Is Your Main Character a Wimp?

Posted on 7 April, 2010 by Deb

Tin SoldierAre your main characters lurking in the wings and refusing to take centre stage? Are they constantly upstaged by every bit player who walks across your pages?

If so, you’re not alone. It happens to the best of us. There’s always the danger that a little girl in the chorus line will suddenly sing up and attract the spotlight, effectively putting the real main character in the shadow. In a single POV story this isn’t a good thing because your protagonist is supposed to stay in the spotlight all the way through. The real danger of secondary characters who step out of line is that, once allowed a taste of glory, they very often won’t give it up and can send your whole plot off on a tangent.

In an ailing story this might not be a bad thing if it gives a new spark of life and renewed interest on your part, even if it does entail rewriting the parts that went before. But in a story that is otherwise sound, letting a secondary character take the lead can only bring trouble.

The main character needs to grab back the control, and only you, the writer, can give him back that control. If you’re struggling with a sulking or hiding main character, these tips might help.

1. Give your main character the best lines of dialogue. The main character is supposed to be one who makes the smart remarks, is always ready with the quick retort and (in comedy) gets the most laughs. If, for some reason, your main characters are always being upstage by the bit-players it’s possible you don’t know your character well enough, or you don’t like them well enough to really walk in their shoes or live in their heads when you’re writing. Go back to the drawing board of character creation and have a heart to heart talk with them. Find out what makes them tick, makes them laugh or cry, what it is they most want in the world and what they’d die to achieve, or protect, or gain and work with them until you understand them inside and out.

2. Make your main characters work hard for their survival. They’ve got to be faced with overwhelming odds right from the beginning. They can’t carry ray guns in their pockets unless their enemies have bigger and better ray guns. Think back to all the successful books or films you’ve seen over the years and try to think of a single one where the main protagonist was (initially) stronger than the antagonist. There’s no such beast. Even Superman has his weak spots that his enemies know about and use against him at every opportunity.

3. Keep your main character active, not passive. Let him be the one who makes the big decisions, the big mistakes, the big sacrifices. If he’s ever sitting around drinking tea and thinking whilst someone else is fighting his battles you’ve lost him, and the one doing the fighting has stolen the limelight.

If your main character still refuses to get out there and you find yourself still favouring a secondary character when it comes to the best bits in your fiction, you possibly need to make that secondary character your new main character.

Yes, it might take some rewriting and replotting, but if your fiction is going to be successful it’s vital that the character who’s taking top billing in the story is the one who deserves it.

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Finding Your Writing Process

Posted on 5 April, 2010 by Deb

A lot has been written about the process of writing – how you go from initial glimmer of an idea to the final draft – and for good reason. It’s one of the things that most bugs new writers, and most fascinates many more experienced writers. When you’re starting out, you wonder if you’re doing it right, and when you’ve been at it a while you’re curious about what processes other writers use.

For those just starting out, the question of whether or not you’re doing it right, whilst valid and, to some extent, unavoidable, is a question that can never be totally answered.

There are as many different answers as there are writers. We all do it a little differently from the next person, and we’re all right. It’s getting to the final draft that matters, not the route we take.

Having said that, there’s something very reassuring about reading about the writing process of someone who’s further along the road to success than you are. At the very least you can, maybe, learn to streamline your own process if you’re lucky enough to find someone who’s work pattern is already similar to your own. At the very best you can discover that other more widely published writers take a route that’s just as meandering and repetitive as your own. Very reassuring.

The important thing is that you don’t let another writer’s writing process totally derail your own.

This has happened to me in the past. I’ve read a workflow that sounds really good, efficient, clean and organised. I’ve thought it was something I just had to try. I’ve abandoned my own process and adopted the new one – with mostly disastrous results. Disastrous because I’ve had to study how they did it to make it work for myself, so I’ve wasted precious writing time. I’ve had to, in some instances, recopy notes already written in order to make them fit into a new pattern, and I’ve even had to get new software and learn how to use that before I could proceed. And in the end, just about every time, I’ve eventually abandoned the new process and gone back to the one that is uniquely mine.

