Bouchercon 2016 and true characters

cj Sez: Bouchercon was amazing. I heard there were about 2,000 people there. The first lady I met at the check-in desk was from Aukland, New Zealand. I met a panelist from Wales, and another from Iceland, and still others from England. On Saturday, on my way back to my hotel for the day, I spoke with a lady from Toronto, Canada. And those were just a few of my encounters. I can’t imagine how many countries I missed.

Fans of best-selling authors were everywhere, and on Saturday, they were en masse. Michael Connolly interviewing Harlan Coban in a crowded-to-the-walls ballroom was a highlight for me.

And, and, and there were two ballrooms filled with tables and tables and row after row of books…made me feel like a kid in a candy store whose mother had given her a quarter to spend.

If you can swing it, mark your calendar: Next year in Toronto, October 12-15, 2017.

Today, I’d like to chat briefly about the amount of preplanning necessary to bring a scene to life and ultimately the story. Every chapter ought to answer these questions: Who did what when where why and how? Ultimately, any novel with a satisfying ending has answered them as well.

Let’s start with who and what. Character and conflict. Almost always an intriguing scene/story begins with the action of a character in conflict, either on the page or in some narrative. This is true whether it’s a memoir or a mystery. To be interesting, to be the character a reader can relate to and commiserate with, s/he needs conflict.

Conflict doesn’t have to be an argument or a threat. It can be as simple as having a flat tire when s/he gets ready to leave for work. Knowing how a character should react to any and all conflict is an author imperative. Since the conflict is stronger when it’s internal—a part of their personalities—authors need to spend time creating characters’ bios before they start writing.

What makes characters the way they are is the same thing that makes real-life people the way they are.

Where were they born? When were they born? Any siblings? What was the home situation like? Is s/he a loner? If so, what caused that? Are they vain? Ego-driven? Church-going? Each one of these questions has the potential to cause conflict, and conflict is what is needed for a great novel. And for the real emotional drama, there needs to be internal conflict...conflict that arises from the way these people look at life. 

  

The hero and heroine—just like all of us—have habits that were decided long ago…before your story started. The hero may have decided that no one is going to help him succeed. If anything, they’re going to help him fail, so he has to look out for himself. His way of dealing with that is to never trust anyone. As a character in the story, he must react that way in all of his scenes until the story’s character arc changes that attitude. The heroine may have become the proverbial middle child who thinks the way to succeed is to become the center of attention. She will always say and do things to achieve that goal unless her character arc changes.

Remember though, lengthy backstory dumps are both disrupting and unnecessary. Readers are carried along on the characters’ actions.

When you're building conflict into your characters, you have to know who they are and what they want and how far they’ll go to get what they want. The answers are an ideal place for the conflict to begin

Okay, you-all guys keep on keeping on, and I’ll try to do the same.

cj

PS: Got your perfect Christmas present right here—for you and the BFF who loves reading a good story. Choosing Carter is in the bundle of six romance novels, “More Than Friends,” launched on Sept 19—it’s available until February 2017 for 99 cents. It’s not too early to be thinking of Christmas presents, and here’s hours and hours of entertainment for less than a buck! Check it out and after you’ve read them, please leave the authors an Amazon review. Thanks.

cjpetterson@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/CjPettersonAuthor

Choosing Carter  -- Kindle  /  Nook  /  Kobo   /  iTunes/iBook

Deadly Star --  Kindle  / Nook  / Kobo

Character Profiling: Sociological

 For today's Friday Forum, I visit creating believable characters again. This part of the profiling deals with the sociological parts of our lives and how those impact on who we become.

All Living Things React to Their Surroundings

It may be a subtle, yet powerful, change as in Clarissa Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway or dramatic as Flannery O’Connor’s characters in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

Woolf’s book details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a high-society woman in post-World War I England. Clarissa is giving an annual party that is a tradition. That fine morning, as she walks through London, a skywriting plane captures her attention—the perfect metaphor for the loopy-de-loop day Clarissa is about to have. Those whose lives brush and disrupt her good mood during the day include: a man she spurned years ago who dumps his confidences and criticisms, her daughter’s angry teacher, a war-shocked man sinking into madness, her husband’s invitation to a luncheon and her conjectures as to why she was purposefully excluded. The outside world bleeds into hers and threatens to overwhelm her. With stiff upper lip, and all that, she marches on, but her marriage is permanently wounded and her mind-set about the relationships between women and women and women and men suffers (a significant change).

In O’Connor’s story, a selfish, conniving grandmother goes to great lengths to hide her racism and elitism under a blanket of politeness only to find that her ingratiating behavior won’t save her. She is shot and killed—a significant change—by a serial killer, which O’Connor went to a great deal of trouble to create with a warped history and philosophy to explain his motivation to murder.

