Cameron Montague Taylor

Fantasy Author & Fiction Editor

Archives for January 2021

Romance and the ‘Other’

by 6 Comments

What makes a Romance?

There’s a difference between a story with romantic elements and a capital-R Romance. In Romance, the romantic arc finishes with a default happily-ever-after (HEA) or happily-for-now (HFN) ending. The HEA isn’t the only required element of a Romance, but it’s among the most important. These elements are part of a Romance’s DNA, and must be there in order for the story to fulfil the promises made to the reader when they pick up the book.

A romantic story can be a love story, but it doesn’t need to have a HEA, nor does it need to include all of the classic elements of a Romance. That gives the writer more flexibility, but also means they can’t bill their story as a capital-R Romance without making a false promise to the reader.

While these ironclad conventions can be found in just about every genre, Romance’s obligate HEA makes it a particularly difficult genre to write. Why? Because readers know how the book is going to end. If readers know the ending, how can it be exciting and compelling?

That’s the unique difficulty faced by Romance writers.

Romance is in the journey

Romance doesn’t spring from a vacuum. The romantic plotline must be tied:

1. to the character’s internal growth arc (ie: how they become a better person throughout the course of the book), and

2. to the external conflict (ie: your protagonist’s quest to defeat the Big Bad Werewolf. Or whatever).

If the romantic arc doesn’t have that depth, it’s going to lack power. Readers won’t connect with the relationship. They won’t see how it’s essential for those characters to end up together, and thus, they won’t ‘ship’ it.

We need our readers to fall in love not just with the romantic arc, but with our external plot, our world, and our characters. Only then will they begin to root for that happy ending.

The journey of the plot

Part of the lure of Romance is in the drama: in Love Overcoming the Forces of Evil (or, at least, love overcoming a super thorny obstacle). Not necessarily love itself, mind, but the characters who are in love. By the end of the book, each character must choose to put their partner and relationship first. They face the Big Bad together as a unit – and together, they can’t lose.

Naturally, this unity can’t come too easily or you won’t have a plot. Every good Romance needs repelling forces – something that pushes the couple apart.

This is what makes Romance interesting even though readers know the HEA is just around the corner. Romance isn’t about the surprise of the ending – it’s about how the writer builds up to and delivers the ending. That journey only becomes interesting when the reader can’t imagine how the characters are going to make it to the HEA.

There’s a saying about three-act (and most classic Romances are three-act): first, you get your character in a tree. Then, you throw rocks at the tree. Finally, you have to figure out how to get them out of the tree. This is the crux of a good Romance: the tree has to be so high, and the rocks so heavy, that your reader can’t see how your character can possibly win. When it all comes together in the end, though, it’s incredibly satisfying.

Readers know the answer. The hook is all about how we lead them to it – and how good we are at getting them to root for the happy ending they know is coming.

The secret to a good HEA? Building attracting forces.

The journey of the characters

If we do a good job of character building, we’ll end up with a pair of puzzle pieces: two characters who uniquely complement one another. When they’re in their healthiest, most functional state, they push one another to grow positively towards the end of their character arc. This growth allows them to solve the external plot problem (and defeat the Big Bad) in a creative way.

That positive growth is a huge attracting force.

In a classic Romance, both MCs are POV characters. One of the two is always the primary protagonist. This character tends to be easier to flesh out. They start the story, they carry the primary growth arc, they drive the plot forward. It’s harder to create the love interest, though – even when we get the chance to dip into their head.

If we make our love interest (LI) as dynamic as the protag and successfully tie their arc to both the relationship conflict and the external conflict, we’ll end up with a compelling duo. These characters solve their problems by growing together, making it clear they’re better as a couple than they are apart. That’s half the battle to hook the reader won.

Yet there are plenty of Romances – and romantic stories – that fall well short of the mark.

Why?

Well, usually because the love interest has a personality as compelling as wet cardboard.

Where do wet-cardboard love interests come from?

The biggest mistake we can write when crafting a Romance is to create a love interest that exists only to fill a hole in the protagonist’s life. This lends itself to lazy writing – to falling back on shorthand and stereotypes in order to build a certain “kind” of character instead of a fully-realized person.

These stereotypes are the bane of every romance writer’s existence. They’re old, they’re stale, and they ruin our stories.

Male writers writing female characters: from scottbaiowulf on tumblr. Cassandra woke up to the rays of the sun streaming through the slats on her blinds, cascading over her naked chest. She stretched, he breasts lifting with her arms as she greeted the sun. She rolled out of bed and put on a shirt, her nipples prominently showing through the thin fabric. She breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards.

In romantic fiction, the wet-cardboard character stems, all too often, from what I call the “I can’t write men/women” problem.

For the past few weeks, I’ve listened to the Writing Excuses podcast while going for my afternoon walks. I started with the oldest episodes and am working my way forward in time, so take all of this with a grain of salt, because I believe the episode I’m about to mention is from 2009.

In it, the WE guys chat about writing Romance. Brandon Sanderson (who is, IMO, a great Fantasy author), mentioned that he wasn’t good at writing female protagonists. I pulled up short as I was walking to hear his advice to listeners:

In order to write good female characters, one must ensure they’re fully fleshed-out people with their own independent arcs.

This was lauded as Pretty Darn Good advice from the other guys on the podcast. In the most general way, yes – side-characters should always feel like the heroes of their own story. But the message I heard was this: I have trouble with female protagonists because it’s hard for me to write women as full fleshed-out people.

::deep breaths::

Again, remember – this is from 2009. A lot has changed in ten years.

Some things, though, remain the same. Men still get flack for writing women badly. Women, too, get flack for writing ‘unrealistic’ male characters (particularly in the Romance genre). As more time passes and the artifice of binary gender constructs becomes more apparent to the collective Western consciousness (–hi, yes, I’m queer – welcome to the blog–), this “men writing women badly, women writing men badly” problem becomes increasingly absurd.

