitty memoir about being abused as a child, the author wishes you’d been abused even worse as punishment for your crimes against language. No, seriously, he says that.

Chuck Wendig responded to the article with a couple posts. The first, “An Open Letter to that Ex-MFA Creative Writing Teacher Dude“, dissected the article point by point and is a good read. His second, “The Toxicity of Talent (Or: Did You Roll a Natural 20 At Birth?)” focused on that first point in the article, and that’s what I’d like to talk about right now.

When I was in school, I was a quick learner. I happened to be the kind of person who did very well in structured learning environments. That, paired with a terror of getting in trouble, meant that I did all my homework and read all the assigned textbooks and got straight As. I was good at school, and I got a reputation for being the smart kid.

Because of that, whenever I did something well, like write a short story I was proud of, kids would roll their eyes and say “Yeah but that’s just because you’re talented.” All that hard work I’d done on it? Yeah, no one cared. When they called me talented, even though they meant well, it was an insult. ‘Talent’ meant that the story was worth nothing, because I could have mashed my face against the keyboard and it would have been good.

So I’m going to call bullshit on the whole idea of talent right here. People do well at things because they work at them. I think the author of the original article had the wrong idea when he faced his students. He thought writers were born with talent, and the best writers he saw were ones who had started in their teens, yet he never made the connection that the ones who started writing in their teens had worked at their craft longer than the ones that started later.

Maybe you’re better at grammar because you read a lot as a child. Maybe you have a talent for dialogue because you watch a lot of movies. Maybe you’re a great artist because you enjoy sketching and people learn better when they’re having fun doing it. Those strengths didn’t spring from a vacuum. You have them because you worked for them, and the exciting thing about that is that you can develop any skill you want if you keep trying. ‘Talent’ is a myth. Start appreciating the hard work behind it.

January 22, 2015March 13, 2015

Nanowrimo Now What?: The Synopsis

In the second part of my “Nanowrimo Now What?” posts, I’m going to talk about writing a synopsis. This might seem like jumping the gun; after all, you’re not going to be querying agents for this monstrosity you’ve written just yet. But a synopsis can be used for more than just getting an agent interested in your story. It’s a key editing tool for figuring out what the heck your story is even trying to say.

When the rough draft of your novel has been spewed out onto the page, it might not look like what you first planned, if you planned at all. For people who write organically, you probably didn’t know where the story was going to end up until you got there, and that’s fine! For people who outline, you probably discovered along the way that the story needed to take a different direction at a certain point, or some key plot elements that seemed obvious in the pre-writing stages turned out to be unfeasible when you actually got to them in the story. When that happens, you need a synopsis.

If you really want to learn about writing a synopsis, go to Miss Snark’s blog and check out her critiques of various synopses. Actually, read everything she has to say about everything, because she’s got a lot of good advice.

A few things I learned from her:

The synopsis does not need to talk about every plot point in the story. It’s not really possible to fit your whole novel plot into the two to three pages (or less!) that a lot of agents ask for. So instead, look for the main character arc, and summarize that. Where did the main character start? What did she work to accomplish? How was she changed along the way? How does that fit with the theme of the story? What is the point to the whole thing? Forget all the side characters and details. This isn’t your story bible. This is just a broad summary of the main theme of the book.

On the other hand, you don’t want a character study. We need to see the specific events that changed your character, not just how they changed. You don’t need to follow the chronology of the book. Write the events as they logically lead into each other.

Make sure you put the stakes front and center. What does the main character stand to lose? What is her motivation? What does she want, specifically, at the beginning of the novel, and how does she get it?

Forcing yourself to whittle down your novel into a svelte synopsis makes you focus purely on the bones of the novel. If you can’t answer the questions I asked above, then there are some big things missing from your novel. This is why you want to do the synopsis now, when you’re beginning editing, and not wait until after you’ve polished the fifth draft to a high shine and are ready to send it out. If you have any major plot holes, you’ll find that out now. If your main character doesn’t really have any strong desires and just lets herself be wafted about on the winds of fate, that’ll show up too.

