Head on over to Lisa’s Writopia to read Lisa Binion’s wonderful review of The Life and Death (but mostly the death) of Erica Flynn! The Life and Death (but mostly the death) of Erica Flynn: A Review
And while you’re there, check out my guest post/interview on Lisa’s blog: Mythology and the Character of Erica Flynn – Sara Marian Guest Post /Interview
I’ve been tagged! Marian Allen posted about her writing process over at her blog, and tagged me to write about mine. So here goes:
First off, the process is a little different for every project. Of course, everything starts with an idea, whether it’s for a character, a storyline, a scenario, a pivotal scene, a setting, or a conflict. Generally, I’ve got a ton of random ideas floating around in my head at any given moment. While I’m doing other stuff, my brain is constantly fiddling around with these ideas and trying to connect them in interesting ways. At some point (seems like it’s usually when I’m either in the shower or about to fall asleep), my brain succeeds in coming up with something cool for me, and I know it’s time to start putting stuff on paper.
Generally, I don’t do a whole lot of planning, per se, but I do make notes of the pieces as they come together. If anything particularly complicated comes up, I’ll outline as much as I need to in order to keep things straight while I’m working on that section of the story. If nothing complicated comes up, I generally just write in the direction I want things to go, let the characters take the lead, and see how things turn out. If I get stuck, I might outline, I might cut a scene (I have a “scrap” file for anything I cut, in case I need it later), I might use a subplot point to push things forward, or, if all else fails, I just do something awful to the main character and force them to deal with it. (That’s partly a good way to move things forward, partly a good way to ramp up the conflict, and partly a sadistic way for me to take out my frustration on my character for not cooperating).
When writing short stories, I usually have a specific concept and/or conflict I want to explore, and the characters come about from thinking through what kinds of people that concept or conflict would involve. Short stories also involve a lot of staring at the screen and cursing and fighting the urge to bang my head on a desk, because pacing and balancing enough/not too much conflict is brutal for me on a short story scale. With a novel, I tend to have an easy time weaving plot and character together so that each drives the other forward in a way that’s unique to both those specific characters and that specific storyline. Most of what makes that possible is establishing strong but flexible characters early on in the process – once I know what my characters’ first instincts would be, but also what they’re capable of doing that isn’t in line with their normal behavior, it’s easy to let them guide the action, but it’s also easy to throw in plot points that are beyond their control and have them respond in ways that are both true to the character and helpful in advancing the story.
How do I create strong characters that feel real enough to work with this way? That’s a hard question, because the answers are vague and overly simplistic… I could say, I make them up, and it would be true, but I’d sound like I was being snotty – even though I’m really not! I could say, I try to look at them as people I’d have to figure out in real life, and that would be true, too, but it isn’t enough…it’s not just my attitude toward characters in general that makes a particular character really pop out in my imagination, or it would always be easy to do (and it isn’t, with 90% of all the characters that occur to me). I could say, I come up with a character who has the right personality for the kind of story I want, and that’s definitely the case, but also not enough to flesh out a 3-dimensional character that a reader (or I) would be interested in knowing better. For example, with The Life and Death (but mostly the death) of Erica Flynn, I knew from the beginning that it was going to be a book about someone determined to come back from a really cool afterlife in spite of all obstacles (I did have specific scenes in mind for the Underworld, the mini-climaxes, and the final outcome before I was even sure who the main character would be), and I knew it was a book about someone who needed to get back to their partner. I thought it would be too cliche to have the husband be in the wrong (let’s face it, ladies, sometimes we’re jerks, too) and have to do all kinds of feats and action-hero stuff to get home to apologize to his wife, so I went with a female narrator. I knew I wanted someone skeptical and funny to keep the book feeling modern and upbeat in spite of the focus on death. I wanted to keep myself from exploring a billion possible plot lines in a really cool setting, so in order to stay focused I wanted (a) first person narration and (b) a single-minded narrator. In order for anyone to willingly go through everything Erica would have to go through just to apologize – to leave behind the security of being invulnerable and having all her needs met, and go back to being mortal and vulnerable – and for her to be up to the task, I knew she needed to be (a) tough as nails, (b) fiercely loyal, (c) stubborn, and (d) clever. Now, this gives you, as a writer, a list of traits: skeptical, funny, single-minded, tough, loyal, stubborn, clever, and (given the need to apologize) probably impulsive.