Why is this so difficult? Why do people keep getting it wrong?

Because sometimes, we struggle to see beyond identity to the human being underneath.

If you let misogynistic/racist/homophobic/transphobic/ableist/ageist bias prevent you from seeing your character as a fully realized human being because of their identity, you’re going to end up with a half-baked stereotype instead of a compelling character.

We all have biases. We are all flawed humans raised in a flawed society. It is an exercise in empathy to see people who are different from us as complete, complex human beings. This goes doubly true when we’re talking about characters who aren’t the white/cis/hetero/male majority.

Minority characters have been relegated to reductive side-show roles for so long it’s difficult to bring them into the limelight – even when we identify with those characters. We treat the Other like an NPC in a video game. Simple. Derivative. Boring.

Please understand: I’m not trying to argue that we’re all the same regardless of identity. We (as humans) have had different lives and different experiences. Many of those experiences are colored by our unique identities. Experiences inform a huge part of who we are.

Yet while identity influences the character, identity does not make the character. If we rely entirely on an identity and the stereotypes surrounding that identity to inform characterization, we’ll end up with a cardboard amalgamation of lazy writing.

The love interest will, therefore, become a NPC in the video game that is the MC’s life: a red-shirt the reader never attaches to and doesn’t care about. It is impossible to write a compelling romance this way.

Don’t write from gender.

That is my single biggest piece of advice. If someone asks “how do I write a man? How do I write a woman?” I answer: start with a character, add gender later.

Look, I write queer fiction, so gender is a wibbly concept for me anyway. I do this naturally. I don’t always know the gender identity of my protagonists and love interests going into a story. (Writing is fun this way – you should try it!) But if you do have a concrete idea of your character’s gender identity – cool. Fine. Put it in a box in your head and set it aside.

Now create a person. A human character. Don’t think about their gender. Don’t start from their gender. Every time you hear yourself saying “well, he’s a man, so—” just stop.

Write a human character, fully-fleshed out, with all the faults and foibles of a person. Only when you get to the point that this person starts to feel real do you go back and say “ok, well – she’s like X, so how would that impact her life?”

She’s bisexual. How would that impact her life and experiences? She’s Asian. How would that impact her life and experiences? She’s hyper-intelligent. She has a messed-up relationship with her mother. She’s a woman.

Given her backstory, personality, and the world she lives in, how would that impact her life and experiences?

Gender is a tool, not a determining factor. It’s a prop through which you can filter a subset of predetermined experiences for your character. It’s not a governing force in that character’s whole personhood.

Resist the desire to attribute patterns of thought and action to gender.

“She’s obsessing over the possibility of a future relationship because she’s a woman.” NO. Stop. She’s obsessing because she’s the kind of person who obsesses. Because she’s an anxious thinker. Because she also obsesses about what her boss thinks, whether she did well in that meeting, whether she did something to offend the stranger who looked at her funny on the subway.

And if she isn’t an obsessive thinker – then why the heck is she obsessing over a possibility of a future relationship? Because that’s “what women do”? No, friend. That’s where we cross the line from behavioral justification to stereotype.

It’s the literary equivalent of saying a character likes pink, fashion, and painting her nails “because she’s a woman.”

We fall back upon these stereotypes – especially when we write other genders – because we’re told our whole lives that “men/women/NB folks are alien creatures we can never hope to understand.” Lack of empathy is lazy writing. It’s lazy living. If we do the work of figuring out who our characters are beyond the veneer of gender/race/sexual orientation/etc., we won’t need to rely on stereotypes to determine how they’d act or react in a given situation.

The question is never “well, what would a man do in this situation?” The question is: “well, what would Darius, the character I created with my brain, do in this situation?”

Writing from stereotypes is what not to do. It’s how to sink a romantic ‘ship before it sets sail.

So how do we write a convincing romantic partnership?

Character driven romance

If escaping tropey stereotypes is a struggle of yours (or if you’ve ever said “I’m not good at writing X gender”), here’s your road map:

  • Come up with two fully fleshed-out characters. Make one a romantic and one a realist. One a fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants type and one an overthinker. One an introvert and one an extravert. (And so on, and so on.) Don’t let gender determine which is which, because wtf does gender have to do with introversion? C’mon.
  • Give your characters heart. Give them unique backstories. Make their actions, reactions, and emotions internally consistent with their lived experiences. Figure out how to fit them together like two puzzle pieces who are stronger when working with one another than they are when they’re apart. What, besides physical attraction, pulls them together?
  • Determine their character growth arcs, and tie them to the external plot.
  • Create a relationship growth arc that also ties to the external plot.

Now figure out their genders.

If you’ve done a good job of developing your characters, weaving their arcs, and connecting them to the plot, you’ll end up with ‘real’ characters who can and will generate authentic romantic tension on the page. They’re primed to fall in love with one another from that very first meet-cute. It’s crystal clear why they can and should be together.

Most importantly, you’ve created characters the readers can fall in love with, too. This is the backbone of a Romance. It’s heckin’ hard to write, but completely worth it in the end. Creating a rich, romantic emotional experience for the reader is a truly magical skill.

It rests entirely on characterization work. We want to create people, not NPCs. We must let our characters’ identities inform but not define how we write them.

(And for the love of god, let’s stop sending our women off to breast boobily to the stairs.)

Make it Work

by 6 Comments

Do you ever sit at the screen and know that getting words on the page will come about as easily as swallowing rusty nails? I think we all have days like this. Professionals aren’t immune to them either, if the myriad twitterverse posts on the subject are to be believed.

