characters

Pet Peeves: “Bad Species” Fantasy

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One of the great things about writing fantasy and science fiction is that you can write all kinds of characters of all kinds of “races” or “species” and show how different ones are different ways even within the same race.  It drives me bonkers when a writer makes a species all one way – they all act alike, think alike, there’s no variation to their characters within that, and they’re all evil or all good (usually depending on how pretty they are).  Oh, and elves are always slender – that bugs me too.  Who says there isn’t a single fat elf out there???  Let’s have a chunky elven chick with a few vices, because I’m tired of reading about pure, slender ones.

I find that fantasy is much worse about species stereotyping than science fiction (on the whole – ha, sorry for the generalization!)  Even the original Star Trek, which relied more on personality traits to define the alien races than prosthetics and makeup (for obvious reasons), often focused on the crew finding their own generalizations about other alien races weren’t accurate on an individual level.  And don’t get me started on how incredible the Babylon 5 series is from a writing standpoint, particularly in making each species distinctive, but showing how different the individuals are at the same time.

One explanation that comes to mind for me as to why fantasy is guiltier than science fiction of demonizing or idealizing entire species is this:  fantasy is usually based in the past (or in a culture technologically or sociologically less modernized than our own time), and science fiction is usually based in the future (or, again, in a society that is technologically or sociologically “ahead” of us, even if Star Wars does claim to be a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away).  Well, we all know how well people dealt with other countries, cultures, races, philosophers – anyone different was scary, in most histories of most cultures.  People were very superstitious about each other.  I think that ends up reflected in fantasy, as something that is past-esque, whereas science fiction looks to the future, where many writers hope things will be better and people will be less divided by their differences.

End broad generalizations of writers of these two genres.  On to addressing the issue!

Now, I know you’re thinking, “But Tolkien had evil races in his books, and everybody reads him!”  I have two answers to you:  (1) Everybody, please stop trying to write Lord of the Rings.  Tolkien already did it once, and so far I haven’t read anyone who did it better.  Write your own world already! and (2) While Tolkien is guilty of the slender elven maiden thing, and the orcs are all evil, and yeah he did some of that stuff, there is at least some deviation between the elves (and you never know which way they’ll go on an issue – they’re pretty unpredictable in that regard).  The orcs were also explained as having been made by Sauron (big bad guy, if you live under a rock don’t know LOTR) by messing up elves somehow (sorry, I’m not so nerdy that I remember all the details of that) and killing off any that didn’t turn out vicious enough.  That’s a pretty solid basis for making a whole species evil, in my estimation.  So do follow Tolkien’s example on that score:  if you make a whole race evil, have a damn good reason why they’re all evil.  And a difficult history is not an acceptable reason – Ghandi came from a country with a difficult history.

It’s far more interesting, to me, to read fantasy with a varied landscape of characters, where individuals may be shaped by their racial heritage, but aren’t ruled by it.  If you take the pointy ears off your elf and he’s no longer interesting, he was never interesting to start with.  Sorry – harsh but true.

The world you build will also suffer from generalizing your races.  Fantasy is all about suspension of disbelief.  Amazingly, you can get people to suspend disbelief when it comes to dragons and magic and shapeshifters, but you have to write those things realistically – funny as that sounds.  If your world is rich and full and varied and fascinating, people will go along with almost anything.  Generalizations are like a badly-done background at a play – they make it obvious that your world is just a one-color wash on plywood.  Make your characters so different and so intriguing that people want to slip into your world and meet them.  (Babylon 5, curse you for making me wish I could go hang out with G’Kar!  It is an unfulfillable dream!)

If for no other reason, don’t make your species “Bad Species” or “Good Species” because it kills hundreds of opportunities for unpredictability.  If all your goblins are vicious, throat-slitting thieves, it’s going to be pretty obvious when one shows up that something will get stolen, and someone might get their throat slit.  If your goblins tend to be vicious and, culturally, they have very little understanding of “mine” and “yours”, but your readers have seen that some understand more than others, and some are peaceful and maybe even spiritual or something, they don’t know what will happen next!  Interest!  Worry!  Will this goblin steal something, or will the “good guys” treat him badly because they are stereotyping him, and will they turn out to be wrong, and the reader will be ashamed of them for their bad behavior when this goblin was trying to help them?  That’s the kind of stuff you want your reader to wonder about.  Don’t take that away from yourself by plugging in lame, stereotypical fantasy races where every individual member of that race is interchangeable with the others.

