Why is it important for writers to keep their story elements connected?
Short answer: it makes everything easier to remember.
Long answer: brains are wired to link memories together. Our minds string lamps across people, places, and events. These associations help us trace our steps back through vast chasms of information.
One of the best ways for writers to get good word of mouth is to make their story easy to pitch. This doesn’t mean dumbing down the developments. It means giving readers clear links to reference. Continue reading Everything is Connected→
How do writers get their readers to identify with their characters?
One method is to make the character as basic as possible. This way the reader can fill them with their own details. Have you ever played a role playing game where you get to select your character’s class, hair, and armor? This is taking the default option: the bland blonde fair skinned male human, the rice cake of warrior classes. This option keeps the character so empty, the audience has no choice but to fill him with their own back story.
My name is Drew Chial and I have a problem: I’m addicted to exposition. I talk too much and so does my writing. I need to learn to give people space to get a word in edgewise. I need to learn to do the same thing for my readers. I need to ask my friends more questions and give readers more room to fit their own imaginations in. I need to stop assuming my friends want to listen to me “tell it like it is” and stop thinking my readers won’t notice the information I show them.
Why writers should avoid cheap romantic shorthand and what they can replace it with
Valentine’s Day is almost here.
The one day a year couples are expected to make the time for one another, to rekindle the old flame, to make bold romantic gestures. So naturally I’m thinking about revenge thrillers.
Ever notice how women are portrayed in these vengeance fantasies? A widower flashes back to his lost Lenore dancing, haloed in sunlight, a ballerina spinning on top of a music box in his mind. She is the picture of innocence, riding the hypnotic bliss of her man’s presence. She rolls in the grass, laughs at nothing, and smiles for the sake of smiling. Continue reading Revenge Thriller Romance→
The X-Files defined dramatic science fiction in the 90s. It inspired fans to write spooky stories of their own. Rumor has it, the show is returning for a limited run. Mulder and Scully will wave their flashlights across our TV screens one last time.
“I have to resist the compulsion to reference everyone of these”
A few years ago, someone approached me about adapting a thriller into a screenplay. Reading through the first few chapters, I wasn’t sure where the script should begin. The first scene involved an autopsy where the pathologist missed the symptoms of a biological agent. The author took us through each stage of the autopsy including each instrument the pathologist used, where he made his incisions, and the weight of every organ. Continue reading Too Much Information: Why Writers Should Conceal Their Research→
SMART goals might not help you make big life changes, but can they help your characters?
Whether we’re using SMART goals to break a process down into something less intimidating, or for our lofty ambitions, no one is entirely sure what the acronym stands for: Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic Timely, Small Material Attainable Relevant Time-bound, or Sporadic Mixed Abstract Romantic Transcendental (probably not the last one).
SMART goals are a great way for businesses to fully articulate ambiguous “commitment to excellence” mission statements. They provide a quick mnemonic to improve employee output, but for those of us aspiring to make big life changes, SMART goals can leave us wanting. If your goal is to write 2,000 words a day and a sick day has you coming up short that slight deviation will make you feel like you failed the system. Research shows minor setbacks can derail these types of outcome driven goals.
The best system for improving retail sales, might not be the best system for quitting smoking. What if it could be repurposed to help your writing? I’m not talking about setting a goal to get published by the end of the year, I’m talking about making one of your characters use the system to show you something.
I propose warping SMART goals into a character building exercise, a way for your protagonist to state their desires, while showing if they have the presence of mind to acknowledge what’s preventing them from getting there.
The following excerpt is a SMART goal written by a character in a situation where she ought to be panicking.
SMART Goals for a Character in Peril
My name is Cameron Mendax, full time blogger part time prisoner. I’ve been arrested by impostures, posing as highway patrol officers. I broke out of their interrogation room to discover a wall full of my online credentials and social network thumbnails, as well as several other bright young faces.
These mock-cops, with their frayed patches, have me in solitaire until they can figure out what to do, now that I’ve had a peek at their plan. This compromising situation offers few options, but rather than give into despair, I’ve decided to upgrade my SMART goals to pass the time.
