What I’ve Learned: Story Elements II – Situation
For our second edition of Story Elements, part of the What I’ve Learned series, we’re going to look at Situation. It’s probably the easiest concept of the 5 Story Elements, so we won’t spend too much time on it.
Situation is somewhat self explanatory: it is the external situation or state of affairs that your character must deal with. Ideally, you want to set up the big situation from the start of the book. Sally Protagonist visits home after pursuing her journalism career for a decade only to find that her mother is going to lose the family flower shop. She must find a way to save the shop and keep her editor back in the big city happy. Or perhaps: Marshall Main, a jaded cop, is pulled into the seamy underside of the city in trying to help a young runaway who’s now disappeared. The brass don’t want him searching for this kid, for reasons unknown, yet he’s compelled by the last conversation he had with the girl before her disappearance.
Creating situations can sometimes be difficult in much the same way creating characters can be difficult. Your situation must be believable, but it must also be universal in some way, so that the reader can relate to what your character is about to go through or is trying to accomplish. And even as it’s relate-able, it must also be unique in some way. You must bring something to it that no one else has. Yet, the uniqueness can be something as simple as an unexpected setting. Or a slight twist of the norm–a young boy runs away from the circus, instead of running to join it. In this case, the universal aspect is the idea of escape from an unpleasant life or situation.
Of course, you will have your main situation, but also, over the course of the story, different situations string together to form your plot. Your character, by his actions, will be put in difficult circumstances and will have to find a way out. Each situation leads to another situation and by this method, your story is told!
Stay tuned for the third installment: Objective!
On Writing Workshops and Spontaneous Writing
So recently I found out that Neil Gaiman is going to be at the Clarion Workshop this year! I’m a wee bit of a fangirl, so I am really excited to hear about this! (Oh and if you’ve never read Neil’s journal, for shame on you! For shame!) I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to go to the workshop, though. The application deadline is March 1. That poses a bit of a chronology issue for me.
Part of the application requirements are two short stories. I have several shorts laying around, but all are still in their first draft form. It’s going to require me to revise. And we all know how well I revise! :p Anyway, what it really comes down to is whether or not I’ll be able to get two shorts revised in time for the deadline or not, since I have to have my novel completely revised by April 10. How much money do I have to pay to get about 5 more useable hours out of each day?
Moreover, I think I’m a little bit intimidated. My understanding is that there’s a lot of spontaneous writing expected. I can’t recall if it’s Clarion or Odyssey which requires a new story every day (I think it’s Odyssey). But either way, I don’t do that sort of writing very well. Given ten minutes in a writing class to write a few paragraphs about whatever–my brain freezes up and I just look at the page. I’ve never been good at that sort of writing.
I’m still going to see if I can get a couple stories polished, even though that aspect does scare the writerly doodoo out of me. I’m already in debt up to my eyeballs from grad school. What’s another $4k, right?
I’m a little snarky about the cost, I know, but Clarion is one of the best short story workshops out there for genre writers. A few of my fellow students at SHU are former Clarion students and they can’t say enough about it. So I’m intrigued about going. I really do believe in the usefulness of programs like these. I know the writers in my master’s program who’ve gone through Clarion are already phenomenal writers, even before SHU gets to them!
Any other graduates of Clarion or Odyssey out there? What was your experience?
What I’ve Learned: Story Elements I – Character
I’m going to do a 5 part blog series on story elements beginning today with Character. Please feel free to comment, add anything you think I may have missed and make any suggestions you think might be worthwhile for others to hear!
Character
In today’s modern novel, it’s not farfetched to say that character is king. Readers want to connect with characters, sympathize with them, especially your protagonist. To catch your reader and, more importantly, keep her, you must make her care about your characters. If we don’t care, we won’t read on.
Characters provide a moral compass for your story. Your protagonist (the character whom your story is about) is the anchor which keeps your tale on track, the lens through which you’re showing the reader your story. Your reader wants to see all sorts of terrible things happen to him but, in most cases (but not all), wants him to prevail in the end.
So how do you make your readers care?
Make your characters believable and sympathetic.
Making characters believable
Know thy character. The more you know about your character, the easier it is to make him believable. Of course, you need to know the basics about him: body type, hair color, eye color, occupation, family, etc. But don’t stop there! What hobbies does he have? What does he do when he gets angry? Does he stop for directions when he’s lost? What charities does he donate money to? What’s his dream car/job/vacation? What’s his biggest regret in life? His biggest joy? What were the circumstances of his first kiss? Does he wish he had a brother/sister/none at all?
Know your character’s strengths and weaknesses, know what he wants and know what’s preventing him from getting it (this goes a wee bit more to plot, but it’s applicable here as well). Know what motivates him and know which character traits he has which will keep him from his goal. Give him a secret.
As you’re fleshing out your character, you should understand that most of what you figure out about him, your reader will never know. But your reader will know that you know, because you will understand your character enough to know how he will react in each situation he enters. And it will be believable.
Making characters sympathetic
First, I should say, characters don’t always have to be sympathetic. There are certainly genres which have unsympathetic characters as main characters. However, in order for your reader to connect with your character, to want to root for him, to care about what happens to him, she has to be able to relate to him in some way.
