Tag: how to add depth to characters

What to Do When Your Scenes Are Too Short

  By ,

Mount Rainier – Kevin Bacher

Erin says:

I’m writing a book, and I’m having this recurring difficulty that is really bugging me. When I write my scenes (I’m on my first draft), they go by really fast. I see that published writers usually spend a lot more time in one moment, really diving deep. Even when I add a bunch of detail, it’s still like one paragraph for my character to make her way down a mountain in the rain. So I’m going to pose a couple of questions. First, it that normal for a first draft? Do any of you have that problem? Second, how would I fix this in my later drafts if it’s normal and okay, or fix it now if it isn’t?

—

This is an interesting question, and the answer depends on a few different factors.

First, not every event (e.g. hiking down a mountain) has to be a scene. It can just be transitional and short. Or you can even cut it out and use chapter breaks and soft hiatuses to imply the passage of time.

But if every scene is coming out paragraph-length, then yeah, you may have a problem. Before you dig deeper, however, ask yourself this:

Is this really a novel, or is it a short story?

I’ve had this problem myself. I get an idea, and it feels like a novel-length thing with layers and depth and plenty of time to get to know and love the characters. But then I start writing at what I think is the beginning, and (a) the scenes are really thin and (b) is takes forever to get to the “good part.” These are usually signs that it should just be a short story.

In that case, start writing at the climax. Read more about that here. Then work in any backstory you need within that climactic scene, but remember less is more. Imply, rather than state, whatever you can. Here’s how to do that.

Bonus: You’ll find you can still fit lots of emotional layers into a short story.

Now, if you need way more backstory and world-building for the climax to make any sense, it may need to be a novel.

If it’s definitely a novel

Maybe this part of the story just doesn’t have much going on. So still ask yourself if you are starting in the right place. Will the story make sense if you open later in the timeline?

Typically it should start just before your protagonist is thrust into a new situation, the “inciting incident”:

  • OPEN: Lucy and her siblings move to the country to escape the WWII air raids.
    • INCITING INCIDENT: Lucy finds a magical land in a wardrobe.
  • OPEN: Luke buys some new droids.
    • INCITING INCIDENT: The droids turn out to be stolen and to be carrying dangerous information. (The opening battle scene works more like a prologue in this case.)
  • OPEN: It’s the day of the reaping.
    • INCITING INCIDENT: Katniss takes her sister’s place.

Each opening provides context, but then we’re thrust into the real tension and action right away.

If your book already starts in the right place

Now it’s time to dig deeper.

It sounds like you might just be moving your character from point A to point B—writing the action without the motivation. Adding details about the scenery will only go so far, and will start to weigh down the prose and bore your readers after awhile. You probably need to take some time to understand your protagonist.

  • What’s her background?
  • What kind of emotional baggage is she carrying?
  • What are her deepest wishes and fears?
  • What does she stand to gain or lose in this scene?

Now, since you can’t just dump all this information into your prose, how will these things affect her behavior? The way she talks? The way she dresses?

  • If she comes from a wealthy background, but has been on the run or down on her luck for awhile, she may have high quality clothes that are a bit worn.
  • If she had an abusive past, she may apologize frequently to avoid offending anyone she meets.
  • If she really wants to get to the bottom of the mountain, but is terrified of heights, her desires and fears will alternately push her on and hold her back.

And so on. These details become little clues into your protag’s past, and it can be fun for your readers to put the puzzle together while the main action carries things forward.

Beyond planting character clues like that, there’s always internal monologue. Some writers avoid it (and obviously most movies do), but I adore internal monologue and it probably takes up the majority of my pages. I love stepping into my characters’ heads and listening to them think, even in third person. Internal monologue can transform a paragraph about a woman hiking down a mountain into a scene about a woman’s struggle against the elements, fighting ever-stiffening joints, rivulets of rain mingling with frustrated tears as she draws closer and closer to her ultimate revenge upon the fire-breathing beast that ate her Chihuahua last month while she was out buying ninja stars at the market.

How much time should you spend on this stuff in first draft vs. later drafts?

It’s true you don’t want to spend too much time on details in your first draft, because they can slow you down. But if your issue really is character depth, you need to invest some time up front, because characters drive the plot, so if you make a misstep here, major rewrites are in your future. (Well, major rewrites will be in your future anyway, but understanding your characters will help minimize them.)

Erin, I hope something in here helps!

Got a question like Erin’s? Suggestion Box, baby.

6 Elements of Character Appearance that Go Way Beyond Eye Color

  By , ,
black and white male mannequins

Image by DryHundredFear

A black fedora crouched low over his hooked nose and stiff blonde mustache. He hugged his fraying coat tightly around his body, as if he was afraid it would run off on him, like the second button had. But the really curious thing about the man was the half-carat diamond ring squeezed onto the little finger of his left hand.

Today’s topic comes to us from Alex T., who asks:

I was wondering how to pick how your characters look. I know it isn’t that important, but I’m a little stressed about it.

