A to Z Challenge: R is for Rule Abider

This year, I'm participating in the insane awesome A to Z blogging challenge, which entails posting EVERY SINGLE DAY during the month of April, except for Sundays. Each day's theme corresponds to a different day of the alphabet: 26 days, 26 posts. I'll be blogging each day this month on some aspect of my current work in progress (WIP).

R is for Rule Abider

Yes, I know I'm conjugating that verb in strange and incorrect ways, but I'm calling it artistic license, so bear with me.

Let's go back in time for a moment, all the way back to April 7th - two whole weeks ago! - when this year's A to Z Challenge was in its toddler-hood, and we were all only posting about the letter 'F'. That day, my post was 'F is for Free Spirit', and I talked about the first of my two Uber Characters.

Once again, that's a made-up term, which I define as the umbrella character for every mortal person in each lifetime that a soul has. Since this novel is going to follow two souls from life to life, I thought I needed to decide what defined each soul: the traits, needs, and basic sense of spirit that are innate to the soul, and that would carry through from life to life.

So, the first soul was a Free Spirit - fiercely independent, suspicious of rules and authority of all kinds, and a bit wild, often in unexpected ways. The second soul, of course, is the Rule Abider.

This is Uber Character #2: cautious, controlled, and a lover of stability. This is a conservative person in the  true meaning of the word: not necessarily religiously or politically, but in attitude and outlook. As Google defines it, this is "holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation." In other words, this soul is just as likely to be a dominatrix as it is to be a priest. I know that sounds strange, but it really depends on how you define 'traditional.' Think about it: this soul would be a lover of rules and control - perfect for a dominatrix - who adheres to age-old traditions about that dominant role, and who keeps strict, ironclad boundaries between his/herself and clients.

See what I mean?

Now, of course, we have two diametrically opposed Uber Characters who couldn't be more different - and yet who find, over and over and over again, from lifetime to lifetime, that they are inexplicably and inextricably bound to each other. It's a case of each soul helping the other to grow where it needs it the most. Like yin and yang, or even simple puzzle pieces, they just fit together. The problem, of course, is convincing them of that fact, and that's where conflict, and fun, come in.

A to Z Challenge: F is for Free Spirit

This year, I'm participating in the insane awesome A to Z blogging challenge, which entails posting EVERY SINGLE DAY during the month of April, except for Sundays. Each day's theme corresponds to a different day of the alphabet: 26 days, 26 posts. I'll be blogging each day this month on some aspect of my current work in progress (WIP).

F is for Free Spirit

No, I'm not selling jeans (more's the pity, too. I always wanted to be cool enough to be in the fashion industry); I'm creating Uber Characters.

Don't look that up; I coined the term. At least, I think I did, just now, as I was writing this. You see, as I've mentioned (yes, I know, ad nauseam, but there are NEW visitors here thanks to A to Z!) my WIP involves following two souls through six or more lifetimes. While that means that each soul will have a new name, history, appearance, and even personality in each lifetime - i.e. the normal characters I need to create - there also needs to be some core identity, some essential piece of each soul that is the same in every life. My hope is that the reader will be able to say, "Oh, I bet this girl is the Damon character from that Greek story," or something like that, anyway. To put it simply, each soul should is some important way be recognizable as itself.

This of course leads to some very metaphysical questions - "What is the essential piece of a soul?" being just one of the many totally unanswerable ones - so I decided to deal with this the best way I knew how: by making each soul a sort of umbrella character for every mortal person in every lifetime it has. You know, as in an Uber Character. One of the first things I did when I started working on this novel was to create character analyses for both souls, complete with detailed psychological profiles.

So this is Uber Character #1: fiercely independent, suspicious of rules and authority of all kinds, and a bit wild - although that wildness can take some very different, and unexpected, forms.

This is the soul I call the Free Spirit. What is the other soul, Uber Character #2? Well, it'll appear somewhere during the A to Z Challenge...but I'm not telling which letter, because it's way more fun that way. Any guesses?

