During his seminar on plot structure, Michael Hauge said something that really stuck with me. I’m going to put this in my own words so I can keep this post until 4000 words. The gist of it was this:

If you want to write a book, the first thing you need to do is pretend you are God. Now find your main character and identify their identity and goals (see my last post if you don’t know what this means).

Done? Good. Now take the things the MC wants/needs and create a character that can give these things to her. If she wants someone who will love her passionately, create a man who falls in love with her at first sight and who is the epitome of passion. If she wants money, create someone who is rich.

Done? Good. Now create a villain and/or a situation that will make it very difficult for the MC to get what she wants from this character. Maybe she’s engaged to someone else. Maybe some other woman wants the rich guy too.

Done? Good. Now find a way to give the MC the courage she needs to defy the villain or survive the situation.

Done? Good. You’ve got yourself a book.

I think the reason this stuck with me most is because I usually start my books with a concept, then I add the conflict and then I try to fit a character into the situation. This often means tweaking and bending until they all fit together. But now that I’ve become privy to the Michael Hauge wisdom, I realize that, if I just started with the character, I would not have this problem.

And that, my friend, is reason #12 why you should take his seminar.

Had you come to be at 9 am on Sept. 25th and asked me, “Holly, what is a character arc?”, I would have given you a fairly confident response. But if you asked me the same question at 5:45 on that same day, I would have told you that my response was crap. And why would I have said that? Because I had just spent 9 hours with Michael Hauge and his lesson on building a character arc blew my mind.

According to Hauge, before you can create an arc, you need to identify two things:

1) Your character’s identity. The identity is the false self that the hero presents to the world. The MC creates this identity in order to protect herself from a fear that grew out of a belief that was created by a wound that happened before the story begins. The MC MUST BELIEVE this is her identity and the fears and beliefs that go with it MUST be ones that will make the character’s outer goal impossible to achieve unless they are abandoned. For example:

Fiona’s first boyfriend dumped her because she was too fat (wound) so she now believes no one can love her (belief) and is thus afraid to go on a date (fear). Fiona’s outer goal in the novel is to get information from Jake but she is too afraid to get close to him. If she wants to achieve this goal, she will have to abandon her fears.

2) Your character’s essence. If you stripped away the identity above, this is what would be left. This is the person your character has the potential to become. In the example above, this would be a confident Fiona who believes she deserves someone like Jake’s love.

The character arc is, quite simply, the MC’s journey from #1 to #2.  But to make it even easier, Michael Hauge actually tells you what goes in each of the five stages of the character arc: 

Stage One: The MC is living fully in identity. This is not the place to give the reader the wound but is the place to give the fears and beliefs.

Stage Two: The MC is still living fully in identity, but gets a glimpse of what living in essence might be like.

Stage Three: The MC is vacillating between identity and essence. She steps into essence but gets scared and goes back to identity. The point of no return is when MC tries to live in essence, even if not successfully at first. Using the example above, this might be Fiona kissing Jake and realizing what she is missing.

Stage Four: The outside world is closing in, making is more difficult for the MC to live in essence. Using the example above, maybe Fiona runs into the ex-boyfriend. The major setback occurs when the MC does something that’s more identity driven, but the MC knows it isn’t right now that she has lived in essence. Often, it is a supporting character who comes in and says THIS IS NOT WHO YOU ARE! For example, after Fiona runs into her ex, Jake asks her for another date and she refuses because she believes he will dump her just like the ex did, even though Jake has given her no reason to think that. Her sassy gay friend finds out, slaps her across the face and sends her on her way.

Stage Five: The MC pushes to the outer goal and to living in essence. For example, Fiona realizes that she’d rather try to win Jake than live the rest of her life with fifteen cats, so she goes after him.

AND NOW FOR THE UNAUTHORIZED PLUG:The Michael Hauge seminar I attended was probably the most useful thing I have ever done for my writing career. If you can attend one of his seminars, I’d highly recommend it. But even if you can’t, you can always buy them on DVD or Audio CD.

I was thinking about writing a post on why it’s always better to be specific in your writing, when the fabulous JK Rowling spoke to me this morning. Okay, it was actually Jim Dale narrating the audio version of Rowling’s Chamber of Secrets, but you get my point.

Rowling is a master of many things, one of which is detail. While listening to her audio book, I heard one line that exemplified why this is true. While some writers would be tempted to write something like:

Mr Malfoy had been hit by a book.

Rowling writes:

Mr. Malfoy had been hit in the eye by an Encyclopedia of Toadstools.

Once again, I bow to Ms. Rowling.

When I start a new novel, I write the ending first. Why? Because I think the final scene is, perhaps, the most important one in a novel. No, it doesn’t hook the reader or change everything for the main character. It’s important because it’s the last word the author gets and often, it’s the one that sticks with people most. How often do people tell you that they hated the seventeenth scene in a novel? I’m guessing not often. But how often do you hear people say they loved or hated an ending? I’m guessing a lot. People don’t read all 322 pages of your novel for the middle. They read for the end. Yes, I TOTALLY agree that they will never get to the end if the beginning sucks, but I’m going to leave beginnings for another time (aka, when I’m not tearing my hair out trying to write one!)

So what do you put in your final scene? In my opinion, you use it to close your most important plot line, which is usually the character’s inner or outer goal. For example, if your book is about a teen-aged magician who is determined to defeat the most evil wizard of all time, you would close with this character either achieving it or reflecting on his need to achieve it. But if your book is about a teen-aged magician who is determined to defeat the most evil wizard of of all time and you close with this teenager making out with some secondary character who helped find one piece of useless information in chapter five, well, you have a problem. Yeah, everyone loves “and then they kissed” endings, but by closing with a scene like this, you are basically saying that your character’s most important goal is NOT actually their most important goal. What you’re saying is that, although they want to defeat the most evil wizard of all time, kissing the chick from chapter five is MUCH MORE IMPORTANT.

Which leads me to my next question: Is it? If kissing the chick from chapter five REALLY is more important to your main character, then maybe your character’s arc is not what you think it is.

And that, my friends, is why I write the ending first!