But we don’t all face the same battles on those days. Folks who write for the love of it – with no intent to publish – don’t have to pick up the pen on the days when it’s a struggle. This isn’t in any way meant to shade hobby writers. There shouldn’t be a pressure to commodify everything we love, and a writer needn’t have publication as an end goal in order for the time they spend writing to be meaningful, legitimate, and useful. But writing goals will change how we approach those rusty-nail days

Those of us who are trying to write professionally must adhere to deadlines. We don’t set down the pen when the words won’t come – which means we can’t wait for sweet, sweet inspiration to strike before we put words to paper.

“I just can’t write today.”

It’s so easy to fall behind on deadlines. If I go a week without writing, I’ll end up with a mountain of words that needs to come out before I’m back on schedule again. It’s incredibly daunting to watch a deficit build after days upon days of undershooting my goals, which makes it tough to re-start.

Last year was incredibly tough on me. Each time a new horror show hit the news, it sapped my productivity and put me behind my planned wordcount. Then, I’d start feeling better about the world, only to be faced with a 4-5k wordcount hole.

The hardest part about writing, is writing.

It’s writing when I can’t write: when the well of inspiration has run dry, and I struggle to get words down onto the page.

I’m 100% for the general thrust of internet advice that says if you can’t write, if this is killing you, don’t beat yourself up. I’m not saying ‘your cat died? Suck it up and write’. That’s, well. Tone-deaf at best, cruel at worst. There are going to be times when you simply cannot get words down. You know when those times are, and that’s not what I’m talking about.

This is also not a post about pushing through mental or physical health difficulties to “just write”. Folks who struggle with their health must think of their health first. Work must always come second to our physical and mental wellbeing.

I’m talking about those fringe times when nothing is particularly wrong, but you’re feeling low-energy, like your will to work has run dry. These are the moments that I want to focus on for myself, because they’re going to impact whether or not I turn work in on time.

Here’s what it comes down to:

Once we’ve cleared major obstacles from our path (obligations, commitments, health problems), can we make ourselves do the work?

There is no silver bullet for motivation

The unfortunate truth is that motivation is a unique, internal process. I can’t motivate you to sit down and write. You can’t motivate me.

To get really hokey: motivation is like happiness. It’s something we have to create for ourselves.

There are general tips and tricks to motivation, of course – ones you can find just about anywhere on the internet. I learn best when presented with specifics, though, and wanted to dedicate a post to sharing these specifics with you. When presented with evidence of others’ productivity, I always ask myself

How do they do it?

Hopefully this answers that question for you. I’d love to hear about your writing rituals in the comments – the more we compile, the more we can learn from one another’s motivation and productivity methods.

Your methods are unique to you, and that’s okay

I’m going to share two different scenarios:

  1. My typical daily wordcount push. I write between 1.5k and 2.5k each day when I have my head on straight – but that doesn’t mean I always want to.
  2. A desperate 4k push to chip away at a deficit I’ve created for myself.

These wordcounts might look nothing like yours. Maybe they’re way over or way under your averages. Don’t negatively compare yourself to them! I’m giving concrete numbers for the sake of illustrating an example and helping you calibrate your own motivational habits, not for the sake of holding up my own stats as some kind of gold standard.

(Because trust me, a gold standard they are definitely not.)

Different writers also count different kinds of words. When I say “wordcount”, I always mean fully-drafted wordcounts. I don’t count outlines, zero drafts, notes, or otherwise. I know some writers do count words on a fast-draft, zero-draft, or skeleton outline, but I won’t. I find zero drafting the most fun part of the process, so I don’t let myself get a reward until I go another step and turn that zero draft into actual prose.

That’s a personal choice. How you count words is entirely up to you. I have a friend who counts all worldbuilding, plotting, and notetaking words because he feels guilty and unproductive spending time on them if he doesn’t. That is very smart of him. Customize what ‘counts’ to guide yourself in the right direction.

If you’re interested in the kind of writing I’d count towards a daily wordcount goal, you can look at my Morning Pages – that’s the general quality and style of prose I’ll consider good enough for a first draft before moving onto the next scene.

Daily writing and wordcount minimums

When I say I end up with 1.5k-2.5k each day, it sounds like I’m working on a daily minimum wordcount. (It also sounds like I have an enormous wordcount range, oop.)

But I’m not working by a wordcount goal. That’s an expected range I’ve come up with after learning a lot about my writing speed and style over the past year. When I write as part of a daily habit, time is the only metric I care about. My ‘goal’ wordcount is bang on 2k. Some days I won’t hit it before time runs out. Other days I’ll exceed it. If it averages out to 10k/wk, I’m happy.

I plan to write five days a week for 2.5hrs each writing day. I don’t have my hands to the keyboard for the entirety of those 2.5 hours. Sometimes I’m outlining, sometimes I’m zero drafting, sometimes I’m staring at the screen while pulling my hair out. At the end of the week, though, I’ll make that average wordcount just by virtue of the time I spend working.

If I need to bump my weekly output upwards (hello NaNoWriMo), I’ll add more days before I add more time. Days off are sacred, but sometimes I need to get a draft done, and adding time to my 2.5 hours is a dangerous gamble.

Why? Because 2.5 hours is absolutely when I hit diminishing returns. If I could give you any single piece of advice about writing schedules, it’s this: know your point of diminishing returns and let it determine your stopping time.

YMMV. 2.5 hours might be a drop in the bucket for you. Conversely, writing for 2.5 straight hours might be literally impossible. Either way, I’m a big proponent of figuring out a schedule that works and doing your utmost to stick to it.

Scheduling your writing time effectively

As a schedule-focused person, I’m at my best when I break that 2.5 hour block into chunks. If I don’t, I end up wasting a ton of time. I might be disciplined, but I’m also incredibly susceptible to distraction.

I have a time cube with which I choose work times. I typically sprint in half hour segments. Though I put my phone out of arm’s reach, I don’t turn it off, and I won’t time my breaks between sprints unless I’m having serious difficulty focusing that day. If I’m grooving, I won’t take breaks.

