Letting your character take control is essential to maintain the illusion that the events in your story are real. Yes, every story is an illusion and what makes it believable are the details as perceived by the character. When writing a representational story (where the writer never addresses the audience), you will need to let the character not only tell but experience story events in their fullest. That experience becomes believable to the reader when the characters actions, reactions, thoughts and perceptions feel genuine. The only way to make that happen is to let your character take control.

Letting your character take control doesn’t mean the story will run afoul and destroy your plot – it’s about enhancing the plot by making it and your character feel real and not contrived. It is about choosing and placing the important details. It’s about the details that make him tick, that color his world, that give him motive and have created his common sense and hence his intuition.

There are three things you can do to let your character take control effectively:

1. Understand how a character perceives and relates to his world

Physically through the five senses of touch, taste, smell, sight and sound.
Common sense which integrates what we’ve experienced through the five senses. It also helps us see the patterns in our life.
Intuition which recognizes the patterns in our lives and allows us to see or project where those patterns may lead us. Your character makes decisions for a reason which must feel genuine to the reader.Emotions which build upon experience and learning and provide a basis for motive and motivation.
Emotion is a reaction and colors how information is integrated. For example, a character may react to a strict upbringing by either always being afraid and leery of authority, or may have a total disregard for it. Either way, this will affect how he reacts in specific instances, the words he uses (metaphors) to describe places, people and events.

… larger than life characters … have a sense of self regard. Their emotions matter to them. They do not dismiss what they experience. They embrace life. They wonder about their responses to events and what such responses mean. They take themselves seriously…Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass

As your character lives in his world, he’ll perceive it through is senses, color his experience with his emotions, use his version of common sense and apply his intuition to move forward. When he does this successfully, he’ll be in control, his responses genuine and readers will love him for it.

2. Explore your character
This goes beyond the standard descriptions some writing advice advocates. As Les Edgerton points out in Hooked, a character’s physical description – unless markedly different from the norm – does relatively little to draw the reader in. A character doesn’t usually describe himself. He may describe someone else which in turns grounds the reader. But HOW he describes someone or the scenery around him tells us a lot about him and the lens through which he sees the world. He may even have physical reactions such as running his fingers though his hair when he sees someone’s unkempt hair or a desire to vomit at a certain smell. Thus, you can show rather than tell when you know your character well and you let him take control.

…possibilities only emerge when we demand more from the idea, when we ask more why and what result questions. Characters & Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card

The easiest way to do this is to write a detailed background history for your character as if you were there. As you get to know his trials and tribulations, the major influences in his life, his fears and desires and yes, even the little things that comforted him, it will become easier to show him in a genuine and full way because the all the important WHY questions become answered. Why does he do that? Why does he feel that? Why wouldn’t he…? Why, if he’s in a responsible position, acting irresponsibly? Why is he so caring about x and then so obtuse and mean about y?

3. Use the things you know about your character against him.
This puts him in a situation which shows who he is and compels him to act (whether running to or from the situation). If your character takes control of the story, his reactions may surprise you. The added benefit is that it cures your writing of the murky-middle syndrome. Often times I’ll ask my character what he sees and how he feels about things. Between his perceptions and his gut reaction, the story moves forward and I have little work to do except to write.

Fictional Characters come to life by giving them individual traits, real weaknesses and heroic qualities that readers can recognize and empathize with. You play these against each other to achieve drama. For instance, a man who is afraid of heights but who must climb a mountain to save his love. The Fiction Writer by Nina Munteanu

In his book, Writing Fiction for Dummies, Randy Ingermanson sums up why you should let your character take control: A character’s past determines what sort of person you have coming into the story. The past is only the imperfect guide to the future, though. Your character has a free will and can choose to break loose from his past and pursue a new future. But will he succeed? Your goal as a novelist is to make it plausible that he might without making it a certainty.

When you know your character this well, he’ll control the story without you losing control.

Happy Writing!

Setting the Scene with POV and Two Aliens in a Bar

April 4, 2014

Leigh Galbreath

Character Craft & Skills First Drafts Leigh Galbreath Narrative Voice POV Rewriting Setting and Milieu No Comments

Ah, the bane of writers everywhere—the joys of “setting the scene”. For the longest time, I admit, I had only the vaguest, unformed idea what that meant. I mean, I knew it was describing a setting or situation in which your characters are placed, but I kind of missed the important part. It’s the describing of a setting or situation where something is about to happen. It is a description that implies conflict and tension.

That critical bit about things getting ready to happen is the hard part, and in my opinion, viewpoint is probably one of the best tools for setting the scene when telling a story. Over and above word choice and setting and dialogue and all those other things we like to harp about when talking about technique and storytelling. Why’s that? Because, in my opinion, all those things come from your point of view.

