Group Hug: Writing From the End

The Three and I had our last writing group of the school year last week, so it seemed appropriate to talk about The End and specifically getting past whatever blocks you have to get to the end of a story you're writing. And since we were talking about writing to the end, I thought it'd be fun to write from the end in our writing exercise.

First we warmed up by writing from the beginning. I offered The Three a set of opening dialogue options (from the random dialogue generator of my favorite random writing stuff generator):

• "You don't think that was just lemonade in your glass, do you?"
• "H-how long have you been standing there?"
• "She's old, and it's about time she died."
• "If you leave now, you lose everything."
• "I knew you wouldn't be able to see it through."
• "He was unconscious when I found him."

Be safe: Squeeze your own lemons.

The Three chose "You don't think that was just lemonade in your glass, do you?" and (after a lively discussion about the grammatical issues in that sentence—I totally la-la these girls) we spent 10 minutes writing the story that starts with that line. Amazing, there was not a death in every story written. Of course, some of the stories had more than one death, so it all averaged out in the end.

After we talked about Getting to the End of a story as a writer, it was time to write again. This time, The Three chose to write from "She's old, and it's about time she died." What I didn't tell them until after they had chosen it was that we weren't going to write from the beginning; we were going to write from the end. They had to write to the piece of dialogue instead of from it.

More death ensued. Of course.

Getting to the End

You might have noticed it’s a lot easier to start a story than to finish one. You’ve got a cast of fascinating characters and an exciting beginning, and you might even know the tragic end it all comes to. But somewhere along the way you get lost.

The Secret of Getting to the End

Here’s the big secret: Write a story you want to finish and decide to finish it. End of blog.

Yeah, yeah; of course that’s not the end of the blog. Because it’s really not that simple, is it? What happens when you hit a wall? You have to figure out how to break through it.

Problem: You’re Bored

If you’re bored with your character or plot, your reader probably will be, too. You know what bores you? Boring things. Duh, right?

I don't know about you, but I'd
find something else to do, too.

So what do you do when you’re bored? First you complain to your mom. Then she tells you she bets that cleaning a toilet would solve that problem real quick. Then you go and find something to make you unbored, because you definitely don’t want to clean the toilet.

So when you’re bored with your characters, find something to make them un-boring.

• Give a character an obsession or an interest. Make it something that seems, on the surface, out of character. How does that change how she behaves?
• Change a relationship. Maybe your characters are bored with each other. Maybe they need to break up or betray someone or reveal a secret.
• Change what happened last. If your protagonist succeeded at something, have her fail—or vice versa.
• Introduce danger. Maybe your characters are too safe. Hurt or threaten them. If something bad has already happened, make it worse.
• Get rid of what bores you. Go back to the last point in the story that excited you. Read forward, find that spot where you start to get bored and make something bad happen.
• Change something elemental. Maybe Brunhilda isn’t the right name for your character. Maybe Marcy is better. Or Skydancer. Maybe she doesn’t live in a faceless suburb but in a downtown building that’s about to be knocked down.

Skydancer is too happy. She needs to live here.

Problem: You Don’t Know What Happens Next

Everything’s going along swimmingly, but you suddenly realize you have no idea what’s going to happen next. You can use any of the tactics above to introduce complications, but you can also try something more structural.

• Skip ahead. If you know what happens further in the plot, go ahead and write that. Maybe that will help you figure out how to get there, or maybe it will just help you bury your head in the sand until later. (Warning: This is an editing-heavy approach.
• Trash your last scene. Even if it was working for you, temporarily discard the last scene you wrote, go back to the scene before it and head in a totally different direction.
• Go back to the beginning. Do you have enough conflict and characters for the long haul? Increase the stakes or add new characters who can cause trouble.
• Write from the end. If you know how everything ends up, start there and work your way backward.

Problem: You’ve Lost Heart

See, isn't outside better?

What if you find yourself bored with your characters and your plot and at a loss about what happens next? This is where you have to get outside your story and outside your house.

By getting outside of your story, I mean explore the world of your story in a way that doesn’t directly add to word count:

• Make a scrapbook. Go online and collect pictures that look like characters, locations or things in your story. Find your protagonist’s favorite hat or a special piece of jewelry. Immerse yourself in the physical details of your story’s world.
• Create a soundtrack. Find a song or put together a whole playlist of songs that reminds you of your story in some way. Listen to it over and over until you get into the mood. 
• Write an unseen scene. Write something outside the scope of your story: a scene from another character’s point of view; a letter from one character to another; a poem about or by one of your characters.

Cranky Rah likes the new flat white
from Starbuck's. Decaf, because she's
kinda...jumpy.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for your writing, though, is to not write. Go for a walk. Take a shower. Get out of the space you’re in, and let your brain breathe. Meet up with a friend who’s willing to listen to you go on for a while about your story. (Buy her a tasty drink while you’re at it.) Getting someone else excited about your story will get you excited.

