Tag: Popular

Your Main Character Needs…

Stories revolve around your heroes, your protagonists, and the protagonists revolve around your stories. Just as you have the storytelling essentials (plot, crisis, jokes, exsanguination), you need the building blocks for the people who populate the story.

People make stories, tell them all the time. They have a formula. But why does that lead to so many stilted characters? People forgetting that they have to put in as much work into people as they do the narrative? Laziness? Income disparity?

That’s why we’re Writing All Wrong.

I need some help. And please don’t laugh. It’s historical fiction, set in Victorian England. There’s a great story here, with something I’ve worked on regarding the “death mask makers.” I just don’t know how to make a protagonist fit in there!

—Ellen Friend, Oakland, Calif.

Ellen, you’ve a dilemma most kind. Better to have no character than a bad one. Can’t help with specifics. I’m not Writing All Clearly. But if you’re going to fit a standout character in there, here’s what she/he/it will need.

1. Imperfections 

Sorry, “being too perfect” doesn’t count. Mind you, the first thing we think of is “character flaws.” And even that’s off base. You can find a captivating tale in the one whose failures are in his abilities (“failures at shark training”), rather than the cookie-cutter failure of morals (“the sharks don’t trust his wandering heart”).

2. Uniqueness

Think of someone you know, someone who doesn’t mind you being around. Try to divine how they got to be the way they are now. Raised by aliens. Took bully-karate in the fifth-grade. Learned to drive on an Abrams tank. Worked with other hard-working ‘Mericans at a factory that built factories. How did it shape this alien-reared, bully-chopping, tank-driving, factory-building friend of yours? You get the idea.

3. Unexplained quirks

“Waiting yet again, he worked at plucking what he thought to be unworthy hairs from his goatee.”

“She stirred her coffee with a fork she’d pulled from the drawer.”

You all do weird stuff, and I never bother to ask you why. That’s what makes you characteristic. And also, weird.

4. Changes

There’s an innate satisfaction to the character who changes, be it for the better, worse, or worser. One wins the lottery, distorts into a psychotic miser, blows his brains out with a discounted Glöck. A tentative quarterback loses an arm during a violent scrimmage of blade football, regathers his courage, overcomes stigma, and adjusts to a bionic limb to rally his team to victory. Basic, but stories are about moving from point A to point B. You can do the same with a character too. It doesn’t work if you’re writing about one who traces his wrinkles with sorrow and regret as he raises children and chickens on a farm, who in turn raise children of chickens and children on a farm.

5. Consistency

Because people are consistent, creatures of routine. Even the spontaneous ones. They’ll consistently do something stupid.

6. Something special

Why did you pick this person for your story? Could I have substituted your brooding, secretive killer for a fat man who rides killing luck to satiate his lust for pilfering one’s refrigerator? What about your independent, strong-willed prairie woman? They’re practically assembly line items by now. Why not someone who’s dependent, with a will broken by too many long winters? Your hardboiled detective? Five cents a dozen. Warp in a straight-laced, tidy-mouthed, teetotaling moralist of perversion, ridding the underworld of “sin and debauchery.” See how that manages. If you’re putting someone in where a story’s to be told, make them worth telling the story about.

Writing All Wrong can be reached via email (WritingAllWrong@me.com) and followed on Twitter (@WritingAllWrong). He stirs coffee with a butter knife.

8 Things to Keep OUT of Your Opening Sentence

In our on-demand culture, we need the best, and we needed it right now yesterday. There’s no time to afford mediocrity developing into greatness. If a TV show isn’t piquing my interesting within five minutes, then I’m switching on “Downton Abbey Zombieland.” If YouTube drivel doesn’t make me “lol” within thirty seconds, then I’m going to chew gum instead. And if the first sentence of a story doesn’t suffice, then your writing isn’t worth my time (or anyone’s else).

That’s why we’re Writing All Wrong.

Hi W.A.W.-

What ingredients do you need for the perfect opening sentence?

—Carter Bellamy, Fort Wayne, Ind.

Don’t call me W.A.W. That’s actually Waxing All Wrong, an unaffiliated blog that has everything to do with waxing, and nothing to do with writing.

This is an inexhaustible topic. You’ll find dozens of ways on how to “do it right,” but none on what *not* to do. Since I’m not Writing All Right, you can look for the “Opening Sentence Ingredients” elsewhere. Here’s a blacklist for things you don’t want in an opening sentence.

1. Banal Brevity

(waits for you to look up “banal” – ok, good)

Don’t shoot for the pithy one-worder or the half-sentence. Why can Dickens get away with an opening sentence of “LONDON,” and you can’t? You’re no Dickens. You are not clever if you think “less is more” and fart down something like “Smokehouses,” or “The falling of the rain,” or “Nothing beside remains.” The discriminating reader will see right though your fraudulence.

2. Truths Self-Evident

There’s a way to state the obvious with mastery, and unless you do just that, don’t do that. 

“Yet another day passed where I’d had enough with my boss.” — How insightful. No one thinks that.

“I loathe Mondays.” — Really? Thought everyone liked those.

“The sun arced ‘round the ridge, just as it always had, just as it ever will.” — Nuh uh.

