Guess what I spent the Thanksgiving holiday doing? That’s right—giving myself repetitive stress injury writing my annual 45,000-word children’s book for my son. I didn’t start until halfway through November this year, so it got pretty darn busy toward the end there. Now I have a completed book (hurrah!), but I also have a gimpy elbow, which means today’s post is going to be more a checklist than a regular tirade. (Sorry about that.) We’ve been on the subject of first drafts all month: Running into the Jaws of NaNoWriMo , 3 Essential Guidelines for starting a novel, 3 Vital Steps to creating an excellent, story-worthy protagonist, and 3 Crucial Aspects of Writing Scenes.
So let’s sit down together now and ask all those hard, necessary questions a writer must ask themself when they finish a first draft of a novel:
Is your protagonist the same character at the end as the beginning?
Is the catastrophe your characters are heading toward at the Hook the same one they wind up with at the Climax?
Does your protagonist matter more than anyone else in the story?
Does your Climax matter more than anything else that happens?
Can you clearly state your protagonist’s two mutually-exclusive needs, which drive them relentlessly forward throughout their story?
Can you account for every single scene in relation to one or both of those needs?
Can you justify basing an entire novel on those needs when you ask yourself why a reader would care?
Can you identify exactly how your Climax forces your protagonist to choose between their two needs?
Can you link every single scene in an inevitable chain of cause-&-effect toward that Climax?
Can you pin-point the tension in every single scene that’s so powerful it makes the reader turn the next page?
Have you made your protagonist interesting, entertaining, smart, human, and unique enough to hold a reader’s attention for 50,000 words?
Have you shown your protagonist’s world in significant, telling details that simply couldn’t describe anybody else’s fictional world?
Have you stuck to only essential dialog?
Have you choreographed your action scenes for tightly-paced action?
Have you skipped all urges to repeat yourself?
Have you avoided every paragraph, sentence, and word of exposition humanly possible?
Is any and all exposition left just so brilliant and essential that your story can’t exist without it?
Have you moved the Backstory from the beginning to its rightful spot after the Hook (or else cut it altogether)?
Have you resisted the urge to ramble in Resolution after the Climax?
Is this story truly, sincerely important to you, above and beyond its basic quality of containing a whole lot of words?
Will you love sinking ever-deeper into this story in the New Year as you launch into the revisions that are, in actuality, the real work of writing a novel?
Are you proud—not of yourself—but of your story?
Are you in love?
You are a high-dive artist who just dove into the deepest point of the entire ocean. Congratulations! You’ve got some kind of crazy-brave glitter shining in your eyes!
And when you return to this story later, after a well-earned respite over the holidays, you will begin swimming home.
This time last year a reader notified me of a contest going on over on Write to Done. They were soliciting nominations for the Top 10 Blogs for Writers of 2010. I said, “You want to?” and you guys said, “Sure!” And a bunch of you stampeded over in what I like to think of as the greatest writers’ rave ever, and you nominated me!
And I was overwhelmed and deeply moved. Awwww. You guys!
Imagine then my surprise to learn during the December holidays that your nominations had placed me in the Top 20 Blogs for Writers.
People! My chin wobbled a bit. I really hadn’t realized the power of this online community we’ve built, the spirit of giving you have in you, or thrill of being our own tribe. You’re all too darn sweet for words.
And I was grateful and touched and filled with the zeal to do even better for you in the coming year, to earn the faith you’d shown in me. To really be what you need: the mouthpiece for the greatest writers’ rave ever.
So imagine my total shock and amazement to learn a week later that your nominations had earned me a spot as one of the Top 10 Blogs for Writers. The top ten! That’s like the ninetieth percentile of the Writers Digest Top 101—with cherries!
Yes, I cried a little. (No, I did not let my loved ones take pictures.)
But I did hold myself to that promise to do even better in 2011 than I’d done in 2010, to work as hard as I could to teach you what it’s taken me thirty years in this art and craft to learn—how to create wonderful fiction—and to do it in a way that becomes so intuitive once you get it you can’t remember a time when you didn’t know this stuff.
