Six Pages This Morning, All is Good with the World

A question had been niggling me as questions are wont to–at least when they pertain to my story and therefore are really my job to solve, and solve quick.

How do characters M and B realize that two auspicious artifacts are connected, and why doesn’t M blow off S’s seeming deceit.  And for that matter, why did my character S make that odd, throw-away comment.  Why did the thought of what he suggested make me tingle with anticipation and a sense of rightness?  Was he right–did my protagonists really have to make that odd change of plan, or was he messing with them to buy time, or was there another nefarious plot afoot?  Or, as I reminded myself quietly, was that remark of his actually something I could delete. 

I do, after all, have the prerogative to have my characters unsay things.  But, at the same time, I need to give the story time to show me if the character’s unplanned action in fact has worth to the story, if it makes the plot stronger or just wider and disconnected and never ending.  In other words, is that string they tuck in going to unravel my entire fabric if I pull at it, or is it a crucial part to a pattern I myself simply never discerned before? 

Odd things, characters.  S has changed, too.  His role–no.  But his appearance and his mannerisms, and even his backstory.  Right now I’m trying to unite two visions of his backstory, but the crucial piece–how he’s connected with M–just fell into place over the past two mornings.  Today I slipped it in, and finally, VOILA, my question was resolved.

S fits much better into the story now, the awkward random coincidence thing is done and deleted, M’s instinctive understanding makes sense, and B’s impossible knowledge explained.  M’s emotions upon first hearing “the news” at the beginning of the second act of the novel no longer seems preternaturally restrained and aloof, and his growing anxiety and haste now make sense.

In other words:  All is well in the world.

It’s amazing how a good writing morning brightens up the day, no matter how filled with deadlines and impossibilities it may be. 

When writing a novel, that’s pretty much what life turns into:  ‘House burned down.  Car stolen.  Cat exploded.  Did 1,500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.

~ Neil Gaiman

Road to Kazbegi

Speak to Me…

I’m thinking about voice now, about how it frames and directs a character, as well as our sense of who they are.

How a person speaks reflects so much: their background, their education, their “themes” in life, their passions, their viewpoints.  When they write, we can “hear them” in their words.

It’s such an integral piece to have down when one’s writing fiction.  So that leads me to a writing question for those of you in the habit of creating characters (or having them pop up unexpectedly and barter/bribe/force their way into your text).

1.  What comes first for you:  a real sense, in the totality, of who the character is, or their voice?
2.  Do certain types of characters take their voices more easily than others, for you?
3.  And if you’ve written more than one manuscript/book, do you find by and large any commonalities in the voices that come easiest to you?

I mentioned a week or so ago that I’d created a new character.  I’d called him an “accidental” character.  One moment I was with my characters escaping the Bloomington rain in a little diner I once huddled in years ago, and the next moment he’d walked across the ether and sat down with us, his motives close to the chest.  I wasn’t sure if he’d last or not, but now I think he’s a keeper.  And one thing I love about him is that he finally did what only my antagonists had been able to do thus far.  He came with his whole self formed.

I mean, I love characters who come fully formed.  Saves me the time and trouble, I tell you.  ;)  But what he also came with was his voice.  Literally the sound of it, its timbre and emotive resonance, its pattern.  Even his pauses.  This makes him so far my strongest voice, but even so, I know it needs development and refinement over the course of my rewrites.  That’s okay.  I’m just glad I hear him.  It makes writing him easier.

For me, the sum of a character has come first each time.  Only when I really sense them can I write them–that is, have them speak using their own voices, and not just my words–and even then, voice does not come easily to me yet.  My two favorite antagonists came fully formed, but even so, their voices are still being refined.  One, I can hear.  I know his style; he’s so cognizant of it, I can’t help but be.

But my heroes, I could shoot them with a brick.  They run from scrutiny.  Their voices are still mine.  To me, that’s the big clue they need more development.

So, what about you–does the character come first, or the voice?  And do you have some voices come easier to you, like my antagonists and this new fellow (bless his soul)?

And for that matter, how easy is voice for you to master?

Nighttime Doorway, New York

Congratulations, It’s a Girl! or Writing Gender

So, an interesting topic of conversation has been making the rounds on some writers’ blogs and forums recently.  Namely, whether and why many (some?) writers express difficulty writing believable female characters.

It’s an interesting question.  As GypsyScarlett writes, there should be no difference in writing believable female and believable male characters.  There isn’t one type of believable or real woman, and likewise there ought to be as many variations of character for women as there are for men.

Anyway, all this has me thinking about something I’ve noticed in my own writing:  Female characters worry me more.

What do I mean?  Because for me it’s not about creating believable characters.  I’m still developing that skill with both genders. Nope, for me it’s different.

First off, I create more male than female characters.  This already concerns me.  I mean, why on earth would I?  The world isn’t 2/3 male, so why are most characters itching to be popped out of the marble that way?

My one theory is that this may come from socialization and language.  The everyman, after all, is a man.  Not a woman.  People may try to sell me women’s literature, but I’ve not heard of men’s literature.  Maybe, as a result, my everycharacter, the unpolished one whom I have to figure out, takes on a male aspect accordingly.

