Finding A Character’s Voice

I have a neat little thing I’m doing in my wip (Book 5, Wing), which is introducing each chapter with a special scene, told in first person. A few of these scenes show a dramatic event in the character’s life. Others simply establish a mood or a central symbol. All introduce us to the interior life of the character, which is what I like about these scenes, and why they are important to the book.

The other thing that I like, but which is also sending me in circles about my own tail, is that there is no faking it in these scenes. Unlike the more standard, third person, plot driven scenes of the novel, characters cannot hide behind their current predicaments to disguise who they truly are. These scenes demand that I know the voice, the history and the deepest concerns of the characters.

This is a problem, because there are one or two I still don’t know.

There’s one in particular who is hard to catch. I’m rewriting his scene over and over again, in a different voice each time. Sometimes I play with the tense/person too. Does it sound “truer” to his character to speak in a languid drawl, in clipped staccato, in lazy profanity? I haven’t found the perfect tone yet.

To help me, I’ve also been shoveling through other people’s books on my shelf, and through public stories on the internet, and poetry, and even old volumes of Mark Twain, not so much for direct inspiration as much as to re-acquaint myself with a diversity of styles and think what defines them. I’m hoping that can help me clarify what defines my character. Hopefully, he won’t just come out sounding like Huck Finn. Especially since these days, even Huck Finn isn’t allowed to sound like Huck Finn. Do to protests, certain words in his vocabulary have had to be replaced by less obstropolous terms like “zombie.”

Huck Finn and Zombie Jim.

Full of Rape and Adverbs

Every now and then I feel sorry for myself that my novels will never be literary masterpieces. There’s that law, passed by Congress, that Tara Maya may not write such things…. Although, after resisting literary literature all through school, I have come to appreciate the genre, I’m still not willing to sacrifice the story I want to tell on the altar of High Culture. My books are much too “full of rape and adverbs,” as Elmore Leonard once (through a character) dismissed Romance novels, contemptuously.

However, Janet Fitch’s 10 Rules for Writers surprised me. Seven of them, I’d read before, but three were bits of advice that struck me as fresh and useful. Probably none of them are new, but that doesn’t make them any less useful. Maybe it’s that we are open to hear the advice we need when we are most in need of it. That’s a nice thought, at least.

These are the four “rules” I found I needed just now.

1. Write the sentence, not just the story.
Long ago I got a rejection from the editor of the Santa Monica Review, Jim Krusoe. It said: “Good enough story, but what’s unique about your sentences?” That was the best advice I ever got. Learn to look at your sentences, play with them, make sure there’s music, lots of edges and corners to the sounds. Read your work aloud. Read poetry aloud and try to heighten in every way your sensitivity to the sound and rhythm and shape of sentences. The music of words. I like Dylan Thomas best for this–the Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait. I also like Sexton, Eliot, and Brodsky for the poets and Durrell and Les Plesko for prose. A terrific exercise is to take a paragraph of someone’s writing who has a really strong style, and using their structure, substitute your own words for theirs, and see how they achieved their effects.

5. Explore sentences using dependent clauses.
A dependent clause (a sentence fragment set off by commas, dontcha know) helps you explore your story by moving you deeper into the sentence. It allows you to stop and think harder about what you’ve already written. Often the story you’re looking for is inside the sentence. The dependent clause helps you uncover it.

7. Smarten up your protagonist.
Your protagonist is your reader’s portal into the story. The more observant he or she can be, the more vivid will be the world you’re creating. They don’t have to be super-educated, they just have to be mentally active. Keep them looking, thinking, wondering, remembering.

9. Write in scenes.
What is a scene? a) A scene starts and ends in one place at one time (the Aristotelian unities of time and place–this stuff goes waaaayyyy back). b) A scene starts in one place emotionally and ends in another place emotionally. Starts angry, ends embarrassed. Starts lovestruck, ends disgusted. c) Something happens in a scene, whereby the character cannot go back to the way things were before. Make sure to finish a scene before you go on to the next. Make something happen.

Well, I already knew “write in scenes,” it’s in my Scene Helper (TM). But somethings can’t be stressed enough. I also use poetry in my prose, although probably in much clumsier way than Janet Fitch. (To wit, I smuggle in ballads and stanzas into the prose, unannounced. Not TOO often.) What I think she meant was more about letting your prose be lyrical, stripped of cliche (in fact that’s another of her rules).

