CHARACTERS Part 2

CHARACTERS Part 2

The Good, the Bad, the Fugly…

Oh, and the Quirky, the Snarky, and the Underdog.

 

The Comments: "Your story has a really weak/slow/boring start." Or "Your main character is really predictable." Or "I couldn't get past chapter two."

What they might mean: Your protagonist is too generic, too good to be true, or so pathetic or predictable they're unappealing.

Does that sting? 

Here's why: The deepest secret about main characters is they're shards of our souls we've somehow managed to chip off and flung into another world.

That's why critiques about them hurt more than critiques about plot, theme, etc. Because it feels like a critique against our selves. We've written our selves into the story and when someone says "Oh, the protagonist was completely idiotic," it stings like they've insulted us. 

The Good:

Perhaps we've made the protagonist everything we wish we could be? Super smart, strong, ripped like Beckham 

"I could totally carry your story."

or as stunning as Michelle Pfeiffer in Ladyhawke.

"I do the rescuing, right? Riiiight?"

Someone who knows exactly the right thing to do at the right moment, who always has a clever quip or a witty one-liner. With "just the right amount of vulnerability to make him endearing". An allegorical saint or Hollywood ideal. In other words, Too Good To Be True.

The Bad:

Or perhaps we've made the protagonist everything we hate about ourselves (or someone else – which is just a manifestation of something we do hate about ourselves but we can't/won't admit it.) Our protagonist is physically weak, intellectually weak, or morally weak. Perhaps they're too passive at work, in bed, in life. The classic underdog (and lordy, there's a lot of underdog protagonists right now – so many that it's become rather stereotypical and predictable.) 

The Fugly:

Or perhaps the greatest offense. We create a protagonist that embodies perceptions of what people want them to be. We stuff ourselves into a genre trope – the hard-boiled detective, the emotionally-damaged hero or heroine with a mysterious past, the super spesh stable boy who somehow overcomes his impoverished surroundings, finds a magical sword, and saves the kingdom from Ancient Evil. The Fugly hero or heroine who, at some point in the story, undergoes a metamorphosis via makeover to become a swan that everyone desires. 

The Good, the Bad, and the Fugly main characters are good starting points but can they carry a story? No.

Why? Because they're such commonplace extremes that it can be difficult to know them as real people. It's just as easy to hate someone who is too good to be true as it is to hate someone with qualities you already dislike. And boy is it easy to ignore someone you've met a thousand times in a thousand different books.

The danger to your WIP is this: the canned Good, Bad, Fugly becomes a puppet. He only is what you want him to be (what you wish you could be or what you wish you could change about your life). He only does what you want him to do (what you wish you could do or what you wish you could stop doing). Or worse - he only is and does what dozens of his predecessors have done before in the genre. No surprises. 

Yes, yes, I know Ancient Evil or Stunning Rival does something to him in chapter two, but check his reaction. Does he react the way you would react, the way you want him to react to suit your plot, or the way he would react if he was real and alive? 

(By the way, this is where that 5x5 Character Manifest fromlast week's post would come in handy. Check his reaction with one or a combination of what you answered for the Who, What, Why, etc.: Protag does X because of the answer to Why.)

I'll offer an example from my personal life a few years back.

I was desperately single. Like, will-date-anyone-with-a-pulse single. So friends and coworkers tried to set me up. A lot.

A coworker, Davey, came up to me one day.

"Hey J, I have a nephew who's single," said Davey.

"Oh yeah? What's he like?"

Davey showed me a photo of a smooth-cheeked, blue-eyed Marine.

"He's hella cute. How old is he?" I said.

"Just turned twenty."

"F*ck, Davey, I'm not a cradle robber, for f*ck's sake!" (I cuss a LOT in real life.)

"How the hell am I supposed to know how old you are? Besides, he don't care. I don't care," said Davey.

"Well I –"

"He's real nice. And real smart."

"So?"

"And he's really … nice. And good-looking, right?" Davey started turning red.

"And?" I knew a lot of nice, handsome, smart men in uniform. Married, related to me, or gay.

"He's quirky," said Davey.

"What the f*ck does that mean to me?"

