Holly Bodger

I like to plan. I’m a planner. When I finally got the 8-foot cork board for my writing room, I decided I would do a scene outline. To do this, I wrote a snippet of every scene in my book, with the date and time listed on the top. For example:

May 19, 3:00 pm
Bob meets Doug at store.
Discovers Doug has lost his dog.

I pinned chapters numbers horizontally across the board then put each scene in the chapter where it occurs. Good. But not good enough. I decided I would do a calendar as well. In the past, I’ve used a separate Word document to organize the chapters by date. For example:

Chapter 1 – May 19
Chapter 2 – May 20

The problem with the Word document is that I can’t look at it at the same time as I am writing, plus I often forget to update it. I figured a calendar would be perfect. It would give me a quick visual cue of where I am in the book. So, if I’m writing something in chapter 4 and I need to refer to something in chapter 10, I know that’s a week away. In the case of my current book, I photocopied May and June from an empty 2010 calendar and filled in the scenes from there. So in the May 19 square it says Chapter 1 and if you look at the cork board under Chapter 1, you will see scenes A and B.

Sounds good right? Yeah, until I filled in the entire calendar and realized I was AN ENTIRE WEEK off! Yep. Lost a week. I thought the book ended on day X and it actually ends a week before day X.

So what have I learned? I’ve learned that I’m never writing again unless I have a visual calendar.

A couple of weeks ago, I received a line edit from my agent Joanna Volpe. Here is one of the sentences from my novel before the line edit:

Mom opened her door and dug her three-inch heel into the gravel…Insert some witty dialogue…She stepped out of the car and slammed the door.

My agent changed it this to:

Mom opened her door and dug her three-inch heel into the gravel…Insert some witty dialogue…She slammed the door.

In her comments she wrote:

You don’t need to tell us every single step the characters take…that actually becomes distracting.  Leave some for the imagination…telling us every step is what editors call “stage directions” and it completely slows the pacing of the books.

Like most of the comments I’ve received from my agent, I instantly thought, Uh duh. How did I NOT know this? We already knew the character was in the car from the beginning of the scene. We knew her door was open and her foot was out from the beginning of the paragraph. It’s pretty obvious she has stepped out of the car before she slams the door. 

So how do you identify the unnecessary stage directions in your story? My advice is this:

Too much: Helen went to the kitchen. She took a cup out of the cupboard then closed the cupboard door. She filled it with coffee and added some cream. She stirred then took a sip. Within moments, the caffeine entered her system and she felt awake.

Enough: Helen went to the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee. Within moments, the caffeine entered her system and she felt awake.

Not enough: Helen went to the kitchen. Within moments, the caffeine entered her system and she felt awake.

As you can see, the first one is boring and the last leaves us thinking, huh? But the middle one is good. It gives us enough information about the action to understand the reaction.

In my next post, I will discuss how I’ve learned that sleep is overrated. Okay, maybe not…

Eventually, I will stop going on and on about the things I learned from the Donald Maass writing workshop. But not yet…

If there is one thing you don’t want, it’s a flat plot. For example, imagine this was your plot:

Bob wants Eggos for breakfast tomorrow but the store closes in an hour. Drive to the store, pick up a box, walk to the cash, TRIP, buy the Eggos.

Why is this plot bad? Aside from being about as exciting as watching flowers wilt, both Bob’s goal and the obstacles in front of it remain unchanged for the entire plot. 

Maass’s idea for fixing this is to MAKE THINGS WORSE, either by upping the stakes or by extending the effects of failure to other characters. For example, to up the stakes in the story above, we could make Bob’s car run out of gas. We could make the store close early for a bizarre town ritual. We could make the store run out of Eggos. To extend the effects of failure in this story, we could say that Bob also has to feed his twelve, hungry children who refuse to eat anything but Eggos for breakfast. We could say that the store owner is overrun by Eggos and must sell them all that day or the store will go bankrupt.

The point is to create a plot that is constantly changing or “hooking” the reader. If you give them the highest stakes and the list of all possible obstacles on page one, they might as well just flip to the last page and read “The End.”

Now, I must go eat some Eggos.

Say what? Why would I want my antagonist to be likeable??? I mean, he’s the one the protagonist wants to defeat, right?

Yes and no. The antagonist is the character who is trying to stop the protagonist from reaching her goal, but that doesn’t mean he should be all bad. According to Donald Maass, the scariest antagonists are not the ones lurking in the corner, cackling Mwoo-ha-ha. No, the scariest antagonists are the ones that are smart, likeable, and right. Here are some of Maass’s tips for creating a three-dimensional antagonist:

1) Give the antagonist a goal of his own and make it one the protagonist could agree with on some level.