A list of traits does not a character make. But you think about this character – this person – the way you might wonder about a new acquaintance. You know this person is tough and stubborn, and you wonder why. What have they had to deal with, or who did they admire and look up to who was that way? This person is impulsive, and you know that’s caused them trouble already – how are they going to deal with situations where they have to restrain themselves (or should restrain themselves) and what will happen if they can’t? She’s single-minded – does she miss things that you’d expect her to notice (given that she’s clever)? See, questions like this start to fill in the character’s background, family and friend influences, regrets, potential for making things worse on themselves, and how their traits play off of one another or augment each other. More like a real person, less like a list. And the process is the same for secondary and cameo characters, although generally not as in-depth or detailed as for the main character(s).
That’s about as organized an explanation of my process as I can come up with! Oh, and WRITE YOUR ROUGH DRAFT AS A WRITER, NOT AS AN EDITOR! You can edit once you’ve got the story on paper (or screen)!
I am not here today to post writing advice. Today, I am here to post about an aspect of writing that is incredibly difficult for me. Call it a rant, call it a cry for help…whatever. So these calls for short stories keep coming to my attention…short stories for anthologies with absolutely awesome themes (I can blame my publisher, 3 Fates Press, for 2 out of the 3 painfully cool themes). And short stories, for me, are like pulling teeth. Ask me for a novel any day – I mean, it’ll take a year to write and another year to edit, but I can come up with the material – no problem! But a short story is a different animal.
“Nonsense,” you say. “Surely a short story is much easier than a novel! It’s short. A novel is long! It’s simple. A novel is complex! It only needs one conflict and one climax. A novel needs many!” Ah. Yes, all these things are true. But therein lies the difficulty. I feel claustrophobic about short stories. I have to have enough conflict to make a story, but not enough to draw it out. I have to develop and push the characters – but very succinctly. I have to make the story world vivid, but I can’t put in anything that isn’t directly relevant to the forward progression of the plot. Mind you, I can write a haiku poem like it’s nobody’s business – I can be efficient with words! One of my personal rules for novels is that every scene has to do at least two jobs, or it gets cut.
My hope is that the motivation of having 3 awesome themes to work with, combined with the process of actually writing 3 short stories within a few months, will kick my brain into understanding how it’s done. In the meantime, those of you who find it easy to churn out short stories should count yourselves lucky – and feel free to offer advice on plotting (and keeping a plot on task)! Ha!
In my post last Wednesday, I mentioned that, leading up to the climax of a story, every choice closes one door and opens three more. That’s another of the things that makes The Middle the hardest part of a book to write – for me, anyway. There are so many variables, an infinite number of ways to get the characters from Point A in the storyline to Point Z, and of course, any writer worth his/her salt wants to find The Best Way.
There is your first mistake. Go with your instincts and don’t worry about whether it’s The Best Way or not. If it isn’t, guess what? You can rewrite it! But often, I’ve written things in on impulse and trusted that there was some reason my brain wanted it in the story, only to find that the whole solution hinged on it or that it was the one thing that tied everything together in the end. Also, many times I’ve written in something entirely useless and had to cut it, but the point is, you can cut something you don’t need, but if you don’t try anything out for fear it isn’t the right thing, you’ll stare at a screen all day and have no progress to show for it.
The difficulty in the middle of a story is that everything is in flux – as I mentioned last Wednesday, the beginning is a status quo and the end is a status quo, even if they’re vastly different. In the middle, you have to create the chaos that demands change. Except it can’t really be chaos.
It should seem messy to the characters, because when life gets demanding and we’re in transition, we feel like everything is up in the air, like things are beyond our control, and we don’t know what will happen next or how things will turn out or how best to rise to meet our challenges. During times of major change, real people are plagued by these kinds of doubts and this sense of the unsure future. Naturally, then, you want your characters to wonder what will become of them, how best to move forward, what’s really going on, etc.
