The last time I needed a new idea for a book, I had an online brainstorming session with one of my crit partners. We basically exchanged a bunch of weird questions until we came up with some real ideas. I don’t want to list all of the questions here because frankly, the ones that resulted in what seemed like a brilliant idea about a girl who has an affair with cheese, well, they’re just wrong. Instead, I will give you the ones I found most helpful.

1) What’s your favourite book, TV show or movie and why? Who are your favourite characters from these? What characteristics make you love them? Make you hate them?
2) Name the 5 most pivotal moments and decisions in your life. How did they change you?
3) Name the 5 most pivotal people in your life. Why are they so influential?

Answers from #1 and #3 help you create the kind of characters you will enjoy writing about (and hopefully, ones that others will enjoy reading about). Answers from #2  go directly to the root of  WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW.  Often, people mistake this tip for settings. For example, you once worked at a Starbucks and thus should write a book about someone who works at a Starbucks. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do this but if you do, you are missing the real gems here. WHAT YOU KNOW is more about the experiences you’ve had that have shaped you into the person you are. The most important of these experiences are listed in your answers to #2. These are the kinds of things we want to see in a character arc. 

Because I like to use examples, here are some of my answers to the above questions (sorry, but I’m not giving my top ones to #2):

1. Bridget Jones’ Diary (book and movie). I love Bridget for being funny and for not taking herself too seriously. I love that she is flawed but doesn’t let that stop her from trying to find love and success.
2. When I was 14, the first boy I thought I loved told me he wanted to date me but also wanted to date another girl at the same time. He was older than me and a total Adonis. Dating him would have been like a fast-track to popularity. I wanted to say, “Okay” but instead, I told him where he could go. And it wasn’t somewhere nice. This moment was pivotal because it made me realize that I couldn’t love someone who didn’t respect me…a pretty harsh lesson at 14.
3. My sister because she knows what she wants and gets it.

The next step is to take these answers and see if you can put them together into an idea for a book. Using my above example, I could write about a girl who is funny like Bridget (#1), experiences #2 while surrounded by someone like #3.

Make sense?

There are several points of view (POV) that can be used for writing fiction, but only two are normally used: first-person and third-person.

First-person is when you write a story from the POV of one character in the story. For example:

The alarm woke me out of a deep sleep. I stumbled out of bed, flicking on the TV on the way to the kitchen.

Third-person is when you write the story from outside one or more characters. For example:

The alarm woke Bob out of a deep sleep. He stumbled out of bed, flicking on the TV on his way to the kitchen.

In this post, I am going to talk about third-person because that is where I see the most mistakes. There are two kinds of third-person: omniscient and limited. An omniscient narrator knows everything about every character while a limited narrator only sees the perspective of one character at a time.  How is this a problem, you ask? It’s a problem because some writers think they can use both omniscient and limited in the same book, while the truth is that, most third-person books are limited. Why? Because omniscient can be dull. People generally read fiction because they want to experience one character’s life, not because they want to watch several character’s lives, but experience none of them.

So how do you know if you are acting like an omniscient narrator, rather than a limited one? A limited one would only ever see things through one character at a time. Yes, it’s possible to change characters in different scenes, but you can still only be in one head at a time. If not, you get something like this:

Bob sat down at the table and looked at Susan. She wondered why he was staring at her. He picked up his coffee mug and took a sip. Susan did the same, choking on the disgusting liquid Bob passed off as coffee.

My reaction to this kind of paragraph is, WHAT THE HELL? The writer is trying to be in two heads at once, but the reader can’t do that. The reader can either “see” the scene from Bob’s eyes or he can “see” it from Susan’s eyes. He can’t see it from both. If the writer wanted to see the world from outside both of the characters (omniscient), it would sound like this:

Bob sat down at the table and looked at Susan. He picked up his coffee mug and took a sip. Susan did the same, choking on the liquid as it oozed down her throat.

Notice that we aren’t in anyone’s head in the passage above. We are watching it, like TV. If this same paragraph were TRULY third-person limited, it would sound like this:

Bob sat down at the table and looked at Susan. Why was she frowning again? He picked up his coffee mug and took a sip. She mimicked him, only she choked as she took a sip. Probably her way of telling him he’d used too much grounds again.

This last example is written from Bob’s perspective. The ONLY difference between this and first-person is that Bob is not “I”. If he was, it would say:

I sat down at the table and looked at Susan. Why was she frowning again? I picked up my coffee mug and took a sip. She mimicked me, only she choked as she took a sip. Probably her way of telling me I’d used too much grounds again.

See? The perspective of third-person limited is the same as first-person. This is a REALLY REALY REALLY (did I mention REALLY?) important lesson if you are writing third-person limited. You have to remember that you are still writing from one character’s perspective. You are NOT writing from your own. Why? BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT IN THE BOOK!