The keys to separating a general goal from a specific one
Specific
My general goal is to escape. I realize there’s precious little time to work out the specifics. All those “W” questions:
Who is involved?
The arresting officer, who was far outside the jurisdiction printed on his squad car. An older man, with a face like tattered boots, who might have been a real cop in a past life. He seemed to know his way around an interrogation room. Not to mention the two others he yelled at over the radio, Cyrus and the one he called, “The Poet.”
What do I want to do?
If life had a God-mode that made me impervious to bullets, I’d like to investigate further, figure out exactly what these boys are doing here, but since it doesn’t, escaping with my life will be a fine consolation.
Where do I need to execute my plan?
Here in this cell, before these cosplay cops move me someplace they have more control of. I get the sense they don’t know this precinct or its equipment as well as their uniforms imply. I was able to get out of those ancient cuffs by wedging a pen clip in the teeth. The bolts keeping the interrogation chair fastened crumbled in my fingers. This room must have a similar weakness worth exploiting. A handful of gravel would make a decent distraction. A loose chunk of concrete would make a fine club. If I’m lucky, I’ll have time to fashion a shank.
When should I act?
When my captors let their guard down.
They’ll be in numbers when they come to transfer me to a torture chamber or a shallow grave in the middle of nowhere. If I can get the door open I can get the jump on them. Maybe I should pretend to go into convulsions. What if they’ve already seen the same prison movies I’ve been watching? Maybe I could lay my hoodie on one side of the room as a distraction, so I can attack them from the darkness, drop from the ceiling, maybe even get myself a gun.
Which requirements and restraints will I have to work with?
I’ll have to commit to one of these scenarios and practice it. Once the fear kicks in, I’ll find myself stuck between fight and flight, in a mode I call “Deer in headlights.” If I pry a chunk of drywall free, I’ll need to practice swinging it. If a sharp bit of rock breaks loose, I’ll have to practice slicing my shank across my captor’s throat.
Why do I need to go this far?
They’ve knocked me out twice. Once with chemicals dispersed from a breathalyzer and once by clubbing me in the head. If the room with all the photos and social media profiles is anything to go on, these guys have been at this for a long time. Since I didn’t hear any voices in my brief jaunt down the hall, I have to assume I’m the last one. I have to act or I won’t live long enough to see how Marvel’s thirty-part film franchise pans out.
Measurable
How much will I have to do? At a minimum, I’ll have to assault or vault over two armed men, this is with limited martial arts and track and field experience.
How will I know when my goal is accomplished? When this run down police station is a dot in my rearview mirror, preferably with flames billowing out the windows.
Achievable
As long as I don’t starve, never fall asleep, and channel a level of Herculean strength I’ve never been able to muster in order to do a pull up, we’re golden.
Realistic
If Hollywood has taught me anything, skinny models can clear a room full of armed guards by power-sliding in with both guns blazing. Imagine what a girl with an average build can do. Here I am clawing at the walls, hoping a club will fall into my lap, but really, all I have to do is wait for the slow motion to kick in, run up one of my assailant’s chests, do the splits, and knock ‘em both in the noggin. Easy peasy.
Timely
Ideally I’ll accomplish my goal before I get maimed, short of that, before I get completely dismembered.
Here in the maddening dark, I doubt I’ll lose my sense of urgency and start slacking. If they do give me that kind of time, I’ll start doing pushups so I can go full Linda Hamilton all over their asses.
That is if “T” stands for “Timely.” If it means “Tangible” then I’m totally screwed.
It’s important to set goals, not just for you, but for your characters
It’s clear Cameron’s in a tight spot, but her musings have revealed several directions the story could go from here. To me the most interesting one involves her attempting to play possum and failing to slice her assailant’s throat with a dull bit of rock.
Cyrus clutched his throat.
Garret steps into the cell. “What happened?”
Cyrus smirked. “She grazed me.”
“Are you hurt?”
Cyrus shook his head. “Nah, just confused. It felt like she was trying to tickle me or something.”
