Building Your Writing Toolkit: Part 6.3 – Bits and Characters, the Tool for the Job

So now I’m hoping that you have some idea of what a character is, how it functions, the round/flat static/dynamic spectrum, and (here’s what really matters) at least a modicum of knowledge about how to make a character do what you want it to do. This week I’m giving you some tips on how to keep your character from getting away from you, and how to make sure that they’re projecting the personality that you want them to project.

A fictional character can get the better of its author in a number of ways, but the most common way that characters have of escaping your control is by turning into somebody you know, or worse yet by turning into you.

Hemingway could get away with writing characters who were basically Hemingway because, in spite of his tremendous unpopularity with feminist audiences (and probably the root cause of that dislike), Hemingway was a stupendous badass with giant brass balls who killed large animals and fascists, and who slept with lots and lots of beautiful women. The same is true of Ian Fleming, who wrote the James Bond books based on exploits he had when he was actually working as a secret agent. These men were not your average author and stories about characters who were thinly-veiled versions of the author were still interesting to read because the authors were interesting characters themselves.

John Irving, though, is not very interesting. He’s a writer who has been a writer for a long time; the narrators of his stories tend to be writers and many of them are named John – they also mostly live in New England, encounter bears, have strange experiences at hotels and are fixated with wrestling in one way or another. John Irving’s Johns are boring, so he does the smart thing and makes the book about the interesting characters (Owen Meany, Fran, State of Maine, Freud, Jenny Fields, Roberta Muldoon) who surround the various faceless, clever-but-boring Johns who tell the stories in his books. You, however, are probably not as smart as John Irving and if you are you still probably haven’t written as many books as he has, so you’re not at a point where you can write yourself into your novel.

The problem with writing yourself as a fictional protagonist is that you’ll find the character slowly becoming the coolest, most awesome, smartest, prettiest, most fashionable version of you, which I’m sure will be wonderfully masturbatory for you to read, but which will bore the tits off of anyone who is looking at your book going “why the hell is the main character here supposed to be so awesome – he hasn’t even done anything.” If anyone who reads your fiction says this to you, congratulations, you have written a Mary Sue, and if you’re not outright insulted just by reading that please make note that the term was spawned by Star Trek FanFic and see why what you’ve done is terrible by clicking that link and realizing that you’re an asshole.

Mary Sues are the worst mistakes that inexperienced (and some experienced) authors make, and they almost uniformly piss off audiences. A Mary Sue is a character that is good at everything without working for it, amuses or fascinates other characters even though the Mary Sue is dull, they’re given tremendous license by the author and the other characters to throw hissy fits and participate in damaging behaviors, they have few flaws and the flaws that they have are minor and endearing, they break all the rules of the universe the author has written them into, and they usually end up getting everything that they want. There are actually a lot of things that contribute to the Mary Sue-ness of a character and the reason a lot of writers accidentally create Mary Sues is because they want an everyman character, someone the audience can relate to who isn’t an outstanding person but manages to do outstanding things – it’s a fantasy that many readers will be drawn to at a superficial level.

If all of that sounds appealing for your character, consider that the most famous Mary Sue character in the fiction world right now is Bella Swan of the Twilight Series: she’s clumsy, suicidal and self destructive, boring as sin, comes from a broken home, and for all of that manages to fascinate the like omygod totally hottest immortal male lead, be the center of a love triangle, have the first human-vampire hybrid child that anyone knows of, and live happily ever after as a bloodsucker who doesn’t take human life. Mary. Fucking. Sue.

But enough ranting. So why shouldn’t you make a character based on other people you know? After all, just last week I was telling you to observe the people in your life and write their traits into characters, so wouldn’t a whole character based on a real person be awesome? No.

Let’s pretend that you’re writing an abusive boyfriend into a story. You’ve decided that he’s a younger version of the German professor you had sophomore year, the one who made a girl cry in class and gave you a D and called students morons on a regular basis. Mr. Deutschmeister sounds like a real asshole, so he’s the perfect basis for an asshole character – except for one thing: you already hate Mr. Deutschmeister. Because you already hate this prick you’re less likely to spend any time convincing your audience to hate this prick. Every time you read what you’ve written you can hear his snarky voice boring into your skull and belittling you, but your audience can’t. Every time your character smacks his girlfriend you’re seeing Mr. Deutschmeister’s hands and frame and snarling face with the perfect clarity of rage-fueled memory – a memory your audience doesn’t share and can’t relate to. But Mr. Deutschmeister is a good start – you know what kinds of behaviors he had that pissed you off, you know the kinds of things he would say to hurt students, so all you have to do is have your character do and say those kinds of things in the character’s body and voice, not Mr. Deutschmeister’s.