Okay, end rant.

Pet Peeves – Amnesia Openings

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All readers have pet peeves about storytelling.  There are some things that just irritate you when you see them in a story or a movie.  I think writers are even more prone to these kinds of tics than other readers, partly because we’re used to watching out for what does and doesn’t work in our own stories.

One of my own personal annoyances is with books that start out with a main character having amnesia.  Why does it bug me?  Well, partly because it strikes me as lazy writing, most of the time – like the character who always asks obvious questions for the sake of exposition via dialogue (*cough* Tasha Yar *cough* Next Generation Star Trek *cough*).  I don’t mind if the character develops amnesia later in the story, but to start out with it just seems like such a cheap way to get away with a long setup for your world and your characters, with an oh-so-obvious element of mystery.  The trouble is, it leaves me cold, and here’s the main reason:

99% of the amnesia beginnings I’ve read treat “amnesia” like it means “lack of personality”.  I’m sure that, without our memories, we’d all act somewhat different than usual, but we wouldn’t lose our personalities altogether.  You’d still think like yourself, you just wouldn’t know why you thought the way you did.  Aside from the fact that it makes no sense to equate loss of memory with loss of personality, there’s nothing duller, to me, than a book without good characters.  I latch onto characters quicker than any other story element, and so do many, many other readers.  Give me a lousy anchor, and I’m getting on a different boat, thanks all the same.

One thing I love, though, is finding stories that break my personal rules of reading and writing.  I’m delighted when a writer can do something I detest, and make me fall in love with his/her book anyway.  For one thing, it impresses me, and for another thing, I like to figure out why their book was different.  Why did this work, when dozens of other books didn’t (or at least, didn’t work for me)?

For my Amnesia Openings pet peeve, the book that shatters the rule is Nine Princes in Amber, the first book in Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber series.  Why does Zelazny get a free pass when the very first page of his series starts with the main character having no memory?  Because, also on the first page, he shows me his narrator has a great deal of personality.  Within half a page, the reader knows he’s suspicious, calculating, tricky, and funny.  The narrative voice, the questions and doubts that cross his mind, the decisions he makes, and the way he handles his lack of knowledge about himself or what happened to him, work together beautifully to establish what type of person he is and how he thinks, and to simultaneously set up the first inklings of conflict and danger.  There’s nothing lazy about writing that can do all that with half a page.

The best writing makes the most of each and every scene – not just because it makes the book richer, although it does, but also because that’s the kind of writing that grabs people.  It’s exciting to open a book and be in another place, but more exciting to open a book and be in another place with interesting questions to be answered, mysterious events on the horizon, and a fascinating main character to anchor you in the world of the story.  A narrative hook, by itself, isn’t enough.  You need some bait, too – if I may mix my nautical metaphors here in my blog (I would avoid doing so at all costs in a story!)  😉

Shadow Characters – Part I

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Psychiatrist Carl Jung, like Freud, defined the subconscious by breaking it down into separate “parts”.  In Jung’s breakdown, the Shadow self is the part of ourselves that we hide (or hope to hide) from others – things we’re ashamed of about ourselves, flaws, weaknesses, vulnerabilities – things we may not even want to admit to ourselves are the case.

In literature, it’s common to find characters who represent the shadow self of the protagonist, even when the author wasn’t consciously writing with that intent.  In high school, I took an awesome elective class on Shadow Literature, in which, essentially, we spent a semester psychoanalyzing books – not authors, books.  Ever since then, I’ve been finding shadow characters everywhere, and I notice the parallels and contrasts in my own characters and their experiences in a way I never did prior to that class.  At times, it’s just been fun to note, but sometimes it’s been extremely helpful in fleshing out characters, drawing out interesting dynamics between the characters, and/or providing intriguing role reversals in the storyline.

