For your characters to be compelling, your readers will need to think of them as real people, not just dramatic functionaries or collections of traits.
To help make this happen, have each of your characters write a short one-page autobiographical piece about themselves in their own words, describing their childhoods, backgrounds, activities, interests, attitudes, relationships, pet peeves and outlooks on life.
Try to write these in the unique voice of each character and from their point of view. Don’t write about them; let them write about themselves.
This will give you the experience of what it is like to see the world through each character’s eyes, which will help you empathize with their motivations and thereby make it easier for you to write your novel in such a way that your readers can step into your characters’ shoes.
Nicknames are wonderful dramatic devices because they can work with the character’s apparent physical nature or personality, work against it for humiliating or comedic effect, play into the plot by telegraphing the activities in which the character will engage, create irony, or provide mystery by hinting at information or a back-story for the character that led to its nickname but has not yet been divulged to the readers. Consider using nicknames in addition to or instead of characters’ proper names to add flavor and familiarity to their personalities.
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A novel does not have to be a story. It can just be extremely free forms, such as in Virginia Woolf’s books where the entire narrative is a single subjective stream of consciousness. Other narratives e are simply explorations of a top or even collections of several stories that may or may not be intertwined.
For example, Jerzy N. Kosinski (the author of “Being There,” wrote another novel called “Steps.” It contains a series of story fragments. Sometimes you get the middle of a short story, but no middle or end. Sometimes, just the end, and sometimes just the middle.
Each fragment is wholly involving, and leaves you wanting to know the rest of the tale, but they are not to be found. In fact, there is not (that I could find) any connection among the stories, nor any reason they are in that particular order. And yet, they are so passionately told that it was one of the best reads I ever enjoyed.
The point is, don’t feel confined to restrict your novel to tell a single story, straight through, beginning to end.
Rather than think of writing a novel, think about writing a book. Consider that a book can be filled with anything you’d like to put in it. You can take time to pontificate on your favorite subject, if you like. Unlike screenplays which must continue to move, you can stop the story and diverge into any are you like, as long as you can hold your reader’s interest.
For example, in the Stephen King novel, “The Tommy Knockers,” he meanders around a party, and allows a character to go on and on… and on… about the perils of nuclear power. Nuclear power has nothing to do with the story, and the conversation does not affect nor advance anything. King just wanted to say that, and did so in an interesting diatribe.
So feel free to break any form you have ever heard must be followed. The most liberated of all written media is the novel, and you can literally – do whatever you want.
Stories aren’t just about the struggle to achieve a goal. That’s just the logistics of the plot. To capture the heart, stories must also include a character whose beliefs come under fire, drawing him or her to the point where they must either change their beliefs or stick to their guns. Stories may be quite interesting with only one of these two threads, but those that incorporate both capture the hearts and minds of the readers or audience.
Here’s how: First write a single descriptive sentence.
Now look at that sentence not as an author, but as a reader or critic. You can see what’s there, but what’s not there?
To find out, ask some questions about what hasn’t been conveyed (yet).
For example, I write, “It was dawn in the small western town.”
Then I stand back and ask:
1. What time of year was it?
2. What state?
3. Is it a ghost town?
4. How many people live there?
5. Is everything all right in the town?
6. What year is it?
These are just the questions that come to my mind – things I’d like to know more about. Your questions would likely be quite different and for the purposes of this example, you may want to jot down a few additional questions of your own.
Next, let your Muse come up with as many answers for each question as possible.
Example:
For question 6, What year is it?, my answers might be:
A. 1885
B. Present Day
C. 2050
D. After the apocalypse.
Now go back to answering questions, but this time, ask questions about each of your answers to the original question.
Example:
For the original question, What year is it?, one of our answers was D. After the Apocalypse.
So now ask:
1. What kind of apocalypse?
2. How many people died in the Apocalypse?
3. How long ago was the disaster, and so on.
Now let’s expand on this technique. Suppose you write a one-sentence description of your story. Then, by alternating between critical analysis and creative Musings, you will quickly work out details about your story’s world, who’s in it, what happens to them and what it all means.
