Character fracking - in this case, it's good to keep digging

I've been asked about the interview I did with Neal to figure out what it is he wants at the start of the novel. It's a short interview so I'm including it here. I'll have some comments afterward. Since I talked to him while he was still with the gang, I refer to him by that name.
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Owlie: Here you are, member of a street gang, with no permanent home and no family. What do you want to do with your life?

Razor: I wanna get away from Coyote. What’s this shit, nobody can look at his woman? She stands in front of me, what’m I supposed to do? If I can’t touch her, I don’t wanna be around her.

Owlie: That’s a start. What else? You must think about your life, up there on that roof you like to sit alone on.

Razor: I look at the little lights, some close, some far. Some of my friends let me help with fixing cars. I could do that, if I got out of MF. My friends make enough money to live on. But that’s just a dream. Coyote don’t let nobody out.

Owlie: He doesn’t let people out, but Flaco got out. You’re pretty sure his family, scattered around L.A. County, hid him. What if you got out too? Imagine MF is no longer in the picture.

Razor: Yeah, well, that’s hard because MF is everyplace. I used to want that, y’know, it was good to know they had my back. I had nobody else so it was good to see MF stand up for me. But Coyote got real crazy, rivals act up and you gotta defend your territory, there’s always shit happening that ain’t as cool as I thought it was.

I just want to know why mi madre left me to MF, y’know? What kind of mother just takes off and leaves a 10-year-old, when she knows there ain’t nobody to take care of him?
Mi padre, who knows who he was. Lola married some Anglo, but I ain’t Anglo, so who was he? Why didn’t she leave me with him?

Owlie: He might have died, like her husband Edward.

Razor: Both of ‘em kicking the bucket? What, did she slit their throats? No, I don’t know why she married somebody else, but I know she left me. Sonofabitch, I was ten years old! Who’d she think was gonna take care of me? Maybe she died, maybe she got jailed for the rest of her life. Blood family is everything and mine fell apart. It’s not knowing that kills me. I just gotta know why.
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I think there was more going on behind his answers, and it's important to be aware of that because he may be holding out on me. At this stage of his life, it's very hard for him to be honest with other people.

Wow, that line of thought just led to a whole cascade of things. See, never accept the first couple of answers your characters give! Maybe Neal also wants to figure out who he really is. Before leaving Mi Familia, he was known to others as Razor, one of "that gang". His non-MF friends know him a little better, but he feels he can never completely let his guard down. MF always comes first.

Wanting to know more about his mother is a very personal thing; he must think about other personal things.

Why am I different? I'm in tight with MF, but I ain't got my own cantón, my own place to live. I got women and kids, but no other family. I live in the barrio, but my given name is Anglo. I got half a handful of lots of stuff, but I ain't got a whole handful of anything. But here I am - I'm alive. What am I, really? I wanna see stuff, do stuff! I wanna take these twisted up thoughts and feelings inside me and do somethin' with 'em.

That came from sitting up on the roof alone, as Neal often does. He likes to go up at night; everything looks more alive with all the lights. Wanting to know more of who he really is ties in with deciding to take an active part in co-creating the non-profit group. He wants to know not just his family background, but who he is personally. He doesn't think of it this way, but he wants to know what he's capable of.

Always pay attention if you sense something with your characters is not quite complete. Your intuition about these things is usually right.

What's going on

I’m putting Street Glass on hold because I’ve found an online course I think will help with the plot, but the course doesn’t start until February. I strongly feel I need a more experienced hand to guide me.

My plot problems, I believe, arise from Neal not having a strong enough goal at the start of the story. I may need to intensify things before he even meets Sandy. Readers have to care about Neal and sympathize with him very early on, or the chance to leave the gang won’t mean much.

But I’ll still play around with scenes as they catch my interest. Moving to the forefront is an idea I’m turning into a short story, with an eye toward making it the first of a series of shorts. I aim to submit the first story to some as-yet-unfound contests. This will keep me writing, and will help with the all-important skill of reducing my words. You may have noticed I like to talk J

This story is a fantasy, set in a medieval sort of era. It concerns the rediscovery of magic. Be assured it will not be a clichéd piece! Using this magic has definite physical consequences, unpleasant ones. This magic cannot do everything though it has certain attractions. I’m still filling in some of the details, but it’s already quite a bit of fun.