There are universal situations in life that most of us go through at some point: the awkwardness of adolescence, dating, loss of a loved one, learning how to drive, good relationships, bad relationships, our first traffic ticket or car accident, moving out on our own, college life, work promotions, getting fired/laid off, renting an apartment or buying a house. While you don’t have to include these situations in your story (unless they are important to the plot), they flesh out your character and they can be alluded to in your manuscript. They make your character more real, more human. And that, in turn, makes readers more sympathetic.
Before closing, I also want to point out that your protagonist–the character your reader is rooting for–does not have to be your point of view character. Probably one of the more famous examples is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Tales of Sherlock Holmes. The point of view character is Dr. Watson, while the protagonist is, of course, Sherlock Holmes. Don’t be afraid to play with point of view this way. Sometimes an outside voice can make the reader appreciate and care for the protagonist more.
Please let me know if you found this post useful. There will be four more in the Story Elements series, with the next installment being Situation.
Best of luck with the writing!
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Incoming!
Watch this space for the first of my new ongoing series, What I’ve Learned. Our first installments will be on Story Elements. Look for the first one, on Character, later today or tomorrow morning.
Writing Action
This isn’t a How-To post. Not yet anyway.
Next term, as part of the graduation requirement at SHU I have to teach a short module on the topic of my choice. I’ve got a few kicking around in my noggin; one is How to Write Action Scenes. I’ve been told by more than one fellow writer/author that I write action scenes very well. I find that really flattering. So when the time came to brainstorm about what I might want to teach, action scenes popped into my head.
Here’s my problem though: I have no idea how I write them well.
I just write the scenes. I never realized they were done particularly well. So I don’t really know how I do it. And if I don’t know how I do it, how do I teach someone else to do it well?
In thinking about possible reasons why this is a strength in my writing, I’ve come to the conclusion that it must have been all the MUSHes I played.
Back in the early days of the net (man, am I dating myself or what?), there were online games called MUSHes (short for Multi User Shared Hallucination). All your Evercrack, World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies games had their origins in the early MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) and MUSHes.
I MUSHed. A lot. In a MUSH, you made a character (complete with stats, for all the gamers out there) and you logged in and roleplayed. In text. No flashy spells, no pretty graphics. Just words. And you roleplayed with other people. You typed out your dialogue and your actions, so that other people understood what you were saying and doing.
I think that’s where my ability to write action came from. MUSHing. Perhaps that’s an idea I can use to teach how to write action. Hmmm. That might be worthwhile. It could make for a fun class activity. Heehee. Okay, my mind is working now! Bwahahahaha!
Any suggestions for other ways to teach writing action scenes?
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Kitchens, Cars and Coffee
So this residency at SHU we had literary agent Donald Maass as our guest speaker. Aside from being a total fangurl (I want him, bad — erm, as my agent, of course!), I got an immense amount of information from his seminar. He did a very pared down version of his Writing the Breakout Novel workshop. Aside from having decided that as soon as my finances will permit, I’m going to take the full workshop, I also realized that half my novel contains no-no scenes.
In his Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (which is fantastic), Maass suggests that all scenes which take place in a kitchen, a car, a shower, etc be cut along with any scenes involving the serving or drinking of coffee or tea as well as the smoking of cigarettes. His reasoning is that these sorts of scenes tend to tone down the tension of the book. I think, in most cases, he’s absolutely right. Not all cases, of course. And he acknowledges this himself by giving a couple examples of good scenes in those settings or with those elements. In each, though, there is an element of tension that gets ratcheted up by the scene, rather than toned down. And that, I believe, is his point.
If there is a scene that must absolutely take place in a kitchen, make sure the scene serves the greater purpose of the story: to make the reader want to read on, to make the reader care.
It’s all about tension, he says. I daresay, he’s right. And that’s not just me being a fangurl! 
I’d love to hear what others think about this!
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The Curse of Was (or How to Hunt Down Passive Sentences)
When I first started writing with an eye for publication, I hadn’t taken any writing courses, no fiction classes, nothing. I was really flying by the seat. I started out submitting mainly to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, then also to Cemetery Dance and other short story markets. I always got rejected, but I often got little notes that really boiled down to, “I liked the idea, but it just didn’t grab me.”
I remember thinking, “How do I do that? Tell me how to grab you!”
Looking back at those old stories *cringe* I recognize why the writing wasn’t doing any groping. Most of my sentences were passive. Certainly, that wasn’t the only error, but it accounts for the sagginess of the prose.
Now, when I’m revising manuscripts (especially the old ones), the first thing I do is track down errant “to be” verbs. Here’s how I do it (in MS Word):
- Edit -> Find
- Checkmark the “Highlight All Items Found In: Main Document”
- Type the word “was” in the search field
- Click the “Find All” button
- Once the words are found and selected, go to the Highlighter function button and highlight the words an obnoxiously bright color
Then I do the same thing for: were, be, being, been, wasn’t, weren’t, and any other passive verbs I can think of. Once they’re all highlighted that garish pink, purple or yellow color, I go through the document highlight by highlight and see whether the sentences affected can be improved and made more active.
Usually it’s pretty easy. It’s just a matter of dropping the “to be” verb and changing the -ing verb to an -ed verb. For example:
Selina was careening through the underbrush.
becomes
Selina careened through the underbrush.
The active verb makes the sentence immediate and engaging. And that’s what grabs your reader.
String together a slew of active sentences and you have a riveting paragraph. Make your paragraphs strong and active and you’ve got yourself a much more publishable piece!
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