Posts by Donald Maass

Know thyself. That advice was one of three dictums inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, deservedly so. It’s a prime directive. And what subject is more absorbing than ourselves?

Discovering who we are is a primary preoccupation of early adulthood. Life review, the exploration of what our lives have meant, is a critical task of old age. In between is a journey in which our self-understanding grows insight by insight, day by day.

In our search for self-understanding we look for guides. Everything from Oprah to self-help books take advantage of this need. We talk to therapists. We confide in friends. We argue with God. Vacations, meditation, yoga, retreats, the Dali Lama and Deepak Chopra give us opportunities to reflect. The best insights we get into ourselves may come from a chance remark by a friend, a reflection in a window, or the sudden realization of what matters most as we’re wheeled into surgery.

The British fascination with royals and the American obsession with celebrities is driven, I believe, by the need to have others against whom we can measure our conduct, our values and our progress.

The protagonists in fiction serve a similar purpose. We look to them as models. What we want from them is not just entertaining stories but examples of how we can feel, see the world, conduct ourselves, grow and change. We admire them, learn from them, celebrate them and return to them over and over for inspiration.

They’re not termed heroes and heroines for nothing. So, an important aspect of your protagonist is their own self-understanding, its progress and growth. It can be looked at in ways big and small. Here are some approaches to try in your current manuscript:

Ever had a change of fortune? Did you see it coming?

Probably not. Windfalls are like that. Losses too. We’re taken by surprise. Suddenly we’re hurtling the wrong direction down the highway. Assumptions flip over. The world spins upside down. Coins fall out of our pockets, or into them. We’re weightless. We’re falling, or rising, unsure when or where we’ll come to ground.

Turnabouts and reversals are dramatic in fiction, too. They’re also rare. In most manuscripts things unfold in a familiar pattern. Tension may be high but we’re pretty sure where we’re heading. The expected destination arrives.

Turning your protagonist’s world upside down is hard to do. It’s messy. It’s scary. But, oh, the impact on the reader is huge. Here are some prompts to help you reverse directions in your story.

Some people have the knack. They’re easy to meet. We like them right away. Trust is instant. Talk flows without effort. They’re open. We feel like we know them after just a short while. Our kind of folks.

Then there’s the other kind. They’re closed. Cool. Stand-offish. Reluctant to reveal themselves. We don’t quite trust them. Conversation is strained. After meeting them several times, we still may feel that we don’t know them much at all. Cold fish.

The same is true of protagonists. When they’re warmly portrayed we attach to them easily. When they’re cool and mysterious we don’t quite trust them. It’s not about being nice, gregarious or glad-handers. It’s about being open to the reader.

You can really see the difference in dark protagonists. All are tormented. We should turn away from their misery, yet some we warm up to quickly while others leave us cold.

This matters because readers either like our characters quickly or not at all. They know them or they don’t. They walk in their skin or observe them from a distance. They care or they shrug. Which set of responses would you prefer?

Portraying characters with warmth starts with warming up to them yourself. Most novelists will tell you it’s hard to write about characters you don’t understand. Building profiles and back stories is thus key to character construction. But knowing isn’t the same as liking. An ounce of openness will do more than a mountain of back story.

Here are some starting points:

Do you like surprise parties? Watch videos of them and the reactions are almost always the same. As the victim enters there’s a loud, “Surprise!” The victim looks shocked. Her hands fly to her face. Her head shakes. “No, no, no!”

Resistance and denial is a natural response. After all, a surprise means an unexpected and involuntary change of plans. It’s inconvenient. But soon enough the party is underway. Even the victim is having a great time. Everyone’s happy that the surprise was planned.

Surprises in your stories can be planned too, but the process of creating them is likely to leave you feeling victimized. It’s a change of plans. It’s inconvenient. To make the party fun is going to take a lot of work. You’ll have to organize the big moment even while keeping it a big secret. But hey, in the end the party will rock.

Often story surprises are not much of a jolt. Did you ever see a plot turn coming miles away? The fault may lie in poor concealment but more likely the error is that the “turn” is something we expect. Events that unfold like they’re supposed to cannot surprise.

Are you a careful outliner or a carefree improviser? Either way, to create an effective surprise you must first of all surprise yourself. You must shake up your idea of your story. That’s fearful. It’s messy. It means work. But do it.

Here are some dynamite sticks to use:

Chances are that sometime recently you saw fireworks. Pasteboard tubes soared into the dark sky, erupting in sizzling blooms of strontium, lithium, calcium, sodium, barium, copper, cesium, potassium, rubidium, iron, aluminum. Spectators gasped, surprised every time. Trails of golden goddess hair lingered on your retinas revealing to you, for a few sweet seconds, the face of the divine.

Chances are that sometime recently you also read a manuscript that launched few fireworks at all. Instead you encountered black words lined up in endless rows, an army of safety attacking on tiptoe and retreating without a shot. Colors seemed washed out. Characters felt bloodless. Did anyone in this novel, you wondered, have anything to eat?

Why is it that when fireworks slash open the night we cheer, yet as we tenderly arrange our words across a white screen we fear drawing blood? Maybe that’d be messy? Perhaps we don’t like calling attention to ourselves?

Whatever our worries, too many manuscripts tell their stories with timidity. What’s needed instead are explosive bursts of divinity. How can we light those fuses? Here’s a box of matches to get you going…

“I know exactly what you’re talking about.”

“Same thing happened to me.”

“Oh yeah, been there.”

So nice to know we’re not alone, isn’t it? Shared experience holds together family, friends, community, country, alliances. Don’t you wish folks in conflict around the globe would get together and see how much they have in common?

