Posts by Kathleen McCleary
I’ve spent the past two months—that’s not an exaggeration—working on three pages of my novel. I’m in the revision stage, and the pages I’m wrestling with are the first three pages of the book and even though I know these characters inside out and know the plot and know all the elements that go into making the opening compelling and smart, I still haven’t nailed it.
We all know that opening lines and paragraphs and pages are critical, the thing that hooks your readers into wanting to know what happens next and into caring about what happens next. The opening is what sells your book to readers, to agents, and to editors and publishers—not too much pressure, right? The frustrating thing is that I’ve done this before. Heck, I sold my third novel on the basis of the first three pages alone before I’d even written the book. Why is it so hard now?
It’s hard because nailing the opening is a really hard thing to do. (If it was easy, every manuscript would get read and every book would get sold, right?) Somehow you have to introduce a character or characters, give the reader a reason to care about that character, start in the middle of some kind of action, make the action something that matters, make sure there are stakes, consequences if things go wrong. Oh, and you have to raise the reader’s curiosity about what comes next. In roughly 750 words or so. Overwhelmed yet? Yeah, me too.
There’s no magic formula, and if I knew it I wouldn’t be writing this column. But I have written and published three books, and I can offer what I’ve learned from my own experience. Here are three things I know:
You have to give the reader a reason to care
I just finished reading Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods. It’s a great book, and it has a great opening:
“The bed is empty.
“Louise, the counselor—twenty-three, short-limbed, rasp-voiced, jolly—stands barefoot on the warm rough planks of the cabin called Balsam and processes the absence of a body in the lower bunk by the door.”
The opening sentence grabs attention because it raises a lot of questions—whose bed? Why is it surprising that it’s empty? But the next paragraph pulls you in because that’s when you realize that person observing the empty bed is a camp counselor who is probably in very deep doo-doo because one of her campers is missing, and already we’re starting to care about this counselor because she’s young and jolly and likeable. She’s human.
Contradict expectations
I had a lot of success in shopping my first novel around, to agents and then with publishers. It’s far from perfect, but it had a good opening paragraph:
“The house was yellow, a clapboard Cape Cod with a white picket fence and a big bay window on one side and Ellen loved it with all her heart. She loved the way the wind from the gorge stirred the trees to constant motion outside the windows, the cozy arc of the dormers in the girls’ bedroom, the cherry red mantel with the cleanly carved dentil molding over the fireplace in the living room. She had conceived children in that house, suffered a miscarriage in […]
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Six weeks ago I finished the novel I’ve been writing for the last two years. I typed the words “THE END,” sat back in my chair, and promptly burst into tears—something I’ve never done before after writing. But completing this book felt like a significant end to me, the end of a work I’d loved writing, the end of a period of my life that had included some major upheaval (I came up with the idea during the pandemic, and started writing a year after my mother died). I felt a mix of relief, joy, pride, amazement (I really wasn’t sure I’d ever write another novel), and a huge sense of loss that it was over.
Writing a novel is to immerse yourself in a world that’s with you most of your waking hours, whether you’re actively working on it or whether you’re showering, gazing out the window, dancing, or sorting your files. The characters you create can feel more real than the people in the next room, and the details of their interior and exterior lives can be all-consuming. So when that is suddenly over, when those people and places are gone, what happens next?
I’m asking myself that question a lot. I miss writing this book. I miss the characters, I miss their struggles and triumphs, I miss their world. And I miss having them to think about at three in the morning when I can’t sleep, or when I’m out hiking and it’s cold, or even when I’m in the kitchen cooking. Once when I was writing my second novel, set in the San Juan Islands off Washington state, I was so deep into my writing that when I finally finished for the day and walked into the kitchen I actually said to my husband, “Wow. It’s really nice to be back home.”
“Where else have you been?” he said.