I’ve written here before about the importance of giving character traits a little balance – making it clear that your good guys aren’t perfect, bad guys aren’t pure evil, and keeping in mind that we’ve all got a little of our opposite within us.  It’s essential to making interesting characters.

What makes shadow so fun to play with is, you can externalize some of that opposite within and let it out.  Let me illustrate using Batman (hah!  I KNEW I’d get Batman into my blog somehow, someday!) and the Joker.  The thing that makes Batman my favorite superhero ever is the fact that he walks a razor’s edge between complete diabolical insanity and self-sacrificing heroism.  He’s a hero, but he’s always struggling to hold back his own demons, as well as the various super villains he comes up against in Gotham City.  Toward the innocent, he’s compassionate and philanthropic, but he’s a vigilante, using his own judgement as to who deserves punishment – and man, if Batman thinks somebody needs punishing, there is no compassion about him anymore.  He may manage to force himself to play by the rules of justice most of the time, but it’s often a struggle for him not to deal out retribution as he sees fit.  So you see, as a character, he already has an internal shadow clearly laid out (particularly in the graphic novels and the most recent wave of movies).

Now, where does the Joker come in?  The Joker’s favorite game to play with Batman is to point out how much alike he and Batman are, which, of course, Batman hates.  But in a way, the Joker’s right.  Batman is crazy.  He’s maladjusted, incapable of resolving his issues with the world, prefers to strive for his goals in an unconventional and unsanctioned way to actually working with the system that we “normal” people have to deal with….  Depending on what version of the Joker’s background you read (every graphic novel writer seems to have his own), there are often parallels or intersections of Batman’s back story and the Joker’s back story.  The Joker is a clear-cut shadow character – he represents everything Batman is afraid he might be, or might become, and everything Batman doesn’t want to admit about himself.  The thing is, Batman chooses not to become his shadow self, and the Joker revels in being what he is.  That choice is what makes them different.

It’s also important to note that Batman is also the Joker‘s shadow self.  The Joker mocks Batman’s heroism, and (again, depending whose version of the Joker’s back story you read) has spent so long ignoring his better instincts that they’ve essentially vanished.  The Joker does not want to be Batman, any more than Batman wants to be the Joker.  That’s why he loves to mess with Batman’s head every chance he gets.

Okay, I promise I’m done talking about Batman now.

There are lots of storylines in which the protagonist’s shadow character is his/her adversary (or at least is the antagonist).  There are others in which the shadow character is a friend or ally, or the relationship between the two shadow characters changes.  It’s crucial that shadow characters are connected through important similarities, such as strategic thinking, a parallel grief, a core tendency toward anger – deeply ingrained elements of personality.  If they have nothing in common, they aren’t shadow characters – they’re just opposites.  Anytime a character says, “No!  I’m not like you!” to his/her adversary, you probably have a case of shadow on your hands.

Long story short, there is a lot to be said about shadow characters, which is why I’m breaking this topic up into multiple posts.  More about shadow characters, and with different dynamics, next time!

For now, I’ll leave you with some pretty clear examples of shadow antagonist/protagonist teams:

  • Batman and the Joker, particularly in the graphic novel Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween and Haunted Knight, and The Killing Joke by Alan Moore
  • Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Probably the easiest and most clear-cut example of the shadow in all of literature
  • Gollum and Frodo in The Two Towers, from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series – I say The Two Towers in particular because that’s where the two characters interact directly for the first time
  • Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s books
  • FBI agent Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter in the film of Red Dragon (based on Thomas Harris’s novel, which is too gory and graphic for me to be able to read it, although I’ve tried)

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On Tuesday, June 15th (this coming Tuesday), I’ll be guest blogging at Marian Allen’s Weblahg.  Marian Allen has three novels published for electronic format through Echelon Press, many short stories published in magazines and anthologies – some of which are available at Amazon.  She is also, I’m proud to say, my mom.  I’ll be posting about giving and getting critiques, and how to get the most out of your feedback, on her blog this Tuesday, so be there or be square!

Fixing Flat Characters

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While there are some fine examples of books/stories in which an “everyman” character can be interesting, there are many more examples in which an “everyman” type is…well, boring.  That’s not to say that stories about “normal” people can’t be awesome, but there’s no such thing as a perfectly neutral person, just like there’s no such thing as a perfect person.

