Category Archives: On Writing

How to Create Memorable Characters

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[I]t’s not a good idea to try to put your wife into a novel. Not your latest wife, anyway.

~Norman Mailer, quoted in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Third Series, 1967

 

How are characters created? In non-fiction, characters are clearly real people as described by the writer. In fiction, however, characters are supposed to be completely fictitious, a.k.a., unreal, made-up, invented, created, imaginary. And yet, the best writers are the most notorious borrowers, copiers, and imitators, mainly of life. How else would they be able to create surrealistically real scenarios and characters if they did not borrow, copy, or imitate from real life? The best writers are excellent students of life in that they observe life keenly and everything they see becomes a potential source for something they write. They might describe a restaurant, but if they had never sat in a restaurant and observed every little detail about it, from the cutlery to the cuisine, from the service to the servers, from the entrance to the ambience, they would not be able to create a restaurant in words that places the reader exactly where the characters are. The same thing goes for characters. Writers need to observe people closely, watching every movement and pose, from the twitch of the fingers to the facial tics, from the strands of hair to the creases and folds of their clothes, from the twinkling in the eyes to the faintest blue or red capillaries weaving delicate networks on a papery-skinned cheek—such is what brings characters to life. As well, not a single little mannerism should escape them, from how a coffee mug is grasped to how hair is brushed from the face, or how fingers tap or twirl and feet jiggle to the slant of shoulders, the tilt of the head, the curvature of the spine, the way ankles or knees or arms cross—all these make characters more human. To complete that image, characters have voices, different tones, different expressions and ejaculations, different accents, different kinds of laughs. It’s not surprising, therefore, if a writer’s characters resemble the people around them, the people they live with, the people close to them, or even the people they detest and abhor the most. Of course, only those who know both the writer and the people in the writer’s life will know who a writer has modelled a character after. In fact, if you are a writer looking for a character, you need look no farther than your family, friends, and acquaintances. In most cases, writers will pick and blend characteristics so that their fictitious characters are a mish-mash of traits from several real people. Depending on how realistic the fiction is, writers can take all the good traits from several real people and put them in the protagonist, then take all the bad traits from those same people or others and put them in the antagonist. While that may not sound realistic, that would certainly make a great caricature for a cautionary tale, a humorous tale, or a fantasy. Certainly, the more unrealistic characters are, the more impossible it is that they are real people. Of course, that is not to say that there are real people out there who are real characters—which is where our expression comes from for calling people “characters”—the fact that they seem so unreal, it’s almost as if they’ve been made up.

When I give workshops that teach writers how to develop characters, I usually provide participants with a character sheet, not unlike character sheets you might find for role-playing games, because they are, essentially, character creation sheets. Writers can develop their own or look for them in a variety of online writing resources. Basically, a character sheet has three major aspects: (1) the physical features of the character; (2) the biographical-historical background, and (3) the emotional-psychological features of the character.

As the categories suggest, the physical features tell us how tall, heavy, the color and length of hair, the eye color and shape, the shape of the body, identifying marks, hand and foot size, what fingers and toes look like, clothing size, teeth condition, nose and nostril type, neck, etc. It helps to have a picture of someone real, or to create analogies: swan-like neck, flared nostrils, chunky fingers and toes, spade fingernails, etc.

When describing biographical-historical background, we decide how old the character is, birthdate, place of birth, race, nationality, residence, family, relatives, languages, education, skills, places lived, their work, religion, memberships, training, jobs held, and all other types of things you might find in the most comprehensive biodata and curriculum vitae ever.

Third, and probably the most difficult, is establishing the emotional-psychological profile of the character. This includes quirks, beliefs, superstitions, attitudes, intellect, viewpoint on various topics from politics to art and culture to family, personality type, phobias, preferences, desires, weaknesses, dreams, and anything else that reflects their psyches. Finally, every character must have that fatal or tragic flaw. That one thing that is the character’s Achilles heel, the one thing that will affect the character’s success. It can be one or more of the character’s phobias or weaknesses that prevent success, but definitely one thing that within the character that works against overcoming the problem they face in the story. This is the humanizing factor that makes readers more sympathetic towards fictional characters, because we all know that nobody is perfect.

