Crafting a character webinar

This might be just the post-conference solution to solidifying that character you're trying to nail down:

Our co-Washington State SCBWI group, Inland NW, is sponsoring a webinar with the longtime editorial consultant Elizabeth Law. This will take place NEXT SATURDAY, May 9, from 9:30–11am.

Titled "A Craft Workshop on Character," Elizabeth will discuss how to develop a character in picture books, novels, and biographies. She will end with a Q&A about aspects of the publishing industry, which she was a part of for many years.


For ALL the scoop, and to register for this webinar, please click here.




 

Character workshop later this spring

Member Lois Harris will teach a two-part children's writing workshop called "Focusing on Character" in late April. Characters play an important role in both fiction and nonfiction, and she says participants will learn to create real, compelling main characters and secondary characters who support their performance. Resources, marketing, and submission information will also be covered.

Skagit Valley College, Mount Vernon Campus
April 23 and April 30, 2014, 6:30 to 8 PM

Get more information (look for 6103, CENGL 055).

Lee White's character questionnaire

For those of you who missed it earlier in February, or for those who actually came but wanted a replay, here's the inspiring content from Lee White's talk on character-building. Thanks to Lee and to Jaime Zollars, for permission to reprint this useful questionnaire to share with our chapter at large!

Character emotion makes the plot

Martha Alderson (a.k.a. The Plot Whisperer) has a post on how a character's emotional transformation drives the plot. Here's the beginning:

Some writers excel at pithy banter. Others create dramatic action. The writers I most admire are the ones who in their own natural style convey a character's emotional personality in scene through active, non-verbal communication with just the right frequency and intensity.

I have written extensively about how moviegoers and readers identify with stories through the characters' emotions. When we connect with the characters on an emotional level, the interaction become deep and meaningful. Well-written scenes that include characters' emotions allow the audience to viscerally take part in the story and bond with the characters.

In my work as a plot consultant, I developed the Scene Tracker Kit to help writers track their scenes one-by-one. To reinforce the significance of emotion in creating compelling scenes, two of the seven essential elements on the Scene Tracker template revolve around emotion.

Check out the rest.

9 traits of sympathetic characters

Darcy Pattison has a series up about sympathetic characters (and good villains). Here's the first part of the one on what makes characters sympathetic--something you need to do to keep readers engaged:

Help Your Readers Identify with Your Characters. We tend to identify with characters who are like us in some way. They play certain roles in a family, do certain types of work, are concerned about things we are concerned about. In my story, G is a big brother who is forced to take care of his little sisters, and does it well, almost heroically well. He’s making sacrifices to do this, which helps also. The problem is that G must leave his sisters behind when he goes on a quest. So, I’ve got to work hard after that to keep him sympathetic.

1. Physical Descriptions. We like beautiful people. Graceful. Striking. Attractive. The problem here is not to over do it and not to rely on it.
2. Altruism. Orson Scott Card, in his classic Characters and Viewpoint, describes three levels of altruism, or the unselfish concern for the welfare of others. (BTW, did you know that Card has a new book out in the Ender series, Ender in Exile? If you’re an Ender fan, you gotta read it!)
   • Victim: A character who is the victim of suffering (jeopardy, pain, evil) will evoke sympathy, but also pity for his/her weakness and a touch of contempt for allowing him/herself to become a victim.

Here's the rest.

What's a Mary Sue?

Kate Testerman at KT Literary has the scoop:

I had several questions on my live blog yesterday about Mary Sues. Karen asked, “What lets you know a character is a Mary Sue from the query or the sample pages?” And Allreb added, “I’d also be really curious to know what you consider a Mary Sue character, or how a character gets to be so Mary Sue you’re turned off by her.” (And for Stina, a photo of a Mary Jane shoe, just for comparison!)

According to Wikipedia,

A Mary Sue (sometimes just Sue), in literary criticism and particularly in fanfiction, is a fictional character with overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as wish-fulfillment fantasies for their authors or readers. Perhaps the single underlying feature of all characters described as “Mary Sues” is that they are too ostentatious for the audience’s taste, or that the author seems to favor the character too highly. The author may seem to push how exceptional and wonderful the “Mary Sue” character is on his or her audience, sometimes leading the audience to dislike or even resent the character fairly quickly; such a character could be described as an “author’s pet”.

Read the rest.

More wisdom from Gail Carson Levine

I just love her blog. Check out the latest:

Two posts ago Kim asked: One question: Do you find it difficult to make everything matter in a story, if you know what I mean? It seems like there's a lot of pressure on a writer to make everything in a story contribute to the story's progression through plot, character, etc.

There is more to Kim’s question below, but I'll talk about this part first. I don’t think every sentence in a story has to pay its dues toward plot or character or setting. Most should, but not all.

For example, you’re introducing a new character who is going to play a minor but noticeable role and is important enough to deserve a name and a description. When you describe him, he needs to fit the story’s environment. If you’re writing a Victorian novel, for example, you wouldn’t give him a Mohawk. Beyond that, feel free. If you want him to resemble your Uncle Bobby, go ahead.