Don’t you risk pushing away some readers if you make a characters’ quirks, beliefs, attitudes, or lifestyles different from those readers’?  Yeah, but, just like in real life, not everybody is gonna like everybody else.  There are people who don’t like YOU, but you’re still yourself, right?  And a lot more readers will be intrigued by and endeared to a strong character (even one of questionable morals) than a flat, boring character.  Look at Han Solo.  He’s kind of a rake, self-centered, and smart-mouthed.  But that’s why he’s an entertaining character – that juxtaposition of “not a NICE GUY, but a GOOD GUY nonetheless” keeps you curious about his next line, whether he’ll do the right thing or not, etc.

Now, there’s another way to make a character flat and boring, at the other end of the scale.  There is nothing more intensely BLAH than a character that’s overdone – he/she is a stereotype, relies entirely on a single central trait, or is so over-the-top that he/she leaves readers rolling their eyes and sighing in moments that are meant to be powerful or gripping.  This happens a lot with the all-good hero or all-evil villain, but it’s not a problem confined to good guys vs. bad guys.

The core of the issue, really, is when the writer himself/herself doesn’t know enough about the character.  Sometimes, characters just come out three-dimensional without any effort on my part.  I love it when that happens.  Other times, they develop depth and back story during the writing process (I also love that, although it usually means I have to tweak the first scenes or chapters that character appears in, to account for things I’ve “learned” about them along the way).  And then, some characters take momentous effort to make them come alive.  Actually, I love that process, too, although it can be frustrating when the characters just won’t work with me.

For particularly troublesome characters, here are some things to try:

  • Break up stereotypes.  If you’re writing a character who is one, reverse a few expectations, throw in some additional interests, or give us some reason that your character him/herself is TRYING to be a stereotype.
  • Ask your character any 10 questions, like it’s an interview.  Write down your questions and their answers, and see what new information you can uncover about them.  What was his favorite birthday present as a kid?  What’s her ideal vacation?  What STILL bothers him, even though it happened 16 years ago?  What’s the ability she’s most confident about in herself?
  • Write down 3 things your character is aware of about himself/herself (pick some good and some bad), and 3 things that OTHER characters would readily notice about his/her personality (some good, some bad) that he/she isn’t aware of about himself/herself.  Think about the things you’ve listed – are they things that would factor into events and reactions within your storyline?  Are they things that will change, or things your character will realize, within the storyline?  Are they things your character will have to call upon or overcome in order to make it to his/her goal(s) in the story?
  • Strengths and weaknesses are sometimes one and the same.  It’s often the balance of a trait that makes it a “flaw” or a “merit” in a personality.  Being stubborn is bad, right?  The flip side of stubbornness, though, is persistance, determination, tenacity, and/or constancy.  Many of the best characters are ones whose flaws and strengths are a double-edged sword, and the interplay of positive and negative side effects of their traits gives the narrative plenty of potential intrigue and tension.
  • Don’t make a character all anything – good, bad, cruel, confident, indifferent, whatever.  Even if it’s just a smidgen of contradiction, and even if it isn’t written on the page, you should have it in mind that no one is all one way or another.  The ultra-confident jerk at the office who always gets the promotions and the girls may be exactly that to your main character, but YOU, the writer, can know better.  Maybe the guy is secretly horribly insecure and is overcompensating, or has something to prove to his overly critical father, whatever.  But, whether that’s specified in the story or not isn’t as important as the fact that, as a writer, you’ve got to know all your characters, heart and soul, as if they were real people.  They’ll never be real people to your readers unless they’re real to YOU first.

You can probably tell by now that I’m a very character-focused writer, so you know I’ll be rambling about characters and character development again.  You haven’t heard the last of it yet!  Muahahaha!  😉

Unsticking Stuck Scenes

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I know things are really “clicking” with a project when my ideas converge so that the scene I’m writing (or rewriting) does multiple jobs.  Notes I’ve scribbled to myself about needing to fit this idea in or that line of dialogue (and I’ve been agonizing over where the heck I can fit it in), problems with pacing, a character having it too easy when I need the stakes high for them, etc. suddenly snap together in my brain to make everything work.  It’s an awesome feeling when it happens.

