Are you aware of the Good Samaritan Law? It’s in effect in many parts of the world to protect those who are trying to help someone experiencing life-threatening trauma, such as a heart attack, from being sued should an injury occur. And yet time and time again I’ve seen shows on TV where no one wants to get involved for fear of an unfair lawsuit. See it enough times and it sounds like it must be the truth.
Another classic is the case of the missing person. Here in Canada there is no waiting period, no matter how old the missing person is. As long as there is sufficient belief held by anyone, whether they’re a relative or a co-worker that someone genuinely is off their schedule and can’t be reached, the police will take the matter seriously. From what I’ve been able to find online, many parts of the U.S. have the same policy. That one must wait 24 or 48 hours to report someone missing is a myth. And yet how often do you see it in fiction?
I’m going to keep today’s post short, but I’d like to hear from you. Can you think of any more urban myths? If you can, please share them. Let everyone benefit from your myth busting!
You’re lining up to cash out at the grocery store. There’s a guy in his mid-twenties behind you and a woman in front of you. The woman is arguing with a child who wants a chocolate bar. You think to yourself, just buy it and shut the kid up. The guy behind you says as much under his breath but loud enough for you to hear. Which one of these people do you relate to? If you actually thought, just buy it… then it’s the guy behind you. On the surface you are in cahoots. But if you’re a parent, you probably thought, that poor woman, and chances are you relate to her on a deeper level. Why? Because you probably share experiences.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the things which connect us as human beings are that which we relate to when we read a book. The more we can relate, and get into the mind of the protagonist or even the antagonist, the more we’ll enjoy the novel.
Back to my scenario at the beginning. Assuming you’re a parent, you can probably understand on some level what it’s like to have a child who, at one time or another, acted out. Yes, there are people out there with perfectly behaved children in public. Perhaps they only go out on days that the sun shines. I have no idea. But not to belabor the point, let’s go instead to the guy standing behind you. If you agreed with him then you can relate, but only to a point. His situation and his attitude aren’t as obvious as the harried mother’s. But that doesn’t mean you can’t write a book he’d be interested in reading. It probably wouldn’t have children in it. Then again, the mother’s ideal novel probably wouldn’t either. She’s looking for an escape.
So is the solution to never put kids into your novels? Maybe. Or maybe you just need to think about who is going to relate to your characters–their lives and their emotions–to find your target audience.
The first arguably most difficult thing about creating characters, is avoiding writing about yourself. This argument is based on the fact that you know no one better. Your experiences, tastes, and even your most used expressions are bound to creep in – sometimes you don’t even realize it.
The second arguably most difficult thing about creating characters is making them believable. It’s easy to write a one-dimensional character. So we write back stories, which may or may not show up in the final cut. But how detailed are those back stories? And how rounded do they make your characters?
The difficulty I find in writing a back story is that it tends to be about the big stuff. When I’m writing one, I’m looking for what motivates my characters to do what they do. Because a character with no motivation is the worst kind of cookie-cutter character. So I go back to their childhoods to discover what made them who they are. What are the huge events that shaped them into the person my readers will see when I plop them down in my story and ask them to react?
It’s not just the big things that shape who we are in real life though, is it? It might be where we were when someone else’s big event happened. It might be a piece of music we heard. Any number of trivial things make us who we are. And it’s those little things that make people care about us. Truly care. Which is another MAJOR if not the most MAJOR thing in keeping a reader reading our story.
With this in mind, I came up with an idea. What about those stupid surveys you see all over facebook and the like, which teenagers love to fill out? I looked one up. My mind was blown. This is only one of thousands: https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=50193333157 so if you don’t like the questions here, google “100 question survey facebook.” If I answered only a third of the questions on this survey, from the perspective of my characters when they were teenagers, I would know everything I could possibly want to know in order to create the best characters I can come up with. Because the problem with writing just a back story, is the lack of spontaneously coming up with your characters quirks, opinions, and thoughts. Why? Again, because your own seep in.
As soon as I have the time, I will take this survey for at least four of my novel’s characters–two main, and two supporting. I honestly believe this is the golden key to rounding out their lives, and making my readers–and myself–care about them and what happens to them.
Do it. And really put some thought into it. Remember what it was like to be a teenager, when all of these questions mattered. Then let your character’s experiences seep in to your story and not your own. I can almost guarantee that it will give you a better story.
There’s a contest going on at a local radio station at the moment to promote the concert and to give away tickets for the band Wheatus. You might remember them – they sang the song “Teenage Dirtbag.”
(great video)
To win the tickets you must write about your own experience with a dirtbag and send your story in to the station. This got me to thinking (as things do) about how one doesn’t really need to resort to watching “Criminal Minds” to find a villain for their story. Most of us, if not all, know people in real life who would make perfect villains. All that’s required is to amp up their faults either a little or a lot.