Sometimes I’ll sprint with friends in my writer’s group for accountability’s sake. Depending on what I’m working on and how it’s going, I can see a 500 to 1,000 word range after a half hour of sprinting.

When I’m really struggling, I’ll put my phone across the room and write in Full Screen mode on Scrivener. I turn my volume down and all of my notifications off. If this still isn’t enough, I’ll disconnect my internet. That’s when I use the time cube to restrict my breaks – five minutes each – and refuse to let myself touch my phone or use the internet even between sprints.

Point is: you know what distracts you and pulls you away from writing. Some distractions (like your family or important phone calls) can’t be helped. Others (like twitter) absolutely can be managed – it’s a matter of figuring out how. Obviously, I’m an extreme case – I have so little self-control when I’m struggling to write that I have to unplug my router. But I do what I have to do to make sure my writing time is sacred.

If I don’t, I end up digging myself a serious, serious hole.

Hitting a high one-time wordcount goal

And getting back out of that hole is easier said than done.

If I have a deadline and need a certain number of words to hit the page to meet it, I might have to set a wordcount goal between 4k and 5k. I know folks who can write way more than that in a day – I’m not one of them. 5k is right at my maximum productivity threshold. It will take me an entire day to complete.

When I have to make up deficits, I’m often not in a good place to write in the first place. If I were in a good mindset, I wouldn’t have gotten myself into that deficit – or at least, the hole wouldn’t be so deep that I had to write 4-5k in a day.

(On the occasions when I need to ramp up productivity a tad over a longer period of time, I’ll do it by either ensuring I hit my 2k goal, or by adding an extra 500 words onto my finishing point each day.)

One-time wordcount goals are about worst-case-scenario deadline crunches.

I’m never happy about them.

But here’s how I get them done, even if it’s like pulling teeth the whole workday:

  • I caffeinate as much as I want. While this isn’t the kind of long-term habit I want to start, if I need to do a serious push only once, sure, I’ll make myself that second Americano at 2pm.
  • I get up early. My ‘early’ is somewhere between 7am and 8am, YMMV. I force myself to go to the gym or do some other kind of serious physical workout. Without that activity, I end up feeling like a dull, listless potato by mid-afternoon, which is a terrible headspace for me to write from.
  • When I sit down to write, I try every single trick to get myself into the mood: cozy sweaters, the right music, pretty Scrivener backgrounds, cool but unreasonable font choices, etc.
  • I put my phone in my kitchen – the absolute maximum range for my Bluetooth speaker. It’s a pain to go all the way into the kitchen to check twitter. This is not an accident.
  • If I have to, I disconnect the internet.
  • I set my time cube to (preferably) 30 minutes. If I’m really struggling, I’ll sprint in 15-minute intervals.
  • At each 30-minute mark, I get down on the floor (yes, the floor) and stretch my back for 5 minutes. My back hates the fact that I chose to be a writer. At this point, I’ll switch the music to pump-up tunes.
  • I don’t write more than 2.5hrs at a time – aka my previously established point of diminishing returns. After 2.5hrs of elapsed writing time, I get up and leave my apartment. Maybe it’s to get that treat I promised myself (omnomnom). More often it’s to take a half hour walk and listen to a podcast. If I’ve been stuck on a plot, I might record myself speaking into my phone (I use otter.ai for voice-to-text).
    • (Side note: when I was a little kid, I mostly ‘wrote’ stories by acting them out loud alone in my bedroom. I used to dress up as characters, too. Sometimes it helps to go back to whatever method we used when we were little when we’re blocked, because it’ll always come more naturally.)
  • No social media. Period. At all. All day.
  • Rinse and repeat until the work is done.
  • I stop working the second I hit my goal. These types of writing days are super-draining on energy and creativity, so I want to spend as much time as possible at the end of the day filling my well back up again. I try to stay away from social media even after I finish writing in favor of reading, consuming media I was looking forward to, drawing, or chatting with folks in my writing group.
  • Most importantly: I don’t stress, even a little, about the quality of my writing. When words come out like nails, I’m certain the writing is terrible because it feels terrible. It’s never as bad as I think it is. Even if it is … sub-par 5k on the page is better than perfect 5k in my head.

All of those ideas and habits are very specific to me and my process, of course, but you’re welcome to try any of them out! I didn’t invent my schedule organically – it came from looking at what other writers did and having a go at imitating their processes, keeping what worked for me and discarding what didn’t.

If I could give one piece of advice, though, it’d be this:

Don’t reward yourself with social media. That ish is like quicksand – once you’re on it, it’s impossible to escape. Make your Big Writing Wordcount Goal days social media free days and your life will be so much easier.

Track. Your. Progress.

Tracking progress is a vital part of my process. It gives me that boost of dopamine each time I hit my goals, and helps me gather and crunch data to tailor my writing routine to my needs.

If you’re new to tracking your progress, here’s the data I find most helpful to have on hand:

  • What project I worked on
  • How much I wrote
  • How long I wrote
  • What time of day I wrote
  • How hard it was to get it out

You’re welcome to add and subtract as necessary – and use any software you need! I really like NaNoWriMo’s goal-setting for this (it tracks all of the above metrics for you), but most writing programs let you set and track goals. I’ve also seen some writers use bullet journals and excel spreadsheets to track their progress.

Over the course of several months, I figured out the following things about myself:

  • I write best in half-hour sprint segments;
  • 2.5 hours is usually the limit before I need a big break from work;
  • I’m 5x more productive in the afternoon and evening than I am in the morning;
  • I work best when I only write 5-6 days a week instead of 7;
  • I’m not actually all that more productive when the words come easy than when they’re hard to get out, so letting that feeling get me down is silly;
  • If I so much as sniff in the direction of Instagram during designated writing time, the whole day is a wash.

