Highlighting Characteristics

So you have a character. You know this person better than anyone, yet you aren’t sure you are getting it across to your readers. What do you do? Give them a nice little list of characteristics that make up this person you have created and sneak it in the first few pages of your story?

You could. But you may bore them, plus the chances are your reader is going to whizz through the list and not absorbing your carefully selected laundry list of characteristics.

What if you highlighted one thing? Just one important detail?

Easy!

Hang on. One thing? Just one thing? One thing that makes this character so unique that if he/she was pushed into a pile of fictional characters a reader could identify and yank your dude out of the pile?

For one of my stories, the fact that the main character, Allie, is always losing thing is a defining characteristic. She is brainy and winning awards, yet very absentminded and thus loses things. A lot. How is this important? Well, outside the story it really isn’t. Everyone can probably think of someone they know or times where they have lost things due to preoccupation. Yet, this characteristic is key within the story. People are stealing Allie’s work from under her nose. It isn’t particularly noted or even noticed seeing as she is always losing things. Therefore it is easy to discount missing documents, purses, keys, etc. This causes problems and conveniently becomes a vital plot point.

Once you have your key feature/characteristic, think of a way to highlight that feature for your readers. Take a lone paragraph and fill it with 2-3 sentences on that key feature. The chances are the reader is going to take note. (But don’t overdo it.)

If I had to describe Allie in a few sentences to highlight her absent-mindedness, I might say something like this:

The expression ‘she’d lose her head if it wasn’t attached’ could have been made with Allie in mind. The woman lost three purses in four months. She was losing documents so often she didn’t just fear losing her job, but her sanity as well.

What sort of things might be key to your character and hence become an important part of your story’s plot?

Chewing gum? The fact that your character walks like they’ve been stuck on a horse for days? A severe dislike for dill pickles? Whatever you choose, make it work for you.

Enjoy!

Twitter: Another Way to Break Your Characters Out of the Book

Twitter, it’s free.

Twitter, make it work for you, honey!

Twitter, if you know what you’re doing, it can be a BLAST.

Seriously though, the other day I had a brainwave. I’d put Allie on Twitter. Who is Allie? What is Twitter?

Let’s start with Twitter. Here’s a brief rundown on Twitter. Twitter is a social network site. That means you make a free account and begin tweeting. That means, you post a short (140 characters) sentence or two updating your status. That’s all. No wall. No pesky invites. All you do is convey information. You can also use it to start an informative, interesting trend like some agents did with a ‘query fail’ game. Basically, post something interesting.

Who is Allie? Allie is the main character of my chick lit/romantic comedy story (The 15 Date Rule) that is currently seeking representation. Allie’s a 32-year-old astrophysicist who has a slight issue with putting her foot in her mouth and is a general, all-round dating disaster. (We’re talking boyfriends hire other guys to break up with her. Ouch.)

Why put Allie on Twitter? Many reasons. One: it’s fun. Two: it’s a great way for a writer to get to know a character better.  Three: it could possibly build an audience for your character which could help with marketing down the line. Four: it’s fun. Five: it is covering the backstory for the novel in an interesting way. Six: it’s a great writing exercise. Seven: it’s free. And Eight: did I mention it’s a blast?

Anyway, check out Allie. You can ‘follow’ her on Twitter, which means her schenanigan updates will show up on your Twitter page so you don’t have to search for her each time. Or you can rss feed her. Or you can also check her out in the handy gadget I made for my website’s mainpage.

Either way, enjoy!

New Year Writing Workout #2: Shadow a Pro

How are your writing biceps feeling today? That was some weight we pulled yesterday with all those adjectives and adverbs, wasn’t it? Today, we’re going to give your fingers a workout, so do some finger stretches to get them limbered up.

This is a strange exercise and I resisted it for some time. Take one of your favourite pieces of work written by someone else. Or take a piece of work that you strive to be like. For me, I write chick lit/romantic comedy so I chose the opening of one of Meg Cabot’s books. You will need five pages of that other person’s work.