From here, the cosplay cops drag Cameron out of the frying pan and dump her into the fire. Still, she’s resilient enough to set another set SMART goals.
What’s the Big Ideation?
What’s the Big Ideation?
Though not a requirement, a character background is a good source of inspiration to fuel your writing. What’s great about this exercise is that it taught me things about Cameron I didn’t know going in.
You probably don’t need to fill out a Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory on behalf of your characters, but it doesn’t hurt to have some idea how their outlook differs from your own. If your story isn’t written in the first person, this exercise can tell you what your characters’ are thinking.
The urgency of this adventure won’t afford Cameron too many detours for her backstory. Her personality has to surface while she’s coming to terms with her environment. This SMART goals activity lets me fire up my imagination, without overwhelming it with too much information. It’s a character development exercise woven into the plot, not a sprawling character bible full of random details I may never use.
Give it a try, before you start writing, or even when you’re stuck in the middle of a scene.
Hear no exposition, see no exposition, speak no exposition… or maybe just a little.
When I started writing, I was more concerned about what my characters were thinking than what they were doing. I wrote uneventful chapters, where the lead spent most of his time talking about his feelings. He rarely explored settings or exchanged dialogue with other human beings. His conflict was internal, his journey was cerebral, and his musings floated free from any kind of story structure.
My narrators weren’t passive observers, giving accounts of events as they happened, they were philosophers whose ideas read more like blog entries than stories. Their selfish nature was made apparent by an avalanche of I feel statements.
After some eye-opening criticism, my writing veered into another direction. I traded narration for strict description, play by plays of what my characters said and done. These stories read like screenplays converted from present tense into past tense. While my writing improved, it felt like it was missing something.
Compensating for my early first person sins, I’d let the plot reign over characterization. At their worst, my descriptions were so devoid of emotion they read like crime scene reports:
“One armed protagonist entered the room, shortly after sunset. He fired several rounds.”
My leads had lost their edge. I tried to smuggle some of their attitude into the dialogue, but it felt forced, especially when they weren’t sharing scenes with characters worth confiding in. I didn’t want to resort to soliloquy, so I tossed their clever musings into the waste bin.
It took a while before I realized I wasn’t taking full advantage of the medium. I was applying the limitations of movies to written stories, denying myself the tools that set the format apart.
Whether you’re writing in the first person or the third person, books let the reader see inside your characters’ heads. The trick is figuring out when to show what they’re thinking through their actions, and when to tell by getting beneath their skin.
Internal monologues can take us beneath your hero’s mask
Sometimes Telling is the Best way to Show
Writers are told showing is preferable to telling. If given the option to reveal a character trait in a scene or through a narration, we’re supposed to write a scene. We’re told that narration is a form of telling that cheats the reader’s imagination out of its contribution. Writers shouldn’t ask readers to take the hero’s word for it, readers need evidence.
Subtext is the preferred tool for illustrating what a character is thinking through their actions, a way to launder information to the audience without the other characters noticing.
On the surface, your romantic leads sound like they’re arguing over which grocers they trust with their business, but they’re really talking about an entirely different set of trust issues. The scene isn’t about either one of them being embarrassed by a food seller’s practices, it’s about the couple’s mutual fear of being hurt.
There is a way to use telling to show. If a character’s thoughts are in stark contrast with their actions, it helps to run commentary over their scenes. Watch an episode of Dexter on mute and it’ll look like the title character is a working stiff who loves his family, until he flies off the handle and murders someone. Dexter’s internal monologue reveals his “dark passenger” lurks behind his every action. He makes the subtext explicit because he knows we won’t catch it.
If your character is a sociopath, they might not emote enough to reveal their motives. They could have a working knowledge of poker tells, they could keep their expression in check.
Characters are allowed to be shrewd with each other and outspoken with their audience. Their high society world might have them on their best behavior, but they can be shamelessly crass with the reader. We forge an intimate bond with characters who let us peek beneath their social graces and tell it like it is.
Reveal as much of the character as you can through their actions, but don’t deny them the occasional brazen declaration of their feelings.