Fortunately for us, novels can produce that effect. When they do that wonderfully well something uncommon happens…they sell big, crossing many demographic lines and sometimes international borders.

High impact fiction simultaneously does two seemingly contradictory things: On the one hand it conjures highly detailed story worlds that are entirely unique to its authors. On the other hand, it portrays universal human experiences with which millions of readers can identify.

Think about paranormal fiction, for example. It’s fun to dwell in the world of demon hunters, fallen angels and witches who text. But what is it that draws us deeply into such stories and which we remember afterward? The violence? The mystical? The spells?

What we remember are the ordinary human dilemmas, foibles, frustrations and ironies that make paranormal characters real like the rest of us. The witch’s mastery of water magic might be cool, but what truly enchants us is that her teenaged son doesn’t call home before he blows his curfew.

Universal human experiences are a foundation of highly successful fantasy, mystery, historical, literary, women’s and romance fiction. Even literature’s most distinctive protagonists may seem like no others, but in fact what they go through resonates with us all. Think of Atticus Finch’s problems as a single dad, or Forrest Gump’s feeling of not fitting in.

To widen the appeal of your work try these tactics…

So many manuscripts achieve less than they could. Published novels too. As I read I often wonder what the author is afraid of. Do deadlines (real or self-inflicted) cut short the creative journey or are there paths in the woods that the storyteller fears to walk?

No question, the rush to deliver leaves many novels malnourished. It’s sad to see hurried third volumes in trilogies, say, shoved into production by overworked editors. But I don’t think that’s the whole story. After all, novels are built day by day in writing sessions that can be either comfortable or courageous.

I’m in favor of sending characters down fearful paths. Stories pushed beyond the limits of comfort stick in readers’ imaginations. That’s an effect most novelists want to have. But that means living with worry. What if you’ve gone too far? What if your editor—worse still readers—are turned off?

Consider this:

What makes a person deeply fascinating?  Knowledge?  Mystery?  Complexity?  Command?  Allure?  Everyone’s answer is likely different, but I suspect there’s one quality that universally makes others absorbing to us: passionate engagement in life.

Awake, aware, discerning, curious, compassionate, gripped, immersed…we could define this quality in any number of ways.  We can also understand what it is not: aloof, cold, hard, apathetic, cynical, unfeeling, detached.

It’s funny, considering how often protagonists in manuscripts are exactly that.  How are we supposed engage—and stay engaged for hundred of pages–with characters who are dead inside?

That is not to say that our heroes and heroines shouldn’t ever feel down, discouraged or even defeated.  That’s natural and can be dramatic.  The measure of engagement is not emotions, positive or negative, but rather caring.

Caring is everything from anger to ennui.  Ennui? Sure.  Being bored is an inverse measure of engagement.  Are you infuriated by the monotony of Phillip Glass’s compositions?  There you go.

So how can we ensure that our characters are as passionately engaged on the page as they are in our minds? 

If you like political theatre then the current situation in Washington probably strikes you as highly entertaining. Everyone’s angry. Everyone wants their way. Whatever your personal affinity, consider this central dilemma of our age: Everyone wants the best of everything but nobody wants to pay for it.

Writing high-impact 21st Century fiction also means facing a dilemma. On the one hand readers want to wallow in the kind of story they love; that is, they want stories that are comfortable and familiar

On the other hand, readers want to be stirred if not shaken. They want to see the world in new ways; that is (as I’ve discussed in recent posts) they long to be elevated out of self into the state of transcendence that scientists call “awe”.

That in turn demands that readers go to places unfamiliar and feel emotions that are at first troubling. See the contradiction? Readers want comfort but also seek discomfort. How is a novelist to meet those opposing needs?

Embracing the familiar is the approach of strict category writers, who cleave to the “rules” of their genre and produce stories that may feel satisfying to read but also can feel small, conventional and low-impact. We damn such fiction as formulaic.

Blazing trails in style, setting or theme may be satisfying for a novelist to write but can put readers off. Highly original stories can be condemned to low sales.

Now consider this: The highest impact novels of our times achieve both goals simultaneously. They both sooth readers with what is satisfying while also pushing them into new takes on a world that they thought they knew. When written with conviction, depth and panache, such fiction sells phenomenally well.

There’s a lot to say about pulling off this trick, but let’s start with two simple things that every novelist can do.

Therese here. Today, we kick off our month of reader-Q-and-contributor-A, beginning with two reader questions answered by agent Donald Maass. Enjoy!

Lin Wang asked: When starting a new novel, how do you turn your ideas (characters, images, phrases) into a coherent story? Any advice for writers who want to find a balance between outlining and writing without any plans?

Elizabeth asked: How do you pull a plot out of characters?

Where does plot come from? For many writers it feels like a rabbit plucked from a hat. If you’re lucky it’s there. It it’s there, it’s magic.

Over my last several posts I’ve posed questions to help build characters’ inner journeys. Journeys require steps and each step it strongest when it has its own delineated meaning.

A plot is built of pieces too; pieces which for convenience we might call scenes. But how do you pluck them from the hat and make sure that they’re alive when you do?

If your novel is the plot-driven sort, say a mystery or thriller, the trick may feel easy. Each step your protagonist must take to discover a killer or save the world is the basis for a scene. Build into it a step in the inner journey and you have a scene that will feel powerful.

But what if you don’t have that easy framework? What if your story is at first nothing but ideas, intentions, a vague sense that stuff is going to happen and your protagonist will change? What if the hat is truly empty?