Let me start this post by admitting that I’m a bit of a geek. In my “normal” life, I have to find ways to convert print documents into an XML format with a very strict DTD and, well, I know I’ve lost you already so I’ll go back to speaking to a writer.

I’ve been working on trying to differentiate the dialogue of the many characters in my WIP and I came up with this really cool way to manage it. Now I realize that most of you will hear nothing but “blah blah blah” as soon as I say the words Microsoft Word, but for those of you who don’t, here it is:

1) Open your manuscript in Microsoft Word. Depending on your version, click either Format/Styles and Formatting or click the Styles flyout on the Home tab.

2) Follow the steps to create a new style for each of your characters. Make sure you name the style after them. Also make sure the style is based on “Normal” or whatever you call your regular text so you won’t have to read your manuscript in 12 different fonts. Well, unless you want to read your manuscript in 12 different fonts. In that case, skip to step 3.

3) Go through your manuscript and tag every line of dialogue with the speaking character’s style. I KNOW this will be tedious but, trust me, it’s worth it.

4) And now for the good part…once you have determined how you want your character to speak (more on that in another post), change the color for only that character’s style and then read the manuscript for only their speech.

Cool? Yeah, I know. Back to my XML.

I have nothing against the idea of living under a rock, but unless you’ve been doing so for several years, you’ve probably already heard about Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat technique for making a character likeable. What I want to talk about today is how to make a character not likeable. Now you’re probably thinking it’s ridiculous to even consider this a challenge. All you need to do to make a character not likeable is get them to kill a cat in scene one and you’re done right?

Right?

Well, here’s the problem. In romantic arcs, the main character is supposed to grow to like the love interest. So while you do need to give the main character reason to dislike the love interest initially, you can’t make it something she won’t be able to forgive him for later (like, for example, intentionally running over her cat with his car).

So what can you do instead? Well, this is something I personally struggle with so I thought I’d take a look at some Jane Austen’s romantic arcs in order to see if I could find an answer.

1) Pride & Prejudice. In their first encounter, Mr. Darcy refuses to dance with Elizabeth and then calls her ugly. Later, he also calls her family a bunch of trailer trash (I paraphrase, of course!) This is what I’m going to call Insulting the Cat.

2) Sense and Sensibility. Elinor discovers that Edward is engaged to some self-centered skank from down the road. This is what I’m calling Saying you don’t have a cat when you really have 12 cats, 4 dogs and a donkey named Steve.

3) Emma. Mr. Knightly yells at Emma after she plays a bad game of chess with a bunch of people’s personal lives. This is very similar to #1 in that it is insulting the cat, however it’s not as strong as #1. So while #1 would be like saying, “Your cat is the ugliest, laziest SOB I’ve ever seen and I bet his mother grew up in a ditch,” this is more like, “I don’t dislike your cat. I dislike cats in general.”

And now to work some cat insults into my latest WIP…

Sometimes, I write these posts because I’ve just read another brilliant post on Kidlit.com and don’t want to enter a comment that’s 400 words long. This is one of those times.

In today’s post, Mary talks about Telling versus Interiority. Specifically, she addresses when it’s okay to tell in a story. As she mentions, this is a very difficult thing to master and I think it’s especially difficult in third-person limited where you (the author) have the oppotunity to tell at any moment. For first-person however, I think the rules are a bit easier. Why? Because the concept of “telling” shouldn’t really exist in first-person. If we’re in the main character’s head, they should never tell us (the reader) anything because we don’t exist. Ever.

Does this mean the main character is are allowed to tell themselves something instead? No. Generally speaking, people don’t need to tell themselves how they’re feeling because, um, well they already know.  Unfortunately, writers need to find ways to let the reader into these feelings which means finding ways to communicate the already known without pulling the reader out and yelling YOU ARE NOT ME, YOU ARE THE READER!

So how do you do this? Depending on the situation, you choose one of four ways:

1) You show (sorry!) how the main character is feeling by giving them obvious thoughts or physiological reactions. For example, if the main character runs into her ex-boyfriend, she can say she feels like punching him in the face and we’ll interpret that as anger. You could also say she immediately clenches her fists when she sees him but I’d caution against doing this because it’s walking away from what the main character is actually thinking which is I want to punch him in the face and not I want to clench my fists. Having said that, there are times when a character does not acknowledge their own feelings and those are the times where you can and should use this kind of removed showing.

