Posts by Donald Maass

It’s tax time.  I’m not talking about the IRS.  There are other taxes we pay.  There’s a price for everything we want.  All that we value costs us.

Have you found, like me, that if you’re going after something big the Universe will test your commitment to make sure you really, really want it?  Buying a house is never smooth and trouble-free.  Marriage takes work.  Meeting your career goals takes years.

If you’re writing fiction you know what I mean.

Perhaps life taxes are the Universe’s way of balancing our desires with our efforts.  If we got absolutely everything we want without paying…well, what kind of shape would our world be in?  (Somebody remind Congress of that.)  Life taxes temper us.  Follow your dreams, it’s said, but to fulfill them we must make mistakes, suffer loses, gain patience, grow in wisdom…in other words, pay a price.

We’re taxed.

I mention this not only because I recently had my humbling annual visit with our CPA’s, nor because my choice to follow my dreams in New York City means paying an effective marginal tax rate of 50%.  No, no, I’m not complaining.

I mention it because in many manuscripts protagonists get what they desire without it costing them much.  Even in stories with high conflict, the resolution can arrive without a truly high cost.  Happy endings do not always feel earned.

It’s April, time to tax your protagonist.  Here are some ways to do that:

What’s your most meaningful relationship? Quick, write it down.

Did you write down a relationship with a person?  That’s great.  Now, keep listing relationships that are important to you.  Write down as many as you like.  When you’re done have a look at your list.  Are one or more relationships that matter to you relationships to non-living things?  Chances are that’s true.

We have relationships to all manner of things: music, animals, towns, careers, sports teams, food, the past, and even our own writing.  We also have relationships to aspects of ourselves, for instance to our fears, our dreams, our sins, our suffering, our beliefs and ideals.  We have relationships with time, the Devine and death.

Here’s the thing about relationships: they’re unique to us, they matter and they change.  Just as our relationships to others evolve so do our relationships to things that are abstract and intangible.

Look at it this way: Do you feel the same today as you did in childhood about your Barbie dolls or Lego blocks?  No.  Your toys today are different.  Is your passion for Van Halen, blue eye shadow, shoulder pads or Jägermeister the same as in your younger days?  No.  You’ve moved on to jazz, minivans, Ann Taylor and Ribera.

As for me, don’t get me started about hair, coffee, books or the European Union.  It’s complicated.  Ask me a year from now and I likely won’t say what I’d say today.  That’s the point.  My relationship to those things is changing.

So it is with characters.  Their relationships to non-human things are as dynamic as their relationships to other people.   How can we measure those changes?  It’s done by capturing evolving feelings, opinions and perceptions.  Here are some approaches to developing a deeper connection between your protagonist and his or her subjective world…

Is your protagonist a lot like you, or like you not at all?

In an absolute sense all characters reflect their creators. How could it be otherwise? Those crazy people must bubble up somehow from the storyteller’s rich, messy unconscious mind. Fear of such self exposure can be inhibiting. It can lead to weak character development or a retreat into stereotypes.

Characters can also be based upon folks known to the author, a possibility that can be even more inhibiting. Authors have been known to hold off writing certain novels until their parents died. Who can blame them? Strong stories ring true—and who wants to expose awful, inconvenient truths? Thanksgiving dinner with one’s family is stressful enough.

Even so, for characters to become fully real they must achieve the form they’re meant to take. They must become their authentic selves. Box characters in, force them to be or do what is safe, and they’ll become marionettes, with about as much impact and emotional grip. To embrace the fullness of your characters you’ve got to embrace yourself.

Here are a few ways to explore, and exploit, the relationship between you and your characters, in particular your protagonist:

• What do you love best about life? What do you hate most about people? What’s wrong with the world? What do you hope will never change? Give those feelings to your protagonist.

• What do you go out of your way to avoid? Why is that good? Why is that bad? Let your protagonist avoid that too—and later regret doing so.

• For you, what are signs of: respect, humility, confidence and/or love. Let your protagonist observe each one in others, and herself put each one into practice—or not.

To be a great novelist requires living with a paradox: Your story matters more than anything, and your story matters not at all.

It’s one of many conflicts and dilemmas that novelists face, but it’s one to master.  Lean too much in either direction and your fiction will suffer.  Embrace the paradox and your fiction will grow in power.

Why does your story matter more than anything?  Because fiction infused with high purpose carries more force than fiction that merely seeks to entertain.  (Not that anyone minds being entertained.)  When our hearts are moved, memories are formed.  Stories fulfill their purpose when they provoke thought.

Why does your story matter not at all?  Because when it matters too much you are likely to rush.  You could miss an awful lot of your story’s greatness.  It might seem self-defeating to dismiss your current novel’s worth.  However, by accepting that, hey, no one truly needs it right now you remove pressure from yourself.  You gain the time and freedom to go deeper.

Like so much of what we can say about ourselves, the same can be said of our characters.  Characters, in fact, are strong when they embody our own conflicts, convictions, principles and nature.  When they’re our idea of what they should be—or, worse, someone else’s idea—they’re weak.  When they’re both unique and credible they linger in mind.  Even when they’re improbable they can, counter-intuitively, become intensely real.