I’m not talking about all the revision work that still lies ahead for me. This isn’t my first novel; I know I have significant work to do. And I’ll do it, just not yet. I know that for many the answer to this missing is to dive into revising or, even more, into the next work, to start creating new worlds and people. But change has always been hard for me. It’s hard to let go. So here’s what I’ve figured out about how to handle what comes after The End:
Wait. It’s a good time of year to for fallowness (it’s a word; I looked it up!) As tempting as it’s been for me to go back and edit and revise, or to start writing a sequel or something new, it’s been important for me to spend some time in my head and my life without the constant distraction provided by writing a novel. It’s allowed me to make plans and set priorities and think differently. Writing is how I figure out my self and my life; I’m a different person than I was when I started writing this book. It takes some time to absorb that.
Celebrate. I wrote a book! An entire novel, all 125,000 words of it! (I know, it’s too long). It’s a difficult, mind-bending, incredibly challenging thing to do, and I did […]
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Every time I’ve worked on a novel, I’ve had a vision in my head of the book I wanted to write, the book that could be— if I could bring it to life. And with every book I’ve written up to this point (three published novels, two I started and put aside), I’ve fallen short. There’s always been a ghost book out there, the one that could have been.
Now I’m about to finish a new novel, my fourth. And this time, for the first time, I’ve actually written the book I wanted to write. It’s the best feeling, and to be honest it’s not something I ever thought I’d achieve. The book is still a newborn—I’ve shared it with exactly one other person, my critique partner, and I’m not sure when I’ll be ready to send it to beta readers or my agent. I want to sit with this feeling for a little while, enjoy it before I face the inevitable opinions and feedback and criticisms others will have. And I want to spend some time understanding why this book feels so different. Here’s what I’ve come up with:
I gave up being a pantser. I’ve always been a believer in the old “no surprises for the writer = no surprises for the reader” school of writing. All my earlier books were character-driven, and writing them involved lots of running down one road, smacking into a dead end, turning around, running down a different road, and ending up at a very different destination. It’s a crazy way to travel. This time, I re-read Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, and I followed that 15-beat structure closely. It gave me guardrails, white lines at the side of the road. It kept me honest. And it enabled me to write a story that is both character-driven and plot-driven. It also gave me a much greater sense of control over my work, a sense that the vision I had was attainable, because I had a way to get there.
I wrote the book for myself. I started this project during the pandemic, after five full years of not writing any fiction at all, and almost ten years after I’d finished writing my third novel, which was published in 2013. In 2020 and 2021 I was struggling with a lot of things, as many of us were. When the pandemic began, I became the full-time caregiver for my elderly mother, who died at the end of 2020. I lost a close friendship. Even my beloved cat died. I started writing fiction to write my way out of despair, to create a character who had to figure out what to do when her world fell apart. I kept writing, always with a clear understanding that this wasn’t a project I wanted to discuss with my agent or friends, that maybe it was a book I didn’t even want to publish. I didn’t think about the potential market for the book, or what readers might think if a character said this or did that. I kept writing the book I needed to write to work out my own dilemmas.
Publishing is a crazy world. I still don’t know if this book will be […]
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I am breathtakingly, tantalizingly close—so close I can feel it, taste it (it is sweet), and see it. And what I see are the words “THE END” typed across the bottom of my 300+ page manuscript. I can’t wait.
What a rush, right? It’s like those moments we’ve witnessed in the Olympics, when Simone Biles nails the triple-double and sticks the landing, or sprinter Julien Alfred crosses the finish line to clinch the first-ever Olympic medal (gold) for her tiny country (St. Lucia). Years of hard, often discouraging work culminating in something you weren’t sure would ever happen. Finishing a novel can feel like that. It’s a huge accomplishment.
Which is why approaching the end of a book can be a treacherous path, because the temptation to hurry up and get there already is powerful. It’s been twelve years since I last completed a novel and this current book has come easily compared to all the others. I am so ready to be done, and I can see the path there. But I catch myself sometimes taking shortcuts, rushing to get to a certain climactic scene, writing scenes that aren’t as essential or tight as they need to be because hey, it’s forward momentum. And if I write more scenes then I’ll be done faster, right?
