4 Ways 'The Book of Human Skin' Changed How I Write Characters.

It's a well-used mantra, quoted by everyone from Stephen King to Chuck Wendig to Neil Gaiman - as well as writing a lot, writers must read a lot too. Stephen King even goes so far as to say that if you 'don't have time' to read other people's books, then you'll never have the skills to become a decent writer.

But have no fear if you think you 'don't read much.' I used to think that too. Whenever I heard the advice 'read widely and read lots,' I used to curl up inside and think "well that's me stuffed then - the last time I read a 'classic' was in an English Lit. class in sixth form." But then I looked at my bookshelf, crammed with books I'd collected over the years and covering all subjects imaginable - fiction and non-fiction. I remembered all the science and history magazines I like to buy on a regular basis. And then I realised my Kindle, which I got three years ago, currently has over 200 books stored on it...

Because the good news is that you're not confined to intellectual, classy or 'recommended' reading when it comes to broadening your horizons. All reading is good - and not just fiction in the genre you write in, but in the ones you don't and even the ones you couldn't in a million years. And sure, the Classics are named so for a reason, but the mass-market bodice-rippers, quirky chick-lits and rip-roaring thrillers are just as valuable for adding credits to your Experience Bank. Non-fiction is just as useful; books about science and history and nature and stuff are pretty much acorn factories for the research stash you'll rely on at some point in the future. So are books that cover the craft of writing.

But best of all, you don't have to be sniffy about the quality of the books you read either. A badly-written book can teach you just as much about good writing as a well-written one.

One book that taught me a lot about writing characters is The Book of Human Skin by Michelle Lovric. I enjoyed reading it and would recommend it to other writers and readers alike - as much for the things I didn't like about it as those I did.

Set in eighteenth century Venice and Peru, it tells the stories of Minguillo Fasan, collector of books bound in human skin and self-appointed torturer of younger sister Marcella, and a Peruvian nun called Sor Loreta who does for religion what the Ku Klux Klan does for race relations. The tale alternates between the POV of the aforementioned three main characters plus two supporting ones - Marcella and Minguillo's manservant Gianni and Doctor Santo - Marcella's 'love interest' (well, kind of. More on that later...) So you have five POV characters altogether - some of which were a joy to read, while others... not so much. Here are my top takeaways on writing characters, learned from reading this book...

1 - The greatest villains think they're heroes.

There were two villains in this story: Minguillo Fasan and Sor Loreta. They were without doubt the best characters in this book, even though they were, at least on the surface, very different from each other.

Of the two, the absolute, stand-out best was Sor Loreta. From the moment we first 'meet' her as a child, it's clear she's several beads short of a rosary, and as her story unfolds she just becomes more and more deranged. The only thing larger and more terrifying than her obsessional religious piety is her monstrous ego, believing as she does that she is quite literally the Bride of God, representing His will on earth. But what really kept me glued to her portions of the story - and longing for her next bit when the other characters got their turn - was the feeling that I, as a reader, was the only one seeing her for what she truly was. Everyone else in the story seemed to be either blind to her wickedness - totally taken in by her sob stories or a conveniently-timed 'miracle' she performed - or, if they did have suspicions, pretty much dead by the end of the scene (covertly by her hand, of course.) Even she believed she was a virtuous holy woman who was simply carrying out the will of her God - she did not, for one second, consider anything she did to be morally wrong. For example, she drowned a young nun in a bathtub of ice-cold water believing she was purging that nun of her sins (and therefore saving her soul.) So the question that burned in my head every time she made an appearance - and upped the ante on her evilness even when I thought she couldn't go any further down that path - was "Is anyone ever going to catch this psychotic woman out and stop her?" Because - and all credit to the author for achieving this - it never looked like anyone would, right up until the very end of her story.

In fairness, this was also true of Minguillo. But his attitude was different; he knew the things he did were considered evil by the rest of society, and he cared not a jot about that. In fact, he even taunts the readers about it, asking them directly to reflect on what it says about themselves that they are so interested in hearing about his evil exploits. This is a hard trick to pull off in a villain without making them look like a moustache-twirling pantomime character - "Oooh, I'm so eeeevil, muha ha ha haaa!" But for Minguillo it works because, while he might 'know' he does immoral things, he believes he has just reasons for doing them. Disliked and ostracised since babyhood because his debilitating skin disease has left him permanently scarred (and therefore physically unattractive,) he has decided he is an undeserving victim of a judgemental society, and all he is doing is exacting payback for wrongs done to him (whether real or imagined.) In that sense, he's as much of a 'hero' in his own mind as any morally-upright pillar of society.

And that's the key to making a really memorable villain. You actually can go into the shades of grey about whether a hero considers himself a 'good' or 'bad' person - as long as that villain is convinced he's entitled to be that way regardless of whether or not anyone else in the story universe agrees with him. If he believes that doing callous and immoral things to those who've behaved in a callous way to him somehow 'cancels out' the immorality of those acts, the reader will accept that he can be as bad as he likes while still believing he's on the side of 'right.' We may not agree with their mindset, but we can understand it, and - sort of - empathise with it. Even if we don't want to.

2 - Heroines with the patience of a saint just try your readers' patience.

Minguillo's little sis Marcella was the heroine of the story - although it has to be said, that really depends on what qualities you think a protagonist should possess to be considered 'heroic.'