Let It Go…Let It Go…

What if, despite everything you’ve tried, nothing you do brings your story back to life? First, just take a break. Work on something else for a while, then come back to your story in a couple of weeks and look at it with fresh eyes. If even that doesn’t leave you feeling like Dr. Frankenstein—“It’s alive! It’s alive!”—then it’s probably time to let it go.

It happens to the best of us, but don’t let it get you down. Everything you write, even the things you don’t finish—sometimes especially the things you don’t finish—make you a stronger writer. Just keep at it, and keep everything you write. Old writing is great for two things: proof that you’re getting better—and a good laugh right when you need one.

Welcome, The Further Four

Dude, Buzz Aldrin is so cool.

Cranky Rah and the Poet-Accountant la-la the Space Race. We love the autobiographies of Jim Lovell (he of Apollo 13 and "Houston, we have a problem."), Scott Carpenter (For Spacious Skies) and Gene Cernan (The Last Man on the Moon). We think Chris Hadfield's book An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth is the bomb (and, yes, we do talk like that). We've even read Flight Director Gene Kranz's Failure is Not an Option (the Apollo 13 disaster may not have landed men on the moon, but it gave us some great quotes).

(Full Disclosure: Cranky Rah had to skim more of Gene Kranz's book than she would like to admit. He speaks engineering like poets speak love.)

We watch the movie Apollo 13 (again) (and again), and every time we watch it, we think, "Hey, maybe we should watch From the Earth to the Moon again, too." Cuz, hey, it's easy to fit 12 hours of an HBO miniseries into our crazy lives. Like, who needs sleep when you can watch a docudrama about astronauts? Not we.

This is why, when my daughter (hereafter known as R) protested at her new writing group being called The Wees (okay, it does sound a little like what you do when you drink a lot of tea), I turned to NASA nomenclature to help me come up with a new name. First, there was the Mercury Seven (John Glenn and company, the first Americans into space). Then the New Nine (or Next Nine or Nifty Nine—one name wasn't enough for those men who were going to walk on the moon). So welcome to The Further Four.

The Mercury 7 (not the Cranky
Rah 7), compliments of NASA

The Further Four (put their initials together, and you get something that sounds like a medical scan: ECRG) are 12-ish and, like The Three, they love to write. Unlike The Three, they're really at the very beginning of their writing journey, so when we got together for the first time on Monday, I wanted to start out simple.

Maybe you know about the Five Ws from journalism or school writing: Who, What, Where, When and Why. (There are those who throw in How, too. Which starts with an H, not a W. And which is kind of covered in the actual Ws, so I left it out.) Anyway, the Five Ws aren't just for steely-eyed, ambulance-chasing journalists. Every good story—fiction or non—should answer the Five Ws.

Who?

Who are the people your story is about? These are your characters.

What?

What happens to your characters? This is your plot.

Where?

Where do your characters live? Where do the Whats happen to your characters?

When?

When do the Whats happen to your characters? This isn't just the year or era your story takes place; it includes the time of year, time of day and the age of your characters. It covers the timeline of your story, too: Does it happen over one hour, one month or many years?

Why?

Why do the Whats happen? What leads from one What to another? And why do your characters behave the way they do? This is also called motive.

The Five Ws of Anger

Look at Ben. See? He hates
losing an hour, too.

Any good meeting of writers at Cranky Rah's cave must include playing around with whatever we're talking about. So to explore the Five Ws, The Further Four and I each created a character to write about, using the same Apples to Apples approach The Three and I used last week. (Cranky Rah might not like Ben Franklin when he steals an hour from her every spring, but she's a firm believer in "waste not, want not.") 

E got the adjective crunchy, which was awesome. It was a great chance to talk about how crunchy could be a physical trait or a character trait.

After we had each created and shared our character, we all wrote again, this time putting the character in a scene that answered the other four Ws. My one requirement was that the character had to be angry in the scene. 

We ended up with characters with crunchy hair who had had a very bad day, a nasty, thumb-sucking girl, and an angry pink shark who kind of regretted losing his temper and eating all his dolphin friends. So all in all, a productive writing day.

Talking the Talk: Dialogue

“Why should I bother with dialogue?” she raged.

Oxford University, home of
the Oxford comma.
Oxford also expelled the
poet Shelley. Boo, hiss.

This is a joke. How boring would a story be if no one ever spoke? Like setting, plot and foreshadowing, dialogue is part of any good story. 

Cranky Rah is desperate to go over the Rules of Punctuation for Dialogue. (Cranky Rah thinks punctuation is the bomb, but don’t get her started on the Oxford comma. She’s against it.) Fortunately for you, though, Cranky Rah doesn't have space in this post because there are too many other groovy points to hit on about dialogue. So consider yourself reprieved.

