Something else that stood out to me was Snyder’s “Six Things That Need Fixing” approach:

This is my phrase, six is an arbitrary number, that stands for the laundry list you must show–repeat SHOW–the audience of what is missing in the hero’s life. Like little time bombs, these Six Things That Need Fixing, these character tics and flaws, will be exploded later in the script, turned on their heads and cured.

He goes on to say that if your ending doesn’t feel complete, go back to look at those Six Things and make sure each of them has been addressed in a satisfying way. I think this is a nice, straight-forward way of setting up conflicts that must be resolved in the story. If you think about the events of the story happening in order for these problems to be fixed in your character’s life, I think it makes the story feel even more meaningful.

Since I’m currently brainstorming some new projects, thinking about those Six Things has been very helpful. Have you used this approach or something like it?

In the chapter, Lamb says:

Remember that choice creates conflict. Without choice, there is no conflict. In literature, as in life, the torment of deciding between two equally weighted alternatives creates one of the most powerful conflicts a character can confront.

This explains why love triangles can work so well, because the character needs to decide between two options that both seem like they might be the right one. When I think about the most memorable problems I’ve had in my life, they’re mostly of the “I don’t know what to do” variety, when I wasn’t sure which choice was the correct one. That, of course, got me thinking about  my characters’ problems.

In a manuscript I’m currently revising, the character hasn’t had much in the way of options. Something happens to his family and he has no choice but to try to fix it. High stakes, right? Well yes, but thinking about what Lamb said makes me wonder if I’ve made things too simple for my character. Saving his family will be filled with obstacles, but he’s so single-minded about it that it’s not terribly interesting. What if he did have a choice? For example, what if he thinks someone else can do it for him–and things only get worse as a result?

I’m not sure what direction I’ll take the story in, but I’m going to try to give the character more choices. After all, every decision he makes might be the wrong one, which will only get him deeper into trouble, and which will make the stakes even higher.

What about you? Have you been giving your characters enough gut-wrenching choices?

Like many screenwriting books, this one talks about three-act structure. Unlike other books, however, it focuses on the emotions of those acts rather than the events. I’ve never been great at structure, and I tend to think more about plot than the emotions carrying my characters forward. Which is why I often run into trouble.

When we talk about moving the story forward, we often focus on what the character wants and needs. But what Dunne underlines beyond those is what the character knows (or doesn’t know) and what she fears. Often what she fears is rooted in something that happened to her previously in her life.

[Your character] becomes teachable [through the course of the story] and what you must teach her at this point is her hidden history…that which caused her to build the walls in the first place…She must face it in order to free herself from the fear it created.

That is essentially the character’s journey, overcoming this fear. In creating the story, we must put her into situations where she’s pushed more and more out of her comfort zone, and closer to confronting whatever it is she’s afraid of (e.g. abandonment, pain, snakes).

According to Dunne, a character should start off the story acting in a certain way because of her innermost fears and desires. But when she’s pulled out of her comfort zone by the events of the story, all the self-preserving techniques she’s used in the past no longer work. The goal is to have the character learn new skills, ones that she might not know how to use at first, but ones that will ultimately help her in the end.

The real reason to set up the roadblocks and barriers on your protagonist’s journey is to make him face and overcome fears that will teach him the lessons he needs to learn…Not only that, but the lesson learned has to enable him to get to the next level on his quest.

All this thinking about characters’ fears really helped me with a WIP I’ve been revising. I’d been so focused on what the character wanted that I was having a hard time making the story feel cohesive. But thinking about the character’s fears helped me with the emotional arc of the story. I started asking questions like:

-When are the character’s fears challenged?

-When does she have no choice but to step out of her comfort zone?

-When does she finally learn to trust someone else?

Once I started thinking about what needed to happen emotionally, I had a much easier time figuring out what needed to happen plot-wise.