So what was struck me so forcefully? It was the advice: “Write the sentence, not just the story.” And the corollary, “Explore sentences using dependent clauses.” I know I’ve read books with just the opposite advice. These are aimed at genre writers, thrillers and science fiction and mystery, and they stress the importance of letting plot drive the story. Never let fancy-schmancy prose muddle the pace or slow the action. That’s good advice too. It’s also the reason for things like the one-line paragraph. Keep white space on the page; force the reader’s eye to dart down the page, chasing down the action.

But it doesn’t mean every sentence has to be simple, or never exceed the vocabulary of a Fifth Grade State Standards Test. One thing that drove me crazy with the two books I published traditionally was that the editor told me I could use no more than two semi-colons per book and any words she deemed overly “challenging” were tossed back into the ocean until they grew smaller. Ugh. It’s not that I want to use a thousand semi-colons, or smother my readers in polysyllabic words, but I hate feeling I must dumb down my syntax or vocabulary just because I am writing in a certain genre.

There was a time when I told myself I would polish every sentence like a jewel. Too often, I lose sight of that pride in my work. Too often, I lose confidence in my right to write right. That is when writing a scene becomes an assembly line rather than an art. When I let myself delight in the scene, sentence by sentence, I recover the missing spirit of the scene that eludes me if I merely throw words around like frisbees.

 * * *

Just for fun, here’s a scene from my WIP, Book 5, Wing, with plenty of rape (or at least the threat of it) and adverbs! It’s from the point of view of Dindi, who is a captive of Umbral, a Deathsworn warrior with dark magic and deadly plans for her. Worse, he has an enchanted mask which allows him to appear as Kavio, the man she loves.

* * *

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Scene Helper

How’s that new outline method working out? (I forgot to tell you, I’ve dubbed it “Scene Helper.TM”*)

Awesome, thank you.

At least for the material that I’ve already written for Wing.

I’ve had insights into what I need to edit, external vs. internal action and the problem of empty characters. If I were a better blogger, I’d make each of these its own topic and schedule them for days when I don’t write any posts, but I’m honestly too lazy. I’m just going to throw it all at you, and you can re-read it during the next three month period I neglect my blog. (Uh huh, Tara, that’s how to build traffic. Woohoo!)

Outlining To Edit

So, yeah, I went back and retroactively applied it to all the scenes I’ve written so far. In that sense, it was a good aide to planning edits. For one thing, I could see clearly that I’d left out any smells, sounds, tastes and touches, and sometimes even any visual descriptions, out of about two thirds of my scenes. Oy.

On the bright side, by playing around with the order of the scenes in the outline, I was able to overcome a problem which has been plaguing me since I started working on Wing. One of the reasons this book is taking me so long is that (a) it was coming out to be about 100,000 words, or twice the length of Initiate, and (3) I need to make sure the story arc flows smoothly from Wing to the next book, Blood, so am I also working on Book 6 at the same time.

One of the things I saw in my outline was that I was trying to stuff too much action into Wing and not leaving enough of the relationships started in Wing more time to mature in Blood. So I found a way to cut Wing from 100,000 words to 80,000 words. It’s not that I tossed those 20,000 words — they aren’t fat (well, MOST of them aren’t fat), but I think they will work better in Blood.

The real test will come over the next day or two as I apply the outline to Blood. That book is a mess, which is sad, since in an earlier draft of this series, it used to be one of the strongest sections. But as I’ve revised, I’ve pulled out this bit and that bit, to give to other books, earlier and later, and now Blood is anemic.

External and Internal Action Arcs

By the way, I thought of another two categories I might want to add to my scene: External Action and Internal Action. Not every scene is strong on both. Not every scene should be strong on both.

Dem’s fightin’ words, so let me explain.

Battling Internal Demons

External Action could be mundane (“They journey through the boglands and reach a lakeshore”) or battle-packed (“The bog mummy drags Dindi toward the water.”) The seemingly dull scenes, those with less external action, are often the same ones with the strongest Internal Action. That’s not surprising. While Dindi and Umbral are battling a bog mummy, they aren’t going to have time for Deep Thoughts. It’s in the quiet scenes before and after that they converse and clash. For instance, the fight with the mummy, while it brings them together temporarily during the fight, drives them further apart philosophically. They each come out more convinced than ever that the power the other represents must be stopped. At any cost.