Okay, not really. There are two things I have to mention with regard to the technical aspects of dialogue: dialogue tags.

1. Please use said, mostly. As in "Father's dead," Nikki said. Nikki doesn't need to shriek it or mutter it or rage it. Okay, she can, occasionally. But usually, she should just say it. Show passion (or lack thereof) through the words a character says, not the dialogue tag.
2. And pretty, pretty please don't write "Father's dead," Nikki sneered. You can't sneer (or grimace or grin) words. You can sneer while speaking, but sneer is an expression, not a sound. Pretty, pretty please.

“Dialogue is so rocking!” she gushed.

The gushing joy Rah feels about
dialogue (and punctuation).

Cranky Rah has been known to disregard her own advice. In this case, she must gush because dialogue is so awesome.

Dialogue shows the personality of our characters.

You know what your character looks like, what kind of clothes she wears, who she loves and who she hates, how much education she has, where she's from. All those aspects, physical and psychological, make her different from everyone else in the world and in your story. What she says and how she says it should, too.

Dialogue shows the relationship between characters.

The way people speak to each other reveals a lot about how they feel about each other. What does it sound like when you disagree with your best friend versus someone you don’t know? How would you confront someone when you’re in a crowd? What about if the two of you were alone?

Yeah, we've seen them
before, but what a public
scene it is.

Dialogue shows conflict.

You see how that word show keeps popping up? A good writer looks for ways to show her characters through action and dialogue. Instead of writing After he left her all alone to deal with her overbearing father, Nikki hated the pool boy, have Nikki scream at the pool boy when she unexpectedly runs into him years later. After all, there’s nothing better than a public scene. 

“Yeah, so what does dialogue stink at?” she demanded.

Reflecting real-world conversation.

Alfred Hitchcock once described drama as “life with the dull bits cut out.” This goes for dialogue, too. The real world is full of people having conversations like this:

                “Hey, Nikki,” the pool boy said.
                “Oh, hey. I haven’t seen you in a while.”
                “Yeah, I’ve been keeping busy. Um, been at the pool a lot. We’ve had, um, some great weather this summer. What have you been, like, up to?”

Seriously, no one wants to read a book where people talk like that. Who cares that the pool boy’s been to the pool (duh) or what the weather’s been like? We just want to know how Nikki’s overbearing dad died and whether she’s going to start screaming at the pool boy or just stew.

On the other hand, you do want your dialogue to sound like real-world conversation in some ways. Unless they’re uber-serious or historical, most people talk in contractions. They also often speak in phrases instead of whole sentences. Just don’t bludgeon your reader with too many dialogue quirks; unlike with garlic, a little goes a long way. (You can never have enough garlic.)

Explaining what’s going on in a story (aka exposition).

Don’t use dialogue as exposition, like in soap operas:

“As you remember, Nikki, Jessica took up with your dad, Dr. Howell, after he botched Matilda’s emergency lip surgery, just before the aliens abducted your pool boy.”

‘Nuf said.

“But what else?” she pleaded. “I need more tips!”

Okay, okay. Simmer down. Here are a few more tips for making your dialogue rock.

Flavor it with action.

When the pool boy gets fed up with Nikki blaming him, don’t just write Frustrated at how Nikki wouldn’t see his side, the pool boy exploded, “What is wrong with you?” Instead, try:

“What's wrong with you?” The pool boy flung his lapboard down so hard, the lifeguard tweeted her whistle at him. “I can’t believe you think this is all my fault!”

Situate your speakers.

Where are your characters? The sun’s beating down, stoking the pool boy’s frustration. Nikki’s best friend is eavesdropping by the diving board. Some brat cannonballs in right next to Nikki and splashes her. Include sounds, smells, textures and the other people around your characters.

Don’t forget silence.

Sometimes the answer to a question is silence. Maybe when Nikki screams at him, the pool boy is sullen and won’t talk to her. Maybe he struggles to find the words to say he’s sorry he left her. 

Also, think about what your characters wouldn’t say. We’re not always honest, especially in emotional situations. Maybe Nikki’s never going to get over the pool boy’s abandonment, but she’s made a scene and now she’s embarrassed and just wants to get out of there. When he asks for her number so they can keep in touch, maybe work this out, she gives it to him, but she is never ever going to answer the phone when he calls. Does she tell him that? Nope.

                “I’m sorry, Nik,” the pool boy said, running a hand through his chlorine-stiff hair. “I didn’t know it was going to be so bad for you. Can I make it up to you?”
                “Sure,” she said brightly. “Why don’t you buy me a Coke, and we’ll call it even.”

Read aloud.

When you’ve done everything else you can do to make your dialogue pitch-perfect, read it aloud to hear how it sounds. Hopefully you won’t, as Cranky Rah once did (many, many years ago), decide that your characters are the lamest creatures on the face of the earth. Luckily, she has gone on to write things much better than The Pool Boy. (She swears.)