"It's the thing to say now, right? Quirky." Davey scratched his head. "How about snarky?"

"Do you even know what those words mean?" I said. "Quirky is just a social construct based on the zeitgeist. In the 1800's, a woman who wanted the right to vote was quirky. Quirky means nothing more than what you think is f*cking cutely odd. It's a value judgment. Like saying someone's beautiful. Means nothing cuz you're idea of beauty is completely different from my idea –"

"He's quirky, snarky, and … and…"

"And what?" I shoved him in exasperation. "Tell me something about him that makes him special. Why would I want to date him instead of any other guy on the street?"

"Oh!" Davey said, eyes wide. "He has perfect pitch. You name a note and he can sing it, play it on his saxophone, or tune a violin to it."

And that right there immediately made Davey's nephew more real. The fact that he could do something unique – not terribly rare, not earth-shatteringly abnormal. Neither "likeable" or "unlikeable". Just… different.

Davey not only told me about that talent, he showed it to me by giving me an example of what his nephew does with it.

A character moving immediately gets more attention than a character standing still and blending in with his background. 

More importantly, that detail separated Davey's nephew from an ideal, from your ideals, from stereotypes and predictability. Davey stopped feeding me lines he thought I wanted to hear and started describing his nephew as a real person doing real things. 

If the comments and critiques at the top sound familiar, take a step back from the WIP and pitch your protagonist to a friend (or, if you're like me, random stranger in line at Costco) and follow the line of questions until you get the Specific and Unique details that transform your protagonist from character to dateable human being.

Then, in your WIP: how quickly can you convince me to "date" - aka, spend time with - your protagonist. Can you do it in the first chapter? Can you do it in paragraph 16? Can you do it on page one? Can you do it from the opening line? 

Happy writing and revising!
J

Coming up:
More Character

Dialogue

Dialogue Tags

Passive

Verbing

Robert Bevan 

Nat Russo

Laura Oliva

Show Versus Tell Part 1

Show vs Tell

Part 1: Show

The comments: "This feels unbelievable." Or "This part is eye-gougingly boring and distant." Or "I can't empathize."

What they mean: You might need to show, not tell something. 

You may have run across the phrase "Show, don't tell" or some variant. And you may have Googled it and found countless sites on why you need to do this. The reason can be boiled down to:  

Show helps your reader feel it. Tell helps your reader know it. 

Both have their places in your story. This is why I prefer the phrase "Show versus Tell," which validates both aspects, to "Show, don't tell," which implies telling is bad. 

In my experience tutoring and Beta-ing, the most confusing part of all this is how to tell whether an instance is showing or telling. To see the difference, I find it's easiest to turn a Tell into Show. 

 

Quick Fix: Find phrases that make a blanket statement about a person or place. Ask yourself (or your POV character): How do you know?

Then insert details into the answer. (Recall my Details post? Remember to make details specific and unique to your character/world.)

Let's slip into our serious pants. 

Awfully generic example: 

Jack was angry.

Ask yourself (or POV character): "How do you know?"

Because he hit the wall angrily. 

That's better. Omit (leave out) the highlighted part and you have a sentence that's a little more show, a little less tell. You can do better, though, because you can still ask: How do you know he hit the wall angrily?

Because he made his hand into a fist and punched the wall, leaving a dent in the plaster.

Much better. Can you still ask "How do you know he made his hand into a fist…?" No, this is already your narrator's or POV character's direct observation. Once you get the answer that starts with: "Because that's what he/she saw/observed," you've found your "showing" imagery. 

Now, omit the highlighted part and clean up that "no duh" phrase.

He made his hand into a fist and punched the wall, leaving a dent in the plaster. 

Almost there. Make it pop, make your writing stand out, by using details that are specific and unique to your world, your characters, your story. Punching the wall may not be appropriate for the President of the U.S. or for the king of a realm, for a lawyer, for a child, for a priest, for a teen fairy-hunter. Recall my post about Fey Hunter Jack? How would he show anger to his best friend, Priya?

Jack flung his transistor at the wall. It cracked the plaster but landed unharmed. He yanked the soda can rifle out of her grasp and slammed its butt against the transistor's blinking face, over and over, until the screen cracked and splattered black diodes onto his new green loafers.