My cold, hard facts contradict two pieces of writing advice I get all the time:

  • Write every day
  • Your brain works best in the morning

But hey – maybe those ^ two bits of advice are the absolute lynchpin for productivity for some. I’d never knock someone else’s technique. But I’d encourage every writer to experiment in order to figure out what works best for them.

Tracking progress helped me figure out how to schedule my writing days in order to best meet my deadlines. Now I know what time in my day is sacred and when/how to wield that time for the most efficient outcome.

(I’m trying a few different things this New Year, too, based on writing advice I’ve picked up from across the internet – more on that in a future post!)

Most importantly: tracking data keeps us from lying to ourselves.

IDK how many times I’ve said “but I just write better at 2am!” to myself in order to justify a day’s worth of procrastination. Turns out: I don’t. I’m most productive in the middle of the afternoon, and I have the data to back it up. Staring at those numbers – and the huge disparity between my 2am and 2pm productivity – makes it impossible to tell myself comfortable lies. You know the ones I mean: the lies we tell to excuse ourselves from doing work, making a change, or upending a cozy routine.

Track. Your. Progress.

Without the data it gives us, we flail around in the dark, trying others’ advice and wondering why it doesn’t feel like it’s working.

You won’t always hit your goals

I wrote a post earlier this month about using New Year’s resolutions to make several smaller goals instead of one or two huge ones. The general idea: start simple, rack up easy & early wins, grow from there.

Let’s give ourselves permission to start small, with goals we can meet with our eyes shut.

When we ramp up, let’s give ourselves permission to have bad days – or weeks, or months.

Let’s build those less productive times into our schedules. We can pad deadlines so the inevitable Week From Hell doesn’t upend everything we’ve worked for.

Yet if we fall behind (and we often do): let’s forgive ourselves. It can be fixed – even if the end result isn’t quite what we imagined when we first set out. The more we beat ourselves up for failing to meet goals, deadlines, planned wordcounts, etc., the harder it becomes to sit down and do more writing.

This is a marathon, not a sprint. Let’s build healthy habits and cheer each other on along the way.

.

Looking for a way to get started each day? Join me for my Morning Pages writing prompts on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. Morning Pages are flash fiction prompts with spec fic flavor. Write along with me, and join the craft discussion in the comments!

Morning Pages: Dragon Snacks

by 19 Comments

Welcome to Morning Pages — it’s time for a monthly roundup. I hope you’ve got your pencils sharpened and ready to write. Wanna join in on the fun? Read the prompt, set your timer* and get ready to let the words flow. Feel free to post the results of your work in the comments below where we chat about writing and (if the mood strikes us) get a craft discussion going.

If you want critique from other commenters, use #YESTHANKS in your comment. Otherwise, you can tell us about the flash fic and the process you went through to write it. And of course, I’m always open to hear what you think about my excerpts!

*you can write for as long as you want, but most folks choose 15-30 minutes.

Things I learned this month: This is has been the month of training my brain away from epics to write shorter-form fiction. I’ve been somewhat successful, but I certainly wouldn’t say I’m comfortable with flash fiction yet. I struggled with the format I used, wherein I set a timer and wouldn’t let myself write past the ‘ding’ at the end of the session. Eventually, I got to a point where the stress of the impending timer locked me up too much, so I gave myself permission to set aside 5-10 minutes to clean up and finish the piece later in the day.

I’m well aware that 5-10 minutes of edits aren’t nearly enough to deliver a polished piece of flash fiction; these are exercises and one-offs, and that’s what most of them will stay. But a little extra leeway has helped them serve their purpose. Morning Pages are about jumpstarting creativity, and for that, they get the job done.

My favorite discovery of the month has been how fun it is to pants ideas again. I’m a plotter by nature and work off tight outlines for my long-form fiction. Throwing words at the wall to see what sticks makes me nervous, but the outcomes have been a fun and interesting departure from the weeks (months, years) I spend kicking ideas around for my other works. The structure is a disaster, but the ideas flow free and easy.

I couldn’t write this way all the time. If I did, I’d spend most of my time doing enormous overhaul revisions and rewrites. (Yes, I’m aware this is how many pantsers operate. Power to you if this system works, but I need structure to get a functional story on the paper.) For small-scale flash fic, though? Bring on the pants; it’s time to play in a sandbox of new ideas.

The Prompts:

“That’s the part tales don’t mention: how the hero, forever changed by his journey, can never fit into normal society again.”

“Journeys”: A post-canon short in the Oceana ‘verse

“Can you cook a dragon?”

“Dragon Snacks”: Neveshir from Dark Arm of the Maker deals with a troublesome student

“Lock”

Two characters from the Blight universe attempt to pick a lock

“The old gods are dead.”

Who’s left behind when all the gods are gone?

“Twilight”

A character exploration for an upcoming novel.

“Dawn”

Red sky at dawn, sailors be warned.

“Key”

Neveshir is having yet another bad day.

“I haven’t slept properly in seven years.”

A narrative joke in the Oceana ‘verse.

Picture Prompts

“Starspinner“: A young boy has a beautiful but dangerous power

A hunter watches the fierce green fire fade from the eyes of his prey.

Get Involved!

Answer the prompts or dive straight in and respond to others’ comments — let’s share our knowledge, our experience, and have a discussion we can all learn from! Don’t want to miss a post? Subscribe to the blog in the sidebar to get notified about new posts.

Questions

Are you a plotter or a pantser?
How do you think that impacts your revisions process?

WWYCD Part Two

by Leave a Comment

What Would Your Character Do? Redux

In ‘WWYCD Part One’, I shared a tool for getting unstuck when character motivation and behavior has us struggling to main consistency in our work. This tool was a series of notecards (or drawings, or post-it notes, etc.) listing each character’s verb: a word or two that describes the character’s most essential nature through action.

