Category Archives: Character

Who Has Time to Waste on People You Don’t Like?

Character Jo Schneider No Comments

josscharactersNear the end of last year I went to a panel at Salt Lake ComicCon that was  a “Why We Love Joss Wheadon” fan fest. I like a whole lot of Joss Wheadon’s stuff, so I went thinking I could use what others said in my writing.

First rule of writing I ever learned: If you like something, steal the hell out of it.

When the questions started, at least ten people cited the characters as their favorite parts about Joss’ stories. The rest of the people in the room nodded their heads like crazed bobble head dolls. Toy Story, Firefly, Buffy, Angel, Dollhouse, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, the Avenger movies…and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

It didn’t take long for me to join the bobble head nation. It’s true, Firefly is a quirky universe, but Jane names his guns and Wash plays with dinosaur figurines. While vampires have been done and done, there’s something about Buffy’s crew that keeps us coming back for more. And let’s be serious, without the great characters is Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, it would have been just another obscure upload in the YouTube ether.

As I listened while grown men and women gushed all over the floor about Joss’ characters, I thought, “It can’t be that easy.”
Could it?

Turns out it’s not particularly easy, but is it that simple.

If  people don’t like your characters, or at least identify with them, they stop caring, which leads to them changing the channel, switching shows on Netflix or putting your book down. Because let’s face it, who has time to waste on people you don’t like? Real life forces us to do this, but we have control over our entertainment. (Unless you lose the battle for the remote, but that’s a totally different issue.)

In proper writer fashion, I Googled the top rated books about writing character and bought a couple. I trolled blogs, because thousands of people have come before me, and surely one or two of them have something helpful to say. I started analyzing the shows we were watching. I made my husband think it was his idea to find interesting character traits, which I’m not going to lie, has been very helpful.

Now I could go on and on and on about this, but due to time, I’ll boil it down to what have become my top four character rules.

1-Each character needs a goal. Something they want. This must be the driving force of every decision they make in the story. A football player wants to win that big game. The nerdy guy wants to get the popular girl. The solider wants to get back home in one piece.

2-More important than what the character wants so badly, is what the character needs. They don’t know they need it until it smacks them in the face like wet fish—can’t miss that. At the fish smacking moment, the character changes, possibly shifting their decisions away from their once goal to what they now realize is much more important. Suddenly winning that big game isn’t as important as being with their family, or being rich pales in comparison with the true love they’ve discovered along the way.

3-Delve into your characters. Give them more than an age, an occupation and a gender. Go beyond the first layer of problems and get to the bottom of what your character is about. Why do the doctor’s hands tremble each time he takes a scalpel? What really happened? Does he have nightmares about it? How does it affect his daily decisions? How does it affect his main goal in the story?

4-#Bemeantocharacters. Just do it. Make their adorable, little lives miserable. As an author you must allow them a respite or two, but make sure that the emotional  spectrum looks like a crazed polygraph readout and not a flat line full of stereotypes and tropes.

Earlier this year I released Fractured Memories, my first Indie book, and the first in a five book series. My beta readers told me my characters were flat (this was just before ComicCon) so when I revised it, I gave them a boost. Fast forward to now, and quite a few of the reviews for the book mention the characters and how much the readers liked them. This brings that creepy, evil author smile to my lips.

Achievement unlocked.
There’s always more to learn, but it’s good to know I’m on the right track!

About the Author: Jo Schneider

Jo SchneierJo Schneider grew up in Utah and Colorado, and finds mountains helpful in telling which direction she is going. One of Jo’s goals is to travel to all seven continents—five down and two to go.

Another goal was to become a Jedi Knight, but when that didn’t work out, Jo started studying Shaolin Kempo. She now has a black belt, and she keeps going back for more. An intervention may be in order.

Fractured MemoriesBeing a geek at heart, Jo has always been drawn to science fiction and fantasy. She writes both and hopes to introduce readers to worlds that wow them and characters they can cheer for.

Jo lives in Salt Lake City, Utah with her adorkable husband, Jon, who is very useful for science and computer information as well as getting items off of top shelves.

Scenes: It Ain’t Just the Cliffhanger

Character Conflict Craft & Skills Editing First Drafts Ideas & Plotting Rewriting The Writing Life No Comments

This year, the editor of my Ronin Trilogy gave me an incredible compliment: “In Spirit of the Ronin, every scene does exactly what you intend it to do.” On a day when I was dreadfully worried about whether the newly finished draft of the novel was any good, this came at the perfect time.

I’ll quickly avert my gaze from the implication that apparently I didn’t quite hit that mark every time in previous books. Chalk it up to the learning process.