Down the Research Rabbit Hole

I'm still firmly ensconced in Ancient Greece right now; I've decided that the best way to tackle Research Fatigue is to pretend I don't have that much to research! If I can give myself tunnel vision, and focus on one item on the (Self-Inflicted) Research To-Do List For Crazy People, I don't feel nearly as, well, fatigued. I recognize that 1) this makes for less diverse and probably less interesting blog posts, and 2) it requires an advanced amount of self-delusion, but hey, I'm up for being dull and nuts if it gets the job done!!

This week, I followed my typical research pattern, which looks like a small child's hand-drawn map. You know, nothing is really in scale, there's no sense of perspective or distance between points, and more than one road goes meandering off into nowhere...

Here's an example: today, I set out to learn what the daily life of a shepherd in Ancient Greece would really be like (the other soul, Apollo's lover, is a shepherd, so this is grade-A important info.) Responsible-writer-cap firmly on my head, I went to JSTOR (thank you, Crystal!!), and started reading semi-related articles on animals and animal husbandry in Greece and so on...but nothing really answered my question.

I didn't want to give up, but I was getting frustrated, so I sort of pushed the responsible-writer-cap a little bit off my forehead - just so I could scratch my head - and found that I was searching on wikipedia instead of JSTOR.

Hmm. How did that happen? Oh well, I thought; I'm here, I might as well look into general shepherd-ry while I'm at it!

Except, that cap was getting kind of uncomfortable, so I took it off - just for a couple of minutes - and put it on my lap.

That's when I thought: wait, do I REALLY need a lot of information on a shepherd's daily life? I mean, the story is going to start when Apollo sees this shepherd and decides to take him away from his shepherding duties.

Yup, not important!! It was much more important for me to have a firm grip on this guy's character. I did some great work on Apollo's character last week, but Acaeus - that's the shepherd's name - was really underdeveloped.

So I abandoned wikipedia, opened up my trusty character analysis document (knocking my responsible-writer-cap off of my lap and onto the desk in the process), and dug into Acaeus. I started brainstorming and writing, and decided that his mother died in childbirth (an all-too-common occurrence in Ancient Greece.)

Wait, I thought, if she died in childbirth, did he need a nurse to, um, nurse him? Would a poor recently widower-ed shepherd dad even have access to a nurse? How did Acaeus survive?

Artemis must have killed his mom and saved him! She is the goddess of childbirth, and the Greeks believed she was responsible when mothers and/or infants died in labor.

But was there a nurse? And why did a virgin goddess care about childbirth, anyway??

Back to the internet! I looked up Artemis and childbirth, which led to much digging into maternal death rates, which lead to attempting to read about the lives of lower class women in Ancient Greece, which got even more frustrating because, like most historical reading, there's a whole lot of information on rich people's lives, and little to none on the masses'.

I brushed my responsible-writer-cap onto the floor in impatience, and decided that what I really needed was to research Ancient Greek names so that I could name Acaeus's mother and father!

Ooo...traditional names and their origin in myth...cool... *buries self in mythology*

Wait, what was I working on? Oh yes, Acaeus's character! I knew Acaeus had some narcissistic tendencies, although not a personality disorder, so I turned again to the internet and started looking up some basic psychology on narcissists.

I read three or four information-rich, thought-provoking articles, and then in the process of searching for more, I found a weird yet compelling website on reincarnation, and thought, OOOO! Why not? I mean, my book is about reincarnation!! So I started reading all about the 5 Levels of Souls and the 35 Stages of Souls and the 7 different Types of Souls and....

...and then I disappeared down the rabbit hole.

Whoops. Sorry about that. I'll try to dig myself out in time for next week's post...

When Research Changes Plot, Or What To Do With A Vengeful God

I've been digging into Edith Hamilton's Mythology this week. No, I'm not indulging some bizarre nostalgia for my early teenage school years (I am not one of those insane quirky people who wishes she could go back to the halcyon days of high school, probably because I would never even think to call them 'halcyon' days, not that I hated them, because I didn't, I just found them full of growing pains and awkwardness and I'm going to stop this run-on sentence now); I'm doing research.