Our characters may be protectors, seekers, caretakers, yearners – the list goes on. Knowing this default state of being is hugely helpful whenever we find ourselves stuck with inconsistent action/reaction cycles or cardboard side characters. It gives us a yardstick by which we can measure character growth (or consistency) and a framework for conflict generation and resolution.

Yet characters are complex animals tucked into a complex narrative framework (ie: a novel). Their single, overarching verb might not be quite enough to go by when we write on a smaller, more detail-oriented scale.

Working at the scene level

Every character in every scene has a goal.

Or at least, they’re supposed to – this is something I struggle with a lot as a writer. I’ve heard scene-sequences described as “try-fail cycles” before, in which your characters work towards a particular goal, try something new, fail, regroup, and try something else in a continuous spiral. Successes come with unintended consequences. Failures come with unexpected knowledge.

These try-fail cycles can vary in length. Some might take up several scenes – even several chapters. Others might be only a fraction of a scene in length. Each time, the character expresses agency by coming up with a plan, trying something new, and pushing past a roadblock to figure out what comes next.

I tend to struggle when my try-fail cycles stretch to include multiple scenes. That’s when the extras creep in: worldbuilding snippets I need in order for the story to make sense. Character interactions that are vital to the growth of a relationship arc. Books might be a series of try-fail cycles stitched together, but what happens within those cycles is what makes the story, and the story isn’t all external plot.

But hooboy, that balance isn’t easy to juggle.

Have you ever hit a scene that felt truly out of place within a story, or a character interaction that made no sense whatsoever given what had just happened a chapter earlier? I have. I’ve written those problems into my stories before. Why did I fall prey to them?

Because I didn’t track the relationship between my character’s verb and their current location within a try-fail cycle.

Lemme unpack that.

Verbs and try-fail cycles

Let’s break the try-fail cycle down into its four major components.

(A/N: this is how I break the cycle down in my head – I make no claims that you have to do it this way, too!)

1. Planning
2. Execution
3. Conflict
4. Consequence
1. (Planning)

In other words:

1. We’re going on a quest to find the Thing – here’s how we’re gonna do it!
2. Wooo, we’re on a quest to find the Thing – omg, we found the thing!
3. Oh no, a dragon!
4. The DRAGON STOLE THE THING—
1. (What do we do now?)

Now let’s imagine a character – say a knight. A gruff, middle-aged knight who has spent her whole career protecting the kingdom and her loved ones. She’s the tank in a merry band of heroes – friends who she loves in spite of their tomfoolery, and though she’s reluctant to join the quest, she recognizes the necessity of obtaining the Thing for king and country.

Her Verb – big verb – is probably protecting.

How does that break down into each of the stages of the try-fail cycle?

Protecting during the planning phase might make her come off overprotective, overly cautious, or restrictive while the merry band talks through their options. Perhaps she’s snappish, even chafing at the bit because talk isn’t her strong suit.

We could even pick a secondary verb to help us interpret protecting as it relates to the scenes around the planning phase. Controlling, perhaps – for trying to control risk, which she might express by attempting to control the behavior and choices of others, or the nature of the plan they concoct.

During the execution phase, the knight will be at her best. She’ll be watchful and vigilant, looking out for threats. And though the duty of care towards the merry band may rest heavily on her shoulders, here, she’s in her element. When danger is low and things are going well, we might even see her crack a joke or take a member of the merry band under her wing. She’s protecting still, but she could be teaching or connecting, too – elements that deepen but don’t contradict her essential nature, and feel authentic given the situation.

The conflict phase brings out even more of the knight’s essential nature. Here, there’s no dissonance between the external plot and her internal wiring: the dragon is a threat, and she must protect against it. Yet we can still use her nature to force her to make a terrible choice—

Which leads to the consequence. Perhaps, at some point, the knight must choose between 1) saving the life of a member of the merry band and letting the dragon run off with the Thing, or 2) saving the kingdom by winning the Thing and dooming her friend. Protect the kingdom, or protect her friend? Whichever she chooses, there will be consequences – and the best consequences in try-fail cycles come from choices our character makes. Especially when these choices are authentic ones that are consistent with their nature.

(IMO, these consequences are all the sweeter when that character made the best possible choice they could, given the knowledge they had – and paid terribly for it anyway.)

Now we’re back to square one: planning phase again. Except this time, the way our knight expresses her verb, protecting, will be colored by the experiences of the last try-fail cycle.

Each part of the try-fail cycle – and each successive cycle – will challenge her verb differently. When is she at her best? When is she at her most constrained? Those are the questions we want to ask of our characters, and their verb should help us find the answer.

Differences in expression and change over time

The best part about these verbs – and possibly the trickiest part about them – is how mutable they are. Verbs aren’t static. Their expression changes based on the plot, environment, and growth arc of the character.

It makes them more difficult to think about from the outset, but more useful in the long run. They’re active descriptions that help us weave characterization into the fabric of our story.

A knight who is protecting is going to show that attribute in a variety of different ways throughout the story, exposing all the different facets of her personality. Yet so long as we stay true to a logical expression of her verb given external stimuli, her characterization should make sense to the reader.

Now, a caveat – the above example certainly isn’t the only way to write a character with a protecting verb in that particular try-fail cycle. Depending on how they express that verb, the sequence and their participation in it could go differently. Most importantly, characters will change how they express their verbs from the beginning of the novel to the end of it – so the way they reacted in Act I should be different from how they react during the climax.

Perhaps at the start of the journey, the knight’s protecting reads as overprotective. She must be in control, she cracks no jokes, she stifles those under her command with the need to keep them safe.

By the end, she might express protecting in a healthier way – by teaching her merry band the skills they need to be safe and trusting their competence to learn how.

