Tag Archives: Character

One potentially powerful and useful tool to have in your toolbox is the ability to write in a certain vernacular that makes your characters memorable. Stylistic voicing has been successfully used by some great authors. Let’s take a look at those, and why they were successful.

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

One of the most memorable characters I can think of is Holden Caulfield. The Catcher in the Rye is a staple for coming-of-age readers. It’s my favorite book, in fact. Why? Why did this book resonate with me so much? No, it’s not because I’m

a sociopath, as many critical readers think of Holden. I loved the book because it was real.

We understand that this is the first time Holden has ever truly spoken his mind, consequences be damned. And we get a front row seat! His raw vernacular often includes calling people “phonies” and using “goddamn” as a consistent adjective. This usage of stylistic voicing achieved a certain authenticity. Whether Holden was right or wrong about the other characters being phonies, we never question for a minute that Holden is completely convinced that they are.

Room by Emma Donoghue

The book Room is told by a 5-year-old boy, Jack, whose main education is the television. Why? Because he is a captive, along with his mother, locked in a shed for years. Jack’s stylistic voicing is so convincing, so well constructed, that the reader is completely enveloped into Jack’s world, where he has only known the Room. He has never been outside. He hasn’t received any sort of education, apart from the one his mother tries to give him, which makes his sentence construction short and plain. He only describes what he sees, not knowing exactly what certain things mean. But you, the reader, know exactly what it means. And it makes your stomach churn and your heart ache.

You may want to pick up Room to see an excellent example of emotional transport with a stylistic narrative voice. It should also be noted that some readers simply could not get past the stylistic voicing. That is one of the risks you take when choosing a stylistic narration, but the rewards can be BIG. Room won Emma Donoghue over ten prestigious awards for her effort and risk.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Perhaps the most well-known example of using stylistic voice is Huck Finn. It was, in fact, the very first novel published to use American vernacular, or more specifically, regional dialect (an example:“Sometimes you gwyne to git hurt, en sometimes you gwyne to git sick; but every time you’s gwyne to git well agin.”). Huck is described as a pariah, son of the town drunk, and the other children wish they dared to be like him. That’s one hellova introduction. If Samuel Clemens decided to write The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in third person, I venture to say everyone would hate Huck. A bratty little kid, running around causing havoc. What Twain did so brilliantly was deciding to tell the story from Huck’s perspective, showing us the charm and charisma Huck has to offer, so we can’t help but love the little shit. Using stylistic voicing, Twain made us relate to an otherwise potentially annoying character.

You may have noticed that I chose all first-person novels, as well as young narrators. Can you think of any examples of stylistic voice using adults, told in third person? Was it as effective as a first-person stylistic voice?

If you’re on the edge about whether or not to write a character’s unique voicing, take heart. Mark Twain had never seen it before, but did it anyway. Emma Donoghue received some unkind reviews of Room because of her style choice, and probably cries about it in front of her wall full of awards. Just kidding. She doesn’t. And Holden Caulfield wouldn’t be one of the most notorious voices in literature if Salinger hadn’t let him. Tell your character’s story in the most authentic way possible, even if that includes letting him or her speak for him/herself.

The Upside to Being Messy and Unfocussed

January 6, 2015

Evan Braun

Character Evan Braun Rewriting Storyline No Comments

RubiksCube For the most part, I’m a gardener. And proud of it! If you’ve spent any amount of time in the writing community, you probably know what this means: I explore my story as I go along, finding my way to the ending through a process of trial and error rather than moving through the book strictly according to a preordained outline. I don’t eschew outlining entirely; I do keep fairly detailed outlines of the two or three chapters ahead of wherever I happen to be in the story on a given day. Working this way gives me confidence in the story’s immediate future, but beyond that I admit it can get a little murky. I only have a general idea of how I want the story to resolve while I’m in the midst of it (usually it’s a solid, workable idea, but nonetheless I only work out the details very generally).

This doesn’t mean the endings aren’t well-earned or carefully orchestrated. In fact, I feel that working this way forces me to spend a lot of time considering how satisfying various plot and character developments will be when push comes to shove. If any particular idea isn’t panning out, I don’t have qualms about jettisoning it in favour of an alternate approach. In my experience, this allows my books to get better, stronger, tighter as I work through them, solving them in the same way one might tackle a Rubik’s Cube. (Full disclosure: I’ve never managed to solve a Rubik’s Cube, so I guess that’s a bad example.)

So what does this have to do with character? Everything.

When you don’t have an airtight outline guiding you through the storytelling weeds, you have to create potential in your characters. In the earlier stages of writing a novel, it’s profitable to spin dozens of little threads that may or may not pay off in the long run. You don’t have to tie them all together. Once your story is worked out, you can trim the book down to focus only on the threads that coalesce. At the beginning, though, the key to creating great, story-propelling characters is to pinball them off other characters and events to see what sticks. In my experience, this leads to a host of options which can be exploited down the road.

