Eric James Stone is a successful short story writer. You can read my review of his excellent “Like Diamond Tears From Emerald Eyes” here. Now, in Tips on Keeping Short Stories from Becoming Long Stories he shares excellent insights on how to keep those short stories from growing out of control. As someone whose stories always tend to go long, let me say that I know from experience that these tips work.
I had a terrific time preparing this for the 2020 StoryMakers conference. A number of people in the session wanted the slides. Here they are.
If you have questions, feel free to ask them in the comments or click the contact link above and send me an email directly.
Good luck!
“Blurbers” is so much more fun than “endorsers.” Stacy has sent the manuscript of Servant of a Dark God out to the first round of people who said they would give the story a go. If they find they’re in the audience, they’ll write up a blurb for it. This is all in preparation for the launch meeting in December when my editors go to bat for me and sell the book to the salespeople inside Tor.
While I hope the potential blurbers will all find themselves in the story’s audience, I do not assume it’s a given. If they’re not, I’m still a happy man (although a bit disappointed). There are many wildly successful tales that I myself am not in the audience for.
I expect we’ll get reactions back in a month or two. I’ll post here the results.
I can’t remember the last time I was this anxious. Yesterday I read Scott Card’s review of K.J. Parker’s stuff. All his business about great writers. And I’m thinking, holy heck. I’m a nothing. Just a little dude with this nothing book. And then I thought, what if none of these readers find they’re in the audience for the book? It’s one thing to send out a manuscript. You can always change, improve. But this is it. This is the book. It either soars or plops in the mud.
But then I read Mette Ivie Harrison’s first article on writing for IGMS and thought—you know what, I tell the stories I tell. While others may aspire to “greatness,” that’s not something I care to strive for. I want to write stories that entertain and move. And while I can learn how to write and tell better stories, they’re always going to be John Brown stories. If they plop, they plop. And I just have to forget all the greatness-everybody-must-love-me nonsense and write John Brown
I met Mette at Card’s boot camp in 2002. We’ve read each other’s manuscripts every once in a while. I respect her ideas, loved MIra, Mirror, and am grateful for that article. If you’re a writer, I recommend it to you highly.
Are you tired of being educated ABOUT writing?
Do you just want someone who knows what they’re doing help you do it?
Specifically, do you want to develop a killer story idea, outline it, and write the first 3 chapters with the guidance of a pro?
If so, then here’s your chance to vote to have me create a course that will do just that.
Read on for more information…
When you’re educated about something, you can talk about concepts and principles. You can recall facts. But most people I know don’t want to be educated about writing. They want more than another class, podcast, video, or book about the topic.
They want to be trained.
They want to develop a killer idea, sketch it out, and actually begin writing. Not just watch or read about it. But they want some help.
I’ve been asked many times if I would teach an online class or workshop, but I’ve put it off for years because I know that I don’t want to offer just another set of videos about writing.
Of course, I will offer just videos. That’s all some people want.
But I know there are others out there who want to go beyond that. They want on-the-job training. They want to develop a fun story, but don’t know the process well enough, and want someone who knows it to guide them.
They want training.
But training takes time. More than the time it takes to create videos or posts.
That’s what I do, by the way. When I’m not writing novels, I work in corporate America training people to actually do things. Over the last 20 years I’ve trained people to do everything from give compelling presentations and speak Dutch to plan and schedule manufacturing plants and close their accounting books at the end of a financial period.
And so I know there’s a difference between being educated about something and being trained.
Just think about it. Do you want a surgeon who has been educated about surgery or one that’s been trained to perform surgery at a mastery level? Do you want a plumber who has been educated about plumbing, or one that’s been trained to plumb? Do you want your airplane pilot to be educated about flying or trained to fly, in all sorts of weather?
Going to school and being educated is cool, awesome, and necessary. But we all know we have to go beyond that. We need to be able to actually DO things. Training requires you know concepts and principles, but it also requires you take the next step and actually do something.
I’m willing to provide this on-the-job training, but before I develop and conduct this course, I need to know enough people are interested in it for it to be worth my time (it would probably be more sensible for me to focus exclusively on getting the books I need to write out the door, but I love to teach too, and had to figure out a way to do it).
So here’s the test. If you want to take the class described below, sign up to express your interest.
This does not obligate you to anything. It simply says that you are almost 100% sure you want to take the class, barring earthquakes, plagues of demons, or crazy in-laws.