But you can also use this technique at any point in the story development process. Pick any sentence from one that describes your plot to one that speaks to an attribute of one of your characters. Apply the technique and you will expand that area of your story quickly and easily into some fascinating new material.
In the end, you may very well turn out to be your own best critic.
When an author tells a tale, he simply describes a series of events that both makes sense and feels right. As long as there are no breaks in the logic and no mis-steps in the emotional progression, the structure of the tale is sound.
Now, from a structural standpoint, it really doesn’t matter what the tale is about, who the characters are, or how it turns out. The tale is just a truthful or fictional journey that starts in one situation, travels a straight or twisting path, and ends in another situation.
The meaning of a tale amounts to a statement that if you start from “here,” and take “this” path, you’ll end up “here.” The message of a tale is that a particular path is a good or bad one, depending on whether the ending point is better or worse than the point of departure.
This structure is easily seen in the vast majority of familiar fairy “tales.” Tales have been used since the first storytellers practiced their craft. In fact, many of the best selling novels and most popular motion pictures of our own time are simple tales, expertly told.
In a structural sense, tales have power in that they can encourage or discourage audience members from taking particular actions in real life. The drawback of a tale is that it speaks only in regard to that specific path. But in fact, there are many paths that might be taken from a given point of departure. Suppose an author wants to address those as well, to cover all the alternatives. What if the author wants to say that rather than being just a good or bad path, a particular course of action the best or worst path of all that might have been taken?
The message has now become no longer just a simple statement but a “blanket” statement. Such a blanket statement provides no “proof” that the path in question is the best or worst, it simply says so.
Of course, an audience is not likely to simply accept such a bold claim, regardless of how well the tale is told. The audience will want proof. In the early days of telling tales, an author related the fiction to his audience in person. Should he aspire to wield more power over his audience and elevate his tale to become a blanket statement, the audience would no doubt cry, “Foul!” and demand that he prove it. Someone in the audience might bring up an alternative path that hadn’t been included in the tale.
The author might then counter that rebuttal to his blanket statement by describing how the path proposed by the audience was either not as good or better (depending on his desired message) than the path he did include.
One by one, he could disperse any challenges to his tale until he either exhausted the opposition or was overcome by an alternative he couldn’t dismiss.
But as soon as these expanded tales began to be recorded in media such as song ballads, epic poems, novels and stage plays, , the author was no longer present to defend his blanket statements.
As a result, some authors opted to stick with simple tales of good and bad, but others pushed the blanket statement tale forward. Through centuries of trial and error, a new art form evolved that was able to support a blanket statement and satisfy an audience even when the author isn’t present: the “story”.
A story is a much more sophisticated form of communication than a tale, and is in fact a revolutionary leap forward in the ability of an author to make a point. Simply put, when creating a story, and author starts with a tale of good or bad, expands it to a blanket statement of best or worst, and then includes all the reasonable alternatives to the path he is promoting to preclude any counters to his message. In other words, while a tale is a statement, a story becomes an argument.
Now this puts a huge burden of proof on an author. Not only does he have to make his own point, but he has to prove (within reason) that all opposing points are less valid. Of course, this requires than an author anticipate any objections an audience might raise to his blanket statement and include a response to them as part of the story itself.
The most efficient way to do this is to create additional characters, each of which represents one of the major alternative approaches to solving the story’s issues that a reader or audience member might consider. The story’s plot is then designed to pit one approach against another until only the character representing the author’s “message approach” must make the final choice or take the final action. As long as each approach has been given its due, the audience will tend to accept the author’s message that his promoted approach is either the best or the worst.
In time, these characters evolved into the archetypes we know today, such as a character who represents the voice of Reason, and one who stands for the Passion of the heart. The Mentor, Trickster, Conscience, Temptation, Sidekick, and Skeptic all developed to illustrate the impact different approaches had on solving the story problem.