If your idea of a strong female character is a woman so passive she practically floats through every injustice done to her like a leaf in a raging river, who sucks up her suffering so quietly and patiently her cheeks are permanently Velcroed to her tonsils and who never does one single, goddamn thing to stand up for herself ... well, you'll love Marcella. Yes, Marcella's superpowers were her jaw-dropping beauty and a saint-like disposition that would make Mother Theresa look like a mardy old battleaxe. 'Crippled for life now because Minguillo smashed my legbone into toothpicks? *Sigh* I do wish sometimes he wouldn't do things like that, but, y'know, I'm so blessed to be so pretty and have so many friends when he's so ugly and unloved I probably shouldn't complain...'

 Aaaarrrrggghhh! By the time I'd got halfway through the novel I bloody hated her - which made me feel oddly guilty considering the only people who seemed to hate her more were the two main villains in the story. I don't know how or where the author got the idea that making Marcella a simpering, uber-placid paragon of virtue would equate to being a tower of strength and resilience - if anything it had the opposite effect of making her look weak and, quite frankly, dumb. Thanks to her brother she was permanently crippled, then packed off to a lunatic asylum and finally banished to a convent - at some point in her miserable life she should've got at least a tiny bit cross about that. Not left it to everyone else around her to do on her behalf, while she just smiled inanely and carried on being Minguillo's human punchbag. In fact that was the other annoyance with Marcella; she never did a thing to help herself at any point. But then again she never had to, because all these legions of people who randomly fell in love with her for her pure, sweet passiveness were practically falling over themselves to fix every problem in her life, big or small. Everything that wasn't either a villain or an inanimate object not only decided Marcella was the most wonderful creation in the universe since time began, but often discussed the matter at great length with the other characters, while wringing their hands at what such an unworthy mortal like them could do to ease her suffering and fill her life with the ponies and rainbows she so richly deserved.... it's okay, you can have a quick break to throw up now if you want....

So yeah, Marcella will forever be my go-to example of a Mary Sue in fiction. If they ever invent a Glossary of Writers' Terms, they should probably just stick her name in as a catch-all reference. I will never, ever write a character like her in my stories, I promise. Unless of course I intend for her to die before the end in some horrible - ideally comical - way.

3 - Sometimes the colloquial accent DOES matter.

As I mentioned previously, one of the secondary POV characters was Gianni, loyal manservant of Minguillo and Marcella (although inevitably he was far more loyal to the latter than the former.) Let's note that his name was Gianni, and not, say, Wayne or Deano. This was because he was a rural Italian peasant living in eighteenth century Venice, and while it's fair to assume that his lack of formal education and general peasant status means he's not going to have a wide vocabulary and immaculate spelling, he's still going to sound - well, like he's lived in Italy all his life...

So why then, did he 'talk' like a Mitchell brother from EastEnders? I'm not much of a historian, but I'm pretty sure there weren't many Cockernee geezer-peasants around in eighteenth-century Venice.

I get what the author was trying to do. She wanted to leave the reader in no doubt that this guy came from a poor, unsophisticated background, where he would have gone into servitude as a child instead of learning the three R's like the rich folk. And yes, one of the best ways to highlight that is to have that character use bad grammar and spelling in his 'diary entries.' But there's a hidden danger with this technique, and it comes down to how readers pronounce those errors in their head as they read them. Everyone does it as they read - they hear what the character is saying as an actual voice talking. The problem is, anything where the words are being 'heard' differently because of the way they're written is going to translate to that reader as some sort of accent - and if that accent is geographically wrong for that character it jars. (That's also why characters in historical novels don't tend to say things like "Whatevs, babe, catch you later, okay?" Unless they're terrible historical novels, of course.)

The lesson I learned from that? If you really must use mis-spellings and shortening of words to convey a character's social status, read your dialogue out loud to hear what it actually sounds like as a voice coming out of a person. I don't know if the author actually did that for Gianni, but if she had I'm sure she couldn't have failed to notice he sounded more Essex Man than Italian Villager. In this case it may have been better to just go with the bad grammar rather than mis-spellings, which are after all phonetic errors (and how on earth do you translate an Italian peasant's phonetic errors in his native language into written English anyway?)

4 - He's called the Romantic LEAD - not the Romantic ON A LEAD.

Now we come to the other secondary POV character, the gentle and caring Doctor Santo (and the one guy given the actual job of being Marcella's Love Interest, even though God knows every other non-villainous human in the book probably tried out for it at the audition stage.) And I'll admit, the takeaway I got from him may well be a lot to do with personal preference. 

Not every romantic lead has to be a badass, I get that. They don't all prove their love by punching out the lights of every evil schmuck who so much as raises a hand to the love of their dreams, or by figuring out ways to protect said love from said schmuck - or even by alerting someone in authority who could do something that this evil schmuckery is going on. Instead, they - um, wring their hands and agonize from a safe distance, refusing to do anything that might jeopardize their position with the evil schmuck in case he blocks access to their lady-love? Especially since they haven't even revealed their true feelings to her yet, because oh my god, how could they ever be worthy of the love of one so perfect and beautiful..?

Mmmmyeah, sorry, but that's why Santo didn't exactly light my fire. If there was some sort of Saint-Off going on in this tale, Marcella and Santo were definitely going head-to-head for most of it. Santo starts off as Minguillo's doctor, treating him for his terrible skin condition, but ends up treating Marcella's smashed-up leg after Minguillo has a game of whack-a-limb with it, which is when Santo first falls hopelessly in love with her. So, his secret crush is permanently crippled by one of his own patients that he already knows is a horrible person - and how does he feel about that? Nope, not angry, that's not what he says. He tells the reader he feels 'sad.'

SAD? 