Also, I got the chance through the Top 10 Blogs for Writers to meet the most fantastic other folks out there today blogging for writers:
I brought them here to meet you and sent you over to their sites to meet them. And almost all of them have become permanent good friends of mine here in the online writing community, people I turn to again and again throughout the year to share our thoughts and ideas, interviews and book giveaways, the myriad aspects of our developing careers out here helping you do what you do best.
You people are the very reason this blog exists. You keep me sane. Plus you bring me cherries.
Thank you. From the bottom of my heart.
And now I’ve just been informed that Write to Done has opened nominations for the Top 10 Blogs for Writers Contest 2011. So if you’re still in the nominatin’ mood—I would be so honored if you’d drop by over there and nominate me again:
They do want a reason for each nomination or it won’t count, so in case your mind is a blank (as mine so often is) I’m going to suggest some reasons below. Please feel free to use any of them or mix-&-match. But if more than one of you wants to use the one with baby lions and tutus, I suggest you coordinate behind the scenes so the contest judges won’t think you’re just toying cavalierly with their heads:
Encouragement
Because when I work I picture myself at Victoria’s desk and hear her whispering in shock over my shoulder, “Holy crap, that’s good! Hang on, I’ve got to make a phone call—”
Community
Because all these other nominations for Victoria are from my friends over on her site, and everyone’s kind to everyone else, and we share our nachos and guacamole.
Professionalism
Because Victoria’s cat The Grey Peril is a harsh mistress. And that makes me a better writer.
Inspiration
Because her site always makes me think of happy little baby lions and lace tutus. Writing great literature.
Advocacy
Because when I read Victoria’s blog I know I’m in league with her, shoulder-to-shoulder with all the others who love beautiful fiction, fighting our valiant fight against the dreaded Cheap Shlockers.
Enthusiasm
Because I like having complex concepts explained to me through things like the Dalai Llama’s hairstyle.
Sheer love
Because I’m Victoria’s mother. (Don’t use this one, though, unless you really are. Mom.)
And whatever you do, never forget: I love you people!
We’re talking about tackling first drafts this month, for the sake of all you NaNoWriMoers scampering around out there. We’ve looked at Running into the Jaws of NaNoWriMo (doing what into the what?), 3 Essential Guidelines for starting a novel in general (doing it how?), and 3 Vital Steps to creating your protagonist (doing it why?).
And today we’re going to look at writing individual scenes. Because that’s really the nuts and bolts of what’s going on in your squirrely little head right now.
Or anyway it had better be!
What you need to accomplish
We’ve been talking over on Jami Gold’s blog last week about the Story Climax, which is—it turns out—the whole point.
And this is true of every single scene you write, as well.
What’s the whole point of this scene? Why are you writing it? Why can your story simply not exist without it? Not because it’s:
characterization
That has to happen as texturing in other scenes, the ones that move the story inevitably forward toward its Climax.
atmosphere
See above.
info dump
See above.
The only thing that’s fair game for a scene is a simply inescapable step in the progress of your characters’ trajectory from the first moment they jump out of the pan until the instant the land in the fire.
Whatever that step is—that’s this scene’s climax.
How you need to accomplish it
This part is fun! This is the part about pitting your characters against themselves and each other and watching the fur fly.
Since all fiction is about cause-&-effect, it’s a given that your characters’ movement through a scene is all about their desperate grappling with their fates. This grappling is what causes whatever you’ve already decided needs to happen in this scene’s climax. And this grappling is enormously entertaining to readers.
This is why you’ll hear that every scene must have an aim. That simply means that every scene must have something that makes your characters fight. Nobody wants to see them lying around picking lint out of their navels. We want them to do something! And in order for that something to matter, they must have deep, fundamental motivation to do it, motivation rooted—you saw this coming—in their conflicting internal needs.
So they spend the grand bulk of this scene wrestling with something with everything they’ve got (sometimes in solitude, sometimes in dialog, sometimes in action, even, um, wrestling).
I have to have it!
No, you can’t!
Nooooooooo!
That’s this scene’s development. It’s the bulk of the scene. And it’s a blast.