This can feel messy and unfocussed while in progress, but a lot of the detritus doesn’t make it into the final cut. I end up writing a number of early scenes that don’t see the light of day, because they don’t lead anywhere interesting. But I often won’t know if particular character combinations work until I attempt them. So Margaret clashes with Fred, and Fred makes a pass at Steve, and Steve can speak with the ghost of a long-dead alien consciousness from Europa, and the long-dead alien consciousness from Europa… The point is, none of these may be central to the premise of my story—at least to begin with—but the few threads that really click create enormous depth and interconnectivity to my characterizations in the long-term. And several of them likely will become central to the premise by the time I type “The End.”

Knowing what will come together and what won’t is a mysterious, unscientific alchemy I have yet to master—and maybe I never will. But in the meantime, I’m going to keep the gardening the hell out of my characters and sees what sprouts up. Sometimes it’s this. Other times? Not so much.

Who’s holding the camera? Choosing the Point of View Character

January 2, 2015

mary

Character Craft & Skills Mary Pletsch Narrative Voice POV 1 Comment

I like to write tight third person point of view. Briefly, that means that the story is seen “through the eyes” of one or more characters. The descriptions of events, the value placed on those events, the decision making process, and the interpretation of actions and gestures is all coloured by that particular person’s experience. Readers see how this character thinks and analyzes.

One of the most fun things to do with tight third person is to drop hints in the narrative that the point of view character might be misinterpreting events, misunderstanding other characters, selectively perceiving some factors while overlooking others, or missing some of what’s going on. Different people can experience the same event in very different ways depending on their histories, values and beliefs. Writing in tight third person challenges readers to question the point of view character’s interpretation.

What character the writer chooses to “hold the camera” can change the entire story.

Two examples stand out to me. The first is when editorial feedback convinced me to change the point of view character; the second is when I chose not to, despite my beta reader’s advice.

Later this year I have a short horror story called “Red Ochre” appearing in Fossil Lake 2: The Refossiling. In the initial draft, the story was told from the point of view of a white male student named Perry. As the story went on, clues in the narrative indicated that Perry’s fascination with, and actions toward, his friend Meesha were twisted and dangerous, even though Perry’s narration showed that he considered his behaviour to be normal and unremarkable. I liked the idea that readers, like Meesha, might be taken in by Perry’s charm at the beginning of the story. The scare factor was to come in when readers realized that Perry had deceived them as well as her.

I gave the story to a beta reader, and he told me that in his opinion, the story was a failure.

Initially, I thought he’d missed the “creepy” cues given by Perry throughout the narrative. No, he said. His problem was that Meesha, a Native American student, appeared as an enigmatic, romanticized object of infatuation rather than as a person in her own right.

That wasn’t what I’d wanted the story to do at all. I tried to rewrite it, but given that Perry didn’t really know much about Meesha as a person, nor did he care to know, I couldn’t fix that problem while telling the story from Perry’s point of view.

I scrapped that draft and started again from the top, using Meesha as the point of view character.

Perry’s object of fascination became a fully developed human being, with her own reasons for disregarding the “creepy” cues Perry gives off as the story progresses. Better yet, I realized that the stakes were higher for Meesha, and the story would be more intense because of it. Perry has only his life to lose. Meesha has her trust in her friend, her understanding of the world around her, and ultimately something even greater than her life on the line: she is risking both her identity and her soul.

Changing the point of view character made “Red Ochre” a much stronger and ultimately more unsettling horror story, and I’m very pleased with the results.

The other example is from the first story I ever sold: “Blood Runs Thicker” in the e-book edition of When the Hero Comes Home 2.

In this story, a woman becomes a reluctant war hero. When her childhood best friend attends her homecoming, he realizes that she has been maneuvered into playing this role, even though she did what she did for her own reasons, and without succeeding at her intended goals.

My beta reader for my first draft told me that she didn’t think that the stakes in the story were high enough, and perhaps I should reconsider telling the story from the hero’s point of view, instead of from her friend’s. After all, she was the one forced into this situation against her will.

I began re-drafting and two thousand words in, I realized it would never work–but more importantly, why not. The core of the story was not about war. The core of the story was about how much a person would sacrifice for a loved one. The focus of my narrative was not the hero’s actions in combat, but that her friend was willing to sacrifice the future he’d planned for himself in order to protect her. He was the active character, and he was the one with something left to lose: she had already lost everything that mattered to her.