3. Dialogue

Of all tactics, this one might be the most well-known. Doesn’t stop amateurs from disregarding the rule. Unless one of your characters says something that will stop both the revolutions of planet Earth and the bowels of one who binged on Taco Bell at 2 AM, then don’t use dialogue for your first line. Heck, even if it’s a great line, use it later.

4. Mundaneness 

The opening sentence need not be something you can slip into anywhere else in the story unnoticed. “Some character did some thing and yeah.” You’re setting a tone with style, not with slumber. You are allowed to jazz this up. There’s a profoundness in the placing of that opening line. Ignore it at your peril. If you’re going to write boring sentences, write them in the middle of the book, where the flames of spite will eat them at the last.

5. Backstory

“Whaaa? But how are you supposed to introduce the events of the story?” Let the events themselves introduce the story. I do not care that “High King Regurgitus was born on the Nocturnalpictus of Seventhember, thus granting him legendary power, all of which sets in motion our story.” Start too far back, and you won’t have anything at all. Need proof? Star Wars hit the scene halfway into its story, right on the money. What? It’s a movie? Yeah, well, whatever…

6. An answered question

“It was where the dead buried the dead who buried their dead.” Cool, that’s great: another dumb zombie/vamp/undead novel that I really don’t need to know more about. Come on, if you’re going to propose something like that, leave room for wonder, not blunder.

7. Character description

“He pressed a firm handed to his barrel chest, peering through penetrating hazel eyes into a lake that reflected an empty soul within a chiseled frame.” Pardon me while I reverse my dinner in hopes of purifying this sentence. This is one of the weakest of weaksauces. It doesn’t even have the consistency of sauce. This isn’t so much clever or cheating. Unless the description plays a key part in the story (and even then, that’s borderline emesis), don’t start off that way. You know, just don’t start off that way, period.

8. Introduction

“Our story begins in—” 

“Here is the tale of—” 

“Lemme tell ya about a story about—” 

You’ve seen these lazy attempts before. At least I have. I failed them when they were written back in Creative Writing for Kindergarteners. These don’t even qualify as weaksauce, vacuous as they are. May God forgive your talentless soul should such opening sentences issue from your pen.

What else do you try to avoid in your opening sentence?

Writing All Wrong can be reached via email (WritingAllWrong@me.com) and followed on Twitter (@WritingAllWrong). He was both the Best of TIME® and the Worst of TIME® in the same TIME®.

Brainstorming: Bad for the Craft

The genesis of ideas. It needs work. If you’ve found yourself infected with the virus of inspiration, then treat it, don’t diagram it, cube it, whatever. Parlor tricks, the whole lot of them. Take brainstorming, for example. You don’t need it. Brainstorming is an outlet unto itself, a fool’s errand, and a dying pit for the writer who has too many kitschy ideas, not enough product.

That’s why we’re Writing All Wrong.

Can you share some good brainstorming strategies for writers?

—Brianne McClellan, Fredericksburg, Va.

Brainstorming is for—cue Jabba the Hutt bellowing—weak-minded fools. Well, that could be the post right there, but I don’t believe in taking away without giving back. Writing All Wrong strives for environmental and critical sustainability.

Instead of brainstorming (which is a mindless, scattershot exercise in haphazardness, a poor way to tend the swirl of ideas, taking them from a mental state of uninterpretable incoherence to a written, physical state of uninterpretable incoherence), try these on for size:

1. Barnstorming

Buy a vintage aircraft and put on a show. Well, to translate the idiom, get the idea down and preserve its integrity. Like a relic aircraft, your idea takes maintenance. Don’t plop it on the paper. And once it’s there, don’t toy with squiggly lines and vapid maneuvers. Construct a repertoire, give your idea some moves, solid things you’ll be able to do with it when it comes time to write.

2. Brainbuilding

“Storms” do not imply creation, unless you consider a razing tornado creating modern, deconstructionist art out of an impoverished trailer park. Brainstorming “creates” things, but it creates randomness. Sure, jot down the brain dumps, but make sure those things harden at one point. As often as you can, make that idea flexible and coherent. Don’t settle for a word here or a word there—give your thoughts some muscle right out of the gate.

3. Creative Cartography

“But, but, but, that’s mind mapping! And that’s part of brainstorming, ha!” No, you’ve only confirmed yourself a dunce without much mind to map. Can you make a country, a world, of mind mapping? Not one I’d want to live in. Creative cartography lays out the surface of ideas, placing down roads, villages, peoples, capitals, and empty space. Don’t like hierarchy? Good. Go linear, make boundaries, lay something out that you can tie together. Borders change. Empires overwhelm others. Rivers dry up. Change the landscape of your story how you will, but there’s got to be a landscape to change.

4. Sketchbooking

You would think I hate sketches. I hate them when they suck, and when people make them public. It’s as much a stunt as swallowing a Goldfish™. But good sketchbooking is effective. Write a name atop a page. Give the character a soul. Words. Likes. Dislikes. Pencil in a place name. Give it a blurb. A GDP. Why you would vacation there. Where they hide the bodies. Write a premise. Throw in the people involved. The angles of approach. Why this matters.

5. JUST WRITE, DANGGIT.

If you have more “brainstorms” then written pieces, then you are doing this all wrong. Start doing it right. Write.

 Writing All Wrong can be reached via email (WritingAllWrong@me.com) and followed on Twitter (@WritingAllWrong). He is a founding member of Brainstorm Preparedness Watch.