Once you finish your synopsis and find all the incoherent plot points and unmotivated characters, put that synopsis aside and write a new one. This time, make sure it makes sense. Keep it broad. You don’t need to go into the details now. What you want is to make sure your story has strong bones before you start putting the meat on it. And yes, I know you’ve already written this thing, but the first draft is really just a method of piling up a heap of words so you can pick through it later to find the good stuff. You’re going to need to do another draft or two (or three or four) before this story is really done. So take this time to fix the mistakes you found in your first draft.

There. You’ve finished the synopsis. Now you have your blueprint for how the second draft is going to go. Time to get to work.

January 7, 2015March 13, 2015

A fresh start

Our traditional New Year's Eve sushi extravaganza. — Our traditional New Year’s Eve sushi.

I survived the end of December, although just barely. I got ridiculously sick on Christmas Eve and decided to spread the cheer by giving the cold to all of my friends and family.

My New Year’s resolutions are, like every year, about writing. This time I’m being a little more concrete with my goals. The three things I’d like to do in the new year are:

Write more
Walk more
Art more

To make this more tangible, I’ve made it my goal to do at least one of these things each day before I sink back into video games. I can either put a small amount of effort towards all three (a couple sketches, some brainstorming, and an exercise class), put a moderate amount towards two of them (make my 10,000 step daily goal and also write about 2,000 words), or put a great deal of effort towards one (run a 5k, do a binge writing session of 5,000+ words, or do a whole illustration). I think this is a more sustainable way of doing it, at least for myself. Having a variety of choices will take away that feeling of being stuck in a rut.

A while back my friend Méabh mentioned a writing and dieting plan that said you could eat as many calories as the number of words you’d written that day. Works well for people who want to write 1,500-2,500 words a day, but isn’t that healthy if it strays too far out of that range. I thought that another way of doing it would be to pick a number (say 12,000) and give myself the goal of reaching that number through number of steps walked, number of words written, or a combination of the two. The more I walk, the less I have to write, and vice versa. So far this year I’ve done very well with keeping my combo count at or over 12,000 but it’s only January 7th, so we’ll see.

Anyone else have any concrete plans for doing better in the new year? How long do you expect to last at it?

December 16, 2014March 13, 2015

Nanowrimo Now What?: How to Critique and Be Critiqued

I got my laptop back from the Genius Bar 10 days ago, and the graphics card has just started to go again, so I probably only have another week or two before the whole computer dies a third time. In the meantime: the post-Nanowrimo entry that I promised!

Writing groups are invaluable for authors. The one I’m currently in is run by my friend Rob, who I met through Nanowrimo lo these many years ago. If you’re looking for a writing group in your area, check out Meetup.com, or get in touch with the people in your regional Nanowrimo forums. If there aren’t any around, there are some online writing groups that might benefit you. You could also start your own, but I’d recommend seeing how other people run this kind of group before you take on the responsibility yourself.

How To Critique

1. It’s not all about you

A lot of groups require you to attend and critique other people’s work a few times before you can submit your own. The group isn’t there for you to dump your most recent work on and then jet off when you’re done. We’ve had a few people do this in our group—a brand new member signs up for their first month in the group, gives us a short story to have critiqued, and then never shows up again after that. Worse is when they do that but don’t actually show up for the critique itself. Writing groups are give-and-take, and that means you have to put in the time before you get the benefit. And why wouldn’t you? If you cultivate your relationship with the group, you can continue to use this resource for years afterward.

2. Their work is not your work

One of the first mistakes a lot of critiquers make is trying to mold other people’s work to fit their own style. You don’t say “It would be better if you…” when you’re critiquing. What you say is “This part didn’t work for me.” You’re there to tell the author what parts felt off to you. You’re not there to fix it. That’s their job.