Granted, I'm supposed to be looking into (to quote myself, here) "Day-to-day life in the Classical Period of Ancient Greece, including specifics on the worship and temples and priests of Apollo", so technically I suppose I'm also procrastinating. See, I do have a book on the "Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks", but 1) it's duuuulllll, 2) it's written for teens, and is therefore a bit oversimplified, and 3) while it's absolutely chock-freaking-full of information about the daily life of Athenians, it's got all of about two wee paragraphs on the daily life of goatherds and/or shepherds and also priests of Apollo, which is what I really need. What I'm saying is that the book has a misleading title and it's irritating. Not to worry, I do have a list of other books to look into (thanks to a certain brilliant and generous librarian friend of mine); I just don't have them in my possession. Yet.

So I'm taking a break from said irritation, and reading Hamilton instead. And happily, like other research, it's a useful and fascinating procrastination. I've got this little story planned out for a brief, possibly violent, and certainly tumultuous love affair between Apollo and a mortal youth, so this particular reading is actually part of my character development for Apollo. And like most research, it's changing my story.

The thing is, since Apollo does exist as a well-known mythological figure, I need to walk a fine line between meeting certain expectations for his behavior, and also crafting my own version of him. I did start some development for him, which mostly entailed combining what I remembered about Greek mythology with what I needed for the story I'm creating. I then used that combination to help me come up with a basic plot structure for this particular lifetime.

Well, it turns out I missed a few important things.

As I've said before, research is character is plot. In this case, I forgot a few things: namely, that the Greek gods can often be cruel bastards with a marked indifference to human suffering. Not all of the time, of course, and actually Hamilton points out that Apollo is one of the more beautiful and less crude of the pantheon, but he stills does stuff like have his sister kill his unfaithful lover, and rabidly pursue an unwilling maiden until she begs for mercy and gets turned into a tree (one that's sacred to Apollo, just to add insult to injury).

I also learned - and this I don't think I ever knew - that Apollo is the God of Truth and Light. Hamilton puts this quite beautifully, actually, saying that "he is the god of Light, in whom is no darkness at all, and so he is the God of Truth. No false word ever falls from his lips." Apollo really cannot tell a lie, nor can anyone lie to him.

Both of these things are important facets of his character, and they change what I'd been planning. I was thinking about having Apollo's mortal lover be unfaithful to him, and get away with it. Well, now I need to reconsider. I can disregard parts of his mythology that don't suit my purpose (thank you, artistic license), but these pieces are so interesting and so full of potential for great conflict that I don't really want to discard them. Now, if his lover is unfaithful, I need to think about how Apollo finds out (because he always finds out), how he reacts, and whether or not he tries to have this lover killed - or even whether he kills him himself.

I'm not sure yet what exactly is going to happen, but I won't be giving much away if I say that both Apollo and his lover will die somehow. After all, I'm writing a book about the various lifetimes of two souls, so in order to move on to another lifetime, the current one has to end.

This is one of the great things about research: when you find something that really does shift the story. What could be better than figuring out what a vengeful, all-powerful god might do to punish his faithless lover? I'm rubbing my hands together gleefully even as I write this...

Snapshots From My Brain

I'm doing something I rarely do on this blog: I'm sitting down to post with zero idea of what I want to write about today. I usually have some framework in mind, or at least a theme, but this morning... not so much.

Excited yet???

Me too!!!

So, I think what I'll do is brainstorm right here. You know, just freewrite, like flipping through my brain's current photo album, and see what comes out. It'll be a little experiment. And I'll do it in list form, because lists make me feel happy and safe. So, without further ado...