How does it come about, when it does, and how does a writer make it happen, when it doesn’t?  Usually, if I’m stuck or have writer’s block about a certain scene, it’s because there’s something that hasn’t clicked into place yet.  The basic elements are there, but something is missing, and I can’t always put my finger on it.

Some things that I’ve found helpful for getting myself unstuck and making my brain epiphanize faster:

  • Keep detailed notes on what you know you need to work into the story, and about problem areas that just aren’t working (even if you aren’t sure WHAT doesn’t work yet).  So often, looking over my notes about this kind of thing will suddenly spark a solution that knocks out three or four problems at once.
  • If you can’t put your finger on exactly why a scene isn’t working, start with the characters.  How is the storyline affecting them at this exact point in the narrative?  How are the characters affecting each other?  Are they feeling just one emotion, or are there mixed feelings about what’s going on?  People have a lot going on, psychologically, and the most obvious actions and dialogue are not always the most realistic, the most accurate for character consistency, or the most useful for the story.  The more in-depth you know your characters, the easier it is to tap into secondary or conflicting emotions to get what you need out of them.
  • Take a little time away from the story.  If you’ve been staring at the screen trying to puzzle it out for three hours and still don’t know what to do with it, take a break!  Let your subconscious mull it over while you relax, do something fun, do some chores, whatever.  It’s sneaky, and gets your subconscious to do the work for you.  I’m often surprised when, in the middle of playing a video game, I’m suddenly hit with the solution to everything that’s been wrong with my story for the past week.
  • Change the tension level.  Either make things waaaay worse for your characters, ramp up the obstacles they’re facing, etc., or give ’em an unexpected ray of hope, moment of calm, or unlooked-for ally.  I like to do this in a separate file so that I don’t have to worry whether it works or not–if it doesn’t, I can just go back to my original scene and try something else to fix it!

Ode to Internal Conflict

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In real life, people have internal conflict all the time.  Sometimes it’s more apparent than others.  Sometimes it’s over a triviality, and other times it’s about something life-changing and complex.  But it’s there, and it affects our words, actions, moods, relationships, and worldviews.

If you want your characters and their problems to come alive for readers, you’ve got to give the people in your story some internal conflicts.  Of course, it’s most important to show in your main character(s), but secondary and “bit” characters can come through richer and stronger for a little dose of internal conflict, too.

How you go about showing that conflict will depend on a few factors:

  1. If you’re writing in first person, your readers get direct insight into the main character’s thoughts and feelings, even if he/she is an unreliable narrator.  Your other characters will be viewed through the lens of your narrator’s opinions and observations, but you, the writer, should know the real deal about your secondary characters – not just what your main character knows, thinks, and feels about them.  That includes knowing what makes them tick and what internal conflicts may be affecting them in any given scene.
  2. Third person can be done in a few different ways, but generally there’s some balance between omniscient narration and a sort of journalistic telling of the facts (just what is said and observed, with no direct insight into the characters’ minds or emotions).  If you go more for omniscient narration, you can reveal characters’ thoughts directly, and show inner conflicts that way.  If you stick with “just the facts, ma’am,” you’ll need to make sure to use facial expressions, hesitations, nervous habits, body language, tone of voice, etc. to communicate your characters’ thoughts and feelings, including their inner conflicts.
  3. If you have a character who just isn’t introspective, who doesn’t (or can’t) face his/her own flaws or mistakes, or who dislikes communicating his/her inner workings (even in his/her own thoughts), again, you’ll have to bring out internal conflict through responses to external factors:  other characters’ actions, dialogue, events, etc.

Now, about different kinds of inner conflicts.  There are inherent, long-term issues, such as the desire for freedom and independence battling with the desire for belonging and love (which could apply to a character’s family background or love life or both).  That kind of deep-rooted conflict is almost a character trait, and can be the foundation for the entire plot or can simply be a factor in your character’s behavior and attitude.  You can resolve it as a subplot, give your character new insight into the problem as the main story goes on, have your character come to terms with it by the end, or leave it hanging over his/her head.