A lot of know-how about writing scenes is packed into this one sentence, and it comes in levels and/or number of trunk novels.

Level 1 (Chum/Sharkbait, 0 novels): “What’s a scene?”

A scene represents a discrete chunk of a narrative’s time wherein a mix of stuff appears: character interactions, things happening, background information delivery. Changing scenes is useful for switching characters, locations, or time. Shakespeare divided his plays up into acts and scenes, and even numbered his scenes, so I should have scenes, too.

Level 2 (Remora, 1 trunk novel): “I understand that scenes are a dramatically useful way of dividing up a story, but what do you mean you can use them to propel the plot?”

Scenes can propel the plot along if you can end them at compelling moments. Cliffhangers are the most obvious example of this, but not every situation is appropriate for them. Some scenes are more introspective, reactive. Sometimes in a scene, Things Happen. Sometimes, the Character Reacts to Things That Happened.

At this point, think of it this way. To propel the plot forward, end every scene with either a “Yes, but…” or a “No! And moreover…”

To build dramatic tension, the protagonist must be constantly striving and failing against the antagonist, who should always have the upper hand, until the final climactic moment when Everything Hangs in the Balance. You can have the protagonist occasionally succeed at some dramatic moment, but their success should be thwarted or minimized in some way by a worsening of the situation. This represents a “Yes, but …”

Every time the protagonist fails, the antagonist’s advantage is strengthened. Protagonist tries, fails… and then things get even worse. This is the “No, and moreover…”

The reader should leave every scene with a major dramatic question. This question makes them hunger to know what happens next.

Credit goes to Odyssey Writing Workshop’s Jeanne Cavelos for this wisdom.

Level 3 (Tiger Shark, 2 trunk novels): “I understand how to set up scenes with cliffhangers or dramatic questions at the end of each one, but what do you mean scenes have structure?”

The vast majority of stories in the Western storytelling paradigm are structured in three acts. Just like stories, scenes have a Three-Act Structure. Movies, novels, short stories, all have a Three-Act Structure (the nature of this is a whole other topic). For our purposes here, we can break scenes down into mini-acts, each representing the Beginning, Middle, and End of the scene.

Each scene follows one of two patterns.

  1. Goal (what the character is trying to achieve is established at the beginning of a scene)
  2. Conflict (the things against which the character struggles in the middle)
  3. Disaster (the way everything goes to hell at the end of the scene, the cliffhanger)

OR

  1. Reaction (at the beginning of this scene, character reacts to how things went to hell in the previous scene)
  2. Dilemma (in the middle of the scene, the character is placed in an even worse situation)
  3. Decision (at the end of the scene, the character chooses how to move forward)

This pattern is often called Scene and Sequel—a potentially confusing choice of jargon—developed by Dwight Swain in his book Techniques of the Selling Writer. This is not the same kind of scene as Level 1, nor does sequel mean the next movie in a series. Use of Scene & Sequel has become relatively widespread or at least familiar to most professionals.

Level 4 (Hammerhead, 3 trunk novels): “I understand how each scene needs to have a beginning, middle, and end, but do you mean each scene needs a purpose?”

During the revision process—not the composition process—ask the question: What is this scene for? What do I want it to accomplish? I say during the revision process because this is the kind of thinking that is not always helpful when you’re trying to open up your subconscious and let the story bubble out. This is too much thinking, not enough feeling. You may be skilled enough that it happens naturally, un-self-consciously, but if not, this is for the polishing phase.

An effective scene requires it to do at least three things from this list.

  1. Advance the plot
  2. Develop character
  3. Develop the story’s world
  4. Pique the reader’s interest for the next scene

If you’ve managed the previous levels, #4 is pretty much built in, so you only have to worry about the other three.

And if you can hit all four, every time, that makes you a Literary Effing Great White, and you’ve either passed beyond the Trunk Novel Stage to some serious publication—or you soon will.

Unlocking Levels Beyond

There are doubtless higher skill levels. Becoming a better writer is a lifetime pursuit of excellence. I have not yet unlocked the Mythical Megalodon and Literary Leviathan levels so I don’t know what revelations they contain. I am only vaguely aware of their existence, in the way I was only vaguely aware of the higher realms when I was Level 1 Chum.

One of the hardest parts of writing is not knowing—really not knowing—whether your work is any good. You have to believe it is, even if it might not be—and when you’re shown it isn’t that good, to find a way past this particularly hard knock and keep striving to get better. Keep studying. Keep practicing. Keep learning. It’s all any of us can ever do.