This is exactly when I need to slow down, take a deep breath, and look around. In my eagerness to be done, I’ve been going too fast. My characters are different people than they were at the beginning of the book (which is pretty much the point) and I need to fully understand who they are now that they’ve grown and changed (or not, in some cases) and make sure that what I’m writing is true to that. Then there’s the overall pacing of the book. I’ve built this story slowly and carefully, and I don’t want readers to feel the end doesn’t live up to the promises I’ve been making over those first 300 pages. How I’m approaching the end:
Write, don’t revise. I know my book has timeline issues, and I know there are things I need to research or double-check about the very real city that provides the setting for the book. I know there’s some repetition. But spending time searching in the document for certain dates or who said what when is not actually getting the book closer to the finish line. Sure, the timeline has to be seamless, so do the details about the setting, and redundancies need to be cut. But those are things to rework during the revision stage, not during this final push.
Take time off. I do my best writing when I give myself time for “fermenting,” meaning time for thoughts, ideas, feelings, and intuitions I have about the characters and plot to simmer. If I try to write hours a day without taking a day away from it, then I’m not giving things that need to ripen the time they need to do that. For instance, I wrote a crucial scene in which my character has a kind of epiphany about what she needs to do to fix the mess she’s made of her life. But I was so keen on getting that scene written […]
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I’ve traveled quite a bit this spring, to Denmark, Iceland, England, and Scotland. And it’s funny, but when people ask about the highlights of my trips, the first things that come to mind are not the planned adventures—the tour of the castle, the hike along the cliffs, the dinner at the restaurant booked in advance. No, it’s the lunch of cheese and prosciutto and warm, fresh bread and pickled vegetables at the little pub we wandered into after an eight-mile hike. It’s sitting down in a church in Copenhagen to get out of the rain and having a profound and surprising conversation about belief with the tour guide I’d met an hour before. It’s turning onto a small street because I was lost and stumbling upon the Museum of Happiness (I am not making this up).
All of these highlights are moments of serendipity, when things align in ways you’d never anticipated. Years ago I interviewed an academic researcher into serendipity (I’m not making that up either), Dr. Stephann Makri, who defined serendipity as when unexpected circumstances and a moment of insight lead to a valuable outcome. Think of Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming, who noticed all the dead bacteria around the mold in one of his culture dishes and figured out penicillin.
As I come down the home stretch of my fourth novel, I’m more and more aware of the role serendipity plays in the writing process and in the lives of my characters. For me, serendipity takes the form of reading a book review in the paper about a novel I’d loved as a child, which inspired me to re-read that novel and then realize exactly what voice I needed for one of my protagonists. It also looks like walking into an art gallery in tiny, rural Kircudbright (pop. 3,350), Scotland, to find an exhibit by an artist whose relationship to the natural world is a model for another of my characters. And in the actual writing process, serendipity occurs for me when I’ve been writing a scene or dialogue and one of my characters says or does something out of the blue that I hadn’t planned or anticipated but that is exactly the right thing for the story—surprising, fulfilling, true.
I’m aware that my characters need moments of serendipity, too. They need the chance encounter with a stranger, the overheard phrase, the wrong turn, that lead to a new relationship, insight, burst of creativity that changes their lives. Yet by definition, serendipity is not something you can plan for or make happen. But you can optimize the opportunities for serendipity in your writing and your life:
Pay attention
Curiosity, alertness, flexibility, courage and diligence—they’re traits that prepare you to recognize opportunities and act on them. So are keen powers of observation. It goes without saying that writers have to be keen observers, but it’s easy to get distracted and forget to really, truly study what we see. Perhaps your characters need to slow down and pay attention once in a while. What if in the midst of doing, struggling, solving, fixing, destroying, creating, fretting, etc. your character just stopped? And spent a few moments immersed in the present moment. How would that change their trajectory? What unexpected things—and […]
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So here’s my love story for this Valentine’s Day.