While I have presented a great deal of details that can go into the creation of a character, that is not to say every single detail must be present. As an aid to determining how much detail to include when creating a character, let me just say that the detail should be commensurate to the length of the story. The shorter the story, the less detail; longer, epic stories will need greater detail, because then, characters are exposed to the reader’s scrutiny in a greater variety of situations. They meet more characters, do more things, have more to accomplish or overcome; hence, they need to be more well-thought out, more fleshed-out, more real to account for every possibility along the way. This also makes them more realistic and, ultimately, more sympathetic. Readers will admire heroes but they adore heroes who succeed despite their flaws. In fact, the more flawed the hero, the more sympathetic and, in the end, the more sweet the triumph.

I still want to get a shirt that says: “Beware. Novelist. I’m watching you. I just might write you into my next novel.” Novelists do write people they know into their novels, because it’s the people they know best who provide them with the best fodder to humanize a character. If you want to paint them as the antagonists, however, heed Norman Mailer’s advice: don’t make your characters too much like the people you live with, because then, you’d have to live with them and they’d never let you live it down. They can make your life unbearable, so be careful what you write about them or how you write them into your novel. Especially if it’s your spouse. Unless they don’t read your novels at all, then you’ll be perfectly fine. Still and all, I think it one of the most fun and entertaining things to do as a writer, to include bits and pieces of real people into my characters. I’m sure every great writer has picked traits from people they have encountered to make their characters more interesting and real. The trick is to change the physical characteristics and biography so the real people aren’t easily recognizable. Try it on some character sketches and have fun!

 

How acceptable is verbing?

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I am treading on shaky ground here, but as a writer and English teacher, it’s a topic I can’t ignore. There really isn’t any other word for it besides VERBING, which in itself, is turning a noun that isn’t used as a verb into a verb. That’s when nouns that do not have verb forms are used as verbs. One of the most common nouns that I have seen being used as a verb for quite a few years now is the word “gift”. People everywhere, including on the news, have been saying “gifted” not in the sense of the adjective that means “talented” but in the sense that means having been given something as a gift. For example, “He gifted her with a scarf.” What the heck was wrong with the verb “give” and all its tenses? “He gave her a scarf” means exactly the same thing. If you give someone something, it’s a gift. Take this other sentence: “It’s the season for gifting.” Whatever happened to the word “giving”? There was absolutely nothing wrong with the sentence “It’s the season for giving.”

Okay, I’ll look at it another way. You can say “giving” and come up with the image of someone passing out something–anything–to another person. When you say “gifting”, the image you come up with is someone handing a nicely wrapped present to someone else. Looking at it that way, I will very reluctantly admit that “gifting” suggests giving a present that’s prettily wrapped. It’s completely different from someone giving me a pair of scissors, giving me a piece of his mind, or giving me a disease. That said, I still can’t get myself to use “gift” as a verb.

Grammatically, many nouns have verb forms, and we don’t really give it a second thought. Some very few examples are research, produce, comment, fan, walk, sleep, cook, drink, etc. Nobody ever questions their dual functions as nouns and verbs. How did they ever gain that duality? I’m not going into that historical aspect of when they were first seen on record used as either noun or verb, although I’m sure there’s some linguistic study somewhere that does that.