• NaNoWriMo. I'm not so much doing it as I am finding new and creative ways to work around doing it. You see, I thought at first that I might leap headlong into the fray of NaNo, throwing caution to the wind, and - gasp - write without a plot or an outline or anything but a vague sort of idea-thingy-dingy. You'll be shocked to learn that this lasted about ten minutes, before I looked in dumb dismay at my computer screen, and said (maybe out loud. I'm not telling), "I have no idea what the f*&$ I'm trying to write about." Yes, I confirmed once and for all that I am not a pantser, because no matter how hard I try, my brain just doesn't work that way. I can't write without at least a brief sketch of a road map, it turns out, and I can't make that map without knowing my characters.
• Not worry! I haven't stopped trying; I've just changed tactics. I may not be able to write a 50,000 word novel in a month, but I might be able to write 50,000 words of character analysis, free-writing, and outlines in a month. That's what I'm doing now. Perhaps some people might call that "cheating"; I call it "changing the goals so I don't get ridiculously frustrated and unnecessarily upset with myself and actually manage to get something done."
• Guess what? It's working! I don't have anything close to 50,000 words, and I might not hit that target (thank you, life, people, day job, and so on), but I am churning out my brainstorming quite a bit faster than usual. And since I LOVE brainstorming so, so, so much, anything I can do to speed the damn process up is a big fat WIN in my book.
• For those following this new book of mine, Sam's name is now Taylor. I took a brief and entirely unscientific poll, and people seem to have much fewer immediate gender associations about "Taylor". So that's what I'm going with. 
• Taylor is, yes, still very keen on getting me to tell their damn story (I'm going with 'they' instead of 'he' or 'she' on the excellent advice of Mr. M.L. Swift. Thanks, Mike!) Thanks in large part to all of your great advice, I'm now enjoying it rather than wondering if I've truly lost my marbles. 
• I'm also working on a few new sections/lifetimes, involving an old man in ancient Tibet, and a nomad in pre-Columbus South America. The amount of research I'm going to have to do for this thing is starting to get a bit alarming. 
• No, I haven't forgotten about Cloudland. Editing is truly done. I've queried a few agents and am now waiting, quite calmly and patiently, to hear back on this first round of queries. I do not, of course, refresh my inbox 75,000 times per minute, nor do I do anything foolish like jump out of my skin every time I have a new email notification. Of course not. Ha, ha, ha.... UGH. As a side note, how the hell do people stay sane doing this????? 
• I also entered Cloudland into some contests. Some results are encouraging, but far from finished. I'll keep quiet about that for now, but will hopefully have news.... later. Things are brewing.

Hey... that wasn't so bad! I guess I can write without an outline, as long as what I'm writing - is an outline! 

Wait, I Changed My Mind

NOTE: I was going to write about NaNoWriMo, but I got distracted. Again. I'll get back to it next week...I think. 

Last week, I wrote at length (of course) about my new idea. You should probably read that post, because otherwise this isn't going to make a whole lot of sense. I titled that post "Let Me Inside Your Head", but I think I might want to take that back.

See, I'm still working on the gender-free first person narrative section of the book (I wasn't joking; go read it). I took the good advice you all gave me to heart, and just went for it. Dove head-first into my character and didn't look back.

Ok, that's not entirely true. Actually, I first tried writing a snippet of a scene (you know, brainstorming), proceeded to have a minor panic attack about my inability to write in the first person, and retreated to the relative safety of my character analysis instead.

Here's the thing, though: I usually write these analyses in the third person, like a psychoanalyst writing up a patient. And I did that for about two paragraphs before I got really fed up with not using any gender pronouns (no 'he', no 'she' - hello, stupid diction gymnastics!), and switched to the first person, anyway.

And then the most amazing thing happened: the words just started pouring out. It felt for all the world like my hands couldn't keep up with the words in my head; the story wanted to be told. Or maybe this character wanted to be heard. Either way, I couldn't stop the story. It was all back-story, all of the details that might never appear in the finished novel but that are essential in crafting a three-dimensional person: how this person grew up, why this person acts the way they do (Oh for God's sake, let's just use the character name - Sam - and dispense with the ridiculous maneuvering), what Sam is afraid of, and all of Elizabeth George's other character attributes.

This was amazing. This was inspiring. It keeps happening, too - every time I sit down to work on Sam, it's a flood of words.

And believe it or not, this is becoming a problem.

Now, this is going to sound crazy. I mean, I know I say that sort of thing a lot on this blog, and maybe it might have the 'boy who cried wolf' effect, but honestly, this is really going to sound crazy.

I can't get out of Sam's head.

I know, I know, you're thinking "Ok Liz, that's cute and dramatic and all, but come on now. Stop snorting the special blue fairy dust and tell us the truth."

