Who's Writing Your Novel?

I know - you're the one with your bum glued to the chair, making words and smooshing them together to make story-things. But it's the characters you create that make all that stuff happen. So... how do see your role in that process? Are you a Puppet Master, making your little pretend people dance to your tune - or are you David Attenborough, spying from conveniently-placed bushes and reporting everything in hushed tones of reverence? In other words, do your characters 'write your story for you,' or they merely your actors, following the script you devise for them?

True Believers - the ones who favour the David Attenborough approach - will say things like "The characters in my stories are real people to me - they have their own agendas and I can't make them do anything they don't want to do." Meanwhile, Architects regard characters as simply part of the overall construction; to them, treating their characters as sacred makes no more sense than saying mortar is more special than bricks when it comes to building a house. And of course, both camps strive for 'characters that feel real in their stories; that their readers can connect with - even if they don't particularly like them.

But it can all go horribly pear-shaped too. No matter whether you believe your characters are semi-sentient beings living inside your story-brain or the building blocks of your story-sculpture, sometimes they just won't do what you want them to do. They throw their toys out of the pram, the pieces won't fit together properly... pick your poison, the end result is the same. You find yourself saying some variation of  "She won't do this anymore! I needed her to do this thing but now I can't make it work and I don't know what to dooo!"

How can this have happened? How can people that were made by you, in your own head, suddenly turn around and do a Kanye West on you with the plot you carefully and lovingly constructed for them? And more importantly, what's the solution? Do you treat them like real-life rock stars and bend over backwards to please them - the natural instinct of the True Believer? Or do you, as the Architect,  get your own Inner Kanye on and decide that, actually, you are the God around here and you decide what goes down?

If you're a True Believer, you're faced with two options. Option One is to find someone else to carry out the part of the plot your troublesome diva character won't, or change your plot to fit in with what said diva 'wants' to do instead. This may still require at least some plot tinkering, because even once you've found your willing backup character, if he wasn't around for that moment originally you'll have to engineer some way to put him there now, that makes sense and doesn't muck things up for other characters or plot points ("but he can't be rescuing Mildred's cat from the burning building - he's supposed to be bonking Pedro's wife in a grungy motel two hundred miles away!")

If that's not possible, you're left with option two - and that's not automatically a bad thing. You might only have to tweak things a bit, so that you change a few events but everything still basically heads in the same direction. You might even find you like the new ideas much better than the old ones. But sometimes the changes you have to make are so radical that it means you're now telling a different story from the one you set out to tell. And that's fine - as long as you're more emotionally invested in your characters than the story they're enacting for you. But if the original story was one that was dear to your heart - that made a point that your storyteller soul felt driven to put out into the world - and now that message has been sacrificed for the 'integrity' of your characters... well, it might be difficult to tell the new story with the same passion. Especially if a part of you is still grieving for the loss of the old one...

By now the Architects will be facepalming at the whole touchy-feeliness of the above and crying "Oh for god's sake, get a grip!" Since they view their stories and their characters like an infinitely-supplied box of LEGO, their attitude is that they built this world and the characters in it, and if some of them bricks aint doing what they oughtta they're gonna get a smiting from the all-business Hand of Story God. Characters and plots can be broken apart just as easily and efficiently as they were made, and then rebuilt into whatever serves the story they're determined to tell. Hermione's phobia of clowns means she won't date Frank, the Ronald McDonald mascot at her local fast-food joint? Pffft, get rid of her phobia then. Or have Frank flipping burgers instead. No biggie - as far as an Architect's concerned, making it all work together is surgery, not psychiatry. No mourning the demise of the Story From Their Soul for them...

What they have to watch out for though, is that they don't allow this single-minded approach to blinker them. While it's certainly possible to 'change' a character to fit the story by removing certain personality traits and replacing them with more suitable ones, Architects need to be sure they're not doing so purely through stubborn determination to make that character fit no matter what. Because if it's done badly or with poor judgement, you get the Frankenstein's monster effect where it looks like a character has been randomly bolted together from a mix of different kits, just so that it will behave the way it 'should' at any given moment.

And this is why character biographies are a writer's best friend - whether you're a True Believer or an Architect. Sometimes just tinkering with one key event in a character's backstory can be enough to change their personality completely, believably - and, crucially - in ways that better fit their role in your story ("Mungo always felt inferior to his older brother, who was lauded as 'the smart one.' What if Mungo was the smart one instead, and felt that his brother resented him for it?") You can go as deep as you feel you need to; some writers approach it in the same way as a therapist might profile one of their long-term patients, while others include even the teeny-weeny tidbits like favourite colours, tv shows and ice-cream flavour. (Personally I feel the latter is where you can potentially cross the line from Useful Knowledge to Pointless Time-sink, unless knowing that level of trivia actually plays some crucial part in the story. But hey, if it ices your gateaux, have at it...)