When enough people signup, I know it will be worth my time, and the love of teaching part of me will be able to convince the sensible part of me to do it.
And then I’ll do a Kickstarter to make it official. Or I may just develop and release. We shall see.
So, here’s more on the course.
The first order of business is to determine if this course is right for you.
Do you want to write a novel, but feel like you have no idea what you’re doing?
Do you often get ideas for a character or setting or snippets of scenes and dialogue, but find they just never go anywhere?
Are you tired of learning about writing, and just want someone who knows what they’re doing help you to do it?
If so, this class is for you.
This is not a theory class. Oh, we’ll talk about theory. You’re going to learn a ton of theory. But this isn’t about theory because I don’t care about theory. And neither, I suspect, do you. I care about developing an awesome story experience and sharing it with readers who enjoy it as much as I do.
So I’m not interested in talking about it. I’m interested in doing it. And having fun.
Which means that in this course you’re going to:
In order to do that, you will need to learn the secrets to:
These secrets and many more. But remember: this isn’t a course about secrets. It’s a course about you actually improving your ability to generate story ideas, develop them into ideas worthy of a novel, and then write them.
This means you need to not only produce, but also have someone who has the ability look at your work and guide you along. It means getting feedback.
So I will be there helping you every step of the way. And if you’re writing in a genre I don’t know as well, I will loop in working authors who are successful in that genre to add their two cents.
I started my novel writing career when I received a three-book, $50,000 deal from a major publisher. I am now an indie author with books that sell thousands of copies each year to readers all over the world. I’ve had publishers purchase and produce my books in audio. I’ve sold story rights to foreign publishers. I love developing and telling stories. And I love teaching others how to do the same.
But when I started, years before that novel contract, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know where to start stories, how to develop them, or even where they were supposed to end. And I didn’t have anyone to really help me. In fact, I remember asking one of my creative writing professors after class how you knew where to end your story. He looked at me, shrugged, and said, “I don’t know. I just end them.”
What the heck?
It was all a vast mystery. I loved stories, but I was clueless about what they were, how they worked, and how someone went about developing and writing one. I had a lot of fun, enjoyed my writing teachers (they were all great people), but I was never able to write something that hung together and felt like something you’d see in a movie or read in a book.
But that didn’t discourage me. I kept at it. And over the years, I made a number of breakthroughs.
What I discovered was that there are three things you must learn to write killer stories. You must learn:
In this class, you’re going to learn those three things and the key principles for each, saving yourself all the frustration and discouragement that comes from trying to discover these insights by stumbling around on your own in the dark. With this class, you can cut years off the time it takes to learn how to write.
When you know these three things, you will be able to write stories on purpose, instead of by accident. You will have power over your craft.
You will see that instead of trying to remember a list of hundreds of “writing rules” or use “writing formulas,” many of which are nonsense, you’ll write by focusing on the simple and fundamental heart of what storytelling is all about.
Below is a more detailed view of the course. My lessons are called quests because I’m expecting you to actually do something, not just watch.
As you can see, in this course you aren’t going to just hear someone go on about theory. You’re going to define your type of story, surprise yourself by developing at least 10 solid story ideas that beg to be written (by you). Then you’ll select one of those ideas, sketch an outline, and write the first three chapters, all under my guidance, using the same practical, simple methods I use.
Most important of all, you’ll actually stop thinking about writing and be well on your way to finishing your novel with a clear path to the end.
Instead of dreaming about someday, you’ll enjoy the excitement of writing a novel right now.
The cost of the course depends on what you want:
Having said that, you need to know that this class is not for everyone. If you are not willing to actually make time to do the work I ask, you will find no benefit.
How much time will you need to spend?
With all of the videos, reading, and development you’ll do, you should expect to take 30-40 hours. You can move through it at your own pace, but I strongly suggest you spend at least five hours per week. Any less than that, and you’re going to find it very difficult to keep your creativity hot enough to make dinner.
Also, if possible, I recommend you take the course with a friend. You will progress so much more quickly when you discuss the lessons and insights and bounce your ideas off of each other.
If you want to just watch the videos, that’s perfectly fine. If you want to actually develop a story and learn on the job, then you have to make time to do this awesome thing, just as you would if you wanted to learn how to dance, quilt, race cars, rappel, or paraglide.