As in "Darn, that's really put a downer on my day?" Well, cheers for that moral support, hero! He also gets his knickers in a knot because, no matter how 'sad' he feels about his crush's appalling treatment, there's 'absolutely nothing he can do to help her' - and certainly if it involves harming so much as a hair on the head of Minguillo. Of course there bloody is you fool, you're a doctor. Here's how it goes: "I have this tincture for your skin condition, Mr Fasan. We've had some great results with it in other patients, but unfortunately the side-effects include stomach cramps and uncontrollable diarrhoea... you might as well just strap your arse to a toilet for the forseeable future. Sorry about that, but thems the breaks." (Hey, medicine wasn't that advanced back then - he could totally have got away with that...)

Even at the end, when he finally - finally! - starts doing stuff to free Marcella from her dreadful existence in the convent and get rid of Minguillo once and for all (like, after more than three-quarters of the way through the entire book) he beats his breast and agonizes about it as if it means he's turning into the Antichrist. Dude, I know the woman you've fallen for is more angelic than Gabriel, but let her win that contest and get this shizzle done, will you?  At least as a couple they're pretty much made for each other. Proof of that comes when they finally escape to a grotty little shack together, along with manservant Gianni, who asks what on earth they'll all live on now they have no money and Santo has no patients any more. Santo and Marcella's answer - spoken, of course, in unison? "Love!" Uuurrrghh, you bloody idiots..!

Like I said, maybe this is just me, but I like my romantic leads to have a bit more agency. To get more than 'sad' when the love of their life has the crap repeatedly kicked out of her, and to not feel the need to go off and have a cry after doing something that makes a really evil person die in a very long-distance, indirect way.  I mean, look at it this way - most of us wouldn't jump on a chance to actually kill an utter bar-steward in real life, for oh so many reasons. Which is why we like it when fictional characters do that stuff for us. It's cathartic, in a vicariously safe way - "You be the champion mate and we'll be... right over here in the corner, cheering you on every step of the way! Yaaay, go you!" No-one actually dies in real life, but we still get those feel-good vibes from Justice Being Served. 

That's your job, hero-characters. And if you can't handle it - well, maybe you'd be better suited to the plot equivalent of burger-flipper at McDonalds. 

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I realise this may sound like I didn't enjoy reading The Book of Human Skin - but I did, and I would certainly recommend it to others. Its shortcomings were more than made up for by the gloriously-drawn villainous characters (along with many interesting minor characters) vividly-described settings and well-researched historical details that made the story feel real. If you like your historical novels on the dark and twisted side, this one certainly ticks the boxes.

Which novels have you read that have changed your writing in fundamental ways? Who are you favourite good guys and bad guys? Feel free to leave a comment below.

5 Things I've Learned About Characters

Characters. Where would a story be without them? They're the meat and veg in your stew, the cards and presents on your birthday, the software on your computer. Put simply, a story triumphs or faceplants on the quality of the characters acting it out, so it pays to get them right. In my years as a writer I've written characters for short stories, stage plays, musicals and now for novels, and if there's anything I've learned it's that, however different they may be, there are a lot of principles about writing them that stay the same across the board. This is my attempt to smoosh some key things I've learned all over one virtual page.

Let's do this.

1 - Characters come in three flavours.

Okay there are certainly more once you get into sub-types and stuff, but for the moment we're trying to keep things simple. 

The first, and most obvious, are the Main Characters. These are the folks who drive the plot; whenever they perform an action the plot is moved forward in some way as a result of what they do (or, in some cases, don't do.) The ideal amount is generally between 2 and 5 - that's not to say you can't have more or less than that, but if you do you're making your job a lot harder. Main Characters most obviously include the protagonist, the antagonist and the POV character, but can also include love interests, sidekicks, mentors and shadows.

Next we have the Minor Characters. These are just as important to the plot as Main Characters and can even have their own agenda within the plot, but their role is merely to assist (or hinder) Main Characters in moving the plot forward - they don't have any direct effect on plot events themselves. Gollum in Lord of the Rings is an example of a minor character, because even though he constantly schemes to get the One Ring back (which could otherwise paint him as the Antagonist to Frodo, a Main Character) he's doing it for his own reasons and not as part of the overall plot of defeating Sauron and ridding Middle-Earth of his evil influence. For Minor Characters, between 5 and 10 is usually the most manageable amount. Having more than 10 is... not impossible, but certainly harder to micro-manage, and having less than 5 is fine - as long as it doesn't leave you with more Main Characters than Minor ones. If that's the case it's highly likely some of those Mains aren't really Mains after all, and need demoting for the good of the plot.

And finally we have the Extras, otherwise known as walk-ons or, in Star Trek parlance, Redshirts. These guys are mostly used for the practical stuff of filling space and performing background grunt work while the Main and Minor characters get on with plot stuff. Crowds are extras, along with retail and service staff in places your characters visit, police and emergency service crews and any other random strangers that pop up for one scene and then vanish, never to be seen again. There's no limit to how many of these you can have, so long as you recognise the expendability of their role. Which brings me neatly on to:

2 - The Extras are supposed to be nobodies.

You can make them quirky, you can give them a personality - but don't make them interesting, and definitely don't make them more interesting than a Main or Minor Character. Lots of us do it; make a walk-on we kind of fall a little bit in love with, so that when he finally gets his big moment we give him a killer line of dialogue, or have him do something super-quirky and memorable, because we want our readers to love him as much as we do. And that's the problem. Succeed and what you have is a frustrated reader, getting distracted from the real story and the real characters because they're too busy wondering what happened to that cool walk-on that showed up for five seconds and then disappeared into the ether. 