One of the members of my local writers’ group gave me a copy of yWriter5 to try. I’ve just started playing with it. It looks like it could be helpful for keeping people, places, and plots straight. Sure, you could use a spreadsheet, but yWriter lets you keep the lists and the story in one program. Okay, you could make lists in Word too. In fact I do that for Street Glass and I have two spreadsheets that I use less often. I’ll let you know what I think of the program in another week or two.

Speaking of lists, the discography for Sylvyr Star has been completed. You’ll find it on a separate page, here. It starts with the band’s first release in 1980 and goes up to 1991. I had to work hard to convince them to tell me the whole catalog; I think they had copyright concerns ;) I assured them that there’s nothing to worry about.

Neal tells me that at some point after he’s become comfortable playing rhythm guitar, he does some CCR covers with Star. He’s gotten so wrapped up in the project that when I listen to CCR, I can hear Star’s versions playing just underneath. It’s a weird effect, let me tell you. Just when I get a handle on the character voices in my head, I get fictional music playing along with the real stuff (insert googly-eyed smiley here!)

what do you want and why do you want it?

Multitasking here; writing a blog post and working on my plot at the same time. You’ve probably heard it before—your Main Character needs to have a strong goal in order for the story to work and for readers to care about him. Case in point: the reason I have plot holes in my outline is because Neal does not have a strong enough goal that would drive the plot.

Don’t ask me why it took nearly three years to figure that out, but at least I realized it before cobbling together a shoddy plot then sending the manuscript out J

How do I find out what he wants? Why does he want it? One night, after having given up on the notion of sleep, I interviewed Neal to try to find out. He told me that beneath his hatred of his mother for abandoning him, he wants to know why a mother would leave her ten-year-old child to the clutches of a street gang.

With that as his original goal (the secondary goal being making a better life for himself), and seeing that Sandy has so many more resources than he ever did, he could become obsessed with finding out what happened to her. This of course leads to all sorts of questions I’ve barely started to realize—would the band’s “people” be able to find any trace of her? If not, how does the plot advance? My muse shakes her head at me:

“Come on, it’s obvious. By the time Neal moves in with the band, Lola’s been involved in Tony’s illegal activities for eight years. She doesn’t want any attention. So Tony would have to step in, leaving Neal with an ever-shifting series of tantalizing clues that may or may not be real.”

Well fine, I say, but how do you expect to pull that off? She just gives me that enigmatic smile. Maybe her name is really Mona Lisa.

So what I pull from this is to question your characters’ motives often. I thought that it was enough to show readers what an awful life Neal was stuck in. I forgot one of Art Edwards' valuable lessons—make your major characters more than you think they should be. Give them truly powerful motivations and they will drive your story. Art calls it “overshooting the runway”. He’s not only great for ways to bring a rock lit novel to life, he’s a straight-to-the-point, excellent general writing teacher. Best money I ever spent was for his class in Basement Writing Workshop!

I also want to say that this new goal of Neal’s makes me a little uncomfortable, because it changes the way he’s always been. However, changes are necessary to make the story better. It’s okay to need time to adjust yourself to character changes, but it’s really important to accept that sometimes big changes need to happen. Don’t let your attachment to anything keep your story from becoming the best it can be. Michelangelo saw the form of a finished sculpture while the marble was still uncut, but for most writers, it usually takes more work J

Reason vs justification

I want to say a few words on the idea that writers should be sure everything they include in their fiction is necessary, whether it's purpose is to move the plot forward or for  characterization.

It's related to my opinion that many unpublished writers don't have a lot of confidence in their ability. We don't have an automatic filter that lets us know what can stay and what doesn't need to be there. Most of us don't know anybody with editor training who can walk us through the process. Basically, we have to guess.

That leads us to worrying that we aren't explaining the characters clearly enough. We add on. We get sucked into that ubiquitous quicksand of characters and plot. We tell ourselves the MC's flashback to the time his sick puppy was kicked by the mailman is necessary to show why the MC is a twisted adult. It's showing, to boot, so of course the flashback is necessary.

Well, maybe, and maybe not. It's perilously easy to cross the line between what's necessary and what's justification.