So... which are you? Are you firmly one or the other, a bit of both - or do you flip between the two depending on what you're writing? (I'm probably more inclined to the last one.) How do you deal with the challenges of 'unruly' characters? I'd love to know.

How To Turn A Story Idea Into A Story: Part One

Putting The 'So What?' In Your Plot

In my previous post I talked about creating stories from ideas, and how not every Great Idea For A Story can actually be turned into a Great Story. At the end of it, I promised to explore the process of growing baby ideas into stories, to see if there were methods that could be applied to make it easier and more effective. And since I like to keep my promises, here's the first instalment.

For the purpose of making this a proper, in-the-trenches experiment, I've decided to take the example I gave in my previous post of a Great Idea For a Story that turned out... not to be. At that point I'd decided it just wasn't man enough for the job - but maybe I was too hasty.

Let's find out, shall we? Here's what we've got to work with:

What if a group of people invented a microchip that could be implanted into a person's brain that could somehow 'censor' real-life, everyday situations and interactions with other people, so they would never have to hear anyone saying 'bad' words or expressing viewpoints that made them uncomfortable?' Imagine it - a whole section of society who, to all intents and purposes, would be living an entirely different reality to everyone else around them! How would that affect them - and what impact would it have on the world at large? Would they use this power for good or evil?

And for this to have any chance of working, I would argue we need to have two other conditions met as well. Number one: the lab rats would need to be implanted with these chips at birth or very soon after (because you can't un-learn any 'corruptive influences' you've already been exposed to.) So they'd probably take a bunch of newborns as their test group. This brings us neatly to condition number two: you'd want to monitor their progress very closely, checking everything was going according to plan and adjusting the implants on the fly as more and more 'corruptive terminology' needed to be blocked (what with language and society evolving over time as it does.) So... the lab rats would need to be confined to one place all together, preferably in isolation from the rest of society, where the Guys In Charge would have quick, easy and constant access to them.

Well, so far we've got ourselves an interesting premise... but that's all it is. Now we need to dig a little deeper to see if we can unearth some story-bones - and that means asking some questions. And the first question is:

Why would anyone do this thing?

The Why is important - there has to be a why, or you'll never get any further than writing 'Chapter One.' And for our example, the most obvious answer is... to control the thinking of anyone implanted with the chip. Some authoritarian group somewhere has decided the world needs some people whose minds are untainted by 'bad' words and ideas - the assumption being that, if all exposure to such corruptive influences is 'blocked,' they will never get a chance to learn such behaviour and therefore remain 'pure' and 'good' people. Whatever their definition of 'pure' and 'good' turned out to be.

Okay then, we've got our Why... the next important question is Who?

And, to kick off this particular story, that Who comes in two flavours: who are the people implanting the chips and who are the lab rats being implanted? To figure that out, we need to look at our Why again - what kind of people would want to be in these roles for the reasons we've established? Let's start with the Guys In Charge - the ones implanting the chips. Who would desire to have that level of control over a group of people's minds? Most likely it would be people with some level of power already, wishing to control a group of people below them in some sort of hierarchy; rulers of a city or state wishing to control the citizens perhaps, or leaders of a religious cult wanting to keep their disciples in line. They could be doing it in the name of good, as a well-meaning attempt to create a Utopian society with (in theory) no prejudice, no hatred, no bullying. Or they could be doing it for evil, Machiavellian motives, bwah ha haaaa....

Great, we've got our Why and some options for a potential Who... but what now? Where do we go from here? Even with all of this extra information, we've still only got a premise for the story, not the seeds of the story itself. To add to that we need the next level of enquiry, which is:

 Why Now? and Why These People?

Well... 'cause they want control of a bunch of people's thoughts, 'cause - well, there are always people out there who do want stuff like that, aren't there? And they want it now because.... well that's the sort of thing people like that would want all the time so of course they want it now as well as - as any other time in the history of... uurrggh! 'Cause I want this story to work, dammit and so it just has to be this way, okay?