Verbs and scene-level conflict

These shifts in verb expression also help us maximize conflict throughout our stories.

For example:

If one of your characters is seeking, find a character who is defending or hiding in that try-fail cycle to stonewall them. If your character is protecting but, in that particular scene, overprotecting because of the pace of his arc, put him with a character who is provoking and see if sparks fly. Use your notecards to find the right character matches for these scenes – or, if you’re locked into a particular cast for a given scene, use the cards to work out which of your preexisting choices have the best chance at propelling the conflict forward without breaking character.

Your notecards are there to help you manage complex character interactions, especially in group settings, by tracing the cascading impacts when each character applies their essential verb in a specific way. If we stay within the boundaries of these verbs for our character, their actions will always have a thread of internal logic – even when they’re being utter idiots!

Let’s get physical

But wait! There’s more!

What does your character look like when they’re Doing Their Verb?

Does our knight, when her protecting is stymied by endless rounds of talking and discussion, none of which are going her way, pace around the room? Does she fidget? Does she pinch the bridge of her nose?

When things are going well and she’s in her protective element, how does she carry her body? Relaxed, with head high?

When things are going poorly and she stresses over keeping her party from harm, does she hold herself tight? Does she compulsively check and re-check the straps on her equipment?

When she’s actively protecting her party, does she put herself bodily between them and harm? Does she throw herself into the fray, guns blazing?

On your notecard, draw yourself a square with a cross in the center (ie: four boxes. Or four columns – I’m not picky.)

Now think about what your character looks like when:

  • They’re in their element (ie: the situation allows them to positively express their verb) and in the middle of the action;
  • They’re in their element, but there’s a lull in the action;
  • They’re out of their element and in the middle of the action;
  • They’re out of their element during a lull.

Let’s take our knight as an example again:

Positive/Active
+Fights like a beast
+Confident, guns
blazing, command
voices		Positive/Passive
+Head held high
+Smiles
+Sings old war
songs
Negative/Active
-Physically on edge
-Weapon in hand
-Puts herself in harm’s
way to protect others		Negative/Passive
-Serious and with-
drawn
-Snaps at jokes
-Paces

Now, not only do I have a blueprint for what my knight is like in action/reaction cycles, I also have a blueprint for what she looks like and what she habitually does in most situations. By the end of the book, even the reader should be able to pick up on her mindset when she starts pacing.

Knowing our character’s physical tics – and breaking them down by verb expression – helps not just with consistency of their physical habits, but helps us

  1. Vary that habit so we aren’t having the character pinch the bridge of their nose in every single situation, and
  2. Red-flag certain habits by linking them to particular mindsets and emotional states for those characters.

All of this helps with deep characterization and gives the reader the impression that our characters are real people.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it

Now go back to a scene that’s giving you trouble and pull out your character cards. Answer the following questions:

  • What are their essential verbs?
  • Where are they in the try-fail cycle?
  • Will that change how their essential verbs are expressed?
  • Are there any secondary verbs for your characters in these scenes?
  • Which characters are present? Do any of their verbs conflict, given the group dynamic and the external plot for the scene?
  • Is there enough conflict in this scene? If not, which characters can you push together in order to generate conflict? What would that look like, given the circumstances and their individual verbs?
  • Or – is there too much going on in this scene? Do we need a breather after a big try-fail sequence?
  • What state are your characters in? Positive (the situation complements their verb) or negative (they experience discomfort because the situation conflicts with their verb)? Is the scene active (conflict is actively happening) or passive (we’ve reached a break between try-fail cycles or major scenes)?
  • What do your characters look like (ie: what physical tics are they expressing)?

I hope looking at verbs helps you pick your way through whatever thorny narrative problem you may have found yourself in! Otherwise, I hope these notecards serve as a guideline while you’re writing to make characterization richer, easier, and more natural for you. I know the tips certainly helped me, and I plan on using these notecards on the corkboard above my desk for all of my future projects.

For those of you who follow me on Patreon, I’ll post the cards for the casts of Wicked Waters and Potionmaster as I start heading into my revision sequences.

Thanks for reading, and I’d love to hear what you think below in the comments.

What Would Your Character Do?

by 1 Comment

Have you ever…

…gotten to a scene were two of your characters are in conflict and second-guessed how one of them would react?

…tried to put action beats into dialogue and ended up with three guys debating the zombie apocalypse while repeatedly rubbing the backs of their necks?

…received feedback from a beta that they didn’t find your character’s response to a situation authentic or in-character enough?

…been told that your side characters all sound the same?

I sure have. Multiple times.

There’s no secret recipe to avoiding these issues. Like everything in writing, all we have are tools and aides that, if structured properly, help us draft (or self-edit) our way through our most common problems.

The most popular tool for the above is the character sheet: an accumulation of facts and backstory that gives the full scope of who our character is and why. Some of us swear by character sheets, some of us have never made a single one. I’m somewhere in the middle. The information makes it into my writing notebook, but never on a single page.

(For the record, this is why I use disc binders as writing notebooks. It’s much easier to create order out of chaos when you can move your pages around.)

The problem with character sheets?

They’re so long.

I’m an easily derailed drafter. If I’m getting stuck on a bit of dialogue, a reaction, or a tic, I’ll slip back into my character notes to help. Instead of helping, though, I often lose myself in the weeds of a character sheet. Next thing I know, I’m down a rabbit hole about what happened to their pet cat when they were eight, an hour has passed, and no new words have hit the drafting page.

Distraction aside, character sheets are so complex and all-encompassing that they don’t often answer the question I have, which boils down to: “what is this character going to do?”

So how do we distill pages worth of character notes into brief, actionable shorthand that helps us answer our drafting questions?

I tried a new tip the other day that I really enjoyed and want to share with you.