That language is a dynamic form of communication is undeniable. If we still spoke English the way it was spoken during Chaucer’s time or Shakespeare’s time or even during the Victorian era, we would sound really strange–unless everyone still spoke exactly the same way. Grammar most likely was invented along with the standardization of everything else during the industrial era. People in control of things probably felt that they needed to standardize language so that it would be easier to understand across various borders, whether political, cultural, scientific, or even personal borders. Creating rules for how language should be structured and documenting those rules ensured clear understanding by the majority of people throughout the world. That standardization of language has given us a measure for deciding what is correct language or good writing. That said, language changes. It adapts to the times. New words are created and useless words become obsolete. This happens because of changes in lifestyles, in technology, thinking, and just about every area in life. A hundred years ago, the word ‘cellphone’ never existed; a little over a hundred years ago, the word ‘airplane’ did not exist; before it was ever invented, the word ‘laser’ was completely unknown. This list can go on and on. On the other hand, how many kids nowadays know what a ‘bustle’ is–and I don’t mean bustling about or hustle-and-bustle; how many people walk about carrying a ‘poke’ over their shoulder?; how many people keep an ‘inkhorn’ or use the word ‘ruth’ to mean the opposite of ‘ruthless’?; nobody calls a ‘thrift’ shop a ‘frippery’ anymore, nor does anybody say they’re having a ‘rejumble’ when they’re experiencing ‘acid reflux’.

Granted, many terms or words that are now obsolete are in  word museums because whatever they referred to is no longer in use, or a better, more scientific name has replaced it. Other words die because of political correctness, regardless of what they originally meant, and the extent of influence political correctness has on language nowadays is, I think, the far swing of the pendulum. But it is also that sensitivity, rational or not, that has given use new words or new meanings for words, such as ‘gay’.

If you were to ask me, I’d say use the words that are there. I think anyone who doesn’t even try to find the right word or the exact word, is just plain lazy. Even if you don’t know the word, there are all kinds of dictionaries and thesauri that you can refer to. Not having a computer isn’t even an excuse, because before online references, we had real ink-and-paper books! There is absolutely no excuse for not using the right word. Don’t even give me the excuse that you’re being creative by coining new words, because it does take a long process for words to be vetted and added to the official Oxford English Dictionary. Yes, there is a committee that studies  words, their usage, and how well they fill a need. More than any other language, English is a melting pot of languages, more so now that it is exposed to cultures all over the world. Many cultures have languages that have words for things that do not exist in the English-speaking world, or that have words more expressive or more suited to things than what they have been called so far. For instance, what is the big difference between ‘mountains’ and ‘boondocks’?

I am thoroughly appalled when people in media use words wrongly or invent new uses for words when there are more accurate words that already exist but just don’t happen to be in their vocabularies, because I have always believed in finding the right word. My exception is when a simpler word can be used, pick the simpler word rather than the more technical term. While I am a big advocate for using the right word, I am also a bigger fan of simplifying the language. I don’t mean reducing your vocabulary so that it’s at kindergarten level–unless you’re writing for that age group–but avoiding jargon, highly technical language, and 5-syllable words that have 2-syllable equivalents. Unless, again, the 5-syllable word is more exact and more picturesque than the 2-syllable equivalent.

If there really isn’t a word for what you want to say, then by all means, coin one. But don’t do it before you check out the dictionaries. And if you’re stumped and can’t find the right word, ask me! I love looking through dictionaries.

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3 Basic Plot Types

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Many critics subscribe to the idea that there is no original idea or thought anymore, hence, nothing completely original that anyone can write about. Themes or plots? There are books and lists discussing every possible plot there ever was for a story. Depending on who you want to follow or believe in, you can classify every story or plot as one of three, nine, thirteen, twenty, or thirty-six plots. In the years I have studied and taught literature, I find that all plots can be reduced to three very basic plots, which my senior high school literature teacher introduced to me, and which I later encountered again while taking my Masters in literature. I find that all other plots are simply variations or elaborations of these three plots, based on the actions of the protagonist. For my teaching, I have decided to modify them slightly to suit my personality and preferences:

