A story isn't just about plot - it's about characters as well. Memorable protagonist characters (or heroes) are what make readers stick with a story, if only because they have to know whether or not they make it to the end of the plot. But sometimes those characters are memorable for the wrong reasons.
Most of us can probably think of at least one book they've read (or film they've seen) where they were left thinking "Y'know, I would have loved that story a lot more if I hadn't constantly wanted to kick that character right in his Crumple Zone." A badly-drawn hero can ruin the most exquisitely-crafted story. It's something I've had to think about a lot while writing Redemption, and so I decided to put the good guys in that through some rigorous testing, just to make sure they didn't fit any of the offending criteria (and so I could fix them quick-smart if they did.) What follows is by no means an exhaustive list, but picks up on some of the deadliest of Protagonist Sins...
1 - Your Hero is Super With A Capital S
Protagonists are of course allowed to have amazing powers and abilities if that's the kind of story you're writing. Readers love a truly badass hero, after all. But there's a big difference between 'badass' and 'invincible.' Joss Whedon's Buffy Summers, I call you to the stand. Now don't get me wrong, I loved me a bit of Buffy as much as the next person - and there was plenty to love about that series - but one thing that always got to me was her apparently titanium-built body when it came to scrapping with monsters. I mean, seriously - that girl was supposedly a 'normal' high school girl who just happened to battle vampires for a hobby; she was bloody tiny, probably barely even a size 6. And yet whenever she got punched, kicked or even, on numerous occasions, thrown across a room by angry behemoths from the underworld, when the fight was over the most she got to show for it was a couple of cutely asymmetrical facial boo-boos. Are you kidding me? She should've ended up in hospital with at least a couple of broken ribs for half of those ass-kickings!
The point is, if readers come to believe your hero is going to walk away from every instance of brown stuff hitting the fan with little more than messed-up hair, why should they continue to worry about them whenever that happens? And, following on from that, if they don't worry about them when they're in trouble - why should they care either? "He'll get himself out of it 'cause he always does, no need to stick around to find out..." And that's when they toss the book aside. So if your heroes are doing dangerous stuff, don't be afraid to hurt them sometimes. And I mean really hurt them - like 'short vacation in A&E'-type hurt them. They might hate you for it for a while - but your readers won't.
2 - Your Hero is a Shining Example To Us All
Your hero is patient and kind and tolerant. She's funny, smart and multi-talented; everyone loves her and respects her and the only people that don't are the villains - booo, nasty, bad villains! She's the girl every other girl wants to be and every man wants to be with.... yeah, hurry up and pass me that sick-bag, please.
Think back to your high school days for a moment. Remember that girl who was The Most Popular Girl In The School, who looked immaculate and got straight A's in everything and was Head Prefect and always got the lead in every school production? (Clue: there's always one of those in every high school in the world, and it's never you.) Did you feel as if life was that bit more worth living if she thought of you as a friend? Or did you spend the whole time hating her guts while simultaneously feeling vaguely guilty about it?
Exactly. Same with readers and oh-so-perfect characters. Readers will follow a character to the ends of her world if they can relate to her - if it feels like she could be us, or we could be her. Most of us know our own faults and vices even if we don't shout about them to the world, and so we can't relate to perfection in human form. Characters who never show a less-than-perfect side make us as readers feel inadequate by comparison - and are dull as hell to boot. So give your Little Miss Perfect (or Mr - because there is a male equivalent) some honest-to-goodness flaws to balance out the awesomeness. It doesn't have to be anything major - something we could take the piss out of her for on girls' nights, for instance. Most of us do that with our real-life friends and still love them anyway. And you want your hero to feel like a friend to your readers.
3 - Your Hero Gets What She Wants With The Power Of Beautiful
This is otherwise known as Disney Princess Syndrome. Yes of course your protagonist is allowed to be drop-dead gorgeous if your plot demands it - after all, there are real-life people like that so it's not like you'd be defying any universal laws or anything. But things go screwy when your hero wields her gorgeousness like some kind of ramped-up superpower. If everyone around her is falling in love with her because she's sooo beautiful, if people drop everything and move mountains for her just because she chose to point her beautiful face at them and they were helpless to refuse her - if evil henchmen who've been tasked with doing evil things to her find at the crucial moment they simply cannot go through with their evil plan because they looked upon her loveliness and their evil heart spontaneously melted into a puddle of mercy... just, no. That era has gone, folks - we're living in the modern world now, where women can work and vote and - and have opinions and stuff.
The male equivalent of this is of course the super-stud, who has every woman falling hopelessly in lust with him at first sight. A popular staple of action thriller stories, this guy generally gets to have a lot of sex, with women he only met thirty seconds ago but whose knickers spontaneously combust when he smiles at them. And naturally, the sex he provides always rocks said women's world - to the point where they want to be his babe while at the same time being totally okay with the idea that he's probably screwing legions of other random women as well...
Repeat after me: HOTNESS IS NOT AN ACHIEVEMENT. In real life OR in fiction. It's just a circumstance, like being born into a rich family (or the Western World instead of the Third World, if you want to be really blunt about it.) Sure, it has its advantages, but as far as I know, no-one's managed to cure cancer or bring about world peace with it yet (dream on, all you Miss World contestants.)
Some authors have tried to get around this problem in what they imagine to be a very 'creative' way. Does this sound familiar? The character constantly refers to herself as being average-looking - plain, even. Her hair won't do what she wants it to, her clothes aren't right - oh trust me, she, like, totally knows she's nowhere near as pretty as every other girl on the planet. And honestly, why every single person who lays eyes on her immediately wants to date her is, like, a total mystery to her... guess it's just one of those tiresome things she has to deal with in her life...
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. For the love of humanity, do NOT do that. If Angelina Jolie did that, you would have to fight an urge to slap her impossibly flawless face - and don't you dare deny it.
By all means let your hero be hot. But please, please don't let that be their only life skill.
4 - Your Hero's Life Consists Of Standing In A Crapstorm With No Umbrella
Every story needs conflict; it's the engine that drives it. But what makes conflict interesting is seeing what your hero does when faced with it. And if all she does is sigh and suffer her way through it, while everyone else around her does all the hard work of Solving That Shit... she's not a hero and she aint even a saint - she's just a wimp, pure and simple. An emotional parasite who sits on her arse staring forlornly at the aforementioned Shit, instead of getting up off it and giving that Shit a kicking. (Hmmm... as analogies go that one's pretty disturbing, but it does fit so I'll leave it with you...)
There are people like that in real life - you might even know someone like that. That one who always seems to have ninety-nine problems but doing something about them aint one. You suggest solutions to their problems - even offer to help - but they always brush your offers away and ignore any advice given to them, spouting convoluted reasons about why nothing suggested would 'work.' So the problems remain, and get worse and more complicated - and all they do in response is sigh and look pained and 'soldier on.' In real life, even if you started off being sympathetic you eventually get fed up and leave them to their misery, feeling that if they're never prepared to help themselves then some part of them must want to be the eternal martyr. It's the same in fiction. Readers won't get behind a 'hero' who never fights back - or worse, lets all the other characters do all the fighting for her. Don't have her being 'rescued' by everyone else and his pet chihuahua all the time; let her grab the tools to solve her own problems. Or at the very least, give her the determination to go and find them herself.
5 - Your Hero's Life Is Just, Like, A Neverending Suck of Sucky Suckness
Yeah, being a Hero sucks a lot of the time. A large part of your job description involves being thrown into the depths of all kinds of Hell on a regular basis, purely for the entertainment of those folks called Readers. And yeah, not even the most hard-hearted of those readers would blame you for complaining about that sometimes.
Sometimes.
But not all the time.
No matter how crap the world your Hero inhabits might be, if she hates everything about it all the time, and has no friends because nobody understands her, and can't get a break in this life because nobody will even give her a chance... well, most readers are going to think maybe her world and everyone it in might have a point.
Yep, as readers, we get it - your poor hero is trapped in a terrible, life-sapping existence that she's desperate to break free from. The whole point of this story is that she will eventually triumph over all of this adversity and emerge vindicated and victorious. But bloody hell, even Officer Ripley in the Alien movies managed to crack an occasional smile in between the face-huggers and mangled corpses of colleagues. No one wants to hang out with a Moaning Minnie for hours on end, and - surprise! - they actually want it even less in depressing and dire situations, even if they are only fictional.
So give your poor readers a break and let your sad-sack Hero chew on some happy-flavoured bones now and then. Readers won't stop sympathising with them as a result, or suddenly imagine that all their problems must be solved now 'cause they're smiling, so hurrah end of story, yeah? Let your Hero have people she loves and who love her in her life - even if it's just one. Things she does to escape the pain in her life, even if it's only for a while. And dreams that keep her going when all she feels like doing is giving up. Then you'll give your readers reasons to not only want your Hero to have her happy ending, but to believe she deserved to have it.
