Lost in my Character's Head

It always bugs me when I hear writers talk about characters roaming around in their heads. Some even go as far as to say that they see their characters in the shadows, or around a street corner, or in a Walmart or Home Depot. And they can hear them also, Sybil with all her personalities available at the braingertips.

If they listen close enough, the character actually tells them what to write.

Secretly, I’ve envied these people. Not so secretly, I’ve make fun of them. But the truth is, I’ve always wondered if I was missing something. How can I truly write good, authentic, 2,4,6, or 18-dimensional characters without having my entire body taken over by them?

Recently, I think I found the answer. Beside the fact that most of these people are lying, I think the ones who are telling the truth have latched onto something.

I think it’s all just a matter of semantics.

I’m not the type to wax on about writing—I don’t go all touchy feely about my process. I just try. And if things are working well, one thing leads to another and it builds. I push forward, coming up with new, and hopefully, unique things to say. But I have to give myself room to write absolute junk. Well, maybe not absolute junk. The key is to think I’m writing something valuable, or else I’ll lose motivation. Then later, I can come back and rip it all apart.

This is where I find myself now, trying to remember how it is I began to write a book. Because now, I’m trying to do it again.

So many months, okay years, revising that first book and now I have to (get to!) start over. I should have some sort of blueprint, a reward for completion of the first. But it doesn’t work that way. I have to think and think hard. I have to make mistakes and go in the wrong direction and keep making mistakes and keep going in the wrong direction until I finally find the right direction.

And THEN, I have to write the thing—just get it done from one end to the other, while reminding myself that I’m not yet at the revision stage. My job is to start something new here—a first draft— and this requires a different, forgiving, mind set.

But back to the point. After the dust has cleared and I’ve settled on point of view, tense, structure—after LOTS of failed attempts which aren’t really failed attempts because they get me where I’m going— if I let myself, I can brainstorm about my character’s mindset. I’m doing this now (well, I was doing it just a few minutes ago) and in this way, I am seeing and hearing my characters.

I stumbled upon this secret with my first book. But I quickly forgot it, never really taking note of what I was doing. I was desperate to make my book better and write it well which lead me to this solution. Now I can see that this is part of my process. By writing this post I’m hoping I can commit it to memory. I have a tendency to forget these things.

So, I have a character. I’ve done some initial thinking about her. I might have even completed a dossier (like the excellent one in DYNAMIC CHARACTERS by Nancy Kress)—and this proves very helpful. By answering questions about my character, I’ve gotten to know her. This leads to thought: it generates ideas about the mental state of my character, and potential situations/plot that might help to illuminate her traits, weaknesses, faults—and of course, this should all involve some sort of conflict or give rise to it.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Right?

Not really. It’s certainly not easy. But, I do try to keep these things in mind, or at least, try not to forget them. I try to think about my character’s motivation, the conflict, external and internal struggles, and possible situations to increase the conflict while moving the story forward.

Something HAS to happen. This is plot. Plot is tough for me because I have a tendency to go all psychological and get lost in my character’s head.

Wait a minute…did I just say I get lost in my character’s head?

Liz

The Blog Entry of a Tramp

It’s September and time to give this blog a poke in the ribs. It seems appropriate to post an entry about not writing, something I have done a lot of lately. I could be like the Barbara Stanwyck character in Ball of Fire when she gives Gary Cooper her list of excuses for screwing him over—it’s a blank sheet of paper. And he says, “The handwriting of a, well, what would be your word for it?” And she says “Tramp” but not until after he leaves so he doesn’t see how much she wants to be a better person for him. I digress, but hey, there’s one of my excuses for not writing. Turner Classic Movies. My word for it? Lazy.

Oh sure, I have the other usual excuses. Work. Moving. Family stuff. And it seems like every time I did sit down to write this summer, I drew “quite a tidy blank” (like Katharine Hepburn in Philadelphia Story).

What happens is, when I have an idea for a story and sit down to write it, I think of another story I need to polish. I open that one up and then start to panic because I really should be sending out query letters for my completed novel. But maybe I should wait until I get a few of these stories finished up. Except the novel is a bird in the hand. It’s done. But writing query letters is so intimidating! Okay, so I’ll just finish up this story and call it a day. Except while I dithered, the day went by. Time for dinner, time for bed, time for some other distraction.

See? I’m not blocked so much as dazzled by all the possibilities. As well as lazy. But Barbara’s character (Sugarpuss O’Shea) knew there were no excuses. If she could work through her insecurities (she was an uneducated stripper) I can get through mine (what if this sucks). Push past the comfort zone (Sugarpuss: gangster boyfriend played by Dana Andrews. Me: Turner Classic Movies). When you finally get that story started or those queries written—well, it’s no Gary Cooper, but an excellent reward just the same.