Oh, but Alex, you’re wrong! Character appearance, done right, is immensely important. It reveals character traits—there’s a reason mad scientists generally have unkempt hair.

Choosing your characters’ appearances is a matter of two things: deciding what you want to reveal about their personalities, and asking yourself the right questions.

  1. Physical Basics. Eye color, hair color, skin tone, build, age. Also known as the laundry list, this accomplishes very little for you. It allows your readers to picture a kind of doll, but not a person. Know these details (you can choose them based on the character’s ancestry and possibly class), but don’t focus on them. And for heaven’s sake, don’t write a whole paragraph just about the eyes.
  2. Distinguishing Features. Here’s where we get to the meat. Something noticeable about the character. A misshapen nose, a mole, a gap between the front teeth. This can relate deeply to their past: an old war injury, scars from an abusive relationship, laugh lines, or something they’ve been self-conscious about since birth.
  3. Type of Clothing. Clothing says a lot about your character’s personality, status, and even occupation. It can also do a lot for your setting. A business suit or space suit? Overalls or miniskirt? Denim jacket or a coat of purple dragon fur?
  4. Quality of Clothing. Is it old, new, designer, knockoff, handmaid, hand-me-down? And whichever it is, why? Does your character wish he had nicer clothes, or does he just not care? This says something about your character’s present and past. A man in expensive but old clothes may have lost a fortune. A girl in ill-fitting fashions from the last decade might be wearing something passed down from older sisters.
  5. Presentation. Is your character neat or sloppy? Pressed and buttoned or wrinkly and disheveled? A rich tomboy might wear expensive stockings covered in runs and grass stains. A poor but ambitious man might wear a second-hand suit that is always painstakingly pressed.
  6. Poise. Think about Heath Ledger’s Joker or Tony Shaloub’s Monk. Mannerisms make a huge difference in a character appearance and speak a lot to state of mind. Do they slouch, or stand straight, or point their nose in the air? Do they limp or shuffle or glide or skip? A confident person will stand tall and look straight at you. An anxious person might fidget and look at the floor.

One Final Rule of Thumb:

Don’t describe every detail. You are not reporting to a police sketch artist; you are giving your readers an impression. Pick a few key details and let your readers fill in the rest.

For instance, without looking back at the description at the beginning of this post, can you remember the color of the man’s coat? Black or grey, right? Right. Only, I never said what color it was. I gave you the color of the hat, but that detail allowed you to make an assumption about the coat, and probably the pants and shoes, too.

–

Now that you know what your characters look like, here’s more help with describing them.

Writing in first person? Here’s how your narrator can describe himself.

Need help building your protagonist? Maybe you need to find his voice! Join us for Voice Week, September 22-26.

Got your own writing question? Drop it in the Suggestion Box.

mannequins

6 Elements of Character Description that Go Way Beyond Eye Color

Voice Week 2014: Aaaaaa!!!

  By

VW2014-Mon

September 22 – 26

Yes, friends, the time has come for the fourth annual, astounding, splendiferous, phantasmagorical, pen-bending event known as Voice Week.

Voice Week is a five day blogging challenge wherein average, ordinary citizens of the writing world push their literary abilities to the very limits of sanity–and possibly much further.

We will step outside our own matter-bound heads and into the mysterious, sensational, never-fully-explored minds of characters we have created. And, with luck, we will write in ways we have never written before.

We will write in their voices.

The rules are simple. Write five versions of the same flash story with identical facts but different voices. Make them each about 100 words long. Post one a day, Monday through Friday, September 22 – 26.

It’s not just about five different characters. It’s about five different tones. Five different thought patterns, and five different ways to express the same thing. Maybe your voices are different ages, or from different time periods, or different species.

Whomever they are, your mission is to make them sound different.

In experimenting with different voices, we hope to better understand our characters and to further develop our own unique voices. Voices that will make people recognize our work the way they recognize Dickens or Hemingway.

It’s not a competition; it’s a learning opportunity. And between now and September 22, I’ll point you to different tools that will help you understand what voice is and how to use it.

You can find all the details, including prompts, at Voice Week Headquarters.

I would so love for you to join the fun. Comment below or anywhere over there to get your name on the official Voice Writers list!

–

When Editing Goes Too Far

  By , ,
measuring tape

Photo by Ciara McDonnell

I preach plenty about trimming the fat from writing. Strunk, White and Zinsser command it, and I’ve learned it firsthand from dealing with limited space in ads, radio commercials and billboards.

Efficient writing is better writing.

But this isn’t some professional writing secret. You’ll read it on all the forums, hear it at all the conferences and even in your local writers’ group. Cut, cut, cut. Maybe it’s the growing popularity of flash fiction, maybe it’s the waning attention spans of the masses, but whatever the cause, the fact remains:

Skinny writing is in.

We’re all shaking our pages till the adverbs fall out, beating the paragraphs till the parentheticals flee, ever striving for that low, low word count.

The red ink flows in our lust for trim prose.