So if you aren’t in a position to make the time, I understand. Please don’t sign up.
But if you’re interested, then click below to raise your hand as someone who is definitely interested. Once I see there are enough people interested, you’ll get the class.
If you’re interested, let me know by filling out the form below.
This does not obligate you to anything. It simply says that you are almost 100% sure you want to take the class, barring earthquakes, plagues of demons, or crazy in-laws.
One of the things I enjoy about being an author are the emails I receive from readers. A few months ago I received one from Mr. Edward Bear. He’d purchased Servant and, as he was reading, found an unclosed dialogue quote.
Mr. Bear could have simply noted it and read on. But he did not. Mr. Bear is a proofreader. And so he practiced a bit of wizardry, found that I had a handful of quote goofs, and emailed them to me.
Many of them ended up being weird smart quote issues Word introduced into the text when I broke a line of dialogue with an action like this: “You will not”–he scratched his nose angrily–“share another pair of my panty hose with that woman!”
You’d think that would be enough for a doughty reader. But Mr. Bear didn’t just notify me of the errors. Oh, no. He also included the page from his proofreader’s grimoire that allowed him to find those quote issues in a matter of minutes in the first place.
As soon as I had the time, I tested the spell on Bad Penny, and, voila, in a matter of a few minutes found a couple of issues in that text. I was delighted.
But Mr. Bear wasn’t satisfied with mere delight. He then sent me another page from that grimoire to help with spelling. We luvs wizardly readers, Precious.
Copy editing and proofreading require patience, painstaking reading, and a knowledge of what to look for. You have to know not only the mechanics of the written word (capitalization, spelling grammar, syntax, punctuation, abbreviations, usage, etc.) but also, if you’re reading for a printed edition, interior formatting (widows, orphans, word or hyphen stacks, headers, and so forth). There’s a lot to it. And anything that speeds up the process and minimizes errors is welcome.
If you’re contracting your proofreading out, a cleaner copy can also translate into lower rates. Knowing that many of you who visit this website are writers, and because your host’s generosity knows no bounds, I asked Mr. Bear if he might be willing to share his wizardry with you. The wizard responded with a yes.
By Edward Bear I’m Ed Bear. I work, both professionally and otherwise, as a proofreader. I’ve gone over books for my publisher and I’ve done scan/OCR/check against paper books for republication, both electronic and back-to-treeware. When I mentioned some of the “ancillary tools” I have for aiding the work, John offered me this guest post slot in his blog. Feel free to pass this stuff around. I’ve found these techniques invaluable in getting the job done faster, and with better quality.
First, though, I need to tell you about the tools themselves. The biggest component is the software for electronic text editing. However, I’m NOT talking Word or anything like that. I’m talking about an editing program which can a: work with plain text and b: handle Regular Expressions. (What are those, some of you ask? I’ll get to that.)
Since I’m a windows user, I have two such programs available. My favorite is a program called TextPad (www.textpad.com). I’ve used it for years and it’s become invaluable to my work. They currently charge $28 for a single user license, but IMO, the program’s so useful that, even though upgrades are free, I buy another license every time they bring out a new major release. The other program is free. It’s called NotePad++ (http://notepad-plus-plus.org/) I’ve tested it and it can handle the methods I use, but I haven’t used it much, since TextPad and I are long-time buddies. If anybody out there knows a program for the Macintosh which will do these jobs, please mention it in the comments.
You don’t have to be a wizard to use them. The tutorial over at http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html describes them elegantly: “Basically, a regular expression is a pattern describing a certain amount of text.” They are also called a regexp or regex, and I’ll be including the regexes I use in this post.
I have a small library of regexes, and two of them are critical to aiding the proofreading process. One of them allows checking dialogue quotemarks, to insure that speech is properly closed off, and the other makes it possible to generate a word list of each unique word in the book. I’ll be walking through the usage, including screenshots.
One of the challenges of checking dialogue passages is that, with one exception, every opening quote (“) needs to have its matching closing quote (”). The exception, of course, is when the same character is speaking in the next paragraph. This can lead to a heavy false positive load if the characters are loquacious.
The first time I tried this stunt, I found 73 paragraphs with unbalanced quotes. Only 6 of them were errors. But being able to find them quickly so they could be fixed in minutes instead of hours? That paid for the effort.