Sometimes One is All You Need

When I was in college I fancied myself as being too punk rock to do things like study, but I did manage to make an effort in my creative writing class. I wrote a perfectly dreadful story—based on a British punk rock movie starring Adam Ant—about a futuristic society (in 1998!) where people go around beating each other to death for fun. The professor had no choice but to give me an A on it because, as loathsome as it was, he couldn’t find that it was badly written, just, as he dryly noted in the margin, overly determined to be shocking.

The class discussion was uncomfortable, to say the least. My classmates were appalled. One girl started crying while she told us she couldn’t read the whole thing because it made her sick to her stomach. Another girl wrote a poem as a sort of rebuttal, about city people who think they’re so cool but they’re really dead inside. (She was incensed by “kids who are all about orange hair and purple shoes.” Snap! I am a redhead and I had a pair of purple Mary Jane high heels.) In short, they all hated it and, I was pretty sure, they hated me for subjecting them to it.

I thought they were a bunch of babies. But still. That writer part of me was in there, buried deeply under the mountain of desperate insecurity that was buried under the façade of rebellion and indifference. And that tiny little writer was stung to have my story so roundly despised. I sat in the classroom feeling like I was being pelted with rotten tomatoes and poked with pitchforks and I tried not to care.

But there was one person in the class whose opinion I couldn’t pretend didn’t matter. The woman who sat behind me was a recently widowed housewife who was going back to school. She had always been genuinely nice to me, despite my orange hair and purple shoes. The others could bite me, but I suddenly felt like a big asshole for writing something that might hurt her feelings since she had just gone through the death of her husband. My thin façade was crumbling—I sucked and I knew it and now the whole class knew it, even the one person I liked.

Except she didn’t see it that way. Her soft voice began to drown everyone out.

“I disagree with everyone,” she said. “I really liked this story. It was supposed to be disturbing. It was supposed to make you angry.” She thought I’d really captured something important about casual violence in our society and what the future could hold. She was almost indignant that the others in the class didn’t see how good it was.

I’m pretty sure I started crying, at least a little.

After class I thanked her profusely for sticking up for me and over the years I’ve never forgotten. As a depressed, self-involved teenager it was certainly a pleasant surprise, having a grown-up not treat me like a pest or a disease. But as a writer I’ve grown to understand what a gift I got that day in class—an audience, a reader who truly appreciated my work. I didn’t necessarily deserve it, but I definitely needed it.

I'm a Writer

There was a time when I didn’t think about rejection. I didn’t think about it, because I didn’t know about it. I was new and shiny and naïve. I wish I could get back to that place in my mind, when all I would do is write and delight in what I created. I’d sit at my desk pushing myself ahead with my words, my goal—to write a book, fiction. The word novel sounded too snooty to me at that point and I choked on describing myself as “a writer.”

Back then, I’d wake up in the middle of the night with an idea and I’d write it down on an index card next to my bed. And then I’d get up early, sometimes 4 a.m., while the house was quiet, typing at dawn. All I really wanted was to go from point A to point B, logically, and to tell an interesting story. But that’s not the whole truth—like most people, I wanted to write a novel. And when I polished my words and it all made sense, I thought I was done. But then I learned about revision and how a skeleton needs flesh and depth, and I kept going, revising. And when I was told it needed more, I took classes, workshops, joined critique groups. And then I really became a writer. I wanted to dig as deep as I could.

Now that I’ve left my bubble of creativity and have joined the marketing masses, I want to go back to being that person who can barely eke out the words, “I’m a writer.” Because along with my new found confidence, this knowledge that I’m a writer, I’ve become over-informed about the way things work. I frequent writer’s forums. I hear. I see. I learn. And as I send out my queries, I am aware of the “brutal” state of the adult fiction market and about the almost impossible odds of publication. I am no longer soothed by the notion of the crappy books that are out there and published—because I know that doesn’t apply to me. I am no longer encouraged by statements like, “it’s a numbers game,” because I know that isn’t true. I used to think if you write something worthy of publication, you will be rewarded with publication. But I know this isn’t true either. None of it makes any sense. It might not even be fair. I have no control over any of it. And, I’ve learned there are tons of authors who don’t get agents, and tons of authors with agents who can’t sell their books.

Like I said, I know too much.

The challenge is to come out the other end and find the beginning again. This is where I find myself now, trying very hard not to be paralyzed by things that are not in my control. The easiest thing would be to get that validation, that external pat on the back to keep going, publication. And believe me, I’m still holding out for that. But because I’m a writer I must adopt that writerly attitude that I’m sick of hearing about, that you’re sick of hearing about. PERSEVERE.