Apparently, unbeknownst to myself, something clicked with Spirit of the Ronin, and my editor saw it. Having someone point it out to you is like ambrosia on the parched soul. There wasn’t anything specific that I learned, or studied. My only explanation is that study and practice came together.

The hardest part is wondering when it will happen again.

About the Author: Travis Heermann

Heermann-6Spirit_cover_smallTravis Heermann’s latest novel Spirit of the Ronin, was published in June, 2015.

Freelance writer, novelist, award-winning screenwriter, editor, poker player, poet, biker, roustabout, he is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and the author of Death Wind, The Ronin Trilogy, The Wild Boys, and Rogues of the Black Fury, plus short fiction pieces in anthologies and magazines such as Perihelion SF, Fiction River, Historical Lovecraft, and Cemetery Dance’s Shivers VII. As a freelance writer, he has produced a metric ton of role-playing game work both in print and online, including content for the Firefly Roleplaying Game, Legend of Five Rings, d20 System, and EVE Online.

He lives in New Zealand with a couple of lovely ladies and a burning desire to claim Hobbiton as his own.

You can find him on…

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The Semi-True Story

Character Craft & Skills Horror Mary Pletsch Narrative Voice POV The Writing Life World-building No Comments

I gave a copy of Fossil Lake:  An Anthology of the Aberrant to my parents with a proviso attached:  it’s not autobiographical.

fossilThe assumption would be easy enough to make.  My contribution to Fossil Lake, the short story “Mishipishu:  The Ghost Story of Penny Jaye Prufrock,” is set at a summer camp for kids.  The name of the camp in the story, Camp Zaagaigan (the Algonquin word for “lake”) is fictional; so is Lake Mishipishu (I actually checked on the maps and found a Mishibishu Lake…)  My parents, however, would be able to name the real camp and the real lake after they read the story:  from the cabin line to that infamous H-dock, the layout of Camp Zaagaigan mirrors its real-world counterpart, and they drove me there often enough to recognize it.

From there it’s just one step further to wondering how much more of the story is real.

I’m often asked whether the characters in my story are “me,” or whether the events are “real,” and all I can ever say is that I write semi-true stories.  Semi-true in that I’ve never been able to take a person, event, or revelation and transcribe it into fiction word-for-word.  As a writer friend of mine says, real life doesn’t have to make sense, but fiction does.  Even if I’m starting with something “inspired by a true story,” in order to make event or character coherent, I have to add things here, or take things away that might have happened in real life, but don’t add anything useful to the tale I’m telling.  Sometimes changes to the story make it more dramatic, more compelling, or more satisfying; and so the events “inspired by a true story” move ever farther away from a faithful reflection of reality.  After all, I’m writing fiction—I’m not required to report on reality.  I’m required to tell an engaging and powerful tale.

And semi-true in that I do my best to write characters who feel real:  who behave in realistic ways, who are recognizable and relatable, who are emotionally honest.  When I write them, I put myself in their position and see the world through their eyes; and yes, to an extent, I feel what they feel, and try to express that emotion in the words I’m writing.  Often this emotional connection is informed by my own real-world experiences.  I do know what being bullied feels like.  I do know what doing something I know is against the rules feels like.  I don’t know what it feels like to drown, but I do know what it feels like to not be able to breathe, so I write about that…and imagine one step farther, based on research and my own ideas.  These characters aren’t me, but they have pieces of my emotions inside them.

So no, I was never bullied at that summer camp you sent me to,  Mom and Dad.  No, I never snuck out of the cabin after hours.  No, I was never a suicidal twelve-year-old, and no, I’ve never lost sight of the line between reality and imagination.

…or at least, I’ve always found it again in time.

About Mary: 

Mary Pletsch is a glider pilot, toy collector and graduate of the University of Huron College, the Royal Military College of Canada and Dalhousie University. She is the author of several previously published short stories in a variety of genres, including science fiction, steampunk, fantasy and horror. She currently lives in New Brunswick with Dylan Blacquiere and their four cats.

Monsters in All Their Forms

Character Craft & Skills POV Reader Investment & Empathy No Comments

A friend and I were sitting in a brewery last weekend, killing time before meeting our wives for dinner. A wide-ranging discussion of pop culture touched on the concept of monsters in fiction, and what we want and expect out of them.

There are as many types of monsters as can be imagined, and as the quote from A Beautiful Mind goes, “man is capable of as much atrocity as he has imagination.” But fictional monsters can be loosely gathered up into two categories: those with a backstory and those without. Think of them as “evil because,” and “evil just because.” Each of these concepts can do the job of terrifying the reader or viewer, as long as it is consistent with the goals and tone of the story being told.