2) You get the main character to question their feelings. For example, it doesn’t make sense for the main character to tell themselves that they’re feeling angry (since they already know!) but they can think something like, “I haven’t seen him in six months. Why do I still feel so angry?” Or even better, “Why do I still feel like punching him in the face?”

3) You convey the main character’s feelings as a reaction to another character’s actions. For example, “The way Jane chewed her gum made me want to punch her in the face.” Again, this is showing the anger more than telling it. 

4) You get another character to acknowledge or question the main character’s feelings. For example, the main character might be staring off at the ex-boyfriend and her best friend might walk up and say, “Jane, why do you look like you want to rip his head off?”

Clear as mud?

I have written some stuff in 3rd person but I predominantly write in 1st. I personally find 1st person easier to write and so it amazes me when I see people break the cardinal rules of the 1st person POV. These are:

1) The reader must experience everything the main character sees/thinks and ONLY everything the main character sees/thinks.

This is a two-part rule. The first part means that, if your main character looks at a squirrel, the reader must see the squirrel at the same time. If the main character thinks, “poor squirrel”, the reader must see those thoughts on the page.

The second part of this rule means that the reader cannot see/know what the main character cannot see/know. This should be an easy one but I can’t tell you how many times I see a narrator sneak in with something like, “Joan thought about her answer before she responded.” Really? How does the main character know this? Is he psychic? Because Joan might actually be pausing while she tries to remember what time her hair appointment is at.

2) All thoughts must be exactly as they would occur IN THE MAIN CHARACTER’S HEAD

Okay, I get a little testy about this one because it bugs me even more than when people say they’re going to speak to a subject. But enough about that restraining order. When a book is narrated by one character, all of the narration should come from that character’s head as if they were THINKING not as if they were SPEAKING TO SOMEONE ELSE. I can’t stress this enough. Yes, I know, it’s possible to adopt a style of writing where your main character speaks to the reader for the entire book. If that’s your style, don’t pass GO. Close this page now. If it’s not your style however, every word you write (other than dialogue) must come from the main character’s thoughts. This means that your main character can’t think something just because you need to explain it to the reader. I will give you an example of this because it’s the mistake I see more than anything (and the one that makes me want to throw bananas at the wall).

The door opened and I saw Sarah Jones, my brother’s wife of ten years.

I’m going to grit my teeth now while I explain why this is SO DAMN WRONG. Say, for example, that you are the main character and you just opened the door to find your sister-in-law standing there. Would you think, “Hey. There is FULL NAME OF YOUR SISTER-IN-LAW, the woman who married my brother ten years ago?” NO! You would think, “Hey, there’s Sarah. Doesn’t her hair look nice?” or something like that. And for the love of twelve kinds of cheese you would not think, “Doesn’t her brown hair look nice?” When is that last time you thought about the hair or eye colour of someone you have known for more than 5 minutes? Let me guess…never! Finally, please remember that this rule applies to all descriptions of all people the main character knows. So his mother is “Mom” not “my mother” (unless he is speaking to a non-family member) and his best friend is “Jake” or whatever he calls him and not “my best friend Jake” or “my friend of twelve years, Jacob Jones.”

Okay, I’m done now. And I need some cheese.

This may come as a shock to you but I’m a planner. I plan things. A lot. And I like planning things. I like doing plotcards. I like sketching out new ideas from start to finish. I like outlining every single chapter that’s going to appear in a book.

But here’s the problem with being a planner. If you’re like me, you also like shiny things. While this is great when you’re looking for a new idea to plan, it’s not so great when this happens:

Do-dodo… carefully following outline… do-dodo… staying true to meticulously planned arc… do-dodo… making sure to OH LOOK A SQUIRREL! KA-POW!!! Entire outline blows up.

Is it necessarily a bad thing when a squirrel enters your tight plot? Maybe, maybe not. You can go back and write the squirrel in from the beginning. You can find a way to make the squirrel an integral part of the main character’s transformation. But ask yourself this first: do I need the squirrel or am I just adding him because I’m bored and he’s shiny? If it’s the latter, maybe it’s time to walk away from the book. Read something else. Start something else. Then, after a while, come back and ask yourself if you need the squirrel again. If it really works, leave it. If not, prepare yourself for feedback that sounds something like this:

I really liked the scene where the nuns are studying in the Vatican library but I felt like the flying squirrel came out of nowhere.

There are two ways to describe detail in a setting:

1) Forest to trees: With this method, you start with the big and work down to the little. For example, your character sees a house. Notices it’s red brick. Has a white porch out front. Sitting on the porch is a flower pot filled with orange flowers. A hummingbird hovers over these.

2) Trees to forest: This method is exactly the opposite. The character sees the hummingbird first. Then the flowers, the pot, the porch, the house.

What you don’t want to do is jump from one method to the other. You don’t want to see the hummingbird, then the entire house, then the tiny flowers, then the porch. Why? Because your reader is trying to focus as you describe a scene. It’s like a movie camera panning in and out. The camera is supposed to start far away and pan in or start close and pan out. If the camera went IN OUT IN OUT really fast, the audience would be left dizzy and confused.

The next question to ask yourself is which method to use when. I find it generally depends on how the character is seeing the setting. If they’re slowly approaching from afar, they would definitely use forest to trees as that is how our eyes work. But if they’ve just woken up and are surveying the scene immediately in front of their eyes, they’re more likely to do trees to forest.

The last thing you need to ask yourself is about speed. Much like the panning camera, the speed at which you give detail dictates the speed at which the character is observing. So if your character is out for a leisurely stroll, they would probably spend a few minutes looking at the detail on someone’s porch, which means you probably want at least one sentence per thing they’re observing. On the other hand, if they’re flying by in a Z4, they’re likely to only see a quick blur which probably means only one sentence or a series of really short sentences.

TIP: If you’re not sure how much time to spend on detail, try reading your description while acting out the motion. If you can’t read it in the time it takes your character to perform the action, it’s too long. And if you’re done reading and they’re supposed to be standing there staring for another five minutes, it’s either too short or you need to transition to another scene.

I’ve been working on a revision that is doing my head in and I decided I needed to approach it from a different angle. I started to think about what really happens in a novel’s climax and what I came up with was this: it’s like the main character’s house of cards has fallen. Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong.  There is no visible light at the end of the tunnel. For example:

It’s the day of the big meeting–the one Jane has prepared for for months. The one that could mean a major promotion to X. Unfortunately, Jane sleeps through her alarm so she has to skip her shower. Her cat has puked on the outfit she prepared so she dresses in the only other clean outfit she can find. She rushes to her car, spilling coffee all over herself. She tries to start the car but it’s out of gas. She goes to the bus instead. The one that will get her to work 10 minutes before the meeting whizzes past, covering her in mud. The one that will get her there on time comes. By some miracle, it stops. When she gets on, she sees her ex-boyfriend sitting next to the only empty seat. He’s with his new girlfriend. And they’re engaged. Which sucks. It sucks even more when the bus breaks down and she has to sit with them for 20 minutes, listening to their plans for flowers at the wedding.

The first point of this lame excuse of an example is to show how everything goes wrong for the main character all at once. The second is to show you how I used this house of cards method to plot backwards. To do this, you first need to create a “worst day in their life” kind of scenario for your main character (such as the above). Once you have done this, you take each crumbling card (thing that goes wrong) and find a way to plant it before the midpoint of your novel. Using the example above, that would mean establishing things like:

1. Jane is a heavy sleeper. If it weren’t for her blaring alarm, she’d sleep until noon.
2. Jane’s cat has a habit of eating people food and then puking it up later.
3. Jane cannot function without a cup of coffee in the morning.
4. Jane hates her job but she’d love it if she could get promotion X.
5. Jane’s boss is very anal when it comes to watching her employee’s hours. She makes it clear to Jane that she can be replaced by someone who isn’t always late.
6. Jane is bad with money. If she doesn’t get a promotion, she will have to ask her parents for a loan.
7. Jane rarely does laundry.
8. Jane hates putting gas in her car.
9. Jane’s ex-boyfriend dumped her after 2 yrs because he didn’t want to settle down.
10. Jane hates flowers.

This might sound a little crazy (planning a novel backwards?) but I have to say, I tried it last night and it was the most helpful thing ever!

And now, as an added bonus for the day: you can use this same method to create a first chapter. Just write out the inciting incident you want, identify the cards that fall (or, in the case of the inciting incident, the cards that shake a little), and voila! You’ll have a list of the things that go into your opening chapter.

Ugh.

Yeah, that’s all I have to say.