Why you can’t avoid accomplishing it
Because, naturally, if your characters could avoid going through all this hell they certainly would.
But they can’t. Because of the climax of the previous scene.
They did something in that last scene, made a decision and sealed their doom, and whatever it was acted as the effect that caused this scene. How does the opening of this scene show that, the immediate and dastardly consequences of those actions they thought—they thought!—in the last scene were the only actions humanly possible?
That’s this scene’s hook.
Now, most scenes average 1,000-2,000 words, which is four to eight manuscript pages. Use this information as you write. You can go ahead and write the climax first and park it there at the end where it belongs and then go back and fill in with lots of madhouse antics. I do this a lot. And it’s generally not too hard to figure out what to use as the hook that’s going to demonstrate the soup your characters are in now, because you’ve got the climax to that previous scene sitting there staring you in the face. That’s where they were giving their all trying to avoid this exact situation.
Just be aware as you write this first draft of how many pages you’re looking to fill.
Jami Gold runs her blog under the slogan, “Beach Reads with Bite.” Her eclectic crowd of paranormal and, as Jami says, otherwise “not normal” writers/readers makes her blog one of those wonderful cult hubs of rampant creativity out there in the online writing community. And this week Jami’s hosting an excerpt from The Art & Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual that she says “gave her goosebumps” and even “the A-ha! moment”! Which I consider something of a major coup considering that Jami spends her life in the business of giving people goosebumps.
We’re over there right this minute having an impromptu session with everyone in the comments trying this quick technique out on their own WIPs. They’re really sinking their teeth into it!
We’re talking about how to approach the first draft of your novel this month, in honor of NaNoWriMo, Last week we talked about the 3 Essential Guidelines for your overall novel, and the week before that we talked about Running into the Jaws of NaNoWriMo. And today we’re going to be talking about the protagonist’s character, because that’s the core of all storytelling. (I tackled this topic last November in a post so bizarre that it famously prompted Roz Morris of Nail Your Novel to ask, “My dear, what are on you on?” 4 Post-Its to Stick Up Over Your Writing Desk. And I outlined the basic elements—which I’m going to talk about in greater depth below—back last summer in one of a series I did on how to write fiction all wrong: How to Characterize Wrong in 3 Easy Steps.)
But, honestly, you don’t have to be doing NaNo to be starting a novel. If you’ve got holidays coming up in December, you might very well be getting yourself in gear to take advantage of them in the most luxurious way a writer can imagine: by writing!
Your protagonist believes they cannot survive without this
It’s a need so core to them that if you changed it you wouldn’t be writing about a human being anymore. What is it? Writers have been using the canonical primary needs for hundreds of years without wearing them out:
survival
love
justice
Truly, these three needs have powered most of the fiction ever written. And there are still more aspects to explore in them. They’re that enormous. They’re that complex.
Some of the other things characters need are:
to protect a child
to heal a wound
to learn the truth
to have an adventure
These needs also have powered incredible numbers of stories. Remember Don Quixote? Out there scampering around the countryside on that mangy old nag with his reluctant sidekick at his stirrup? What was he up to?
He certainly wasn’t defending his life. And I don’t think he ever really had a chance with Dulcinea.
Justice. Adventure.
He needed them really badly.
Your protagonist can’t survive without this either
Because that’s what makes a story: two needs. Otherwise, it’s a bildungsroman, the story of a protagonist grappling with a whole series of internal conflicts, and modern readers don’t have the attention span to survive a bildunsroman anymore. They need explicit signposts on why they should care. (I’m sorry, Moll Flanders.)
But here’s the magic wand—you’ve already done this step. Yes, you have! Look above. How many stories are about two of those top three in conflict with each other? What if you mixed and matched two out of the seven? One of the seven with some equally-powerful but more subtle need?
to prove a point
to accomplish a lifelong goal
to protect someone elderly (or otherwise physically or intellectually vulnerable)
to escape evil
to come to grips with their own dark side
You’ll notice that, no matter how subtle a secondary need you give your protagonist, it can pretty much always be traced back to one of those three canonical primary needs. And when you choose not to root your protagonist’s character in a secondary need quite that canonical, for whatever reason, you must add motivation to that subtle need through one of the canonical ones.