3. Prioritize

Sometimes you’ll get a work that’s perfect in every way, and you struggle to find something to say. Other times you’ll get something that looks like someone mashed their face into a keyboard for ten minutes. In the first case, you congratulate the author and ask them what specifically they’re looking for, since the odds are they have an idea of what they think needs work (unless they’re just there for the accolades, which is something I’ll address in a moment). In the second case, you need to think about what advice will help the author the most. You can’t point out every mistake, because the author might get demoralized and give up on this story (or writing in general) forever, and in any case it’s a waste of your time. Instead, look at the big picture. What is the biggest problem with the story? Which thing, when fixed, will make the biggest difference? Focus on just one of them.

4. Forget grammar and spelling

No, seriously. Forget them. That kind of stuff is cosmetic, and it’s a waste of everyone’s time to focus on that when the whole story or chapter might be rewritten. There have been people in my writing group who refused to critique someone’s story because of the typos or punctuation problems they had, which is a ridiculously condescending thing to do. It’s not helping anyone. It’s just embarrassing the author. Remember when I talked about priorities? Grammar and spelling are two of the lowest priorities, and should be focused on only when the bigger issues have been fixed. You, as a member of the writing group, are not the end audience for this work. You’re seeing this story in all its rough, half-constructed squalor. Don’t waste your time critiquing the paint job unless the author asks for it.

5. Don’t forget the good parts

Yes, you’re there to point out the mistakes, but it really helps to point out what worked, too. Every single time you critique, try to find one thing you liked, even if you absolutely hated the story. They probably didn’t get everything wrong, after all, and a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, as they say. They’ll be more likely to listen to your critique if they know all is not lost. Additionally, letting them know what worked means that they won’t cut that part out in their edits.

How to be critiqued

1. It’s not all about you, part 2

It’s nice to get compliments on your work, but your writing group is not the place to get them. If you have a story that’s perfect in every way, maybe consider submitting something else instead. And if you do submit something that you think is perfect, don’t be surprised if and when it gets criticism. That’s the point of a writing group.

2. Stay inside the glass box

Some writing groups have this as a rule. Mine doesn’t, but sometimes I wish it did. When you’re getting critiqued, you cannot argue with your critiquer. Ideally, you shouldn’t talk at all. If your critiquer has completely misunderstood the point of the story and is going off in the completely wrong direction, it’s not your place to tell them. Once your work is out there in the wild, it has to stand on its own. You won’t be there to correct every reader of their misconceptions. So when your critiquers get something wrong, take that as a sign that you need to fix the story, not set your critiquer straight.

3. Give yourself a few days to soothe your ego

Critiques can be demoralizing. Remember: they’re not critiquing you. They’re critiquing your story so you can make it better. The ego punch gets easier each time you get critiqued, but it still can bug you even if you’re a seasoned veteran. Your first reaction might be to reject all the critique and give up on editing entirely. Don’t let that happen! Instead, wait a few days or a week, then revisit the criticism with an open mind. (I hope you took notes!)

4. Consider saying yes

There have been a few times in my writing group when my critiquers have suggested a change to the story that was completely out there. Get rid of your main character. Write the story from someone else’s point of view. Rework your magic system. My first reaction was to dismiss that out of hand. That big of a change is ridiculous, right? It would require rewriting everything. But then I actually sat down with my notes and said to myself “What if I did make this change? What then?” What had seemed ridiculous quickly became exciting, and the changes I made to my novel (rewriting it from the point of view of an entirely different character) vastly improved it. If you get advice like this, especially if it’s from a majority of your writing group, it doesn’t hurt to consider the possibility. Squash your initial urge to say no and seriously consider what the changes might do.

5. Know when to say no

On the other hand, there can be times when your writing group is urging you to write an entirely different story from the one you wrote, and you have to put your foot down. Remember that this is only a small subset of people, and they don’t always know what’s best for your story. If only one or two are advocating for a big change, or if the people who don’t like what you’ve done are people with little to no experience in your genre, it might be a good idea to put their advice aside. After all, your writing group is there to critique, and there is always going to be more to critique, ad infinitum. At a certain point, you have to know when to stop editing and release your story out there into the wild.

