Tag: Writing Process

I’ve been doing a bit of research on local history recently, and, while reading about one of the churches, came across the following sentence:

“[The Sunday School teachers] spent a great deal of time with the children and on various programs, including Children’s Day and Christmas, in addition to regular schedule of Sunday School, and it was at Christmas time in 1924 that the first little church burned.”

That’s probably not the way that you were expecting that sentence to end! When I first read that, I thought it was the most ill-advised attempt to join two independent clauses with a conjunction that I’d ever encountered. The information that the church burned down struck me as the sort of thing that was really worthy of its own sentence. Maybe even its own paragraph, entirely separate from the other activities of the Sunday School.

When I shared this opinion with friends, however, one pointed out an obvious point: “You don’t know what the “various activities” they were doing with the children may have entailed. It is possible that conjunction is warranted!” And to be fair, I think that she was right, at least to a certain extent. I do think that the Sunday School kids burned down the church. My source was written in a very non-judgmental, “just the facts” style, with a steadfast refusal to draw any conclusions based on those facts. However, the facts are that the kids were at the church rehearsing the Christmas pageant, they “built a good fire in the coal stove in preparation for the evening program,” and they came back for the service “to find the building in flames.” I suspect that you could find cause and effect in at least a couple of those clauses.

Regardless, though, my opinion remains unchanged: the fire was still worthy of its own paragraph, separate from other Sunday School activities that did not involve burning the church down.

My friend, however, pointed out that the way that the writer had phrased things made it, “Passive-aggression [as] a highly developed art.” Which I had to admit had some truth to it, and it got me thinking about the women who had written that sentence. It was written in 1956, 32 years after the fire, by two women identified only by their husband’s names. I don’t know how old they were, but it occurred to me that if they were in their late 30s or older, they might remember the fire. In fact, they might very well have been part of the infamous Sunday school class that burned down the church. Thinking about that, the sentence seems a little different, doesn’t it?

All of that in turn got me thinking about different voices in a story. What a character says says can tell the reader a lot about that person, but how they say it can tell even more. An insult delivered by a gangster will sound one way, an insult by a perfectly mannered southern belle quite another—and an insult by someone who want to be a perfectly mannered southern belle but hasn’t mastered the art of the subtle put-down is still a third thing.

Language is a tool, for both the writer and the reader. Grammar is a suggestion—but exactly how you and your characters choose to use that suggestion is something that can reveal quite a lot of information.

One of the worst tragedies to happen to writing is that the phrase “flat character” has become an insult.

“But it is an insult, isn’t it?” I can hear you saying. “Doesn’t everyone want their characters to be fully realized, three-dimensional people who stay with the reader long after the book has been put down?”

Well, yes. But not all of your characters. And, at any rate, that’s not what being a flat character is about.

What differentiates a three-dimensional character from a flat one is the ability to grow and change. To use an example from classic literature, in Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is a three-dimensional character. She starts as a shy, young girl, who hasn’t thought much about what she wants from the future and just wants to please her parents. By the second act, she’s fallen in love with Romeo and is conspiring with him and the nurse to arrange a secret marriage. And then, when Romeo is exiled and her parents are intending to force her into a bigamous marriage with Paris, she defies both them and the nurse to fake her own death, having decided that her loyalty to Romeo overrides everything else in her life.

Note that nothing I’ve said above should necessarily be taken as an endorsement of Juliet or a reason to like her. It’s simply a fact that, whether you love her or hate her, whether you agree with the choices that she made or not, Juliet is not the same person in Act 5 that she was in Act 1.

An example of a flat character would be the nurse. She’s bawdy, earthy, interested in seeing Juliet married above all else. In Act 1, that means encouraging Lady Capulet’s scheme of a match between Juliet and Paris. In Acts 2 and 3, it means assisting with the marriage scheme, then smuggling Romeo into Juliet’s room so that they can consummate the marriage. And then, after Romeo is exiled, it means going back to encouraging the marriage with Paris. But with all of these different positions she takes and decisions she makes, the underlying character is the same. The nurse is the same person at the end of the play as she was in the beginning.

But, just as I said above that Juliet being a three dimensional character wasn’t a reason to like her, the nurse being a flat character isn’t a reason to dislike her or to think that she’s badly written. Would the play have been better if it had included a fourth act soliloquy from the nurse musing about marital fidelity and whether it would be worth it for Juliet to give up everything to stay with Romeo? Questioning her loyalty to the Capulet family in light of Lord Capulet’s threats against Juliet? I don’t think so. Romeo and Juliet is the story of, well, Romeo and Juliet. It’s supposed to be about their relationship and growth. Trying to shoehorn in a subplot about how all of this affects the nurse would just get in the way.

That’s a problem I feel that a lot of modern writers have. They don’t want their characters to be flat. But showing character growth takes time and pages. If you insist on making everyone from the innkeeper in the town where the hero grew up to the ferryman who takes him across the river into “well-rounded characters,” the net result is that either the book is so crowded that there’s no room for any character to stand out—or that what should have been a relatively simple story balloons into an epic dozens of books long with no end in sight.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with falling in love with a secondary character and wanting to give him or her more depth. But you can only do this with so many characters. For most of them, what you want is a bit of shading: a line or two that hints that there may be more to this person than the stereotype, and if they were the main character, you’d see something interesting. But you have to keep in mind that this isn’t the main character, and hints are all you should give. Don’t let them take over or occupy page space that needs to be reserved for your actual main characters.