Also, although experts once swore mysteries were too ‘intellectual’ to accommodate romance, pretty much any story gets better when you add thwarted love to the mix.
Your protagonist has absolutely no intention of choosing between the two
Which means any situation in which they are forced to do just that serves as a rip-roaring, roof-raising, mind-bending catastrophe for your Climax. As country singers are so fond of reminding us, “My baby left me, I lost my home, and then my dog died.”
Say you have a protagonist who needs:
survival
love
Whomever they love, it puts them in danger. In danger of losing their job? In danger of losing their home? In danger of losing their sanity?
When Jane Eyre had to choose, she lost all three. Well, she wasn’t totally plugged in to begin with, but I really don’t think that night on the moor could have helped much.
Pit your protagonist against themself by giving them the two most fundamental needs in the human animal. It doesn’t have to be romantic love, either. It could be love of a friend, love of a place, love of a cause.
Romantic love has the added attraction of sex, of course, which always gets the attention of the hormonally-bullied. (You know who you are.) Just keep in mind—and this is really important—you must address sexual issues through their grip on the personality rather than through simple textbook instructions. Your reader doesn’t need to learn how to do it. They need to learn how to handle the consequences when they indulge in something they know how to do all too well.
Or say your protagonist needs:
justice
survival
Their pursuit of justice does nothing but put their life in danger. You know what that is?
Every thriller ever written.
This is why thriller works so well as series genre. Because you can pit your protagonist against themself through their need for justice—and the evil perpetrators’ efforts to kill them—over and over and over again until Doomesday and never run out of excitement.
Be aware that thrillers get their layering through complicated technical subjects, so the authors of thrillers do a great deal of research into specific industries: law, politics, banking, history, international espionage, high-tech weaponry, et cetera, plus very often exotic locales. That all needs to be professionally-researched and very adroitly handled. For advice on how to use your research properly, read Roz Morris’ Nail Your Novel, in which she explains exactly how she used her research for eleven ghostwritten books, eight of which were best sellers.
Or maybe your protagonist needs:
love
justice
What would force a person to choose between what they want and what they know is right? Well, almost everything. Anne of Green Gables tells us all about it as she works her way through her daily life—the endless, excruciating decision-making process that never leaves us alone. It’s when she has to choose between the things she loves and the things she knows are right that she becomes important to the reader, someone they will carry with them internally for the rest of their life.
Because such stories don’t have death hanging over anybody’s head, they tend to be more mild-mannered. That allows them to go deeply and profoundly into the human experience. Remember that your reader is reading not only to be reassured that life is worth living, but to learn something they don’t already know. If you choose to pit your protagonist against themself through these two very human (but not dastardly) needs, you’ll have to know something about those needs that the reader can’t figure out for themself. Just reiterating an experience identical to the reader’s own without adding anything original won’t hold their attention.
You can see how this simple pyramidal design gives you a protagonist your reader passionately wants to see succeed, even as you back that protagonist into worse and worse corners until you’ve backed them right against a wall.
Then your protagonist must always, in the Climax, choose. That choice is the secret ingredient that makes your story work.
This, my friends, is what we call sympathetic character.
NOTE: If you’d like to introduce your protagonist below, I’ll help you identify their conflicting needs.
I know I mentioned this the day Joanna put it up on YouTube, but I’m going to mention it again because today she’s putting it up on her blog, The Creative Penn. Joanna Penn has interviewed me on video! Go visit her! She’s providing a written explication of the points she and I discuss, as well as the link to the interview, in which you may watch me wave my hands with great enthusiasm and make ‘doot, doot, doot’ noises in describing the manner in which I expect writers to design their stories.
In an impromptu moment, Joanna even gives me her one-line synopsis of her new novel, and I show her how to develop it into a gripping plot. See how developmental editing works on the grand scale!
There’s also a great deal of arm gesturing to describe character arc, pointing to show where the solution to all the world’s ills lies (right below the camera, as it turns out), as well as my “You’ve stumped me” face for discussing Scrivener.