This is the truth, though, melodrama and mind-altering substances notwithstanding. I start writing, and when it's time to stop, I can't. It takes me a long time to move out of Sam's headspace. I quite honestly feel dazed, and - call the loony bin, because this is even crazier - I feel submerged in whatever emotion Sam was feeling. Sadness, loss, fear, joy; whatever I was writing about, I'm still feeling it when I get up from the computer. And God forbid I should be interrupted while I'm writing, because then I'm pretty sure there's a non-gender-specified Australian sheep farmer (yes, Sam is an Australian sheep farmer; don't ask) walking around in my body, talking to my wife, giving massages, texting my friends, and sleeping in my bed.

Which is weird.

This has never happened to me before. Sure, I get engrossed in my stories; sure, it's hard for me to be interrupted; and yes, of course I'm often still thinking about what I was writing when I get up and move about the rest of my day. But I don't usually feel like I'm stuck in another person's brain. A FICTIONAL person's brain, which I myself MADE UP.

I'm telling myself this is a good thing. I'm telling myself that I'm really getting to know my character, that I'm really digging down into my, like, writer's soul, man, and that's, like, deep and stuff.

Needless to say, I'm not sure I believe myself. Maybe this is one of the perils of writing in the first person, or maybe I am snorting special blue fairy dust. The thing is, I don't even know if I really have Sam's voice down yet. I don't think I do. I think I don't have a tone yet, or a set style, or Sam's real, true voice, and I think I'm still having Sam say and think things that aren't accurate. And yet, I can't get out of Sam's head. It's confusing and unnerving and for the first time in my life, I'm having to come up with ways to transition out of writing and into the rest of my day, and put Sam away.

So yes, I think I might change my mind. It's not "Let Me Inside Your Head", it's "Let Me OUT". At least, let me out when it's time to get out. Please?

Real-Life Fake People! FREE!

I was just sitting down to start working on this post when my sister-in-law texted me about the Supreme Court's decision on DOMA and Prop 8. I got completely derailed - listening to NPR, watching Twitter and Facebook explode, crying and laughing, and wishing profoundly that my wife didn't work in a concrete cave so that I could call her and hear her voice and celebrate with her. I know this is a blog about writing novels, but I can't help it; this is so far beyond just politics for me.

However, I'm going to try to re-focus, here, and talk about characters. You know, about Real-Life Fake People! FREE!

Seriously, who can resist FREE STUFF??? I can't. I'm a sucker for all the swag they give out at conferences (and really, how many flimsy plastic keychain lobs does one person need?), not to mention free food. And for someone who normally tries to eat very healthy, this is a very strange thing to love, because free food is almost uniformly horrendous. And yet, I love it, anyway, because I didn't pay for it.

BUT, lucky for you, this post includes NO cheap-o keychains or crappy packaged food. Nope. Here, you get FREE IMAGINARY PEOPLE! YAY!

Last week, I went on a heavily psychological tear about crafting real, three-dimensional characters instead of lifeless robots (incidentally, if you're writing a sci-fi novel about robots with no personalities, you should ignore these posts). This is the approach I used when I was working on Cloudland; if you haven't read the last post, go do it now. No really, I'll wait. I don't mind; it's important (can anyone else hear their Jewish grandmothers talking when I say that?)

All done? Lovely. So, on Ms. George's advice, I created a nice character analysis document in Word, and then I went to town. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and then I ignored all reasonable word limits, and kept writing. There are two main characters in the book (Jake and Sara, as I've mentioned), and then a second tier of four secondary characters (the Guide, Jake's father and mother, and Sara's mother), a third tier of one tertiary character (Sara's father), and then a fourth tier of some characters who are barely mentioned at all.

Everyone in the first three tiers got a detailed, in-depth, and otherwise exhaustive analysis. This included Jake's mother - who dies early on in the novel, but she's clearly so central to the story that I had to know who she was - and Sara's father, who dies before the novel starts, but since the whole book is about Sara's quest to find him, he needed to be developed.