6 - Your Hero Does Whatever Shitty Stuff She Wants, Because She's The Hero So It Doesn't Count And Shut Up Already
There's a reason your Hero is called the Hero, and not, say, the Wrecker of Other People's Lives. It's because the reader expects the Hero to ultimately Do The Right Thing to solve the problems presented. Now 'right' doesn't necessarily mean 'legal, or 'intellectually logical' - or even 'honest,' in certain situations. But it should always be the thing the hero chooses to do with good intentions - even if it all goes horribly pear-shaped later. And if that does happen - well, the Hero should feel suitably remorseful about it and try to make amends in some way. What she certainly should not do is shout and scream about how it's everyone else's fault instead, or that those people are horrible anyway so they probably deserved it...
I once beta-read a story where the young female protagonist slept with the bridegroom of her best friend the night before said friend's wedding. Naturally she devoted some sharp internal monologue to what a low-down scumbag this man was - while she enjoyed some rumpy-time with him. Not only that, but because of his selfish cheating ways the heroine now had to avoid her best friend completely in order to not feel uncomfortable about having secretly bonked him, and this whiny, needy best friend of hers just didn't get that at all. She kept phoning the heroine up all the time, wanting to know why her one-time best friend had suddenly frozen her out, to the point where the heroine felt she was being annoying and extremely inconsiderate and told her to stay out of her life and never call her again. And then later on in the story, when that same heroine's mother confessed that the marriage to her father ended because he found out she had a one-night stand with another man, the heroine's reaction was to be mortified that "all this time, I never even suspected my mother was nothing but a common slut"!
And yet the author was dumbfounded when I said I found the heroine completely unlikeable. Like an over-devoted parent, she had indulged her protagonist's every whim, allowing her to have whatever she wanted just because she wanted it and making excuses for her bad behaviour whenever she threw a hissy fit. And, unsurprisingly, that character had subsequently morphed into the ultimate spoiled brat.
Such people aren't popular even in real life, and readers certainly don't want to be forced to root for them in fiction. Yes, anti-heroes with unlikable elements to their personality can often work, along with protagonists who keep on making the same stupid mistakes until they learn the error of their ways. But in the end it always comes back to good intentions. If the Hero is not at least always trying to do the right thing - and she feels no guilt or refuses to accept any responsibility when she does the wrong thing... well, sorry, but she's not the true Hero of your story. You should fire or at least demote her, and find another character who's better equipped to handle the role.
Well these are just for starters. What traits do YOU hate in a Hero character? I'd love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to leave a comment.
Saturday, 6 September 2014
Thursday, 28 August 2014
What Doesn't Kill Your W-I-P Makes You Stronger (Hopefully)
Yeah, I've been away from this blog for a while. August? Soooo not a good month for me, it would appear.
Apart from the obvious change in routine that having my eight-year-old son at home on school holidays inevitably brings, this particular August has been something of a lesson in stress management for me. I've had a catalogue of minor disasters occur, which has led me to conclude that this first book in The Renegades Trilogy has more lives than a cat and must really, really want to be written. After all it (and by association I) have been through these past few weeks, I practically owe it commitment now.
Disaster Number One pretty much put the mockers on me writing anything at all on my computer, since sitting at it felt like having arrows shot through my shin-bones. Remember that allotment of mine I told you about in this post? Yeah, well, about three days after that I spent an evening out there doing my Monty Don thing, and managed to get bitten by some nasty flying midge-y things. Four of them, to be precise. I know it was exactly four, because some three weeks later I still have the four slightly hideous puncture wounds on my shins as evidence. Y'see, as the doctor helpfully explained to me, ninety-five percent of people suffer only itching and stinging for a couple of days from said midge-y things, but about five per cent will have a reaction that requires antibiotics and staying horizontal for a couple of days until their lower legs deflate back to their normal size and stop oozing. Guess which category I fell into? It's fine, don't worry. I now wear wellies and bathe in insect repellent spray before I set foot in my allotment. And I'm not a leg model so the unattractive holes in my shins are no big deal - although if I were to audition for a role as a Plague Victim I reckon they'd at least earn me a callback.
Disaster Number Two was what you might call of a triumph of my own stupidity. I use Scrivener to organise my novel, which is saved on the hard drive of my computer. But, in the interests of averting disaster (ha ha) I also keep a 'backup copy' of it saved to a USB stick, which I copy over at the end of every writing session. Or at least, I thought that's what I was doing. It turns out actually no, I wasn't. Somehow I had managed to make two copies of the Master Version on my hard drive; one that I'd been diligently adding to every day, and another that hadn't been touched for about six months. When I discovered there were two copies I thought it made sense to delete the old, redundant one - after all, if I left it there I might get confused and accidentally do something terrible to the wrong copy, mightn't I? So I solved this potentially terrible possibility by deleting one of the copies on my hard drive.
The wrong copy, as it turned out.
Did I double-check beforehand that I was deleting the right one? Noooo, because that's how sure I was I knew what I was doing. But that's okay, I hear you cry, because you still had the backup on your USB stick, right? Erm... yeah I did. A backup of the six-months-old, redundant copy I thought I'd just tried to delete. I'd been diligently copying the wrong version to my USB stick for the past six months as well.
I looked in my Recycle Bin, but for whatever reason the deleted files weren't in there. I went into Scrivener and tried to restore the most recent backup, but for some other reason it wouldn't let me do that either. I could of course have gone into full-on meltdown at this point, but for some reason I didn't - I was actually quite calm, if a little depressed about the huge amount of work that potentially lay ahead of me if I couldn't retrieve my files somehow. After a day or two of posting queries on the Scrivener forum and preparing to start the whole thing over from scratch I got some helpful replies and, with a lot of tweaking and fiddling, was finally able to restore a backup of the right file that only had about a days' work missing. And you can bet your life the very first thing I did was delete the real redundant one and put my new, restored one in a sensible place I was sure to remember. And backed it up to my USB stick as well. That's how to learn a lesson the hard way, let me tell you.
They say disasters come in threes, and clearly Fate didn't want me to feel I was being short-changed so Disaster Number Three followed less than a week later. My computer began to die. I'd switch it on and it would chug along happily for about - oooh, ten minutes - and then suddenly go to blue-screen and try to restart. Sometimes it was successful - until another ten minutes had passed and it would blue-screen and try to restart again. Other times it wasn't, and just hung there in blank-monitored silence like the proverbial dead parrot of Monty Python fame.
Needless to say this was a problem that trumped the preceding two. Being permanently without a working computer would mean I wasn't going to get much of anything done - but I didn't have the money to buy a new one. There was always my local library, which offers free computer access - but that often means waiting for ages for one to be available, and while the Scrivener program does fit on a USB stick (and I'd managed to copy it to mine before my computer started its death throes) running it from there is so agonizingly s-l-o-w it's unworkable in practice. And libraries definitely don't like you installing your own software on their machines.
Buying a new computer was out of the question, but fortunately I have a computer-y background, part of which involved a previous job at a large, well-known computer retailer with a technical support department. If I could get an expert opinion from one of the guys there on which bit of my computer had gone belly-up, I could possibly afford to replace that one component. (I'd already previously replaced the hard drive in the past, when my old one succumbed to the effects of a particularly malicious virus.) So I packed it up and took it into the store I used to work in, and after a forty minute diagnostic the verdict was in. Praise the lord, it was simply clogged up to the max with dust, which was stopping the fan from turning and making it overheat and shut itself down! A quick blast with their air-jet thingy and, like Lazarus, my beloved old 'puter rose again.
So yeah, a stressful month - but all of this has convinced me I am meant to write this novel. Even if it takes me years, even if I end up self-publishing it because no-one in the Legacy Publishing industry wants anything to do with it - hell, even if I end up never publishing it at all and just moving on to something else instead. And since it fights so hard to live, no matter what, I've realised it needs a little more respect than I've been giving it so far. It's planned as Book 1 of The Renegades Trilogy, so I can't keep calling it The Renegades; it needs its own, stand-alone title. And in keeping with both the theme of the novel itself and its ability to keep getting back up from every little setback, it will be known from this point onwards as Redemption.
Well... until some agent or editor somewhere tells me it sucks and suggests changing it to something else, of course. That could happen. But I'll chew on that gristle if and when it gets served up to me.
So come on, Redemption - we've got an appointment. You and me, at my computer, now. I'll bring the chocolate.