October 31, 2014March 13, 2015

Nanowrimo prep: Point of View

We’re coming up to the wire now: Nanowrimo starts in less than 3 hours for me (on Eastern Daylight Time) and has already started in most of the world. So here’s my final post in the Nanowrimo prep series. I hope to do a couple posts during the month of November if I can tear myself away from my own book, and I definitely have some plans for a “What Next?” series after Nanowrimo ends. So without further ado:

Point of View

This might seem like something very minor, and when compared to plot and setting and character, it is. Still, your decision to write in first, second or third person can make a big difference in how your reader receives the story.

Arthur Golden, who wrote Memoirs of a Geisha, said in a later interview that his first few drafts were written in third person, and while people were interested in the concept, no one wanted to touch the novel.

Before meeting Mineko, I’d written a draft in third person. Even after interviewing her I felt no temptation to try entering the head of my protagonist by writing in first person. Instead I wrote another 750 page draft in third person. While I was revising it for submission, a number of big name agents and editors in New York began calling me–very heady stuff for an unpublished writer. But when they saw the manuscript, they all lost interest. I know I’m a perfectly competent prose stylist; I didn’t think the writing itself had scared them away. And the subject matter is so fascinating–or at least it was fascinating to me. The way I saw it, if I’d failed to bring the world of geisha compellingly to life, I’d done something dreadfully wrong. And in fact, as I came to understand, my mistake was having chosen to use a remote, uninvolved narrator.

Writing the novel in first person made the story closer and more personal, which was exactly what the novel needed.

First person (“I walked down the street”) is particularly useful in genres where the action or emotion of the plot needs to come through. It seems to me that a large part of the success of Fifty Shades of Grey has been because it was written in first person, which lets the reader imagine that they’re the main character. It’s also popular in urban fantasy, which is often full of romance and action. Mira Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy did fantastic things with first person point of view, breaking a lot of rules. If you want to learn how to do first person well, read that series.

Second person (“You walked down the street”) is extremely rare. A lot of people have an irrational dislike of it. I happen to like it, but that’s just me. Unless you’ve been in Homestuck fandom, you probably haven’t seen too much of it, at least not in fiction. I wrote a short story in second person and my writing group unanimously hated the POV. One of them complained that she wasn’t doing the things described in the story, so why was the text telling her she was? It was a bizarre complaint, but not uncommon. Writing in second person can make your novel stand out, but it runs the risk of putting off readers. Any time a writing technique is too obvious, it distracts from the story itself. If you have a good excuse for it, though, do it! Just beware of the potential response you’ll get. (Side note: this is why I recommend that beginning writers write fanfiction. You can experiment with lots of writing techniques like this one with very little consequence).

Third person (“She walked down the street”) is most common, and therefore most invisible. It might be more narratively distant than first and second person, but it’s useful if you have multiple points of view in your story, or if you want to leave a little bit of mystery in your main character’s head. It’s a pretty safe bet, for better or worse. Don’t rely on it too much, though, because you could be missing out on a better option.

Basic? Yep. And you might not even know which POV your story should be in until after you’ve written it. If you get a chance during the frenzy of Nanowrimo, try writing the opening scene in all three POVs and see which one sounds best. It might make a big change in your novel.

That’s it for my Nanowrimo prep posts. I hope they were helpful. For those attempting it this month, good luck!

Previous posts:

Outlining your novel
Making characters
Setting
Themes

October 17, 2014March 13, 2015

Nanowrimo prep: Themes

I remember in high school, reading books like Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Steinbeck’s The Red Pony and having to identify the Christ metaphors and color symbolism. I knew without a doubt that no author would ever actually put this crappy symbolism stuff in their novel intentionally. Unless you were doing it with the sole purpose of giving high schoolers work to do, what was the point of it all?

The idea of annoying high schoolers is a good motivating factor, but now that I’ve had a little more experience with novel writing, I’m beginning to realize that you can’t really write a story without a theme. A story without a theme has all the soul of a grocery list. It’s just a sequence of events with no real meaning behind it.

First, let’s define theme. A theme is what your story is about, even though it’s never stated outright. It’s the invisible thread that links your subplots to the main plot, and it’s the kind of thing that makes readers think about your book after they’re done reading.