And what are we seeing as a result? Leaner literature?

Or malnourished manuscripts?

Are we perpetuating a healthy word diet – or an editing disorder?

There is a point when the art becomes emaciated, with wording so simple you can’t differentiate the work of one author from another. Cut too deep, and the voice will bleed right out of your sentences.

Cutting words is one of those rules you have to learn first, to break later.

First you learn how to make each word count. How to construct clear thoughts. How not to waste your readers’ time.

But then you have to find your voice: that special way of writing you have (or your narrator has) that no one else has. And that voice may require a few “unnecessary” words.

Once you know the mechanics of writing efficiently, you can start learning the art of writing uniquely.

What happens if you don’t?

I took the red pen to the three wordiest excerpts from the 5 fantastic examples of voice I posted two years ago. Here’s how they came out.

Mr. Dickens: A Christmas Carol

There is no doubt Marley was dead. The clergyman, clerk, undertaker, and chief mourner all signed the register of his burial. Scrooge Signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.

I don’t know what is particularly dead about a doornail; I might regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery. But our ancestors’ wisdom is in the simile; and I won’t disturb it, or the Country’s ruined.

WORDS CUT: 60

Mr. Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

In the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small yellow sun.

Orbiting this at about ninety-eight million miles is an insignificant blue-green planet whose primitive ape-descended life forms still think digital watches are cool.

This planet had a problem: most of its people were unhappy. Most of the suggested solutions for this problem involved the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

WORDS CUT: 48

Mr. Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

You don’t know about me, unless you read “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that doesn’t matter. Mr. Mark Twain made that book, and told the truth, mainly. He stretched some things, but everybody lies sometimes, except Tom’s Aunty Polly, Mary, and the Widow Douglas.

WORDS CUT: 55

Feel that? That something missing? How it seems rushed?

I could have cut even more: Dickens’s entire second paragraph; several of the adjectives from Adams’s piece. But honestly, would there be anything left?

Learn to write efficiently, by all means. But don’t cut so much that you lose yourself.

—

Need help finding your voice? Sign up for Voice Week, November 4 – 8! You’ll have a chance to win a copy of Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief!

—

measuring tape

Are you over-editing?

Your plot is useless without this

  By , ,
Image by Francisco Osorio

Image by Francisco Osorio

–

A hundred strangers cling to one another as their runaway train thunders toward a dead end.

Across town, the only woman you’ve ever loved is strapped to a time bomb.

Save her, keep your heart from breaking. But a thousand other hearts get broken instead.

“My husband!” a woman screams as she runs up beside you, clutching a small boy to her chest. “My husband is on that train!”

Save the train, do the right thing, the city will throw you a parade. But all you’ll see through the floats and confetti will be the grief-ridden faces of your true love’s family and the knowledge that you’ll never see her again.

You inhale the deep breath you’ll need for the flight across town.

You’re frozen in mid-takeoff. You can’t take your eyes off the boy in the woman’s arms. He’s the age you were when your father was killed. Young, but you can see in his face he knows what’s happening. Because you felt the same.

Oh, snap. You curse and hammer the keyboard. You threw the little boy in to milk the drama, not to change your hero’s mind—but now you see there’s no turning back. This is going to mean rewrites.

For all the dramatic events that happen around your hero, there are equally dramatic events happening inside him. Events that move him to action. If you don’t keep track of what’s going on inside his head, you won’t be able to predict how he’ll react to any given situation, and by the time you realize it, you might be in a terrible plot bind.

Keep that from happening by mapping your hero’s emotional journey along with the plot. Here are a few guidelines to help.

Outline your hero’s history.

Three forces influence your hero’s decisions: logic, emotions, and morals. What makes sense? What feels best? What’s right? How each of this forces affects him is first determined by his past. So start by outlining his history with questions like:

  • What’s the most traumatic thing he’s ever experienced?
  • What’s the safest he’s ever felt and why?
  • What’s the worst sin he’s ever committed?
  • Which two people have the biggest positive and negative influence on him?
  • What does he want most?
  • (Here’s more help getting to know him)

Use his history to determine how he will react to each major plot point.

The severity of each situation relative to his personal demons will determine his decision. And every decision he makes will affect future events, which, in turn, affect him right back. As the story progresses and the stakes are raised, his decision process will change. Emotional turmoil clouds his moral judgment. Righteous anger clouds his logical judgment. It’s a tumbling system of cause and effect, playing on your hero’s weaknesses and leading to the climax.

Equip him for the ultimate decision.

At the climax, your hero must make one final decision between right and wrong. The forces influencing him are now one big mess of everything that’s happened so far. Of longing and pain and fear.

Make sure that mess includes the motivation for him to make the decision he is supposed to make. If you want him save the people on the train, kill off his father; plant the boy. But if you want him save the girl, you’d better plant something early on that will undermine his empathy for the boy and push him in a different direction.

And if you want him to find a clever way to save everyone (like they do in all the movies), you’d better give him a memory that inspires the answer.

—