Apart from the obvious change in routine that having my eight-year-old son at home on school holidays inevitably brings, this particular August has been something of a lesson in stress management for me. I've had a catalogue of minor disasters occur, which has led me to conclude that this first book in The Renegades Trilogy has more lives than a cat and must really, really want to be written. After all it (and by association I) have been through these past few weeks, I practically owe it commitment now.
Disaster Number One pretty much put the mockers on me writing anything at all on my computer, since sitting at it felt like having arrows shot through my shin-bones. Remember that allotment of mine I told you about in this post? Yeah, well, about three days after that I spent an evening out there doing my Monty Don thing, and managed to get bitten by some nasty flying midge-y things. Four of them, to be precise. I know it was exactly four, because some three weeks later I still have the four slightly hideous puncture wounds on my shins as evidence. Y'see, as the doctor helpfully explained to me, ninety-five percent of people suffer only itching and stinging for a couple of days from said midge-y things, but about five per cent will have a reaction that requires antibiotics and staying horizontal for a couple of days until their lower legs deflate back to their normal size and stop oozing. Guess which category I fell into? It's fine, don't worry. I now wear wellies and bathe in insect repellent spray before I set foot in my allotment. And I'm not a leg model so the unattractive holes in my shins are no big deal - although if I were to audition for a role as a Plague Victim I reckon they'd at least earn me a callback.
Disaster Number Two was what you might call of a triumph of my own stupidity. I use Scrivener to organise my novel, which is saved on the hard drive of my computer. But, in the interests of averting disaster (ha ha) I also keep a 'backup copy' of it saved to a USB stick, which I copy over at the end of every writing session. Or at least, I thought that's what I was doing. It turns out actually no, I wasn't. Somehow I had managed to make two copies of the Master Version on my hard drive; one that I'd been diligently adding to every day, and another that hadn't been touched for about six months. When I discovered there were two copies I thought it made sense to delete the old, redundant one - after all, if I left it there I might get confused and accidentally do something terrible to the wrong copy, mightn't I? So I solved this potentially terrible possibility by deleting one of the copies on my hard drive.
The wrong copy, as it turned out.
Did I double-check beforehand that I was deleting the right one? Noooo, because that's how sure I was I knew what I was doing. But that's okay, I hear you cry, because you still had the backup on your USB stick, right? Erm... yeah I did. A backup of the six-months-old, redundant copy I thought I'd just tried to delete. I'd been diligently copying the wrong version to my USB stick for the past six months as well.
I looked in my Recycle Bin, but for whatever reason the deleted files weren't in there. I went into Scrivener and tried to restore the most recent backup, but for some other reason it wouldn't let me do that either. I could of course have gone into full-on meltdown at this point, but for some reason I didn't - I was actually quite calm, if a little depressed about the huge amount of work that potentially lay ahead of me if I couldn't retrieve my files somehow. After a day or two of posting queries on the Scrivener forum and preparing to start the whole thing over from scratch I got some helpful replies and, with a lot of tweaking and fiddling, was finally able to restore a backup of the right file that only had about a days' work missing. And you can bet your life the very first thing I did was delete the real redundant one and put my new, restored one in a sensible place I was sure to remember. And backed it up to my USB stick as well. That's how to learn a lesson the hard way, let me tell you.
They say disasters come in threes, and clearly Fate didn't want me to feel I was being short-changed so Disaster Number Three followed less than a week later. My computer began to die. I'd switch it on and it would chug along happily for about - oooh, ten minutes - and then suddenly go to blue-screen and try to restart. Sometimes it was successful - until another ten minutes had passed and it would blue-screen and try to restart again. Other times it wasn't, and just hung there in blank-monitored silence like the proverbial dead parrot of Monty Python fame.
Needless to say this was a problem that trumped the preceding two. Being permanently without a working computer would mean I wasn't going to get much of anything done - but I didn't have the money to buy a new one. There was always my local library, which offers free computer access - but that often means waiting for ages for one to be available, and while the Scrivener program does fit on a USB stick (and I'd managed to copy it to mine before my computer started its death throes) running it from there is so agonizingly s-l-o-w it's unworkable in practice. And libraries definitely don't like you installing your own software on their machines.
Buying a new computer was out of the question, but fortunately I have a computer-y background, part of which involved a previous job at a large, well-known computer retailer with a technical support department. If I could get an expert opinion from one of the guys there on which bit of my computer had gone belly-up, I could possibly afford to replace that one component. (I'd already previously replaced the hard drive in the past, when my old one succumbed to the effects of a particularly malicious virus.) So I packed it up and took it into the store I used to work in, and after a forty minute diagnostic the verdict was in. Praise the lord, it was simply clogged up to the max with dust, which was stopping the fan from turning and making it overheat and shut itself down! A quick blast with their air-jet thingy and, like Lazarus, my beloved old 'puter rose again.
So yeah, a stressful month - but all of this has convinced me I am meant to write this novel. Even if it takes me years, even if I end up self-publishing it because no-one in the Legacy Publishing industry wants anything to do with it - hell, even if I end up never publishing it at all and just moving on to something else instead. And since it fights so hard to live, no matter what, I've realised it needs a little more respect than I've been giving it so far. It's planned as Book 1 of The Renegades Trilogy, so I can't keep calling it The Renegades; it needs its own, stand-alone title. And in keeping with both the theme of the novel itself and its ability to keep getting back up from every little setback, it will be known from this point onwards as Redemption.
Well... until some agent or editor somewhere tells me it sucks and suggests changing it to something else, of course. That could happen. But I'll chew on that gristle if and when it gets served up to me.
So come on, Redemption - we've got an appointment. You and me, at my computer, now. I'll bring the chocolate.
Saturday, 2 August 2014
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...'
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...'
Sunday, 27 July 2014
Writing A Novel vs. Writing Lyrics
I'll be the first to stick my hand up and say I was a late arrival to the novel-writing party.
I'd certainly tried writing novels in the past - I think the first one was when I was about eighteen or so (for the life of me I can't remember what I called it or what is was about, so it must have been so godawful I've blocked it out.) As the years went by I tried to write several more, many of which still languish in tatty old notebooks in a dingy cupboard somewhere or in the Story Graveyard Folder on my computer. So yeah... novels? Something I was more than a bit crap at, judging by the evidence (or rather, my consistent lack of it.)
Lyrics for songs, on the other hand...
I'd been writing lyrics since my early teens - and unlike novels, I did finish the majority of them. I wrote them for myself (although I was way too shy to sing in public, so god knows what I thought I was ever going to do with them) I wrote a few for some singers in local bands (no formal copyright stuff, just gave 'em away - hey, it was in the hippie-chick-ing, doing-it-for-the-karma-man period of my life...) And, in my mid-twenties, I collaborated with Stephen W. Rodgers, an American composer, to write the lyrics for two stage musicals - Cinderella and Peter the Great. Both were performed publicly and received good reviews from theatre critics. And ever since then I've continued to write lyrics; 'straight' ones geared towards the mainstream music scene, comedy ones and parodies of existing songs a' la Weird Al Yankovich. (I've written over 100 parody songs alone.)
Lyrics were always things I could write pretty easily - and finish pretty easily. Novels... not so much. And yet every time I started a novel I wanted to finish it - but somehow, for years, never could. Eventually, after stumbling upon Chuck Wendig's excellent blog and being inspired by his advice (the most important bit of all being "finish your shit") I began to wonder why. What was it about writing lyrics that I found easy - and writing novels that I found hard?
The most obvious theory is of course to do with length (said the actress to the bishop...) The average song is designed to last somewhere between three and seven minutes, while the average novel is designed to last... um - flippin' ages - well, a lot longer than a song, anyway. Aha, it seems I've found the answer - when it comes to writing I clearly have the attention span of a goldfish!
Except that doesn't really hold water when it comes to writing lyrics for stage musicals - particularly in the case of the second one, Peter the Great. There were no previous stage productions - musical or otherwise - that I could read to 'get an idea' of the story; it hadn't been done before. Instead, Stephen and I had to research his life using academic and historical textbooks, pulling out the parts we felt would be interesting and structuring them into a coherent plot. In other words, using the same process used for outlining a novel. And while it's true to say that in place of chapters containing scenes in a book we had scenes containing songs on a stage, the commitment to a cohesive story as a whole was just as important. So no, it wasn't simply that I was only capable of creating five-minute-long stories.
However, when I started breaking down the structure of stage lyrics compared with the structure of novel chapters, some key differences emerged. Particularly when I compared my strengths as a lyricist to my weaknesses as a novelist.