For example, in Love, Actually, there are a number of story lines going on at the same time, but they’re all exploring different facets of love, illicit or familial or unconventional or passionate. In Batman Begins, the theme is fear, and how you let your fears define you–whether you use it to become a hero, or use it to control and incapacitate a city. In Finding Nemo, the theme is how avoiding all risk keeps you from experiencing life.

China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station always comes to mind when I think of themes. The book explores intersections and borders—that in-between space that happens when something meets up with something else. One character in the story is made up of pieces of many different creatures. He hires a sculpture to sculpt his portrait, and her challenge is finding how to represent those places where he turns from one creature into another. Yet she herself is a creature that has the body of a human female and the head of an ant. Another character is a bird-man, but his wings have been cut off, so he’s not quite bird enough and not quite man enough for the societies around him. The subway station after which the book is named is integrated so completely into the cramped neighborhood around it that no one can really tell where the neighborhood ends and the station begins. The more you look at the story, the more connections you can see to this specific theme.

I previously talked about making characters, and how they need to have goals throughout the story. The three questions that I recommended you ask for each scene were:

What does your character want?
What does she do to get it?
What do her actions achieve?

When you’re developing a theme, you can go back to those questions and add another question on the end:

Why?

Why do these particular consequences happen, and not others? If your character achieves what she set out to get, why? If she doesn’t, why not? What message are you trying to send with the outcome of your story?

I’m not saying that you have to have a moral to your story, but you should have a question that your story answers, or a statement that your story affirms. If your theme is “do the means justify the ends”, then at the end of the story, your plot should have answered this question in some way. If your theme is “love conquers all”, then when the curtain falls, love will have done so.

A lot of times, if you have an idea for a story, you already probably have an idea for a theme, even if you don’t know it yet. It’s especially thrilling when you examine your story in progress and realize that your various subplots already fit into a theme. As an exercise, look over something you’ve already written, or something you have in progress, and try to find a unifying thread that runs through the story. You might be surprised.

As an added bonus, just think of the irritated high schoolers who might be searching your book for these very themes in the future.

Next time: Point of View

October 3, 2014March 13, 2015

Nanowrimo prep: Setting

A lot of story planning can start with setting. Depending on the genre, you could come up with a whole series worth of plots, just from making a map and figuring out what kind of people live in the world you’ve created. The setting can (and should!) be a character in itself. It can help or hinder the events of the story and provide major plot points. There should be a good reason that the story is set where it is. The tv show Dexter wouldn’t be the same if it weren’t set in Miami. Buffy the Vampire Slayer wouldn’t be the same if it weren’t in California. Imagine Portal without Aperture Science. Imagine Batman without Gotham City.

Holly Lisle has a lot of good writing advice on her website, and one of the posts that I’ve found useful is her article on developing the fictional world through mapping. In it, she talks about how to make a map and how to use that to figure out a story. This is great for fantasy or science fiction stories that are set in places other than Earth, but even more local stories could benefit from mapping out a city or town.

Obviously only a tiny fraction of your research is going to make it into your story, because you don’t want to deluge your reader with information. One of the fastest ways to get someone to put down your book is to hammer them with paragraph upon paragraph of detailed description about your country’s history and system of currency and notable citizens. Those are things you can sprinkle in the story when (and if!) they become relevant. It’s okay if you come up with an elaborate system of laws and then it never comes up in the novel. Don’t try to force it in just so you don’t feel like you wasted your time.

On the other hand, you don’t want to suffer white room syndrome. That’s when your characters talk to each other and occasionally do things, all while moving around in featureless white rooms. Your reader is going to need something to anchor the scene. Visual descriptions are good, but using the other senses can be better. What does the place smell like? Sound like? What’s the temperature? The great thing is that this leads right back to character. What does your character think of the smell/sound/temperature? Are they the kind of person who bundles up in the slightest breeze? Does the smell remind them of their grandmother’s cooking? Is it always too loud for your character?

