Tag: character development

Yikici’s Character & Voice Experiment

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If you already know what’s going on, skip to “My Entry.” Otherwise, read on!

This piece is part of a game devised by Voice Week writer Yikici. Yikici had a theory that if you gave two writers the same character sketch and told them to write some dialogue for that character–without letting either writer see what the other had written–that their pieces would still be similar; the voice of the character would shine through.

She tested this by providing setting, background, and situation, then having her participating writers create two characters, and write a 200-300 word dialogue between them. Each writer would then send the character sketches to another participant, who would write another dialogue based on the same characters. She graciously invited me to join in on the last round–and I didn’t even have to write character sketches!

Yikici gave us this:

Setting:  A small quiet village approx 200 miles from the nearest city adorned with thatched cottages and surrounded by vast empty fields.  Not much happens here, except for their festival –the festival of colour, this happens once a year; tourists and families from afar visit, no one misses this event.  This is the highlight of the year for the villagers; they prepare for this the whole year.

The Dialogue Prompts:

  • No children live in the village.
  • A child hides in a barn and stays after the festivities.
  • Your character(s) interacts with the child.
  • The child has a secret.
  • Add a surprise of your own -in keeping with your character(s) profile.

I got character sketches from veteran InMonster Billie Jo. Click here to see the character sketches and the dialogue she wrote.

Yikici will be posting her thoughts, contrasts, and comparisons over the next couple of weeks. Catch up, keep up and offer your own opinions on her blog.

My Entry:

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“Need any help?”

Hank looked up from packing up his unsold wooden animals to see the redheaded festival organiser bouncing on her heels.

“Haven’t you been here since dawn? You should go home. Get some rest.”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly sleep for the next twelve hours, at least. I just get so excited about the festival. And being in charge this year, it’s even worse!” she laughed. “What do you call that?”

“An Iberian Lynx.”

“Beautiful. How do you think it went?”

“What?”

“The festival of course. Was it as magical as ever?”

Hank sighed. “What flower is this that greets the morn, its hues from Heaven so freshly born? With burning star and flaming band it kindles all the sunset land.”

She gaped at him. “Did you write that?”

“It’s Oliver Wendell Holmes.”

“Oh. Your name is…Hank, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m Lucy Hale.”

“Honored to make your acquaintance, Miss Hale.”

“So it went well then? The festival?”

“Beautifully.”

She smiled—she had a beautiful smile—and insisted on helping him carry the packed crates to his wagon in the barn. He was just turning to retrieve his horse when Lucy grabbed his arm.

“What’s that?”

Hank followed her gaze to a shadowed hole, from whence came a rustling noise.

“Probably just a rat…” he said, but just then, a much larger shape emerged.

It was a little boy.

The boy froze, as surprised to see them as they were to see him.

“Is…” Lucy whispered, “Is that…?”

“It’s a child,” Hank supplied. Lucy had probably never seen one.

The boy dashed for the door, but Hank was quicker, getting a hold of both the boy’s arms.

“Hey, now,” he said gently. “I won’t hurt you.”

Lucy knelt and inspected the boy’s face and fingers with wonder. “He’s so small!”

“Children generally are, yes. Where did you come from?” he asked the boy.

The boy glared at him and held his mouth shut.

“What are we going to do? Should we turn him in?”

“We can’t. Don’t you know what they’ll do to him?”

“But it isn’t his fault. Surely someone can make them see reason. My father—”

“No one can make them see reason.”

“But surely—”

“Believe me. I know.”

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How to edit your novel: 7 practical tips that really work

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You’re drowning in words. There are a million things wrong with this book. And you’re so busy trying to figure out why page thirty-five sounds so blooming doofy that it’s months before you notice the whole first half of the book drags and your characters are totally flat.

Further down the road, after countless rewrites, you will finally realize you’re the wrong person to edit your work. You’re too close to it. The picture of what you want your novel to be is so huge in your mind’s eye that it leaves no room for what the novel actually is. You can get your friends to read it, but they’re not editors either, and can’t tell you much. And you sure as heck can’t afford to pay a professional a few thousand dollars to take a look at it.

So…a hopeless case?

Not so.

You just need a plan.

For starters, forget about your novel for a couple of weeks, at least. You need a break. Use the time to catch up on your reading and write a short story or some flash fiction. When you’re ready, take a deep breath and proceed to the next paragraph:

Nathan Bransford has the excellent advice of starting with the biggest stuff and working your way down from there. You don’t want to waste time making a bunch of tiny changes in a section you’ll end up cutting or completely rewriting later on. Nathan also has a fantastic editing checklist.

But if you’re like me, you need help seeing the big stuff. Because right now, you can’t see the forest for the trees (er…the story for the words?).

Here are some practical steps that work for me.