I re-wrote the initial story, emphasizing how much the point of view character stood to lose if he acted to protect the war hero. I focused the narrative on the point of view character’s internal conflict, emotions, and doubts. During my rewrite, I kept foremost in mind that the core of the story was about sacrifice.

The story sold. You can check it out for yourself here.

In this case, trying to tell the story from someone else’s point of view helped me understand the theme of the story. I used this knowledge to give the story a tight focus on the crucial concepts and tell a better tale.

If your story’s not working, consider how the plot might look from another character’s point of view. The lenses through which each character filters the events can make all the difference.

A Crash Course on the Best and Worst Elements of Writing

November 28, 2014

Ace Jordyn

Ace Jordyn Character Craft & Skills Reading Reviews The Writing Process Writing Tools No Comments

What an enlightening month November has been! If you ever wanted a crash course in what makes writing the best or the worst, this was it.

There is so much to learn about writing craft and storytelling from the masters yet we can learn equally from writing that doesn’t engage us. Deciding on the ‘best’ means we need to understand why we like what we do and what constitutes the best for each of us (Kristin Luna). It also means not disregarding other forms of fiction because the best stories use elements of both literary and commercial fiction and knowing how each works makes us better skilled writers (Susan Forest).

Elements in the best writing includes:
precision of word choice, great imagery and detail plus an author who gets right into his character’s heads (Clancy); a grasp on multi-sensory prose which like a dream, makes the fantastical normal and lifts the reader to a place of wonder (Brenda Sawatsky); cliffhangers and when multiple story lines crash together in a maelstrom of calamity at the end of a book (Evan); well executed diverse fiction that helps the reader understand the world we live in and cultivates respect (Kim May); story matters and being a good storyteller with proper pacing and resolutions is key, but before telling the story, think about how much you can tell us by each word, each sentence, and the beauty you strive for in bringing them together (Colette); it’s not just about the protagonist against the antagonist but about how every character interacts with every other character (Jace Sanders); heroes aren’t heroes all the time. They are just humans with something about them that is extraordinary, and the more flawed a character is, the more human they seem (Leigh Galbreath); the best writing has characters who strive for themselves along with sentences that soar on their own (James Van Pelt); successful prologues convey information without being an info dump and they promise a story/writing style upon which they deliver (Ace Jordyn); a consistent background which functions almost as another character, widening the options for the protagonist’s conflict along with psychological realism where characters behave consistently (Al Onia); the key to the ‘best’ has less to do with perfect prose, and more to do with story impact when what we’re writing matters, emotions rise up, and the reader can feel it (Adria Laycraft).

What constitutes the worst writing includes:
meandering prose that loses the reader and is boring and there’s no beginning, middle or end and no characters to invest in (Clancy); it’s a bad idea to mislead readers about what kind of story you are telling readers for pick up books because they’re hoping for a certain type of experience. (Mary); when writers grab hold of a culture’s cool elements—Samurai swords, martial arts, ninjas—and throw the rest out the window because the history, philosophy, sociology, and traditions are so intertwined and influential on the cool elements that you can’t separate the two and do it justice. (Kim May); it’s not possible to root for a guy who seems like a walking pity party or if the main character lacks any sense of wonder (James Van Pelt); prologues don’t work if they create expectations that the book doesn’t meet either in story content or style, if they’re an info dump or if they are used to foreshadow or tease (Ace Jordyn); when writers betray the promises set in the beginning of the book and shatter the reader’s bond with the story (Frank).

So how can we judge how we each measure up at being the best? We can compare our work to those we admire and like to read or, as Nathan Barra observed, we can learn by comparing our earlier works to our current ones and being motivated by that.

In case you want to follow up on any of the excellent points I’ve summarized, here is a list of November’s blogs. Just click on the title and the link will get you there.

Happy reading and writing!

Lee Child vs the Boring Clancy
Not What I Signed Up For Mary
The Dreamer Brenda Sawatzky
In Loving Appreciation of the Story Swirl Evan Braun
The Emperor and the Impostor Kim May
Kneeling in the Silver Light Mary
The Importance of Word Choice Colette
Learning from the Masters Jace Sanders
A Tale of Two Readers; or, Everybody Wins Kristin Luna
The Not So likeable Hero Leigh Galbreath
Pluck, Pity Parties and Prose – What I Like Best and What Doesn’t Work James Van Pelt
SSWS Writing Scholarship: Should YOU Apply? Colette
Clive Cussler, Guy Gavriel Kay and DJ McIntosh are Masters at … Ace Jordyn
Writing What I Like to Read Al Onia
Writing Stories that Matter Adria Laycraft
Looking for Progress in a Mirror Nathan Barra
Don’t Break Your Promises Frank
Using the Tools of Both Literary and Commercial Fiction Susan Forest