...It's not really working, is it? With our original idea as it stands, all this stuff is supposed to happen 'just because'  - which is the most rubbish reason for anything to happen in a story. What's missing is the motivation. Why are we setting all these plot wheels in motion right here, right now, with these people? What's the 'So What?' in our Plot?

Unfortunately, our original idea isn't going to give us that, no matter how hard we crush its little innards to try and wring the last few creativity-drops from its withered flesh. As I surmised in my previous post, it's just not man enough for the job on its own. Aint never gonna get a fully-fleshed story out of this baby.

Which means... we need another story idea. But not to replace what we've got - to add to it. Adam needs his Eve, Yin needs her Yang.

So let's have a think. What's going on in the world at the moment that might fit our needs? Well, here in the UK we've got a General Election coming up, and the politicians are in full campaigning swing. I'd bet they'd love a crack at some mind-control via brain-implanted chips! Hmmm yeah, maybe... Alternatively, The Voice UK has its Grand Final this week, and then after that Britain's Got Talent starts - how about a tv talent show's head honchos putting the implants in the heads of their contestants? Possible, I suppose... oh wait, what's this? The Mars Project has made its final selection of 100 people who will be sent on a one-way mission to colonise Mars in 2024...

Bingo!

This is perfect, because it gives us our Why Now? and our Why These People? as well as tying nicely into our Why? and Who? If you were looking to start a colony on another planet, you'd want a sample of the best of humanity to do it; it's a chance for mankind to start afresh, after all. So why not keep a bunch of people isolated from birth, chipped with these mind-censoring implants to stop them taking the corrupt ideologies out to the New World with them? Oooh, even better - it doesn't have to be Mars the people in our story are heading for. What if they were heading out to some really distant planet that will take a spaceship at least a generation of human lifetime to reach? That would solve both the newborn and the isolation problem; the implanted people could be the offspring of those chosen to begin the journey to that planet, born and raised on the spaceship, ready to become the responsible adults who will be the first colonists when they finally reach the New World! Yeah, that could work.

So let's see how far we've come then. We started out with some vague premise of a bunch of people having their minds censored of 'bad' words and ideologies via the use of a chip implanted in their brain. Turns out that wasn't enough on its own, but once we'd added another idea into the mix, we came up with:

 A group of space travellers are on their way to a distant planet to build a new colony of humans. Because of the vast distance they're travelling, by the time they reach their destination they will all be elderly, which means the responsibility of establishing the new colony will fall to the next generation, conceived and born on the spaceship. In a well-meaning attempt  to create a 'better,' more tolerant community of humans to eventually colonise the New World, they implant those children with the mind-censoring implants, monitoring and adjusting their functionality as and when required to ensure any 'undesirable' thoughts are quickly squashed and censored in all implantees before they can 'spread.'

We've got our What if..? and now we've quantified that with our Who?, Why?, Why These People? and Why Now? We've put the 'So What?' in our plot!

But this is only the start. We've still got a lot more work to do. If we want to make this into a proper tasty story-stew, we need more ingredients. Which is where Part Two comes in...

(If you have any ideas for what else we can throw into the mix, please let me know in the comments. I'm all about sharing the fun - and who knows what we might end up with?)

>>Part Two: "So Tell Me, Why Do You Want This Job?"

How My New Allotment is a Lot Like Draft One of My Novel

Yesterday I finally become the proud owner (well - 'leaser' anyway) of an allotment - a lovely patch of land about forty feet by twenty feet for the purpose of growing stuff to eat.

I'd been on a waiting list for a while, so when this came up I jumped at it. If I hadn't, my eight-year-old son would probably have jumped on my behalf, since he's been panting to have his own little patch to grow things ever since our next door neighbours got their allotment plot. Needless to say, he is beside himself with an excitement which hasn't been dulled in the slightest by the current state of our newly-acquired plot. Because... yeah. Ready-to-plant it aint. Not by a long shot.

Its previous owner was a man in his eighties, who gradually stopped tending to it because it just became too much for him. So when we took it over yesterday afternoon it hadn't seen any action for at least two years. As a result, any soil there is hidden under a thick carpet of knee-high grass, ivy and a particularly virulent form of thistle - not to mention long-discarded bags of fertiliser, bits of wood and wire netting and other assorted rubbish scattered all over the place. So yeah, something of an unholy mess that's gonna need a lot of clearing up, digging up and tearing out unwanted stuff before I can start putting in the things I want to grow and nurture.

And it struck me that my first draft of w-i-p The Renegades looked a lot like that too, when I first came back to it after a six-week 'fermentation period.'