So curb the love and treat 'em mean. Don't even give them names in most cases; there's no reason for a janitor to become Fred the Janitor if all he'll be doing is scrubbing toilets in the background while the other characters do the cool stuff. Extras should be little more than walking and (occasionally) talking meat-props. That's why in movies and tv shows they only appear in the end credits rather than the opening ones. Showbiz. It's brutal.

3 - Serve up your characters like you'd serve up a good meal.

As in one course at a time, not the entire three courses dumped on one massive plate. In other words, don't introduce too many new characters at once in a single scene. Imagine you're at a party. You know the host, but you don't know any of the other guests invited, so he offers to introduce you to them. "Here they all are," he says, rounding them up into one giant herd. "This is Jim and his wife Sally, and this is Mark, Jim's boss, and that's Mark's flatmate June, and this is Frank who works with Sally and that's his wife Shelley, who's actually Mark's sister-in-law..."

How much of that did you actually take in? Next to nothing, probably. That's because it's too much information too fast - and, crucially, too early. You don't know any of these people yet, so you have no reason to care about them one way or the other. The host would have done better to let you meet Jim and Sally first, allowing you to speak with them for a while, then bringing in Mark and June a little later, and then waiting for a while after that until Frank and Shelley came over to talk to Sally and then introducing them...

The reader doesn't need to know who everyone is right off the starting blocks, so the best time to introduce any new character is at the first point they do something important in the plot. That usually limits things to, ideally, no more than three per scene. Extras don't count toward that quota, and you can also get away with including characters the reader has already met - but go easy on the number of 'active' characters you have in any one scene at a time. Because then you'll need to...

4 - Beware of Character Jump-Scare Syndrome.

This commonly happens in novels and short stories, when dialogue occurs between two characters while there are other characters in the scene as well (who aren't extras, because again, extras don't count.) These non-participating characters might be avid spectators of the exchange between the two speaking characters, or they might be ignoring them and doing their own thing in the background. Either way, the longer the focus stays on the dialogue between the two speaking characters, the more the non-speakers disappear into the wallpaper as far as the reader is concerned (since they're only 'seeing' what's being described on the page.) This means that when they finally do pipe up and make their presence known again, the effect is similar to them suddenly popping up out of the floorboards like Fenella from Chorlton and the Wheelies - "Whoa! Where did he come from? Was he still there all this time then?" 

There are some little touches you can employ to lessen this effect. One is to have the non-participators join in a bit - even if it's just the odd line here and there to agree or disagree with something one of the speakers has just said. Another is to have the POV character observe and comment on the non-speaking characters' reactions to whatever has just been said (and if that POV character is also one of the speakers, that might in turn influence the way she responds to what's been said.) Alternatively if the non-speaking characters are ignoring the speakers and doing their own thing, the POV character could equally comment on that (might she be annoyed they're not interested when they should be - or alternatively worried that they might hear something she thinks they shouldn't?)

But if none of the above tactics work, or they just aren't plausible for the situation... why are these non-participators there at all then? Their input clearly isn't needed, so get 'em offstage. As a boss, you wouldn't pay an employee to just hang around in the background doing nothing, and there's no reason to let your characters to get away with that either. If they've got nothing to do, find some excuse for them to leave or even don't put them there in the first place. Make them work for their moments in the spotlight. Speaking of which...

5 - Some characters are just third wheels.

Why have just one jokey sidekick when you can have a wisecrackin' double-act for compadres? One jobsworthy minion when you can have a jobsworthy minion and his jobsworthy boss? More character goodness just multiplies the fun, doesn't it? Erm....no, actually. The only thing that gets multiplied is the wage bill - and as the boss of your story you already know that's not good business sense. There's no point in having two characters on the same side of the battle perform exactly the same function, because no matter how interesting they are to write, they're not interesting to read. It's like being made to eat two Full English Breakfasts when you've only got room for one. It typically happens in the form of comedy/villainous duos and loyal companions - either on the hero's or villain's team - and while they might help to beef up the buddy tally, if they're not bringing anything useful to the plot they're dead weight.

Fortunately there's an easy way to spot those kinds of unnecessary duplicates. Take the dialogue attributed to both of the suspect characters and swap them around, so A is saying all of B's lines and vice versa. It should sound weird and like they're both acting completely out of character, saying and thinking things they would never normally say or think. If it doesn't... they've just secretly cloned themselves, and your story would be made stronger by eliminating one of them.

Another variation of this is the Soundbite Dispenser. They're easy to spot as well - most often minor characters, they hang out in the background until their moment comes to deliver a whip-smart, uber-wise or hil-ariously funny line, before slipping back into the shadows again until their next killer bit of dialogue. They're basically an extra with delusions of grandeur, who contributes absolutely nothing to the plot but somehow got awarded all the perks of being the resident smart-ass/wise person/comedy loser without actually putting in any of the hours. And yeah, I'll admit it here because I can - it hurts taking them out of your story. Been there, done it, worn the *sadface.* But if slicing them out doesn't change a single detail of any plot or sub-plots going on in your story... face it, he's wasted meat-space and he needs to go.

Like I already said, showbiz is brutal, baby. But on the bright side, at least you can divvy up his cool lines amongst the remaining cast members.

_______________________________________________________________________________

As a writer, your job is to be the most horrible boss in the world to your characters - and that's a hard thing to do when you also love them all to bits. No wonder we're all a little bit bonkers. But if the end result is a stronger story, your little pretend people will forgive you. So be hard, be ruthless and be cruel. Like the evil little story-maker you were born to be, bwa ha haaaa......

