From the Archives: Levels of "Done-ness"
On three... one, two... a one, two, three... Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday dear U.S.A... ...
Nine Things I’ve Learned Through Six Manuscripts
As I finished a round of revisions for my latest project, I did some reflection about what I’ve learned from this process. Is there...
We are talking about raising the stakes in our novels this week. Whenever I think about this topic, I'm reminded of the Storytellers' writing conference I attended a few years back, where Donald Maas challenged us to dig deep to find emotional and embarrassing truths about ourselves and get them on the page. Part of me was terrorized by the idea of mining experiences that I'd locked away for good reason, and I think I spent much of the day in abject horror. But there were several things he said that stuck with me and that pop into my head when I'm plotting or revising a manuscript.
Emotional connections are a natural way to increase the stakes: As Katherine pointed out yesterday, the stakes are immediately raised when the people involved have some sort of personal and emotional connection to the character. An antagonist who swoops onto the scene from nowhere, with no connection to the main character beyond the machinations of the plot (i.e. he wants something different than the main character) is less compelling than the anatagonist that has a deep, personal connection to the main character. It's easy for a character to fight against someone they have no feelings for, but what if that person is a sibling, a parent, a lover or a close friend? These multiple layers of conflict immediately raise the stakes for the character. For example, a woman might be madly in love with a man who is married to someone else. There is already lots of conflict in that situation. But what if the man is married to her sister? What if the man was her high school sweetheart who left her for her sister years earlier? Personal and emotional connections immediately raise the stakes. Everyone remembers Darth Vader telling Luke "I am your father," for a reason.
Make your characters confront their worst fear: What is the worst thing that could happen to this particular character? Make it happen! Tension in a novel comes from the threat of failure and the potential consequences of that failure, but readers often feel let down if the threat never materializes. If your character is threatened with something, make it happen. Better yet, make it worse than the character feared. It's not enough to threaten obstacles to the character's main goal, we have to allow those obstacles to materialize, and challenge the character until they are past their breaking points. Talk about raising stakes!
The unintended consequence: One of my favorite ways of raising stakes is to give the character what they think they want, but then make the outcome far different from what the character imagined. The ancient proverb "be careful what you wish for" is always in the back of my mind when plotting and revising books. A character may believe that dating a particular boy will make her happy, but what if the boy turns out to be controlling, mean or abusive? What if the killer turns out to be someone much closer to the character than she ever imagined, and finding him will shatter her entire family? What if getting into that great university means leaving behind the love of his life?
Let your characters fail: a character who never fails is not only one dimensional, but likely boring and insufferable. Even James Bond gets captured by the bad guy at some point. Rising action is heightened by a series of set-backs, and tension is created by the knowledge that the character can and still could fail. The tension in that climactic scene is built by the character's past failures. One trick used often by screenwriters it to force your character to do something in the climactic scene that he already failed at earlier in the book. Remember the lift in Dirty Dancing? Baby could never get it right, and when we see her setting up for it in the final scene, we are hoping she lands it. And when she does, we share her joy. Do you think we would feel the same way if she had landed that jump in the prior scenes? No way.
Emotional connections are a natural way to increase the stakes: As Katherine pointed out yesterday, the stakes are immediately raised when the people involved have some sort of personal and emotional connection to the character. An antagonist who swoops onto the scene from nowhere, with no connection to the main character beyond the machinations of the plot (i.e. he wants something different than the main character) is less compelling than the anatagonist that has a deep, personal connection to the main character. It's easy for a character to fight against someone they have no feelings for, but what if that person is a sibling, a parent, a lover or a close friend? These multiple layers of conflict immediately raise the stakes for the character. For example, a woman might be madly in love with a man who is married to someone else. There is already lots of conflict in that situation. But what if the man is married to her sister? What if the man was her high school sweetheart who left her for her sister years earlier? Personal and emotional connections immediately raise the stakes. Everyone remembers Darth Vader telling Luke "I am your father," for a reason.
Make your characters confront their worst fear: What is the worst thing that could happen to this particular character? Make it happen! Tension in a novel comes from the threat of failure and the potential consequences of that failure, but readers often feel let down if the threat never materializes. If your character is threatened with something, make it happen. Better yet, make it worse than the character feared. It's not enough to threaten obstacles to the character's main goal, we have to allow those obstacles to materialize, and challenge the character until they are past their breaking points. Talk about raising stakes!
The unintended consequence: One of my favorite ways of raising stakes is to give the character what they think they want, but then make the outcome far different from what the character imagined. The ancient proverb "be careful what you wish for" is always in the back of my mind when plotting and revising books. A character may believe that dating a particular boy will make her happy, but what if the boy turns out to be controlling, mean or abusive? What if the killer turns out to be someone much closer to the character than she ever imagined, and finding him will shatter her entire family? What if getting into that great university means leaving behind the love of his life?