It may be obvious, but point of view is one of the very first decisions on how to tell a story, so, for completeness sake, lets run down the differences real quick. We’ll keep to 1^st and 3^rd here as 2^nd person is so little and specialized in use that it deserves it’s own post (which you’ll get from Tracy Hickman, so stick around for that!).

With 3^rd person, we have the external narrator with varying levels of distance, from omniscient (furthest) to limited (closest) viewpoints. With omniscient, you get the “god” perspective. Objective is through an impartial observer, and limited traps us in the head of one character at a time.

With 1^st person, we have an extremely close narration that allows the reader to take on the experiences and personality of the narrator. The constant use of “I” reinforces this aspect, which makes empathy with the narrator an almost given.

Each has its uses and can be very effective in particular genres and situations.

To be honest, most of us will be doing 3^rd person limited or 1^st person these days. While omniscient viewpoint works for milieu tales, like Lord of the Rings or Dune where the setting and culture take precedence, it’s gone out of favor over the last few decades. Objective can work, too, but my favorites are when you’re in it with the person your supposed to sympathize with rather than hearing about it from someone else.

The real issue is: the further from the character’s personal viewpoint you get, the less the reader tends to care about them. If your story is about a the setting, like with Dune, distance works. Not so much for a character piece.

So, let’s take our prompt—two aliens walking into a bar.

With a 1^st person narrative, obviously, we have to pick a character. For simplicity’s sake, lets pick the human guy sitting alone in the corner who sees our aliens come in together. Say, our human is a drifter with a snarky personality, who’s had dealings with this particular species and tells us right off, they don’t get along. Instant tension. Our drifter gets uncomfortable, keeps his eyes on the newcomers, pushes his glass away and asks for the bill right quick. All the while, we’re getting the narrator’s snarky version of what’s going on. The scene is being set just by having the narrator get antsy in his own personal way. With 1^stperson, personality is key, and we’ve only got our narrator to tell us how to interpret what’s happening.

Third person gives us a little more leeway. What if the first alien, Bob, is from a culture where public inebriation only happens when someone dies, and there’s a birthday party going on. When he gets into the bar, he starts thinking about the funerals he’s been to. Suddenly, you’ve got tension with what’s actually happening around him and the somber mood he’s now in. Bob gives us information about his people and their ways by how he handles the situation. Maybe he’s upset that he’s mood got soured by the joviality. Maybe he finds humans obscene for using alcohol to celebrate a life rather than a death. Maybe Bob picks our drifter in the corner because of his uncomfortableness, thinking this lone human might agree with him.

Depending on the distance with 3^rd person, we could get as particular in limited perspective as with 1^st person—Bob’s been dying for a certain beverage, but it’s too sweet for the somber mood he’s now in—or more generalized with Bob’s recount of how his friend accidentally picked a fight with the drifter, if you want go more of an objective viewpoint. Both of these, of course, keep us in Bob’s head, so we open the scene up a bit to things that our drifter might have missed while we were so focused on his pithy turns of phrase. At the same time, we’re not buried under exposition as to why Bob’s people think parties are for the dead, because we’re right with Bob as he experiences things.

With 3^rd person omniscient, all bets are off. We can get information from Bob, his friend, the drifter, the bartender, the birthday party-goers. We can learn the history of Bob’s people, the trouble the drifter had with them, probably even a few facts about the bar even the owner didn’t know. We’re also often supplied with what it all means and why its important. We lose much of the detailed personal impressions that our characters might have for more of an overarching view of the point of the scene.

Setting the scene isn’t easy, but picking the right viewpoint from the start, can make it a lot easier in the end. Pick carefully, my friend.

Why First-Person is Popular in YA: A Theory

April 3, 2014

Kristin Luna

Character Craft & Skills Kristin Luna The Writing Life 9 Comments

You may have noticed that many popular YA titles today are written in the first-person narrative. But why? Why is first-person so popular with the YA audience?

In her blog, YA writer and children’s book illustrator Ingrid Sunberg shares five reasons why authors choose to write in the first-person. Ingrid observes that first-person gives the reader a quick connection with the protagonist, makes the story believable, helps develop the protagonist, is somewhat easy to write, and creates an agreement with the reader of how the story will be told.

To help find the answer to why readers connect with first-person narratives, I decided to make a graph, because graphs are my jam.

First, I took thirty titles of popular YA fiction all the way from the mid 1800’s to 2013. These titles are or have been enormously popular, and a couple of titles are just a few of my favorite YA and Middle Grade books. Next, I went through and marked which stories are told in first-person and and which were told in third-person (limited, objective, and omniscient).