If you are writing third-person and are worried that you are crossing into omniscient or, worse, head jumping, take a section of your manuscript and re-write it from the perspective of one character. If you find any text that your character cannot know or does not experience, DELETE IT! NOW! Do not pass GO. Do not stop for a Grande, non-fat, Tazo Chai. Actually, I take that back. But get me one too…

Let me start by saying that, for me, red-eye flights are like perms: great idea until you get home and look in the mirror. Okay, enough about what my therapist calls The Perm of 92…

Rather than write one post on scenes, I’ve decided to cover the required elements separately, starting with the setting. Settings tell the reader where the action is taking place. For example, a bedroom, a car, a field. Every scene needs a setting and it should be defined right at (or near) the beginning of the scene. In my experience, there are three ways to define a setting:

1) The setting blurb. This is when the author writes a paragraph describing the setting. For example:

The school cafeteria was a basic, square room. Fluorescent lights beamed throughout the room, which was packed with beige tables sitting on top of a beige linoleum floor. Even the walls were beige.

2) Setting with perspective. This is when the author sets the scene from the perspective of a character. For example:

The moment I walked into the square room known as the school cafeteria, the fluorescent lights beamed in my eyes. I looked around the room. It was packed with beige tables sitting on top of a beige linoleum floor. Even the walls were beige.

3) Setting with reaction. This is when the author sets the scene using the reaction of a character. For example:

I rushed into the square room known as the school cafeteria, squinting the moment the fluorescent lights pierced through my retina. Great. Every single one of the beige tables was full. Well, except for the one where Laney Smith sat. Guess it would be another one of those days where my lunchtime conversation was about as exciting as the cafeteria’s beige walls.

Personally, I think the third one is best because it gives us the setting while also telling us how that setting affects the main character. Without this, we have detail without meaning, which to me, reads something like “blah blah blah, beige walls, blah blah blah”. But with it, we are drawn even closer into the character’s head, which is exactly where you want the reader to be.

To implement this in your own writing, I’d suggest you identify the details in your scenes and then ask yourself these questions: 1) Who is experiencing this detail? 2) How is it affecting them? and 3) Why should the reader care? If you cannot answer all three of these items, select the detail and then press the Delete key until it is gone.

Let me start this post by saying that, most of the time, I’m sharing things as I learn them, which is my roundabout way of saying that I haven’t always taken my own advice. Yet. But enough about cutting cheese from my diet…

I love dialogue. LOVE IT. I wrote the first draft of my most recent novel entirely in dialogue. Yes, I went back later to add some actions and feelings & crap like that (because I now know that is the secret to the breakout novel. Dialogue + actions + feelings & crap like that = winner!) I digress. Already. And I haven’t even had any cheese today. *sigh*

When I first started writing, I thought dialogue should go something like this:

“Do you have a pen?” I asked.

“Yes, I do,” replied Bob.

Sometime after I used book 1 for kindling, a crit partner told me to kill all of my dialogue tags (italics above) and use action instead. So, in book 2, I ended up with something more like this:

I turned to Bob. “Do you have a pen?”

He opened his backpack and removed a blue Bic. “Yes, I do.”

Better? Yes. The problem is that, by book 3, I discovered I was giving TOO MANY actions (see earlier post on Stage Directions). So, in book 4, I tried to use a mix of half tags, half actions, and got something like this:

“Do you have a pen?” I asked.

Bob opened his backpack and removed a blue Bic. “Yes, I do.”

Well, then my fabulous crit partner pointed out a BIG problem. My characters were too flat and robotic. I had the dialogue, I had the actions, but I was missing the F&CLT (feelings & crap like that).  So now, I am revising books 3 & 4 so the dialogue looks more like this:

“Do you have a pen?” My voice was apologetic. It’s not that I didn’t know I needed a pen before class. Of course I knew. Why else would I be begging for a Bic, five seconds before our History quiz was about to start.

Bob handed me one of the seventeen pens from his ink-stained pocket. His face said, “I’m never going to see this again, am I?”

I wrapped my fingers around the plastic shaft. My forced smile said it all. No, Bob. That you are not.

I’ll be back when I’m done making these revisions. Should be around, say, 2043?

We’ve all heard the expression, Show, Don’t Tell.  If you’re new to writing or have been living under a rock, this means that you should show a character’s actions and emotions, rather than tell them. For example, this is telling:

Bob looked embarrassed.

And this is showing:

Bob’s cheeks went red as he cast his glance on his dusty shoes.

The problem with this rule is that, sometimes, you have to break it. For example, if you’re writing in first person, you can’t say:

My face went red.

Why? Because unless you have a mirror, you have no idea that your face is red. You can know it feels hot, but you can’t know it’s red.

Having said that, sometimes, you can’t just show a character’s emotions in first person. Why? Because when you’re in someone’s head, you have to think like them and they would not think, “Wow, my face feels hot,” unless they are daft and don’t know what embarrassment feels like. They would think, “Holy crap. This is more embarrassing than the time I walked into the glass window pane of a nice restaurant in Hawaii.” Not that I’ve ever done that. Well, not since the 80’s…

So how do you know when to show and when to tell? Put yourself in the character’s shoes. Pretend whatever is happening just happened to you. For example, you’re out for a nice dinner with a friend. You walk up to the front of a restaurant, which looks like it’s completely open. But as you cross the threshold of the entrance, your face smashes into the glass. Every single person stares at you, except for your best friend who has fallen on the sidewalk in a fit of laughter.

What is the first thing that goes through you mind?

a) Man, my face looks red.
b) Man, my face feels hot.
c) How quickly can I get to the airport?

For me, it was C. Or, it would have been if I had ever walked into the window pane of a restaurant in Hawaii. Which I haven’t. Recently.