Monsters with no backstory are easy to find. Look no further than John Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece Halloween or the much more recent instant horror classic It Follows. In Halloween, six-year-old Michael Myers transforms from a seemingly normal child into the brutal murderer of his own sister in the films opening moments, filmed chillingly from first-person perspective. From then on, he never speaks a word and barely moves a muscle until fifteen years later when he breaks out of his mental ward and begins killing again.

The monster of It Follows, despite the film’s slasher sensibilities, isn’t even human. Rather, it’s a malevolent force that kills whomever has been afflicted with it. Spread through sex, the entity follows its victims at the same maddeningly slow pace wherever they flee. If it catches them, it brutally kills them, then begins working its way back down the line of the cursed, seeking next the person who passed the curse to its now-dead victim. Once afflicted, you are never truly safe again, even if you pass the curse along. Only the afflicted can see the entity, which takes the form of random people, sometimes a stranger, sometimes people they know. Whatever helps it get close.

In both these films, our inability to relate to or understand the monster is a large part of what makes them scary. You cannot reason with Michael Myers or It, just as you cannot fathom why they are doing what they are doing. Despite later films’ ill-advised attempts to tie Michael Myers to a pagan, druid ritual involving the holiday that would become Halloween, any attempt to explain this sort of monster to the viewer robs it of some of its power. No attempt at all is made to explain the curse of It Follows, and that is to the film’s benefit. These monsters are forces of nature, and they are frightening specifically because they recall the fear, buried deep in our DNA, of being preyed upon by creatures that would never offer mercy and could never be reasoned with. Creatures that saw us only as food.

For examples of villains with backstories, look no further than George R.R. Martin and Thomas Harris. A Song of Ice and Fire is replete with human monsters of both the “evil because” and “evil just because” variety, but where Martin really excels is establishing the protagonist family of the Starks and setting them against the antagonist family of the Lannisters. Very quickly the reader is led to hate the Lannisters, and at some point in the story each member of that family commits monstrous acts, either against the Starks directly or just in general. But over the course of the series, Martin masterfully peels back his onion layer by layer, and we are shown the inner worlds of the Lannister characters and the reasons (very valid to them) why they do awful things. Tyrion we sympathize with from the beginning of course, but no one was more surprised than I when Martin made me like Jaime Lannister. Even with Cersei I could find a measure of pity if not any warmth. If you delve into The World of Ice and Fire, you can even learn a bit of what Tywin Lannister, the main architect of his children’s misery, endured as a younger man that shaped him into the man he later became.

Few books I’ve ever read chilled me as much as Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon. The first of the Hannibal Lecter books, this features a plot similar to the more well-known Silence of the Lambs, but with a different FBI investigator trying to catch a different serial killer. This killer, Francis Dolarhyde, is a singular creation in fiction. He murders entire families at the behest of an alternate personality he calls the Red Dragon. Much of the book is told from his perspective, and it’s the most effective example of getting into the head of a deeply disturbed individual I’ve ever read. We come to learn that Francis, born with a harelip and a cleft palate, was abandoned by his mother and raised with brutal cruelty by his grandmother. This treatment ended up warping Francis into the monster he becomes, and the reader feels anger, horror and pity all at once for the character.

If done effectively, this kind of monster awakens a very different kind of fear. Rather than worrying what lurks beyond the firelight, waiting to eat us, the “evil because” monster forces us to look inward, to see the monster lying dormant within each of us (and our fellows). We look and we wonder. Everyone has heard the quote “There but for the grace of God go I.” If we were perhaps less strong or even just less fortunate, if the various circumstances of our lives had combined in the perfect (or anti-perfect) way, would we end up as warped as these characters? Just how far beneath our surface does a monster lurk?

Each of these kinds of monsters can be used effectively in your writing. However, care must be taken to avoid combining traits of the “evil because” and “evil just because” monsters into a single character. It accomplishes nothing but to muddy the waters and confuse the reader, dragging them out of any sense of immersion you’ve built. The key, as always, is in figuring out the kind of story you are trying to tell and what tools need to be pulled from your toolbox to perform the work.

Don’t worry, the rest of the monsters will still be there, waiting for you, when this particular story is done…

 

About the Author: Gregory D. LittleHeadshot

Rocket scientist by day, fantasy and science fiction author by night, Gregory D. Little began his writing career in high school when he and his friend wrote Star Wars fanfic before it was cool, passing a notebook around between (sometimes during) classes. His first novel, Unwilling Souls, will be available later this year. His short fiction can be found in The Colored Lens and the upcoming Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology. He lives in Virginia with his wife and their yellow lab.