Group Hug: Building Characters From Apples

It was a long, dark summer without The Three (mainly because Cranky Rah's life kept getting in the way of us meeting up), but we had a lovely afternoon together yesterday. I bang my head on the floor in delight over L's pie cookies. Pie. Cookies. Two great things that go great together. And they were lemony, just like Cranky Rah.

We played with dialogue yesterday, which was great good fun. Before you play with dialogue, you need some characters. Otherwise, it's just you and the voices in your head—and while they might have some interesting things to say, it's probably best that you get away from them every once in a while.

So, first you need some characters. It's easiest to do this exercise (adapted from a newsletter on writing tips by Brave Writer) if you have the game Apples to Apples, but if you don't, you can just make a stack of cards with one adjective written on each.

Here's how it works: Each person takes three of the green Apples to Apples cards and uses the adjectives on them to write a brief character sketch of a person with all three traits. (You can up the crazy factor by drawing five cards instead of three.) 

We did this twice—and I did not, by the way, tell The Three what we were going to do with these characters when they were creating them. We did this first half of the exercise at the beginning of our afternoon, as a warm-up, and it wasn't until we were reading our character sketches to each other that I mentioned, oh-so innocently, that their characters would later be talking to each other.

Poor Matilda. It wasn't her fault.
Sometimes genetics are just
against a girl.

A note on this in practice: After I drew the adjectives long, furry and unhappy for my first character, I went through and took out all the adjectives that could only be used for physical traits so that when we drew a second set of adjectives, they would all be personality traits. But I'll be honest, at the end of the day, the fact that my first character, Matilda, was furry had a huge impact on her relationship with the difficult Francesca, so maybe it was a mistake to take out the physical traits. If Matilda hadn't been furry, she wouldn't have been carrying that duct tape around with her (for emergency hair removal, you know), and the vengeance she wreaked on Francesca would have taken a different path, perhaps one that left Francesca's perfect eyebrows intact.

So after we warmed up by creating characters, we talked a while about dialogue (more about dialogue in then next post). And then we went back to our characters, to have them talk to each other. There were three rules:

1. Each character's dialogue must reflect his or her personality.
2. You can use said or asked but no other dialogue tags. You have to express each character's attitude through the words they speak.
3. You can use some action narrative to keep things going, but limit it. The focus here is on dialogue.

The conversation between the two characters could be about anything, but the dominant emotion in the scene had to be anger. (This is technically not a fourth rule; it's really just the set-up. If we had had more time, we would've done different versions of this, wherein the dominant emotion was confusion, joy, etc.).

As you might expect, hilarity ensued. 

Seriously. Anyone else want to know
what these three are talking about?

Once you've built your characters, there are a lot of other dialogue exercises you can put them through. One idea I really liked (but that we also didn't get to; in 90 minutes there are, well, only 90 minutes) was to have those two characters talk to each other about one of them being really late for an appointment. The first time, the characters are dating each other (this would've been a problem with M's characters, one of whom was six). The second time, they're meeting for the first time, and one of them is more powerful than the other. 

All these exercises are about playing around with how a character's personality is reflected in how he or she speaks and how the way characters speak to each other shows their relationship, two of the most important roles of dialogue in a story.

What else does dialogue rock out? Find out in my next post. Right now, I have to go crawl around the couch and see if anyone dropped any pie cookie crumbs.

Where Do We Go From Here? The Hero's Journey, Part 2

When last we saw our hero, she was sitting grumpily around, waiting for us to get her on her journey. I don't know about you, but Cranky Rah's pretty sure we ought to hop to it. I mean, look at her:

The good thing is, our hero is kind of where she needs to be in the first place: at home or otherwise in a place she's always been.

If we're using the vocabulary of a journey (and we are because we're talking about the Hero's Journey), then the action of our story is about where our characters are going, what they do on their way and what they've gotten (or how they've changed) by the time they get there. We also call that plot.

Cranky Rah would like to repeat (because she can be tiresome that way) that our story doesn't have to be an actual journey. But even actual journeys include a metaphorical journey that leads to the hero learning and changing. The Wizard of Oz isn't, in the end, about Dorothy meeting some groovy friends, hanging out with a wizard and getting back home. It's about Dorothy learning a bigger truth: There's no place like home—even when it looks like Kansas.

All journeys start somewhere, usually at home. In the lexicon of the Hero's Journey, we call this the Ordinary World.

The Ordinary World

This is the hero's life at the beginning of the story. It shows readers who the hero is so they can appreciate how she changes. A lot of times, this part of the story gives us a hint that something's not right, that something's about to change.

What's the (Plot) Point?
This is your basic set-up. Show the hero interacting with her life. Is she satisfied or dissatisfied? What's important to her? 

