Family Matters

This post is especially for MG books, but could be used in other categories too.

Three-dimensional characters are a must. I've had other posts on how to do this, but you know what? It isn't enough to just have 3-d characters - they have to be involved in 3-d relationships, too. And the best way to develop a relationship is to add quirks. This time, let's look at a family dynamic.

Recently my sister posted a note on facebook about why we love our mum and dad. Here are a few examples:

1. They wear matching outfits. Accidently. And often.

2. Dad has to stand on phonebooks in family portraits so he can be taller than mum.

3. We often find Australia drawn on oranges in the fruit bowl, immediately understanding that dad has been trying to explain to mum how a solar eclipse works.

4. Mum never checking spell check on her phone and her children receive messages such as “Are you home tonight? We’re having a smart dinner.” (Meant to say ROAST dinner).

5. Mum calling us ‘fruit’ as we are the fruit of her loins.

6. The hilarity of the constant and continuous arguments at Christmas over silver tinsel getting all over the floor, what colours of the do-it-yourself plastic tree go in what order, and how to ‘nicely drape’ the lights. Then dad just ends up doing it all.

7. That mum has always been more excited at birthdays and Christmases than all of us. Combined.

8. Mum’s drawing in Pictionary (has to be seen to be believed).

9. Everyone fighting to not be on mum’s team in Pictionary.

10. Dad being able to remember exactly what he and everyone around him ate 20 years ago.

11. Mother’s Day walks which ended with ice cream as a reward.

12. Mum's comforting, wise sayings, and the fact she always gets them wrong - "Don't let the turkeys get you down" is one of her favourites. We still don't know what it means.

Now how much can you already tell about my family from that? And the best thing is, I can use all of these for my stories. Why bother making up my own family quirks when there's a goldmine of them right here?

Try making a list of your family's/friend's quirks and see if you can come up with a goldmine on your own.

On discovering your characters

While working on a WiP, most authors wait for that “it” moment. That eureka. That exact point in time when finally, finally, she discovers her protagonist.

Some authors discover their characters as soon as they see them in their heads. For me, it took many drafts, character bio pages, and daydreams to discover my protagonist for my earlier work, BLAZE. And when I say “discover”, I mean knowing her so intimately and precisely that she finally became a real person in my head; someone I knew as well as I know myself.

For anyone working with original characters, this normally doesn’t happen in the first draft. The first draft is more about plot and events and just figuring out what the darn story’s supposed to be about. It’s only during later drafts that you’re really trying to feel out your characters, and it’s very important to reach that stage, because determining your protagonist determines your story’s voice.

The things you should know in order to discover your characters:

DAYDREAMING IS ESSENTIAL

Put your characters in all kinds of crazy scenarios and see how they react. What kind of people push their buttons? Who are they infatuated with? What are their favourite pastimes?

If you’re writing literary fiction, fantasise about your story in terms of your original plot then throw a dragon in and see what happens. If you’re writing a high fantasy, imagine your characters in our world and watch how they react to everyday things.

Throw them in the past. Pitch them forward into the future. Have your protagonist fatally ill and see what the other characters do. Give another one of your characters time in the spotlight and see how they fare as the protagonist. How does your protagonist react when she isn’t in the main role?

GOOGLE IMAGES IS YOUR FRIEND

Get the details right. I mean exactly right. About a decade ago, I used to find images in magazines, but obviously the web offers so much more. If you have an image in your head but can’t find one online that matches it, try a character generator.

Don’t just tell the reader your character’s hair and eye colour. Give us those subtle details – a crooked front tooth, a dimpled chin, high eyebrows. Do something special. Unique. In GONE WITH THE WIND, Mitchell introduces Rhett Butler with this charming description: There was a cool recklessness in his face and a cynical humour in his mouth as he smiled at her… It’s different, it’s imaginative, and it tells us as much about him as it does about Scarlett, whose eyes we see him through.