  • Running Man
  • Standing Man
  • Trapped Man

Consider every possible motivation, action, reaction, and consequence you can think of putting into a story and you will find that your plot will always be one of these three. The RUNNING MAN plot is all about a person running towards something or away from something. It’s the classic action-adventure plot and, understandably, the most exciting. You should write with this plot if you want to keep your readers at the edge of their seats. The STANDING MAN plot is all about a person who hasn’t decided what to do and needs to make a decision. It’s the type of plot for anything cerebral or introspective. If you want to focus on a character’s thoughts, personal development, and reactions to external influences and use up your whole story waiting for that character to make a decision, this is your plot type. Remember that from a standing position, your character can sit, lie down, fall down, or remain standing, all of which symbolize defeat, regression, or retreat. On the other hand, your character can decide to move from his spot, either walking or running. If this happens early in your story, then your plot is really the running man. If this happens only at the end of the story, then your plot is the standing man. Many post-modern stories fall under this classification because of their focus on metacognitive thought. I would classify coming-of-age stories as having this type of plot, particulary when the main character is at a loss which way to go; the main character is “standing” figuratively because he is being affected by an uncontrollable (external) factor—growing up—and he doesn’t know if he really wants to grow up or change. Classically, Holden Caulfield of Catcher in the Rye comes to mind. Finally, when your character has a problem or is in a situation that he actively or desperately wants to get out of and the whole story involves trying to get out of that situation or problem, then your plot is the TRAPPED MAN. Unlike the standing man, who sometimes doesn’t know he’s actually “trapped”, the trapped man is fully aware of his situation. Being trapped can be literal, e.g., your person is in a physical prison, captured, shackled, or what have you; or it can be figurative entrapment, e.g., a loveless or bad relationship, an oppressive home. All other types can easily be fit into these three types, which is why I prefer to teach just these three. However, for more mature students or more advanced classes, I will mention other plot classifications because they are more specific and more descriptive. As for the use of “MAN” in the names, I’m neutral in this use. I don’t subscribe to being overly politically correct or excessively feminist. I like the use of the word because it’s short and universal. If I ever were to change this word, especially in the light of inhuman characters as main characters or protagonists, I might resort to just using the adjectives or replacing “man” with “protagonist” or “character”—both of which are such unwieldy long words. I do like brevity in titles.

Nothing you can write is new!

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There’s no completely new or original topic in writing and that’s the cold hard fact. World literature spans thousands of years and humans are still, well, humans. Because humans think alike and share the same universal values regardless of the era, whatever we write about will always be the same: love, hatred, family, children, growing up, sibling rivalry, competition, anger, friendship, death, birth, loss, grief, envy, greed. Our emotions and motivations have not changed over the centuries, hence, neither has the core of what we write about changed. From the earliest records of mythology from the Bronze Age all the way to contemporary literature, topics and themes remain the same. Imitation is rampant, and even my favourite writer of all time, the accomplished William Shakespeare, does not have original stories. He has borrowed rampantly from Greek and Roman literature, with plays that have plots so similar to the Greek tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles or the Roman comedies of Menander, Terence, and Plautus. To say the least, my friend Will was well-read in Greek and Roman literature! And from Shakespeare, Moliere, and Voltaire, we have progressed to thousands of outstanding playwrights including Shaw, Osborne, Ionesco, Mamet and many many more. What makes the writing new is how it is approached, developed, and executed. What new turns of phrase, situations, settings, props, and personalities are introduced; what combination of fortunes or misfortunes; what twisted or inspired language; what pacing, excitement, quirks, and questions are presented–all these are what make the literature original, unique, and worth reading. And if these things appeal to readers a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand years from now, then that will be great writing, worthy of joining the canons of world literature that will be read, studied, and preserved long after the writers have shed their mortal coils.