Battling external demons

A book with predominantly Internal Action will be “literary” (or else very boring). A book with predominantly External Action will be an adventure or thriller (or else very boring). Poorly written fantasy books read like the transcription of a D&D campaign, the novelization of a Scifi Monster of the Week movie. (*Shudder*), with the heroes battling a baddie every chapter, but not much else. A fight scene without a emotional stakes turns punches into yawns. On the other hand, I fear I lack the writing talent to make 5000 words about a man falling out of a chair riveting. (To see Scott Bailey pull off this feat delightfully, see here — you have to look in the Comments for the actual excerpt. It’s gorgeous. Ah, Literary Lab, how I miss you!)

Empty Characters

Meanwhile, the outline of Wing has helped shine a light on another problem with my draft, which is empty characters. I’ve been aware of this problem for along time. It’s bugged me, but I’ve felt helpless to fix it. The outline reminded me that the longer I put off fixing this, the harder it will be to fix at all.

Empty characters occur when you don’t have a good fix on a character. They’re just sort of blank. They move around and talk and may even have drives and motives and goals, but they still don’t have a clear personality.

Maybe they are plot-born characters. Plot Puppets. They need to be there to serve the plot. But who in Cthulthu’s name are these assholes? What makes them different from the other bit players and sidekicks?

There are 3 problems with Empty Characters. 

The first problem is that when I have Empty Characters, I end up drawing them all like me. Don’t get me wrong, I do this with my main characters too. Dindi and Kavio both share neurotic characteristics of Yours Truly. But there are things Dindi or Kavio would do that I would not. They are their own people. When I get to a point in the scene where one of them needs to make a decision, I no longer ask, “What would I do?” I ask, “What would Dindi do?”

But with the Empty Characters, I fall back on inserting my own reactions for theirs. It’s just the default. Someone called my guy a pig’s tail! He might be hurt but smile and shrug and pretend he doesn’t mind, because that’s what I would do.

But… how stupid. I already know how *I* would respond. I want to know how *he* will respond. If he would do something I never would, like fly into a rage, like snap back, or laugh because he really *doesn’t* mind, or maybe he’d feel utterly dishonored and go kill himself.

The second problem with Empty Characters, related to the first, is that they begin to blend together. Every character in the book has a similar personality, because they are all just Authorial Puppets. No, no, no! Begone, Plot Puppets! Cut your strings! Strike out, become works of art, not stamps!

I have a few scenes that I want to completely re-write now, not because they are bad scenes, but because I want to differentiate the characters in them more, to make them distinct, from me, and from each other. It’s a little scary, because it may also mean letting some characters be less well behaved, less kind.

Because that’s the third problem with Empty Characters. They pull their punches too often. They aren’t really a reflection of me, but how I WISH I were, my IDEALIZED reaction: a bit too nice, too clever, too strong, too good, above all TOO MECHANICAL. They don’t have enough foibles. And that robs them of the chance to be human. Even the characters who aren’t actually human deserve to be full people.

 *No it’s not really trade marked. Yet. Don’t you hate it when companies trade mark obvious things like that? Well, if Company Who Shall Not Be Named, mainly because I can’t remember which one did this, or because they all do, can copyright “online shopping,” I can trademark some obvious crap like this. BWAHAHAHAAHAHA!

Maybe THIS Outline Method Will (Finally) Work

Here’s my plan. It’s pretty straight-forward.

You know how They Say there’s two kind of writers, those who outline methodically and those who fly by the seat of their pants? Outliners and Pantsers.

I’ll be darned if I know which one I am. I seem to suck at both. Ugh.

A series of twelve novels is too complicated to just write in one sweet session of red hot inspiration. Or even a bunch of sessions of red hot inspiration. Red hot inspiration is indispensable, but unattainable, if I don’t first have some clue about what I’m doing.

Hence, outlines.

The problem is, I don’t have much luck with outlines.

“When I let go, sit exactly where I tell you, and don’t move. You can do that, right?”

My scenes are more like cats than dogs. And you know what They Say about herding cats.