Transformation plots primarily examine how a character’s sociological influences affect them. Eliza in Pygmalion and the movie Kramer vs. Kramer are good examples. Both show physical, psychological, and sociological changes in the primary characters. Eliza changes the way she looks, speaks, acts, dresses, and views the world. The two Kramers change their look, their vision of what is important, and how they world sees them.

Strong Belief Systems:  Examples of starting with one strong belief system, having it deflated, and then reconnecting with those core beliefs strongly is indicative of many plot styles. In The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger, Andrea takes a job as the lackey for a powerful and bitchy magazine mogul and discovers who she is and what she wants to do with the rest of her life, and ditches the cheating boyfriend.

On the TV show Happy Days Mr. Cunningham, who owns a hardware store is the steady force in the weekly plot line. When he decides—in a moment of mid-life crisis—to run away to Tahiti, the Fonz helps him get his head on straight. Mr. Cunningham has come to believe that his pre-held beliefs are old-fashioned and life has passed him by. At the moment of truth with Fonzie, he makes a decision about his future. This show frequently used the differences in sociological groups to reveal the universal truths of all man. Fonz, the biker dude and Lothario, taught truths to the Cunninghams as well as their friends and they taught him in return.

Pygmalion: Eliza is upset when she is first “kidnapped” into the professor’s home, but she grows to love the more posh environment, then shifts back when she sees the professor’s indifference to her as a real person, then shifts back again when she visits with his mother, and finally, she has a decision to make. 2013 women might chafe at her final decision; I prefer to think, she had him whipped into shape in no time.

The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter weaves an intense intrigue about a group of people who have all arrived at the altar of their careers and acquired their cherished career More serious forms of the Doolittle character changes are when core beliefs are tromped and goals—partnerships, professorships, judgeships—and look around at the angry, empty waters to realize they have arrived with nothing. What do they do with the rest of their wretched lives reveals character change and growth of one sort or another. 

People are an amalgam of physical, psychological, and sociological input, some involuntary but most voluntary. 

Spend a lot of time getting to know your characters in all three ways. While most of what we should know about our characters will never directly hit the page, 99% of it will infuse the pages with characters so believable, they resonate with readers permanently. 

How many times have you been in a class or read in a book on the art of writing a reference to a famous book? How many of those times did the setting or plot leap into your mind first? Probably close to none. Characters. It's all about the characters.

Who are some of your favorites?

Mahala

Characters Need to Talk to You

 FRIDAY FORUM

Last weekend cj and I attended Carolyn Haines’s Daddy’s Girl Weekend for writers and readers. From pirate costumed participants, ghost tours, and treasure hunts to serious discussions of the art of writing, not a minute of the weekend was wasted. Carolyn's new cookbook to benefit Good Fortune Farm Refuge is jam-packed with wonderful recipes which we tasted throughout the weekend. Buy one and save an animal.

I made new friends and had the privilege of hanging out with some well-published authors, an agent, and several publishers. My head is still reeling with new ideas I want to incorporate into my writing.

I was especially thrilled when my belief that characters are the key to the story was supported repeatedly. While I know that is self-aggrandizement at its height, it’s what I believe and teach in my character development classes.

Holly McClure, well-known agent with Sullivan & Maxx Literary Agency, pointed out that characters need to talk to the author. We need to know our characters better than we know ourselves to bring them to life on the page.

Listening to the authors who have successful book series (proof positive they created good characters) and others with numerous publications under their belt — Carolyn Haines, Dean James, Sue Walker, Holly McClure, John Floyd, David Sheffield, Cynthia Walker—it was obvious that characters and a reader’s connection to them is pivotal to the success of a book.

The bottom line: take the time to develop your characters. Dig out those character sheets you got at a conference or read about in a book on character development and fill them out. That will get you started. Then bring them to life with psychological and sociological information.

I teach my creative writing students that a character is developed through profiling: physical, psychological, and sociological. We are all the sum of our experiences, our looks, our surroundings. Our personalities develop through our experiences/choices/ desires/decisions.

Think your characters are blah?

Create something they hate or love: people, place, or thing, then expose them to it.

Give them a tic. Who can forget Inspector Jacques Clouseau in Pink Panther movies? His clumsiness kept us laughing. Add to that the eye tic of the commissioner when Clouseau created  another disaster and you have memorable characters. Want to go to the dark side? Hannibal Lecter and his fetishes will take you there. Check out R. B. Chesterton’s The Darkling.

Make them vulnerable. How will your characters get what they want or need from where they are starting? Examples: True Grit (youth). Rocky (loser). Argo (impossible). Steel Magnolias (disease). Great Expectations (poor). The Language of Flowers (stranded).

