writing the heart of your story (11 page)

* Opinions

* Attitudes

* Values

* Core Beliefs

* Self-image

Long before a core belief in us changes, our opinions and attitudes must shift. Change comes in increments. Most people are gradually persuaded into a new belief system. Or not.

So, you can’t have a character talking to someone about the death penalty (which he is all for) and just through that one conversation have his belief changed (fully against) right at the heart of his core belief. I bring this out because this is how you have to think of your theme as it grows through the novel. If you want to send a message that the death penalty is wrong, how better than to start with your protagonist who is all for it but through the journey of the story ends up convicted at heart completely opposed to it? Great novels and movies do this, and the changes their characters make are believable.

Okay, go ahead and call it an arc.

Think about
. . . your novel’s plot. If you are far along or in the revision stage, this is a great time to draw a chart, write some sticky notes, and put them on the timeline in order. See where the holes are. You may need to either write or rework a scene so you can show a bit of change. Always keep in mind that you are moving toward your character going from persona to essence, but you do want some setbacks and backsliding. Usually close to the end your character will fall back into the person they were before because it’s safe and they’re ready to give up. You can put that on your chart too!

Chapter 16: History as Mystery

“What is past is prologue.”

~William Shakespeare

We’ve gone over some nifty things about character in the last few chapters. Hopefully by now you have gotten a great glimpse into how to create a complex, driven character. I’d like to add some more insights about character development now and get you to think about history as mystery.

I mentioned how it’s not all that helpful (or interesting) to spend time creating the outward attributes of your character, for what really shapes a person is their history. I showed how by creating and exploring a character’s past hurt or wound you can determine the way she looks at herself and the world. When your character believes lies about herself and her world because of this hurt, she creates a persona that’s not her true self. And when someone is not her true self, she feels restless, unhappy, and lost. Which spurs her on a journey to find her essence. It’s the place she needs to get to, and her journey through the novel is not just aimed at her reaching her visible plot goal but also her spiritual goal of embracing her essence or who she truly is. Remember the sixties and how we were all about “finding” ourselves? This is the same thing but without the drugs.

Create Some History

So once you’ve established this pivotal element or incident (or series of incidents) that have made her who she is at the start of the story, you’ll want to create some more history. With that major task out of the way, the next step is giving your characters an entire life. This doesn’t mean you have to write or know every single second in their past. But you want to create enough of a past that they fill out. And the events and history you create need to be homogeneous with who they are now as well as fit in with your plot.

I really love Elizabeth George’s book
Write Away
. She has a whole section showing how she freewrites about a character, and I think she’s spot on (okay, she writes British mysteries so I had to say that). I take her writing advice seriously because she’s one of my favorite authors and a terrific writer. And nobody, at least in my opinion, writes better characters.

She has a prompt sheet that she uses to do a workup on each main character. It lists things like core need (heard that one recently?), ambition in life, gestures when talking, age, best friend, strongest character trait, weakest trait, hobbies, what she does when alone, and other details both physical and internal. She also lists “significant event that molded the character” (which is a variation of my “wound caused that makes them believe a lie”). She also reprints a number of pages that she typed while freewriting about a protagonist in one of her novels. Which is what I’m suggesting you do (the freewriting, not the reprinting).

Getting to Know You

Take some quiet time, just you and one of your characters, and get to know each other. Start writing about her. Let the words flow, and don’t edit yourself or censor. Start talking about who she is, where she came from, what she thinks and cares about. Just ramble. As writers we know all about creative inspiration, and we experience it (hopefully often) while we write our scenes. Call it muse or divine inspiration, but freewriting, like journaling, can draw from a deep well of experience and emotion. Things float to the surface of the mind when you do this, and I will guarantee that some of your best ideas for your character will come through this exercise. You are delving into the mystery of your character, and this exercise will bring out their secrets.

One variation of this exercise is to write in first person and let the character talk to you, emote, rant, go off anywhere she likes. You may want to do this for an hour or a number of times over days. When I wrote Intended for Harm I decided I would give each character one full day of my attention, and so as I went through my day, not just while sitting and freewriting and ideating but also while making dinner and vacuuming the house, I conversed and meditated on my character and let him or her grow organically. I think that’s a great word to use because I don’t believe you can force a character to appear in all her fullness in a few minutes. Like a good stew, she needs time to simmer so the flavors can come out. (Okay, that’s a weird simile, but, oh well.)

Interestingly (and what I love best about writing fiction!), at some point the characters become real to you. As your personality and needs and fears and passions start infiltrating into your characters, you start to care about them. If you are starting your novel and you don’t care at all for all your main characters (including your antagonist), you haven’t done enough homework. I can’t stress how important this is. Doing or not doing this work might mean the difference between an okay novel and an amazing one. And who wants just an okay novel? Not me, no way.

Reduce It Down

Of course you aren’t going to use all the material in those fifty pages you wrote. Go through and highlight the best lines that work great in characterizing your character, and pick the bits of history that make her the unique person she is. You may only use a small bit in your novel, and maybe almost none of all that history you wrote. So why do it? Because knowing your character’s history will show even if you don’t write about it. Trust me, it’s true.

You can tell when someone truly knows their character inside and out, even if they tell you almost nothing of their past. You need to know all that because it will shape how you write her in every scene—her speech, thoughts, movements, choices, etc. At some point you will feel you are ready to tell her story.

I always know when that moment is. And if I’ve done my work and planned out my novel (which involves those cool charts and index cards), I’m good to go. Do I ever get writer’s block? Never. Really. I never have. And it’s not because I’m so amazing, because I’m not. It’s because by the time I’m ready to start, I am so bursting with story and theme and character that the story just spills out. I believe you can be the same if you do your prep work and resist beginning until the pieces are in place. Think about it for your next novel.

Think about
. . . taking one character who you don’t feel is very complex or deep and do some freewriting—either in first or third person. Let yourself write about not just what you already know about her but all kinds of other things from her past and what she feels. See if anything you write is good enough to merit a place in your novel.

Chapter 17: Bad Guys Aren’t All That Bad

(or at least they shouldn’t be)

“Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.”

~W. Somerset Maugham

I want to take a little bit of time talking about bad guys. Most novels have an antagonist. Not all, but somewhere along in your novel writing career you will probably have one bad guy (or gal) show up. Writers really have a tendency to lean toward the stereotype with antagonists, and maybe that’s because we’re such nice people and don’t really know any evil folks, and so we don’t have a clear idea what a bad guy really is like . . . except from all those superhero movies we watch. And those are only adding to the problem of badly created antagonists in our novels.

Maybe some writers feel the antagonist doesn’t have to be a sympathetic character. Why in the world (you may ask) would I want my reader to sympathize with that creep? Well, I’m going to give you a good reason, so hold that thought. As with any and every character in our novel, we want our bad guy to be believable. And what have we discussed about creating believable characters? That they are complex, contradictory, and they have a past that has made them who they are.

Past is key with your antagonist because usually there is something that happened way back when to your character that has made him (or her) into the vile, despicable person he is today (or at least on the day in your novel when he’s introduced). And sometimes when we get an understanding of why a person behaves the way he does—what made him that way—we often can muster up some compassion for him. Face it—bad guys aren’t always 100 percent bad, just as good guys aren’t perfect. No one will relate to a hero/protagonist that has no flaws, and no one will believe an antagonist that has no redeeming qualities.

Characters You Love to Hate

I’m a big
Star Trek
fan, and for those of you who have watched
Deep Space Nine
, you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say the Cardassians are a great example in a collective way of the antagonist/bad guy that has contradictory qualities. Cardassians are very cruel and heartless, void of mercy, and yet they are extremely affectionate and tender toward their children and devoted to their wives. Gul Dukat is one of the best characters in the series due to his complexity and seeming contradictions. You can hate him all your want, but there are those moments . . .

A Glimpse of Vulnerability Goes a Long Way

And this is where you’ll want to do some special work on your antagonist. You are not risking anything by having your reader feel a little sympathy or empathy for him.
Ever After
is the great example of a movie that portrays the perfect antagonist. Anjelica Huston’s character is such a horrible, wicked stepmother that you hate her guts. And yet the screenwriter did a fantastic job by writing the one and only scene (moment) in which we see a hint of her humanity and actually feel something for her. It’s truly brilliant.

In that scene she tells Danielle [read: Cinderella] to come over and brush her hair. For just a moment she softens and mentions how the girl looks so much like her father (although she has to poison the line by commenting on how manly her features are). Danielle then asks her if she loved Auguste, her father, and the stepmother says sadly that she didn’t really know him all that well. She shares a little insight into her childhood and the way her mother raised her, giving her a history we can imagine—and almost empathize with.

This is such a subtle but powerfully tender moment where for a second we see not just a soft side to the evil stepmother but a fragility and vulnerability. In that one moment we can understand why she is so scheming and ambitious and mean. We see her deepest fears in her face—maybe the fear of being alone, of losing everything. She still goes on to do hateful things, and in the end we are glad she gets her just desserts because she doesn’t change right then—not at all. But by getting that moment of a glimpse into her soul and the hurt she holds inside, she becomes a much richer and more believable character. We understand her motivation and why she is so mean. We don’t condone her behavior, but she is now fully real to us—even in a fairy tale structure such as this. Which is what makes
Ever After
one of the best fairy tales movies ever made.

Flip the Script

Before you say you don’t have a clear antagonist in your story, think about a character that opposes your protagonist. It could even be a good friend. In some instances, supportive characters take on the role of an antagonist, so try to broaden your perspective a bit as we go a little deeper into understanding your antagonist and working on making him more human (unless he isn’t human, as might be the case in a sci-fi novel—but he still needs to have some agreeable “human” traits, so if you think you can get out of doing this because of the genre you’re writing in, you have another think coming).

Ask: What is the worst trait of your antagonist? Is she heartless? Judgmental? Cruel? Take a moment and challenge your brain to come up with a moment and situation in which you could show a glimpse of exactly the opposite. Remember the example I just gave of the wicked stepmother in the movie
Ever After
, showing how the writer created a scene specifically to reveal a bit of vulnerability of that character. That scene could have been left out of the movie (in which she has a “heart-to-heart” talk with her stepdaughter in the bedroom) and the movie would still have been great. That scene was not at all crucial to the plot—not one bit. Yet, I feel that scene is one of the most important ones in the movie, and I’m sure you can guess why. I love seeing the flip side to the bad guy, getting a peek at his humanity. I guess I just want to believe everyone is redeemable deep down inside. And I think that’s a belief that resonates inside a lot of us. But we can still hate the bad guy anyway.