There was a lot of other wisdom in this book, but these were the things that helped me the most. I know focusing on a character’s fears isn’t an earth-shattering approach, but it was exactly what I needed to hear to help me gain some perspective on my story. I highly recommend checking out this handy little craft book.

1.Strength – Of course you want your manuscript to be the best representation of your writing. So even if a manuscript isn’t your most marketable, if the writing and storytelling are the strongest then it might be your best bet.

2. Hook – As I said above, showcasing your writing is important, but if you have more than one manuscript that has strong writing, the one with a stronger hook might be the better one to query.

3. Targeting – If your manuscripts are equally strong and fairly different from one another, it might make sense to send different manuscripts to specific agents depending on which might appeal to them.This means having more than one project out there, which I think can sometimes increase your chances.

4. The Letter – Even if you have the best manuscript in the world, if your query isn’t strong then the agent will never actually see your project. So try writing queries for each of your manuscripts and seeing which one works the best (you might need some outside feedback for this one).

As I queried multiple projects, it soon became clear which of them were the strongest based on the responses I was getting. I also kept revising, which I think is the most important thing. You don’t want to keep sending out manuscripts that you know could be better. And as I kept querying over the course of a year, the project that finally got me an agent was the one I had most recently finished. So I guess the lesson is keeping writing because you never really know what will grab an agent’s attention.

Have any of you had to choose between multiple projects? What made you decide to query one over another?

]]> http://www.annastan.com/2010/10/choosing-which-manuscript-to-query/feed/ 10 http://www.annastan.com/2010/08/tension-conflicting-emotions/ http://www.annastan.com/2010/08/tension-conflicting-emotions/#comments Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:07:41 +0000 annastan http://www.annastan.com/?p=2774 I’m almost finished reading The Fire in Fiction by Donald Maass, and I think his chapter on tension is one every writer should read. Tension is what keeps us turning the pages. It can come from a variety of things, but as Maass points out, one of the most effective ways of creating tension is through conflicting emotions.

When I thought about the books that really gripped me, that made me keep reading way past my bedtime, I realized they were full of conflicting emotions. For example, in The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams, the main character must choose between marrying a horrible man and destroying her family – there is no “good” choice and she’s conflicted the entire time.

Then I started thinking about The Hunger Games. (No, I haven’t read Mockingjay yet, so shhhh!) We have the danger of the games, and Katniss’s struggle to survive, but there are also conflicting emotions. Katniss doesn’t want to kill the other contestants, but she doesn’t want to die. And, of course, there’s also the love triangle, which is the definition of conflicting emotions.

So here’s an idea: Grab a scene from your WIP, one that you think is intense and full of tension. Now look at what your main character is feeling. Is she conflicted? Does she have mixed feelings about what’s happening or about what she wants? If not, might that kind of conflict raise the tension? And if your character is conflicted, is it possible to pump it up even more?

Maass’s explanation is much more complex than my little breakdown here, so I recommend reading the chapter. The conflicting emotions approach might not be the answer to every problem, but it can be a good way to perk up some saggy middle scenes. And a bit of added tension is never a bad thing, right?

-The Spectacle has a handy post on how to create a dystopia

-Nathan Bransford gives a back-to-basics rundown on how to write a novel

-And Charmaine Clancy lists the 10 best links for structuring your novel

Okay, and now as promised in the title of this post, it’s time for taco dogs! No, it’s not a hot dog wrapped in a taco shell. It’s my dog, Emma, wrapped in a blanket and looking adorable:

She’d just had a bath and was a tad chilly, so I wrapped her up like a baby. Yes, I’ve officially become one of those crazy dog people.

1. Writing Prompts

I love coming up with writing prompts (that’s what my blog StoryBug is all about) but I get a little lazy when it comes to actually doing them. Often I’ll just think about what I would write in response to the prompt instead of sitting down and doing it. But the thing about writing is that things flow out of your pen (or your keyboard) that you don’t even realize are in your head. The prompt I found the most useful was actually the one up on my website right now: Write about a time when your character was completely relaxed.