	1st Person	Year Published		3rd person	Year Published
1	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	1884	1	Little Women	1868
2	The Catcher in the Rye	1951	2	Anne of Green Gables	1908
3	To Kill a Mockingbird	1960	3	The Secret Garden	1911
4	Island of the Blue Dolphins	1960	4	Charlotte’s Web	1952
5	Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret	1970	5	Lord of the Flies	1954
6	The Perks of Being a Wallflower	1999	6	The Phantom Tollbooth	1961
7	The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants	2001	7	A Wrinkle in Time	1962
8	Twilight	2005	8	Hatchet	1987
9	The Book Thief	2005	9	Number the Stars	1989
10	The Lightning Thief	2005	10	The Giver	1993
11	The Host	2008	11	Ender’s Game	1994
12	The Hunger Games	2008	12	Holes	1998
13	Divergent	2011	13	Eragon	2002
14	Incarnate	2012	14	Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone	2003
15	Vampire Academy	2013	15	Inkheart	2005

The information I gathered already surprised me. I assumed that of the thirty books, at least 66% would be written in first-person. But of the thirty books I chose, exactly half were written in third-person.

Next, I charted how many books from both POV’s were published in ten year increments from 1800 – 2013.

You may or may not be surprised by my microcosmic, pedestrian research. What surprised me was that technically, third-person isn’t any less popular as a whole. In fact, according to my chart, it’s been steadily increasing in popularity through the years. Note that while I only took the first books in popular series, keep in mind how popular all of the Harry Potter books were (third-person), with the last book published in 2007. Third-person YA stories aren’t going anywhere. They’re steadily increasing in popularity, according to my small-scale study.

First-person narrative YA and Middle Grade novels increase sharply in popularity according to my chart, especially in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. First-person narrative is trendy, but it has also steadily grown in popularity as well.

But why has the first-person narrative become so popular recently in YA and Middle Grade fiction?

This brings us to my theory: chicks and their diaries, man.

Chicks, man.

In this article from The Guardian, Vanessa Thorpe summarizes a 2009 study in which researchers interviewed 2,000 people about their reading habits. Researchers found of the women interviewed, forty-eight percent could be considered avid readers, while only twenty-six percent of men could be considered the same. Thirty-two percent of men admitted to only reading two books per year, while eighteen percent of the women interviewed said the same. According to this article on NPR, surveys conducted in the U.S., Canada, and Britain concluded that men account for only twenty percent of readers in the fiction market.

While it could be argued that maybe many of the study’s participants were adults and did not read YA fiction, an article in Publisher’s Weekly claims otherwise:

“More than half the consumers of books classified for young adults aren’t all that young. According to a new study, fully 55% of buyers of works that publishers designate for kids aged 12 to 17 — known as YA books — are 18 or older, with the largest segment aged 30 to 44, a group that alone accounted for 28% of YA sales. And adults aren’t just purchasing for others — when asked about the intended recipient, they report that 78% of the time they are purchasing books for their own reading. The insights are courtesy of Understanding the Children’s Book Consumer in the Digital Age, an ongoing biannual study from Bowker Market Research that explores the changing nature of publishing for kids.”

From this evidence, we can conclude that women read more fiction novels than men by a wide margin, and that plenty of those women are reading YA.

Diaries: The Missing Link to First-Person

For as long as I remember, I’ve kept journals. I have an entire bookshelf dedicated to my journals, one dating back to fifth grade. According to this January 2013 article by Carolyn Gregoire, I’m not the only one. According to a study, eighty-three percent of girls aged 16-19 write about their lives in a journal.

Let’s examine common characteristics of the female diary entry.

Disclaimer: these characteristics may or may not match your own diaries. These are typical characteristics I’ve noticed from the diaries I’ve snuck into (Okay, only once, and I feel awful about it. The saving grace was that the entry I flipped to talked about wanting mango ice cream instead of vanilla, and then I stopped reading immediately), have heard fellow females talk about, or have read as published works.

Almost always (I can’t imagine otherwise, frankly) written in first-person.
Focus on emotional reaction to situations and events.
Chronicles important events.
Marks events that have just happened.
Divulge true feelings and secrets.
Examine secret longings.
Heavy on self-evaluation.
Usually written in a stream of consciousness fashion.
Has voicing specific to the person writing the journal

Now, let’s compare those characteristics to a YA first-person story with a female protagonist:

Focused on one central character who tells the story
Emotionally charged
Has voicing specific to the protagonist
Tells important events through the protagonist’s point of view
Lets the reader peek into the mind of the protagonist, viewing her longings, desires, and emotional reactions
Usually follows as steady span of time without skipping through time.

Seeing the strong connection between the two? Now think about the target for most YA fiction. Research shows that most avid readers are women. Research also shows that many young women journal. When you combine the two facts, it makes a compelling case.

My theory is this: girls aged 12-18 who read regularly can and do connect quickly with a first-person narrative because it is reminiscent of their own journaling behavior. That is to say, how young girls process important events in their lives through journaling is very similar to a protagonist’s process of self-evaluation and self-discovery in a YA first-person narrative.