My crit buddy told me that the fight scene between Razor and Coyote in my current draft of chapter one doesn't need to be that long. I have reasons why it's written that way, but his reaction makes me question whether those reasons are in fact justification.

Do I need to make the point that scene is there for? How would the story change if I did shorten it, or remove it? Is all that detail there because the truth is I think I did a great job on it?

I'll add that my local writers' group liked the fight, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't benefit from tweaking.

It's good to have self-confidence in what we write. It's even necessary in my opinion. It's got to stay manageable though. It's hard to write something we love (a phrase or a chapter) and then hear that people are not getting out of it what we intended. Really listen to yourself and your inner editor. If you find yourself offering reason after reason why you've included something, consider that maybe it needs to be changed. Ouch, I know.

Robert Kernen said that not every idea, not even every good one, needs to be included. I'd rather take out some stuff I like and have most people tell me they really enjoyed the whole work, than keep stuff I like and have readers point out bunches of stuff that didn't work for them.

Getting out of the "character comfort zone"

Sometimes I get so immersed in chapters of my WIP, and my main characters as they are in those chapters, that I have trouble remembering the characters are supposed to grow and change as the story progresses. When I think about the arc for each MC, I can see that change, but when I’m down in the trenches from chapter to chapter, it’s easy to get a handle on someone’s personality and then not want to struggle with changing it.

Of course, protagonists must have some degree of change. And for Street Glass, personality change for both Neal and Sandy is a major part of the plot. One way to keep from getting too comfortable with someone’s personality at any point in time is to jump ahead.

What I do for writing fun is think of an interaction I’ve never written out before; recently, it was events on the morning of Sandy’s wedding, and now I’m playing around with the evening of Neal’s first live show as second drummer. Neither of these may ever make it into any part of the novel. Critters may never see any version of them. But I write them mostly stream-of-consciousness style, with little thought to word choice, pacing, or those other things that tend to slow writers down. I just turn the characters loose and see what happens.

Not only is it incredibly fun (because there’s no pressure), scenes like that remind me of how the characters’ personalities change over time. Neal gets to a point where he eases from slangy English to grammatically correct English to slangy Spanish and back again, all in one paragraph, and Sandy has no trouble following his meaning. They’ve been through so much together that Sandy hardly even notices Neal’s language changes. However, in order for that to be plausible even in my own head, I have to show those changes happening gradually.

That keeps me focused on the chapters I know will be included in the novel. I tell myself that I’ll never be comfortable with those scenes that take place in the future if I don’t set them up right in the first place. Because I tend to be pretty literal and linear-minded, this works well for me.

By the time readers get to the end of your story, they should sense that your MC is not the same person he or she started out as. If you’re not sure that’s happening, or if critters are telling you they don’t think your major players have been affected by the big happenings, consider bouncing ahead several years. It make take you a few scenes to get the feel of how your character should have changed, but see what develops.

Don’t be afraid to get carried away. If you write enough future scenes that can be strung together, you might  do half the work for a sequel!

“Building Better Plots” by Robert Kernen, part 31

We’ve arrived at the final post in this series!

Kernen ends his book by giving a short rundown on non-traditional plots. He has concentrated on the usual ways plots are constructed—and published—and those probably do garner the most attention and sales. It makes sense, though, to at least be familiar with other ways of working. The best writing often uses bits of this and some of that in striking ways. You can’t do that if you only know one way to do it.

The epistolary novel and different ways of manipulating time are the two ideas he spends a fair amount of time on. As usual, he offers examples of works that have used each method. He suggests trying various twists on traditional plot construction to see if a stronger story emerges and just to improve your writing chops. He also suggested, earlier, to take all the index cards you’ve written your plot on, mix them up, then lay them out to see what you get. For some people, that’s going to be pretty tough to do. Mess with my plot? How dare you!

Yeah, guys, that’s the idea. It’s surprisingly simple to work yourself into writer’s blocks just because you think various things have to happen in certain ways. Writing is a creative process, so get creative!

Kernen then gathers all the exercises and quizzes together at the end, so you can have the tools all in one place as you go through your projects. I find that helpful. After that, he includes a glossary which is equally helpful. Things like “allegory”, “catharsis”, and “resonance” are briefly explained, as well as concepts like “conflict” and “raising the stakes”. If you’re going to talk about how to do anything, you ought to be sure everybody means the same thing when they use various terms.