Take the jock in the video, for instance. He pisses off his girlfriend when he throws something at the nerd. Bullies like this are everywhere – not just at school.
True story: A couple of years ago, my mother was in the parking lot of the local mall when she grazed another car going around a corner. She was supposed to meet up with me inside the mall that day, and she didn’t know what to do, so she came to find me. Someone, meanwhile, witnessed the accident and wrote two notes; one they left on my mom’s windshield and the other on the windshield of the person she hit. I don’t remember exactly how it went down, but I contacted the owner of the damaged car. Luckily, I didn’t let my mother deal with the asshole.
He told me he wouldn’t put in a police report if I would agree to pay for his repairs. I said fine – it wasn’t much damage. He was going to get it fixed right away. When it was done, he called me to say it would be $300. This is how it went from there:
Me: Okay just send me the receipt for the repair.
Him: No.
Me: I’m not giving you any money unless I see the bill.
Him: Don’t you trust me?
Me: (thinking, no I don’t) It’s not that I don’t trust you, I just want it for my records.
Him: What do you need the receipt for – are you a bookkeeper or something?
Me: Yes I am.
Him: Well maybe I’ll just call the police. You don’t want this to go on your mom’s record, do you?
Me: Not really, but I still want the receipt.
Him: (getting angry) Look, I’m giving you a deal here. You should be paying me more than $300 for my inconvenience. I had to go without my car for two days. Doesn’t my time mean anything to you?
Me: No.
I hung up on him and took my mother to the police station to report the accident. Her insurance paid for her damage and his paid for his. And that was that.
Classic bully. What a villain he would make.
Have you crossed paths with a villain? Please share your experience in the comments!
One of the best and the worst things in writing fiction is to get your characters into a situation that’s difficult to get out of. It creates a quagmire not only for them, but for you, the author. There’s nothing quite like the moment when you figure out how to release them from an impossible situation. There’s nothing better for your readers than not being able to figure out where the story is going. It makes them want to keep reading. It’s the goal of the author to create such an irresistible environment.
But what if you’ve put your characters into a place that’s so boggy that the only way to get them out is for something convenient to happen? They’re adrift at sea and the sharks are circling… oh look! It’s a helicopter! That sort of thing just doesn’t fly (pardon) with most readers.
Do you keep trying to come up with a way out? Or do you start again, and put them into an easier situation? Personally I hate giving up on these sorts of difficulties. Because the solution, when it comes to me, is one of the best feelings in the world.
The subtle art of foreshadowing takes skill – some may say great skill – for if it’s done without, a work of fiction can be fatally predictable. After all, who wants to read or watch something when it’s painfully obvious exactly how the story will conclude?
For me, there’s nothing better than a story with a twist. Being strung along to believe one thing to find out that what I thought was true never was is part of the art of foreshadowing. It can be done well (The Sixth Sense) in which case the foreshadowing was so subtle as to not be there, or it can be done wrong. Maybe you can come up with a good example. They tend to be the most forgettable stories out there.
I’m hoping to get some kind of twist out of the fiction A-Z story I’m writing alongside this. If you’re reading it, I hope you’ll stick around to the end to let me know how I did. In the meantime, I’m looking for any accidental foreshadowing that already exists, since I had no idea where the story was going as I began it. I think I have an idea now.
How much predictability is too much for you? I’m wondering if there’s anyone out there who likes to know the end before they get there.
Do you ever wonder how much you’re giving away of yourself when you write? Details of a writer’s psyche must show through, since all we really have to draw from are our experiences and our emotions. Our backgrounds: our genetics, our nature and how we were nurtured as children make up who we are, and are inherent in everything we do. Whether a writer of fiction, personal accounts, poetry… what creates our literary “voices” is our individuality.
I worry–not as much now as I used to–how much personal information I’m putting out there, whether intentionally or not. I worry that my kids will read what I write and be embarrassed or scarred – who wants to read their mother’s love scenes after all? How do they know how much of it comes from my imagination and how much from experience? I certainly won’t hand my own mother my novel and say, here, enjoy it. But then she judges me more harshly than anyone on the planet.
Of course, not everything we write comes from experience. I often say that if Stephen King did, he’d long be imprisoned. It’s not as though he goes around killing people, or feels the pain of being hit by a car. … oh wait, never mind. I watched a Youtube video the other day, in which he spoke to a room full of students about his process in writing, among other things. He said that one of the questions he is asked most often is what his childhood was like – what kind of trauma he went through in order to write the things he does. He said there was absolutely nothing… but if there was, he wouldn’t tell.
For myself, I went through an obsession with death after my father passed away suddenly. Not surprising since I was only fourteen years old. Is it why I write horror on occasion? I’m not sure. It was certainly the only traumatic thing I went through as a child. Yet paternal abandonment, in whatever form, shows up in every major work I’ve written to date. It took four novels before I realised it.