Then, noticing that I keel slightly toward writing more male characters than female, I begin to strategize, desirous of making upcoming characters female.  Suddenly I’m not wanting my female characters to fall into typical scenarios.  No being saved by male characters, no being bad-ass ninja girls or alternatively feisty artsy types.

What makes this a little effed up is that I don’t get concerned the same way about my male characters.  Why?  Aren’t there male “types” that are overdone, or do I for some reason consider those pitfalls equally for male and female?  I’m guessing the answer’s yes.  Why am I so analytical about my females?

Ah, but that’s not the whole truth.  There are females in my book who come easily and naturally.

The thing is, characters don’t all get born the same way.  And how they’re born in the book or in my mind, affects how I think (or don’t think) of their gender.

There are three ways I find characters for my book.

1.  Organically.  They appear to me as the sum of their parts.  They’re already breathing, and I have a sense of them straight away.  I may learn more from them and may tease more out over time, but they pretty much BELONG to the story and in it. They’re the ones who make me try the hardest because they’re both so rewarding and because I believe in them so much I can’t leave them in the lurch.

Organic characters come with their genders intact.  I won’t mess with them, because you know, that would be wrong.  They’re authentic as they are.  I’ve had three male and two female organics.

One female doesn’t worry me at all.  She’s fantastic.  The other I’ve had to develop more.  The first, I don’t change anyone else’s trajectory for.  She’s independent, she did what she did the way she did it because that’s what she believed she had to do.  Thank God.  The second…  I originally had her fall into serious trouble, but then realized all my leads (for a considerable part of the book) would be male.  So I turned around and created ANOTHER character, and an entire set of motivations so that she could be free to be a lead with the others. What manipulation.  Which leads me to the second way of creating a character, wouldn’t you know.

2.  Artificially/Calculatedly.  This is the character that I create from scratch to fulfill a specific purpose.  Anything and everything about these characters may change.  Their gender, their names, their races, ages, jobs, backgrounds, everything.  And they can disappear completely if they don’t fulfill their purpose well, or if I decide to toss aside the idea that requires them.

These ones cause me the most problems, because it takes a lot of wiggling and writing before I can feel them fit right.  And often they don’t.

Five of my characters (that still exist) are calculated characters:  three males and two females.  So you see, the group I have the most maneuverability with–is still male-dominated.  (Yes, it’s “just” three-to-two, but considering the numbers above, my characters are now six-to-four male to female.)

3.  Accidentally.  This is where a character suddenly writes him/herself upon my page when I’m in the flow.  I don’t necessarily know them perfectly, but I have a vague sense about them.  They have, let’s say, more leeway than an organic, but feel better than a calculated character.  (Mind you, calculated characters can eventually start to feel more real and stick right, joining organics finally on a substantial level.)

With accidentals, so far, I have one character: a male.  I like him that way and don’t reckon I’ll change his gender.  Who knows how long he’ll stay; he just came to visit us two days ago, but so far he’s doing okay.  We’ll see.

Have you noticed my gender math?  Seven males, four females.  And don’t even get me STARTED on things like race and religion.

Maybe we know as writers that people may judge others based on certain preconceptions, and we don’t want to handicap our characters that way.  Or maybe we’re not being brave.  Or we’re swallowing what we see on our TVs and regurgitating that image in our work.

I don’t know.  But it’s an interesting question.

What are your thoughts?

Girl and Gull on Brighton Beach

The Secret Lives of First Drafts

Before I tried, I never knew.  I used to think first drafts were just slightly poorer renditions of final drafts.  Now it physically hurts me inside when someone asks to see my first draft.  I shake in my sandals; I babble a squeaky and horrified refusal, wanting to wrench that idea from their minds and drown it in the Hudson.

After a rewrite, and only after a rewrite, will anyone see my “first” draft.  Every once in a while I give myself a mini-heart attack, imagining I die before the draft’s rewritten, and someone reads it in its current, seriously malformed condition.  I cross roads extra carefully now.  Now is no time to live recklessly.  I have a story that cannot be read until it’s written right.

Take Katz.  Actually, take him, literally.  Because although he features in my first 40 pages, he’s absent in the rest of the book. Know why?  Because he was all wrong.  Used to be, he was a gruff but well-meaning secondary character, whose primary role was to own the bowling alley where the protagonist skips school before starting his quest.  He was minor.  Now?  Now he’s not Katz, he’s M, and he has a painful past the whole neighborhood knows about, a past which it turns out is entwined with the quest.

In the first draft?  He’s there in both versions, Katz and M.  No explanation.  Because I am the only reader, and I know what I’m going to do with him when I rewrite him.  I can’t have you read that until it’s rewritten!  No way.  Perish the thought.  Perish it with an ice pick.  Perish it Rasputin-style.  Perish it further and more.

I interviewed a character, D, a while back.  For character development.  (Also to get his counsel on where the story was going. He was markedly unhelpful in the latter.  I believe his response was something along the lines of, “You’re the author, isn’t that your whole job?”  Thanks, D.  Thanks a lot.)

Character interviews are an odd thing indeed.