Internal monologues are effective in moderation. Let them flow with the plot. Let them riff off of ongoing scenes. Don’t let them derail the action. If a chapter reads like a journal entry you’ve gone too far into telling territory. If you ever want to see a film adaptation give the director something to put on screen. Sometimes it’s better to put your lead’s internal monologue in their mouth. Give them one good friend to gossip with, so they don’t have to talk to themselves.
We need to see more of your character than they’re willing to show the world
Let Your Characters Gossip with Your Reader
In his book Robert’s Rules for Writing, Robert Masello says, “One of the greatest virtues of gossip is it gives us a chance, in a casual, nonjudgmental format, to check our own proclivities and attitudes against everybody else’s.”
Is it wrong to bully phone support into doing their job right? Do other people have scripted excuses they give to panhandlers? Does anybody else have friends who live-tweet their panic attacks?
We all want to know if we’re the only ones who do what we do or if our actions are part of a universal human condition.
As much as eavesdropping and observations can help your writing, so can accounts of other people’s wrong doing. The trick is to capture the spirit of these gossip sessions without quoting them verbatim.
It’s good to reveal characters’ relationships through scenes, but the medium allows them to gossip with the audience, to confirm hunches without the other characters knowing.
Why not give our leads a little too much wine and let their tongues hang loose?
Let them say things like, “How long have I been with my husband? Long enough to experience his entire sexual spectrum, from his premature ejaculations to his inability to perform.”
From scene to scene, this character’s mask tells the world they’re satisfied with their marriage, but we know different.
The narrator cuts us in on a dramatic irony, unknown to her husband. This insider information tints how we see the couple’s interactions, it foreshadows tragic outcomes. We get to chuckle at the false assumptions others make about the state of the narrator’s relationship, because we’re closer friends.
There are subtler ways to get this effect, but sometimes giving your audience a peek beneath your hero’s mask is the most entertaining one.
My favorite first person stories are littered with moments where the hero says something so shameless it makes my jaw drop, where I think, “I can’t believe they’re trusting me with this information,” where I mistake them for a real person.
It’s important to ground your story, to show as much of your character as you can, but indulge in telling what they’e thinking every so often.
The very first line in Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places is, “I have a meanness inside me, as real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out…”
Right out of the gate, I knew I was going to like this book. It spit in the face of everything my screenwriting background had taught me. Libby Day, Dark Place’s narrator, doesn’t care what the reader thinks of her and that’s one of her most endearing qualities. She doesn’t pet a dog to win us over. She doesn’t compensate with a sense of humor. If she’s an ice queen with a heart of gold, she doesn’t wear it on her sleeve.
Libby wins our affection almost by accident. She’s the lone survivor of a murder spree that claimed her mother and two sisters. The moment this personal tragedy could get our sympathy, we learn she’s been exploiting it for money, living off of donations, even having a self help book on recovery ghost written for her. Now she’s down to her last few dollars. She’s a loser who strives to be as unlovable as possible.
Libby testified that her teenage brother sacrificed her siblings in the name of Satan, but didn’t actually see the event go down. When a group of true crime junkies hire her to investigate her past, Libby starts to wonder if the killer is still out there.
Libby’s call to action forces her to grow fast. Since she starts from such a low place, she has nowhere to go but up. Even though, she set out to rub us the wrong way in chapter 1, we find ourselves rooting for her when the book is done. Her no bullshit attitude proves beneficial. She doesn’t come with a strong moral code, but she finds one on the way.
These are the types of stories I love the most: likability long cons. If Libby had started as a grown up girl scout, she wouldn’t have commanded my attention.
Ask yourself, if Tony Stark was a gentleman from frame one, how compelling would you have found his transformation into Iron Man? If Han Solo never cared about Galactic Credits, how much would you have cared when he helped the rebellion at the last minute? If Catwoman hadn’t stollen Bruce Wayne’s fingerprints, would you have cared as much when she decided to help him save Gotham?
Unlike those lovable rogues, Libby Day doesn’t even bother being charming, but she goes through a similar karmic transition.