Description, for example, has always been my weak point in my novels. Like an over-geeked George Lucas, I tend to dump my characters in front of little more than green screens a lot of the time, with this vague idea that the awesome CGI-o-vision that's rocking in my head will somehow magically translate to the readers without me having to paint anything in myself at all. This is a direct result of writing lyrics, of course. In a song on a stage you've already got the set doing the work - and since you've only got a few minutes to tell the audience what's going on plot-wise (about 20-30 lines of lyrics) you can't waste them bibbling on about the view and the ambiance. Being good at describing scenery was something that I not only didn't have to learn as a lyricist, but would even have been a handicap to the process - so in a sense, I almost had to train myself not to be good at it.
Another key difference is the speed at which plot is given. In a novel the pacing ebbs and flows; some parts are more emotional and therefore more at a slower pace, while the more action-packed parts move faster. Either way, the pace still feels 'natural' to the reader, even when there are jumps forward in time. Stage lyrics, on the other hand, because they're also songs as well as chunks of story, tend to fall into one of two categories. On the one hand, you can have an entire song for one small, special moment (rare, but usually saved for the 'memorable songs' - y'know, the ones you envisage being the 'favourites,' that wannabe actors will pick for their 'audition pieces' in years to come.) Or, on the flipside, one song can whoosh through a whole chain of events like a high-speed train. "Peter needs a wife! We must invite tons of women to the palace! Oh look, here they all are - why, they all seem to want to marry the rich and powerful tsar-in-waiting! Not her, she's too fat! Not her, she's not classy enough! Not her, she looks like a horse! Oh wait - this miserable-looking one looks like she'll be a proper doormat, so let's have her! Well, that's quite a random choice, mother, but hey - you're the boss I suppose..." (Those aren't the actual lyrics to the particular Peter the Great song in question, but it does give some idea of how quickly the events zip past.)
And then there's the whole 'rhythm and rhyming thing' that you have with song lyrics. They've gotta fit the tune they're going to be sung to, and, while they don't have to rhyme, audiences do seem to prefer it when they do. Obviously, doing all of that and still making it sound like normal, naturalistic speech is next to impossible, so, in exchange for all of that lyricists - like poets - are granted huge amounts of creative license when it comes to proper use of grammar and sentence structure. And cliches too. Cliches are the invention of Satan in novels - but can be almost comforting in song lyrics. Basically, in their quest to Make Stuff Rhyme And Fit, lyricists can do things with the English language that would make Strunk and White cry like babies.
All of the above traits have helped me write lyrics over the years, because lyrics are compact and fairly abstract boxes, where getting your point across involves packing as much as you can into the small amount of space you have to work with. By comparison, the landscape of a novel is a vast, open wilderness; you must still choose your words carefully and not waste them, but that doesn't mean applying the same principles as for lyric-writing and then simply scattering the results over a bigger area. That, I've come to realise, is where and why all my previous attempts at novels failed.
So... it's been Back to Writing School for me while writing The Renegades, metaphorically speaking. I've been reading tons of writing how-to books to fill in the gaps in my knowledge, along with following the blogs and online tutorials of various authors who know their stuff. I've focused mainly on improving my outlining and plot structuring skills, and learning how to incorporate descriptions without resorting to cliches. It'll be a long, hard road I'm sure - but I'll stay on it for however long it takes to make The Renegades the best it can be.
I'd certainly tried writing novels in the past - I think the first one was when I was about eighteen or so (for the life of me I can't remember what I called it or what is was about, so it must have been so godawful I've blocked it out.) As the years went by I tried to write several more, many of which still languish in tatty old notebooks in a dingy cupboard somewhere or in the Story Graveyard Folder on my computer. So yeah... novels? Something I was more than a bit crap at, judging by the evidence (or rather, my consistent lack of it.)
Lyrics for songs, on the other hand...
I'd been writing lyrics since my early teens - and unlike novels, I did finish the majority of them. I wrote them for myself (although I was way too shy to sing in public, so god knows what I thought I was ever going to do with them) I wrote a few for some singers in local bands (no formal copyright stuff, just gave 'em away - hey, it was in the hippie-chick-ing, doing-it-for-the-karma-man period of my life...) And, in my mid-twenties, I collaborated with Stephen W. Rodgers, an American composer, to write the lyrics for two stage musicals - Cinderella and Peter the Great. Both were performed publicly and received good reviews from theatre critics. And ever since then I've continued to write lyrics; 'straight' ones geared towards the mainstream music scene, comedy ones and parodies of existing songs a' la Weird Al Yankovich. (I've written over 100 parody songs alone.)
Lyrics were always things I could write pretty easily - and finish pretty easily. Novels... not so much. And yet every time I started a novel I wanted to finish it - but somehow, for years, never could. Eventually, after stumbling upon Chuck Wendig's excellent blog and being inspired by his advice (the most important bit of all being "finish your shit") I began to wonder why. What was it about writing lyrics that I found easy - and writing novels that I found hard?
The most obvious theory is of course to do with length (said the actress to the bishop...) The average song is designed to last somewhere between three and seven minutes, while the average novel is designed to last... um - flippin' ages - well, a lot longer than a song, anyway. Aha, it seems I've found the answer - when it comes to writing I clearly have the attention span of a goldfish!
Except that doesn't really hold water when it comes to writing lyrics for stage musicals - particularly in the case of the second one, Peter the Great. There were no previous stage productions - musical or otherwise - that I could read to 'get an idea' of the story; it hadn't been done before. Instead, Stephen and I had to research his life using academic and historical textbooks, pulling out the parts we felt would be interesting and structuring them into a coherent plot. In other words, using the same process used for outlining a novel. And while it's true to say that in place of chapters containing scenes in a book we had scenes containing songs on a stage, the commitment to a cohesive story as a whole was just as important. So no, it wasn't simply that I was only capable of creating five-minute-long stories.
However, when I started breaking down the structure of stage lyrics compared with the structure of novel chapters, some key differences emerged. Particularly when I compared my strengths as a lyricist to my weaknesses as a novelist.
Description, for example, has always been my weak point in my novels. Like an over-geeked George Lucas, I tend to dump my characters in front of little more than green screens a lot of the time, with this vague idea that the awesome CGI-o-vision that's rocking in my head will somehow magically translate to the readers without me having to paint anything in myself at all. This is a direct result of writing lyrics, of course. In a song on a stage you've already got the set doing the work - and since you've only got a few minutes to tell the audience what's going on plot-wise (about 20-30 lines of lyrics) you can't waste them bibbling on about the view and the ambiance. Being good at describing scenery was something that I not only didn't have to learn as a lyricist, but would even have been a handicap to the process - so in a sense, I almost had to train myself not to be good at it.
Another key difference is the speed at which plot is given. In a novel the pacing ebbs and flows; some parts are more emotional and therefore more at a slower pace, while the more action-packed parts move faster. Either way, the pace still feels 'natural' to the reader, even when there are jumps forward in time. Stage lyrics, on the other hand, because they're also songs as well as chunks of story, tend to fall into one of two categories. On the one hand, you can have an entire song for one small, special moment (rare, but usually saved for the 'memorable songs' - y'know, the ones you envisage being the 'favourites,' that wannabe actors will pick for their 'audition pieces' in years to come.) Or, on the flipside, one song can whoosh through a whole chain of events like a high-speed train. "Peter needs a wife! We must invite tons of women to the palace! Oh look, here they all are - why, they all seem to want to marry the rich and powerful tsar-in-waiting! Not her, she's too fat! Not her, she's not classy enough! Not her, she looks like a horse! Oh wait - this miserable-looking one looks like she'll be a proper doormat, so let's have her! Well, that's quite a random choice, mother, but hey - you're the boss I suppose..." (Those aren't the actual lyrics to the particular Peter the Great song in question, but it does give some idea of how quickly the events zip past.)
And then there's the whole 'rhythm and rhyming thing' that you have with song lyrics. They've gotta fit the tune they're going to be sung to, and, while they don't have to rhyme, audiences do seem to prefer it when they do. Obviously, doing all of that and still making it sound like normal, naturalistic speech is next to impossible, so, in exchange for all of that lyricists - like poets - are granted huge amounts of creative license when it comes to proper use of grammar and sentence structure. And cliches too. Cliches are the invention of Satan in novels - but can be almost comforting in song lyrics. Basically, in their quest to Make Stuff Rhyme And Fit, lyricists can do things with the English language that would make Strunk and White cry like babies.
All of the above traits have helped me write lyrics over the years, because lyrics are compact and fairly abstract boxes, where getting your point across involves packing as much as you can into the small amount of space you have to work with. By comparison, the landscape of a novel is a vast, open wilderness; you must still choose your words carefully and not waste them, but that doesn't mean applying the same principles as for lyric-writing and then simply scattering the results over a bigger area. That, I've come to realise, is where and why all my previous attempts at novels failed.