There are also smaller, more specific inner conflicts (do the right thing, or the easy / profitable / fun thing?)  That kind of internal conflict is the spice of fiction, in my opinion.  When an author weaves together the events of the book and the conflicts and tough decisions of their characters, everything pulls together until you can’t separate THOSE characters from THAT plot.  It had to be [Character A] faced with [Event 1], because only he would’ve reacted by doing [this], which caused [Event 2], which set up [Character B] with [that] decision, and…so on and so forth.

So there are lots of reasons to give characters internal conflicts of various importance and scale.  It gives them depth, keeps them from being too predictable or stereotypical, lends tension to the story (because people don’t always make the right choices, or even know what the right choice is), plays characters off one another, and is an excellent catalyst for both main plot and subplot.

Even if you’re never going to mention a particular character’s hang-ups in the story, you should know what they are.  Your characters, dialogue, and story will all be the better for it.

Structure

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So you finish your first draft of a novel, and you’re ready to edit.  It needs more work than just proofreading – there are things you need to work in, move around, combine, cut, rethink, etc.  In other words, it’s time to look at the overall structure and see where everything should go for clarity, effect, and pacing to be the best they can be.

Sometimes it’s easy to see where something can be plugged in, but when it isn’t so obvious, it can be daunting, to say the least, to start rearranging your manuscript, changing the tone of scenes and dialogue to make it all fit together cleanly, unsure what the domino effect of all that effort will be.  And if it doesn’t work, you have to undo everything you’ve worked on for weeks or months, and start trying to tackle the problems again.

It’s really hard to hold the entire structure of a book in your head (even your own book), so I decided early on in the editing process of my current novel that I was going to try a different approach to rewriting on a novel-length scale.  I made a plot layout for the whole book.  For each chapter, I did this:

  • Chapter # / Title
  • Characters’ Goals & Motivations:
  • Chapter Summary
  • Questions Raised:
  • Points of Conflict:
  • Larger Plot Movement:
  • Notes & Suggestions:

Goals and motivations are whatever your character(s) in that chapter are striving for, whether that’s “defeat the evil overlord” or “have a positive conversation with his son” or whatever.  If you have multiple characters, answer for each of them.

The chapter summary is just a brief account of the events, like an episode guide.

Questions raised means anything that either the characters themselves are asking, or that the reader may be wondering during/after the chapter.  “Who is the evil emperor?” or “How did that cheerleader learn black magic?” or “Why did the zombie cross the road?”  Anything hinted, foreshadowed, unexplained, etc. that you mean to follow up on later.

Points of conflict should include inner conflict as well as external conflict.  It will really help you pinpoint character development over the storyline arc, as well as helping you pace the action and the lead-up to the climactic scenes of the book.  If a chapter seems to have no conflict, either (a) cut the chapter or (b) dig deeper for some inner conflict or character dynamic conflicts, and make sure the rewrite brings those to the forefront.  People don’t have to fight or even argue to be in conflict – they don’t even have to be upset with each other.  They just have to have some goal or need that’s at odds with one another.

Larger plot movement – what, in this chapter, pushed the story arc forward?  It’s fine to have a chapter here or there dedicated to subplot, or to deepen the characters, but if you find you have multiple chapters in a row that don’t move the story forward, it’s time to rewrite or rearrange.  Also, if you have a high ratio of chapters that don’t move the story forward, you probably want to re-think some of the material.  And yes, character development that affects the action in the larger story does count as plot movement!

Notes and suggestions is for anything you realize as you’re reading, like, “I never answered this question in the whole book!” or “Oops, 3 chapters in a row with no forward movement.”  “This chapter is kinda short, not much happens…might be a good place to plug in [this scene].”

I found that this really helped my focus with multiple elements of rewriting.  It really helped me pinpoint pacing problems, troubleshoot boring chapters, keep the characters’ interactions true even as the characters and their relationships changed and developed, and figure out where I had room to maneuver new material into the book.

I hope it can be likewise helpful to you.

How To Write A Novel While Working Full Time (Without Going Crazy)

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…or at least, without going crazier than you were to begin with.