But your plot cannot be chaos to you, the writer, obviously. To you, there must be a clear direction at all times, at least one purpose for each scene, a reason behind every choice every character makes, and an overall structure to the “chaos” of the plot. Simultaneously, you have to keep your characters in the dark, never forgetting that they don’t know what you know, letting them reach the conclusions that are logical to them based on the information you’ve provided them with through revelation, other characters, personal interests, or twists of fate. They have to find everything out on their own, though – they can’t just Know to go to such-and-such place at such-and-such time to find the person they’re looking for…and you can’t get away with very many fortunate coincidences, either. They have to make their decisions because those are the decisions this person you’ve written would make.
Dostoevsky’s character Dmitri Karamazov is the kind of guy who would lose his temper and humiliate a man in public, and he’s also the kind of guy who is sorry for it later, when he finds out how badly it’s affected the man’s little boy. Thomas Hardy’s character Tess is the kind of woman who would suffer for her principles, in spite of an easy out. Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff could’ve chosen to find happiness somewhere other than with Catherine, but he’s not that kind of person – he’s the kind of person who’d rather live in bitterness and spite and hatred for the rest of his life, as long as it meant everyone around him had to suffer for it, too.
Choose your characters’ basic personalities carefully – because even if you plan to transform a character, the choices they make before they change are going to be based on who they are to begin with. A lot of the time, you need a character who is a certain way to carry off a certain plot. I needed a stubborn, authority-hating, single-minded person to narrate my Erica Flynn novel – nobody else would’ve made the same choices.
On the subject of the middles of stories and novels, the foremost topic that comes to my mind is pacing. The road of pacing is fraught with many perils, traps, meanderings, and pitfalls. It’s one of the single hardest things to fix about any given part of a story, if it goes wrong to begin with.
Pacing, like most things, is a continuum with two extremes at either end. Slow pacing is boring because the story drags out longer than necessary to get to any satisfying point(s) in the storyline. Fast pacing is also boring, because too much is going on to take any satisfaction in the events of the storyline. What’s the key in both cases? A sense of satisfaction.
Before you can be satisfied with something, you have to start out by having a desire – take eating, for instance. If you’re hungry, you eat something, and you feel satisfied if the meal is good. If you’re not hungry, maybe you still have a craving for a certain food, and if you eat that certain food, your craving is satisfied. If you’re not hungry and you don’t have any desire for a specific favorite taste, then eating is anything but satisfying – even if you eat compulsively, the whole point is that you are never satisfied.
So you have to make the reader want something from your story, to begin with. That’s your series of narrative hooks, where you plant the seeds of interest, curiosity, questions that need answers, the wish for a character to excel or be crushed, etc. Once you have that established, the trick is to give them payoffs along the way while simultaneously planting more hopes/wishes/questions in their brains for the story yet to unfold.
Some tips about middles, payoffs, and lead-ups:
I’m thinking of devoting my Wednesday posts to topics on middles and ends. It seems only fair, since my Friday posts are exercises – and exercises are generally for the purpose of getting started. Beginnings get all the glory, with writing, and in some ways that makes sense. After all, nobody will get to the middle or end of your book if you don’t have a stand-out opening. Readers and agents judge you by your first few pages, your first few paragraphs, your first few sentences. I, myself, as a browser of books, have often put a book back after reading the first line.
However, there’s nothing more disappointing in the world of readership than a book that starts great and goes steadily (or abruptly) downhill from there. It’s frustrating, because the writer has gotten you invested in the story, convinced you to care about the characters, and lured you into taking the time and attention to find out What Happens Next, only to let you down. I hate it when I’m invested enough in a book that I can’t just stop reading it, but wish I could just stop reading it.
Like most avid readers, I have a hefty stack of titles I want to get around to, and if you hook me into reading your work, I expect something back for my investment. If I don’t get it, I’ll be disgusted with you as a writer, resent you for wasting my time, and I’ll never buy or recommend another of your books…ever. This is not the reader response an author wants, obviously.