So... it's been Back to Writing School for me while writing The Renegades, metaphorically speaking. I've been reading tons of writing how-to books to fill in the gaps in my knowledge, along with following the blogs and online tutorials of various authors who know their stuff. I've focused mainly on improving my outlining and plot structuring skills, and learning how to incorporate descriptions without resorting to cliches. It'll be a long, hard road I'm sure - but I'll stay on it for however long it takes to make The Renegades the best it can be.
Saturday, 19 July 2014
5 Fun Websites for Writers (But for AFTER - NOT INSTEAD OF - Writing!)
Yep, I'm sticking the disclaimer right there in the title - just so's we can all be clear. It's all too easy to get distracted and procrastinate-y about the serious business of Getting The Writing Done; there are emails, social media sites, blogs, etc. Not to mention that all-important, pseudo-writing 'activity' we like to call 'research.' *Looks shifty, closes a couple of internet windows YOU DID NOT SEE, 'cause they WEREN'T THERE...*
And these five sites are, if you're in the mood for some good old-fashioned work-avoidance, potential time-thieves. Sure, they're fun. They might help you think creatively. They might even give your ego a wee boost. But, if you're spending large chunks of time on them you're doing that instead of writing. That's me trying to be like your mum just before I morph into the irresponsible auntie, by the way. So I suggest you use them with caution; as a reward for getting your stuff done, perhaps - or a way of jump-starting your creative... spark plug... thingies when you're feeling blocked. (Note to self: maybe don't use complicated car metaphors when you don't even drive.)
So - like those celebratory cake moments you have every once in a while on your diet programme (what? Doesn't everyone have them?) here they are - in no particular order...
1 - freerice.com
There are two reasons this site is awesome (and a potential time-thief.) Reason one: you get to test your knowledge in eight different academic subjects - which is pretty useful (and of course fun) for any writer. But reason two: for every correct answer you get, the site donates ten grains of rice to the World Food Programme. Which sounds like a piddling little amount... but you can rack up a bowlful of rice in mere minutes. You win a free meal for a hungry child, simply by having fun on a website. What's not to love about that?
2 - Pulp-o-mizer
If you write sci-fi novels - or even if you'd like to see a sci-fi version of one of your novels - this site is huge fun. It basically allows you to create a book cover in the style of a 'fifties pulp sci-fi magazine. With a wealth of drop-down menu options to select everything from background and foreground pictures to titles and font styles, you can use it to create a gloriously camp version of your current work-in-progress - just for the giggles - or to brainstorm a potential future idea for a story. You can save your creations, and there are even options to get them printed onto merchandise, like mugs, posters, cards and notebooks. You know you want to give it a go...
(the site also includes a random sci-fi title generator, the Pulp Sci-Fi-Title-O-Tron, if you're looking for some wacky writing prompts/creative exercises.)
3 - I Write Like...
Looking for a boost to your battered writer's ego? Or perhaps a disturbing revelation, depending on who you 'get,' I suppose... this site performs a 'statistical analysis' on your prose and compares it (and, by association, you) to whichever famous author you 'write like' (hence the title.) You just copy and paste a decent-sized chunk of your text (at least 400 words) into the window and hit the 'Analyze' button, and your results appear instantly - with a link to the books of said famous author if you should happen to find yourself thinking "Who the heck is he/she?"
Of course this is an analysis done by a computer - that little box that's great at maths but has hopeless people skills - so the results shouldn't be taken too seriously. (Marching into your nearest literary agency screaming "Step aside peasants, for it is now official - I AM the New Ernest Hemingway!" is not recommended, for example.) But it's a fun little exercise - and you might even get a surprise out of it.
4 - Languageisavirus
This site has a load of creative writing games, exercises and prompts for the blocked and/or bored writer. Some of them are a bit pointless (while mildly entertaining, I can't honestly see how some of the text manipulation games - like the WTF-O-Vision, for instance - contribute anything useful to the creative process. But that's just me.) However, their online version of the Poetry Magnet kits - using the styles of famous writers as themes - are a lot of fun, and along with the exercises and prompts there are quotes about writing techniques from famous authors too.
5 - CafePress - Gifts for Writers
This is a site that, once you've had good gander at it, you'll probably want to point out to your nearest and dearest, and get them to bookmark. Because it could come in very handy indeed around - oooh, y'know, Christmas and birthday times? Who knew such a plethora of lovely, writer-themed stuff was out there, just begging to be acquired for the Writer In Your Loved Ones' Life (i.e. you?) Although you might not want to wait long enough for them to get the hint - seriously, there's some awesome stuff there.
Are there any more you could recommend? Sure, I know sites like these are Bad For Productivity and I'm probably corrupting the heck out of all you serious and dedicated writers by even mentioning these sites... but everyone needs to be a little naughty now and then. It can be our little secret. the non-writing Muggles don't need to know what we get up to when they're not looking...
And these five sites are, if you're in the mood for some good old-fashioned work-avoidance, potential time-thieves. Sure, they're fun. They might help you think creatively. They might even give your ego a wee boost. But, if you're spending large chunks of time on them you're doing that instead of writing. That's me trying to be like your mum just before I morph into the irresponsible auntie, by the way. So I suggest you use them with caution; as a reward for getting your stuff done, perhaps - or a way of jump-starting your creative... spark plug... thingies when you're feeling blocked. (Note to self: maybe don't use complicated car metaphors when you don't even drive.)
So - like those celebratory cake moments you have every once in a while on your diet programme (what? Doesn't everyone have them?) here they are - in no particular order...
1 - freerice.com
There are two reasons this site is awesome (and a potential time-thief.) Reason one: you get to test your knowledge in eight different academic subjects - which is pretty useful (and of course fun) for any writer. But reason two: for every correct answer you get, the site donates ten grains of rice to the World Food Programme. Which sounds like a piddling little amount... but you can rack up a bowlful of rice in mere minutes. You win a free meal for a hungry child, simply by having fun on a website. What's not to love about that?
2 - Pulp-o-mizer
If you write sci-fi novels - or even if you'd like to see a sci-fi version of one of your novels - this site is huge fun. It basically allows you to create a book cover in the style of a 'fifties pulp sci-fi magazine. With a wealth of drop-down menu options to select everything from background and foreground pictures to titles and font styles, you can use it to create a gloriously camp version of your current work-in-progress - just for the giggles - or to brainstorm a potential future idea for a story. You can save your creations, and there are even options to get them printed onto merchandise, like mugs, posters, cards and notebooks. You know you want to give it a go...
(the site also includes a random sci-fi title generator, the Pulp Sci-Fi-Title-O-Tron, if you're looking for some wacky writing prompts/creative exercises.)
3 - I Write Like...
Looking for a boost to your battered writer's ego? Or perhaps a disturbing revelation, depending on who you 'get,' I suppose... this site performs a 'statistical analysis' on your prose and compares it (and, by association, you) to whichever famous author you 'write like' (hence the title.) You just copy and paste a decent-sized chunk of your text (at least 400 words) into the window and hit the 'Analyze' button, and your results appear instantly - with a link to the books of said famous author if you should happen to find yourself thinking "Who the heck is he/she?"
Of course this is an analysis done by a computer - that little box that's great at maths but has hopeless people skills - so the results shouldn't be taken too seriously. (Marching into your nearest literary agency screaming "Step aside peasants, for it is now official - I AM the New Ernest Hemingway!" is not recommended, for example.) But it's a fun little exercise - and you might even get a surprise out of it.
4 - Languageisavirus
This site has a load of creative writing games, exercises and prompts for the blocked and/or bored writer. Some of them are a bit pointless (while mildly entertaining, I can't honestly see how some of the text manipulation games - like the WTF-O-Vision, for instance - contribute anything useful to the creative process. But that's just me.) However, their online version of the Poetry Magnet kits - using the styles of famous writers as themes - are a lot of fun, and along with the exercises and prompts there are quotes about writing techniques from famous authors too.
5 - CafePress - Gifts for Writers
This is a site that, once you've had good gander at it, you'll probably want to point out to your nearest and dearest, and get them to bookmark. Because it could come in very handy indeed around - oooh, y'know, Christmas and birthday times? Who knew such a plethora of lovely, writer-themed stuff was out there, just begging to be acquired for the Writer In Your Loved Ones' Life (i.e. you?) Although you might not want to wait long enough for them to get the hint - seriously, there's some awesome stuff there.
Are there any more you could recommend? Sure, I know sites like these are Bad For Productivity and I'm probably corrupting the heck out of all you serious and dedicated writers by even mentioning these sites... but everyone needs to be a little naughty now and then. It can be our little secret. the non-writing Muggles don't need to know what we get up to when they're not looking...