*vanishes in a puff of purple smoke. To cackle and eat chocolate.*

Who's Writing Your Novel?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Tell Me, Why Do You Want This Job?

In my previous post I looked at how to put the 'So What?' into a potential plot; brainstorming reasons for the situation that arises from a Story Idea. Now we've chucked those into our story-pot, we need some more ingredients - and for this post, I think we need to look at characters. Most specifically, main characters.

We already did this a little bit in our previous brainstorming session, but only at a very superficial level, i.e. we decided what kind of people - from the sections of  the society particular to our story - would likely be involved in the scenarios we had. Now we need to drill deeper and get ourselves some actual spokespeople - vehicles we can use to take us down this story road and show us the scenery on the way until we get to our final destination. And since it's likely to be long old trip, with plenty of bumps in the road, unexpected detours and dodgy roadside eateries, our vehicles need to be up to the job. We'll need to be happy to travel with them, trusting that they're not going to screw us over and dump us on the roadside without warning and that they'll eventually get us to the end in one piece. 

So how do we determine who those vehicles, i.e. characters, should be? Well, the same way the boss of a big company decides which of his employees should get big fat promotions. Does he gather them all in one big room and then stand on a high balcony and point randomly at individuals? No, he calls them into his office for an interview. And one of the first - and certainly most important - questions he asks each candidate is "Why do you want this job?"

Obviously anyone who answers "It pays more money," "It means I don't have to work weekends anymore," or "I get a company car and a discount on triple-chocolate muffins in the staff coffee shop" will get shuffled to the bottom of the pile pretty quickly. Because when the Boss asks "why do you want this job?" he doesn't actually mean 'why do you want this job?' - he means "what are you gonna do to make it worth my while to give you this job?" He's not looking to make his minions happy, he's looking for people who are up for the challenge of taking on a way bigger dose of responsibility and stress in their working lives, in exchange for a little more money and perks. Even if it ultimately messes with their relationships, social lives and overall levels of happiness with life in general. (A cynical view perhaps, but no less true for it.)

And... that's even more true for the main characters of a story.

Since conflict is what drives all stories, it's a given that you're going to be putting your characters through fifty shades of hell in yours. So you need folks who can take that kind of punishment, not the ones who aren't thinking any further than the slightly bigger pay packet and extra-wheelie office chair. Those characters gotta be keen. Keen and hungry.

However, they can't just be keen and hungry in a generic, 'ooh yeah, I love me a challenge - bring it on!' kind of way. It needs to be specific. The ones who deserve the job are the ones who can say "I want this job because I can see it has these opportunities to achieve these things, and here are the skills I have that will help me do that." In other words, casting all employee-related metaphors aside for a moment, the main characters need goals that establish and feed that all-important conflict within the plot. Not just everyday Joe or Jane who only got the job of Main Character because no-one else showed up for the interview.

So let's put this into practice with our story-foetus now. To start with, it would make sense to have at least one main character from each side of the fence, as it were - one Implanter and one Implantee. We'll start with the Implantee. I'm going to make her a girl because - well, I'm a girl so that makes it a bit easier for me to get into her head. We'll make her age about late teens, so that she's still young enough to be potentially rebellious (for that yummy conflict) but old enough to assume a level of responsibility on the overall mission that enables her to make stuff happen. But she's not going to be the only one - there's going to be quite a few of them on this spaceship. So... who to pick? Who's the special one of the bunch? And what defines 'special' anyway?

Maybe she's the smartest/nicest/most popular of the bunch. Bleurgh, *raspberry noise* no thanks, let's not have the Disney Princess, okay? Perhaps she has some super-ability that marks her out from the others then - a massively high IQ or - ooh, I know, she can read people's minds! Hmmm yeah, maybe.. nah. Let's face it, the 'amazing chosen one' is a cliché that's been done to death already. I think we need to take a different angle to freshen this up. How about if this thing that makes her special is something that would generally be regarded as a handicap by society - something that would make living with a chip that controls your thoughts more difficult? What about.. if she was somewhere on the Asperger's scale? That would cause problems with social interaction, interpreting the body language of others and, in some cases, distinguishing between literal and metaphorical conversation - obviously we'd need to do some more research into it, but this is a promising starting-point, with plenty of opportunities for conflict.

But now we have a problem. The Implantees are supposed to represent the 'unflawed' of society to lead the New Earth colony - and while the other Implantees will have had the instinct to prejudice against others removed by the chips, the Implanters won't. Some of them are going to feel this girl shouldn't be a part of the project. Obviously no-one could've stopped her being there from the start if she was born on the ship, but if they don't want her there now what do they do with her? They can't just kill her off... can they? No, and they're not likely to try - but they could try to reduce her status somehow.

There would probably be two tiers of  hierarchy amongst the colonists. The scientists, doctors and professionally-trained people - and Implantees with high enough intelligence to train for those jobs in the future - would be the 'elite' Tier 1 class. Meanwhile, those who are less academically-inclined would do the everyday jobs like catering, maintenance, food production and the like, and form the 'standard' Tier 2 class. Our Asperger's girl could be assigned to Tier 1, partly due to her parents being Tier 1 but also because she's intelligent enough to meet the criteria for it, and those against her could feel she should be downgraded to Tier 2 because of her 'disability.' Oooh - now we have a potential Antagonist as well as a potential Ally within the ranks of the Implanters! The Ally would most logically be one of her parents... a doctor or psychiatrist perhaps, so that they'd be the one who fully understood the characteristics of Asperger's at the same time as having the protective instincts of a parent wanting the best for their child. The Antagonist? Well, there might well be more than one, but remember - we need the special one to make the story pop. Well, it would make sense if they were Tier 2 themselves I suppose, because then you could factor in jealousy... but that still only narrows the field a little bit - and a little bit is not good enough. We need more than that.