It’s that coach-in-a-movie speech we all tell ourselves, “You call yourself a writer? Then pick yourself up Bucko and WRITE!”

It’s good advice. I like it best when I imagine Billy Bob Thornton delivering the punch line. And it’s all you can do. So, I’m heading in that direction; this whole journey—up and down, a roller coaster, a learning process.

“The challenge is to come out the other end and find the beginning again.”

I like this advice. I might even follow it.

Liz

Of copycats and lemmings

A while ago a lot of my single friends started getting married. Being the copycat that I was, before long I was married too. So I suppose it’s no surprise that when my friends started abandoning the short fling or rather the short story for the novel, I decided to do the same. Maybe that wasn’t the best reason for starting a novel, but it seemed like a good enough one at the time.

I used an unfinished short story about my childhood as my first chapter. It contained thinly disguised versions of myself and my two cousins. We were at the beach. One cousin was a mean red-head. The other was a lovely hippie. We frolicked in the cold waves. My neurotic mother made a cameo appearance. I had no idea what would happen next, but I brought it to class and Eliza said, “Keep going”. She was a firm believer that the chief obstacle to a novel’s success, above all others, was the failure to complete it. I took her advice to heart.

Every week I forced myself through another chapter. Even though I had no idea where I was going, I kept going. I thought it would be good for the plot to have a death. so I threw in a mystery over a drowned child. I knew my book would never be made into a movie if there wasn’t some sex in it, so I threw in a dark young man who took lots of LSD and swept me, I mean my main character, off her feet. There was a horseback riding incident. I had recently gone myself so I through threw that in too.

I kept throwing things in, hoping for the miraculous insight that would save me from the tangled mess I was creating, but it didn’t happen. And every time I brought a chapter in, Eliza would say, “Keep going.” I added a frantic drive across the country (not exactly a car-chase but close enough), and more LSD. The drowned child morphed into a drowned teenage girl. The ‘me’ character was still in love with the dark- drug-taking young man, but he was in love with the lovely hippie. There seemed no way to resolve it so I kept going.

After about two years I completed my 300 page novel mostly because (and I hate admit this) a lot of other people in class were finishing their novels. It ended with the dark-drug-taking young man, who had also turned out to be the killer, going right over the edge of a cliff. The ‘me’ character almost followed him over the edge but was saved at the last minute by the mean red-haired cousin; an apt metaphor for the whole experience.

Somehow I didn’t feel the satisfaction I expected, but the next step was revision so I dragged out that first chapter, polished it up a bit (even though it seemed nearly perfect) and brought it to class. I was expecting some gentle criticism, but Eliza didn’t waste any time. I can't remember exactly what she said, but the spirit of it is indelibly etched in my mind. It was something along the lines of, “What’s wrong with the mother? Is that hippie girl a moron? Why is other the cousin so mean? Why are you even writing this?” It was as if she’d never read or praised my novel before, but I didn’t say anything because I realized that all this time, I’d been waiting for permission not to keep going and now finally she was giving it to me.

And I'm not bitter. I don’t think “Keep going,” is bad advice. What I learned from all this is that it's very good advice for most but not for me, because I have a very bad sense of direction. A better directive for me would be, make sure you’re headed in the right direction and then keep going. Even better advice would be, it’s fine to be copycat if that’s what gets you going, but don’t turn into a lemming and blindly follow the whole damn thing right over the cliff, unless of course you have a mean red-haired cousin standing next to you.

The Call—Not THAT Call—But A Call All The Same

I remember getting the call on my birthday, that I had been accepted into Eliza’s fiction writing workshop. I had heard about Eliza’s class from a successful local author, who stood before a room of wannabee writers and tossed out Eliza’s name as a way to better one’s craft, “but it’s really competitive to get in.” She looked out at the 100 or so needy faces and said— “Statistically only 3 of you will ever complete a novel.” I cringed at her words. I made a point to prove her wrong.

The timing of Eliza’s call was perfect. A few months before this, I’d handed over my completed novel, my masterpiece, to the two women in my local writer’s group for critique. It was a big deal for me to write a novel—something that spanned beyond the 800 word columns I wrote for the local paper—and I had gone over the thing many, many times—all 50,000 too short words of it.

I was sure they would find it practically flawless.

It was Judy who began her written commentary with the following:” For a first draft this is really well done…” and if I recall correctly, my face turned red and my hands went numb. First draft? WTF? This is not a First Fucking Draft!

