WRITING CHARACTER-DRIVEN FICTION: A FEW SUGGESTIONS
1. Know yourself – come to terms with who you are, what has shaped you, your strengths and weaknesses, your secret fantasies, your darkest feelings, your best qualities and essential flaws, neuroses and inner conflicts. Face who you are, warts and all.
2. Create characters you care about – characters who intrigue you, arouse your curiosity, engage you emotionally or intellectually, frighten you, make you laugh, make you cry, make you uncomfortable, characters who feel real and fully dimensional to you.
3. Let your characters take on their own life and surprise you as you write. Editors are looking for the unique, distinctive, flesh-and-blood character that captures our attention, causes us to care what happens, and keeps us turning the pages. Don’t try to force the character to fit the plot; search the character’s background and personality to see how they might make the story more interesting and credible.
4. Write the character from within, rather than from the outside. External details, action and characteristics are important, to a point. But don’t neglect your character’s motives and goals, no matter how noble or evil. Know your character from the inside and write from that place, even if you have to go deep into your own private world to do it. What is your character’s attitude and world view? Is that being conveyed in the writing?
5. Turn off the censor inside you as you write; take creative and emotional risks. As Anne Lamott puts it: "Write as if your parents are dead." Stop writing to hide who you are, to prove you are something you are not, or to "please" others; find the courage to write freely and honestly, unconcerned about how you might be judged.
Suggested Exercises:
List your best and worst character traits, being both generous and brutally honest with yourself; now do the same for your main character(s).
List your greatest loves and hates, the things in life that most arouse your passion; now do the same for your main character(s).
List your most important goals, ambitions and dreams, the ones you may not dare to speak aloud; now do the same for your main character(s).
List your five greatest fears; now do the same for your main character(s).
Write down the events that have most shaped you and influenced the direction your life has taken, no matter how troubling; do the same for your main character(s).
In a few words, identify the essential inner conflict that has most held you back in life, kept you from "being yourself" or from living life to the fullest. Does this suggest a character you might want to write about, or other story material?
In a private place, alone, sit and close your eyes. Visualize a beautiful forest. You enter the forest on a winding path. As you follow the path, all your senses are alive, seeing, smelling and hearing everything around you. The path emerges into a clearing, a lovely meadow with a group of people at the center. As you get closer to the people, you see that they are people you have known in your life who have passed on. One by one, you approach and greet each one. What happens between the two of you? What is said? What do you feel? What memories have been opened up by this exercise? What does the experience suggest in terms of deep or buried feelings – and possible story material?
Finding Your Writer’s Voice
Voice is the conversational quality of your prose, the essential way that you "talk" to your reader. If the voice is erratic, hesitant, confused, weak, unsure of itself, readers won’t stay with you. Writing every day can be important in helping you find your natural writing voice and rhythms. It also helps if you open your story with the most honest and direct line that you can, to see if that helps get you started in a more honest and natural direction. Don’t hesitate; just write a good, honest opening.
Let’s take a look at an example from a manuscript evaluation I did recently for an aspiring mystery writer whose main character is a psychiatrist at L.A. County Jail:
The security doors slid open. I stepped inside to a teeming mass of rapists, murderers, thieves, drug addicts, con men and the mentally disturbed. They were screaming, spitting, fighting, urinating and doing things inside their cells I didn’t even want to think about. A brew of urine, vomit and disinfectant infused the air with a powerful stench. Welcome to the psychiatric ward of L.A. County Jail, the largest and most crowded psychiatric facility in Southern California. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. And I work here, five days a week, until I quit, retire, suffer a breakdown or one of my patients shanks me. My name’s Penelope Towers. I’m a forensics psychiatrist. I didn’t study as a professional to end up in a place like this. But it’s where I ended up, just the same.
As you read this, do you sense an attitude and viewpoint in the voice? In the way the details are related from the character’s POV? How much can be said in a short space, with few words, when the voice is strong, clear and authoritative? How it establishes a character who has some intrigue and grit about her but doesn’t tell us exactly what she’s feeling, on the nose? How a deeper, possibly conflicted person is suggested, to be revealed, layer by layer, as the story unfolds? How it suggests certain questions: Where did this character come from? Why did she end up here? Will she stay? What will happen to her? What is the story that’s about to unfold, from this woman and this place? What is the journey she’s about to go on, taking us with her? And so on.
Find a character you care about. Take us into his or her world. Show us what happens.