Why? Well, a lot of reasons. For example, I had to know what, specifically, Jake and Sara missed about their parents, because that's how grief often works; it's so damned specific, it can seem crazy. You focus on the tiny, insignificant things about a person - an old shirt they loved, no matter how dingy; their favorite food; the way their hands moved when they talked - and then you spend a lot of time missing the hell out of those little things.

Plus, both of these people live in Sara and Jake's flashbacks, and in order for those memories to be compelling and real, I had to know how both parents would have acted, spoken, thought, and moved.

As for the other very minor characters, I didn't work on them, mainly because their appearances were so brief that it didn't seem necessary. However, my editor would probably argue (and she'd probably be right) that I should have created an analysis for at least one of those fourth tier characters - Sara's boyfriend, Brian - because he is currently giving both of us rather large, pounding headaches; he just doesn't quite seem to belong in the book. My editor keeps using writerly terms like, "you haven't earned that conversation" when he shows up. Meaning, in layman's terms, "what the &*$# is he doing here??" A fair question, and he may be one of my murdered darlings by the time we're done. I'm holding out for him for now, though.

At any rate, how do these analyses actually look, in real-world terms? Below, I'm posting an excerpt from the one I created for Jake. Why an excerpt, you ask? Well, for one, I tend to be rather, um, long-winded (I'm sure you haven't noticed that by now). Two, I really do dig in when I do these analyses, and I write for a long time, in free-form brainstorming-style, about who they are. And those two factors combined would make what is already a long blog post into a freaking monster.

So, excerpt-time:

Jake (Age 5-6):

Half Cape Verdean (mom's side), and half African-American (dad's side). He looks much more like his mother than his father, which will torture his father once his mother has died. He has his mother’s lighter brown skin tone, his mother’s delicate facial features and small frame, and, especially, his mother’s beautiful and soulful brown eyes. 

He is a quiet, introverted child by nature. Thoughtful, silent, and intense. He can communicate, he gets along with other kids relatively well, although he doesn’t have many friends: he prefers his own inner world to anything anyone else offers, except maybe his mom. I think he is an observer, a watcher. He’s probably quite bright. He is intensely curious, but unlike most children, he doesn’t ask questions out loud. Instead, he asks them in his own mind, and creates his own answers based on the facts he gathers from the world around him, and his own fertile imagination. Magic is very much alive for him, but he wouldn’t characterize it as ‘magic’ – it is every bit as real and solid to him as the so-called world of objects.

I think he had a special relationship with his mother, because they are so similar. He was much more communicative with her than with anyone else, especially his father; he can easily sense his father’s ambivalence and discomfort, and is a little afraid of him. His mother liked hearing his queer, strange ideas and stories; she never made fun of him, was never worried about what his brain created. 

It’s only when his mother dies that his quietness becomes deep, unassailable, and frightening (to the world). He withdraws into himself completely, into his own inner world where he can make sense of what is happening, where there is no accusatory father to disturb him. When his mother dies, and his father becomes so withdrawn and so angry, he is terrified. His world is full of danger, and there is no one to protect him. 

Core Need: To feel safe and loved, especially by his mother.

Pathological Maneuver: Introversion to the point of being totally non-responsive to the world around him. When he is afraid or upset, he retreats within; it is only within himself that he can be safe.

Sexuality: He was just starting to grow past the point where he was intensely attached to his mother, and starting to wonder if he could be more like his dad, when his mother died. This does two things in terms of child sexuality: 1) it made him intensely vulnerable to his father’s distance and coolness, and 2) it made him regress back to desperately wanting to be close to his mom.

Essential Past Event: His parents took him to the Museum of Natural History when he was very small, probably 3-4 years old or so. He got very interested in an exhibit, as he often does with things he observes, and didn’t realize that his parents had turned to the next exhibit. They were only a few feet away, but when he realized they were gone, he panicked. He sat down on the floor and concentrated very hard on his mother finding him, believing that if he thought about it hard enough she would. And she did. This led to a strong belief in the power of his own mind.

Core Desire: To find his mother.

Religion: Catholic. He goes to Church every week with his mom and dad, but he finds it a little boring, and hard to understand. He likes the beauty of the big churches, and the organ music, though. 