In character building terms embracing the paradox means granting your characters high self-worth, and their stories high personal significance.  At the same time characters who live in the moment, who aren’t in a hurry to resolve their inner conflicts, become deeply absorbing.  Wallowing in misery is off-putting, don’t get me wrong, but we’re drawn to people who take their own lives seriously and whose inner journeys matter to themselves.

Almost all characters I meet in manuscripts could have greater self-regard.  Here are some ways to spring off the paradox to build characters whose existence will matter to your readers too:

While reading a well-reviewed novel, have you ever felt both awed and bored?  You know the feeling.  This is soooo beautifully written… when is something going to happen?

Authors are at high risk of provoking that feeling when they write stories that essentially rely on delay.  Novels in which the main character’s primary need is to get over it, grow, heal, hit the road or in some other way become unstuck are especially prone to this pattern.

If that sounds like much literary and women’s fiction you’re right, but genre-based and plot-driven novels can also lean on delay.  Murder mysteries that grind through suspects and clues, epic journeys that take a long time to go anywhere, romances that churn…all can spin their plot wheels at high speed while not really seeming to take us very far.

The antidote to delay is change.   In plot-driven novels that isn’t automatically generated by action.  In character-driven novels it isn’t delivered by stunning rendered reality.  Altering the story’s circumstances or a character’s direction may fulfill the requirement, technically speaking, but can still leave a novel feeling hollow and readers feeling impatient.

Gripping change is change that happens within.   That, after all, is how we mark our personal progress and measure our inner time.  Do you catalogue your life month by month, or do you think of your past in rough periods like “the bikini summer”, “my first marriage”, “when I was unemployed”, or “after Dad died”?  You see what I mean.  Time is subjective and so is change.

In terms of novel construction that means capturing Inner change as it happens scene by scene.  Why include a scene unless it changes a character in some way?  Writers of plot driven fiction need especially to pay attention here.  Keeping action going and plot twists coming is nice but the effect is shallow.  Plot is interesting but it’s the unfolding inner conflicts of characters that grips emotionally.

What changed your life?

If not for a certain person, event, tragedy or triumph, you’d be coasting along through life, content with your job in benefits administration, trimming your lawn, living for the weekend and never missing an episode of “Community”.  But that’s not you.  You’re on a unique path.  Your purpose in life is higher.  Why?  Something or someone shaped you.

That’s true of stories, too.  A strong story can be shaped by someone or something in the story itself.  It takes the path it takes because a character gives it a shove, or something occurs that imposes on your characters the necessity of change.

That shove or provocation is the story’s inciting incident.   When such an incident is present a story doesn’t gradually gather velocity, it bursts from the starting blocks at high speed.   When a character fires a provocative shot it doesn’t simply startle folks standing nearby, it ignites a war.  Packing more into an inciting incident is the fourth way of developing your premise.  It’s a seed that you genetically modify so that your story grows huge.

One way to look at inciting incidents is to see them either as something someone does, or something that’s done unto your characters.  It might be an opportunity that opens up, a mystery that arises, an injury made fresh, the arrival of a stranger, or anything else.  What’s important is that whatever occurs is enormous in its implications and that it stirs up inescapable trouble.

Here are some ways to develop your inciting incident:

You know how in relationships everything you need to know was, in retrospect, revealed in the first twenty-four hours? It’s the same in pitch sessions. Everything important is revealed in the first twenty-four seconds.

Ask the question, what’s your novel about? One of two things happens. Either a numbing blow-by-blow plot summary begins or you hear a statement of theme that’s both vague and grand. My novel’s about life!

Uh-huh.

Plot summarizers may have lots of story to relate but they can have a hard time saying what that story means. Theme ministers may have high aspirations but the impact of their pages usually is low. Both would benefit from the third principle of premise development, but each needs to try a different approach.

Here, then, is the third principle of premise development: turn problems into characters. Or, conversely, grow through your characters the conflicts that will make your story universal.

Characters embody conflicts that everyone knows. Envision this character: mother-in-law. What do you immediately imagine? Meddling, nosy, clingy, pushy. I’m against stereotypes, as you know if you’ve taken my workshops, but this one illustrates my point. Characters stand for something. Magnify it and make it more obvious and your story will have greater impact. Reverse your readers’ expectations of what a character stands for and you’ll have a character they’ll never forget.

You can enact this technique the opposite way. Say that you want your story to be about life! Well, you can immediately see the flaw in that idea. It isn’t specific enough. What particular aspect of life is, for you, the most interesting, challenging or painful? Start there. That’s the core conflict.

Let’s say that conflict is wanting an environmental law career when your mother-in-law wants a grandkid. What forces tug your heroine in two directions? Two instincts: killer and maternal. To generate story events each force needs a champion. Hand out briefs, assignments or a mission. Story happens and your theme (life!) becomes active. From her firm’s fearsome senior partner your heroine will learn the depth of a father’s love; from her mother-in-law your heroine will learn the tactics of red-in-tooth-and-claw victory.