When a young girl picks up a YA first-person story, she is looking into the mind of the protagonist, almost the same as reading that protagonist’s own diary. As the young girl grows into a woman, whether or not she decides to continue journaling, she will understand the connection of first-person narrative because she has already written it.

Third-person in YA is in no way dying, but it may not have the strength of connecting so immediately with its audience as YA first-person storytelling does.

What do you think about the connection of girls who journal and girls who read first-person YA novels? I would love to know if you agree or disagree! Please let me know what you think in the comments.

Multiple POVs: Friends or Foes?

April 2, 2014

Gregory D. Little

Craft & Skills Gregory D. Little The Writing Life 2 Comments

Multiple POVs. Are they friends or foes to authors? Well, as my dad likes to answer this sort of question: It depends. Let’s look at an example.

Two aliens walked into a bar. Krizznorp, Overlord Supreme of the Everlasting Fleet, surveyed the foul watering hole, disdain hue radiating from his luminous compound eyes. He was time was far too valuable to waste on such a putrid gathering of organic waste as this. But the Uber-Emperor’s polyp-spawn, Crown Prince Bill, was visiting from the blessed homeworld, and Krizznorp had been given the dubious but potentially career-advancing honor of showing him a good time. And if ever there was a waste of organic matter, it was the polyp-spawn gawking slack-jawed beside him. Setting his jaw, Krizznorp braced himself for a night of debauchery.

Okay, Greg again. This is a fairly ho-hum setup. The POV character has been tasked with treating the boss’s kid like royalty (which he happens to be in this case), but he’s got better things to do. There’s nothing new or interesting about this. But now let’s add a second POV.

Crown Prince Bill was ecstatic to be getting his first ever visit to a war zone bar. Oh sure, his guards and attendants had told him they were just exactly like every other bar in the quadrant, but Bill knew better. Even just standing in the doorway next to his new best friend Krizznorp, Bill could sense the desperation hanging in the air as if lifted there by the drunken fumes wafting up from the soldiers. Once he was able to return later, this time alone, that desperation would add the perfect savor to his favorite pastime.

Murder.

So in that example of multiple POVs, the most obvious advantage afforded is dramatic irony, where the reader knows more than the character, thus generating tension. In this case Bill doesn’t know how much Krizznorp disdains him, but Krizznorp also doesn’t know that Bill is some sort of alien serial killer. Thanks to the story dipping inside multiple characters’ heads (or whatever this particular species thinks with) the author has additional tools with which to generate conflict. Will Bill become aware of Krizznorp’s dislike of him and if so, will he murder Krizznorp, fearing no retribution because of his royalty? Conversely, will Krizznorp (I regret this name a little more every time I type it) realize what Bill really is, and if so, will he dare report it to the emperor? But what if Bill’s father already knows?

The opposite of our example with Krizznorp and Bill above is that if you have only a single POV, all information critical to the plot must somehow be conveyed to that character at some point in the story. This is what I like to call Overly-Important Character Syndrome, and it’s part of the reason so few epic fantasies have just one or a handful of POVs. It’s hard to convey “epic” through a single person’s eyes.

But for every advantage multiple POVs can convey, there are also disadvantages. The two worst offenders are length and pacing. I’ll discuss each briefly below.

Every POV character needs a plot arc. These can be of varying length, but if a character occupies a POV and an important part in the story and they don’t have a subplot of their own, it’s going to stand out in a bad way. But the number of POVs drives the length of your book as much as any other factor. My first novel manuscript featured about a dozen major POVs and was 287,000 words. For every first-time author not named Pat Rothfuss or Brandon Sanderson, that’s way too long. For my second novel I focused on keeping the number of POVs down. I ended up with five major POVs and the novel topped out at 126,000 words. For my third novel I went with just a single POV and ended up with 84,000 words.

Adding POVs and their attendant plot arcs also has dramatic impact on the story’s pacing. Maybe I want to have an unbroken segment of chapters featuring an extended, major action set piece for Krizznorp. But then I realize I haven’t checked in with Bill since chapter two and the longer I wait to do so, the more jarring that reintroduction will be. Or maybe I’ll alternate chapters so that Bill and Krizznorp each have an equal number and I trade off chapter-ending cliffhangers. That sounds great until I realize I have too little plot for Krizznorp and half of his chapters will end up being filler. If not well thought-out, multiple POVs can transform quickly from an advantage to a chore.

Multiple POVs can add a lot of richness to the tapestry of your story, but they also will have their own demands that must be met. I come back to this concept a lot in my posts, but it all comes down to what kind of story you are trying to tell. If it does require multiple POVs, advance planning (or an upfront acceptance that you’ll be doing a fair amount of rewriting) can save you a lot of headaches and frustration down the road.