The process itself is simple: You take the document and convert it to plain text. If it’s an RTF or Word document, you simply select ALL, hit copy, and paste it into Textpad. The result will look something like this:
What I normally do is turn on word wrap, so I can see the whole paragraphs as I go. So it looks like this:
Now, we go hunting. The next step is to set up the search pattern using a regex. The one I use for this is the following: (?!^([^“”\r\n]++|“[^“”\r\n]*”)*$)^.+ Complicated little brute, isn’t it. I didn’t write it, but I knew who to ask if he could write one, and the above is the result. FYI, there’s also one for straight quotes: (?!^([^”\r\n]++|”[^”\r\n]*”)*$)^.+ You use it the same way. So go into find, and put the regex into the “Find what:” box:
Notice that the “Regular expression” box is checked. I also “Wrap searches” just in case I miss something and want to loop around. Click “Find Next” and:
The paragraph highlighted has two opening quotes, one at the beginning and one at the end. Word assumes that a quote preceded by a space is an opening quote, so you need to correct it in your RTF/DOC. Wash, rinse, repeat. You keep doing “find next” all the way through, checking for situations like the following:
As I said, same speaker, next paragraph, so this one is good. This post is getting a little long for a blog entry, what with illustrations, so I’ll break off here. Stay tuned for part two: checking spelling and spelling consistency. In the meantime, here are the RegEx tool commands plus a few bonus goodies: RegExToolCommands.
In the last part in this series we discussed the idea that readers don’t want your characters to be happy. They want them to hunted, stressed, threatened, freaked, and nigh unto some horrible fate for 90% of the novel. At that point, after all that trouble, readers want the characters to pull victory out of the jaws of defeat, exhale a big sigh of relief, and enjoy a Slurpee . . . until the next book in the series.
All through the big worry, readers don’t want to know what WILL happen. They want to know or suspect what MIGHT happen and HOPE and FEAR about those possibilities. And then they want a cathartic resolution of all that hope and fear, all that dramatic tension they have felt.
But our readers won’t hope and fear for just anyone. They will only hope and fear for those characters who evoke sympathy and interest. And so the second set of Pareto factors focus on the things, the conditions, that do this.
Sympathy starts when we see someone in trouble. That’s not the only thing that’s required. Some people who are in terrible trouble only evoke pity or even antipathy. So there’s more to this than trouble, but trouble is where sympathy starts. So what kind of trouble are we talking about? I like the categories James Scott Bell uses. We feel sympathy for people who are:
When someone is in jeopardy, it means some significant aspect of their happiness is being threatened. Hum, sounds suspiciously like the first type of story problem I discussed in the last post, doesn’t it? That’s because it is. We have sympathy for people who are being threatened with death, slavery, drudgery, etc. We’re just wired for it. Likewise, we feel for someone experiencing a hardship. And a “hardship” is simply someone having to deal with a lack, the second type of problem we discussed. So we begin to evoke reader sympathy by just giving our characters significant problems to deal with.
And you can pile the problems on so that not only does our hero have to deal with the central problem of the story, but maybe he’s also broke and has nothing but one box of macaroni and cheese in the cupboard, or his car just got repossessed, or he’s just been dumped by his girlfriend, or he and his daughter are estranged because his ex-wife is pouring poison in her ear, or he breaks his arm, or he works in an awful job.
Do you remember Peter Parker in Spiderman 2? He gets fired from his pizza job, has no money, is losing his girl. Lots of hardship. And lots of reader sympathy.
But giving characters problems is not quite enough. Because if you recall, the readers want to fear for our characters. Nobody fears too much for someone else if we know that they can easily resolve any threat or hardship that comes their way. And so we need to stack the odds against the character. They need to be underdogs.
This means that the opposition starts off two steps ahead. It means they have more power, more resources, or more information. This is why strong antagonists make strong stories—they help the reader to fear for our protagonists.
Who worries about a Superman who is a hunk of burning love? Nobody. Unless he’s actually Clark Kent in other matters and stands to lose something like Lois. Or, when he is Superman, someone hangs kryptonite around his neck and turns him into a dweeb.
In this same vein, our characters need to be vulnerable. This means they can be squashed at any time. They can be shot, killed, ruined. Until the very end, the reader must know the characters can lose big. In the previous post, I said that problems have to be hard to solve, otherwise readers don’t worry. The things that make problems hard to solve are character limitations, ongoing and increasing troubles, conflicts, and surprises. All of those factors make characters vulnerable as well.