In Cranky Rah's story, we might see her feeling a little itchy, a little uneasy, gazing longingly out of her cave and madly Googling airfare prices. That's just her at home, though. No one really wants to hang out there long, watching that. (And Cranky Rah certainly doesn't want the surveillance.)

So we have to get her the heck out of her cave. She has to experience The Call to Adventure.

The Call to Adventure

This is the action that thrusts the hero into her journey. There's a problem or mystery to be solved, a life to save, a wrong to right, a society to change. Whatever the action, it's upsetting. It's going to rock the hero's world and make her do something she doesn't want to do.

The Call to Adventure can be instigated by a lot of things: a death or injury; a kidnapping (either of someone the hero cares for or the hero herself); a need for revenge; a prophecy; a mysterious message; a move; a breakup—anything that forces the hero to act.

You know this bird, right?
You know where she's about to put her
head, if she can find some sand.

A lot of the time, the hero isn't all that into the idea of jumping in and saving the world (saving the world not exactly being a safe occupation). She might try to duck the Call and see if she can get away with just staying home, but that always leads to something bad—something that forces her to put her foot on that literal or figurative road.

What's the (Plot) Point?A lot of great scenes come out of the Call to Adventure. Show the event that makes the hero leave the Ordinary World. There's a lot of action here, and we learn how the hero behaves under pressure. 

Show the hero refusing to go, and then show us the bad thing that happens as a result. Fate is not going to leave that slacker hero alone. It wants her to get out there and get busy. Otherwise, we don't really have a story.

And Now What?

Now that she's been forced out of her comfort zone (The sun! The sun! It's so bright!), what happens to your hero? This is the meat of the journey, all those plot points that keep the story moving. Is this where you start ripping your hair out or gnashing your teeth because you can't figure out how to flesh out the plot? Don't. Your hair's already groovy, and your parents have spent a lot of money on those teeth. In our next and final post about the Hero's Journey, we'll talk about how to drive your hero forward.

Sheep? Heroes? It's all the same to Jack.

Where Do We Go From Here? The Hero's Journey, Part 1

Cranky Rah loves to get out of her cave if it means going on a journey. The Great Ocean Road in Australia, the tiny walled town of Rothenburg, Germany. The Rocky Mountains, the Okefenokee Swamp. The Highlands of Scotland, of course.

Maybe this is why I dig the Hero's Journey so much—and why, as The Three know, I can go on about it. When I do go on about something with The Three, I usually ply them with cocoa and treats (okay, they bring the treats; I just give them excuse to bake something chocolate). Since it appears I can't deliver cocoa through cyberspace (is that why there's chocolate on the floor under my desk, or was that just the Poet-Accountant eating ice cream at 6 a.m. again?), I'll break this into three posts. Today, we'll just tackle the question What the heck is this thing, the Hero's Journey?

You can read entire books about the Hero's Journey (I particularly like The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler), but I broke it down a little for The Three. I also focused on the first half of the journey for them because the first thing The Three told me when we started getting together was that while they love making up characters and developing backstory, it's the plot that snags them—figuring out how to make the ideas they have happen in a way that makes sense, figuring out where those characters are going to go.

First, the backstory of the Hero's Journey: The mythologist Joseph Campbell studied myths from around the world and believed that the reason certain stories are repeated over and over in vastly different cultures is because they deal with universal questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? What is good and evil, and what should I do about it?

Not Godzilla,
but copyright free!

Most stories are, in essence, about a search: a girl searches for love or freedom or herself; a boy searches for the mother who abandoned him or to make a name for himself or to discover the antidote to a poison; a detective searches for a murderer; Japanese citizenry search for a way to escape Godzilla. This search is what we call the Hero's Journey, and you'll find it in The Odyssey, Shakespeare, Cinder, Agatha Christie, Shrek and The Hunger Games. Some books and movies are obvious journeys, like Star Wars, The Lightning Thief and The Lord of the Rings. Others don't involve a physical journey but are Hero's Journeys nonetheless, like Iron Man, Pride and Prejudice and Divergent. All very different stories, but all with similar characteristics.

Here's the Hero's Journey in a nutshell: A hero starts out in her ordinary world but soon ventures (or is dragged) into an unfamiliar world where she must accomplish a task. She encounters challenges and tests, and she confronts a villain or villains. In the end, she either succeeds at her task or doesn't, but she's grown, her outlook on the world has changed and life will never be the same again.

Don't be turned off by the words hero and villain. By hero, we mean the main character; the person the story's about; the person who has the most at stake and who will change the most by the end. There are lots of different types of heroes, including dark, troubled anti-heroes who are their own worst enemy and heroes who aren't particularly heroic. And by villain, we mean the character who's getting in the main character's face in some way; a villains doesn't always need to mean the main character harm.