And so I licked my wounds and did the only thing I could think to do— retreated into reading writing books. BEGINNINGS, MIDDLES & ENDS, SCENE & STRUCTURE, SELF-EDITING FOR FICTION WRITERS. I began what I considered a thoughtful revision. I particularly liked Noah Lukeman’s THE FIRST FIVE PAGES, so I worked on those suckers until they shined. At some point, I signed up for a writer’s conference to have my first 20 pages critiqued by an agent—a twenty minute, $120 investment. I needed to press ahead. I needed to know if I was kidding myself with this whole writing thing.

Of course, I was incredibly nervous. I sat in the waiting room chatting with the woman who had the appointment before me. I watched her go into her meeting and I watched her come out of her meeting. I watched her say, “I hope you have more luck than I did, Liz,” as the agent, my agent, trailed behind her. A perky young thing with blonde hair, she reached out her hand to me, smiling. “You must be Liz, come on in and have a seat.”

She held my future in her mind.

I sat across from her with a frozen smile on my face. This is all I remember:

“You’re funny. This had me in hysterics!”

“You get right into it.”

“If you could just keep this level of humor up—“

"Send me the first fifty pages.”

My writing had passed the straight face test. I left the meeting ecstatic.

It seemed I was good to go for querying. So I sent out those fifty pages and then got around to sending out some more queries, often including my shiny Noah Lukeman pages in the package. I got some requests for the manuscript. And things seemed good—I was optimistic—until that day I checked my mailbox on the way to the post office to send out a request, and found those fifty pages back from Ms. Writer's Conference Agent. Across the tops she had scrawled: “Don’t have time to comment.”

And I knew—I knew—I was done.

I think I sent out 20 queries, tops. And from the requests I granted, I was lucky to receive some suggestions, actual letters of critiques and encouragement. The fact that I hadn’t been completely ignored took the sting out of the rejections. The fact that these agents had bothered to respond to me at all meant that I must have the start of something.

And then I knew—I knew—I was not done.

What I had was a FIRST DRAFT** A 50,000 word skeleton that needed bones.

Which brings me to Eliza’s class—the next step in not being done—the next step in my quest to complete a novel—a legitimate novel—one that would hopefully, some day, pass the straight face test.

……to be continued.

**Yes, Judy, you were right.

Liz

My Weirdest Day in Writing Workshop, or I Take a Styrofoam Cup to the Head

So I was in this writing workshop once, with about twelve people and an instructor who’d published one or two novels. He’d been in the military and all his comments had that clipped brevity that sounds harsh. Starting off a round of feedback on someone’s manuscript, he’d say, “Not believable. I didn’t buy it. Anyone else?” Going around the room, each person had to say three good things and three bad things. Throughout this barrage, the author was not permitted to speak. There could be no rebuttal, no defense, no explanation.

That day, I was the first up to be critiqued and the group immediately went on the attack. They’d read a section of my novel where the main character, wrongfully convicted of murder and treason, waits in prison to be executed. They said I’d turned my character into a monster. He was miserable and mean; they used to like him but couldn’t stand him now. I couldn’t write it that way. It had to be changed. He would never be like that. He was a jerk. And on and on.

I protested, “But he’s going to be executed, that’s why he’s--”
The instructor barked a warning that sounded like, “Hup!”
But they needed to get it. “You’d be mean too if you were stuck in prison.”
“Shut it! I won’t warn you again.”
“I thought this wasn’t believable either,” the next person was saying, “You can’t have a nice guy turn bad so fast. That’s not good character development.”
Slouched in my chair, scowling, I thought: This bitch who’s writing a tedious mystery about two kids and a haunted house is going to tell me about character development? I would show her, not with irrational protests but through articulate argument. “He didn’t turn bad fast. In the last section--”

Something white hit my forehead with a thwick! and bounced on the table in front of me. I had just been struck in the head with a Styrofoam cup. Aghast, I looked at the instructor to see if he’d noticed that somebody was throwing cups. Then realized he’d thrown it.
“I said, enough from over there!” he said.
Wadding up the waxed paper from my bagel, I winged it at his head. He laughed and swatted it away, saying, “Now who’s next?”
My fellow writers gaped at me, no doubt thinking that this deranged instructor and I had something going on, a secret code that involved pitching garbage at each other. To their credit, they moved right on while I fumed for the rest of the session. My beloved character had been torn to pieces and I’d had trash thrown at me, by the instructor no less.

At any rate, I survived to write another day. And I can’t help feeling that that instructor was conferring special favor on me; I’m sure he didn’t throw his trash at just anybody. In fact, taking a cup to the head has made me stronger. If I can handle projectile garbage, I can handle anything. To my future critics and reviewers, I say, fire away!