So, threaten your characters will all sorts of things, give them hardships, make them vulnerable underdogs, and we’ll feel sympathy for them.
Or will we?
There are some characters with problems who we don’t want to root for. Instead, we hope they fail. Villains, for example, have problems, but we root against them with vigor. In our minds, these folks deserve to fail. So you can’t rely on problem alone. There’s another quality that your characters must evoke if we’re going to hope and fear for them.
That other quality is deservingness.
All of us have an automatic scale of justice inside of us. We can’t turn it off. Nor can we ignore it. It’s very simple. If someone’s bad outweighs their good, then we think they don’t deserve good things. Conversely, if someone’s good outweighs their bad, we think they should be happy.
Don’t believe me? Fine, let’s test it.
A boy breaks his arm and he whines, whines, whines about it all day long. Tells his teachers he can’t do his school work because of it. Mopes at home in front of the TV. Steals his sister’s money to buy candy because he has this awful injury and he deserves it. Maybe he makes all his friends listen to him talk about how hard it is, and he just goes on and on and on.
You know exactly what you’re thinking. You know exactly how much sympathy you have for him, which is none.
Another boy has a broken arm. But this one doesn’t whine. In fact, when his dad falls ill, he goes out and with the one good arm, and in pain, mucks out the horse stalls. He does this because his dad was going to lose his job if he didn’t. Then the boy comes back in and cleans himself up and doesn’t say a thing.
You like that second boy? You want good things for him?
Of course, you do.
Problems aren’t enough. They’re only half the equation. For us to root for someone, we have to feel they’re deserving. Or if you like the term better, you can say they need to be “likeable.”
So what makes someone deserving or likeable?
That’s going to be slightly different for each person because our moral codes are all slightly different. If you feel it’s a sin to kill animals, you might feel conflicted reading a story about a rancher who needs to get his cattle to slaughter. If you feel unions do nothing but harm, you might throw down a book that’s about a union boss trying to force a corporation into compliance. Nevertheless, there are many virtues and vices that people hold in common. Usually, we feel people are deserving if they weigh more on the one side of the table below than they do the other.
| Deserving / Likeable | Not Deserving / Unlikeable |
|
|
We tend to like people more who show the characteristics on the left side. We tend to dislike people who show the characteristics on the right side.
Notice, a lot of this has to do with motive. In many instances it isn’t just the act that decides us for or against someone. It’s the act + the reason why they did it. Let’s go back to that example of the kid with the broken arm that mucked out the horse stall. We’ll love him if he made that sacrifice out of selflessness. We’ll feel something different if he does it only because it allows him to hide his and his father’s crime (maybe they killed someone and have temporarily stashed the body in the barn under the muck in a stall).
Furthermore, while we need to make the characters we want our readers to root for deserving, this doesn’t mean they have to be paragons of virtue. Remember that deservingness is weighed on a scale. Just as long as the characters tip the scales one way, we will feel they’re deserving. On the other hand, if they cross the line the other way, we’ll turn against them.
For example, let’s say your lead character is a thief who steals money from retired folks. But in your story she’s trying to save a kid from being kidnapped and sold into the sex slave trade. Yeah, our character may be a thief, but what she’s doing outweighs the bad, and we’re going to root for her.
Now let’s make our lead a child molester. He’s trying to capture a brutal drug cartel murderer who has just escaped prison. Along the way he has his way with a few children.
Who are you rooting for this time?
Yeah, me too. I hope the murderer finds the child molester and offs him. Or at least alerts the authorities to his crime and ties him up in a neat package for them to pick up.
So you don’t have to have perfect people as your leads. In fact, it’s sometimes more interesting to have someone with foibles just like the rest of us. But when those foibles turn into things we find despicable, we’ll turn against those characters.
And vice versa. For those of you who have read or watched Pride & Prejudice, did you notice how you rooted against Mr. Darcy when we interpreted his actions as smug condescension? The moment he changed, and we learned of it, we cheered for him. It was all a matter of deservingness.
If we want to hope and fear for our characters, they need troubles. But they also need to weigh in on the deserving side of our scale of justice. When they do, they become admirable, likeable, heroic.
In fact, heroes, the ones that make us stand up and cheer, are those people that put their own happiness at risk to do the “right” thing. They’re the very embodiment of deservingness.