“There’s nothing behind my back…”
Average Characters are Overdone
A trap early writers fall into is trying to make their characters likable from the get go. Treating character introductions like job interviews, they go out of their way to make a good first impression.
A lot of writers think the key to making characters relatable is to make them as average as possible. This is why sitting through movie trailers feels like watching a parade of Joe Everymen. I’ve already written about how much I hate that feeling. I don’t find regular Joe’s very compelling. Designing your lead to appear hyper normal, is a cheap way to make them accessible. A smarter investment, would be to give them a goal your audience can relate to.
Maybe we’re not all blue collar slobs, but we all want a reason to get up in the morning. Maybe we’re not all Joe-sixpacks, but we all want to be happier than we are. Maybe we’re not all average Americans, but we all want to be loved by someone.
Your character doesn’t need to be someone the audience wants to have a beer with. They’re not running for president. You don’t need to file down their jagged edges. Well developed characters are just as likable as characters that are just like us. It’s more important for your hero to feel like a human being than a delegate for all of humanity.
“… I swear.”
Don’t Avoid Every Extreme
Writing a believable character is a lot like trying to seduce someone; if you’re too calculated in your approach, your target audience is going to feel it. They might not be able to explain why it’s not working, but they’ll have a very strong hunch. If you use manipulative language on a first date, your date has every right to walk out on you. If pander to what you think your audience wants, they have every right to put your book down.
Readers have read enough stories to subconsciously recognize writers’ tricks. Character formulas are not love potions.
If you write with an imaginary audience in the room, you’ll sacrifice your honesty in the name of broadening your appeal. You’ll avoid extremes. You’ll struggle to make your character vulnerable, without seeming too whiny. You’ll make them an underdog, with an unnatural resilience. You’ll waste too much time trying to make them seem smart, but not too clever. One sarcastic quip too many and you’ll fear you’re losing your reader.
If you write with your audience in the room, you’re setting yourself up for writer’s block. How can your story move forward, when you’re so afraid your reader will turn on you?
There’s something freeing about writing nasty characters, then unleashing them on the total squares that occupy their universe. We all spend so much time saving face, it’s fun to watch someone cast off social mores with reckless abandon. Audiences might find your hero repellant in the prologue, only to root for them later on.
Sarcastic, cynical, arrogant people are not without their appeal, so long as they’re three dimensional. Defects give your characters room to grow. Don’t rob them of a deep emotional change by making them too likable from the get go.
Method writers write what they know while classical writers draw entirely from their imaginations. I’m not here to tell you which style is best, I’m here to tell you how to walk the line between the two without staggering.
Take too much inspiration from the real world and your notebook turns into a black hole
Writers struggle to keep our memoirs out of our fiction, to keep our rage journals out of character narrations, to put some distance between our diaries and the worlds we’re building.
Our personal lives have a way of demanding roles in our stories. We’re lured into taking ideas from them with the promise of added realism. A smattering of truth can add authenticity to fantasy, but there’s a risk in mixing fiction and nonfiction. If a story is rooted too deeply in reality it resists changes it may ultimately need. The trick is to warp life events to serve your story, not to bend it to report those events more accurately.
I use a waiting period when it comes to drawing from trauma. Fresh wounds bleed into my imagination. When I have a falling out I have to fight the urge to pick up my pen. When I get dumped I have to resist the compulsion to bring the break up into my story. When I get downsized I have to resist setting the same pink slip on my hero’s desk.
When something bad happens, I usually have another story going. I don’t want to shoehorn my journal into events I already have in motion. I might feel a need to share a personal revelation, but if I put it into the wrong forum it will seem jarring.
That’s why I wait until my statute of limitations has passed. My immediate reactions are inarticulate. They come out too soon for me to settle on an allegory. My metaphors refuse to mix, like a sloppy cocktail, they leave a bad aftertaste in the readers’ mouths. If I feel something too intensely I overuse hyperbole. My poetic exaggerations color my prose in the deepest shade of purple. I get so abstract that when it comes time to edit, I fail to see what I meant.