On the one hand, obviously the author creates the character.  But sit your character down for an interview and suddenly the conversation veers headlong into uncharted waters, clouding up what seemed clear and inshallah, also clarifying the murky.

Even silence in response to a question means something.  It can swing an entire plot around.  Before I asked D about it, in a sudden flash of suspicion, I hadn’t known that the house was hiding a secret captive.  Who knew?  That’s right, D knew, and somewhere in his interview with me, he sparked an epiphany for me.

Figuring out the identity of that mysterious captive was a struggle.  I was creating and snuffing out characters like the worst sort of person.  It finally gelled yesterday.  The dangerous C suddenly materialized, changing everything.

Brooklyn suddenly shifted from being the epicenter of the tale.  The timeframe shifted.  The entire plot went supersize.  Several new characters were born.  The story’s richer for it, and now I have only to put my all into it to make sure my words live up to the story.

Did I say my book would be 60K words?  I lied through my teeth, but inexperience made me do it.  The ripples C has made means the first draft is FAR from the final version now, both the past has to be rewritten entirely and the future has much forging ahead.  It’ll be more like 75K, and that only if I’m masterfully tight in imagery, dialogue and characterization.  Which means work.

First drafts are…expeditions for a writer.  And for a reader?  Ain’t no reader reading my first draft.  It would be cruel to the story to show it unmade.

Fine, Meet Cataclysmically about a Chapter Early, FINE.

OMG, what a day.  I strained through this one, but I tell you what, I got it down, finally.

I had this horrible situation.

For my story line to work, characters A and B have to be kept apart until a dramatic confrontation.  They must, they simply must.  The problem is, character A is pretty much obsessed that no-one else find out about character B, and therefore is very much on tenterhooks, and with good cause.  But it’s vital, absolutely vital, that A not check in on B too early or B won’t be able to set into motion the second half of the book.  Good reason to keep them apart, no?

A, however, was having none of that, since of course the second half of the book contains exactly his worst case scenario of life as he knows it.  My lord how I struggled with A.  He kept popping up early, bent on foiling my plans.  Problem is, of course, it was completely in character of him to do so, and also he was adding some delicious tension to chop up the waters at the most perfect times scene-wise.  But story-wise, what was I to do?

I shall answer that rhetorical question.  I was to slog on.

And so I did.  I toiled away for an hour, writing scenes that I then spent hours editing, cursing, rewriting and then deleting. Finally, I threw up my hands and said to A, “Okay, A.  Have it your way–meet!”  And held my breath.

And B, bless the fictitious character, whose goals mirror mine (especially as B doesn’t realize how I plan to close the book), expertly deflected A.   Thereby allowing their confrontation to happen as planned.

Wow.  I released a breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding.  Oh, okay, fine, be that way.  I was well aware of my distress. Anyway.  I sighed heavily and turned off the computer in relief.

It was a meager word count, but I considered it a victory because a major hurdle–also known in writing circles as Ruth’s Inadequacies–had been surmounted.  A paltry two pages, but a hard fought two pages.  Tomorrow I could move on.

A few hours later, before going to bed, I felt around in my psyche as I am wont to do, and realized I wasn’t drained anymore.  (Apparently I retool on BBQ ribs and iced water.)

Tap, tap, tappity tap, grumble, muse, tap, tap, tappity tappity tappity tappity tappity tap tap.   One hour later seven new pages were written.

Yum.   Thank you B for acting based on your goals and fears.  And A for sticking it to me.

I Managed to Score an Interview Date with Some Amazing People: My Characters

I’m so excited!  And at the same time I’m mildly afraid of my interview with my heroine, A.

A. was originally written in as a secondary character, but she had such a personality coming in that she refused to ignore the odd things afoot and pushed my hero into taking action, tumbling into the broo-ha-ha with him.  I feel I don’t yet have a sense of her weaknesses, and it slightly frightens me to interview her.  What on earth will she tell me?  Does she know who she is?  :)

It’s so odd, this form of realizing someone from…what?

A writer has to grasp a living story from–where? the ether?–and then keep it and all of its jumble of assorted characters vibrant and real as they make their way onto the page, eventually meshing perfectly with the story.  Like a surgeon of the imagination, doing the most incredible transplant.  So much care, so much focus on making sure the body doesn’t reject the organs, that the operating table and miracle of life doesn’t result in death.

Inspiration is so ephemeral.  It’s both frail and potentially so strong.  The second an idea strikes, I have to grab it with both hands and run, and yet at the same time I have to approach it the right way or it dries up into something not beautiful or alive at all.  It needs to bleed onto the written page with life in it, seeping a voice, a mood, a pulse and future with it, or it’s…dead on the table and one just wants to get out of the operating room with its rank stench of failure.

So no details until they’re all settled where they belong, humming and thriving in their own life, their own ecosystem.

Anyway, I ought not be afraid of interviewing A.  After all, she was the first of the bunch to ever talk with me, back when she first grabbed me by the arm, pulled me back to the computer from the kitchen where I was pottering about anxiously, and took charge because both I (silly writer) and S (stuck hero) didn’t know how to start our quest.  No A, no story.

So it’s about time I sat down with her again.  If she can free her schedule for me.  :)