If you’re writing something funny and your reader is laughing her head off, she won’t mind that you’ve wandered a city block from your plot.

When your story problem is established and your reader is worried for the main character, you can take a little time to embroider and have fun. Chances are, you’ll charm your reader. In Ella Enchanted, Ella’s visit with the elves isn’t strictly necessary, but she’s in so much trouble that I could get away with giving her and the reader a break - and for my own pleasure, I could imagine elf society.

We are writers not merely to slave and suffer. Occasionally, we are allowed to enjoy ourselves.

Yes, most of what you write should serve plot or character or setting or mood, and a lot of it should serve more than one. But there are acres of leeway in there. For example, in the mystery that I’m revising one of the main characters is a dragon. Aside from the Komodo dragon in Indonesia and in zoos, I suppose, there are no dragons in real life, but there are many in fiction, and I was free to make up my own. I got to decide how big it is, how hot its fire, what its wings look like, how many teeth it has, even the shape of the teeth. I won't say what I did, but I could have gone any of dozens of ways. This is the freedom within the rigors of plot and character and so on.

I write plot-driven books, so I always have an eye on plot. I define my characters based on the role I have in mind for them. When they talk I want them to say things that will subtly move the plot along. But I also want them to sound like themselves, in the fashion that I, using my authorial free will and glee, make them sound.

Read the rest.

Does your character have good flaws?

Plot to Punctuation has a nifty post up about character flaws and how you can use them to drive your narrative:

To really make your story come alive, you’ll also do well to give your characters flaws which enhance the story’s underlying drama. It’s all well and good to have a character who is afraid of the color yellow, or who simply cannot remember anybody’s name until the third time he hears it. But does it really help your story?

Most novels rely heavily on the strength of the story’s central conflict, that thing which drives the whole plot forward towards the climax. The reader’s perception of drama and tension comes from that conflict, and from the degree of challenge the protagonist faces in addressing that conflict. This is where your character flaws come in.

Read the rest.

Marianna Baer on introducing characters

Here's a really helpful craft post on introducing your new characters effectively:

It's a cliche, I know, but you really do get only one chance at making a first impression -- in life and in fiction. From the moment a new character enters a book, the reader consciously and subconsciously picks up on clues about his nature and quickly forms an opinion. If details are not thoughtfully chosen, a character's first scene can be a missed opportunity or, more negatively, disruptively misleading.

Describing a character’s physical appearance is certainly one tool you -- the writer -- have at your disposal, but actions and dialogue are the keys to creating more complex, nuanced first impressions. Sarah Dessen’s enormously popular young adult novels contain excellent examples of how a great deal of information can be subtly conveyed through deceptively simple, short scenes.

Although the plots obviously vary, there are consistent themes in Dessen’s novels. One of the hallmarks of a Dessen book is that the narrator, a teenage girl, begins a relationship with a new boy during the course of the story. (If the protagonist has a boyfriend at the opening of the novel, you can rest assured that he’ll be gone in a few chapters to make way for the new guy.)

Read the rest.

Thanks to Laurie Thompson for the link.

Creating a hero

The Type M for Muder blog has some advice from Donald Maas:

Maass began by telling us that great novels need a compelling hero or heroine, a person who takes risks for the benefit of others, and to do so, flies in the face of social convention. He asked members of the audience to think of their own personal hero/heroine. Then he asked when we first heard of this person. What was the day, month, or year? Were we alone or with others? What was particularly inspiring about this person? And having witnessed or heard about this individual, how was our behavior affected? Did we say or do anything differently? Maass wanted us to nail down the emotion we felt, what was inspirational and why.

Maass then asked us another question. What were these characteristics and how could we demonstrate them in our protagonist them in the first five pages of our novel? Make a list of the qualities. This character has to make the journey through the novel worthwhile. And Maass repeated, do all this in the first five pages.

Read the whole post.

What you know to be true

Molly O'Neill, an editor at Harper Collins, blogged about certain beliefs we might have. You'll want to read the whole post, but here are her questions for how we might enrich our characters by understanding their beliefs.

Here's part of the post:

So if you're in the mood for a writing exercise, take the main character(s) in whichever book you're working on right now. And wherever you are in the story right now, be it beginning, ending, or murky middle, pause and ponder these questions. (If you're revising, rather than writing, try asking question #1 twice, at both the story's beginning and end, to get a good glimpse--hopefully--of your character's full arc/growth.)

1. What thing(s), minor or monumental, does your character know to be TRUE in this moment? What, for her/him, is unquestionably beyond doubt, certain with every cell of his/her being, beyond all hesitation--simply and inescapably and absolutely true?

2. [This one's my own addition.] Does anyone know that your character believes the above to be true? (Who? Or if not, why not?)

3.What was the dumbest thing that your character once believed to be true that s/he later learned wasn't entirely true...or wasn't true at all?

Visit Molly's blog.

A bit on the science of character

David Brooks at the New York Times has a piece on the Where the Wild Things Are movie. Don't read it if you haven't seen the movie. He gives the whole thing away (fume, fume).

In light of Cheryl Klein's brief discussion of literary depth, though, I wanted to combine these two ideas.

