Does This Novel Seem Crowded? A Rerun

[Author note: If you’re a pantser, sit down and make yourself comfortable. I'm hoping to show that some pre-writing activity can save you work later without killing creativity. Honest!]

Character, characters everywhere! But do they have a job to do? That’s a good question to ask. Just like you’re created with a purpose in mind, your characters should be, too.

It’s so easy to overpopulate a story. That’s how I’ve collected so many dynamite deleted scenes. But creating a cache of deleted scenes is not my objective. I need to look at my characters as part of an organic whole, not as detached individuals. Each character should help define the others.

According to John Truby in The Anatomy of Story, we learn the most about our protagonist when we can compare her to the other characters on four different levels: by story function, archetype, theme, and opposition. 

Today, I’m going to talk about the story function of your characters, because this helped me the most with crowd control—and revolutionized the way I think about developing characters.

This is my gift to you after being so snarky about Maass’s chapter, “Standout Characters.” Deepest apologies again, Mr. Maass, sir.

Every novel starts with a premise. The premise is what your story is about in one sentence. For instance, the premise of The Hunger Games (HG) is: In post-apocalyptic America, a teen-aged huntress takes her sister’s place in a last-man-standing battle against representatives of the eleven other districts of Panem.  

Once you know your premise, you create characters. Start with your protagonist or hero. She’s the one with the central problem. (Katniss must take care of her sister.) She’s the one who drives the action in an attempt to solve her problem. (Katniss volunteers to take Prim’s place in the hunger games.) The protagonist drives the action, but she isn't without her weaknesses and needs. (Katniss is a loner, but she must partner with other contestants to survive, knowing she will later need to kill them in order to solve her problem.)

This is where things get interesting. All other characters in your novel will represent an opposition, an alliance with the protagonist, or a combination of the two. Every character has a job to do to tell your story according to the premise.

Antagonist: The antagonist should want the same thing as the protagonist, which will bring them in direct conflict. This doesn't mean they hate each other, necessarily. Think of them as opposition, a less brick-wall kind of word. (Katniss has one big antagonist, the government, plus twenty-three contestants that want to live to take care of their families, so they must kill her.)

Ally: An ally helps the protagonist solve her problem. They listen to the protagonist, giving the reader a chance to hear in the protagonist's own words what she values and wants. Again, their goals are usually the same, but sometimes the ally has her own goal. (In HG, Katniss has an ally in Gale, her hunting partner in District 12. Also, Cinna, her stylist uses his cunning and skill to make Katniss a favorite in the games.)

Fake-Ally Opponent: This is where things get really interesting. This character seems to be on the protagonist’s side, but is really an opponent. This is how twists and turns are added to a story, as well as tension. (Effie Trinket plays this role for Katniss. She’s very proper and gathers a team to help Katniss, but she represents the government, the source of all Katniss’s problems. As the government’s representative, she facilitates the death of at least one, if not both of her charges, Katniss and Peeta.)

Fake-Opponent Ally: These are fun characters to write but not as common in storytelling as the Fake-Ally Opponent, but HG is full of them. This opponent appears to be fighting the protagonist but is actually a friend. (Peeta, of course, is the first of Katniss’s opponents to come to mind, but don’t forget about Rue. The most powerful Fake-Opponent Ally is Haymitch, Katniss’s supposed mentor. He is drunk and useless most of the time, but he sees something in Katniss that makes him believe she is finally the one who can survive. He recruits sponsors and sends supplies at just the right moment.)

Subplot Character: Their role is to give another opportunity to define the protagonist through comparison (they want the same thing or have the same problem but go after the solution differently) and to advance the plot. In HG, Katniss’s mother is a subplot character. She wants the same thing, to take care of Katniss and Prim, but her grief has paralyzed her. In this way we see the heroic side of Katniss. The mother moves the plot along by her passivity. Katniss is all Prim has in her broken world.

HG might not have been the best example because there are lots of characters, but they fit very nicely into their roles. Let’s look at a “smaller” story world to see how this works.  Feel free to disagree with me.