So make your characters admirable in some way, if only just a little bit.
For more on the topic of deservingness, read How Inequity and Deservingness Propel Readers Through Story.
Still, we’re not done yet. We might have characters who are completely deserving, but they are so boring we can’t muster any interest in them. And that brings us to the third Pareto factor.
We want to hope and fear for a character for 90% of the novel. But will you stick around if the characters are utterly boring? Probably not. So you want to make your characters interesting. Heck, sometimes we don’t need much of a problem, but will read about someone just because they’re so dang interesting. Character interest is a key factor in a reader’s enjoyment of your story. It one of the things that produces the biggest bang for the buck.
The question is: what makes a character interesting? The answer: the same things that make real people interesting.
You’ll want to make your own list of things that make people interestings because what rocks you might not rock me, but I’ll share the types of things that spark my interest in other people below.
Your characters don’t have to exhibit all of the traits listed, but you might want to think of giving them at least one or three of them.
People who have power draw our interest. That power may be one of many varieties:
People with extraordinary skills or talents draw our interest. It’s why, in fantasies, we’re so interested in those that can actually practice magic. In fact, ability is a type of power. And just like those with the other types of power, these folks evoke wonder, respect, and sometimes awe.
The skills and abilities you’re interested in may differ from mine, but we are fascinated by those who can do things well or have some gift. Maybe they are expert at selling, or making money, or framing a house, or painting, or doing gymnastics, or reading, or hacking into computers, or skydiving, or firing weapons, or riding horses, or hunting, or getting people to like them, or making pancakes, or a thousand other things. Maybe, like Edna Mode in The Incredibles, they have the ability to design amazing super-hero outfits.
Even though your characters have limitations that prevent them from immediately solving the problem they face, you can still give them some kind of an ability that makes them admirable to us. Some gift or talent. And maybe it helps them solve the problem in the end.
People who are uncommon in some way draw our interest. In fact, if you think about those with power and ability, you see that they possess this quality as well. However, you don’t always need power and ability to be extraordinary.
Maybe you’re a normal guy in an extraordinary job. You’re a CIA officer, a smuggler, or a spy. Maybe you raise wolves or are a bounty hunter. Or you hunt bears with a pack of dogs and a horse. Or maybe you have some other uncommon hobby.
You might argue that these are special skills. They are. But who says my categories can’t overlap? Still they don’t have to be extraordinary in that way. Maybe you simply have extraordinary experience. You fought in a war, escaped prison, were a bank robber at one time. Or maybe you’re just outrageous, bizarre, eccentric, odd, or have some exaggerated quirk.
Maybe you’re a loud-talker, a mumbler, a guy who takes his three parrots with him where ever he goes, a farmer who loves pies. Maybe you’re super thin. Or a cab driver with glasses so thick his passengers immediately wonder if they’ll arrive alive. Maybe you have squeaky shoes. Or are always dressed to the nines and smell of lemons. Maybe you’re one of these people that walk around in their sleep or hold loud conversations with ghosts. Or you’re a coffee freak and drink a pint of black mud each day. Maybe you just have an uncommon name like the folks in the Netherlands who surname is, no lie, Born Naked.
Sometimes these extraordinary things affect the plot. Sometimes they don’t. The point is that the extraordinary captures our attention. When you’re inventing your characters, add something extraordinary. You’ll be surprised at how much more interesting they are to you.
People who are beautiful capture our attention. In movies we see a million bits of information at once. We can see the beauty and respond. But we can’t do that in text. And so we have to evoke the image of beauty in the reader’s mind. A few key details and the way others react to them should be enough.
Now you might think beauty is a superficial method for generating interest, but I think it’s a manifestation of something else more fundamental. If you think about a lot of the interest factors we’ve discussed so far–having special power, wealth, ability, or beauty–they all have a common element running through them. That element is wish-fulfillment.
We cannot help but be interested in characters who are, do, or have things we want. In fact, this is one of the main draws of fiction–experiencing something wonderful or cool, even if it’s vicariously. Phyllis Pianka states this so well in How to Write Romances:
“You cannot write an engrossing romance novel until you create a heroine the reader wants to identify with and a hero the reader can fall in love with . . . they are idealized; the heroine is someone women would like to emulate: nicer, prettier, thinner, more intelligent, though not necessarily all of those things. She will have a flaw but it will be a minor one . . . the hero is the ideal lover and husband and father . . . Above all, he must be the man with whom every woman would like to fall in love [bold font added for emphasis]” (30).