The beginning’s job is to catch the attention of the reader and make them want to find out about the plot and the people in your story. Once you do that, you have an obligation to follow through with a middle that does its job well – being the story. That’s the middle’s job.
All the elements of being the story (questions raised and answered, intrigue and tension built and relieved, complications arising and being overcome (or not), downfalls suffered, redemptions achieved) have to work together to advance your plot in a way that holds the reader’s attention. It isn’t enough to have an interesting plot. You have to have the storytelling skills to tell it in an interesting way. I’ve read a few books, actually, that I loved in spite of a weak plot simply because they were told in a way that kept me turning the pages, thirsty for more, curious about the characters’ next moves.
Which leaves, of course, the end. Last but not least, dear ending. You are just as important as the beginning, except during the slush pile years. The ending’s job, then, is to be the payoff. Yes, it’s there to wrap things up, but just tying up your loose ends or saying Happily Ever After may not be enough.
True, there are some genres we expect a certain type of ending from – horror usually ends with a twist or a final scare, sometimes the gruesome death of a character who thought he/she had gotten away; romance is often the happily-ever-after scenario; a series will sometimes set up the conflict for the next novel; etc.
Specifics aside, however, I think what makes for a truly great ending is this:
It’s easy to want to make your central characters the “good guys”, and therefore nice people; even if they aren’t perfect, per se, they can end up with nothing particularly “wrong” with them, no real flaws, just sort of humdrum, plain-vanilla people. They’re okay. They’re not offensive. They seem like they’d be all right to have dinner with sometime, but you wouldn’t go out of your way to find out more about them.
Wait, these are your characters. You need people to give a damn. You need people to want to dig around in these people’s trash cans and browser histories, spy on them when they don’t know anyone’s looking, and draw them out so they’ll tell us crazy stories about their lives. Let them be offensive sometimes, make the wrong decision, take the wrong side, make mistakes, act inappropriately defensive, and use messy logic to justify behavior that isn’t really justifiable or logical.
It can be tricky to balance flaws so that they don’t make readers dislike a character, but I’ve found that most of the time what carries the characters I like in spite of their bad sides is just that they are all-around strong personalities. It’s pretty simple. A little boldness, determination, or pluck in the face of hard times will make up for a fair bit of bad behavior. Inner conflict and self-awareness will counter a few bad decisions or ill-chosen reactions.
The hard part, sometimes, is coming up with what flaws you want your character to have. You don’t want to just tack them on like it’s Pin the Tail on the Donkey, either…they have to feel like they fit the character, like they stem from somewhere in their past or the side of themselves they keep hidden. Anyway, here are some ways to choose flaws for your characters:
There are very few rules in writing that you can’t bend, break, or ignore – if you do it right. I’m a believer in knowing the rules and why they exist, but once you understand how to follow them, you can start figuring out how to not follow them effectively. See, there’s no point flouting something just to flout it – in any arena, I’d say, that’s just a sign of immaturity. You have to flout rules with a purpose in mind, if you want your writing to be stronger for it.
Some of the rules I will gleefully break if it suits my purposes, and which I enjoy seeing broken to good effect:
I was told at an early age by an excellent writer that the only unbreakable rule of writing is Do What Works. Thanks, Mom!
It’s a pet peeve of mine when a character is clearly just a vessel for the author’s little fantasy of themselves and their life – as they wish they looked, acted, felt, lived, etc. If you want to have an alternate reality life of yourself, then go play The Sims 3, do your best to make the Sims in your household look like you and Johnny Depp or Catherine Zeta Jones (depending on your gender preference and all), and give those little folks some fantastic goals and life fulfillment.