Saturday, 12 July 2014
7 Books About Writing That Will Change Your Life*
*Well okay - that may be a slight exaggeration. Or it may not - they may indeed actually change your life - well, at the very least your writing life. Either way, they are totally awesome books and, for this post, I feel it's only right and proper that someone should shout it loud and proud just how utterly awesome they are. And, for that purpose, I have elected me (mainly since I'm here and the only candidate who came forward at the time of asking.)
I've been reading a lot of writing 'how-to' books recently, mainly because I've found reading a chapter prior to sitting down to write a great way to get Into The Zone - like a warm-up exercise, I suppose. I haven't put my current favourites in any particular order, and they cover a wide variety of different aspects of 'The Craft,' so hopefully it's a buffet everyone can dig into.
Enjoy!
1 - Write Your Novel From The Middle (James Scott Bell)
It took a while before I was persuaded to buy this book, because I read its title and thought "that's a completely terrible idea and it would never work for someone like me!" So I completely understand if that's what you're thinking as well. But don't worry; the approach James is advocating is far more insightful and revolutionary than just literally starting your novel at Page Halfway and then working away from there to each opposite end. In fact, the methods and mindsets he covers are simple yet sheer bloomin' genius. This book will change the way you look at the novel-writing process, and make you see your own works-in-progress in a completely new light. If you aspire to writing stories with depth, where the characters are memorable, this is a strong step in the right direction.
2 - On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Stephen King)
Well, apart from a suspicion that not including this book in a list of awesome writing books is probably considered a crime in the fiction-writing world, I'd be a fool to leave out something written by one of its biggest and heaviest hitters, wouldn't I? So for any writers out there who haven't read it yet, I can assure you it's well worth the hype. Part-autobiography and part writing masterclass, Stephen King tells it how it is, offering good, solid advice interspersed with personal anecdotes in a down-to-earth manner that's well laced with his quirky, self-deprecating humour. Even if you don't like his novels, his personal journey to becoming the writer he is makes a great read in itself; he slogged long and hard to get the success he's achieved in his career and this book is an honest and inspiring account of that.
3 - The 7 Secrets of the Prolific: The Definitive Guide to Overcoming Procrastination, Perfectionism and Writer's Block (Hillary Rettig)
If you're one of those writers who looks at published authors and thinks "I wish I could be like them... I wish I had whatever they had that makes them write all those books and finish all those books and get them published... dammit, I wish I knew the secret to being like them!" you need this book in your life. Most of the other books out there on this subject approach it in a 'here's a magic box full of solutions' way; writing exercises designed to 'kickstart the imagination,' suggestions for tweaking schedules, setting yourself targets, etc... This book largely ignores all of that and instead goes much, much deeper. It's an uncomfortable read at times; Hillary will tell you things you don't like and much less want to admit are... probably true. But at the same time it will switch lightbulbs on in your head, and change your attitudes to both your writing and yourself. Calling it 'therapy in book form for writers' feels almost like cheapening it, because it's so much more than that. If the title of this book made you think "that's me," if you worry that you'll never be 'good enough' to make it as a published writer - if you've spent large amounts of your life beating on yourself for not being where you want to be as a writer, you need this book.
4 - The '500 Ways..' Series (Chuck Wendig)
There are four books in this series - which I realise is cheating a bit with the title being 7 books and all - but I couldn't bring myself to leave any of them out because I devoured them all with equal enthusiasm. Chuck's delivery is sharp, smart and of a laugh-out-loud variety that's definitely NTSW (that's 'Not Safe For Work' - I'm explaining that acronym because I have this theory that, if you're someone who needs it explained, the chances of you finding that kind of material offensive might be slightly higher. Just a theory, yet to be conclusively proved, but, y'know... ) Like Stephen King but with extra chilli sauce, Chuck tells it like it is; these are not books you turn to if you want cuddles and tree-huggy platitudes about the Reality of Writing. If you're looking for a good old motivational kick up the writerly pants, however, these books do it in the funniest way - and the advice is solid gold., covering everything from all aspects of writing, to marketing and publishing and even advice on conducting yourself as an author on social media.
5 - Writing Down The Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (Natalie Goldberg)
I first read this book in my early twenties, and it played a huge part in making me the writer I am today. It was the book that showed me being a writer and a dreamer at heart, and wanting to express that, was okay - and didn't automatically make me some kind of wishy-washy loser who was never going to do anything 'useful' with her life. It's more about digging into your soul and finding the courage to write without inhibition, rather than giving you a bunch of How To Write Commandments to live by. Yes, looking back on it now (I still have that dog-eared paperback on my bookshelf) it has a very 'New Age' vibe that was all the rage back then, but it's one of those books that's great to just pick up and read a couple of chapters when your Writer's Self-Esteem needs a little pick-me-up. Natalie Goldberg has a writing style that feels like a best friend (albeit your Hippie Best Friend) talking to you, empathising with your troubles, boosting your confidence and probably baking you some brownies as well.
6 - How to Write a Novel (Nathan Bransford)
This book slots comfortably into the category of 'does what it says on the tin' - but it does it in a friendly and witty style. Practically and intuitively laid out, this book really does cover everything you need to know about writing a novel - from birthing the original idea to publishing and marketing your squealing book-baby. Nathan strikes the perfect balance between being encouraging while telling it like it is - and as both an author and an ex-literary editor, he clearly knows his stuff. A great, practical manual to have sitting on your writing desk while you craft your work-in-progress.
7 - Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction (Jeff Vandemeer)
Oh my word. What to say about this book? You will have never seen a book about the craft of writing quite like this before. This is the Willy Wonka version of writing how-to books - and I mean that in the best possible way. A hefty doorstop of a tome, it's packed with writing tips, tools and advice, and contains wise and pithy quotes from many, many successful writers and artists. But what really sets it apart from all other books in this genre are the incredible illustrations. Page after page of beautifully-rendered diagrams that are as informative as they are gorgeous, they bring their accompanying text to life with their own, unique touch of Dali-esque weirdness. Even if you don't read any of the text (but why would you not do that? It's a book, after all...) just looking at the pictures is a joy (and enough to spark the imagination in whole new ways.) It's like opening a chocolate box. Even when I think I've explored this book from beginning to end, every time I come back to it I still see something new that I didn't notice before.
What about you? What books have you read that you'd put on your 'books that changed my life' list? I'd love to know (still looking for more to read, after all...)
I've been reading a lot of writing 'how-to' books recently, mainly because I've found reading a chapter prior to sitting down to write a great way to get Into The Zone - like a warm-up exercise, I suppose. I haven't put my current favourites in any particular order, and they cover a wide variety of different aspects of 'The Craft,' so hopefully it's a buffet everyone can dig into.
Enjoy!
1 - Write Your Novel From The Middle (James Scott Bell)
It took a while before I was persuaded to buy this book, because I read its title and thought "that's a completely terrible idea and it would never work for someone like me!" So I completely understand if that's what you're thinking as well. But don't worry; the approach James is advocating is far more insightful and revolutionary than just literally starting your novel at Page Halfway and then working away from there to each opposite end. In fact, the methods and mindsets he covers are simple yet sheer bloomin' genius. This book will change the way you look at the novel-writing process, and make you see your own works-in-progress in a completely new light. If you aspire to writing stories with depth, where the characters are memorable, this is a strong step in the right direction.
2 - On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Stephen King)
Well, apart from a suspicion that not including this book in a list of awesome writing books is probably considered a crime in the fiction-writing world, I'd be a fool to leave out something written by one of its biggest and heaviest hitters, wouldn't I? So for any writers out there who haven't read it yet, I can assure you it's well worth the hype. Part-autobiography and part writing masterclass, Stephen King tells it how it is, offering good, solid advice interspersed with personal anecdotes in a down-to-earth manner that's well laced with his quirky, self-deprecating humour. Even if you don't like his novels, his personal journey to becoming the writer he is makes a great read in itself; he slogged long and hard to get the success he's achieved in his career and this book is an honest and inspiring account of that.
3 - The 7 Secrets of the Prolific: The Definitive Guide to Overcoming Procrastination, Perfectionism and Writer's Block (Hillary Rettig)
If you're one of those writers who looks at published authors and thinks "I wish I could be like them... I wish I had whatever they had that makes them write all those books and finish all those books and get them published... dammit, I wish I knew the secret to being like them!" you need this book in your life. Most of the other books out there on this subject approach it in a 'here's a magic box full of solutions' way; writing exercises designed to 'kickstart the imagination,' suggestions for tweaking schedules, setting yourself targets, etc... This book largely ignores all of that and instead goes much, much deeper. It's an uncomfortable read at times; Hillary will tell you things you don't like and much less want to admit are... probably true. But at the same time it will switch lightbulbs on in your head, and change your attitudes to both your writing and yourself. Calling it 'therapy in book form for writers' feels almost like cheapening it, because it's so much more than that. If the title of this book made you think "that's me," if you worry that you'll never be 'good enough' to make it as a published writer - if you've spent large amounts of your life beating on yourself for not being where you want to be as a writer, you need this book.