How about... if the antagonist is the ex-partner of the Ally Implanter?  Maybe our Ally left our Tier 2 Antagonist for our Asperger girl's mother  - a Tier 1 class like him - before the space mission began? And now, the Antagonist has a child of her own with a new partner, and resents the fact that her child is 'only' a Tier 2 like her, while the 'flawed' child her ex-husband had with the woman he left her for is a Tier 1. Which adds in another layer of conflict if we factor in that her child, as an Implantee, would be free of the prejudice his mother feels. If he was also our Asperger girl's best friend that would annoy the heck out of his mother and complicate things even further... yep, this is coming together nicely now...

Okay, so let's recap on everything we've got so far:

We have a long space journey for the purposes of humans colonising a new, Earth-like planet, so distant the timespan will take two generations to complete. Since it is the offspring of the current crew who will eventually become the new colonists, all children born aboard the ship are implanted with microchips that can be tailored to censor all 'inappropriate' thoughts, ideologies and prejudices, with the intention of creating a more tolerant and peaceful race of humans for the new colony. But a Tier 1 doctor realises his daughter has Asperger's Syndrome, which becomes harder to conceal as she gets older in spite of his best efforts to teach her how to 'hide' her condition. Inevitably, some other crew members feel her 'disability' will compromise the 'perfection' of the rest of the group; one of the most vocal naysayers is his ex-wife, a Tier 2 class he split from just before they set off for this mission. Even though she's since married another Tier 2 man and has a son with him, she's still bitter that her Tier 1 ex left her for a Tier 1 woman and the daughter they had together is 'automatically' a Tier 1 even with her Asperger's diagnosis, while her own son is 'only' a Tier 2 like her and her new husband. She is leading a movement to have his daughter 'downgraded,' purely on the strength of having Asperger's Syndrome. However, it seems her own son is not helping her in this endeavour; as a fellow Implantee, he and our Asperger's girl are best friends, and he doesn't understand why his mother is so angry with him about this.

Yaaay! We've done it then! We've got a real, proper story now, right?

Errr... nope. Not yet we haven't. Still a long way to go. And in my next post we'll look at what else we're going to need.

(We also haven't got names for our four main characters yet. If you have any suggestions, please leave then in the Comments section and I'll be glad to use 'em. If not, I'll dream some up for Part Three.)

<<Part One: Putting The 'So What?' In Your Plot

When Draft One is Only The Job Interview for your Characters

Now that I've passed the 60% mark for Draft Two of Redemption, I'm starting to realise how completely different the story is from Draft One - whilst at the same time essentially the same. Confused? I don't blame you. I shall explain...

The original key plot points are still there, unchanged in their purpose or meaning within the story as a whole. The settings and locales are still the same. And I haven't added or removed any characters or changed their names, ages or occupations. And yet, when I compare my first draft rantings to my second, they read so differently in style and context as to almost seem as if both were written by completely different writers. So far I like the second writer's version much more, I have to say (just as well, or may have to either give up writing or find a way to travel backwards through time to do the stages in the opposite order.) But what's changed, exactly? What is it about my revised version that was missing from that first draft? I've felt a need to figure this out from the moment I noticed it, if only so that I can apply the lessons learned to future novels. And this week, on completing a very particular chapter, it finally dawned on me.

It's the characters. I've finally got to know them as people, rather than just walking, talking plot devices.

If you've been writing stories of any kind for any amount of time, you will have doubtless heard the advice about creating detailed profiles for your characters. The advocates of this approach proclaim you must know everything about every important character in your story; not just the basics like their name, age and physical attributes, but even the most minute stuff. Like where they went to school, their shoe size, their most embarrassing memory, whether they'd be Team Jennifer or Team Angelina...

I did that thing. Well, most of it anyway. If I'm honest, I didn't bother with many of the trivialities. My protagonist has lived a pretty hellish life even before she got to her current place in the story, so is it really going to help me to know what her favourite tv programme would be - if she ever got the chance to even see a working tv, never mind watch it?

The thing is though, I did all of that malarkey after I'd worked out the basic plot, filling in the information as I came to it while writing the first draft. There's a popular school of thought that says you shouldn't even begin to write the words 'Chapter One' until you have these complete biographies of every significant character in the story, all written up like handy mini-Bibles for you to refer to with each twist and turn of your plot. I'm sure that works like a charm for some writers, but it doesn't really match the way I dream up stories. I usually start with a 'What if..?' and chase the premise to its ultimate conclusion via a series of even more 'what if..?'s piled on top. Part of that process involves asking questions like "What kind of person could find themselves in that situation in the first place?" "What sort of things would they do to get out of that situation?" and "How could their solutions to those problems make the resulting situation even worse?" (Bwah ha haaaaa..!)

Those are things you can't really figure out until you've actually put your little LEGO-men onto your Head-Stage and watched them improv their little plastic socks off. So, if you ultimately discover you need a Benedict Cumberbatch to drive your plot forward, you're going to be pretty gutted if you've only got a pre-made Bruce Willis available in your character-bank.

So, while I had a basic idea of what sort of characters I might need to populate Redemption as I began to write it, I didn't really get to know them as individuals until I'd spent some time with them, watching them on my Head-Stage and making notes about their performances. Hence the job interview analogy in the title of this post (see, it wasn't just a random thing..!)