At the time I was writing my current novel, I had a full-time job with a “flexible” schedule (flexible, in this case, meaning, “You will never be able to maintain any kind of regular sleep schedule while you have this job.”)  I wrote the first and second drafts (65,000-ish words) with said full-time flexible schedule.  Most writers have to have so-called “real jobs” to pay the bills, and it can be really frustrating when you feel like earning money is holding you back from progressing with your art.  The Sara D method for getting around that is:

1.  Pick a storyline that has a lot of potential for fun, excitement, and escapism from real life.

2.  Come up with characters you ENJOY spending time with.  They don’t have to be nice people, but they should be fun for you, the writer, to spend time with.  You want them to be interesting enough for readers to want to spend time with them, right?

3.  Set a nice, low word-count goal for yourself.  My daily goal was 250 words, because even on an insanely hectic day, I could almost always get that much writing done.  Why a small goal?  Because (a) it feels good to get it done on busy days, (b) it feels even better to surpass it on days when you’ve got more time and/or are on a roll, and (c) if you’re so tuckered out that what you’ve written on a particular day completely stinks, it isn’t a huge setback to scrap 250 words and write a new 250 words in its place.

4.  Do your word count as often as you possibly can, don’t beat yourself up if you miss a day, and enjoy the escapism of spending time away from real life WHILE doing something productive.

5.  DO NOT EDIT WHILE WRITING YOUR FIRST DRAFT.  That’s what the second draft is for.  Get the story down first.  Clean it up and flesh it out later.  Your inner editor will inhibit your creativity if you unleash it on the rough draft.

At least, this is what worked for me, and I don’t THINK I’m any crazier than I was before I wrote this book.  I was already pretty far gone to begin with.  😉

Tone

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So right now, I’m having huge problems balancing the tone in a scene – which means I’ve been thinking a lot about tone lately.  It’s one of those things that I usually don’t have problems with, so I usually don’t think much about how I approach it.  Of course, I make choices about which words I use, how my characters react both internally and externally, and so on, but generally once I’ve got my characters firmly in mind, consistency of tone just happens by itself.  It’s like going into a situation with people you know through and through – if you and your uber-neurotic, self-conscious pal are going to a meeting with the boss today, you KNOW it’s going to be a nerve-wracking experience, no matter how well things go.  If, on the other hand, you’re going in with your light-hearted, easy-going pal who doesn’t take anything too seriously, you’re figuring on a much more laid-back day, even if the meeting doesn’t go well.

So characters contribute to tone a great deal just by themselves, and that’s generally what gets me through the troublesome nebulousness that is atmosphere / mood / tone.

One thing I’m very intentional about with my writing environment (and which has everything to do with maintaining the right tone for whatever I’m working on) is what music I listen to.  There are times (especially while editing) when I can’t listen to anything while I work, other times when I can’t concentrate if there are any lyrics, and other times when I’m so in the zone or the music is so spot-on when it doesn’t even occur to me that the music isn’t part of what I’m putting on the page.

The book I’m working on has its sad times and its dark elements, but on the whole I wanted a sense of light-heartedness, fun even in the face of danger, and a pinch of irreverence for even the most serious situations.  So when I picked my music, I chose, primarily, jazz.  The playlist has evolved as the book has evolved, as I got to know characters better, and as new elements filtered into the story.  Now, it’s a mix of big band swing, instrumental surf tunes, and the occasional offbeat, funky song that just fit too well to be ignored.  Some of it is just great background music for working on the book, and some of it is so attached in my mind to specific scenes in the storyline that the music pops into my head anytime I work on the scene I associate it with.

For this book, it’s the perfect playlist to keep the tone consistent.  The music says, “Heartbreak is natural – everybody’s got troubles.  Now come on, let’s have our gin & tonics and enjoy ourselves anyway!”  And that’s so in line with my narrator.  If I’d listened to heavy metal while I wrote this book, or The Cure, or Mozart, or Disney songs, it would probably have been a very different book, even if I’d had the same original ideas about the characters and the story.

And a lot of the ideas I’ve had as I went along came directly from the influence of the music I listened to – it really helped me picture some of the events in a new way.

So here’s to you, Louis Armstrong and Bix Biederbecke, Benny Goodman and the Squirrel Nut Zippers!

There’s a writing exercise for you:  Make a new playlist!  See what happens.