Character Notecards

For those of you who (like me), hate index cards thanks to a subliminal association with vocabulary tests, hear me out. These don’t need to be notecards. They can be post-its, stickers, magnets, a beautifully illustrated flowchart—

Point is, you need something that’s:

  1. small
  2. easy to glance over with a single eye-sweep
  3. posted to the wall over your desk (or inside the cover of your notebook, or pinned as a note on your desktop – the world’s your oyster).

I’m going to keep calling them ‘notecards’ for the sake of simplicity, but understand that this refers only to whatever base unit of whatever system you’ve devised.

“But Cee,” you might say, “aren’t notecards just a different format for the same set of information?”

Not necessarily.

The questions at the top of this post point to an action/reaction problem. We might know exactly who our characters are after doing pages upon pages of diligent personality profiles. We might hold the blueprint to their being in our heads. (Or we’re shoot-from-the-hip pantsers learning character as we go – in which case I say: you are brave, friends. Very brave.) Yet none of that tells us what our character is going to do. It tells us only why our character is who they are.

The problem with expansive, general frameworks? It’s very easy to get bogged down in them. If our issue is figuring out a concrete, authentic action/reaction for our character to take, then we need to start at action’s very root:

Verbs.

Pick a Verb, any Verb…

Grab your first notecard. Write your protagonist’s name on top.

Now, below their name, write one verb that describes that character’s most essential nature.

You might be saying “Cee, don’t you mean adjective?” Nope. I mean a verb: only an action word for your action/reaction problem.

What is your character always doing? What are they driving towards? What role do they assume in pivotal scenes? What character do they play in group settings, in conflict, at parties?

For example: Samwise Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings is a loyal bean who spends the entirety of the series looking after Frodo. Great – now let’s rephrase that into verb form.

Sam is protecting. If I used a second verb, I’d pick caretaking.

(LotR fans might argue about the order here, but let me off the hook for a second – I’m just tryna provide an example.)

What is your character always driving towards? What are their primary motivating verbs? This isn’t meant to encompass the sum total of their character, but you do want to make an attempt to strike at their core.

Once you have 1-3 verbs written down, prop the card next to your writing station. Take a moment and look at it.

Now think about the scene you’re having trouble with. Is your character acting / speaking in line with those action verbs? If not, what would bring them more in line with your chosen verbs? Or: if they must act this way for the sake of the story, have you done a good enough job setting up a scenario that forces them to act contrary to their nature?

Again, this isn’t a cure-all, but I find it to be a helpful tool. Whenever I’m writing, I have actionable words describing my character’s most essential nature sitting right in front of me. If their action/reaction cycles get muddy, I can refer back to what they should be doing, based on their core being at any point in time.

That goes doubly true when that character gets thrown into the mix with another.

We could say Frodo is sacrificing, or that Pippin is taking risks, perhaps – both actions that come into direct conflict with Sam’s protecting, caretaking. If all of those characters stay true to their essential natures within a given scene, the friction between them will become immediately evident as soon as a catalyst enters the picture and throws their equilibrium off-kilter.

External plot prompts Pippin to take a silly risk? Frodo (sacrificing – no conflict) is a lot more likely to forgive, while Sam (protecting – big conflict) will be substantially more upset.

On side-characters:

Side-characters often boil down to a single verb – especially if they play only one concrete role in the story. The crux of creating fleshed-out side-characters lies in allowing that verb to throw them into conflict with the protagonist.

Make sure your side-characters hold to their verb, even when (especially when) it’s inconvenient.

When our betas accuse our side-characters of being one-dimensional, conflict – or lack thereof – is often the culprit. Instead of relying on an internally consistent set of motivations that drive action, they become props to aid (or thwart) the protagonist in all of their endeavors. Allowing them to flip from aid to neutral force to impediment based on their motivating verb will make for much stronger side-characters. Only then will they feel like the protagonists of their own stories (even if we don’t get to read those stories).

It’s also a great tool for helping us add authentic conflict at the scene level when the major antagonist is absent!

Notecards and character growth:

One of my favorite things about these notecards is how they help track character growth.

Some of our characters start off as one verb, but transition to another by the end of the story. This isn’t a necessary aspect of character growth, mind. A protag can have an immense growth arc even within a verb (protecting, protecting) but change how they approach that essential aspect of their nature.

Yet when the verb changes, it’s huge (provoking to peacemaking, for example). Thinking about this shift – and where the character is on their journey from one verb to the other – can help us plan authentic character growth arcs.

Like everything else in fiction, it’s easier to write the beginning and end of these growth arcs than it is to write the middle. I approach the muddy middle by creating a sliding scale like this:

<—provoking ——– ch. 5 ——– ch. 10 ——– ch . 15 ——– peacemaking—>

It’s not fancy, but it helps me visually identify where the character is in their transition. That helps me pick a verb to calibrate their character’s response accordingly.

This is especially (massively!) helpful when writing an antagonist’s heel-faced turn.

Your mission, should you choose to accept:

Make notecards for all characters with a significant role in your plot, including side-characters. Answer the following questions for yourself – and feel free to share your answers in the comments!

Do your characters keep the same verb for the whole story? If so, does the way they express that verb change?

If your character’s verb changes, when does that change happen? Can you make a scale like the example above?

Pin your notecards to your wall / desk / Scrivener file / whatever. Have a look at all of them together. What conflicts jump out at you from first glance? Which characters are more likely to form alliances based on their internal motivations and tendencies?

Think about the major catalysts in your plot. How will those determine the way each of your character’s verbs are expressed?

Can you identify any areas in your current story where your character arcs counter the verb on the card? Was it intentional? Do those scenes work, or will they need alteration?

Now go back to the scene that started all of this trouble to begin with. Does having this verb list help you with your block?

If not, stay tuned for my next post where I’ll detail a few other quick and dirty tricks you can include on your notecards.