Just occasionally I come across a writing process/workflow that really does help. In case you’re curious, the best ones I’ve found recently are the totally fabulous writing app Scrivener (which all mac users who write really ought to have, and which I was so sure would be the right one for me I actually bought a mac so I could use it), and which I now use for all my writing, the diary system used by David Hewson, and the notebook used by Antony Johnston.

I’ve always made copious notes about what I’m writing, including plot progression ideas, character sketches, motivations, questions to myself and my characters, reasons and consequences, and I’m more inclined to follow Mr. Johnson’s method of having one notebook on the go at a time, rather than a dedicated notebook for each separate long project/novel. I’ve never tried MacJournal, as used by Mr. Hewson but I am tempted by his latest idea of the private, online novel blog diary and may give that a go.

These two examples of successful author’s processes help rather than derail my own writing process because they expand on methods I already use – namely the notebook and Scrivener. With my notebook, I have tended, in the past, to leave my notes in there and eventually lose them in the plethora of random addresses, phone numbers and shopping lists that also get noted down. But if I adopt either the online diary or the extended use of Scrivener as described by Messrs Hewson and Johnston I should, theoretically at least, not lose track of my notes again.

I don’t think I’ll ever be totally cured of my curiosity towards other writer’s working methods, but hopefully I’ve learned over the years what works best for me and can now pick and choose which new methods I take on board.

The very best advice? By all means read how others do it, and learn from those who’ve gone before, but ultimately follow your own instincts and do what feels best for you. And never, never, ditch a working method half way through a project unless your present writing process just isn’t working and you’re starting again anyway.

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Should You Write Every Day?

Posted on 27 February, 2010 by Deb

notebookPhoto by jking89

Should you write when you don’t want to?

Everyone’s heard the advice to write every day. I’ve even repeated it to writers myself, but I’m wondering if it’s really good advice after all.

Most writers start out writing because they enjoy it. They do it just simply because they can and because it gives them a sense of satisfaction and fulfilment. It’s why I started writing, and why my exercise books in school consisted of several taped together by the end of term, whilst most people were struggling to get half way through their first. I just loved to write and wrote at every opportunity.

Back then I had no notion of writing for money, or writing to please someone else. It was just something I did, and if it pleased me it was good enough.

Because I had so much enjoyment in my writing, I wrote on most days. But I never felt bad or guilty for the days when I didn’t. I never once got anxious that if I missed a day or two, or even a week or two, I’d struggle to get back into it or have to relearn some writing skills.

If you don’t write everyday, unwritten crap doesn’t build up in your head. You don’t have to get all that garbage down on the page before you can writing the good stuff again. Once you can write well, you can write well at any time no matter how long you stay away from it.

You might get rusty. You might find your ideas don’t flow quite as smoothly or as fast as they did when you were writing every day. But you won’t necessarily have to write rubbish before you get to the good stuff.

The biggest danger in not writing every day, especially if writing isn’t your living, is that it’s harder to start again after a break.

Being such creatures of habit, if we allow the writing habit to get broken then that precious half hour we’ve got into the habit of stealing from each day will become elusive again. If you’ve missed two weeks of writing, it’s only too easy to let yourself believe another day won’t hurt.

That’s the biggest danger in not writing everyday. Losing the habit. Not losing the ability to write.

So, should you write everyday?

I’m no longer going to say yes. I’m going to say, if you like. If you want to minimise the danger of writing becoming something you used to do but no longer find time for.

But also if you still find it enjoyable to write every day.

If it’s become a chore, if you no longer enjoy it, then give it a miss. Walk away from it. Do something else for as long as it takes.

Writing is hard enough without making it a punishment.

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Grabbing Creative Writing Ideas Before They Vanish

Posted on 22 February, 2010 by Deb

winding writing pathSometimes you just can’t see the wood for the trees.

Story beginnings seem to be the most treeful area of writing. Creative writing ideas are there, but elusive. You grab hold of one and write, and within a minute or two another crops up. Do you abandon the first creative idea to jot down the second and risk losing track of idea no. 1, or do you plod on and let idea no 2 slip into oblivion?