On writing and blogs

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Sometimes, I think blogs are a bane rather than a boon to writing. Anyone can start a blog for free and write pretty much whatever they want. Often, you find blogs with atrocious writing–terrible grammar, bad spelling, illogical structures–and lots of gratuitous sex and violence. The worst part is that a great deal of this incredibly cringe-worthy writing gets published as fan fiction, simply because of the number of people who follow that kind of writing. I sometimes wonder if half of their fans are not followers because of some morbid fascination over how horrible the writing can be, or simply because it seems like something they understand–because the language sounds exactly like theirs, the stories things they wished they could have told themselves. Rather than uplift the average or below-average reader by exposing them to better literature, this class of literature celebrates and perpetuates ignorance by passing off as fiction. True, they will never ever be good enough to win prizes or recognition from prestigious award-giving bodies, but they might occasionally creep into the New York Times Bestseller list by virtue of selling a million copies or more. Even fine literature falls victim to marketing and crass commercialization.

Be like a mosquito!

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Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it.

~Jack London, “Getting Into Print,” 1905

Inspiration is never the only way to start writing. If every writer depended solely on inspiration, then there would be much less literature out there. Writing starts with writing. Like any other trade, writing takes skill and practice which beget expertise. Granted, there are writers with a knack for churning out copious amounts of writing, they certainly were not born that way. They started with writing words, then sentences, then stories—simple, sophomoric ideas that became more sophisticated as they gained yet more skill, experience, and knowledge. What a writer must rather have is an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, never-ending patience, and the persistence of PEI mosquitoes. With enough perseverance, a skilled writer can become a master and a bad piece of writing can be re-crafted and revised over and over again until it is so unlike the original work it can be quite the gem. No diamond ever adorned a woman so gracefully that was not cut and polished into refinement and glory by the most patient of craftsmen. That is precisely because the writer is a craftsman, cutting, refining, polishing, until the roughest work is a masterpiece worthy of inclusion in the canons of great literature.

Writing is Nonpareil

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Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.  ~Norman Mailer, 1998

Funny, I never had any problem completing writing assignments, regardless of the format. Anything from poetry to essays to research papers were a breeze. Assignments for the school papers or magazines I could pump out. Articles for press releases and publicity I could churn out. But when I decide to sign up for a 1-month-50K-word writing challenge, or tell myself I need to write my book my collections my stories my poetry I come up with sweaty guts à lá Norman Mailer, so I guess I’m not in such bad company. Probably the distractions of survival have something to do with it. I think it’s probably the knowledge and realization that life isn’t just getting up and going to class and doing what is expected of you or asked of you or even what you choose to do because you know you always have somewhere to go home to, food at the table or in the fridge, a bed, and all the creature comforts you need. When you’re writing and hoping that it will bring home the bacon and pay the bills, then it becomes an immensely unreliable method for relieving worry or for self-expression because your expression becomes limited to your source of worry which is whether or not your writing will sell and how soon and how much. Anyone who wants to be a writer by profession or vocation should first take a course on how to survive on writing alone. The intellectual, psychological, and emotional satisfaction you get is nonpareil.

On the Internet and Research

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Muddling through the Internet can be a challenge to writers looking for resources, but with enough persistence and perseverance, you can find almost any information you need to write just about anything. Young people nowadays just don’t appreciate what they have, and more mature writers who are not familiar with the Internet and somewhat technophobic don’t know what they’re missing. I still remember when I had to research for academic writing when I was still in school. I was an expert at looking for cross-references, browsing through library indices, book indices, encyclopedias, and trade journals, among other sources. Many times, I had to physically travel all over town just to get information from specific organizations or libraries. The cost of research could be prohibitive from travel alone. If I had the Internet back then, I would have saved mostly on travel time, which took away from reading and writing time. Now, I often need to tear myself away from the Internet because of all the available information that just keeps me wanting to read more. Not to mention, well-designed sites and search engine optimization makes it so much easier to find anything. Like all writing, you just need to use the right words, this time, to find what you want. And if you don’t know the word? Don’t worry. There are dictionaries and thesauri at your fingertips. Now, the only thing stopping you is your typing speed and the speed of your Internet connection. I would never have imagined this 30 years ago. I can barely imagine what there will be 30 years from now!