The benefits of this approach are that you have a much better chance of putting the right person into the right job, and that, should there be some areas where they're not quite compatible with certain duties, you can make alternative plans rather than writing yourself into a black hole (i.e. delegate tasks to another, more suitable candidate, or allow them their awkward little foibles but then hit them from another angle with something more 'suited' to their personality... *strokes imaginary white cat and cackles*)

The downside, of course, is that your characters will be... well, little more than LEGO people for most of your first draft, as you watch them get to grips with your script and attempt to deliver the performance of their career. By the time I was ready to do my first read-through of Draft One, I'd spent enough time with them to know what they were really like, and was able to get completely frustrated when they weren't performing their roles to their full potential thanks to the lousy script some knuckle-headed chump had given them. ("Why does my protagonist cry so bloody much - at just about everything? Whoa, Mr Doctor-Character, do you not think that's waaaay inappropriate behaviour? And as for you, Mr Supporting Character - no sweetheart, you are not a stand-up comedian...") Take some familiar-ish stereotypes and give them a few double-espressos with Red Bull chasers, and that was pretty much the Draft One population of Redemption.

For the second draft I had all the pieces of the plot already in place, which meant I could let them marinate while I focused more deeply on the characters playing them out - and the biggest shift was in viewpoint and motivation. In the first draft my approach had been pretty rudimentary; the protagonist would do or say something and the other character would do or say something in response that fitted in with both the plot and what I'd discovered about their personality so far. This character was tactless and socially inept? Boom, he'd do/say something tactless and socially inept then. Job done!

But by the time I got to starting the second draft, I'd learned something about characters - all characters, not just the ones in my novel. That, no matter who they are as far as the structure of the story works, in their eyes they are the protagonist - the only life they're living is theirs, and they're the star of that, baby! So now, for every interaction between my protagonist and other characters, I had to consider the feelings of two or more people, not just one. To think beyond "What is this typically socially awkward and blunt character going to say and do in this particular situation with my protagonist?" and instead think "how is that character likely to feel about this situation? Would he misinterpret the words/actions of my protagonist? And if he did, would he still respond the same way - or would he be defensive or fearful instead?" Sometimes this took my plot in new directions that I hadn't even anticipated - but even when that happened, the new twists still worked within the plot structure I had. If anything, they even explained parts that previously didn't have as much depth as I wanted.

As a result, some characters who started out as mere extras in my story have found themselves with bigger, more defined roles in this second draft. One character in particular has evolved in ways I could never have foreseen. In my first draft he was little more than occasional light relief, a bit of comedy filler to make the major characters look good. But once I started to see the way his mind worked and the reasons he became the person he'd become, I realised how much potential influence he could have on many existing plot points. He went from being a walk-on stooge to an unlikely but helpful ally for the protagonist and her friends, and became a much more interesting character as a result.

I still have a way to go, of course. Even once draft two is finished, there'll be further edits and polishes before I dip my toes into the cold cold waters of beta-reading... and then probably further editing and polishing. But it's an exciting journey, getting under the skin of my characters and letting them riff with the existing script to see what develops.

So, all you fellow writers out there... do you have a character from one of your stories who surprised you with their capabilities once you got to know them? One you grew to love (or hate) once you saw their true potential? Feel free to share them in the comments - I'd love to meet them.

6 Reasons Your Reader Doesn't Like Your Hero

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.

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.

I've Been A Terrible Writer - Which Is Good To Know

At some point in their life - many, many points, if I'm to speak from my own experience - all writers worry that they're maybe, actually... rubbish at this writing lark.

They look at the Stephen Kings, the J.K.Rowlings, the George R.R. Martins and cry "I am not any of them, therefore I must suck!" They look at their current work-in-progress, stalled halfway through that awkward middle zone, and fret that it's not so much Writers' Block as 'writer is a blockhead.' Or they get yet another rejection from a publisher/agent, and imagine them cackling and emailing snippets of the submission to colleagues for them take the piss out of it, before struggling to type out their 'thanks but no thanks' with a straight face.

This week, I discovered that reading your old stuff is a great antidote to those 'I will never become a good writer' blues.

Sounds like a no-brainer, I know. But the reasons it can work so well are twofold. First, it lets you know you were definitely more rubbish in the past. And second, you can see exactly where and how you were rubbish. Both of which means you are now less rubbish - so if you keep on doing it, you can only get less and less rubbish until you are - pretty darn good at this writing malarkey. There's hope! It's not impossible - you just might make it someday!

Reading through the half-dozen or so novels I started but never finished, still languishing in their WIP Folder of Death on my hard drive, it was very clear I made the same mistakes with them, over and over again. That was why they never got finished. These were classic writing flaws; the kind that make successful authors and writing gurus do that face like they've just had lemon juice rubbed in a paper cut. I wouldn't have seen those glaring errors back then. I probably thought I was doing great. But now I'm doing the same lemon-in-the-paper-cut face - which is no easy feat when you're trying to bang your head on your desk at the same time. How could I have thought this was the right way to do it? What an utter plank!