Spirituality: He is led, inspired, and informed by his mother’s true sense of spirituality. He believes very much that God and Jesus exist. To him, they literally live in a kingdom in the sky, close to or even the same as the place that his mother imagines escaping to. He has asked her before if her special place in the sky is close to where God lives; she doesn’t have a clear answer (“Maybe. Maybe they’re the same thing, maybe not. But I’d like to believe that wherever God is, there’s peace and lots of open sky.”) He sees God as a father figure; powerful, loving, a bit distant, a bit unfathomable. 

Hey, thanks for making it all the way to the bottom of this post! You are my new Favorite Person, and I will give a signed copy of Cloudland to you...once it's published :)

Next week: time to talk about PLOT. Probably. 

Mmm-hmm, and How Does That Make You Feel?

DISCLAIMER: I have made and will make no money off of this post, and this is just my own take on one small part of the process outlined in Write Away. If you want to know more about Elizabeth George's methods for writing novels, I recommend that you buy her book. 

Ah, psychoanalysis. Great for people AND characters. For those of you who have never been to therapy - WHY HAVEN'T YOU BEEN? Seriously. It's amazing. I'm going to agree with Dar Williams on this one. 

Anyway, I ended last week by introducing a small piece of the book-writing process author Elizabeth George uses, which starts with characters instead of plot. In other words, instead of brainstorming what's going to happen in your book, you instead first figure out who is in your book. Think about it this way: let's say you decide, "I'm going to write a book about a bank robber lady who is involved in the biggest heist of her life. It takes months of planning and tons of work and at the last second, when she's standing inside the open safe she's just cracked, staring at 3 million dollars' worth of pure gold, she decides not to go through with it!" 

Ok. Why doesn't she go through with it? Is it because she has sudden stomach pains? Because she gets bored? Because she realizes that the bank she's stealing from is owned by her lover's terminally ill father, and her long-hidden moral compass suddenly kicks into gear?

You have to know the answer to that question, because you have to set it up throughout the book, or else your big climactic moment won't make sense. And even if you know the answer, you have to know the why of that answer: does she have a strong moral compass that's been hidden because she was raised by nuns in an orphanage, and she's blocked out that sad, cold experience? Or were her parents renowned thieves, and this morality is a way of rebelling against them? The choice you make here will completely change the kind of book you're writing. And if you don't choose, you might end up at that pivotal plot point, with your bank robber standing in the safe, and she won't cooperate and walk away. She wants to take the damn money. And then you fight with her.

I've been there. Not fun.

So, instead, George recommends something she calls character analysis, which is a lot closer to actual psychoanalysis than you might think. You make a list of important information, including the basics (name, age, etc), and fill in the blanks for each important character. This list includes: Core Need, Pathological Maneuver, Sexuality, Essential Past Event, and Core Desire. I'll take a brief look at each of these.

Core Need: this is, quite simply, the gas that powers a person's engine. This is the one thing they need, that, as George says, "when denied, results in whatever constitutes his psychopathology." Examples might be the need to be good at everything you do, the need for excitement, the need to always be right, and so on.

Pathological Maneuver: this is directly related to the Core Need. When a person's core need is denied - or when they are under serious stress in general - how do they respond? The person who needs to be good at everything would turn that stress inward on themselves; they would never act out. Internal core needs usually have internal pathological maneuvers when that need is denied, and vice versa. This behavior can be a ton of different things, though, from addictions to phobias to delusions and so on. 

Sexuality: this is more than just sexual orientation. This is how a person sees and approaches sex, and a person's sexual history. You may have a character who is heterosexual, but that doesn't tell you anything except the gender of that character's partners. Does this character like sex? Is she addicted to it? Does she think it's shameful? How does she view her own pleasure? How many partners has she had? And so on.

Essential Past Event: exactly what it sounds like - an event that was instrumental in shaping this person's life. Now, in real life, we all probably have at least a handful of these. But for the purposes of creating characters, it's helpful to choose just one or two. Did your character lose someone important to them? Did your character witness a crime, or was she a victim of a crime? Did her parents split up in a messy divorce?