The avatar of the author’s point of view became the Hero, and the diametrically opposed approach became the Villain. As the art form continued to grow and the arguments became more complex, the Hero stopped being a single player in the story and split into two separate kinds characters: a Main Character who grapples with the moral or ethical aspects of the story’s problem and a Protagonist who struggles with the physical or logistic aspects. Similarly, the Villain split into an Obstacle Character who represents the opposite moral or ethical stance to that of the Main Character, and the Antagonist who works in the pyhical or logistic realms to thwart the Protagonist’s goal.
Today, this subdivision of archetypes continues and has reached a point where stories clearly exhibit as many as sixty four different character attributes, each representing a different attitude or approach to solving the story problem. And just as some approaches are compatible while others mix like oil and water, there are underlying dynamics that indicate how we might combine groups of these basic character building blocks together to form more complex characters, more appropriate to this complex age.
The Protagonist is one of the most misunderstood characters in a story’s structure. When creating your Protagonist, don’t let him or her get bogged down with all kinds of additional dramatic jobs that may not be necessary for your particular story.
It is often assumed that this character is a typical “Hero” who is a good guy, the central character, and the Main Character. In fact, the Protagonist does not have to be any of these things. By definition, the Protagonist is the Prime Mover or Driver of the effort to achieve the goal. Beyond that, he, she, or it might be a bad guy (such as an anti-hero).
Being the Central character just means that character is the most prominent to the audience. For example, Fagin in “Oliver Twist” is perhaps the most prominent, but he is certainly not the Protagonist. So, a Protagonist may actually be less interesting than the Antagonist, or may actually be almost a background character.
In addition, the Protagonist is not always the Main Character, who could be any one of the characters in your story who represents the reader or audience position in the story.
So, don’t feel obligated to attach all those other qualities to your Protagonist if your story might be improved by having other characters fulfill those roles. The only attribute your Protagonist absolutely needs is to be the one with the unshakable drive toward reaching the Goal.
Reversals change the meaning of something by changing the context. In other words, part of the meaning of anything we consider is due to its environment.
In storytelling, we can add surprise to a story by leading the reader or audience to perceive something one way, than shift the context to show that it is really quite different.
For example, there is an old Mickey Mouse cartoon called Mickey’s Trailer which opens with Mickey stepping from his house in the country surround by blue skies and white clouds. He yawns, stretches, then pushes a button on the house.
All at once, the lawn rolls up, the fence pulls in and the house becomes a trailer. Then, the sky and clouds fold up revealing it was just a painted backdrop and the trailer is actually parked in a junkyard.
In your own story, look for opportunities to liven things up by intentionally creating a false first impression and then reversing it when more information is provided.
A story without a clear indication of success or failure is a failure with your readers or audience. You need to work out exactly how the audience will know the goal is achieved or not.
This might seem obvious in an action story, but may be much more difficult in a story about character growth.
Success and Failure don’t have to be binary choices; they can be matters of degree. For example, the effort to bring back a treasure may fail, but the adventurers discover one large ruby that fell into their pack. Or, someone seeking true love might find love but with someone who is rather annoying.
Whether either of these examples is a partial success or a partial failure depends largely on how you portray the characters’ attitudes to the imperfect achievement. To ensure a sense of closure in your readers/audience, make sure they know exactly how things end up on the success/failure scale.
Welcome to our new series designed to focus on one practical way to improve your story each weekend.
This week, try coming up with a log line for each of your characters.
A log line is a one-sentence description of what each character is all about and can help focus your understanding their motivations and their behavior.
Examples:
John is a marketing executive and frustrated artist, unable to pursue his talents because of the financial needs of his family.
Sally, a fashion reporter, is determined to step out of the shadow of her sister, the adventurer, she accepts a dangerous assignment from her newspaper.
Each of these examples gives the character’s name and illuminates their situation and the key issue or issues that affect or drive them.
Individually, each log line provides a core or spine for each character and, collectively, the log lines suggest the nature of the conflicts you might want to explore between your characters and how their relationships might progress.
By referring back to your log lines as you write, you can keep your characters consistent and on track. And by revising each log line as your characters (and your understanding of them) evolves during the writing process, you will build a template to help with revisions to the beginning of your story when you approach your second draft.
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