In order to elaborate - and hey, maybe give you a laugh and help you feel better about your own insecurities - let me give you some idea of my cringiest sins. Don't worry, I'll spare you the actual text itself, in favour of brief summaries that could be applied quite universally to just about all of my early attempts:

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Main Character Info-Dump!
 "Chapter One, first paragraph - right then, here's my main character. I'm now going to tell you everything about him; what he looks like, what he does for a living, a nice big chunk of background info about his childhood - ooh, and all his issues and insecurities as well. Hell, can't forget THAT! Hey wait - where are you going? No, come back - you NEED to know all this stuff before I can start telling you the actual story..!"
 I did this Every. Single. Time. In every half-finished novel from my past. You'd literally only just met my main character and there I was, giving you not so much an introduction as a case study from his psychotherapist. Readers don't want that. It feels like they've met the literary equivalent of The Nutter On The Bus (you know - that complete stranger who comes and sits next to you and within five minutes they've told you their entire life story, including that bit about their operation that meant they couldn't sit down properly for six weeks afterwards...) Most importantly - and it clearly took me a while to realise this - they don't need to know it all upfront. Get on with the bloody story, and drip the background stuff in quietly as events unfold.

I'm Going To Tell You Exactly How She Really, REALLY FEELS!
"She's upset! Really REALLY upset! I need you to be in no doubt about just how upset she is - how can I convey this? Goddamn it, I don't think there are enough adverbs in the English language to fully convey the depths of her upset-ness -  I've already run out, and I haven't even finished the paragraph!"
Ermmm... yeah. When it came to Big Emotional Scenes, I had this tendency to go huge. If you'd turned any of my early efforts into a movie, they'd probably look like one of those early talkies from the 'thirties, where the heroine would clasp her hand to her forehead and fling herself face-down on the bed to show she was unhappy - in case the audience didn't quite get it from her wailing "Aaarrrggghh, Rodrigo NOOOOOO!!" and bursting into tears. Lesson learned: you really can have too many adverbs. Way too many. In fact, you don't need them at all more often than you think.

How It Works 101
"Okay, if you're going to believe in this funky new techie thing I've invented for the purpose of this novel, you need to know EXACTLY how it works... Whaddya mean, 'you don't care?' This is SCIENCE FICTION, you Luddite! Now pay attention..."
A variation on the Main Character Info-Dump, this was a side-effect of working as a software technician for four years. In that line of work, if you came up with some new snippet of coding, software program or Way of Doing Stuff, you had to justify the hell out of it if you didn't want to endure the ridicule and scorn of your peers and superiors (especially if you were one of that rare and peculiar species, a Female.) And, for a long time, I got into a habit of thinking I had to do that for the pretend techie stuff in my novels as well. You don't - at least, not to that extent. You still need to do enough research to be sure what you've invented is at least plausible - because if you don't, there are certainly people out there who'll pick holes in it if it isn't (I've worked with some of them.) But you don't need to include the instruction manual in your novel.

Green Screen, Green Screen, Blah Blah Blah...
"Where are they? Well... it's a ROOM, isn't it? What kind of room? A - a ROOMY room! Aw jeez, bored now - can I do dialogue instead, please?"
For all my Baz Luhrmann-esque enthusiasm when it came to conveying character emotions, when it came to setting the scenes I barely even bothered to phone it in. Obviously you can go over-the-top when it comes to painting your scenic visuals - but it's fair to say I was under-the-bottom. It seemed to me like an unnecessary chore to offer any description of the venue in which my characters were acting their little socks off; I'd already said they were on a street, and everyone knows what a street looks like, don't they? Y'know.. roads, pavements, stuff...
Maybe I forgot that readers didn't have an admission ticket to the inside of my head, to watch the same brain-movie I was watching. As it was, all they were getting were the blank green-screens, while I was taking my full-on, writer's-privilege-CGI-experience completely for granted. I still find writing descriptions of my settings a bit of a chore. But now I take the time to do it anyway, because if I'm always the one getting the best view of the movie, it's only fair.

Thunderbirds Are Go!
"Okay... so now we're on the Adverb Diet, how else can I make my characters convey emotion? Nodding heads - yeah, that's a good one, especially when the character's about to answer a question with a 'yes.' Ooh - and head-shaking for 'no' - GENIUS!  And don't forget arm-waving and shrugging - whoops, I mean shrugging HIS SHOULDERS... and - oh look, if I pull this string his leg goes up and that makes him look anxious..!"
Yep - that was my compensatory strategy after identifying and attempting to cure my Adverb Overload Disorder. Hey, why make them sound bloody ridiculous when I can make them look bloody ridiculous instead? From thirties pulp movie to sixties puppet show; there's progress for you. I had a whole bunch of 'stock gestures' I would roll out for each specific emotion - over and over and over again.... In one of my novels, I used the phrase "he raked his hand through his hair" so many times I began to wonder if this was actually a story about mullet gardeners. It's not a bad phrase for describing character action - but after bingeing on it so indiscriminately in that one project it'll probably be a cold day in hell before I ever use it again. And if I'm honest... this is an affliction I'm still battling. I'm aware of it now, which is a good thing - but I'm still very much in the process of trying to cure myself. One day at a time, and all that.

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Betcha glad you never read any of my early works now, eh? (I know I am.)

I've still got a long way to go before I'd be comfortable actually saying, out loud, the words "I am a good writer." But after today, I'm totally happy to say "I'm not as rubbish a writer as I used to be." I have grown. I have improved. I haven't reached my destination yet - but at least I know it's worth carrying on up that highway.

I might go back to some of those old novels one day; with my new perspective, the basic ideas behind them could still work if I took the time to write the actual stories properly. I'm glad I looked at them again, and I'm glad I don't do those things I used to do anymore (or at least that I'm better at catching myself when I do.)

But most of all, I'm really glad I don't still believe those early works stood a chance of being published - as I'm pretty sure I must have done back then. Now that would be embarrassing....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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