4 - The '500 Ways..' Series (Chuck Wendig)
There are four books in this series - which I realise is cheating a bit with the title being 7 books and all - but I couldn't bring myself to leave any of them out because I devoured them all with equal enthusiasm. Chuck's delivery is sharp, smart and of a laugh-out-loud variety that's definitely NTSW (that's 'Not Safe For Work' - I'm explaining that acronym because I have this theory that, if you're someone who needs it explained, the chances of you finding that kind of material offensive might be slightly higher. Just a theory, yet to be conclusively proved, but, y'know... ) Like Stephen King but with extra chilli sauce, Chuck tells it like it is; these are not books you turn to if you want cuddles and tree-huggy platitudes about the Reality of Writing. If you're looking for a good old motivational kick up the writerly pants, however, these books do it in the funniest way - and the advice is solid gold., covering everything from all aspects of writing, to marketing and publishing and even advice on conducting yourself as an author on social media.
5 - Writing Down The Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (Natalie Goldberg)
I first read this book in my early twenties, and it played a huge part in making me the writer I am today. It was the book that showed me being a writer and a dreamer at heart, and wanting to express that, was okay - and didn't automatically make me some kind of wishy-washy loser who was never going to do anything 'useful' with her life. It's more about digging into your soul and finding the courage to write without inhibition, rather than giving you a bunch of How To Write Commandments to live by. Yes, looking back on it now (I still have that dog-eared paperback on my bookshelf) it has a very 'New Age' vibe that was all the rage back then, but it's one of those books that's great to just pick up and read a couple of chapters when your Writer's Self-Esteem needs a little pick-me-up. Natalie Goldberg has a writing style that feels like a best friend (albeit your Hippie Best Friend) talking to you, empathising with your troubles, boosting your confidence and probably baking you some brownies as well.
6 - How to Write a Novel (Nathan Bransford)
This book slots comfortably into the category of 'does what it says on the tin' - but it does it in a friendly and witty style. Practically and intuitively laid out, this book really does cover everything you need to know about writing a novel - from birthing the original idea to publishing and marketing your squealing book-baby. Nathan strikes the perfect balance between being encouraging while telling it like it is - and as both an author and an ex-literary editor, he clearly knows his stuff. A great, practical manual to have sitting on your writing desk while you craft your work-in-progress.
7 - Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction (Jeff Vandemeer)
Oh my word. What to say about this book? You will have never seen a book about the craft of writing quite like this before. This is the Willy Wonka version of writing how-to books - and I mean that in the best possible way. A hefty doorstop of a tome, it's packed with writing tips, tools and advice, and contains wise and pithy quotes from many, many successful writers and artists. But what really sets it apart from all other books in this genre are the incredible illustrations. Page after page of beautifully-rendered diagrams that are as informative as they are gorgeous, they bring their accompanying text to life with their own, unique touch of Dali-esque weirdness. Even if you don't read any of the text (but why would you not do that? It's a book, after all...) just looking at the pictures is a joy (and enough to spark the imagination in whole new ways.) It's like opening a chocolate box. Even when I think I've explored this book from beginning to end, every time I come back to it I still see something new that I didn't notice before.
What about you? What books have you read that you'd put on your 'books that changed my life' list? I'd love to know (still looking for more to read, after all...)
Saturday, 5 July 2014
How to Detect the Clank of the Deus Ex Machina
There comes a point in almost every rewrite of a draft one manuscript when you suddenly become aware your internal Writing Satnav/GPS is yelling at you. Not the normal sort of yelling, where they're just giving you instructions like "continue with this POV until the next plot twist" in that slightly bored and disjointed voice they do so well, but the loud, insistent scream of "do a U-turn NOW or you're gonna dump this story over the edge of a cliff!"
Y'see the wonderful thing about a draft one is that anything goes in terms of making your characters Get Important Stuff Done. They can temporarily be Superman, McGyver and Gandalf the White all rolled into one if that's what it takes to move your story from Plot Point A to Plot Point B, because you're still in the figuring out stage and "the rest of the story can't happen unless they do this thing and shuddup okay I haven't got time to think about it I just wanna get this done dammit!" In essence, you roll out the Deus Ex Machina.
Translated as 'The God in the Machine,' a Deus Ex Machina was a plot device employed in Greek tragedies, when the audience loved nothing more than tales of piddly little humans getting repeatedly kicked in the 'nads by the awfulness of their piddly little lives until some random Greek God dropped down from the sky and fixed everything in the last three minutes of the show. (In these stage productions, the actors playing said gods were literally dropped on wires through a trapdoor in the ceiling to perform the obligatory last-minute miracle. In a world that had yet to acquire a 'Die Hard'-ing Bruce Willis, this was the best they could manage.)
Draft ones of manuscripts are the perfect place to slap Deus Ex Machinas; it's how many draft ones get completed at all. But when draft two and beyond rolls around you can't get away with that sort of nonsense anymore. Stuff has to make sense. You need to make sure that, when it comes to solving problems and moving the plot forward, your characters aren't using a sledgehammer to crack a nut - or, even worse, an inexplicably-acquired magic nut to destroy a sledgehammer. And if such a thing occurs, it often occurs more than once. Like that thing they say about a butterfly beating its wings causing major disasters on the other side of the world, one such doof-up can have knock-on effect on several other areas of your story, amplifying the doofiness of each subsequent doof-up until your precious draft one begins to look like the work of a lunatic.
This week, at the two-thirds-through mark of my current w-i-p The Renegades, I reached that point.
As I began rewriting Chapter 22, I realised there was some major information that needed to be given earlier in the story if what occurred from this point on was going to make any sense. Which meant a pretty intensive re-write of Chapter 18 - the only place where including that information would be sensible and flow naturally from the events described. And as I started doing that, I began to see holes in other areas too, until the crucial Grand Plan of my protagonist and her two comrades-in-arms began to look distinctly colander-like in terms of its ability to hold water.
I sighed. I head-desked. I ate cake ('works when you're happy, works when you're sad - the all-purpose mind-medicine!') And then I decided that the only way to fix it - and at the same time catch any other giant doof-ups that may still be lurking elsewhere in my story - was to draw up a list of hard questions to ask myself. Put every one of my plot points on trial and see if they made the grade. And here is the list I came up with. The Renegades is a sci-fi story, which is why I need to focus heavily on technical details, but there's no reason why this list couldn't work for other genres too:
1 - Would this course of action actually achieve the desired result?
This is the first question because it's the most obvious. Are the characters - with all their strengths and weaknesses - actually capable of doing what's required? Does this thing they're trying to do comply with what's physically/scientifically possible in their world? How could things go wrong, and how plausible is it that they could still achieve their goal a) without anything going wrong or b) by adjusting to a Plan B 'on the fly' if things did go wrong?
2 - Is this course of action the easiest/safest way to achieve the desired result?
Because characters don't care what makes the plot funkier; they just want to do what they want to do. In real life we don't generally pick the hardest and most dangerous way to do something, and if a story is to make sense to readers then the characters shouldn't either. So if your heroine is creeping up behind a burly security guard and doing a Vulcan Death-Grip on him, hacking into the security system to bypass the locks, and then taking out another couple of security guards before escaping through the front entrance of an underground complex - when instead she could just sneak out of an unguarded back door and run like heck... well, it might be more exciting, but it's ludicrous. Forget the action-thriller whizz-bangs and let characters behave like someone with common sense.
3 - And they're doing this thing... why, again?
There are only two reasons people in real life do something they don't need to do; if it's enjoyable, or if they believe they can't avoid doing it. The same should be true of characters in stories. This applies to the big, game-changing actions taken and the smaller efforts that help towards achieving the big goals (those times when a major action can't be completed until a series of minor ones are done.) Both can suddenly become redundant with even the smallest of plot changes elsewhere in the story, so it's worth going back and checking to see if they're still relevant when such changes occur. Do those characters really still need to do that slightly random midnight raid that contributes nothing to their current objective at all? Or is Cackling Overlord Author only making them do that, so they will 'accidentally' find the secret thing they didn't even know existed but just so happens to reveal some really vital plot information? Don't be that author. Readers will snigger at you and call you names behind your back.
4 - Why are they doing this thing NOW? What stopped them doing it BEFORE now?
