Holly Bodger

The ratio of squirrel to non-squirrel metaphors in my posts is about to go up. Yes, I could use a chipmunk or one of those dwarf bunnies, but that would require that I find another image and I’m too busy eating soup.

UPDATE: Since starting this post, I have finished my soup. And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

So here’s the thing: your protagonist has to stay invested in her goal from the moment it’s incited until the moment it’s achieved or abandoned at the end of the novel. There are NO exceptions to this rule. Yes, she can have moments where she thinks she won’t achieve the goal but she cannot give up wanting it. What you really, really, really (did I mention really?) don’t want to do is something like this:

Protag wants goal. Protag REALLY wants goal. Protag is like OBSESSED with goal. Oh look, a handsome squirrel:

Protag forgets goal while gazing longingly at squirrel’s silky fur and chocolate-coloured eyes and perfect teeth and blah blah blah. Eventually, squirrel needs to find an acorn so protag goes back to REALLY WANTING GOAL. Unfortunately, the reader has now decided that protag, a) is a vapid idiot and, b) doesn’t want goal as much as she said or she wouldn’t have forgotten about it for 34 pages.

So, if you want to add a handsome squirrel to your plot, make sure that squirrel is connected to the goal, either by being someone the protag needs assistance from in order to achieve it, or by being someone the protag needs to avoid/overcome in order to achieve it.

P.S. And by squirrel, I mean love interest. For the love of soup, please don’t write a book about a squirrel. It has already been done by the wonderful Mélanie Watt.

Your main character cannot reach their goal until the 90% mark in the story. For screenwriters, this rule is non-negotiable. For novelists, it’s a little fuzzy, but I would argue that “a little” means you have maybe 5% padding on either side of this mark. Why? If the whole point of your plot is for character A to reach goal B, once they either do so or give up on doing so, the plot is over. People will stay with you for some tears and wrap-up, but not much more.

For example, I read a book recently where the main character met her goal at the 50% mark. Yep. Halfway. You want to know what happened then? I lost interest in the book. I kept going since I’d already invested a lot of time in this character, but I had zero engagement in the story. I was no longer desperate to pick it up and when I did, all I heard was  blah blah blah. I wanted it done. Like now.

Think about this when you are revising. If your ending lacks lustre or feels too rushed, maybe your goal has been reached too early or too late.

End note: If your response to this is, “but after she meets the goal, she has to go get XYZ”, then guess what? Your goal is actually XYZ!

Novels are stories of how one character gets from point A to point B, however, the beauty of the novel is not in the point A or the point B; it’s in what happens along the way. Boiled down to its simplest form, this is because novels are journeys that don’t go as planned.

For example, Bob is busy living his life until, all of a sudden, his coffee maker spits out watery slush and he decides he must replace it with a new fancy one. He decides to get in his car and drive to Walmart so he can buy a new one ASAP. Sounds easy right? It is until he gets to Walmart and finds himself in lockdown due to an approaching tornado. He spends his entire day with people who can’t afford fancy coffee makers and by the end of the day, he leaves the store without one because he realizes that, maybe his crappy coffee maker isn’t so bad.

In this example, there are three important elements to the story:

Bob wants a coffee maker (goal)
A tornado prevents Bob from getting his coffee maker (obstacles)
Bob learns that he doesn’t need a new coffee maker in the end (character arc) 

Think about your character’s journey the next time you try to write a logline or query.

1. Where does he start? It must be somewhere imperfect or there is no reason for #2.
2. What happens to make him choose to go somewhere else? Note the choose. This is very important. He must choose to embark on the journey. People don’t end up on journeys by accident. At some point, they need to stand up and start them.
3. What prevents him from getting there in a quick and orderly way? This is the real meat of your story. There must be obstacles and they must directly cause #4.
4. How do these bumps change the person he is (and possibly, the thing he wanted when he set out on his journey)?

It’s quite common to use similes and metaphors to put a character’s experiences in context. For example:

The sky reminded Jane of…
The sound was sharp like a…
It was like her favourite song…
It was like the housekeeper from that show…

There are two purposes to these kinds of references:

1) To help the reader experience what you’re describing. If your character says that someone’s jacket smelled like coffee, the reader will smell coffee when he/she reads this. Obviously, this will fall flat if he/she has never smelled coffee before but that risk must be weighed with the ever-important #2.

2) To add depth to your characterization. This one slips me up a lot.  If your character says that a sound reminds her of an out-of-tune piano, the reader assumes she’s familiar with out-of-tune pianos (and in-tune ones for that matter). The reader then concludes that the character is a musician. Excellent. Well, excellent if she is a musician. If not, what you have is probably what I find myself constantly avoiding (*cough* revising *cough*) and that is the tendency for writers to use metaphors that work in their own heads. This is why we see a lot of references to 80s culture in YA novels (because 80s culture works for the 30+something writer, not today’s teen!) 

The advice here is: be careful. Every time you use a simile or metaphor in your writing, make sure it is the right one for both your audience and your character.

I know I shouldn’t harp on this one anymore, but I can’t help it. I harp. I’m a harper. The fact of the matter is that I’m currently reading a book and it’s only plot is the main characters’ desire to find out a secret (except, in the case of this book, the main characters don’t even want to find out the secret…more on that later!)

There are many problems with the secret as a plot and I like lists so I’m going to make one:

1) Books are about journeys. If they only reason for readers to turn the page is to find out the end, they might as well just read the last chapter and save themselves the 4 hours of their lives that they’re never going to get back. Ever. So if you want to have a secret in your book, you need to make the discovery of said secret an interesting journey (by the way, main character sitting on ass saying, “I wish I knew___” is not interesting!)