In all, this is a darn useful book. The novel I’m working on is not really traditional, but I’ve gained a lot from Kernen’s methods. I’ve come back to the original idea that Neal’s and Sandy’s growth are the main focus. In other words, the rock-n-roll part of the story is part of the framework, not the plot itself. It’s a part that readers can see sometimes, but the details don’t matter as much as how the characters react.

I’m convinced that because all writers have trouble with various parts of their projects from time to time, that writers of any level will benefit from this book.

I recently got two books for research and started reading one, Street Wars by Tom Hayden. I’ll post a review of that at some point, plus I plan to read one of the rock lit novels out there and review that. Also, a member of my local writers’ group showed me a book on “creating original characters” that looks intriguing, so that may be on my “to review” list.

Thanks for coming along with me and Bob Kernen on the safari through plotting my novel! The process has to be internalized now. Feel free to add insights, tips on what works for you, or comments on failed efforts. We learn even when something bombs!

pt 30 of Robert Kernen's "Building Better Plots"

Plot devices! Kernen says these are ways to focus the plot on the most important parts of characters’ lives, to clarify the context, or sharpen the story so that its fundamental meaning is well-defined—I like that. I think that’s just what I need to tackle the murky issue of Neal’s life during months-long tours.

The framing device. This is pretty much what it sounds like: circumstances and interactions happen at the start that we don’t fully understand, a narrator takes us back to where everything started and shows us how we got to that opening scene, and now we understand the connections and happenings. Kernen uses the example of the movie The Usual Suspects as one effective way the framing device has been used. I can see how some stories would gain excitement and tension from this device, but I don’t think it’s what my story needs.

The episodic plot. Kernen doesn’t really define this one, but says that this device is often used badly because the episodes are not well connected. He refers to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Each story is almost completely unrelated to the others. I personally think that something like the Tales remains popular partly because the society they show us is so different from what modern readers know. I do show glimpses of closed societies in Street Glass, but the differences are not as dramatic. Anyway, I don’t think an episodic form will work for my novel either.

The flashback. Yes, it’s true, the flashback is often a cliché. But the device can still have value if you use it right. Don’t stick one in just because you’ve thought of a clever way to ease into and out of it. The information you offer has to be important, and preferably, the flashback should be the best way to get that info out. Kernen relies on two movies for examples of this device, but I think that’s a failing. We’re talking about writing flashbacks so I’d much rather have an example of a book where that’s done well. I do have one flashback in an early chapter but I’m going to stop there. I think telling this story in a linear way will help readers experience the changes along with the characters.

Parallel stories. Kernen says you need balance and timing to pull this off. I can see how it could be tricky. You don’t want to confuse readers but parallel stories can add depth and tension. I could say that Sandy’s changes parallel Neal’s as the story progresses, though both characters change because of their interaction with each other. There’s no separation in time or location. I’m sure that many fiction pieces use more than one of these plot devices.

It occurs to me that my original pile of individual scenes could be considered an episodic plot form. As Kernen mentions can happen, they were too loosely connected in that form to make a coherent story.

Kernen points out that the way to use any plot device successfully is to let it happen. Trying to force something onto the characters never works. For example, the first couple of times I posted early chapters of Street Glass to Critique Circle, readers complained that Sandy seemed too nice. Why did he offer to help Neal, who had nearly killed him? Sandy only had one dimension and it wasn’t even an appropriate one for the situation.

In Art Edwards’ Rock And Roll Writing course through Basement Writing, we were challenged to get to know our characters better. I combined this with an exercise designed to help us create compelling characters. We were told to write about an alcoholic coming home for Thanksgiving. I discovered that Sandy had a cousin who resented his success and blamed him for her life falling apart; when she died, he shouldered the blame. With Neal, Sandy sees another young person whose life is out of control. By helping Neal, Sandy hopes to right a wrong and maybe put his cousin’s memory to rest. Now Sandy isn’t just Mr. Nice Guy, he has a personal reason for helping Neal. That background info comes out in a flashback.

Next post in this series is the last! I discuss the final sections of the book and wrap up my impressions of the whole work, and add some comments on other stuff coming down the pike for me.