If they're doing what they're doing now in response to a situation they were aware of ages ago, what changed to make that happen? The answer can't be 'nothing,' because that just makes your characters look like apathetic chumps. Action should always be followed in quick succession by reaction, and even if that reaction is to do nothing, the reasons for that should be logical within the context of your story - along with any reasons for them to change their mind at a later date. The same rules apply when it comes to characters with special skills or magical powers. The reader has to know about them as soon as the character is aware of them - and from that point on, they're a tool in their toolbox, to be used whenever any person with an ounce of intelligence would use them to make their life that little bit easier. No saving them up for an oh-so-convenient, one-night-only appearance in the Final Showdown Moment - "Oh I remember - I can shoot burning jets of fire from my hands! Well thank goodness I finally realised that just now, as I'm fighting the Deadly Ice Troll we've been hunting through The Frozen Wastes for nearly three-quarters of this tale! Doh - now I think about it, I could've used that on all his icy minions on the way here as well... silly old me, eh?"
5 - And they still think this is a good idea, right?
Sometimes, in the name of building the tension and moving the plot forward, characters have to do completely the wrong thing. Make really bad decisions, horribly misjudge a person or situation or take a risk on impulse and have it not pay off in the worst possible way. Your readers might see the disaster coming way in advance, fighting the urge to scream "nooo, you raving idiots, that's the worst thing you could possibly do..!" as your characters blunder towards the inevitable snake pit - but your characters definitely shouldn't. People don't generally choose to do stuff that's going to mess their lives up. If you're gonna make your characters do a dumb thing, they have to have damn good reasons for not thinking it's a dumb thing, and those reasons have to be crystal clear to the reader. If your character has clearly stated he has an acute phobia of snakes, that's not going to go away without intensive therapy - so you can't suddenly - and purely for the purpose of fulfilling your plot obligations - make him read an advert in the local paper for a job as a snake-charmer and say "Ooh, I'll go for that! I mean, I know I'm terrified of snakes... but I'll muddle through, I'm sure!"
I'm applying these questions to my w-i-p as of now - and it's already given me things to think about. Have I left anything out that could be added to this list? What are your experiences of extracting the Deus Ex Machina from your work? I'd love to know.
Y'see the wonderful thing about a draft one is that anything goes in terms of making your characters Get Important Stuff Done. They can temporarily be Superman, McGyver and Gandalf the White all rolled into one if that's what it takes to move your story from Plot Point A to Plot Point B, because you're still in the figuring out stage and "the rest of the story can't happen unless they do this thing and shuddup okay I haven't got time to think about it I just wanna get this done dammit!" In essence, you roll out the Deus Ex Machina.
Translated as 'The God in the Machine,' a Deus Ex Machina was a plot device employed in Greek tragedies, when the audience loved nothing more than tales of piddly little humans getting repeatedly kicked in the 'nads by the awfulness of their piddly little lives until some random Greek God dropped down from the sky and fixed everything in the last three minutes of the show. (In these stage productions, the actors playing said gods were literally dropped on wires through a trapdoor in the ceiling to perform the obligatory last-minute miracle. In a world that had yet to acquire a 'Die Hard'-ing Bruce Willis, this was the best they could manage.)
Draft ones of manuscripts are the perfect place to slap Deus Ex Machinas; it's how many draft ones get completed at all. But when draft two and beyond rolls around you can't get away with that sort of nonsense anymore. Stuff has to make sense. You need to make sure that, when it comes to solving problems and moving the plot forward, your characters aren't using a sledgehammer to crack a nut - or, even worse, an inexplicably-acquired magic nut to destroy a sledgehammer. And if such a thing occurs, it often occurs more than once. Like that thing they say about a butterfly beating its wings causing major disasters on the other side of the world, one such doof-up can have knock-on effect on several other areas of your story, amplifying the doofiness of each subsequent doof-up until your precious draft one begins to look like the work of a lunatic.
This week, at the two-thirds-through mark of my current w-i-p The Renegades, I reached that point.
As I began rewriting Chapter 22, I realised there was some major information that needed to be given earlier in the story if what occurred from this point on was going to make any sense. Which meant a pretty intensive re-write of Chapter 18 - the only place where including that information would be sensible and flow naturally from the events described. And as I started doing that, I began to see holes in other areas too, until the crucial Grand Plan of my protagonist and her two comrades-in-arms began to look distinctly colander-like in terms of its ability to hold water.
I sighed. I head-desked. I ate cake ('works when you're happy, works when you're sad - the all-purpose mind-medicine!') And then I decided that the only way to fix it - and at the same time catch any other giant doof-ups that may still be lurking elsewhere in my story - was to draw up a list of hard questions to ask myself. Put every one of my plot points on trial and see if they made the grade. And here is the list I came up with. The Renegades is a sci-fi story, which is why I need to focus heavily on technical details, but there's no reason why this list couldn't work for other genres too:
1 - Would this course of action actually achieve the desired result?
This is the first question because it's the most obvious. Are the characters - with all their strengths and weaknesses - actually capable of doing what's required? Does this thing they're trying to do comply with what's physically/scientifically possible in their world? How could things go wrong, and how plausible is it that they could still achieve their goal a) without anything going wrong or b) by adjusting to a Plan B 'on the fly' if things did go wrong?
2 - Is this course of action the easiest/safest way to achieve the desired result?
Because characters don't care what makes the plot funkier; they just want to do what they want to do. In real life we don't generally pick the hardest and most dangerous way to do something, and if a story is to make sense to readers then the characters shouldn't either. So if your heroine is creeping up behind a burly security guard and doing a Vulcan Death-Grip on him, hacking into the security system to bypass the locks, and then taking out another couple of security guards before escaping through the front entrance of an underground complex - when instead she could just sneak out of an unguarded back door and run like heck... well, it might be more exciting, but it's ludicrous. Forget the action-thriller whizz-bangs and let characters behave like someone with common sense.
3 - And they're doing this thing... why, again?
There are only two reasons people in real life do something they don't need to do; if it's enjoyable, or if they believe they can't avoid doing it. The same should be true of characters in stories. This applies to the big, game-changing actions taken and the smaller efforts that help towards achieving the big goals (those times when a major action can't be completed until a series of minor ones are done.) Both can suddenly become redundant with even the smallest of plot changes elsewhere in the story, so it's worth going back and checking to see if they're still relevant when such changes occur. Do those characters really still need to do that slightly random midnight raid that contributes nothing to their current objective at all? Or is Cackling Overlord Author only making them do that, so they will 'accidentally' find the secret thing they didn't even know existed but just so happens to reveal some really vital plot information? Don't be that author. Readers will snigger at you and call you names behind your back.
4 - Why are they doing this thing NOW? What stopped them doing it BEFORE now?
If they're doing what they're doing now in response to a situation they were aware of ages ago, what changed to make that happen? The answer can't be 'nothing,' because that just makes your characters look like apathetic chumps. Action should always be followed in quick succession by reaction, and even if that reaction is to do nothing, the reasons for that should be logical within the context of your story - along with any reasons for them to change their mind at a later date. The same rules apply when it comes to characters with special skills or magical powers. The reader has to know about them as soon as the character is aware of them - and from that point on, they're a tool in their toolbox, to be used whenever any person with an ounce of intelligence would use them to make their life that little bit easier. No saving them up for an oh-so-convenient, one-night-only appearance in the Final Showdown Moment - "Oh I remember - I can shoot burning jets of fire from my hands! Well thank goodness I finally realised that just now, as I'm fighting the Deadly Ice Troll we've been hunting through The Frozen Wastes for nearly three-quarters of this tale! Doh - now I think about it, I could've used that on all his icy minions on the way here as well... silly old me, eh?"
5 - And they still think this is a good idea, right?
Sometimes, in the name of building the tension and moving the plot forward, characters have to do completely the wrong thing. Make really bad decisions, horribly misjudge a person or situation or take a risk on impulse and have it not pay off in the worst possible way. Your readers might see the disaster coming way in advance, fighting the urge to scream "nooo, you raving idiots, that's the worst thing you could possibly do..!" as your characters blunder towards the inevitable snake pit - but your characters definitely shouldn't. People don't generally choose to do stuff that's going to mess their lives up. If you're gonna make your characters do a dumb thing, they have to have damn good reasons for not thinking it's a dumb thing, and those reasons have to be crystal clear to the reader. If your character has clearly stated he has an acute phobia of snakes, that's not going to go away without intensive therapy - so you can't suddenly - and purely for the purpose of fulfilling your plot obligations - make him read an advert in the local paper for a job as a snake-charmer and say "Ooh, I'll go for that! I mean, I know I'm terrified of snakes... but I'll muddle through, I'm sure!"
I'm applying these questions to my w-i-p as of now - and it's already given me things to think about. Have I left anything out that could be added to this list? What are your experiences of extracting the Deus Ex Machina from your work? I'd love to know.
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