Alternately, let's say you're writing a female lead or love interest, and let's say that you think your girlfriend is the perfect platform for a heroine. That's great, you adore your girlfriend and I'm sure you're very happy. We don't know your girlfriend and we probably won't see her strengths the way that you do because you know her as a whole person with flaws and secrets and passion and humanity while we only know those traits that you chose to share with us - which will probably not include the most interesting or damaging things about your girlfriend (because if you put those in a book she has every right to kick you in the nuts) that would make us sympathetic to or admiring of a character. But you know that your girlfriend has a great sense of humor, tremendous integrity and a gentleness that you would like to build into your character, so start with a fresh character and allow those qualities to infuse her without overwhelming her: if your character has a unique voice that is separate from the people you know it will be stronger and more independent as a character than it would be as an homage to a person.

This gets us to the problem of voice – how the hell do you get a character to sound like someone who isn’t you and who isn’t someone you know? That’s both very hard and very easy – you get to know them as an independent entity, in exactly the same way your audience will eventually get to know them. This works well if you have a plot planned – you meet your character as you drop them into this plot and watch them jump through the hoops that you’ve set up, you let them solve problems the way that THEY want to solve them, not the way that you do, and you let them evolve to meet challenges. A good character can become powerful enough to completely derail your plot, which can be good or bad – if they take the plot in a direction that undermines what you’re trying to write then you’ll probably want to revise the character a little, but if they hijack the plot into a new and better direction than the one you had planned you’ll probably see the value of changing a plot to better serve your character.

Characters are hard to write, and the best ones are like siblings – they can irritate the living shit out of you, but they’re there when you need them and they’ll do what they can to help you out. Try as hard as you can to keep your characters independent and not products of narcissism, blind admiration, or revenge and they’ll serve you well.

So to review:
Don’t make a character out of you.
Don’t make a character (entirely) out of someone you know.
Keep your characters relatable but realistic – they have to have our sympathy but they can’t be perfect.
Let your character become its own entity.
Don’t let your character overwhelm your plot.
Keep your characters as round or flat, or as static or dynamic as you intend them to be.
Characterize with what you’ve learned from the world around you.
Practice characters all the time by building up a stable of bit characters.
Have fun getting to know these little strangers.

Thanks for reading and I’ll be back next week with a new topic – voice as stain, the indelibility of a good literary voice.

If you get bored between now and then, check out these cool Mary Sue character tests and see how your characters stack up (please remember that the Mary Sue concept started in FanFic so some of the questions will seem strange) – though feel free to disregard the results; a personality test isn’t necessarily any more valid for your character than another one would be for you.

OnlyFiction Mary Sue Test
KatFeete Mary Sue Test
Ponylandpress Mary Sue Test

Anyway, cheers until next week,
-Alli

Building your Writing Toolkit: Part 5.2 – Pounding it Together: Making Narrative Work

When you’re first learning to use a hammer, you don’t use it well – one of two things tends to happen: either you take mincing, pussyfooting little swings that only serve to waste energy and bend nails, or you whack the shit out of your thumb a couple of times before you get the technique down right. The same approaches are evident when a writer is getting a handle on narrative – either they’ve worked hard to remove all storytelling aspects of a work (you see this a lot with poets who don’t think poems are supposed to tell stories), or they are so aware of the narrative as a narrative that you don’t care about what’s happening on the page. Eventually most writers get this figured out and settle into a narrative style that is comfortable for them (don’t worry, there are more ways to craft narrative than there are to swing a hammer), but it’s a hard rhythm to fall into so here are some dos and don’ts for people who are trying to figure out exactly how narrative works.

Do – Tell jokes. Tell lots of jokes. Tell knock-knock jokes and dead baby jokes and silly kid’s jokes and long-winded story-style jokes. Find friends who are patient with you and just start telling them lots and lots of jokes. Humor is really, really hard to do well, and telling a joke well depends on a lot of factors – timing, delivery, phrasing, pacing, animation and audience are all important to getting a good response. Once you understand this on a personal, verbal level you’ll have an easier time with things like pacing, delivery, phrasing and audience in your writing. And you’ll probably feel better about going out and interacting with real people if you’re decent at telling a joke – which is really, really important if you want to write realistically.

Don’t – Tell us everything all of the time. Have you ever read one of those stories that devotes several pages to the intricate details of a character’s hair, clothing, shoes and mannerisms at a party? Or a story that explains the minute variations in the weapons of a couple characters joined in battle? Or a story with paragraph after paragraph all about how handsomely the main male character pouts? I hate those. Most people hate those. In fact most people have a very specific word for those kinds of stories – boring. There are authors who do this well: Austen could write a lot about party plans, but rarely delved into minutiae; Tolkien spends a whole lot of words describing paths through the woods and swords, but more often focused on his universe’s history (and his descriptions of weapons are totally awesome, so he gets a pass on that); Dickens does spend a lot of time working with tiny details, but he either made them funny or important to make up for their mind-numbing nature. But none of those authors gives us every detail of every outfit that every character wore in every scene. None of them wrote about every emotion that every character was feeling in every dance, battle, or factory revolt (though it seems like Dickens tried to in some books.) The reason you don’t get all the details all of the time is because they’re not important all of the time. Be selective with the details you hand out to your audience, and your audience will learn to value the insight that you give them.