2. Visual Aides

I was inspired by Tera Lynn Childs’s WriteOnCon vlog on character collages. Instead of cutting out images from magazines and gluing them together, I did a series of Google image searches and pasted the images into OneNote, along with some notes to myself about each image. I’m not a hugely visual person, but the exercise did give me a stronger sense of the setting as well as some props that might be important to my characters.

3. Free Writing

Some people free write about their character’s experiences or journal in their character’s voice in order to get a sense of backstory, motivation, etc. I tried a slightly different approach with a couple scenes I was struggling with. I used the comment feature in Word to insert interior monologue for my main character throughout the scene. The story is told in third person but the comments I inserted were in first – this allowed me to go beyond motivation and emotions and really get at the nitty gritty of what was running through her head at each moment of the scene.

I’m still working on getting at the heart of this character, but these exercises have helped me get to know her a lot better. What techniques have you found helpful in getting to know your characters?

“How to Grab Them on Page One” by James Scott Bell at The Kill Zone

“How to Layer Points of View” by Mary Kole at Kidlit.com

“Sagging Middles Part Deux: Pick Up the Pace” by Roni Griffin at Fiction Groupie

“The Best Writing Advice (According to Writers)” by Jane Friedman at There Are No Rules

And finally, here’s a little cuteness to get you through the weekend:

The part you must jettison is not only the best-written part; it is also, oddly, that part which was to have been the very point. It is the original passage, the passage on which the rest was to hang, and from which you yourself drew the courage to begin…So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book’s form hardened.

Since I cut the first twenty pages of my WIP a few weeks ago, this excerpt really struck a chord with me. Those pages had been there from the very beginning and, I thought, were essential to the story. They were rooted in storytelling, which was supposed to be a huge theme in the book. It turns out, however, that as the book’s “form hardened” that theme wasn’t nearly as important as I thought it was going to be.

Dillard is right; you need to be willing to cut the very things that seem the most important to you, all in the name of making the book what it needs to be.

How are your WIPs coming along? Have you needed to make any painful cuts?

]]> http://www.annastan.com/2010/04/wip-wednesday-cutting-the-important-things/feed/ 7 http://www.annastan.com/2010/03/people-read-to-worry/ http://www.annastan.com/2010/03/people-read-to-worry/#comments Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:11:38 +0000 annastan http://www.annastan.com/?p=1962 I’m back to share some more wisdom from James Scott Bell’s fantastical little book, The Art of War for Writers. While Bell gives several helpful exercises to develop your writing, he also shares insight into the art of storytelling in general. Last night I read this gem:

They [people] read to worry. They read because they want to have their emotions wrenched by the plight of a character to whom they feel em0tionally connected. You do the connecting. You start connecting from paragraph one.

This statement isn’t necessary earth-shattering, but I think the word “worry” here is so interesting. Often people say they read for character or they read for story. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say they read because they like to worry. But that is exactly what we do. If we put aside a book because we don’t care about the characters, it’s because we’re not invested enough to worry about them.

The fact that writers need to start making a connection with readers in the very beginning is so important. Not only must you hook readers, you must also make them care:

Remember, speed in the opening is a matter of disturbance, not high levels of action…The faster we worry about a character, the quicker the bond. And the greater our desire to turn the page.

I just saw a perfect example of what Bell is describing here. In Devil’s Kiss by Sarwat Chadda the opening scene introduces a teenage girl who’s struggling with the fact that she must kill a six-year-old boy. He’s not actually a boy; he’s a demon. But he still looks and acts like a child, which heightens Billi’s emotional struggle. The fact that she must do something so terrible, and the fact that she feels so conflicted about it, automatically make her sympathetic. We also wonder who this girl is and why it’s her job to kill demons.  We want to know more, and we want to see if she’ll actually do it. That’s what makes us turn the page.

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