I’m 75,000 words in to my fourth novel, a book I’ve been working on for more than a year. I love this book. I love writing it, I love the characters, I love the way the story is unfolding. Believe me, I’ve had much rockier writing experiences with all my previous books. And I’ve shared this book with exactly one other person—my critique partner, Allison.
With every other book I’ve written, I shared drafts or chapters with friends, my daughters, my spouse, and more. But this book is different. I feel protective about it, reluctant to share too much too soon. I was trying to explain how I feel to a friend and I said “It’s like I’m in a new relationship, and my book is my beloved, and we’re in this wonderful love bubble and I’m not ready to let anyone in who might point out all the flaws in my beloved and burst my bubble.” And once a month my love affair becomes a throuple when Allison joins in. (A recent article in Women’s Health magazine defines a “throuple” as “an emotional, intimate relationship between three people. They go on dates together, have deep conversations together, and confide in one another,” which pretty much sums up my monthly meetings with Allison over tea and wine at a D.C. restaurant.)
I was joking, but not joking. I am in a very serious relationship with this book of mine, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the values that characterize a great relationship are also the values that are the most important in writing a novel. Consider:
Honesty: It’s the bedrock of any good relationship, and it’s also the bedrock of any good work of fiction. If your work lacks emotional truth, if you’re not brutally honest with yourself and with your characters, it’s not going to work. I recently wrote a scene in which the characters—a family of parents and two adult kids—has a bitter fight over one parent’s betrayal. When Allison read it, she said, “Why is no one swearing? Even if you avoid confrontation in your real life, don’t avoid it here.” She’s right. I have to be willing to write scenes in which people say and do things I hope they never would, and I hope I never would, but that happen in real life. I also have to be willing to go places in my fiction that I would not go in real life.
Vulnerability: This is closely related to honesty, but is not exactly the same. This is the willingness to reveal your wounds, your desires, your regrets, your hopes in all their beauty and ugliness. In order for your characters’ relationships with each other to be believable, they have to show some vulnerability, they have to let each other in on some of the secrets at the core of their being.
Commitment: Oh, my God. No one finishes a novel unless they’re committed, right? But, as my mother always said, clichés are clichés because they’re true and every good relationship involves a lot of commitment and hard work. It involves working on the relationship when it falls into periods of boredom […]
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Can you write your way whole? This thought never occurred to me in the process of writing my first three novels, or the two I started and discarded after that. But with my latest book (my fourth or my sixth, depending on how you look at it), I think about this all the time. In retrospect, writing my way whole has been part of everything I’ve ever written; I just didn’t understand it until now. And while this all sounds very self-referential, I’ve also realized that in writing ourselves whole we also offer the reader the opportunity to experience a sense of wholeness of their own—through the validation of knowing they’re not alone.
You may have seen the anecdote on social media about a high school teacher who asked his students in 2006 to write to a famous author and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was one of the few to respond, and his answer was this: “Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow” [original emphasis is Vonnegut’s]. “Making your soul grow” is simply another way of saying, “becoming whole.”
What does it mean, to write your way whole? I’m sure we all have answers as different as we are—that’s the point. My childhood miseries and joys, my adult heartbreaks and successes, my failures and lies and loves and truths are mine alone. Yours belong to you. For me, it means writing from the POV of a 13-year-old girl who says and does things I couldn’t at thirteen: Speak up for herself, say what she wants, stand up to authority. It means writing from the POV of a 56-year-old mother who is often more patient and gentle than I could be, and who also isn’t afraid to speak her truth. I’m writing both these POVs in present tense, which I’ve never done before, and which give my writing a sense of immediacy and urgency I love. This novel has come more easily to me than any of my others, and been the happiest writing experience I’ve ever had. And so far I’ve shown it to exactly ONE person, my writing partner. This is the book I’m writing for me, and I see myself growing and changing as I write, as my characters grow and change. They are nothing like me and they are completely autobiographical. It’s a wonder.