Please do not write a polished-up version of how you wish you looked, fawning over the waves of scarlet tresses that your spunky little self is always fighting not to make frizzy (thus making you super-cute to the hunky guy), or, if you’re a male writer, fawning over the badassery of your jawline or the sharp looks of your suit and sunglass combination. Don’t give me a protagonist full of your own best qualities, who always does the “cool” thing, if not the right thing, and always makes the predictable, plain-vanilla, obvious decision at every turn. Don’t give me a protagonist with all the bad bits cut off, because you’re more interested in “playing pretend” than writing good fiction.
Good fiction requires ugliness. Ugly truths, flaws, mistakes, accidents, injuries, pain, suffering, and existential crisis. The dark pit full of stuff we don’t like to face – about ourselves, about other people, about life. Not that it’s all bad. It’s just that, to make characters real, they must have an awareness of the ugly stuff, even if they glaze over it, even if they deal with it well, even if they deny it so well you’d never know (if you met them in real life) that they felt anything that wasn’t superficial. Why? Because real people are aware of these things. The constant struggle to meet all of your needs, to maintain a tolerable (if not healthy) internal life and a tolerable (if not healthy) external life, to present yourself a certain way in public, to hide things you hate about yourself, to have the life you want, to find meaning, to LIVE before you DIE….even people who don’t directly, consciously think through the dilemmas involved in being a mortal creature that’s incessantly struggling to properly identify itself, still feel the effects and, on some level, battle with it every day.
So it’s fine if you want to give me a tough guy narrator that’s the coolest thing you could ever wish to be, as long as you give me some hint that you, the writer, know that there’s a reason he presents himself as a tough guy. That you understand what lies under that surface presentation, that you understand that he, the character, not you, the writer, chose to present himself that way and that he reaps the benefits and suffers the consequences of that self-created image. Or maybe he doesn’t mean to be a tough guy, and others perceive him that way no matter what he does – now that’s interesting, too. How does he feel about that, and does he fight against it, or has he given up trying and just embraced it? Or did he grow into it naturally? This is where your character stops being a stereotype and a wish-fulfillment, and starts to be a real person – when you start running off questions like this in your head and get excited because the answers start to get more and more interesting.
Sometimes I think writers are afraid to let their protagonists be realistically flawed because they’re afraid people will read it and know how deeply flawed the writer himself/herself is. And I’m not saying your protagonist has to be the antichrist. But let’s be honest: we’re all coping with life as best we can, and none of us do it perfectly…and none of us do it without some struggle, even folks who take it lying down and have no ambition or drive. There’s still a struggle there. None of us are perky, spunky, self-assured heroes who just so happen find the perfect mate in the midst of a major catastrophe and live happily ever after.
We’re all screwed up one way or another, and frankly, I find it somewhat reassuring to read about people more messed up than me. Another point: most readers aren’t thinking about how messed up the writer must be (or if they do, it’s with a certain admiration) – they’re too busy looking for themselves in the characters. Don’t ever assume, dear writer, that, to your readers, your book is anything to do with you. Once it’s published, it’s a game between your readers and your story. You’re not even in the arena anymore.
I don’t know of anything more difficult about novel-writing than pulling off multiple story arcs. I don’t mean a main plot plus a subplot or three, which can be a little tricky – I mean when you have an ensemble cast of major characters, for all of whom you have to shape a transformative change worthy of a novel-length storyline.
Personally, this is one thing I can’t do without an outline – at least a rough one – to guide me and help me keep track of the big picture. It’s easier to keep everything in mind with a concise reference to help solidify it. Plus, it gives me an excuse to color-code everything, which means I get to use markers or colored pencils, which is always a plus, IMHO.
In a way, it’s easiest if I think of it as a map of the book, rather than an outline, and I have to plan a route for each character to reach the destination of the climax, whether that’s the same place for two or more of them, or totally separate towns. Then it’s just a matter of travel planning so I know what they’ll encounter on their journey. Physical battles? Confrontation with someone they thought was an ally? An abrupt and ugly revelation about him/her self? What do I want each person’s story to be about? How can I bring them to their finest moment within that? How can I bring them to their worst impasse or their ultimate failure within it? And of course, where do the different characters’ paths cross? Do they trip each other up, or spur each other on? In what ways, and why?
Sara Marian 