Let's do another. 

Ben loved Linda.

Bam! That's about as telly as you can get. Ask: How do you know he loved her? 

Because he always did things for her, even though she never asked him to do that stuff. 

Yes, but how do you know? Give me proof!

Because he always gets up early, takes her car to the gas station, and fills it up on days she has to drive from San Francisco to Newport Beach.

Great. Omit the highlighted part and you have a decent showing instance. But this seems like a pretty big deal if you're mentioning this example and not another. Put me in the scene by using specific and unique details.

The voicemail icon was blinking on Linda's phone: a new message from Ben. She listened to it as she waited for the windshield to clear.

"Hey," said Ben. "Sorry I wasn't there when you left this morning. Got called in. I filled up your tank, though, ok? And checked your oil. You're gonna need an oil change soon. Maybe when you get back. Or if you have time in Newport, all right? And make sure you stop if you're tired. Before the Grapevine. There's some places you can stop that don't cost much. But past the Grapevine, you keep driving if you can. Those places don't look so good, all right? If you can make it for another half hour or so – if there's no traffic – you drive all the way to your grandma's ok?...Bye." 

We added a lot more words and omitted the word "love," but we've trickled in some key information to build their relationship to the world they live in, and to each other. 

What does that voicemail say about Ben? Notice how he keeps saying "ok?" and "all right?" And how he phrases things like "don't cost much" and "don't look so good"? What does that imply about his personality, his level of education? What does the word "your" before "grandma" imply about his relationship with Linda and her family? 

How would a teenager react to such a voicemail? How would an adult?

And what does your reaction to this voicemail say about you? 

Showing makes scenes emotionally interactive, which keeps a reader engaged and turning the page.

Let's do one more, narrative description, which is often a wasted opportunity to reveal themes and conflict. 

Vanessa's room was very neat and organized.

How do you know? 

Because the bed was made, the desk was free of clutter, paired shoes were arranged on shelves, and all clothes were hung in the closet. 

Can you still ask "How do you know?"

 

No, this is already direct observation. We can omit that highlighted part and use the sentence to show how neat the room is and it would be just fine. Should we settle for "just fine" though? (Correct answer is no. Also, it's a very passive sentence.) 

Let's improve it. Focus on one or two elements that can represent the entire room and add the specific and unique details we talked about. Show me more about whose room this is. 

I edged around Vanessa's bed, brushing my fingers across a blue sheet stretched so taut and flat across the top, my touch left no indentation. The clothes in her closet were grouped by type, subgrouped by color, further subgrouped by texture so that lowly cottons were segregated from sumptuous silks by insulating inches of merino wool. I tugged on sleeves, examined tags. Brands I'd only read and didn't have the courage to say aloud, afraid of mispronouncing them and revealing I had no place in her world: Marchesa, Burberry, Versace, Lanvin. 

Much better. Note what we've managed to trickle in: 

What type of person would make their bed this way and group clothes in their closet in such a manner? Who would wear these brands? 

We've even managed to inject some tension, some little bits of conflict. We can show how the POV character feels like an outsider in Vanessa's world by showing how the POV character feels this way in the Vanessa's room, a microcosm of the story's world.

"Showing" turns flat statements – "The room was very neat" or "He loved her" – into multifaceted, emotionally interactive scenes. 

Instead of you, the writer, telling the reader what to feel and think, you allow the reader to develop their own conclusions by showing a scene through a character's perspective. It can be thought of as emotion on the page (telling) versus emotion in the reader (showing).

Lastly, check your understanding. Which instances are show, and which are tell?

The battle was difficult. – Can you ask "How do you know?" and get a descriptive response? Yes. This is a Tell instance.

My mother was always strict with us. 

The warlord walked away in shame.

My hands shook as I stared at the bomb. 

"My mother was always strict with us," said Jack.

The journey through the mountains was long and difficult.

Learning how to navigate through star fields was long and difficult.

Next week, we'll look at the importance of Telling.

Happy writing,

J

Coming up:

More Show vs. Tell

Jay Groce

Passive

Characterization

Dialogue Tags

Verbing

Robert Bevan