Desire: this is always going to be related to a character's Core Need, somehow, but it's also much more immediate, and much more changeable. It's really what a character wants at any given moment. You can have a character's Desire for the novel as a whole, and then Desires for each scene (very helpful when writing those scenes, actually). Our bank robber's Desire for the whole novel might be to be insanely rich (or safe for life, which could lead back to her Core Need...), but her Desire in one scene might be to get out of an awkward conversation, or find out the code to the bank's safe, or just get some sleep. 

To this list, I added two things when I was working on Cloudland: Religion and Spirituality. I did this because 1) I had a feeling that they were going to be important in a book about loss (which means a book in some ways about death, and the soul), and 2) for some people, religion and spirituality can be very, very different. And like Sexuality, these are about more than just what kind of church a person does or doesn't attend: they're about how that person feels about religion and spirituality in general. Is your character a dutiful Christian who attends church every week, but secretly feels there is no God? Is your character someone who distrusts organized religion, but prays to a higher power all the time anyway? And so on.

See? Pretty heavily psychological. It helps to have some familiarity with basic human behavioral psychology.

Next week: concrete examples of how this process worked when I was writing Cloudland.

How to Create Dull, Lifeless Characters, Or What Not To Do

Ok, my split personality disorder has subsided somewhat, mainly because I've finished editing a big chunk of Cloudland. I'm not actually done editing, period, but I'm taking a little break while my editor and I re-group.

Anyway, I now have the time (and attention) to write a little bit about characters, as I had promised.

One of the questions I often get has to do with characters. There are a lot of variations, but it goes something like: "How do you create three-dimensional, compelling, and interesting people, instead of boring flat unbelievable cardboard automatons?"

Excellent question.

To tell you the truth, I didn't know the answer to that question for a long time. An embarrassingly long time, actually. When I was writing plays, I used to just come up with ideas for characters, figure out the general details (age, appearance, career, etc), and then I would go on my merry way and, you know, write, like I was supposed to. Because only losers plan stuff, obviously.

You'll be shocked to learn that this didn't work very well. Not matter what I was writing, I would inevitably end up sitting in front of my computer, tearing out great fistfuls of my hair, and swearing at my characters (yes, out loud, like a crazy person), because they wouldn't do what I wanted them to do. I had fantastic ideas about where to take the story, but these people I had created would NOT cooperate for love or money. We would have frustrating arguments that would end with me throwing my hands in the air and deleting chunks of text, and writing more chunks, then deleting those and writing more, and so on, until I managed by pure stupid luck to write myself out of the corner I was in, and move on with the story.

Just as a side note, I now know that the fact that I was fighting with them instead of just making them do what I wanted (which is an option, by the way; it's called Bad Writing), was a good thing. It meant that I was forcing myself to create real, believable people, instead of robots. As a TOTAL side note, or really a side-track, this is one of the reasons I disliked The Grapes of Wrath; I felt as if Steinbeck was making his characters do things they really probably wouldn't do, because it made a better story. I felt the same way about The Memory Keeper's Daughter. I realize many of you may disagree with me, which is great, actually. Leave a comment and we can debate about it.

Anyway. Fun though that whole fighting thing was, let's call that crazy approach What Not To Do, shall we? So, what do you do, instead?

Another great question, and when I started working on my first novel, I had absolutely not one damn clue. So I did what writers do: I researched (incidentally, research is a great way to procrastinate). I went down to my local library and looked for books on writing, and found a book called Write Away, by British mystery novelist Elizabeth George. For those who don't know her, she's the highly successful author of the Inspector Lynley series, among others.

I have a confession, here. I didn't read the whole book, just a few pertinent bits. Sorry, Elizabeth.

At any rate, George has this whole process for conceiving, planning, and writing a novel down pat (something I think you pick up when you are a prolific mystery writer), one of which is to start with your characters, instead of starting with the story. You can and should have your seed, but before you build this glorious plot, build characters who will interact with it first.

Well, duh, right? Apparently not, since I hadn't figured that out on my own.

Ok, this is now a very long post. Before you all doze off, I'll end here - and I'll expand on how George recommends building those characters, and how I used her advice when I was writing Cloudland, next week.

In the meantime, leave comments and tell me why I'm wrong about Steinbeck :)