In The Language of Flowers, the premise is that a young woman uses flowers to say the things she cannot say on her quest for love. 

Victoria is our protagonist. Her central problem is that she wants to love and be loved but can’t do either. As a product of the foster system, Victoria has never properly bonded with a caregiver, so she probably suffers from reactive attachment disorder (RAD). She uses the language of flowers she learns from her foster mother to try to make connections. 

Her antagonist is RAD, I think. She sabotages herself in all of her attempts to make meaningful connections. 

The author brilliantly gives Victoria two strong allies, Renata the florist and Grant the flower grower. Renata gives Victoria a job to rescue her from homelessness and allows her room to be ellusive, and Grant is the most patient man in the world, and he loves her, literally and figuratively challenging her flower language. 

Victoria’s false-opponent ally, and this is up for debate, is her caseworker. Name? She comes off as making hurtful decisions for Victoria, but she introduces her to the only mother she will ever know because she understands what Victoria needs. 

The false-ally opponent is her foster mother, Elizabeth. She needs the same thing as Victoria, love, and she gives it freely until what she loves more than Victoria is destroyed. She ends up wounding Victoria worst of all. 

The subplot character is Victoria’s assistant whom she brings in from her old group home. Again, name? She’s there to compare how two foster system kids react to emancipation.

So, there you have it, a purpose-driven approach to populating your novels. Personally, this information has helped me develop a wider variety of characters with greater capacity for conflict and helped me to focus the story on the premise by not adding characters who aren't needed. (This is how adorable yet menacing Fred got booted from Goodness & Mercy.)

I would love to hear what you think of Truby’s story structure approach to populating your stories. Have you tried this approach? What benefits or hindrances did you experience? How do you keep from over-populating your stories? Have you ever asked yourself while reading a novel, "What is this character doing here?" 

New Rule: Beautiful is NOT Boring

There's nothing quite so boring as a book where nothing happens. I'd recently started a beautifully written (lovely phrasing and language) book, but I finally skimmed to the end to see what I already knew would happen--no twists or surprises and hardly any outer journey, slim action.

If this particular author (and I never read and snark) had read the chapter, "The Outer Journey" of Writing 21st Century Fiction by Donals Maass, I would still be reading the story. The story contained all the elements that should have added up to a great story, but it flat-lined.

Maass spends a good amount of time outlining the differences between plot-driven and literary writers, but the message that stuck with me was the externalization of emotion into action:

A plot development is a nice accomplishment, but without emotional impact it’s just something that happens. Emotional experiences are fine, too, but unless they’re externalized in actions, they won’t touch readers. They lack the kinetic force of the real.

We all know what it means to call yourself a plot-driven writer or a character-driven writer.  The trick is to take the best of both and make give your stories higher impact. The two groups have much to learn from one another.

As a character-driven writer, I tend to envy the genre writers a bit. The threat of death that all stories need (yes, even literary stories) can be the real kind of death by stabbing, shooting, poisoning, or a long, long fall over a cliff, none of this internal or psychological death stuff. Running away from real death, facing real death, and fighting to the death are by need real action.

In character-driven or literary fiction, that external threat is harder to come by. Our art is painted with line and shadow of internal struggles—things like regret, forgiveness, and lots of psychological scars.

I agree with Maass that external struggle is crucial for strong impact, no matter what the genre.

…your artistic sensibility pulls you away from strong feelings. It pushes you toward what is subtle, nuanced, and delicate, which can be another way of saying what is small, nebulous, and weak. P 49

Ouch.

Friendly reminder: Maass is a New York literary agent. He appreciates art, but his passion is art that sells. That’s how he makes his living. He’s a keen observer of what elevates good fiction to powerful fiction, again, the kind that sells. So, art for the sake of art is not the point of this book. The melding of the best of commercial fiction with literary fiction is the point so that the story engages the reader and sells.