Here’s where you need your fingers. Take those five pages and type them (or write them) out. I know this seems like a strange thing to do, but trust me on this one. Type it out and see if by the end of your five pages if you haven’t discovered something about how the great writers approach things.

Let me share a bit of what I discovered when I typed out those five pages of Meg’s. First of all, let me mention that I had the impression that chick lit tended to have stunted, grammatically incorrect sentences here and there to create that chick lit voice. I also figured there were internal wit and barbs all over the place. Not quite true. In fact, my grammar checker didn’t go off ONCE during that five pages, whereas in my own writing I was going off several times in one page. Lesson learned: chick lit writing is actually quite good in terms of grammar. It just gives you the impression of being informal and off the cuff in terms of grammar rules.

There was also more action than I had realized. By action, I mean that things were moving along a lot faster than in my own work. We were right into the action and there was no let up. It was focused and fast. There were also a few well chosen words to set the scene, describe a character, and in short, things were tight.

Probably the coolest thing was how she dealt with backstory. Seeing as the book I copied out of was part of a series, she had to tuck a lot of backstory into the first few pages. To do that, she used a disposable character and used him very well to fit her needs. It was interesting, even for someone who had read the first book several times.

In short, I learned about five times more by typing out those five pages than I did rereading and analyzing those five pages five times. So get over the fact that this seems lame and give it a whirl. It won’t take as long as you think it will and you might discover something interesting.

It’s time well not wasted.

Enjoy!

NaNoWriMo Winner!

I did it! 

I sat down today and launched myself over the 50,000 word mark and I didn’t even have to plague my characters with the rare, tropical disease called ‘blah, blah, blah’.

In case you missed the news:

So, yes, needless to say, I got around that wall and have set my main character on her steady course towards the story’s black moment where everything will go wrong and everyone will wonder with awe, (hooked and unable to breathe until it is over) how on earth she will pull it out of the fire.

I love it when stuff pulls together. It is so exciting and is the best part of being a writer. I always feel so brilliant when I inadvertently do things like this: I just realized that one of my ‘make the character’s life hell’ moments I have planned will work totally in my favour in more ways than one. You know how characters are supposed to change and form over the story’s course? Well, I have the groundwork for that. Sure, it is full of muddle puddles, quagmires and the odd tree planted right in the way of the groundwork, but it is there. Anyway, I just realized that when she loses her apartment and goes to live with this sweetheart of a woman, that she will have her eyes opened in a way that will help her change who she is so she can settle down and relax.

Not so exciting to you as for me? Sorry, how about THIS:

Oh, not that either. Okay, well maybe I’ll sign off then. Even though I’m over the 50k mark, I still have at least another 30k to go. Wish me luck.

Sincerely yours,

Naming Characters

What is in a name?

Good question.

Usually when I name characters, the name is just there for me and I plug along happily. Problem is, I am now getting to the point where I can’t recall all the names I’ve used. You have all these minor characters and old stories that one day could get resurrected and published and you don’t want accidentally reuse names over and over. You don’t want readers to think you only have 40 names in your back pocket and you keep reusing them over and over again because you have no creativity. Then there is the other problem of what if you use the name now and later find that it just HAS to be the name for the new character you’ve created and no other name will be as ‘perfect’ but the name is already used?

Anyway, I think I am going to have to start making a master list of character names so I don’t accidentally and unconsciously always have a ‘Ben’ or something in all my stories. Although that could be kind of funny…especially if he was a barista or something. Then eventually he could have his own story with all these other characters from the other books visiting him. It would be so Maeve Binchy.

But I doubt I’ll do that. Here is what I do when I get ‘stuck’ though. (Funny, I have never been stuck on a character name for longer than about 5 minutes and rarely have I gone back and changed a name.) What I do is go online. There are some great baby name websites and I just discovered that the American Social Security Site has the most popular names from different decades. Super cool if you need an older adult and you want the name to fit the time they were born in. What I’ve heard other writers do is save names from spam they receive. Isn’t that funny? Imagine the creative names they get there!