I write what seems like a perfectly suitable plan for the novel, only to find halfway in that my outline left out too much crucial detail. Like, where the heck are my characters? How did they get there? Are they there before or after another bunch of characters arrive and do something else there? Logistical stuff. I’m  lousy at it. Even when I tried to write detailed outlines, I seemed to leave the logistics out. That meant when I got around to writing the scene “for real,” I would suddenly realize it made no sense. I had to answer basic questions ignored in the outline, and often this sent the whole scene reeling a new direction.

This made the story stronger, ultimately, but it also meant that it was not possible to reach the word count I needed each day. I spent too much time backtracking and second-guessing myself. Sometimes I wanted to poke my eye out with a pen rather than look at the same dumb scene one more time.

But I’m terminally optimistic, so, I have a new plan for how to plan. A meta-plan, if you will.

POV: Character (Third Person, Past Tense)

CHAPTER: B5-C4-S4 – Chapter Title

HOOK:

SCENE:

HANGER:

MAIN CHARACTERS:

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS:

PLACE:

IMAGES:

SOUNDS:

SMELLS:

TASTE/TOUCH: 

Now I’ll break it down in more detail: 

So as not to shortchange the other senses, I decided to write reminders to include them right into my outline. Not every scene needs to have these. I’d rather leave out smells in my description than force in artificial smells. Once I caught myself writing on every other page that this thing or that thing smelled of “cinnamon” because that was the only smell I could think of. I re-read it and wondered, “Why the heck would ANYTHING in this scene smell of cinnamon?” 
I confess, I have a terrible sense of smell, so it’s hard for me to remember to include it. There’s a good reason we have Television, not Telesmell.

Maybe not my best idea ever.

That’s it. That’s my new outlining method. I think I’ve probably spent more time blogging about it than using it, soooooooo…. no promises this will actually work.

I know you’re all dying to know if this works. I’ll keep you updated.

Each Scene Must Fight Or Die

Each scene in your book must fight for its existence. If you are a writer, you must have no mercy for weak and flabby scenes. Kill them. Now.

Die, boring scenes! Die!

You may think this is cruel. You may feel sorry for those scenes. Don’t. What doesn’t kill a scene makes it stronger.

Some of those scenes you try to kill will fight back. They will surprise you by proving they are stronger than you ever suspected. They will slam you in the gut with grief. Tickle you with laughter. Send a shiver down your spine.

 If the scene doesn’t make you feel something, it shouldn’t be there.

Now, I admit that I often put scenes into a book for completely different reasons. I put in scenes because the Plot Requires It.

Plot Requires That the Companions Travel.

Plot Requires That Someone Be Injured.

Plot Requires That Something Bad Happens Here.

But even if a scene sneaks into a novel on such a flimsy pretext, it needs to beef up if it wants to survive to the final cut.

What brought this to mind is a scene in Wing where two characters were falling from the sky to their deaths. It was pretty dull.

You see, Plot Required Characters To Fall From the Sky. So I described characters falling from the sky. But it was mechanical. They might as well have been potatoes falling from the sky.

COME ON.

They are about TO DIE.

Shouldn’t I feel something when I read this scene? If I, the author, who love my characters, can’t manage to feel something as they plunge tragically to a new existence as human puddles, how can I expect the reader to care?

So I had to re-write the scene.

(There are some writers who don’t believe in re-writing. It can get ridiculous. It can be overdone. I may be guilty of both crimes. But sometimes, it’s necessary. Sorry. If your draft sucks as badly as mine does, rewriting is required.)

Now, another writer might have approached this differently. My friend, Rayne Hall, who is an expert in scaring the shit out of you, might have gone for evoking Terror. And this was my first thought too, that the scene needed to be more exciting, more frightening.

But that version didn’t work either. This time the problem was not that the scene was emotionally flat–it had emotion–it just didn’t have the right emotion. I realized that terror was not what this character would actually be feeling. What she would be feeling was something more complicated than that, it would connect her to events earlier in the book, and to characters who weren’t even present but who were the most important people in her life.

For me, the scene works better now. It has emotion, the right emotion. Of course, not every reader is going to feel it as I do, but unless I feel something as I write it, I don’t believe any readers would be able to connect to the emotion in the scene as they read it.