Let me share a bit of how this is working in my present novel. About five years ago—and I don’t remember what was going on in my life—Psalm 23 came to mind, especially the line: "Surely goodness and mercy will follow you all the days of your life."

Oh yeah?

Either I didn’t understand what goodness and mercy were, or God had some 'splaining to do.

[Disclaimer: I am not a theologian, but I write about Jesus anyway.] It turned out that I wasn't 100% clear on what goodness and mercy looked like in everyday life. Basically, I discovered a great chasm between what is and what ought to be in my life—and your life, too, I suspect—because while we live in the kingdom of God, we also live with the remnants of the curse, most notably death and decay.  This not-so-little truth clarified a lot for me. I saw goodness is God's ultimate provision for me--Jesus!--every day, and I discovered that mercy can sometimes feel like a smack to the back of the head, at least until the larger picture is at hand.

And I wanted to write about what I was learning, of course!

As a story, not an article for Christianity Today. (They prefer their writers to actually be theologians.)

As per Maass’s direction, I needed to externalize spiritual concepts into actions, surprises, and twists—and characters with strong goals! Enter my hero, Lucy, in dire need of goodness and mercy, even though she has twin siblings named Goody and Mercy who follow her all the days of her life already. In the story, the twins manifest the qualities of their names, but not in The Shack kind of way or a Hind’s Feet in High Places way. The story is not an allegory. It’s about a girl who feels like a second-class member of God’s family due to deep regret and the accompanying shame, but her sister, Mercy, is God’s right-hand girl, and her brother, less obviously, is the source of goodness in her life. Lucy finds her sister’s ministrations perplexing and inconvenient, just as anyone would who can’t forgive themselves.

Anything important that’s internal can be externalized. p.50

And so, a promise made to a beloved parent becomes the impetuous for a felonious act. A contrary aunt spurs a race with uncertain winners. A hunger to connect with a daughter produces all kinds of self-sabotaging behavior. The outer journey is the inner journey put to dance steps.

Our job as storytellers—according to Maass—is to take these concepts like sorrow, anger, shame, regret, embarrassment, betrayal, and so on and so on and externalize them into action. He gives Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as an example of this done exceptionally well. I couldn't agree more. I mean, a little boy who goes on a quest to express his grief? That's action. Also, my oft-referred to The Language of Flowers does this beautifully. Victoria Jones, the main character, burns a house down, gives up her infant, walks away from a lover. Action! And she will break your heart and make you angry. That's high-impact fiction.

Even if selling doesn't motivate you, strongly impacting your reader should. Why else would you sit for years and years in front of a computer screen than to connect in the most explosive way possible with our readers?

If you are the writer of upmarket, literary, high-impact fiction (whatever!), what challenges do you face when wanting to "go big" with action that represents what's going on inside your characters? Can you give an example from your work? How about a book you've read recently that demonstrates what Maass is trying to teach us? Are you even "buying" Maass's take on externalizing emotions to up the emotional stakes for the reader? Why or why not? Have you set down a book (don't give the title or author) lately because nothing really happened, but it was written beautifully? What would you tell the author? 

Book Club: Writing 21st Century Fiction, The Inner Journey

I'm reflecting on chapter 3 of Writing 21st Century Fiction by Donald Maass, "The Inner Journey." Rather than regurgitate what you've already read, I've picked two ideas that were especially relevant and challenging to me. Feel free to add other ideas from the chapter. Haven't read the chapter? Don't let that stop you from joining in. We love hearing your voices.

Think of your favorite story of all time.

Now, what has kept that story more like a memory than fiction?

Was it the conflict? The meet-you-for-lunch reality of the characters? The action? The snappy dialogue? The lyrical prose?

According to Donald Maass, it's the emotional landscape of the story. And the starting place is opening ourselves up to our own emotional landscapes. We've been talking about the power of writing personally, honestly, transparently--except when, as Latayne pointed out on Monday, writing from reality can be dangerous. But typically, the more willing we are to mine our emotional lives, the more compelling our characters will be.

By way of example, let me give you peek into one of the most traumatic periods of my life. If you're thinking high drama, prepare to be disappointed.