For example, the antagonist wants to steal the Mona Lisa. This is wrong. But make him want to steal it because he needs the money to pay for his mother’s cancer treatment and suddenly, the goal seems justified. The protagonist may not agree with the antagonist, but she will understand him and maybe even sympathize with him.

2) Find one way to make the antagonist’s “way of looking at things” right.

For example, despite being a hardened criminal, the antagonist might believe in universal health care. The protagonist will be able to agree with him on this point, making it harder to hate him full stop.

3) Right before the climax, get the protagonist to agree with the antagonist. 

Using the example above, maybe the protagonist is about to stop the antagonist from stealing the painting, but she sees his dying mother in the hospital and can’t do it, at least for a moment. Yes, the protagonist will eventually have a change of heart when she realizes that innocent people may die during the heist. But by making the decision difficult for the protagonist, you will create more tension in the pull.

This past Saturday, I attended a writing workshop run by Donald Maass (aka, The God of Writing). He spent the morning of this workshop on protagonists, the first task of which was to make them likeable.

According to Maass, there are three kinds of protagonists and each comes with specific challenges:

1) The ordinary person – This is the every day Joe. He is you or me or the guy next door. Nothing special. Nothing grand. But if you want to make readers care about Joe, you need to give him some kind of heroic quality. Maybe he’s a bit of a jerk but he loves his five-year-old daughter more than anything on Earth. Maybe he loves his dog. Maybe he gives all of his money to the blind. Whatever it is, Joe needs to do something in the first 5 pages to show us why we should care about him.

2) The hero – The hero spends every moment of his life helping people. He’s a fireman, a soldier, a cop. But readers won’t necessarily care about him just because he helps people. This type of character is too perfect. He needs a flaw that makes him a regular human to which readers can relate. Maybe he has an annoying neighbour who always steals his newspaper. Maybe his dog pees on his bath mat every freaking morning. Maybe his mother has cancer. Whatever it is, the hero needs to do something to show us he is just like us in the first 5 pages.

3) The dark protagonist – The dark protagonist is usually not human. He’s a vampire, a werewolf, a fallen angel. If you want readers to care about this type of protagonist, you need to show one way that he wants to be a normal or happy being. Maybe he’s a vampire who just wants to die. Maybe he’s a fallen angel living in Hell who just wants to repent. Whatever it is, the dark protagonist needs to do something to show us that he wants to not be dark, in the first 5 pages.

The key message here is that you must give the reader a reason to care in the first 5 pages.

On a side note, if you get the chance the attend one of Maass’s writing workshops, I’d highly recommend it. He will open your mind to things you never thought about before (and he’ll probably make you laugh your ass off too!)

I’m a big fan of the Myers-Briggs personality test. Part of this is because I’m the type of person who likes to categorize people I meet. Are they an only child? A youngest child? Did they go to school X? Did they grow up in that part of town?

Yesterday, after reading this post  about writing a character’s feelings, I realized that the comments Lynne received resonated with ones I had received as well. That’s when I remembered my Myers-Briggs rating. On the Thinking/Feeling scale, I am a strong T (thinker). For those of you unfamiliar with the T/F scale, it means the following:

“Those who prefer thinking tend to decide things from a more detached standpoint, measuring the decision by what seems reasonable, logical, causal, consistent and matching a given set of rules. Those who prefer feeling tend to come to decisions by associating or empathizing with the situation, looking at it ‘from the inside’ and weighing the situation to achieve, on balance, the greatest harmony, consensus and fit, considering the needs of the people involved.” (Wikipedia)

The moment I re-read this, I realized this is the biggest problem in my writing. My characters are constantly thinking. They are opinionated about everything, but they don’t express enough feelings. For example, if my character heard about another character’s dead dog, she might say:

Bob’s story reminded me of the time I lost Winkie when I was twelve. It was a Tuesday.

This is thinking. Feeling, on the other hand, would be this:

The moment Bob finished his story, a lump grew in my throat. I hadn’t thought about Winkie since I’d cried myself to sleep when I was twelve.

There are times when your character needs to think, but there are also times when they need to feel. Knowing which is which is part of the challenge.

My advice is this: if you haven’t taken Myers-Briggs, take it. Once you have your rating, read the definitions and use them to identify your strengths and weaknesses as a person. You will probably find these same strengths and weaknesses in your writing.