Let your characters fail: a character who never fails is not only one dimensional, but likely boring and insufferable. Even James Bond gets captured by the bad guy at some point. Rising action is heightened by a series of set-backs, and tension is created by the knowledge that the character can and still could fail. The tension in that climactic scene is built by the character's past failures. One trick used often by screenwriters it to force your character to do something in the climactic scene that he already failed at earlier in the book. Remember the lift in Dirty Dancing? Baby could never get it right, and when we see her setting up for it in the final scene, we are hoping she lands it. And when she does, we share her joy. Do you think we would feel the same way if she had landed that jump in the prior scenes? No way.
UPPING THE ANTE
We are talking about raising the stakes in our novels this week. Whenever I think about this topic, I'm reminded of the Storytellers...
Raising Stakes
I think I may have mentioned here before that I'm more of a pantser than a plotter. More often than not (five books out of six, so far)...
Revision is Like Washing the Dishes (except I ENJOY revision)
Dirty dishes. They happen. I mean, we have to eat, right? But I have such a hard time getting them all finished in one sitting (standing...
From the Archives--Mental Revision Tools
Our dear Bret Ballou is on paternity leave for a few weeks, so I'm filling in every other Friday with some of my favorite Bret posts ...
The "Show, Don't Tell" of Subtext
I love novels that put me right inside the story instead of holding me at a distance, forced to view the action through binoculars. The e...
When is it okay to TELL?
“Show, Don’t Tell.” Like Robin said yesterday , it’s such old advice it's probably found in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Yet I sti...
We're talking voices on the blog this week, and how they
affect our writing process. Sometimes the various voices that speak up along
the drafting and revision stages can feel confusing and contradictory. Part of
my development as a writer has been learning when to say, "tell me more
about what you mean," or, "thanks, but that's not in line with what
I'm trying to do."
Sounds easy, but it's not. I'm still working on it. Navigating the voices requires:
- knowing what you're trying to do
- knowing who can actually help you (you trust them and share similar artistic sensibilities)
- knowing your process well enough to judge when & how much feedback you need
Getting just one of those elements down is tricky, but all three? Tough. The writing game is unpredictable. This isn't science,
after all. Every story is different. Every character. And you. You are also changing all the time--what you admire in writing. What your goals are, as a storyteller. It's a lot of moving parts, and any one wobbling wheel can upset the entire balance. The most seasoned
writers, I'm certain, still run the risk of coming away from a critique or editorial
letter (or review) feeling black and blue.
The useful voices, I'm learning, are the ones that don't go
away. They niggle and nag and taunt, and force you to shop online at 2 AM
because you can't sleep. They say:
"Sorry, V, but you just aren't pulling off the first
person Golden Retriever POV. It's not believable and it's falling flat, and the
narrative is so ponderous and repetitive. I mean... what's with the obsession with tennis balls and squirrels? And what makes you think that you, a human, can pull off a
believable retriever mentality? You're just not qualified, and the market saturated with goldens! Everyone's moved onto French Bulldogs. I'm sorry to break this to
you, but you're barking up the wrong tree."
Grrr.
What do you say to this kind of feedback? How do you respond to this voice?
Well, you can make your retriever a bulldog, or you can push yourself. Feedback is only negative if you let it be. Almost everything you hear about your work, if it's delivered to you by someone thorough and halfway thoughtful, can be made usable, instructive, or enlightening--even if it's simply by reinforcing what you already know.
Well, you can make your retriever a bulldog, or you can push yourself. Feedback is only negative if you let it be. Almost everything you hear about your work, if it's delivered to you by someone thorough and halfway thoughtful, can be made usable, instructive, or enlightening--even if it's simply by reinforcing what you already know.
Whenever you are told that something seemed off or weak or
confusing, you get to decide first and foremost whether you agree. Here's
where your gut comes into play. Trust it, but don't be close-minded, either. How can you improve your craft if you aren't willing to see areas that could be strengthened? Honed? Rethought? You get to decide what how you go about dealing with that. But if the feedback doesn't feel right and your Golden Retriever POV actually rocks, then you get to own that, knowing it's stronger because it took some punches, but it's still standing.
My point is that you don't always have to fight the voices.
Let them come. Listen to them. You can be
stronger and smarter. Why wage war against the very thing that can help you? Trust yourself to single out the ones that
matter -- and to put them to use in a way that works for you. Work toward that trust. Practice it so that someday, when someone tells you you're POV isn't working, you can look them in the eye, and smile, and say: woof!
Listen to the Voices Until You Hear Barking
We're talking voices on the blog this week, and how they affect our writing process. Sometimes the various voices that speak ...