2) The longer something stays secret, the bigger the payoff needs to be. I read a book recently where the entire plot was finding out what happened to a friend of the main character. When the big reveal came in the end, I was very disappointed, almost to the point where I couldn’t recommend the book to friends. I’d read 200+ pages for this secret. That’s 200 pages of growing expectations. So, if you want to do this, your secret better come with fireworks and I’m talking, “Luke, I am your father” fireworks.

3) Creating realistic obstacles to secrets is a challenge. If your main character’s goal is to find out a secret, what stops them better be pretty serious. Another character saying, “I don’t feel like telling you” is not serious. Neither is the main character not thinking to ask when it’s stupidly obvious to all readers that he should. Oh, and neither is the main character not getting off his ass because he can’t be bothered to ask. These aren’t obstacles; they’re stupid and annoying main characters. You need a real obstacle which means the keeper of the secret needs a REALLY good reason for keeping the secret and the main character needs a REALLY good reason for wanting it revealed. And, if you’re really smart, these reasons should oppose each other.

4) A secret with no purpose is like a race that ends at a brick wall. You need your main character to DO SOMETHING with the secret once they get it, otherwise your story ends the second it is revealed (and yes, I mean the second and not 20 pages later). This is why secrets work well as obstacles to goals. For example, imagine you have a main character who is a cop and he needs to find a killer so he can put him in jail. In this case, there is a REALLY good reason for the killer to keep the secret and there is a REALLY good reason for the cop to want it. But more importantly, once it is revealed, the goal is not dead because the cop has to use the secret for something (which is the real goal…put killer in jail).

I wanted to write a post about why the reflection character is so important, but there’s no way I can say it as well as Michael Hauge, so instead, I bid you to read this:

http://www.storymastery.com/articles/98-what-are-friends-for-the-kings-speech

Here’s the thing. You don’t have a plot in your novel because time moves forward. Time is boring.

You don’t have a plot because stuff happens while time moves forward. Stuff is boring too. Sure, some stuff is more interesting than other stuff but it’s still just a bunch of stuff.

You don’t have a plot because your main character is trying to figure out a secret while stuff happens while time moves forward. Secrets… well, secrets aren’t boring when they’re revealed but they are for the 300 pages before they’re revealed because, um, they don’t exist yet.

A plot is what you have when your main characters finds a goal and then tries to reach it. Yes, there may be a secret he/she needs to figure out and there may be stuff happening and there probably will be time moving forward but without the GOAL, there is nothing to engage your reader in what happens.

 

The first line contest on Authoress Anon’s blog has got me thinking about first lines so I decided to post some of the ones from a random selection of books on my shelves.

A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning
“If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.”

Angela’s Ashes
“My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born.”

Before I Fall
“They say that just before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that’s not how it happened for me.”

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
“Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were prefectly normal, thank you very much.”

Hunger Games
“When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.”

Identical
“When I look into a
mirror,
it is her face I see.”

The Catcher in the Rye
“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

The Help
“Mae Mobley was born on a early Sunday morning in August 1960.”

Thirteen Reasons Why
“Sir?” she repeats.

Twilight
“I’d never given much thought to how I would die–though I’d had reason enough in the last few months–but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.”

will grayson will grayson
“When I was little, my dad used to tell me, ‘Will, you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose.'”

So tell me. If these had been posted on Authoress’s blog, which ones would have you hooked?

We members of the writersphere like our rules and that is evident by the number of them floating around. While I could attempt to list the most common ones, I don’t see the point as I’d then have to also list why there are exceptions to every single one. Well, almost every single one. The one about not stalking an agent in the toilet is probably valid.

Anywho, the one I want to talk about today is stereotypes. People will tell you to always avoid stereotypes. This is one of those rules that is mostly right but sometimes not. There are certain circumstances where a stereotype can be necessary. For example:

1) When you have a minor character you don’t need to explain. For example, if your main character needs to make reference to someone in their past in a way that will explain an entire scenario without actually explaining an entire scenario, it’s sometimes easier to use a stereotype. So your main character might refer to her younger sister, the head cheerleader-slash-supermodel and it will be implied that this sister was more popular and probably got all the boyfriends etc etc etc. While it would be more interesting for the younger sister to be more popular despite being a Physics nerd, it would take a lot more time to justify this kind of thing and you don’t want to do that if all you need is one line to establish why the main character doesn’t want to fly to Buffalo for her sister’s birthday party.

2) When you have a major character who the main character needs to have a revelation about. For example, if your main character needs to hate a character named Bob for a portion of the book (probably because Bob has some kind of essential information the main character needs), you can make the main character dislike him because of a perceived stereotype. So your main character might hate all bartenders because she dated one and he was a player so she thinks they’re all players and therefore Bob, the bartender, must be a player too. This stereotype acts as a blinder for a portion of the book, however it’s important that you turn it on its ass in the end (meaning Bob can’t actually be a player).

3) When you are making a statement about stereotypes in a more general sense. You may want to do this if you’re trying to show why a stereotype is ridiculous. For example, if you had a book where the government decided to make all blondes into professional cheerleaders because they decided that’s what blondes do. Yes, I realize my example is ridiculous but that is kind of the point.

4) When it just works. I have no explanation for this one. Sometimes, you just need a character that is a stereotypical whatever because that is exactly the kind of character you need for your plot. The example that springs to mind is Jack from Will & Grace. In many ways, Jack fit into a stereotype for a gay man in New York. This worked for the show because it showed how different Will was and, in a way, showed that the stereotype was wrong (see #3).

If you can think of other examples of when stereotypes work (or don’t!), please add them in the comments.