Here are some ways to embody problems in your characters, or to have your characters enact universal conflicts:

Last month we began to look at premise development. I argued that developing a premise through writing a first draft is a natural practice, one that most authors follow. Yet a bit more attention to deepening one’s premise at the beginning of the process will both enrich that first draft and avert later shortcomings.

The second way to work on a premise is to create a central conflict that’s bigger than the main character, or universal. You might think that all conflicts are, in a way, universal. Who doesn’t need to grow, heal, journey, surrender to love, enact justice or slay a bunch of big bad demons?

That’s true, but many manuscripts feel narrowly focused and small even when the fate of the world is at stake. Conversely, there are novels in which the setting is local, the protagonist isn’t anyone important and their problems are unique. Even so, those novels sometimes seem to be talking about us all.

How is it that big scale stories can seem small, while small scale stories can feel big?

Here are the relevant principles: Fate-of-the-world stakes won’t feel truly big until they’re also scaled down to affect your protagonist personally. Meanwhile, small-scale stories become bigger when they grow more particular.

In other words what truly makes global-stakes stories gigantic is not the global stakes: it’s the protagonist’s personal journey, or arc of change. Small-scale fiction achieves universal meaning through distinctive detailing of the main character’s life, times and problems. Everything’s larger under a microscope.

Is your WIP plot-driven and high stakes? Try developing your premise with these questions:

Will you ever run out of story ideas?  What a laughable question.  Of course not!  There are more stories in your cocktail napkin collection than you’ll be able to use.  And new story ideas–?  Just read the newspaper.  Cull from family lore.  Do some research.  Or just live life.  Novel ideas are everywhere.

True enough.  The abundance of story ideas isn’t a problem.  So why is it that there are so many weak second novels, series flat tires and mid-career crashes?  Are those novelists somehow choosing the wrong vehicles?  Or is it a matter of how you drive them?

Rushed or careless writing can ruin any good story but the problems can start on day one, when the premise itself is selected.  Is one premise better than another?  Not really.  Okay, then is it a question of nailing it in draft one or of relentless revision?  Those are important but aren’t what I’m talking about.

Many authors choose a story idea that grips them, that feels big enough, and that’s as far as it goes.  An outline or initial draft soon begins but there’s a step missing: the development of the premise itself.

Wait…isn’t that what outlines and first drafts are for?  You’d think so but I can tell you from being involved in hundreds of novels from their inception to their delivery, in their eagerness to get underway many authors fail to spot what’s weak or missing in their premises.  That results in problems down the line, problems which get increasingly hard to fix as roll down the runway toward publication gains velocity.

A fully developed premise includes: 1) A setting, milieu or world that is intriguingly different or unique; 2) a central conflict that’s bigger than the main character, or universal; 3) a conflict that’s personified (turned into people);  4) a powerful inciting action; 5) choices for the above and all the story elements to follow that eschew the obvious, go for what’s less obvious, take a counter-intuitive approach or simply are the opposite of one’s first choice.

Over my next several posts I’ll explore each of those premise development areas, starting with this: the arena in which the story will play out.

We all love to go somewhere different.  Historical and exotic settings are delightful.  Imagined story worlds that are convincingly built and authentically alive allow us to dwell there happily.   While we’re reading fiction we also like to learn new things, which explains why protagonists with unusual professions and special abilities are so popular.

But what if you’re writing about now, as in the real world and everyday reality?  What if your main character isn’t a demon slayer, Navy Seal, forensic sculptor or circus performer but somebody regular?  Is your premise doomed?

The truth is that exotic settings and unusual professions by themselves aren’t the key to a killer premise.  Nor is a hyper-reality automatically awful.  The task is to work on exotic settings until they feel real and recognizable.  Real settings by contrast need to become distinctive, which means finding in them what is local, uncommon, odd and contradictory.

Here are some ways to begin to work on your theatre of operation:

Here’s a question for you: Who’s the superior writer, Jane Austen or Ernest Hemingway?  If you answered Jane Austen then you probably write more emotionally, embracing exposition and characters’ interior lives.  If you answered Ernest Hemingway then you may believe that emotions on the page are cheap, gooey and artless.  For you, showing rather than telling is not just good advice but an iron law.

Restraint, showing, suggestion and subtext all are valid fiction techniques that lie on the cool end of the spectrum.  They’re most pronounced in the kind of literary fiction that’s called minimalist, but coolness is a quality that can prevail in any type of story.  Cool writing can excite admiration but it acts to distance readers from characters.  In its extreme form it reports a story at arm’s length.

Interiority, exposition, reactive passages and emotional exploration are techniques that fall on the warm end of the spectrum.  They’re most noticeable in romance novels and women’s fiction but can be found in plenty of literary novels as well.  Warm writing invites readers’ emotional involvement but leaves less room for readers’ imaginations.  In fact, when you supply everything readers are supposed to feel they may wind up feeling little at all.

Cool writers can benefit from warming up to their characters and opening their interior lives.  Warm writers can become stronger storytellers by more often showing through action, using restraint and suggesting feelings rather than slathering them on.

Which type are you, warm or cool?  Whatever your answer, here are some ways to strengthen your style: