. . . might smell as sweet, but it still wouldn’t be a freaking rose, now would it?
Yeah, you could say names are important to me. I can’t really get to know one of my characters until I know her (or his) name. Once I know it, the rest seems to flow into place.
Names usually come to me first. My process tends to go something like this:
Name –> Character (personality and appearance) –> Plot seed –> Wild seat-of-my-pants ride –> First draft done.
Now, I’m not saying things don’t change with the rewrites, because they do. But if the name of a major character is one of the things I change, then a whole lot of other changes to the character go with it. They become, fundamentally, a different person to me. I changed the name of a minor character in In a Fix at the suggestion of my editor (because she had a point I happened to agree with), and the only way I managed it was to do a blanket search and replace to the finished book. Took me forever to come up with an acceptable name that didn’t warp the whole character out of shape for me. If I’d had to change the name of a major character . . . well, it would have wound up being a different book entirely.
(BTW, my name weirdness doesn’t apply only to my characters. When our son was born, TG and I took one look at him, talked to him a little bit, and both decided he was not the name we had picked out for him. So we decided on a new one, right there in the delivery room. One that fit him. He seems happy with it.)
The main character of In a Fix is Ciel Halligan. The name definitely came first for her—I saw it on a license plate while I was riding down the Fairfax County Parkway. (Vanity plates are popular in northern Virginia.) As soon as I saw that plate, I knew who she was. She was there, in my head, as if she’d been there all along, waiting in the wings for her cue to step on stage.
Guess it’s a good thing I didn’t see this license plate instead:
[If that's a bit obscure, try looking at it upside down. *grin*]
Ciel’s story came to me in a first person POV, but it never felt like it was “me” talking. She has always been herself, sharing her story with me gradually as we went along.
Have you ever met someone in real life who you, from the get-go, felt like you’d known forever? Maybe not all the details (unless you’re psychic), but in your gut knew who they were? That’s how it was for me when Ciel popped into my head. I liked her at once, and knew I had to listen to her. Eventually, Ciel told me about some of her friends (and her not-so-friends). They all came equipped with names, which I didn’t learn until Ciel mentioned them.
Yeah, yeah. I know that sounds like a woo-woo load of bullshite. Trust me, I really do. And I’m not even into crystals or astrology, or anything else remotely woo-woo, either. That’s just the way my subconscious works.
I guess this rambling post is by way of saying I don’t really build characters, at least not consciously. They just are. And, when I’m lucky, I discover them.*
Okay, admit it. You think I’m crazy. It’s okay, I can take it.
*I read a blog post once (sorry, can’t remember which blog, because I never went back to it) where the writer went off on a rant about how writers who “claim” to use what is basically the method I describe above are doing a huge disservice to writers in general by making it seem like we’re “touched by the muse,” and not really working. That “real” writers plan, and plot, and outline, and figure out every tiny detail, and (near as I can tell) impose their will on the paper people they use to hold their stories together.
Naturally, I don’t agree–just because it feels, to me, like I’m discovering characters instead of building them doesn’t mean I’m not working damn hard at what I do. I don’t claim it’s the only way, or even the best way, to write characters. Only that it’s my way.
So, are you a builder or a discoverer? Or maybe a mixture of both?
Have you had any woo-woo moments in real life?
Finally, did you figure out the license plate?
January 27th, 2012
| Posted by LindaG | 2012 Debs, In a Fix, Linda Grimes
| 18 Comments
When writing memoir, the issue of creating characters is tricky. These are real people, after all, so you have a responsibility to represent your “characters” honestly. Framing my husband or best friends as characters in a book rather than living, breathing people, was weird. And yet, as much as one can try (perhaps successfully) to translate real-life contacts into three dimensional beings on a page, it’s virtually impossible not to cast people in a role.
In MWF Seeking BFF, I’m the excited, sometimes awkward, often neurotic, hopefully friendly one. My husband is the lovable and supportive guy’s guy. Those adjectives most certainly describe us each in real life. But are also times when I’m tired and shy, or when I’m grumpy and standoffish. My husband is, on the very rare occasion, less than the perfect supporter. (Remember when I asked for the Jillian Michaels Wii game for Christmas? You told me it was stupid. Unsupportive! The fact that I’ve still never used it is irrelevant.)
To compress a full life into the pages between covers can be tricky business. Often memoir writers have no choice but to embrace the traits that represent the essence of a person, even if they aren’t the full picture.
One of my literary role models, AJ Jacobs, talks about this building of non-fiction characters in his book My Life As An Experiment (my apologies to those of you who’ve already seen this quote in the comments of this blog, but it was totally relevant to Deb Linda’s post too!):
“Calvin Trillin, in his wonderful tribute to his late wife Alice, said that every writer portrays his or her family somewhere on the spectrum between sitcom and Lifetime movie. Julie and mine is firmly in the sitcom genre. She’s the sensible one, the straight man to my wacky schemes. She makes the realistic decisions, I do what she says.
Our real marriage is like the one portrayed in my books, and yet it isn’t. I overrepresent the conflict, for one thing. It’s not that the conflict doesn’t exist. The fights happen. But I don’t write about the hours of peaceful, contented coexistence.”
Who wants to read about hours of peaceful coexistence anyway?
Bottom line: When turning real-life people into book characters, and real-life relationships into book relationships, you need to represent them honestly and accurately, while simultaneously paring them down to their core.
And then you just hope those real-life people don’t get real-life mad.
Who out there has represented real-life people in their work? Does the fact they exist in real-life make it harder or easier to write them?
January 26th, 2012
| Posted by RachelB | 2012 Debs
| 4 Comments
Like most writers, I don’t know where characters begin. A moment in passing, a stranger on the train, a half-remembered story, a what if — characters begin as whispers and shadows, best seen peripherally. Time passes, and you do your best to show up every day, hang out for a few minutes or a few hours, and begin to tease out their stories. I don’t know of any way to do this part other than dreaming and listening and writing. I don’t think there’s a shortcut.
Once you have them on the page, though, pinned down in sentences and paragraphs, you can begin to think analytically about who you’re working with. (My students taught me the concept of a “zero draft” — such an early draft that it hardly counts, so it doesn’t matter if you make huge mistakes or go off on wild tangents or get distracted by unimportant details or subplots — and now my whole workshop has adopted the idea.)
I’ve written before about making sure characters have wants and needs, and this is where I start when I’m moving from zero to first draft. What does my character want? What is her goal? What does she desire? And what’s her big flaw, her psychic and emotional blindspot, the thing that (we hope) will improve at least slightly as she moves toward achieving her goal? How is she feeling as she gets closer to or farther from her goal? How will she deal when people challenge her or get in her way?
And once I know all that, everything else is character building.
Every character comes from somewhere, and every character has a prism of assumptions — cultural, regional, religious, political, familial, social — and emotions through which she views the world. Her assumptions shape the way she sees, how she makes her metaphors, how she speaks, how she reacts, what (and who) she admires, what she loves. Her emotions determine the things she notices and how she processes.
For instance, take two women at a small-town fair. One is in her late seventies, and she’s there because she wants to revisit the place she met her late husband. Her joints hurt, she’s a little cranky, and she grew up in a time when children were taught to be seen and not heard. The way she describes the fair will be filtered through her prism: it is loud and garish, it’s not what it used to be, it’s shabby and small where it used to be magnificent, it’s too hot, it’s vulgar, it’s lonely. Everything she describes, every interaction she has, and every emotional reaction she has reveals her character, because everything she says and notices is filtered through her unique worldview.
The other woman is fourteen, just a girl, who’s spent the summer between eighth and ninth grade selling produce at a roadside farmstand. She’s tan and strong and friendly, with enough cash in her pocket to ride every single ride. For her, the fair is full of possibility: it’s the social scene of the summer, the one time all summer that the teens of the town are all in the same place at the same time. She’s changed, and she can’t wait to see if anyone notices. To her, the hum of the crowd is intoxicating, and in it she hears all the conversations she might have, with newly-interesting boys who never noticed her before. The rides look thrilling and the lights enticing. And because she’s spent the summer hauling produce, she compares the unfamiliar colors and shapes of the fair to the familiar ones of the vegetables. The funhouse is the purplish black of a ripe Black Bell eggplant, and the sweaty tendrils of her hair stick to her face like corn silk.
Everything they notice, everything they say, the way they move and how they interact with the setting — it all reveals character.
With each draft, we have to pay close attention to these details, because often they reveal more about our characters than we know ourselves. And if done well, all these tiny details, many of which will go virtually unnoticed by readers, add up to a greater whole — a living, breathing, complicated person with a history and a future, someone who will live on in your reader’s mind long after he finishes your book.
January 25th, 2012
| Posted by M. Molly Backes | M. Molly Backes, The Princesses of Iowa
| 13 Comments
My characters start small. Like bacteria small. But they really can’t help it. My novels tend to start the same way.
Usually I’ll find the inspiration for a story in a single relationship that intrigues me. Maybe it’s two brothers who have spent their whole lives trying to one up the other. Maybe it’s a pair of recent divorcees who discover love at a mutual friend’s wedding. Maybe it’s a father who hasn’t seen his daughter in thirty years and arrives on her doorstep with the police on his trail.
See what I mean? Relationships. No, not even relationships. More like moments. But the seed of the overriding conflict is there and I know it will eventually grow and flower. But just as my plots tend to grow and flower through subsequent drafts, so do my characters. If I have ever started a novel with a fixed character in my mind, I can guarantee you that character changes—dramatically.
So what does it mean to me to build a character? Am I talking about that character’s physical look, her emotional core, her history? I’m really talking about all of it. As we know, it’s a package.
Now that said, I can’t tell you how many times I used to put the cart before the horse. In other words, how many times I would build the body before I’d built the soul. I would have a look in mind for my character. I would get attached to that look.
Big mistake.
Now I know a lot of writers don’t like to be too specific with their descriptions of their characters (though I know some do) just as some readers like the look of their character to be spelled out to the smallest detail (I’m looking at you, attached earlobes!) and some readers prefer to draw their own picture of a character. But in my experience, I can’t know how my character will look until I know how they feel. Does that make sense?
Since I’m married to a biologist, an anatomical analogy comes to mind: You start have to start with the bones. You have a skeleton which is a rough idea of your character’s wants and needs, fears and loves. Then you fill those cavities with organs and you figure out what sort of heart she has, what sort of brain. Is she frenetic or sloth-like? Does she play the piano, in which case she probably has long fingers—or maybe she plays the piano but she has short fingers which emphasizes her determination to get what she wants no matter any physical limitations. You see where I’m going with this…
Then, only after you’ve worked all this out, can you finally, truly put skin on your character. It’s essentially working from the inside out. No guts, no glory.
For me, the building of that person, that character takes many, many drafts. Sometimes I won’t even attach any bodily characteristics to a character for several scenes, because too often nothing clicks. I may love the idea of a man with frothy black hair, but so what? Maybe my character doesn’t have any business having frothy black hair? And assigning him frothy black hair before I’ve assigned him a soul or a purpose would be limiting. Why not let him reveal himself to me—instead of putting him in a frothy-haired box from page one.
Oh, and there’s one last thing: When you’re done and that character is a walking, talking, feeling hot mess of a human being (my favorite kind!), then after all that—if you’re me anyway—you decide that his or her name is all wrong. Oh, go ahead. Change it. I’ve changed character names many, many times over the course of a novel’s many drafts. Why? Because the character has changed and the name no longer suits them. (Clearly, this is not how it works when naming babies. We don’t get to wait until their personalities are clear and then decide ten years later, “Well, obviously she’s a Mildred!”)
Has anyone else ever done this? (Rename their character, not their baby.)
Anyone else think I’m verging on hot mess myself for suggesting this whole cart before the horse when it comes to building characters thing?
January 24th, 2012
| Posted by ErikaM | 2012 Debs, Erika Marks, Little Gale Gumbo
| 15 Comments
I’m a pantser*. I should get that out of the way right now, so you understand where I’m coming from when I say I build my characters in a very backwards way—sort of like building a brick wall from the top down. Which, of course, doesn’t make a lot of sense, nor is it the best way to do things. But it’s how I roll. Please bear with me.
When I begin writing a story, I usually start with an idea or a ‘what if’ statement. Like: What if someone got hit by lightning and could suddenly hear ghosts?
So then I have to create a main character. And she or he needs to learn something and have some personal growth in the span of the book. And he or she probably needs to find someone to kiss (in my books, anyway) and encounter conflicts, and triumph over her conflicts and then tadaa! the book ends on a happy, satisfying note.
Sounds easy, right? Except, what is it that the character needs to learn? And what does she need to get past and WHO will she kiss? And most importantly, who IS she? Does she come from a good family? Does she have brown hair? Gingivitis? A facial tick? Does she twirl her hair when she’s nervous? Pee a little when she laughs? Is she a vegan? Does she hate the color red? How will she react if someone yells at her/stomps on her foot/kisses her unexpectedly?
Who IS this person?
Well the answer to that, when I begin a book, is: I don’t know. And that comes from being a pantser. I build my characters as I go, which means that halfway through the book, my character could do something or say something that makes me realize a part of her personality that I hadn’t perceived earlier. There are always little AHA! moments in my drafts, which also means that first drafts are ALWAYS ugly and messy and my characters are never as fully developed as they are after draft four (or four-hundred, as the case may be).
I personally think this is a terrible way to write and I certainly don’t advise it, but it’s what works for me AND is the best way for me to write, because A. I HATE writing outlines and character sketches and B. discovering who my characters are as they face the situations I put them in, is so much fun and is actually an organic way to figure out who they are. So it’s more work at the end because I need to go back and edit and layer in their personalities and fix quirks that I first got wrong. But like I said, it’s fun. And why am I writing if it’s not fun?
Now what about you – how do you build your characters? Do you sketch them out? Or just throw them in and see how they react to you torturing them?
*Dear Mom, a pantser is a writer who doesn’t outline, but uses the ‘fly by the seat of her pants’ method of writing. In other words, when I sit down to write a book, I have no supplemental outline, character sketches or real idea of a plot arc in my head. I usually start with four or five plot points that will happen in the book and then go from there. This may seem like a ridiculous way to write a book, and I agree, and I’m even thinking I may need to do something about it, but for the time being, this is how I work. You’re welcome for that little tidbit of insight into how your daughter writes.
P.s. how’s Florida? Come home soon – we have a party to plan.
January 23rd, 2012
| Posted by JoanneL | 2012 Debs, Joanne Levy, Publishing, Small Medium At Large
| 16 Comments
Congrats to Sara of Stories & Sweet Potatoes, winner of a copy of Priceless Deception!
From the 2012 Debs…
Deb Joanne – has very exciting news – She has booked her launch party for July 14, 2012 to be held at Bryan Prince Bookseller in Hamilton, Ontario and you’re all invited! Just think – you can meet my mom! Also, a lovely twitter friend saw stacks of SMALL MEDIUM AT LARGE ARCs at ALA Midwinter! Huge thanks to Jo Whittemore for sharing!
Deb Erika was honored to add a few of her husband’s New Orleans’ recipes (including drinks–I’m looking at you, Deb Linda!) to upcoming Deb Guest Alex George’s reading group guide for his novel, A GOOD AMERICAN, which releases February 7th (And Alex will be here February 18th!)
Deb Molly’s Creative Writing I class at StoryStudio Chicago still has two open spots in it…… just saying!
Deb Rachel will be reading from MWF Seeking BFF this Thursday, 1/26, at Schuler Books & Music in Lansing, Michigan. She’d love to meet you there!
Past Deb News
Rights to Deb Sarah Pekkanen’s upcoming book These Girls are sold in China and Australia! These Girls will hit stores April 10.
Friends of the Debs
Deb guest Tayari Jones‘s novel SILVER SPARROW has been nominated for the NAACP Image Awards in the category of Outstanding Literary Work: Fiction. Congratulations, Tayari!
Deb Dish – Status Report: How’s everyone doing on those, ahem, NY’s resolutions?
Deb Joanne – Er…looking at this and realize I’m zero for 5 so far. Get back to me in a month, though, I’m sure I’ll be well on my way!
Deb Erika can’t remember her New Year’s resolutions–is that a bad sign?
As you may recall, Deb Molly makes resolutions after the fact, so she’s happy to report that her retroactive resolution to rearrange the guest room went very well. Also, her retroactive resolution to watch all of Downton Abbey has been a roaring success! Two for two!
Deb Linda–I’m happy to say I haven’t broken even one New Year’s resolution so far! And I don’t expect to in the future. (Okay, okay . . . so I didn’t make any. I find they’re much easier not to break if you don’t make them in the first place.)
Deb Rachel refuses to answer this question on the grounds that she may incriminate herself. Or just totally embarrass/shame herself.
January 22nd, 2012
| Posted by ErikaM | 2012 Debs, News Flash
| 3 Comments
Eileen Cook is a multi-published author with her novels appearing in six different languages. She spent most of her teen years wishing she were someone else or somewhere else, which is great training for a writer. Her latest release, Unraveling Isobel, came out earlier this month (Jan. 2012).
You can read more about Eileen, her books, and the things that strike her as funny at www.eileencook.com. Eileen lives in Vancouver with her husband and two dogs and no longer wishes to be anyone or anywhere else.
Unraveling Isobel is a darkly comic novel that blends paranormal mystery and romance with humor, from the author of The Eductation of Hailey Kendrick and Getting Revenge on Lauren Wood. Isobel’s life is falling apart. Her mom just married some guy she met on the internet only three months before, and is moving them to his sprawling, gothic mansion off the coast of nowhere. Goodbye, best friend. Goodbye, social life. Hello, icky new stepfather, crunchy granola town, and unbelievably good-looking, officially off-limits stepbrother.
But on her first night in her new home, Isobel starts to fear that it isn’t only her life that’s unraveling—her sanity might be giving way too. Because either Isobel is losing her mind, just like her artist father did before her, or she’s seeing ghosts. Either way, Isobel’s fast on her way to being the talk of the town for all the wrong reasons.
The topic at the Debutante Ball this week has been “Advice.” Here’s what Eileen has to say about it:
There’s a lot of great writing advice out there. Read a lot. A novel happens by putting word by word on the page. Be willing to kill your darlings. However the best advice I ever received made the difference for me between being published or not.
I’ve always written, but I didn’t always believe it would be possible to be a “real writer.” It seemed to me that wishing to be a published author was on par with wishing to be a princess or discovering that you were secretly a wizard and would be going off to Hogwarts. A nice idea, but a fantasy.
Then I took a writing class. The class was taught by Canadian writer icon, Ivan Coyote. (http://ivanecoyote.com/) Ivan awed me, not only because she’s a great teacher, but because she was a full time writer. I wasn’t sure I’d ever met one before. One day Ivan asked me to stay after class. She told me that my writing was good. Really good. She thought I was ready to start sending my work out. I was equally pleased and freaked out. I told her that I didn’t know if I could send my stuff out. What if people hated it? What if was rejected?
Ivan sat me down and said: “Eileen, I hate to tell you this. You’re already not published. The worst thing that’s going to happen is that you still won’t be published.”
That was my light bulb moment. I realized that I might never be published, but there was zero chance unless I was willing to take the chance. If I was willing to dream big and put in the effort, then there it was possible I just might reach those dreams. Now every time I find myself staring at a blank page and blinking curser I remind myself that I already havea blank page. The worst thing that will happen is that I’ll have a not very well written page. Then I go for it.
My advice to you is to make sure fear doesn’t stand in your way. Whatever you dream for- you already don’t have it. But if you try, if you work really hard and take some chances….. you never know.
Fantastic advice, Eileeen! Thank you for coming back to your old stomping grounds and sharing your great news with us.
You can find Eileen on the web at her website, on Facebook, and as @EileenWriter on Twitter.
Oh, and the best part: Eileen will be giving away a copy of Unraveling Isobel to a lucky Deb Ball reader, and it’s open to everyone. To enter, all you have to do is leave a comment. Easy-peasy, right?
January 21st, 2012
| Posted by admin | 2012 Debs, Eileen Cook
| 11 Comments
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