Also, don't be turned off if you think this all sounds a lot like an adventure story. It's true that the Hero's Journey is easy to see in quests like Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz. If you read about the Hero's Journey a lot, you'll come across words like supernatural and fabulous forces and battle language like victory and power. But the Hero's Journey is just as relevant to stories that don't have a physical or mystical quest. The Hero's Journey is, at its root, a character's inner journey. Writers who are sitting around scratching our heads and wondering what's going to happen next can use the Hero's Journey as a guide for developing a strong plot and memorable characters.

Another kind of caveat,
the ungrammatical kind

Before we get into the ooey-gooey viscera of the Hero's Journey, there's one caveat (there's always a caveat): This is an art, not a science. The steps I'm going to outline are just pieces in a puzzle. Each one can be left out, twisted or put in a different order. It's up to you, after all: You're in charge. (Bwa-ha-ha!)

In the next post, we'll explore plot and how to get your character on her journey.

Group Hug: Pick a Name, Any Name

Generally Cranky Rah likes to write alone in her cave, but when The Three come for a visit, we all hang and do freewrites and writing exercises together. Let's call this one Pick a Name, Any Name.

1. Find a random name generator online (there are a bunch of them out there), and generate a name—or five or six. When we did this, we kept going until we found one we all liked (relatively speaking). If I remember correctly (and, honestly, the likelihood of that is pretty slim), we wrote from the name Paxton.

2. Spend about 10 minutes with everyone writing on her own, spinning a character based on the name. Everyone writes from the same name.

3. Squabble over who gets to read first, then share.

All of the characters we created were vastly different from each other. We were split 50-50 on gender, and we even each ended up with multiple spellings of the name: Paxton, Packston and Joe. (That would be L with the eclectic spelling.)

This is a fun exercise anytime, really, but it's also good for when you're in the doldrums of writer's block or if a character's not really working for you anymore. Not sure who someone in your story is or where he's going? Maybe he's not a Butch, he's a Kristof. Or maybe he's not a Kristof, he's just plain Chris. Even within one name, you often have a lot of options. Christopher, Kristof, Chrissy and Topher are all very different characters.

In fact, you could have fun doing a freewrite in which all of the characters' names are just variations of the same name. Hey, that sounds good. Take 10 minutes. Ready? Go.

From Cranky Rah's Cave: Quirks and Tells

Cranky Rah's been in the cave writing a lot lately, so let's delve into the stalactite-y landscape of her mind and see what's there (besides tacos).

Ah, quirks and tells. Those little things that make a character real, both to the writer and the reader.

Quirks are a person's weird, unusual habits (don't tell me you don't have any). One of my characters likes to invent and build; he uses his bedroom walls like a whiteboard, drawing schematics and equations on them with a Sharpie (don't try this at home). When he's done with a set of diagrams, he whitewashes over them with paint. When he doesn't have a notebook to hand, he takes notes on his jeans.

Giving a character a quirk or two makes them memorable to a reader; it can also create tension or inspire scenes. When my character starts writing chemical formulas instead of mechanical schematics on the wall, is it just because he's trying out a new science or a sign he's starting to experiment with his crazy uncle's voodoo medicine even though it's nearly killed him before?

Tells are like quirks that give something away. We talk about tells in poker: Maybe a player always sneezes when she has a good hand. My father-in-law whistles thematically (and unconsciously), so when someone tells a story about a house that burned down, about 10 minutes later you'll hear him whistling that song Eternal Flame by the Bangles. This could be pretty inconvenient for an arsonist.

You don't want to overdo it; quirks and tells are a spice. Like cumin in taco meat. Ooo, tacos... Gotta go.

Villains Are People, Too

Since the last post was all about (okay, mostly about) our hero (the main character protagonist we want the reader to identify with), and since we don't want to throw the balance of the universe out of whack by hanging out with Yang and ignoring Yin, I guess we'd better give equal time to the Other Side, the villain. And let's be honest: We all love a good villain.

Villains Are People, Too

A recap: All stories are about conflict—that is, what does your hero want, and what’s in the way of her getting it? A story is filled with obstacles for your hero to slam into, and usually there’s more than one character getting in your hero’s way. But there’s one who is scarier, more powerful and meaner than the others: The Big Bad Wolf of Bad Guys.

Of course your hero’s super important because that’s who you want your readers plugging for. But your Big Bad Wolf (or the antagonist, as he’s more properly called) is key because he provides that vital conflict. The plot hinges on your BBW—what he’s doing to the hero, the battles they fight, how it all turns out—which means your BBW is a Very Important Person.

Flat is Boring

We all know flat villains. They're the ones that don't change; they're evil and nothing else. Think Cinderella’s wicked stepmother and pretty much every fairy tale villain you know. (They're flat because they’re archetypes, but that's a-whole-nother discussion.) Sometimes a flat villain works (see President Snow, below), but usually the more interesting the villain, the better. The way to write an interesting villain is to remember that villains are people, too.