Just as my first novel was gaining the interest of an agent and a publisher, I started having weird physical symptoms. My hands and my feet felt as though someone was driving spikes through them. Doctors were clueless.

To minimize the pain, I discovered two coping mechanisms: 1) Stay in the most neutral position possible. This meant lying on the floor, usually with my dog, watching the 2000 election returns. Remember hanging chads? 2) Apply ice to the back of the neck.

Since this went on for 15 months, I had lots of time to till my emotional landscape. I grieved my loss of ability--every movement intensified the pain. I wallowed in self-pity. I ranted at doctors (in my
imagination only) who dismissed me. I wondered if God could be trusted. Was He even there? Could I die soon, please? I dug for courage to make it to 9 am, 10 am, 11 am...I felt betrayed by the church. I'd become invisible. My friends disappeared. I clung to the thinnest threads of hope. I asked my husband to hide my sleeping pills. My life devolved into doctor's visits, who I realized weren't going to solve my medical mystery within the allotted 1-hour period and bone-crushing loneliness. Until...until...trust leached from my bones and I settled in to live well with pain.

Writing a novel about lying on the floor for fifteen months would be b-o-r-i-n-g, boring! But writing a story with the knowledge of this kind of upheaval was like opening a Swiss Bank Account of emotional currency I could loan to my characters. And connect with my readers.

Since Jesus promised us tribulation (grievous trial; trouble or suffering) in this world, I assume you also have a Swiss Bank Account of emotional currency. In that case, what Maass has to say should redeem, at least in part, what you've been through:

One of the joys of writing 21st century fiction is the permission it gives you to feel deeply and wide. Your task is to tune yourself to the frequency where honest emotions come through with a crackle and hiss. p. 22

A huge part of our humanity is our inner conflict. Not inner turmoil (I want to do this, but I do that.) Maass describes inner conflict this way:

The strongest inner conflicts plague characters with two desires that are mutually exclusive. When believably built, inner conflict leads to unsettling actions...Inner conflict is a dilemma. It's a debate that can't be won, an unavoidable fork in a road that leads to two equally feared or desired destinations. It's a predicament that's powerfully human. p. 23

Strong characters, the kind that become as real to you as those you dearly love, have strong inner conflict. In structuring your story, you will want to deliberately inflict your main character (at least) with a very strong inner conflict.

I recently read The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh. Here's the book description from Amazon.com:

The Victorian language of flowers was used to convey romantic expressions: honeysuckle for devotion, asters for patience, and red roses for love. But for Victoria Jones, it’s been more useful in communicating mistrust and solitude. After a childhood spent in the foster-care system, she is unable to get close to anybody, and her only connection to the world is through flowers and their meanings. Now eighteen and emancipated from the system with nowhere to go, Victoria realizes she has a gift for helping others through the flowers she chooses for them. But an unexpected encounter with a mysterious stranger has her questioning what’s been missing in her life. And when she’s forced to confront a painful secret from her past, she must decide whether it’s worth risking everything for a second chance at happiness.

The description hints at the inner conflict. The girl cannot get close to people she cares about, but she desperately needs and wants to get close to those people. All while I read the story, I ached to draw Victoria into the circle of love that is my family. She. Is. A. Character. In. A. Novel. And still I ached. Hope would present itself and be snatched away. She would sabotage every opportunity at intimacy in huge ways. I fell to sleep thinking about her. I woke up reaching for my Kindle to see how she had fared in the night. The resolution is brilliant, hopeful yet guarded. It's honest. I will never forget her.

I wonder what emotional currency the author brought to this story. How did she gain insight into someone with reactive detachment disorder? That is for her to know and for us to enjoy.

What struck you about Maass's ideas dealing with the inner journey? What stands in the way of creating a rich emotional landscape for your story? Can you cite examples of stories that successfully connect emotionally? When structuring your story, do you deliberately juxtapose your character's desires? Will you? Anything else from the chapter you care to discuss?