character

WWYCD Part Two

January 13, 2021 by Cameron Montague Taylor 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

Vary that habit so we aren’t having the character pinch the bridge of their nose in every single situation, and
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?

January 3, 2021 by Cameron Montague Taylor 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:

small
easy to glance over with a single eye-sweep
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.