Writing a Novel, Part Nine: Characters, Characters, Barely Even Human

Say you have a character.  His name is Bob.  He sees the world through your eyes.  Whether he’s the main character, or the sidekick of the story, or a love interest, or an evil mastermind bent on breaking open the world’s crust with a space laser, he is fundamentally limited to the sorts of things you can imagine he will do.  If you want Bob to be sweet and sentimental in once scene and a rude piece of crap in the next, he’s not going to protest about his motivations not making sense, because his actions are dictated by you.  You are his creator.

When writing characters that are going to get more than one line, keeping them consistent is important.  A Bob who alternates between giving flowers to orphans and recoiling at the sight of children is probably going to contribute towards making your story seem a little less real.  Try to get a sense of your character’s personalities before you force them into dialogues and actions.  If a certain something has to happen to advance the plot, try to think about which character most fits the activity.

Next week, we’re going on hiatus.

Writing a Novel, Part Eight: Setting

Honestly, setting has always troubled me.  Way back in the day, I read some writer’s lament about an old manuscript of theirs that tried to tell sweeping war epic but failed to be anything other than silly.  The point was about ‘writing what you know,’  one of the more important clichés.  When an author starts typing away about something outside the realm of personal experience, factual mistakes are guaranteed, and the only question is how many there will be.

I took this law of writing to imply that the safest settings were alternate worlds, born entirely out of one’s mind and thus safe from criticism about things like actual driving distances or US court procedure.  My first two books were set on the continent of Shivell, and my third was set in an expansive and equally imaginary empire.  Because of their locales, those books qualified as epic or heroic fantasy.  Urban fantasy, meanwhile, is the moniker for magical books set in the real world, or something quite close.  In my new genre, I have to write about cars and planes and all sorts of things that can actually be checked.  But real-world settings, as complicated as they are, can be opportunities to teach something, excuses to do research, and thematic hooks.

Specific settings are excellent at conveying tone, metaphor, and plot.  What’s more interesting than two people talking?  Two people shouting across an empty road.  Think about the lightsaber battle between Obi-Wan and Anakin at the end of Star Wars: Episode III.  The lava made the scene.

Anyhoo, next week we’ll cover characterization.

Writing a Novel, Part Seven: The Zone of the Tone

Tone, more popularly known as style, is one of the harder things to teach, according to conventional wisdom.  It’s one thing to tell students to have plots with a beginnings, middles, and ends, to have snappy dialogue with clear attribution, to have a core idea for a story, but an author can have all three checkmarks without really being interesting.  What’s the deal?

A middle school teacher of mine put the dynamic quite well.  In books, the tired old metaphor is true—it’s the journey, not the destination.  But don’t mistake good style with flowing literary writing.  Flowing literary is only one kind of tone, and not all flowing literary is good.  A rule of thumb is this:

Be interesting.  Be always interesting, every sentence, every word, every scene.

Some people think that the key to novel writing is length.  While verbosity might intimidate some people (there’s a whole literature on the fine art of using big words to bluff knowledgeability in scholarly writing [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair]) it’s the wrong way to go if you want to be a good novelist.  Why?  Consider the following:

George dismounted from his simpering, whinnying equestrian animal and took careful padded steps towards the great beast, a fine example of the genus Draco, speaking in a nuanced cant as he sauntered ever closer: “You must not, I say, bother this fine village again, because if you do, my dear creature, you will find that the pointy end of my spear will pierce your left dragon eye, cutting off your depth perception and rendering you unable to hunt even the smallest, most youngling waterfowl in all of the Five Duchies.”

Or,

George dismounted towards the dragon, speaking in a cant: “You must not bother this fine village again, because if you do, my spear will pierce your left eye, cutting your depth perception and rendering you unable to hunt even the smallest waterfowl in all the Five Duchies.”

To step into the dangerous world of assessing one’s own writing, the problem with the first sentence is not in the individual phrases (even ‘equestrian animal’ could have uses towards comedy or characterization) but rather in all the redundancy.

Don’t be redundant.  If you have a good turn of phrase, use it to advance plot, setting, or characterization.  Otherwise it’s just getting in the way.

Next time—Setting the table, kingdom, empire, or whatever the place may be.

Writing a Novel, Part Six: Plotting, Overplotting, and Laughing at James Bond Right Before the Laser Slices Him in Half

Plot, so goes the joke, is the difference between literary and genre fiction.  The condensation goes both ways—literary writers with poetic language but less-than-logical narratives can say that commercial writers don’t choose individual words with as much care, and so don’t produce work of lasting value.  Sometimes the argument surfaces that all old fiction read today is literary.  While both sides of the genre argument have interesting points, the more specific notion that only ‘literary’ works stand the test of time is bunk.  Shakespeare and Mark Twain, among others, most assuredly wrote for the popular audiences of their day, and their works most assuredly contained plot.

To imagine plot, imagine a flowchart of the events that happen in a novel.  With Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, an abridged version would be something like:

Harry is invited to Hogwarts -> Harry goes to Hogwarts, meets friends and teachers -> Harry discovers a conspiracy -> Harry and his friends solve some puzzles, and save the day

This sort of thing can be much more or even much less detailed, but the point is that pure plot is essentially the description of a path.  Rowling's writing style—her tone, characterization, humor, wit—these are all different things entirely.  Plot is a blueprint for fiction, just as dialogue is a key tool.

What might your plot be?  Genre fiction, at least, has a sort of standard narrative (in common with many movies) that is very hard to break away from.  Step One: Hero(ine) leads boring, or at least repetitive life.  Step Two: Heroine experiences some irresistible call to adventure.  Step Three: Heroine vanquishes physical evil, metaphorical evil, or both.  Step Four: Heroine returns to a level of normalcy.

In series, sometimes this process is dragged out over many books.  Sometimes there are twists—the heroine’s retirement is death, the bad guy or true love is someone other than expected, etc…  But this narrative arc, explained in great detail in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is startlingly consistent across a wide variety of stories.  Indeed, tales that don’t have clear endings are sometimes accused of being done ‘wrong.’

If you want to write gene fiction, like urban fantasy, it is probably better to ponder how your first novel will explore the four stages I outline above, rather than how it can break away from the constraints.  Don’t fret too much.  Understanding the paradigm probably the first step towards figuring out how to rearrange it.

Next week—Tone, so fickle.