Holly Bodger

In my post, The Five Stages of a Character Arc, I mentioned that a character’s arc is basically their journey from their identity to their essence. What I want to talk about today is the thing that happens at the end of stage four: the critical choice.

According to Dr. Phil McGraw, we are the people we are today because of three types of external factors. One of these is called the Seven Critical Choices. Here is the definition from McGraw’s Web site:

Seven Critical Choices: There are a surprisingly small number of choices that rise to the level of life-changing ones. Critical choices are those that have changed your life, positively or negatively, and are major factors in determining who and what you will become. They are the choices that have affected your life up to today, and have set you on a path.

The reason I am quoting Dr. Phil is not because I have decided to take up Pop Psychology. It’s also not because I am the next future guest host of Oprah. Although…wait, no.

The reason I am bringing this up is because every great story is about one of these critical choices and that choice is made at the end of stage four (the climax of the story). Let’s look at the example from my previous post:

After Fiona runs into her ex-boyfriend, Jake asks her for another date and she refuses because she believes he will dump her just like her ex did, even though Jake has given her no reason to think this. Her sassy gay friend finds out, slaps her across the face and sends her on her way.

What happens next? Fiona makes a choice: either give in to her fears and let Jake walk away forever, or listen to her sassy gay friend and go after Jake. Obviously, she picks the latter choice.  Maybe she marries Jake. Maybe they have three wonderful children and a dog named Buck.  The point is that Fiona makes a critical choice that changes the direction of her life and if you want your readers to feel like your main character has gone through a similar life-changing transformation, he/she must make one too.

I’m currently working on the first act of a new novel and have been struggling with the role of one of the secondary characters. I knew I wanted him to be blond and that I wanted him to shake up the main character’s life but that was about it. Not exactly enough to fill 200 pages.

So I decided to put some of the Hauge tips into practice and thought I’d share how it worked. Here is what I did:

I made a table showing the Before and After pictures for the main character. In the first column, I wrote my Six Things That Need Fixing (a la Blake Snyder). In the third column, I wrote the end of result of those things being fixed. When I was done, I used column 2 to write ways in which the secondary character could help the MC change from who she is in column 1 to who she will become in column 3. For example:

Column 1: MC Before
Susan hates Cheese

Column 2: Transition from 1-3
Bob takes Susan to cheese emporium where she discovers that Gorgonzola is actually quite tasty

Column 3: Main Character  After
Susan loves cheese

This may sound like a bit of a trivial exercise but I can honestly say that it helped me nail exactly what my secondary character needs to do in the novel.

And now that I have patted myself on the back, I am going to eat some Gorgonzola. It really is lovely in a cream sauce with a few red grapes thrown over some tortellini. Mmmm.

If there was one thing Michael Hauge told us over and over again, it was that every main character needs a tangible outer goal: a single, measurable “thing” that the protagonist is actively pursuing throughout the story. According to Hauge, there are only 5 types of outer goals:

1. To escape from a bad situation
2. To stop something bad from happening
3. To deliver something of value so that something good can happen, or something bad can be avoided
4. To retrieve something of value
5. To win, either the game, the competition or the love of another character

As you can see, there are no items that start with  “To understand…” or “To improve…”. Why? Because goals that involve feelings are, by definition, inner goals and while you certainly can (and must) have these as well, they cannot take the place of the outer goal. The outer goal is the thing that is visibly accomplished in the end of the story. It is what hooks the reader and carries them through to the end. If the reader cannot see it, he cannot attach to it and if he cannot attach to it, he probably won’t keep reading.

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!

Let me start by saying that if you didn’t read this WriteOnCon post about dialogue, you must go there immediately. Done? Okay.

The topics I choose for my blog are usually based on my current struggles (in writing, that is. No one wants to hear about what my cat did to the toilet). My latest one is with transitions between dialogue of different characters. For example, say you have this:

I held the hat out to Bob. “Is this yours?”

He shook his head. “I think it’s Jane’s.”

I returned it to the hook. “Oh. Thanks.”

In addition to being, perhaps, the most boring dialogue ever written, the problem with this is that it is very much like reading a game of ping-pong. We’re the MC, we’re Bob, we’re back to the MC.  This isn’t a problem if done occasionally but can get very tiring if done for long stretches of dialogue.

The other problem with this dialogue is that the tags are acting like bumps. It reads kind of like this:

BUMP. “Is this yours?”

BUMP. “I think it’s Jane’s.”

BUMP. “Oh. Thanks.”

So how can we fix this? Well, we can eliminate the tags all together (if they’re not necessary) or we can re-position them so the transition is, well, less bumpy. For example:

“Is this yours?” I said as I held the hat out to Bob. 

He shook his head. “I think it’s Jane’s.”

“Oh. Thanks.” I returned it to the hook.

The difference here is that, by putting the tags back to back, we’ve merged two bumps. It now reads more like.

 “Is this yours?” BUMP. BUMP. “I think it’s Jane’s.”

“Oh. Thanks.” BUMP.

And now, back to the cat.