Sometimes finding images gives you ideas for quirks you’d never imagined for your character before. And once you have that character image in your head, moving on to personality profiles will be a lot easier…

PLOT AND CHARACTER PERSONALITY ARE INTERRELATED

Your protagonist can’t be a coward if the plot calls for someone to march forth and slay a monster. Or, better yet, they can be, but they need a secondary character to push/encourage/trick them into it. This is always a good tactic when you want to show character growth over the story.

Think about your plot. What kind of character does your protagonist have to be to make it through to the climax? What kind of characters does she need to bounce off in order to move the story forward? Can a well-developed secondary character help you with a certain trait in your protagonist? What message do you want to send to your readers?

For example, if the love interest in your story is a strong, capable male, do you want your protagonist to match him in strength and capabilities? It could lend to some decent conflict in the story. On the other hand, if you decide to make your protagonist timid, it gives her the chance to grow throughout the story and find her own self-worth before getting together with the love interest. Maybe it takes her until the end of the book to see what the love interest has seen all along. Again, it depends on what the plot needs at the beginning to move the story forward.

So where can you get personality types from? Well…

ASTROLOGY AND NUMEROLOGY CHARTS ARE AWESOME

No, you don’t need to start following the stars or visiting Tarot readers. Marissa Meyer mentioned in a blog post that “choosing astrological signs for my characters helps to pinpoint their general personality archetype”, and that’s always a great start. But if you need some extra help, why not keep going?

If you’re having trouble giving your character real depth and precision, work out their numerology and check the personality description for that number. There are plenty of websites out there to give you ideas, but I found a book a while back that had ultra-detailed descriptions for every single birthday in the year. It could have been a great character profile resource if it had occurred to me at the time.

Birth trees, the Chinese zodiac, and online personality tests are also good tools for getting personality descriptions and temperaments, but basic personality profiles are just the beginning…

PSYCHIATRY 101 ISN’T JUST FOR STUDENTS

Don’t just jot down the likes, dislikes, and family status of your character. Write up a proper bio – parents, childhood, most influential moments, most painful memories – be as thorough as a psychiatrist. You can work backwards, too. If your character needs to be scared of water for some reason, delve into their past and find out why that fear is there. It adds an extra dimension that, while may not be explicitly written into your story, will still help you as the author understand your character on a deeper level.

The detail is where you discover the motives behind your character’s actions and attitudes during the story. I can’t stress this part enough. The detail is where I had my “ah ha” moment with my protagonist from BLAZE, and it was such a relief when she finally revealed her true nature to me. I knew she had parental issues that were the root of her main motivations, but it was her attitude towards school that I’d forgotten to take into account. The story starts with her adjusting to a big school, when originally she’d come from a little country town school with a graduating class of seven students. I was so busy with her parent-saga, I hadn’t factored in her feelings of being overwhelmed and crowded and claustrophobic after the move. Once this sunk in for me, I discovered my character.

Don’t panic if your characters don’t reveal themselves to you straight away. It’s a slow, ongoing process. Let them come to you gradually, and before you know it, you’ll be experiencing that “ah ha” moment for yourself.

What experiences have you had with original characters? Can you "discover" your protagonist immediately, or does it take work? How do your characters become living, breathing people on the page?

Character quirks

Yes, it's great to give your characters quirks, but don't go too far. Sometimes the quirks are so obvious and strange that it's clear the author's putting the quirk in for the sake of giving a character a quirk, and it's painful to read. Really.

I read this book once where the protagonist's shoes always squeaked. Always. It didn't matter what shoes he was wearing, or what floor he was walking across. They squeaked. Okay, hands up, who can make sense of that? Yes, it's mildly amusing. But it annoyed me, because it was ridiculous! It wasn't quirky. It was against the laws of physics, and I got annoyed, because the author had tried too hard to follow some good advice and it was obvious that's what he was doing.
Quirks can be great. Just don't defy the laws of physics for them.