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It’s National Novel Writing Month … Again

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After my first foray into National Novel Writing Month, better known as NaNoWriMo, exactly 3 years ago, I decided to finally sign up again this year. The past two years, I hemmed and hawed and decided in the end that I’d just stick to doing my own writing on my own time at my own pace and not shoot for the 50K-word target.

Finding myself in a situation where I had the freedom to do a bit more writing (a.k.a. in-between-jobs), I decided I had to do something about an idea that had been brewing since I first thought about it and wrote a short scene consisting mainly of dialogue several years ago, which I turned into a short script intended for the PEI Screenwriters’ Bootcamp of 2013, for which I developed a full 13-episode mini-bible. That meant I had a very rough idea of what direction the story would take–and when I say rough, I mean rough: 50- to 100-word concepts for the remaining 12 episodes.

I’d received a lot of feedback that it was a very promising story, but was torn between expanding the episodes to fill an hour (really, about 40 minutes) or cut them and concentrate them to fit a half-hour (which really is only about 18-22 minutes). As you might have guessed by now, I remained torn; hence, the decision to take the mini-bible and convert it into a novel.

I’m still hemming and hawing about how it will develop. However, I got off to a head start just converting the script for the first episode into prose. I also managed to up the count by throwing in some character descriptions, some scene descriptions here and there, and even a bit of dialogue and action for a couple of the episodes.

It’s also part of my excitement, I guess, at my newest toy, a really handy software called Scrivener from Literature and Latte, which allows me to write on “index cards” and to see my writing as index cards or as written text. I can shuffle those cards, move them around, and keep any bit of writing I want even if I don’t think I will keep them in the final copy. I do know I’m not too happy with the last bit I wrote, and then I got extremely busy and was out of the house for quite a length of time so I wasn’t able to follow-up on my incredible head start. Now, I’m in a bit of a slump and need to get back to writing that novel while stopping my editor’s brain from telling me “Delete! Delete!”

And that’s why I’m writing this. I figured that if I just let it out and do a bit of metacognitive processing I might be able to metastasize my thoughts into words.

After I get back from running an errand and supper and a shower…

On Writing and Culture

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If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.  ~Anaïs Nin

What makes writing good enough for it to be significant to any culture? That all writing is a cultural activity, there is no doubt; however, not all writing is worth reading, and therefore, of no real use to any culture except to highlight the need to improve the state of writing. What makes writing truly valuable to culture–any culture and culture in general–is what the reader can get out of it. I’m going to dissociate academic writing or professional writing from literary writing, because academic and professional writing are certainly and always written with a clear and valuable purpose in mind–in most cases, to share valuable information, record events, or instruct readers. Literary writing, on the other hand, aims mainly to entertain; occasionally to enlighten or inform as a great deal of creative non-fiction does, but in its purest form, to entertain. There is no other reason for stories–short and long fiction, poetry, or drama to exist. That we should have such a rich culture of literary works is clearly evidence that writing is valuable, otherwise, we would not preserve and pass on our stories with such care and fervor. What does make writing–or literature–valuable to culture is its significance to humans and to civilizations. That significance comes from the ability of a literary piece to speak directly to each reader who comes across it, its ability to make that all-important and significant connection with readers that makes them feel every emotion and connect with every idea the author has tried to convey through the written word. In many ways, a writer’s words are a window to the writer’s soul. Only when writers pour everything–their thoughts, joys, frustrations, successes, failures–into their writing, does the writing come alive and become a reflection not only of individual writers, but of their lives, their  milieus, their environs–their culture, if you will, in little bits and pieces, because that is exactly what each piece of writing is: a piece of a puzzle which, when put together, reveals a whole cultural panorama that decorates history as it is being made and brings it to life for future generations.

How much of yourself or your life do you reveal in your writing? Share your thoughts on The Writing Pool.