Many others have written about using writing as a way to process, to heal, to grow more fully into yourself. Charles Dickens started writing an autobiography when he was 33 and already famous for writing Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol. He found writing truthfully about the dark years of his childhood to be so painful that he abandoned his autobiography and instead, at 37, started writing David Copperfield. In it he explored all the memories that were too much to process in reality: working in a factory as a child while his father was in prison, attending school with a sadistic headmaster, his relationship with his wife. It was his favorite of all his books.
Nora Ephron wrote her first novel, Heartburn, after discovering that her husband […]
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I’m pretty comfortable with being naked. If I’m backpacking with friends and someone suggests a skinny dip after a long day of hiking, my clothes are off before she’s finished her sentence. I have plunged naked into Lake Superior, remote rivers in the Adirondack wilderness, and glacial lakes in Washington state (not to mention some neighbors’ pools).
Sharing my fiction, however, is a whole different kind of being naked, one that’s much more difficult. I’m currently more than 100 pages in to a new novel, my first in almost a decade. Thus far I have shown my WIP to exactly one person, the writing partner I meet with every month. With my previous novels (three published, two started and abandoned), I’d shown my writing to at least six or seven others by this point, including my agent and editor. But not this time.
I’m reluctant to share for several reasons. One, I’m in a honeymoon phase with this new novel. I love my story, I love my characters, I love the way it’s unfolding, and it’s a joy to work on. I’m not sure I’m ready to have someone point out the inevitable flaws and shortcomings of my beloved. Second, I’m writing at an unusually (for me) productive pace. I don’t want negative feedback to discourage me to the point that I slow down. Finally, I am naked in this book. The characters are not me, the story is not anything I have done or that has happened to me, but the insecurities, fears, lapses in judgment, failures, longings, griefs—I know those all too well. Sharing this book is showing pieces of my bare soul to the world.
Of course we all do that when we write. If a book is to have any emotional truth, then we have to write the hard, scary, unpleasant truths. It’s not easy for me to peel back the layers of myself and show those truths to others. Yet, getting feedback is a key part of the process of writing and refining and perfecting our work. How do you know what to show, when, and to who?
One of my friends doesn’t show anything to anyone until she’s finished a solid first draft. Another shares in thirds—give the first third to some select readers, then adjust, give the second third, etc. Some writers I know share with friends; others share with readers they’ve found through writing groups or on social media. So, almost 20 years and (almost) four books in to this whole process, here’s what I know:
Think about what you want. What’s your goal in sharing your work at whatever stage you choose to share it? Do you want encouragement that your WIP is good, some incentive to keep going? Or do you want to know what is or isn’t working, what plot holes you need to fix, what shadowy characters need to be more fully drawn? There’s value in most kinds of feedback. It’s important to be clear with yourself what you’re hoping to get from it.
Choose your readers carefully. If your best friend is brilliant and a natural editor and insightful but someone who hates Sci Fi and you write Sci Fi, she’s probably not your best early reader. Ditto your […]
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You’ve been there, I’m sure, as have I: You hit a stretch when life seems to hand you one setback after another, a fusillade of adversity that makes it impossible to even think about things like, say, writing a novel. Or maybe it’s not even adversity, but simply the small demands of the everyday—a child’s illness (or your own), a work project, houseguests, holidays, financial worries—that keep you from writing. I have lived these scenarios over and over. But I discovered this summer that these are not the roadblocks to my writing I believed them to be. Instead, they are an essential part of the creative process, what poet Maggie Smith calls “Keep Moving.”
For me, “Keep Moving” looks like this: Reading— anything. Writing: poetry, essays, letters, social media posts, emails. Watching movies and TV shows. Talking to friends about their lives and my life. Absorbing everything. Letting go of self-criticism about not writing.
Example: Every year for the past 55 (!!) years, I’ve spent 2-5 weeks in the Adirondack mountains in upstate New York, renting a cabin from the same family on the same small lake. I planned to make my Adirondack time this year a 35-day writing retreat, to immerse myself in my current novel, my characters and their stories, and write 20,000 words or more.