Part One: The Forest

Plot, Tension, and Character Development

 

1. Summarize. Quickly skim each chapter and, in a separate document, list everything that happens, in order (incomplete sentences are fine). My Chapter 3 summary looks like this:

Meets R. Discovers language problem. Walks to castle. Intro J, planning to leave. They meet. J shocked. Debates his life or hers. Tells her truth. She doesn’t believe it. Hear ship outside.

2. Highlight tension and clues. Pick two colors and highlight the parts of your summary that indicate either an escalation of tension (dramatic stuff like explosions, death, getting fired, or discovering a cheating spouse) or the revealing of clues (interesting information that will be important later, like footprints, mysterious notes, or snippets of conversation). The colors may overlap sometimes.

3. Highlight character development. With a third color, highlight everything that indicates character development. That includes background, expressions of love or hate, and any important decisions the character makes. You might use different colors for each major character. Do each character’s actions fit with his or her personality? Do they change as the story progresses?

4. Review the plot. Looking over your summary (highlighted in at least three colors by now), pay attention to the progression of the plot. Which characters cause which events? Did those characters have logical reasons for acting that way (plausible motives)? Does each event lead logically into the next? If not, hold a brainstorming session to find a way to make it work (critique partners are invaluable for this kind of thing).

5. Rearrange. Once you’ve got your plot squared away, again look at the highlighted portions. Make sure you have an increase in tension at least once in every chapter, preferably at the end (keep readers reading). Make sure your “clues” are spread fairly evenly throughout and not clumped together (nothing worse than a huge pile of plot exposition at the climax). Move chapter breaks around if necessary.

6. Compare each character’s dialogue separately. Now back to the actual manuscript. Using the “Find” feature of your word processor, search for your main character’s name. Stop at each place you find dialogue by that character. Copy and paste it into another document if necessary. Make sure everything that character says consistently matches his upbringing and personality. Tweak as necessary. Then, do the same for the next major character down, and so on.

7. Contrast dialogue between characters. Make sure your characters don’t all talk the same way. Adults speak differently from children, blue collar workers from desk jockeys, Northerners from Southerners, and aliens from dragons. Play around with accents, slang, and verbal ticks.

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Got any editing tips? Leave them in the comments!

Now posted: how to look at the “trees” of your novel.

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7 tips for naming your characters

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StanleyYelnats. Dreadful Spiller. The Artful Dodger. Lemony Snicket. Ebenezer Scrooge. Arwen Undomiel. Atreyu. Ender Wiggin. Their names are sealed in our hearts forever. So how do we find names for our own characters that have the same staying power?

Baby Name Books

Yes, people actually buy entire books to help them name the two or three children they will have. And then they give the books to used book stores where us hardcore namers can pick them up for half price. These books have lists of first names with meanings, and often etymology, associations in popular culture, and Most Popular lists. There are also several websites that do the same thing. This one, for instance. Or this one, which has popular names from a variety of countries.

Phone Books

Yes! Printed phone books still have a purpose! The residential white pages offer a plethora of options for last names. So if you don’t want all your characters named Smith or Jones or Garcia or Nguyen, pull a real phone book out of the paper recycling and stash it on your bookshelf. Any old edition will do (YellowPages.com isn’t exactly browse-able).

Translation Dictionaries

If your story takes place in a fictional world that presumably speaks a different language, pick up a couple of translation dictionaries in some languages that strike your fancy. Then find a cool sounding word, and change the letters around until it sounds right for your made-up culture. This can work for first and last names.

The Thesaurus

If you want to get a little more whimsical, play around with some synonyms. This often works best for nicknames, but there are no rules.

Bible Names

There are tons of cool names in the Bible—and not just the obvious ones like Adam, Abraham, Sarah, and David. Ishmael is a Bible name. Or there’s Nimrod, Mor’decai, and Eleazar. Start in Genesis 4-5, 10-11 for some good lists, and flip around at your leisure for more.

Choose Different Initials

Characters named Mark and Matt and Mary and Molly can confuse your readers pretty quickly. Make sure to choose names with a variety of first letters to help your readers keep characters straight. Sometimes, however, giving siblings or other family members similar names helps readers to remember how they relate to each other (like Fili and Kili and Oin and Gloin and so on).

Choose for Phonaesthetics

Phonaesthetics refers to the beauty or ugliness of words based on the way they sound, not on their meaning (for instance, beauty and pulchritude are synonyms, but the former is far more phonaesthetically pleasing than the latter). Giving an evil villain an ugly name, or your hero a noble-sounding name, or your comic relief a name that’s fun to say can make those names stick in your readers’ heads.

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What are some of your favorite character names—read or written?

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Show Don’t Tell: prove it

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Telling is claiming. Showing is proving.

Even acknowledging what I said in my last post on Show, Don’t Tell, the fact remains: when it comes to character development, “show don’t tell” translates to “actions speak louder than words.” And it’s especially important with our main characters.

For instance, I can tell you that my hero is brave and kind, but humble—but you have no reason to believe me.