Worse, you get caught up in the inner debate between the two ideas and find you’ve lost both of them. The trouble with imaginative, creative writing is that ideas seem to breed off each other, and before you know it they’re coming so thick and fast it seems impossible to hold onto the best ones.

Over the years I’ve found the best way of holding onto ideas is through brainstorming with clusters. It’s not foolproof, and some of the things that occur to me as I’m writing still get away, particularly the ideas that relate to story structure. Still, since I’ve been using the cluster method of developing stories I find I’m holding onto more of my creative ideas than I did before.

Here’s how it works for me.

My central idea goes in the middle. It might be a character, a theme I want to explore, an event – whatever it is that sparks the chain of muse pitches that I need to get hold of.

From this central idea I jot down anything and everything my trusty muse throws at me. Some of it is good, some of it is relevant, and some is just plain crazy. It all goes down, and sometimes it’s the crazies that spark off the neatest twists when I refer back to the clusters during the actual writing.

Once I have a few ideas jotted down I don’t need to juggle so many balls in my mind. I can let go of ideas knowing they’re caught in the net and can’t get away.

Sometimes a starting point suggests itself. Other times a definite structure emerges.

And now and then I realise a story is going nowhere before I’ve spent hours writing, and can ditch it and move on.

Best of all, very often I’ll get a whole new story idea from one or more of my cluster branches – and again, the crazies are a fertile breeding place.

Brainstorming, mindmapping, clustering – whatever you want to call it – isn’t new. In fact there is so much written about it that it’s in danger of becoming overworked and through that losing it’s value. People who’ve never tried it dismiss it just because it seems to smack them in the face at every corner.

But it’s good.

It’s liberating.

It’s productive and inspiring.

Whether you use a pen and paper or go the high-tech route and download some software, once you get into the habit of exploring ideas through clustering you won’t want to go back.

I use both paper and software, but the thing I really like about clustering on the computer is the way I can move ideas around the map. By making the map look different, and seeing my clusters of ideas juxtaposed against different ideas gives a whole new perspective that often is enough to make a breakthrough when I’m stuck.

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First Drafts – Patchwork Writing

Posted on 9 February, 2010 by Deb
patchwork writing

Photo by Lori Ann http://mamawit.wordpress.com/

I’ve just read a post on Holly Lisle’s Talysmana site regarding first drafts and the writing process, which has sparked off a few thoughts of my own.

One of the hardest things in writing, or learning to write, is learning to accept that what comes out of your imagination, your pen or your keyboard first time round isn’t necessarily anything remotely like what it will be when you decide it’s finished.

You have to push on through the muddles, accept the changes in direction and bear the confusion with stoic determination. You have to trust that the changes you make to a first draft are going to result in a better story.

And it’s not cheating when you change the beginning to match the ending. It’s okay to rewrite whole sections, delete others, change character names, swap locations, switch themes or whatever else occurs to you as you’re writing.

I’ve been a creative writing tutor for a few years now. I use the word ‘cheating’ deliberately, because so often I’ve had students cast me scandalised glances when I tell them it is perfectly okay to go back and add a few lines in chapter two when they think of a cool twist in chapter 15 that needs some foreshadowing. It really is as though I’ve suggested they cheat during an important exam.

First drafts are meant to be torn apart. Stories grow in much the same way as patchwork quilts. You have a load of little bits and pieces of material (in stories called scenes or ideas) and as you assemble the finished piece you rearrange, discard, add, match colours and shades, experiment with stitch styles and thread colours (in stories called narrative voices) and finally find a combination of all the above that pleases you.

You have to go through the experimentation and shuffling, the mixing and matching, the discards and the additions. There’s no other way to do it. If you don’t try the pink floral up against the purple stripes you might miss a wonderful and startling combination that delights and surprises.

It’s not cheating to shuffle the pieces around to work out which looks best.

But here’s the thing. In order to have pieces to shuffle about, you’ve got to write them first. Only then can you start the final assembly process that builds a story. And that’s what’s so hard about first drafts. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of believing that because it’s written, it’s got to stay as it is.

Wrong. It’s just another piece of the patchwork. If it clashes then change, revise, rewrite or delete it.

That’s what first drafts are for.

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