Do – Experiment. One of the reasons that creative writing classes are so useful is because they encourage writers to move beyond their comfort zones. Creative writing professors expect their students to be aware of the possibilities of all kinds of writing – not just the one that a student happens to feel cozy with, and so the students learn – albeit uncomfortably – to write in a broader scope. Give yourself assignments to experiment with – try writing a one act play, try writing in second person (though I strongly recommend that if you’re writing in second person you get VERY good at using it before submitting a second person narrative to anyone – even a creative writing professor), try haiku or sonnets, try any kind of experiment you can think of and see what it does to the structure of your narratives.

Don’t – Force yourself. It is excellent (and vital) to try new things, but if a certain narrative device isn’t working for you don’t force yourself to use that device. You don’t have to be an expert (or even proficient) at everything – if you’re a distant narrator by nature, you’ll have a lot of trouble writing internal monologues but you’ll probably do a great job with creating realistic worlds for your characters to navigate. Play to your strengths and work around your weaknesses. As a personal example, I once had to write a creative nonfiction essay in a stream-of-consciousness style; I was awful at it – I hate reading the style, I hate writing the style, I hate hearing people talk about the style. Stream-of-consciousness and I are not friends. But while I’m bad at writing in that style, I’m pretty good at compartmentalizing ideas, so for the purpose of that particular essay I ended up writing about fifty tiny stream-of-consciousness paragraphs and scrambling them up until they were a coherent (or as least as coherent as stream-of-consciousness gets) essay. It wasn’t pretty, but I was able to get through it – if I had forced myself to sit down and just pound through a long, rambling reflection on the assigned topic in stream-of-consciousness, I never would have gotten past the first hundred words.

Do – Practice. I know, I say that a lot. But I always tell people to practice because it’s the one thing that will always get results. If you’re just starting to get comfortable with something, practice until it feels like home. If you’re already good at something, practice to maintain your proficiency. If you’re utter crap at something, practice until you’re something less than utter crap.

Don’t – Give up. If you want to be a writer but narrative is giving you fits, don’t worry. Telling a story is hard work – especially if you’re trying to tell that story as a poem or in an essay format or in a voice you’re not familiar with. But you need to understand that writing is very hard work – you’re not going to be brilliant right away, your stories will limp and lurch at first, and you will always have a long road ahead of you to perfection because nothing is ever perfect. But the more you work with your writing, the more you re-write, practice, and have patience with yourself, the happier you will be with each project you complete.

Anyway, I’ve said another thousand words without covering all that I want to on this topic. I’ll be back next week with an examination of narrative in different written media (like short fiction, poetry, drama and essays) and the week after that with a few exercises to help you flex your narrative muscles. Thanks for reading.

Cheers,
- Alli

Letter To The Leaves: Every Novel Begins With A Few Lines

My Fellow Contributors,

I must admit something that I have been reluctant to tell many. I am a victim of our modern technological era. It seems in our time of status updates and tweets I have become trapped in writing in 150 character thought blocks. My ability to write long cohesive stories has deteriorated. Or perhaps it would be more accurate stated this way: my motivation to write long cohesive stories has eroded.

William Winfield Wright stated last week during the Q&A section of his reading that he loved titles and endings and that short poems let him get to both quickly. Short poems are like Polaroid snap shots. They capture one scene in all its glory. Every minute detail is allowed to rise to the surface. There is truly something to be valued in how much can be said in just a few lines.

But as a good friend of mine reminded me the other day, there is also something to be valued (if not more) in a long sustained novel. This friend said that it was amazing that someone could concentrate and manipulate ideas over the course of three hundred pages.

I suppose I agree with her. It is quite the feat that a writer could spend the amount of time and thought necessary to produce such a work. I might even go as far as my friend did and say that it is more impressive than say a collection of poems. However, I'm not one for sitting down for long sustained periods of writing. I find it hard to sit down and write papers for school let alone sitting down to write a novel. And the thought of developing a story that could last over two hundred pages is intimidating. But even with these reasons, I still haven’t been stopped from trying all together.

You see I have been keeping a journal since 2009. It’s not a diary but more like a common place book. Most of it is reflective prose, but there is some poetry interwoven that breaks up the narrative. My hope for this book (and subsequent journals) is two-fold. First I want to keep my thoughts and experiences written down so that they do not get erased with time. And second, I hope one day to pass these books down to my future children and grandchildren. I often write pages and phrases as if I was addressing them. Giving them the advice I learn as I make my way through life.

So I guess in a sense I am writing a long sustained book. And in the course of writing this blog I have discovered for myself the way to write a novel. Just as my common place book, a novel grows day by day, line by line.

There is something to be valued in both short quick poetry, and long methodical novels. Each gives its artist a medium to paint the world as they see it, each with their splendor, each with their beauty.

As Always

Undoubtedly Yours,

Bermuda

P.S.

If you haven’t already please go start following and reviewing Alli’s blogs on Building Your Writer’s Toolkit. These are great for any level of writer and will help you lay the foundation for later success in the world of writing.

Here’s the link to Part Four: “Building Material for your Material”,

http://afewlinesmagazine-theblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/building-your-writing-toolkit-part-four.html