On killing your characters (and scaring your readers)

I've just finished reading the Rondo series by Emily Rodda, and while I loved the books, I finally picked up on something that I never realised before.

I was never scared for the characters' lives.

Yes, obviously, it's a middle grade series, but there's always the chance an author's going to do something extreme. In the last book, there were plenty of omens in the way Rodda was writing that made me think maybe...

And then one of the characters was put in mortal peril. It was only a secondary character, and I thought, good god, she's actually going to do it, but after a few pages the character was okay again, and that was that.

So I stopped worrying. A character gets abducted? Fine. A character looks weak and sickly? No problem.

I wasn't worried, because Rodda didn't follow through with that initial threat, and I knew after that that there would be no deaths. That's fine, of course, for the story in question, but when it comes to my own stories, I need to do more.

In one of my stories there will be a major death, as well as a moment where the reader will think all is lost for every good character in the story, and I want the reader to feel scared. I'd already planned a secondary character death earlier, and it's only now I realise why.

Subconsciously, I think I knew that I had to lead up to the major death by killing off this secondary character. To take that secondary character's life is to make the reader truly fear for the main characters. To make them believe that there is a real, honest-to-god possibility that the characters they love will die as well. After all, if the author can kill of one of her characters, who's to say she won't do it agan?

It will certainly have readers gripping the pages and reading to the end.

Plot and Character

So I've read statements saying that character *is* plot. The people who make these statements often go on to say that the characters "tell them" what to do in the story.

And then I've read some statements who claim that this is complete and utter drivel. They add that you have to think about plot structure, and how your story needs to follow certain guidelines, not go on some subconscious whim that writers claim are characters "speaking" to them.

Okay, so that's a valid point, but I'm still going to argue the case that character is plot. I fall under the category of the first lot of writers, rather than the second.

Why?

Because, well, character IS plot. We no longer read stories where stuff happens to the character and they just react instead of act (did we ever?). Stuff will happen to the character at first, sure, but what the character then chooses to do is based purely on who the character is. Say a plague hits your fictional town. Depending on your protagonist, your book could go any way. For example, the story could start off with the protagonist's reaction to the plague, where he or she could -

1. Run for the hills and try to hide
2. Set out on an adventure to discover what caused the plague
3. Do scientific research to discover what caused the plague.
4. Tend to the sick

So right there, your plot is decided for you by who your character is.

Now. I am definitely, definitely an advocate of knowing plot structure. You can't just meander around the pages with nothing happening for the majority of the book while your character chooses their own adventure. A writer needs to know the bones of the plot. But the meaty part, the ups and downs of the story, are up to the characters.

How I figure out the beginnings of my stories, step-by-step, looks like this:

1. Create main characters and antagonists - this means giving them histories, desires, motivations, etc.
2. Figure out the story goal and ending (1 and 2 are interchangable, but I usually do them in this order).
3. Start the story off with an inciting incident, and while I'm doing that...
4. Work out the first doorway (see James Scott Bell's proper explanation for this phrase in Plot and Structure). I need to know what's going to force my protagonist into the story and give them no way to turn back.
5. Lead my character to the first doorway, so they can begin the story goal.

Now, from here on in is the tricky part, and this is where character really becomes the plot. What happens next is a choice depending on who the character is. Your character(s) will decide how to overcome this no-turning-back thing (usually it's with resistance at first), and take certain steps to try and get where they want to be (usually the status quo - back to how they were at the beginning of the story, although they never get there).

Do they try to eliminate the threat on their own? Do they enlist help? Does the antagonist have a certain style while trying to keep the protagonist from reaching his/her goal? Because, yes, the antagonist is also the plot. And all these plot choices rely on character.

Of course, while planning all this, I know that I need to lead my characters through doorway two and reach the climax, so I know the basic direction, but how the story gets there is up to the characters.

And that's what we authors mean when we say our characters "tell us" what to do.