The most fully developed, deeply motivated characters are always the most compelling, no matter how ordinary they might be. Think Mrs. Dalloway, Jane Eyre, A Gathering of Old Men.

Flesh them out now, and your readers will thank you later.

Kudos to cj who sat on the mystery writers panel!  Mahala 

Michelle Ladner Interview, Part 2

Welcome back, Michelle Ladner.

Lyrical Pens is happy to have Michelle Ladner back with us today. Michelle is a wonderful writer who lives in Ocean Springs, MS, with her husband, Bryan, and a lapful of purr-fect cats.

So, tell us, Michelle, who inspires / motivates you to keep on keeping on.

My husband is an incredible support and inspiration. Not only have I gotten to watch him work at a job he loves, which has taught me the importance of doing something in life that you enjoy, but he’s incredibly supportive: financially, emotionally, and motivationally. I’m lucky that way. Writing can feel very selfish at times, especially when you aren’t pulling in a paycheck or you can’t cull together a list of “respectable” writing credentials when someone asks the dreaded, “what do you do” question. The pursuit of traditional publishing is brimming with opportunities for rejection. That can take a toll on confidence and self-esteem. Having someone in my life that understands the scope of the highs and lows is invaluable.

When you’re creating novels, are you a pantser, plotter, or the newest descriptive, pathfinder (a hybrid who creates a very loose outline then ad libs the plot from that)?

I used to think I was a pantser. That process hasn’t generated a lot of completed first drafts for me, certainly not any marketable ones. My draft shelf is littered with first drafts that are missing good structure. That said, I’m not a meticulous outliner. I think the best way to surprise the reader with unexpected turns and twists is to surprise myself while writing. I lose that ability when the outlining is too detailed—I begin to feel married to my plotting decisions once they are fully formed on paper. Pathfinding is the way I’m finding success. I think now that I’ve discovered that I can do both—plot and write organically—I’m finding my feet in the long form. Pathfinding is instilling more confidence in my ability to tell a good story. I hate that I came so late to the hybrid game, but that’s why I never stop being a student of writing. What you hear and the way you hear it can shake something loose in your process that you need to lose or develop.

What has been your biggest writing challenge?

My biggest challenge has always been (and continues to be) getting too far ahead of myself. All the not-actually-sitting-my-butt–in-the-chair-to-write things are many and ever-changing. I tend to worry about the business and the marketability and the agent and the publisher and the eBook and everything else before I finish the story. My focus on that multitude can, and has, paralyzed my ability to write. I have to force myself to remember that it has to be about the writing. The thing that counts the most is to write the best story I can. If I focus on that, the rest will follow.

Do you have a favorite genre? Do you write in more than one and why/why not? What do you read for pleasure?

I like to read a good fiction story. I do read memoir, biographies, poetry, and short fiction, but I tend toward speculative fiction novels. That said, good writing is good writing. And good fiction is good fiction. So I do venture outside the fantasy sub-genres while reading and writing. I love coming of age stories, and YA is a market I tend toward. I like the pacing and structure of a thriller. I like the big ideas and themes in listed and awarded literary fiction. I get a lot of enjoyment reading a racy romance. JANE EYRE is my favorite book. When I write I tend to weave together all the sub-genre elements that inform me. The largest percentage of what I’ve written to date is urban or alternate reality fantasy. I guess that makes me a fantasy writer at heart. I’ve always had an affinity for the fantastical. I was a kid with a lot of imaginary friends, none of which were human—always talking animals or mystical creatures. The human imagination is a wondrous thing. I love that we have the ability to formulate images and ideas that do not exist in our world or personal experience and put it on the page to tell compelling stories. I like to wallow in that experience.

If you were to host a dinner for your favorite authors, who are the six writers you would include? They don’t have to be living.

Charlotte Bronte, Brent Weeks, Rebecca Cantrell, Neil Gaiman, Neal Shusterman, and J K Rowling—and I’d probably insist that we have Thai food.

Thai food could certainly warm up the evening. What’s next for you and where can readers find out more about you and your work?

What’s next? More manuscripts, more rewrites, and more queries and pitches. I hope to get back into the conference circuit in 2015 after buckling down and doing good strong work on a promising rewrite and a couple first draft projects. It’s become important to me that I only solicit them when I am confident they are written well. I do have a published personal essay up on my website so it’s easy to locate.  You can find me at: www.michelleladner.com, www.courtstreetliterary.com and www.ninjapeas.blogspot.com

Thank you so much, Michelle, for visiting Lyrical Pens. Best wishes from our pens to yours for great writing successes in the future.