Why Emotions Suck at Plotting Stories
If I invite emotional reactions into what I’m working on, they make themselves at home. They move things around. They demand that I convert my third person story into a first person one. My emotions don’t have time to show evidence to the audience, they want to talk directly to them. They insert monologues into scenes that would benefit from quiet tension. They’re too negative to let my characters go through positive changes.
When there’s a death in the family, sometimes it’s better to hold onto that grief before putting it on paper. Writers naturally develop fresh phrases to describe their emotions. It takes time for the right language to come. Wade into your stream of consciousness too soon and it will flood out onto page.
It’s only when I’m numb to tragedy that I can examine it with clarity. Time allows me to see which details add credibility to my story and which ones weigh it down. I want the audience to relate to my characters, but I don’t want to share too much information. Not because I run the risk of exposing myself, but because I run the risk of slowing my pacing.
My notebook swallowed the sun, enshrouding the world in eternal darkness
The Dangers of Casting Characters with Real Life Players
Real world personalities can add spice to your story, but don’t just cast your evil ex because you’re jilted. Do it because the story needed a character who was at once disloyal and prided themselves on their honesty. The “You’re so vain, I bet you think this book is about you defense” won’t hold up with your family and friends.
When drawing character traits from real life focus on behaviors more than physical features. Borrow tells, looks, strange habits and peculiar mannerisms.
Get the expression on your subject’s face right. Don’t bother giving us a composite. If you draw from subtleties, your coworkers might not recognize themselves. They’ll continue to give passive aggressive criticism of your performance, without realizing their smile is in stark contrast with their eyes.
If your boss sees themselves on the page, what are you going to say? If a friend sees themselves in your character lineup, do you want to deal with the fallout? Will you look forward to Christmas dinner after demonizing your mother?
If all your characters need to come from a real place, mix and match the parts. Make a Frankenstein monster, an unrecognizable amalgamation. If the character is complex enough, you won’t get sued for likeness rights.
Why You Shouldn’t Tell Anyone a Character is Based on Them
When you tell friends they have a part in your story, you’re less likely to take creative liberties. When they know a character is based on them you’re less inclined to make them do something embarrassing. Humiliation humanizes characters, but now you feel compelled to give them a cool composure. Their stand-in becomes a flawless forgery that’s no fun to read.
For characters to be relatable they need to be vulnerable. Dignity is a luxury. Before anyone can rise above a challenge, we need to see them at their lowest. Stories shouldn’t respect their character’s privacy. We need to talk about their unmentionables, sort through their dirty laundry, and autopsy the skeletons in their closets.
If you use a real person’s name throughout your first draft, only to ‘Find and Replace’ it later, you’re playing with fire. Even if you’ve burned all your bridges, your story is better off without them. If you base a character too closely on a real person, they might refuse to take your commands. The plot needs them to go one way, but you know their real life counterpart wouldn’t.
Being real and feeling real are not the same. Use some artistic license.
Another life swallowed up by my fiction.
Keep Your Imagination from Leaking
Just as writers don’t want their memoirs to invade their fiction, we want to keep our imagination from leaking into the rest of our brains.
Having experienced so many narratives, from Saturday morning cartoons to novels, our memories have adapted their story-telling mechanics. Remembering things in three act structures, we assign life events an artificial beginning, middle, and end, when in reality that’s not how they happened. Blending our recollections with our imaginations, can have consequences.
The brain uses the same process to evoke a memory as it does to visualize an idea. The mind’s eye plays its documentaries and found footage movies on the same screen. It’s only natural that we mistake one for the other, but just because we see signs of fate, doesn’t mean our lives follow story logic.
If we corrupt our memories to fit into narrative beats, we’ll see ourselves as heroes and ignore the things we need to change. If we spend our memories in our stories, we’ll run out of material quickly. We need to perfect our skills for fabrication, while keeping them isolated to our imagination.
Writer’s block isn’t always the result of a lack of inspiration. Sometimes it comes from a conflict in the mind. A little self examination can save a whole lot of time. Wordsmiths need to be aware of their own thinking, before finding the right balance between classical and method writing.