Your characters are going to be physically interacting with this setting, and it’s going to effect them directly in ways they might not even be aware of. They could have adopted the social mores and local dialect without realizing it. Alternately, they could be an outsider to the setting and come up against hostility or uncomfortable misunderstandings at every turn.

One thing I like to do in novels is consider the season and the weather. It’s a cliche to start your novel with a description of the weather, but occasionally referencing what’s going on outside can help set the scene and anchor the story in time. Is there a heat wave? Is there a blizzard forecast for later in the week? Have there been weeks of endless rain? Is it perfect spring weather outside? Mira Grant’s book Deadline, book two in the Newsflesh trilogy, has a major plot point centered around a hurricane that was honestly chilling when it was introduced.

There’s a lot more you can explore when building your setting, including time period, technology, religion, fashion, music, economy, politics, and so on. Just remember two things: try to give just enough detail to be interesting, and make sure not to get so involved in worldbuilding that you never get around to writing the story.

Next time: Themes

September 24, 2014March 13, 2015

Nanowrimo prep: Making characters

We found out this really simple rule… We can take these beats, which are basically the beats of your outline, and if the words ‘and then’ belong between those beats, you’re fucked, basically. You’ve got something pretty boring. What should happen between every beat that you’ve written down is either the word ‘therefore’ or ‘but.’ Right? So what I’m saying is you come up with an idea and it’s like okay ‘this happens, right? … and then, this happens.’ No, no, no! It should be ‘this happens… and therefore, this happens.’ [or] ‘this happens… but this happens.’
—Matt Stone and Trey Parker, creators of South Park.

You don’t have a story without character. This sounds obvious, and you might think that what I mean is that a story doesn’t exist without people for the plot to happen to, but that’s backwards. Plot doesn’t happen to characters. Characters create plot.

Certainly it’s possible to write a story where the plot happens independent of the actions of the characters, but that story is going to have a fatal flaw: the characters won’t develop and grow and achieve their character arc, since nothing they do has any effect on what happens to them. Unless the characters can make choices, suffer the consequences, and learn from their mistakes, they’re never going to change. And that, of course, is the point of the story: your protagonist is a different person at the end of the story than she was when the story began.

In other words, if you presented your protagonist with the same choice at the start and end of your novel, she should make a different choice the second time due to the stuff she’s learned over the course of the novel.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s the character arc, and first you need to come up with your character’s starting position. What does your character want? What is her driving motivation? As the curtain rises, what is your protagonist’s number one desire, and what is she doing to achieve that? Why are we even reading about this character in particular and not about someone else?

And while you’re considering that, what is your antagonist’s desire? The key factor that makes your antagonist an antagonist is that he is going to get in the way of your protagonist achieving her goals.

Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

— Kurt Vonnegut

1. Your protagonist has a desire, and a specific idea of how to achieve that desire (not necessarily what they’re going to do during the story, but what they THINK they’re going to do during the story).

2. Your antagonist has a desire, and a specific idea of how to achieve that desire, and their actions to achieving their desire are going to block your protagonist from their own goals.

It’s this conflict that’s going to kickstart the plot of your novel. Each subsequent scene is going to lead from the choices your characters make. If your plot requires characters to do things they’d never normally do, the story is going to feel forced and artificial for the reader. Everyone’s seen movies or read books where the characters act exceptionally dumb just so the next plot event can happen. It’s frustrating, and kicks the reader out of the story. Don’t do that. Instead, remember these three questions:

What does your character WANT?
What does she DO to meet those goals?
What do her actions ACHIEVE?

Every scene in your novel is going to answer these three questions, though the answers will change from scene to scene. What’s important is that they have answers, so the scene keeps moving forward. If she doesn’t want anything, then she won’t be taking any actions. If she wants something but doesn’t do anything to get it, that scene has no purpose and shouldn’t be in the story. If she wants something and does something to attain it, there will always be some sort of consequence to her actions, positive or negative.