Here's what Cheryl says:

The writer and blogger Caleb Crain recently defined "depth" on his blog as "a sense of the complexity of reality." That's precisely what I mean when I say I'm looking for a novel with literary depth: I want fiction that presents the complexity of reality (which could be a funny or romantic reality as well as a tragic one--indeed, most realities are in more than one mode), and writers who can make those realities tangible and meaningful. (Here's a link to the Crain piece she's talking about.)

And here's what Brooks has to say about character and how it isn't necessarily the fixed element we tend to create in fiction. In other words, it could be a kind of complexity.

Op-Ed Columnist
Where the Wild Things Are
By DAVID BROOKS
In Homer’s poetry, every hero has a trait. Achilles is angry. Odysseus is cunning. And so was born one picture of character and conduct.

In this view, what you might call the philosopher’s view, each of us has certain ingrained character traits. An honest person will be honest most of the time. A compassionate person will be compassionate.

These traits, as they say, go all the way down. They shape who we are, what we choose to do and whom we befriend. Our job is to find out what traits of character we need to become virtuous.

But, as Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Princeton philosopher, notes in his book “Experiments in Ethics,” this philosopher’s view of morality is now being challenged by a psychologist’s view. According to the psychologist’s view, individuals don’t have one thing called character.

The psychologists say this because a century’s worth of experiments suggests that people’s actual behavior is not driven by permanent traits that apply from one context to another. Students who are routinely dishonest at home are not routinely dishonest at school. People who are courageous at work can be cowardly at church. People who behave kindly on a sunny day may behave callously the next day when it is cloudy and they are feeling glum. Behavior does not exhibit what the psychologists call “cross-situational stability.”

The psychologists thus tend to gravitate toward a different view of conduct. In this view, people don’t have one permanent thing called character. We each have a multiplicity of tendencies inside, which are activated by this or that context. As Paul Bloom of Yale put it in an essay for The Atlantic last year, we are a community of competing selves. These different selves “are continually popping in and out of existence. They have different desires, and they fight for control — bargaining with, deceiving, and plotting against one another.”

The philosopher’s view is shaped like a funnel. At the bottom, there is a narrow thing called character. And at the top, the wide ways it expresses itself. The psychologist’s view is shaped like an upside-down funnel. At the bottom, there is a wide variety of unconscious tendencies that get aroused by different situations. At the top, there is the narrow story we tell about ourselves to give coherence to life.

The difference is easy to recognize on the movie screen. Most movies embrace the character version. The hero is good and conquers evil. Spike Jonze’s new movie adaptation of “Where the Wild Things Are” illuminates the psychological version.

Read the rest if you've already seen the movie or don't care about the spoilers.

A fun way to make your character more annoying

You know, here's a link to a poll that claims nearly half of all Americans find "whatever" to be, like, the most annoying word ever. It is what it is, you know.

Anyway, here's the link. Whatever.

A sort of scientific way to name your characters

You know how it can sometimes feel like you're pulling character names out of a dark, unmentionable space (I'm talking about the kitchen junk drawer, sicko).

The Shelftalker blog at Publishers Weekly has a great find: a book and website called The Baby Name Wizard.

Check out Shelftalker to get the links and see how it all works. Or, just go straight to the Baby Name Wizard. Be prepared for a timesuck.

Thanks to Nina Hess for the suggestion.

Cheryl Klein on characters

Cheryl's blog has a great list of things we need to think about when we're building characters. It comes from Joan Bauer, and includes:

ESSENCE
1. Facts
-- Gender
-- Age
-- Ethnicity
-- Sexuality
-- Basic family situation
+ Who's in the immediate family
+ Their socioeconomic status?
-- Where they live
+ Rural, suburban, urban?
+ Region and country

2. Internal Qualities
-- Personality traits
-- Ethics/morals/values
-- Degree of self-awareness

3. External Qualities
-- Appearance
-- Manners of speaking/patterns of behavior

4. History (aka Backstory)
-- that is relevant to the plot or relevant to how your characters will act in that plot

ACTION
1. Desire: What the character wants

2. Attitude/Energy: The attitude the character brings to the situation in which s/he finds him- or herself

3. Action: What they will do within the novel; the result of Desire plus Attitude

And three more questions:
1. What is the character's joy? What keeps him or her alive?
2. What is the character's pain?
3. Where did the character get his or her name?

Be sure to check out her blog for the whole thing.

Book recommendation

I've been reading I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears, a collection of idioms and their origins by Jag Bhalla (published by National Geographic). It struck me that this is a useful little thing for writers.

Bhalla's premise is that "languages make visible what's important to their users."

The same goes for our characters. What expressions reveal your characters' hearts? You might refer to this book for inspiration--both for ways you can customize language and for characters who might spring into your head because of the chewy idioms you encounter.

And speaking of chewy, the Russian expression for gossip is to "have itchy teeth." To "sweat seven shirts," to Italians, means "to work hard." The Spanish or Chilean way to say the same thing is "to peel the garlic."

Check the book out on Amazon or Indie Bound.