Villains have their own story, and in that story they’re the hero and the hero’s the bad guy. That means they need to be as fully developed as the hero. How do you do that?

• Ask the same questions of your villain as you do your hero: What does my villain want? What’s in the way of my villain getting what he wants? Does my villain get what he wants in the end?
• Ask what the hero (or the world) did that ticked the villain off so badly. How did the villain become the person he is?
• Villains aren’t perfectly strong (that’s a yawn). They have weaknesses. What are they? How can the hero exploit them?
• Villains have their own character arc. A hero changes; a villain does, too. Just like a hero, a villain can be conflicted, vacillating between doing evil and giving up on his evil plan. Sometimes they see the light at the end and redeem themselves (think Darth Vader). Sometimes they get meaner and angrier and more hateful during the story.

  

  To wreak havoc, or not to wreak havoc?

One way to develop a great villain is to have a look at your hero. A villain and a hero are often two sides of the same coin: The villain is who the hero might have been (or might become), if she made other choices. Sometimes, what a hero despises about a villain is something she despises or fears in herself.

The Villain’s Gig: Sewing Discord

A villain’s job is to get up in the face of the hero’s goals. To make trouble for the hero. To tempt the hero. (And just a sidebar here, because I can't help it: Heroes need to be tempted. Perfectly good characters are even more boring than perfectly evil characters.)

What all this means is that throughout the story the villain has to win against the hero more often than not; otherwise, he’s not strong enough; he’s not enough of a challenge to the hero. Whether the villain wins in the end is up to you, but during the story, it has to be a good fight.

  

When Villains Aren’t People

Of course, the villain of the piece isn’t always a person. It can be an idea (like racism), an institution (like the government) or a natural force (like a tsunami)—but it should always have a human face. The villain in The Hunger Games is the government, a faceless thing. That evil, corrupt system is embodied in the person of President Snow. He’s the current BBW, but the system would exist and be evil without him. He’s just the human face we see, someone we can root against.

  

Who Else is Out to Get the Hero?

The BBW isn’t the only one throwing obstacles in your hero’s way. In addition to the BBW and your run-of-the-mill minions—those minor henchmen—any good hero also has a pretty hefty assortment of antagonists (characters acting against them in some way). Not all of them are evil; some of them don’t even dislike the hero.

• You’ve got your shapeshifter, someone who seems like a friend but is actually an enemy (or seems like an enemy but turns out to be a friend). You can’t pin a shapeshifter down; often they’re conflicted themselves.
• You’ve got your allied rival, that annoying character who's ostensibly on your hero’s side but
  either doesn’t like your hero or disagrees with your hero’s methods. Think Gale and Peeta from
  The Hunger Games. They both love Katniss and hate each other. That kind of rivalry distracts the hero from her goal and can be dangerous to her.

  

  "I like her best! "No, I like her best!"
• There’s the crazy friend, who starts off helpful or means to be helpful but is always somehow getting in the way or accidentally helping the bad guy. This is often a comic character. Be careful with this one: The crazy friend can be flat or too annoying. There has to be a reason the hero keeps her around; the crazy friend has to be useful in some way. Peregrin Took from The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a great example of the crazy friend. Pippin bumbles around, knocking a stone down a well in Moria and bringing the goblins right down on the Fellowship; he steals the palantír from Gandalf and draws the eye of the dark lord Sauron. But he's brave and loyal, too, and has an important role to play in the quest.
• There’s the temptress, someone from the other side who wants to convert your hero rather than destroy her. At some point, a hero is tempted to give in and stop fighting or is confused and questions her goal. This is when the temptress is most dangerous.

At the end of the day, your reader should feel strongly about your BBW, one way or the other. Some villains we love to hate because they’re so deliciously evil. And some villains creep us out because we see ourselves in them. 

Story Bones (Or: The Ankle Bone's Connected to the Foot Bone)

The first time I sat down to talk writing with The Three (we'll call them M, L and S for the mystery), there was a common theme: They all love developing backstories for their characters, and they all love miserable endings, but they weren't sure how to get from one to the other.

There are a million ways to parse plot, but we can start with three questions that every story hangs on.

Question 1: What Does My Hero Want?

The answer to this question is the essence of your story because it's at the heart of what motivates your protagonist (who we'll call the hero here). You can look at the entire plot as just a series of events preventing your hero from getting what she wants.

Seems straightforward, right? Not so fast. A lot of the time, what the hero wants at the beginning of the story is not what she wants in the end. But let's talk about that a little later.

So how does the question What does my hero want? illuminate a story? Let's take a look at the Cinderella-meets-cyborg novel Cinder by Marissa Meyer. [Spoiler Alert! If you haven't read Cinder (and if you haven't, you should), you might want to skip the indented bits in this post.]

What does Cinder want?

For most of the story, Cinder just wants to get the heck of New Beijing. Everything she does is aimed at escaping the life she's leading—and pretty much everything that happens to her gets in the way of that. 