The tl;dr version of all this is that you shouldn’t be afraid of flat characters. It’s okay to have a character who just fills a role in the narrative and never exhibits any growth. A bit of shading on the secondary characters can make your world feel more real and lived-in, but too many “well-rounded” characters will distract from your story and cause unneeded bloat in your book.

One thing that I hear a lot from pantser is some variation of, “I’m a character writer. My characters come up with far more interesting things to do than I could ever plan.” Hearing this always makes me feel like a hack. I like to think that I’m a character writer, and other people have told me that my characters are good and interesting. Is that not true? Are my characters actually just paper-thin caricatures that I can force to do whatever I want?

Well, it’s not for me to say if my characters are any good or not, but I can say that they aren’t action figures under my complete control. I have plenty of strong-willed characters who won’t go along with my plans. Saoirse is a good example. There’s a scene early in my forthcoming book, The Harper, where Saoirse and Shane meet up, and I had planned for Saoirse to give Shane an explanation of the title character: who he was, what his goals were, and how he interacted with the rest of the Fae. Before I could write the scene, however, I heard Saoirse’s voice in my head, asking me how many drugs I had taken that I seriously thought she would do that, or conversely, how many drugs I planned to have her take in order to force her to do that. The Harper’s relationship to the Seelie Court is a complicated one, and the Court is unwilling to admit the truth about it to themselves, much less to outsiders. And I seriously believed that Saoirse, who goes above and beyond to make sure that she’s seen as a loyal, upstanding member of the Court, was just going to blab the full story to a mortal after one casual inquiry? Saoirse was right, I must have thought she was on drugs or had a serious head injury or something.

Saoirse has set me straight on a few other things too, ones that I won’t mention right now since they contain spoilers for Book 6 and beyond. She’s the most vocal of the Seelie Court characters, but she’s far from the only one. Emma has nudged me about things that she wouldn’t let alone. Shane has occasionally had to remind me that I’m writing the “old” him, the one before he really adjusted to the idea of the supernatural.

So how do I reconcile the idea of careful planning with characters who insist on doing their own thing? Basically, I need to include the characters in the planning process. Whenever the plan includes a character making a choice that radically affects the direction of the story, I need to “ask” that character if this is really the choice that he or she would make. The characters are rarely secretive about it. The opinionated characters are more than willing to tell me what they will and won’t do, and usually they’re just as willing to tell me in the planning stage as they are when I actually try to write the wrong decision; there’s no reason to wait to ask them.

Note, however, that “usually.” There have been times when I’ve been writing and then just hit a problem with my given plan, either because a character won’t cooperate or for some other reason, I realize that I was doing the wrong thing. Next time, I’ll talk about what happens when the plan goes off the rails in the middle of writing.

The earliest “How-to” book I remember reading on how to write was a little booklet that I received in my sixth grade language arts class. It was a big proponent of what I later learned to call pantsing. The book suggested sitting down with a blank piece of paper and pen or pencil (yes, it was that long ago) and just letting your imagination run wild. Quoting from memory: “Some of [the writing] will be pretty bad. That’s only to be expected when you really let yourself write freely. But some of it will be pretty good—probably the best stuff you’ve ever written,” at which point it simply becomes a matter of editing to turn your rambling free write into a masterpiece.

Perhaps it’s because this was one of the first pieces of serious writing advice that I ever read, or perhaps it’s because it fit with the sixth-grade Z. M.’s generally lazy approach to life, but for whatever reason, that advice imprinted itself on my brain. Even after I learned that there were other ways of doing things, that there were these people called “planners,” I clung to that first bit of advice like a baby chick remembering its first sight of Mom. “Oh, I’m a pantser,” I would say whenever someone asked me about my writing technique. While I would acknowledge the possibility of other people doing things differently, for me, obviously the right way to do things was sit in front of my computer and let the words flow as they would.

I was in my thirties before I started questioning that decision. I’m not sure what triggered it, but at some point, when I was about to give my pantser answer, I paused and thought about it. What, after all, had being a pantser gotten me? Oh, I’d managed to finish, I think, one novel, but for the most part what I had was a computer full of stories that were somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters complete and were never going to get any further. So I said to myself, “Maybe I’m not a pantser. Maybe I should give this whole planning thing a try.”

It turned out to be easier said than done. I outlined a couple of novels but didn’t have the discipline to keep writing to the end of my outline. I went back to pantsing a bunch. I tried outlining again, then got stuck in my outline so just went on to write the novel anyway. I tried various methods of outlining and found myself getting increasingly frustrated with them. I believe it took five years from that initial revelation that I wasn’t a pantser to the first time I successfully wrote a good outline and then produced a novel from that.

In the next few weeks, I’m going to be writing about how I figured it all out and finally embraced the inner planner. My hope is that it might help some people who are still struggling with pantsing but can’t find another way. It’s possible to plan without destroying your characters or draining all the passion out of the novel. A well-planned story can be a thing of beauty and a joy to write.