Not to mention the ghost in the rocking chair.
Please join us for The Art and Craft of Story with Victoria Mixon at The Creative Penn.
So let’s review quickly how to make that dive a swan dive and not a cannonball:
Know why this story matters
Somewhere, somehow, at that one moment when they can least afford it, your protagonist is going to come up against themself in a spiritual dark alley. And it’s going to be bad.
They have always, all their life, sincerely and desperately believed they could not handle this confrontation. Chaos, madness, mayhem, yes. But not this.
And that heart-stopping confrontation is why you’re writing this story. Handling the impossible matters to readers—it’s possibly the only thing that does.
The bulk of a novel is just for fun, thrill, excitement, unending adventures that leap from one peak to another as though in Seven-League Boots. Your reader’s grappling with one drama! Aaagh! They’re grappling with another! No! They’re back to grappling with the first drama again! Eeee! There’s a new drama they didn’t see coming!
Back and forth, round and round, in and out of the complexities of your plot they run full-tilt, flapping the pages of your book as they go. They can’t stop!
Don’t get too attached to the first scenes that it occurs to you to write. Those are your warm-up scenes, and chances are almost certain they’re Backstory, not Hook.
Write them! Have a fabulous time! But be willing to set them aside in their own little outtakes files later, when you’re far enough into this story (possibly at the end) to be able to see what originally happened to force the decision that got your protagonist into this whole impossible mess in the first place.
That’s too important of a scene to toy with by getting yourself emotionally-dependent upon it right now. Just take lots of notes as you work on your novel so it will be a truly fabulous opening scene when you do eventually write it.
And because we all live here in the twenty-first century, I know as well as you do how hard it is to squeeze NaNoWriMo into your already-packed schedule. So remember the 9 Ways to Find Time to Write.
Take a deep breath, run to the top of the highest pinnacle you can find, and start flapping your wings. Welcome to NaNoWriMo!
Jan O’Hara recently made Twitter history by starting the #FreetheRealPorter movement about my recent interviewee Porter Anderson. She also stood up for my lace curtains, because of course all the right people understand about lace curtains. She’s the voice of the Unpublished Writer on Writer Unboxed, secretly a family physician in real life, and addicted to citrus fruit. And today she’s going all-out, hosting a guest post from The Art & Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual, in which I explain exactly how to use your protagonist’s freedom of will to get them in a half-nelson and continue ratcheting the tension on them until your story implodes.
As Jan likes to say: “See? Win-win scenarios really do exist!”
For years, I’ve been holding my husband and son captive over the dinner table as I wave my hands and rant and rave about fiction, writing, publishing, all the many and wonderful intricacies of this extraordinary art and craft. For years. Recently, I’ve been interviewed online in a number of places, including Rachell Russell, Editing Hacks, Constant Revision, and Book Trends Blog.
And now for the first time Joanna Penn of the Creative Penn has interviewed me on video.
Aaaaghgh! Yes, I really do wave my hands that much in real life.
Please join us at the Mixon kitchen table for the first step in this new (rather unsettling) phase of my life as an independent editor: The Art & Craft of Story with Victoria Mixon.
Short story author Scott Warrender is a Mentoring Program client. I have done full Copy, Line, & Developmental Editing on a number of short stories for him, the first of which was his poignant fictional memoir of Africa, ''The Boy With the Newsprint Kite,'' now published in the Foundling Review.
Clients’ Books
Bhaichand Patel is the author of two nonfiction books: Chasing the Good Life (Penguin Books India, October, 2006), and Happy Hours (Penguin Books India, October, 2009). I edited Patel's debut novel, When the Streets Were Cold and Dark.
I've edited a number of nonfictionessays for my friend Lucia Orth. (Many years ago, my contribution to Baby Jesus Pawn Shop was simply a peer critique and participation in a standing ovation.)
The poet Chris Ryan is the author of The Bible of Animal Feet (Farfalla Press, 2007). He has recent stories in Pank, Anemone Sidecar, and A Cappella Zoo. I edited Ryan's novel The Ishmael Blade and worked with him on his debut novel Heliophobia and WIP Pogue.