By the way, this question of what your hero wants isn’t just for your hero. Every character in your story—the sidekicks, the love interests, even (and especially) the villain—wants something. Your reader doesn't need to know what every character in your story wants (unless, of course, you're James Michener), but you'll create a deeper story and more believable characters if you know and show what the major characters want, how they're going to try to get it and how their actions to get what they want help or hurt your hero.

Question 2: What’s in the Way of My Hero Getting What She Wants?

When you’re worried your story’s moving too fast, your hero is probably getting what she wants too easily. Take Cranky Rah. If Cranky Rah wants a taco and all she has to do is get in the car, drive down to El Cerro Azul and get a taco, that’s boring. (Not to Cranky Rah, of course. Cranky Rah's thrilled to have a taco. She might even have two. But no one else wants to read about it.) Now, if Cranky Rah goes out to her car to go for a taco and notices someone slinking away from it and some suspicious wires dangling under the bumper and that causes her to think about how she had really hoped all that would be over once she had changed her name and gotten that facial reconstruction—well, that is definitely not boring.

Plot is the spine of the book; the scenes are the vertebrae. Each one is its own thing but is connected to the others. Together they’re the structure of the story. Each scene needs to make your reader care about your hero because if your reader cares, she’ll keep turning the pages to find out whether Cranky Rah gets her taco in the end. (She does.)

“But wait! How do I come up with all those scenes?” Chill out. I’m here to help. Scenes can be categorized in infinite ways (of course), but I like this one: Each scene involves an obstacle, a test or a tool.

• An Obstacle: Lots of things will get in the way of your hero getting what she wants: the villain or the hero’s well-meaning but clueless mom; a natural disaster or a closed restaurant. Maybe it’s the hero herself: Suddenly she can’t save the world because she got thrown into detention for mouthing off to her writing teacher. Obstacles push your hero further from her goal. To get back on track and move forward, she needs tools.

• A Tool: Tools take different shapes. Some are literal tools: Your hero needs to figure out how to grow and harvest corn to make her taco shell. Or she finds a clue that makes the prophecy make sense. Some tools are allies, the helpful friends your hero meets along the way. Some are lessons: Before she can get what she wants, your hero has to learn to trust or overcome her prejudices (maybe not all aliens are evil creatures who destroy tacos).

• A Test: Does your hero have the strength and conviction to get what she wants? Is what she thinks she wants really what she wants? Did she actually learn to trust? Can she sacrifice her own desires to do something Good? We only find out if she’s tested.

What's in Cinder's Way?

Cinder’s got obstacles a-plenty: Peony getting sick; Dr. Erland wanting to study her; Kai flirting with her and needing her help.

Tools? The too-small foot; the orange car; Peony’s dress (though Cinder doesn’t see it that way until she needs it). The information Cinder learns about who she really is comes in handy in the end. Cinder comes stocked with a couple of allies (Iko, Peony) and accumulates others, like Kai, Dr. Erland and the voice on the D-COMM chip, along the way.

Cinder faces a lot of tests, but the final exam is the ball. Cinder has to overcome her aversion to wearing Peony’s dress. She has to sacrifice her desire to escape. She has to risk being seen by Queen Levana. She has to face the disgust of others at what she is.

Question 3: Does Your Hero Get What She Wants?

Remember what I said up top about what the hero wants at the end often not being what she wanted at the beginning? This is generally because what the hero first wanted was self-serving, shallow or naïve. Overcoming obstacles, learning from her tools and enduring all those tests changes our hero. She has a greater perspective and realizes there’s something bigger she is called to do.

Ack! Does that mean a happy ending? Nah. Maybe the hero fails to do what she was called to do. Maybe she succeeds but ends up broken and alone. Maybe she gets exactly what she wanted in the beginning, but now she wants something different, something she can't have. Maybe in the end it’s not clear whether Good or Evil triumphs. But regardless of how your story ends, we need to see how your hero has changed.

So What About Cinder? Does She Get What She Wants? 

Yes and no. At the end of the first book in the series, she’s getting out of New Beijing and her beleaguered life like she wanted to at the beginning, but now what she wants is different: She wants to stay and help Kai. She accepts that she has a role to play in the salvation of New Beijing and maybe the world, and she has to sacrifice what she wants and what might make her happy for this Greater Good.

What If I Don't Know What My Hero Wants?! No Worries.

You don’t have to have all the answers when you start writing, and you should never not write a scene you’ve imagined just because you don’t see a purpose for it. Its purpose might develop as you write, the same way your characters develop as you get to know them. If you have a scene in your mind, write it. You can clean it up later; that’s what editing’s for. These questions can get you thinking and help you out of a jam when you’re not sure where to go next. Ask yourself: What does your character (or your villain) want? How can you mess up her day or send in some help? Where do you want her to end up and how can you get her there?