I can tell you that my villain is brilliant but evil and unspeakably cruel—but you have no reason to believe me.

I can tell you that my heroine is gentle and naïve yet strong—but you have absolutely no reason to believe me.

I have made several claims, but they are nothing but opinion at best, hearsay at second best, and outright lies at the worst. I haven’t given you any proof.

The actions are the proof.

Prove bravery by making that hero scared out of his mind as he rides into battle or stands up to the bully. Prove his kindness and humility as he pretends to prefer to stand on the subway when he’s really giving up his seat to an elderly man. Show the growth of his character by upping the stakes and changing his behavior as the story progresses. What he runs from in the first chapter, make him charge at in the final chapter. What he hides from the people closest to him early on, make him bare to the world at the climax.

Prove the intelligence of your villain by making him a chess champion or a con artist or a troubled child whose parents locked him in the library to punish him. If he is a business man destroying the competing mom-and-pop store, he shouldn’t just outsell them; he should soil their reputation and win the loyalty of their customers, and know all the legal loopholes to get himself off scot-free. He should outsmart both your readers and your hero throughout the story, and when he is defeated in the end it shouldn’t be because he made a stupid mistake. Prove evil and cruelty by making him abuse an old man, a little girl, his wife. Have him murder his best friend or his brother.

Prove the gentleness of your heroine by making her go out of her way to set a mouse free instead of killing it. Prove her naivety by having her trust the villain when he says he’s trying to turn his life around. And prove her strength by making her fight her own battle; she’s the one digging up legal proof of the villain’s guilt while the hero is out sparring with his lackeys in alley ways. Or she’s the queen trying to stifle a political coup while the king is away at war.

If there is any character trait you want to convey, give that character something that tests that area. Give them a chance to show who they are. Make a patient man wait years for his girlfriend to say yes to a ring. Make a determined woman who has just escaped slavery face poverty and discrimination and sickness before she finds her happiness.

Then, your readers will not only believe that your hero is brave, your villain is evil, and your heroine is strong—they will argue with you if you try to tell them otherwise. That is the power of Show, Don’t Tell.

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Read more!

How to get rid of background exposition

How to “show” in description

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Show Don’t Tell: If you must tell, have something to show for it

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Continuing the series on Show, Don’t Tell.

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I have this awful habit of writing little narrative “character sketches” devoid of dialogue or action; simply summarizing the personalities of my heroes. I was all set to write a post about how to avoid this—with the “actions speak louder than words” approach I touched on in this post—but Wednesday morning, Mark Twain changed my mind.

I had settled in to read a little Huck Finn for twenty minutes while I ate breakfast. And there—yes, really—was a character sketch.

This naturally gave me second thoughts on the contents of this blog post. But as I kept reading, I realized my initial thoughts weren’t wrong—just a bit simplistic. Because here’s the thing: to show, you have to tell.

After all, we’re not making picture books here. All we have are words. What can you do with words besides tell? The trick is to figure out what you want to show, and then use telling to do it.

Example!

Here’s a little of what Huck, our first person narrator, says in his character sketch:

Col. Grangerfield was a gentleman, you see. He was a gentleman all over; and so was his family. He was well born, as the saying is, and that’s worth as much in a man as it is in a horse, so the Widow Douglas said, and nobody ever denied that she was of the first aristocracy in our town; and pap he always said it, too, although he warn’t no more quality than a mud-cat, himself…

…There warn’t no frivolishness about him, not a bit, and he warn’t ever loud. He was as kind as he could be—you could feel that, you know, and so you had confidence. Sometimes he smiled, and it was good to see, but when he straightened himself up like a liberty-pole, and the lightning began to flicker out from under his eyebrows you wanted to climb a tree first, and find out what the matter was afterwards. He didn’t ever have to tell anybody to mind their manners—everybody was always good mannered where he was.

All telling. Telling in a perfectly charming way, but telling nonetheless. Note, however, that he’s not telling us anything important. This character doesn’t last more than a chapter or two. So why the time spent on him?

Because by telling about Grangerfield, Twain is showing much more:

Society of the time: Huck’s mention of “well born,” and of the opinions of his father and the Widow Douglas—characters on completely opposite ends of the personality and status spectrum—shows us something about the beliefs of the time.

Huck’s character: we learn what a kind, decent person Huck thinks Grangerfield is. We later discover the family is feuding (pointlessly, as you’d expect) with a neighbor family. When a Grangerfield girl runs away to marry a boy from the rival family, the feud escalates into a bloody battle. Rather than changing his mind about the family, Huck blames himself for their deaths, as he had unwittingly helped deliver a message between the two lovers.

So this little bit of telling about a minor character actually serves to show us a lot about our main character.

The takeaway? If you find you must “tell” something, stop and ask yourself what that telling shows. What are your words indirectly illustrating? If it shows only what it tells, rewrite.

But if by telling a little, you show a lot—you’re good!

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