A lead you’d like to be like in some way. A hero you could fall in love with. Or at least feel attracted to. Remember, readers are hoping and fearing for the characters. How can readers hope for a woman to enter a committed relationship if the readers feel the man is completely unattractive, physically or emotionally? How can we males root for the man if we feel the same about the female character? It doesn’t mean they have to be perfect. Wish-fulfillment, like many things in writing, slides along a scale. But we’ll be more interested as readers the more we can participate in the same attraction and desire.
Someone might be thinking this is just for love stories, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. What’s one of the reasons why James Bond and all the other action heroes are so popular? Among other things, it’s because so many of us would love to live the adventures those heroes do. We would love to be the types of guys who know how to fight like Jack Reacher and get to use all the high-tech the gizmos and drive the deluxe cars. How many YA stories are about characters finding fairies or dragons or aliens? How much of fantasy is about having the powers magic grants? Wouldn’t it be cool! Of course. That’s wish-fulfillment.
So when developing a character, we can think of things we’d like to be, do, or have and give those things, or the opportunity for them, to our characters. Make them admirable or desireable in some way. Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t give your characters flaws, or that you can’t write about someone we wouldn’t want to be like. Our readers don’t have to want to be like our characters in every way, but a little bit of wish-fulfillment helps. It’s something to consider.
Also, as with anything, what’s desireable to you might not be what’s desireable to me. Maybe I’m interested in anyone who has served in the armed forces or lives with some kind of risk and adventure. Maybe you can’t stand that and are enthralled instead with horses. Maybe you’d like to fly airplanes, but I’d love to fly dragons. One guy is drawn to those with happy marriages full of laughter. Another is drawn to the freedom of single life. You write your stories, and I’ll write mine. But we can both make our characters more interesting by adding, when it fits, some element of wish-fulfillment.
We love humor. Love to laugh. And so anytime you can create a character that does this to the audience, they will be interested in them. It might be our characters have witty lines or comments. Maybe they’re humorous types or find themselves in humorous situations.
One note. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that making a character interesting will make them deserving or admirable. Humor, just like beauty, can be given to characters we root against. Maybe the character is funny, but it’s a cruel funny. Maybe the character is mind-stealing beautiful, but they use their beauty for terrible purposes. Sympathy and interest are different things.
Anyone who poses a threat demands our interest. This is one of the reasons why Darth Vader is so interesting. Criminals present threats of all sorts, which is why we’re always interested in them. Recall, however, that many aspects of happiness can be threatened. It doesn’t have to be a threat to life, limb, or property. For example, someone may threaten my relationship to my wife or my belonging to a group or community.
We’re also interested in those who are in danger. This ties back to the first story element of problem. In fact, the problem might be so interesting and threatening that we could cast anyone in the role and readers would go along with them. Do you really remember the leads in Jurassic Park, for instance? There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with a plain vanilla character. In fact, that might be exactly what your story needs. However, I would still see if it doesn’t improve things to make your character interesting outside the context of the story problem. If you do, you just might end up with an Indiana Jones.
We love mysteries. And so sometimes it’s wonderful to give characters secrets. It might be they present a bit of danger or have something to hide as Aragorn does when we first meet him in The Lord of the Rings. Or maybe they have a past they don’t like to talk about. Either way, we love to wonder about them and then have our questions answered in surprising ways. We like it even better when these secrets affect the deservingness of the character or our understanding of the situation the character faces.
We are intrigued by characters who play against type, if only a little. So maybe you have a plumber who quotes Shakespeare or William Blake to his customers. Maybe you have a mixed martial arts fighter who is a woman with three kids. Maybe the hero has a fear of spiders. Or the villain is a magnificent artist or tends lovingly to his bees or his daughter. Maybe the super rich businessman secretly goes to poor neighborhoods to find folks to help. Maybe the bearded and tattooed biker carries around a Book of Mormon and reads it during quiet moments. Maybe, like Michael in the series Burn Notice, the super spy loves yogurt. Anything that runs against, or just doesn’t fit, our expectations of the type. This includes motives as well as external character tags.
Finally, because we almost always deal with a cast of people in our stories, we need to make sure they’re interesting as a group. You will increase reader interest if you give each character some memorable and interesting trait, but you’ll get the most bang for the buck if you make those traits different.