In both cases I think I went through the same emotions. I started off  by staring at it and going "Whoa... that's a whole lotta work to do right there." I definitely doubted my stamina and determination to commit to the task. My track record in the past hadn't been that great, particularly with novels; I'd put in the hard work for a bit, but as my enthusiasm trailed off so did the hours I put into it, until it got to none at all. But that was with even getting a draft one finished, and this time I'd done that - I'd finally got to the stage where I had a completed draft to work on. I finally proved to myself that I can do it after all - I can commit when I feel something's worth the effort. The Renegades is worth the effort, even if it ultimately never gets published - I'll still have learned so much about how to write a novel from it, which I can use towards writing more and better ones in the future. And this allotment will be worth it too.

So yesterday, within minutes of acquiring my new plot of land, I decided to approach it the way I approached my other plot - the one I'm currently shaping into Draft Two of The Renegades.

Golden Rule Number One: start small. I can't fix everything right away, and trying to make the whole thing look better overall in just one pass is just too big a task and will ultimately leave me feeling like I've barely made a dent in terms of progress. So I set to work on clearing just a small section of the plot, a six-foot-square corner overgrown with thistles and trailing ivy. I ripped them all out, broke up the soil underneath and dug it over, so that I had a nice, bare patch of ground to plant things in. Okay, it might only be six foot square patch, but it's the best patch, and when I look at the whole plot overall it's very obvious that I've done something to improve it. Which makes me think "hmm, yeah, I can do this. A bit at a time, in regular little chunks, and I can do all of this."

I've reached the halfway point in draft two of The Renegades so far - and that too, was done in regular little chunks each day. Of course I'll still need to go back over them and tighten them further - but, like my little patch of earth, they already look miles better than the draft one sludge pond they emerged from. And that spurs me on to keep going, in regular little chunks at a time.

I'll be the first to admit I'm no gym bunny, so after yesterday's efforts in my allotment I was fully expecting to wake up this morning feeling like I'd fallen out of a first-floor window. But actually it's... not bad. The only place I ache is, somewhat weirdly, my hands, from tearing all those stubborn thistles up (a writer who's fingers are out of shape - how ironic is that?) And I probably felt the same way the morning after my first time at the coalface with draft two as well.

Each morning, before beginning my writing session, I've also been reading a metric tonne of books about novel writing and plotting and outlining and dialogue and show don't tell... Because if I'm gonna do this thing - and I am gonna do this thing - I'm darn well gonna do it armed with every tidbit of knowledge and advice I can get my hands on. So now I'm planning my library trips to get books about growing fruit and veg, not to mention trips to garden centres to ogle all those lovely seeds and gardener's charts and all the other fancy-pants things that now look like I desperately need them (I probably don't - a bit like I don't really need another notebook divided into six sections, or another set of highlighters that - oh look! Can be hung on a keyring this time..!)

And now I must leave you - I have an allotment to tend to. And my eight-year-old son has already planted it all out in his head and is nagging my ears off to make it a reality - by the end of today, if possible. Hmm... looks like not everyone can see the benefits of 'regular little chunks...'

Fun Ways To Say "In Your FACE!!" To Stalled Story Syndrome.

Writer's Block is like a unicorn, as I believe I said in this post from way back when.

If you believe it exists it makes you cry bitter tears, smash your head repeatedly on the nearest flat surface and fear your writing life is over until you can rid yourself of the cursed affliction. If, however, you don't, it makes you roar denial like a Baskerville Hound in the face of anyone who says the phrase in your presence - while your brain whirs like helicopter blades trying to come up with an alternative explanation that doesn't sound like you're just saying 'I can't be arsed anymore...'

(Possibly. The above may be slight exaggerations of real life - sorry, that's just what my brain does...)

In cases of General Writer's Block (That Doesn't/Does Exist), where writing anything feels like an impossible task, there are gazillions of resources to trawl through; on the web alone there are entire sites dedicated to writing prompts in the form of random ideas and phrases, images - you name it. There's a way out, they tell you. Mostly because, in that situation, you haven't yet gone into anything.

But what if you're already working on something - an actual, specific project - and now it's been hit by the bad brain-voodoo? You switch to something else for a while, like all the advice says - and your writing mojo comes back, and as the words come pouring out once more you cry "Yaayy! I'm cured of this Writer's Block (That Did/Didn't Exist) - now I can go back to my original project and kick its butt!" Only to find... you're back to being stuck again. The creeping fear sinks in. This aint just lack of inspiration or creative stagnation; this is Stalled Story Syndrome.