This is what I am open about. What about the stuff I’d rather not be? I ask again: do you ever wonder how much of yourself you’re giving away when you write? Is there anyone in your life you’d rather never read your work – or are you careful just in case they do?
I got to thinking about time periods in fiction and how certain events, depending on how close to the story line they happen, can be a dead giveaway for when the story takes place. This can be tricky when writing a piece that takes place in the future. For instance George Orwell’s 1984 or Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – both major works of art in literature, and yet now that we know better they tend to lose a miniscule amount of merit.
It can be even worse if the story takes place in the present, because what might be huge news today, unless it’s a major event, might be a non-issue in the future when your readers are reading it. How about this blast from the past: The L.A. Times announces McDonald’s big news! Read all about it!
My novel takes place in about the present – meaning I don’t really know. In trying to get the days of the week straight with the date, I put it about two years ago, but then again, I’m not sure anyone will really notice but me. But it’s difficult not to put some kind of time frame on a story. My characters obviously won’t be going to a Michael Jackson concert, nor will they be taking the next shuttle to the moon. These kinds of events place my story in the approximate now. They do, however, go to see Aerosmith, unless I write that scene out in the edits. What if, by the time my novel is published Aerosmith stops touring altogether? This will stick my novel in the past, whether I like it or not.
News can also be extremely inspiring, and sometimes it’s tempting to want to write current events into a story. It can even creep in when you’re least expecting it, in my experience anyway. How? Because some point in time everything is news, and there’s someone out there who is bound to remember it AS news, and by that I mean they’re going to remember when it happened.
Unless your story is fantasy–even more so than Lord of the Rings, which was based on World War II–there’s no getting around a time frame in the real world. It’s a tricky thing.
Writing for money–earning a living at it–has long been a dream of mine. I’d dearly love to have any day job, but being single and caring for my two kids with their numerous disabilities, makes it unfeasible for me to work outside the home. I’ve never attempted to hide the fact that I live off of the social assistance that I receive for my kids. Actually, scratch that. I have a paper route for which I earn a whopping $15 per week.
So during the time that I’m not driving to appointments, looking after them when they’re either sick or sent home with behavioural issues, I write. I suppose you could say I’m in a rather enviable position, in that if I do make even one dollar selling a novel I’ve gained something.
The fact is that one day I may find myself living alone. If I’m unable to care for my kids anymore, for whatever reason, and they go to assisted living elsewhere, I’ll have nothing but whatever I gain through this practice of writing. Yes, I have a background in bookkeeping, and have worked in retail, reception, data entry, and on dude ranches and thoroughbred farms, but who will hire me when I get to the point that I can’t care for my children and have nothing to put on my resume since 1999?
Realistically, at this point, my future lies in my writing. When I have enough money saved I’ll take more courses; I’ve never been more determined to do anything in my life, and I want to be good at it. If I can sell these manuscripts I have laying around–three of them so far–either to a publisher or by self-publishing, I may just be okay. Is there a living to be made? I think it’s best I find out now, while I at least still have my paper route.
This is Linda, coming to you today from a moment in time where all I want to do is rest. That’s life. And that’s what this blog, and the theme of this challenge is all about here on “Life In Progress” – life and how writing fits naturally into it. So that’s the “life” part of today’s topic. Now for the writing part.
The experts suggest that when an author writes a novel, he or she should let it rest. Depending on who the expert is will depend on the time frame of the resting period, but most say at least a month. Why is this a good idea?
We get attached to our words. We read them after they are first written wearing rose-coloured glasses, and it’s not until we’ve stopped reading them for a while and then go back to them that we realise how dirty those glasses were. I wrote my first novel, Trixie in a Box, during 2004’s NaNoWriMo. The manuscript has been sitting under my bed, communing with dust bunnies ever since. I took it out last year, thinking it might be a good idea to polish it and e-publish it ahead of my epic The Great Dagmaru, on which I’m currently working. However, three paragraphs into Trixie I was struck hard by how awful it is and it quickly rejoined the dust bunnies. I still believe in the story, but the prose is of fanfic quality – which makes sense since that’s what I was writing a lot of at the time.
Nine years is a long time to allow a manuscript to sit; I’m not recommending it. But to let your work sit for, say, as long as it takes to successfully complete a grammar course isn’t a bad idea. Failing that, the simple practice of daily writing can help significantly, as can reading the works of a good author. I can’t emphasize enough that it must be a GOOD author – someone you aspire to be just like. I tend to pick up the habits and to an extent, the style, of whomever I am reading, whether it’s E.L. James or Stephen King, the former of which is a scarier prospect than the latter.
I know how tempting it is when a story is finished to just publish it – I do it here on WordPress all the time. But for something I want to be remembered for, I’m going to take all the time it needs (not I need) to get it right.
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