For example, let’s say you have a team of characters who need to go behind enemy lines to find and dismantle a radar station. If every one of those team members is exactly the same–all wise-cracking blond farm boys from Oklahoma–we might find it funny and odd at first, but it will soon lose its appeal as they all say and do the same things. Compare this to a group where one is a silent-but-deadly farmer, another is a metaphysical mechanic, a third is a short woman’s man, the fourth is a wise-cracking American Indian. Maybe one joined the ARMY because he’s got first person shooter games dancing in his eyes, another because his father was a military man, another is there to conduct some kind of criminal heist, the fourth because he’s poor and needed help getting through college and supporting his wife and kid.
I know, I know, you women are probably saying the tall blond farm boys might not be all that bad. But after you finish oogling them, think of this: your readers might not all be into farm boys. Did you ever wonder why boy bands have a variety of types–the serious one, the good one, the bad one, the cutie? It’s because it broadens the appeal to a wider audience.
But it goes beyond that. Variety also avoids the problem of diminishing marginal utility. This is simply the idea that the more you experience something, the less power each experience provides. For example, the first time you hear a great joke it may be gut-busting funny. By the time you’ve heard it ten times the joke has probably lost its appeal. Imagine eating a meal that’s nothing but salmon or broccoli or fried okra or ice cream. Eventually, after twenty dishes of cheese, you will go blind. The same thing occurs with characters. This is why it’s always more powerful to have one villain instead of a hundred of them. One wise-cracking American Indian is awesome. Fifteen of them only water down the effect so that none of them are as powerful as the one could be all by herself.
And it doesn’t end there. There’s an even more important reason for giving your cast variety: it opens up possiblity for more conflict, surprise, and story. Maybe one of the lead’s team members turns traitor. Maybe one of the bad guys is thinking about doing his boss in. With some variety, you can not only write about the main problem, but you also add in subplots–a love story or a redemption plot. And both can complicate the central problem.
Vareity adds interest. Develop your characters–the major, minor, and bit roles, folks that help our lead and others who hinder or oppose them–but also develop them with an eye towards the effect of the cast as a whole.
Our readers want to hope and fear for our characters. They want to feel sympathy. But they also want to be delighted and awed by them. They want to feel admiration for them. They want to laugh at and with them. These are some of the key joys of the experience they come to us for.
The way we deliver this is by giving our characters troubles, letting them demonstrate they deserve to be rooted for, and making them interesting.
But we’re not done yet. Right now we’ve only talked about the problem and the character. That’s just the beginning. Remember, readers want to hope and fear and then feel a cathartic release. But you can’t feel catharsis if your worries don’t build up to a certain point, if they aren’t extended.
Form follows function.
Think about the itch deep down in your cast that builds and builds and builds over days. It’s amazing when you finally scratch it. Think about the time you couldn’t drink or eat for a day or two and how hungry or thirsty you were. Think about how good it felt to finally satisfy that tension. The experience of eating after a fast is so different from the one when you eat when you’re still mostly full.
You need to make your readers hungry for a release. They want to be hungry. And that takes time. So while a six-hundred word piece of flash fiction can evoke some emotion, it’s nothing compared to the emotion and experience a 100,000 word novel can deliver. Because 100,000 word novels allow you to build the reader’s hunger, their tension, their hope and fear, to a sharp point.
You build this tension with plot. And that will be the next post in the series.
In the meantime, if you think of other things that make characters interesting or sympathetic, specific examples of the factors I’ve talked about, or have questions, please post them in the comments.
A lot of the factors listed above that make characters interesting have to do with them being larger than life. If you want to read more on this, Orson Scott Card devotes a whole chapter to it in his wonderful book Characters & Viewpoint.
For those interested in exploring the factors that lead to sympathy, let me recommend Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. That link will take you the wiki about the book. At the bottom of that wiki are links to the actual text.
Where do you get your ideas? How do you turn them into story?
Those are fabulous questions. The answer is a bit longer than I have time for today. But I have posted my list of idea generation methods, structured ways of performing creative Q&A.
These have been collected over the years from a number of sources and are now passed on to you, faithful reader. Use them, cherish them, and, if you wish, start an order of crazed monks to preserve the fabulous secrets.
John Browns’s Idea Generation Method List
Enjoy!