Before this gets too long, here’s a list of questions you should ask for each main character in your story. I’ve cobbled this together from Chuck Wendig’s post on making characters. Forget the questionnaires that ask your character’s favorite color and most hated band. These are the questions you need to answer before you start your story:

What does the character want?
What does she do to get it?
What consequences happen as a result?
What does the character fear most?
What does she think the solution to her problem will be?
What is her greatest character flaw?
What is her personality, in one sentence?
What is her internal conflict?
What is her external conflict?
How is she connected to the other characters?
What is she good at?
What is she bad at?
How does she change over the course of the story?

If you can answer these questions, you’ll start to have an idea of how the characters are going to interact and what conflicts are going to come up between them. Your plot will develop from there.

Next time: setting

September 14, 2014March 13, 2015

Nanowrimo prep: Outlining your novel

Nanowrimo is a month and a half away, and while technically the rules state that you can only start planning a week in advance, I say fuck the rules. If you want to end November with a novel you can actually do something with, you need a plan.

Nanowrimo calls them planners and pantsers (as in, flying by the seat of your pants), although I’ve heard the latter called “organic” writers too. The idea is that there are two kinds of writers: those who outline, and those who make it up as they go along. There are benefits to both sides. In 2004 I started the month with absolutely no idea of what I was going to write about, and every word I wrote was a surprise to me. Where does the first scene start? Well, let’s pick a random room and say it’s in a bathroom. A bathroom where? In a church. What’s the character doing there? He’s at a funeral. Why isn’t he at the funeral itself? Because he doesn’t want to see his late best friend’s family. And so on. I love discovering the story at the same time the characters do. You don’t know what’s behind a door until you open it and find out what your brain has come up with.

Of course, pantsing means you end up with a massive, meandering novel that takes a lot of false turns before it finds its way, and that means there’s a lot of editing in your future. If you’d rather end up with something more coherent, you should have an outline. This can be anything from a vague series of scenes you know you need, to a specific scene-by-scene analysis. In 2009, I decided to outline my novel to within an inch of its life before I started. Oddly enough, this didn’t work very well. When I actually sat down to write, all the joy had been sucked out of the process. The characters felt wooden. The dialogue seemed unnatural to me because it couldn’t flow naturally when it had to follow a strict route. My novel ended up much, much shorter than it was supposed to, because I’d followed each point in the outline without any improvisation or tangents.

Over the next few years, I figured out how to have a plan that didn’t wring the fun out of writing. Here are a few suggestions for routes you can take. You’ll probably have to try a couple before you see what works for you.

The tentpole method:

You know a few key scenes in advance, and all you have to do is figure out how the characters get from one to the next. At the very least, the scenes you need to know should be the inciting incident (the event that sets the novel in motion) the turning point (what makes the protagonists start acting against the antagonist instead of just reacting) and the resolution (the final showdown or the event that resolves the plot). As you write, you’ll probably figure out more scenes that you need in order to get from A to B to C. I like to keep a running list of what I know I need to include, deleting the ones I’ve done and adding the new ones I’ve realized I now need.

The snowflake method:

This one’s a pretty famous method of outlining. Basically, the idea is that you come up with a short, one sentence summary of your story; then expand that to a paragraph; then expand each sentence of the paragraph to a paragraph of its own; and so on. Follow the link above to read the detailed explanation. If you’re someone who likes really specific outlines, this might work for you.

The story structure method:

Larry Brooks came up with this on StoryFix.com. I like this one a lot, and I’ve used it a few times. It’s a very formulaic way of plotting your story. Roughly, the scenes you need are:

the opening of your story
the story hook within the first 20 pages, that makes your reader get invested
the first plot point at the 25% mark of the story, where important information is revealed that changes what the hero knows
the first pinch point, where the antagonist shows their strength and acts against the hero
the mid point at the 50% mark, where the hero changes from reacting to acting
the second pinch point, where the antagonist shows that they have learned from their past mistakes and are stronger than ever before
the second plot point at the 75% mark where the final information needed to solve the problem is revealed, and the hero finally has everything they need to go against the antagonist
the final resolution

There’s a lot more to it than that, and I recommend you check that out at the link as well.

So with that in mind, what method do you think you’ll use?

Next time: character development.