Are you wondering why I've brought this up? Pfffft, nah, of course you're not, if you've read any of this blog in the past  - you'll already have guessed. Yep, 'The Renegades' and I recently suffered from a bad bout of Stalled Story Syndrome. As I've said in the past, short stories, stage plays and lyrics have mostly been my bag up until now; this is the first full-length novel I've written. It's one hell of a learning curve for me, and I've been making devoted use of whatever advice I can get my hands on regarding the novel-writing process from Those Who Know. And Those Who Know say that a stalled story is a sign that something's wrong with it somewhere. So... if I want to get this novel to publishable quality (and I do) I've got to put it right. Pronto.

And so I've read tons of advice from a myriad different sources on how to hunt down the flaws and deal with them. There's the CSI Approach to it; analysing clues, revisiting the scenes and performing forensic examinations and anlysing the evidence. All very thorough - but kind of... dull. And then there are some more creative approaches. Being the person that is me, I decided to try out some of the latter (and they'd work just as well for short stories, I would imagine.) So, in the spirit of sharing, here are some of the ones that are not only huge fun - but seem to have helped:

1 - Go to a language translating website (Google Translate is pretty good.) Copy and paste in a chunk of text from your work, and then translate it into another language (it works best if you can pick a language where their syntax and grammar usage is quite different from English; Chinese and Japanese work well for this, as does German.) Copy and paste the translated text over your original English text and then translate it again into another language - and then copy and paste that translation over the previous one to translate it back into English again. With any luck, there will be parts where your original words had been interpreted in an entirely different way - and that may inspire you to think of new directions for your story to go in.

2 - A lot of writing advice recommends 'interviewing' your characters to get to know them - but what about doing it in the style of one of those 'tell-all magazines?' (A British example might be 'Hello' or 'Heat' magazine - for the US, something like 'National Enquirer.') Write an article as if it's your character giving a front-page 'exclusive interview' where she 'opens her heart' and tells her side of the story regarding some key plot point that's causing a problem. Then maybe switch and do the same thing for another character - perhaps with a very different perspective on the same event. They may 'reveal' new things about themselves, other characters or events that you may not have known or thought about before. Things that could take your story in a whole new direction - or at the very least show up where 'your' version of events might be flawed.

3 - Imagine your story is going to be turned into a movie or tv programme - and that you have the absolute cherry-pick of the showbiz world with regard to casting. Find pictures of the actors you would cast to play your characters and collect them together; if you're feeling really creative, maybe even mock-up a movie poster complete with titles and blurb (So what if it looks like The Photoshop Screw-up from Hell? After all, no-one else has to see it.) Putting real faces you can actually see to your characters can not only bring them to life in your mind, but also help with defining their roles in the story. (For example, you probably wouldn't choose action-hero-type Vin Diesel to play your painfully shy and withdrawn male librarian character - just like you wouldn't have vulnerable-neurotic-type Nicole Kidman play the knockabout comedy Fat Friend of the leading lady.)

4 - Take a point in your story where there are a series of events occurring that don't seem to be working for some reason  - maybe a scene, or even a whole chapter. Go to any one of these events, and rewrite it so that the opposite thing happens instead. For example, if your male lead dumps his girlfriend have him ask her to move in with him instead. Obviously this will mean having to change the girlfriend's choice of reactions, from being upset or not upset about being dumped to agreeing to move in with your male lead or turning him down. Or is there a third option? What else could she do? What would be the most ridiculous response she could have?  Then try the next event, applying the same principles. Yes, it may look like you've suddenly upended a barrel of WTF? into your story. Or... it may be a lightbulb illuminating that dark corner with the 'something' hiding in it that you didn't see before...

Obviously I can't promise that any of these tactics will magically 'fix' a story, or cure it of Stalled Story Syndrome once and for all. Heck, I'm no expert - I'm still learning all this stuff as well. But I know what it's like to be eyeball-deep in your writing and worrying that, instead of just being immersed, you might actually be drowning. Writing can be a lonely ol' business sometimes - and feeling like it's not coming together quite so easily anymore feels worse when it seems like you're the only one going through it.

You're not, of course - every writer goes through it, even the famous and revered ones. There are lots of different tricks, tips and strategies to get past it - but it seems you can basically boil them all down to one little mantra; as Dory from Finding Nemo says "Just keep swim-ming, swim-ming, swim-ming..."

And rest assured that, somewhere out there, there's a ton of your writer-kin who know exactly how you feel.