That didn’t happen. A stream of houseguests and weather catastrophes and my own lack of motivation stopped me. The big surprise: The minute I got home the creative floodgates opened and I’ve had several weeks of amazing productivity on this book. I’m in that phase where the characters speak to me in my sleep, where I sit down to write for an hour and find that three hours have passed, where I re-read what I wrote the day before and realize, It’s good.
When I stopped to think about how I got here, I realized that over the last two months I’d read half a dozen novels, seen some brilliant TV shows and movies, chatted with friends and family about friends and family and all the drama contained there-in, written at least eight poems, and had a three-hour cup of coffee with a fellow writer. I also witnessed an amazing sunrise from the top of a 5,000-foot peak, bushwhacked through boreal forest to spot a woodpecker’s nest, startled four fox kits playing by the side of a road, hiked, swam, canoed, worked, argued with my kids, cried, laughed, sweated, and walked the dog. And all those things, my friends, are the drops of creativity that built up and built up until the dam burst and I am writing and writing.
So what does Keep Moving look like?
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Here are a few bits of writing wisdom I collected this year: “The condition of being a writer is the condition of being stuck” (James Wood, author and staff writer for The New Yorker). “Writing is decidedly an act of communication. We write the stories that are urgent and pressing to us. I think of writing as carrying water up the beach to a bucket, and all the time it’s slipping through my fingers.” (Claire Messud, author). “Poets are the Olympians of writing. I start every day opening the Norton Anthology of Poetry.” (Geraldine Brooks, author).
I accumulated all this wisdom this past April, when I attended my first-ever writers’ retreat (as a participant; I’ve attended a bunch as an author/panelist/speaker/workshop leader.) And my feeling about my first writers’ retreat is: Oh my God. Why did I wait so long? My week in Reykjavik at the Iceland Writers’ Retreat—surrounded by authors, writers, readers, book lovers, wordsmiths, and adventurers—did more for my writing than months of sitting alone at my desk had done. I came home with a new way to outline, several scenes for my WIP, a deeper understanding of my characters, some amazing new friendships, and renewed joy in and appreciation for the incredible undertaking involved in writing a book. Fiction, non-fiction, published, never-published, self-published, just thinking about starting a novel—we are all heroes, each and every one of us.
I admit: I signed up for the retreat mostly because I wanted a lark, and Iceland in April seemed like a good idea. I wondered if it made sense for me, since I’ve had several novels published. I don’t mean that in an I’m-all-that way. I mean that I have been writing fiction for almost 20 years and I’m not new to this. But I haven’t finished or published a novel in 10 years, which makes me, in many ways, a novice. So I went. As I said, it turned out to be invaluable for me. Here’s why I think writing retreats are a good idea for any writer at any stage of their career:
The most obvious: A good writing retreat pushes you outside of your ordinary routine and your comfort zone. I tried writing exercises that made me roll my eyes, that scared me, that delighted me. All of it made me think really hard about how I write and what I want to say.
For example, the author Helen Oyeyemi had us fill out a Proust questionnaire (a parlor game popularized by writer Marcel Proust) as one of our characters. I am not someone who writes lengthy character studies, or knows every detail of my characters’ backstories when I write. It’s not the kind of exercise I would ever ordinarily do when working on my novel. But answering questions like “What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?” “On what occasions do you lie?” and “For what in your life do you feel most grateful?” as one of my main characters gave me some rich information about the character that I hadn’t known previously. I even turned one of the answers into a scene in my current WIP.
You have a chance to practice and improve key writing skills. “If you get through the hard stuff […]
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If you Google “How long does it take to write a novel?” you get more than 700,000 results, with answers ranging from three months to a vague “years.” I can tell you it took me four years to write my first novel, while also raising two young kids and working part-time. My second novel took another four years. I wrote shitty draft after shitty draft while my agent told me that every author has at least one novel that ends up in a drawer. Three years in, I rewrote it yet again and my agent said, “I thought I was going to tell you it’s time to let this one go, but I think we can sell it.” We did, to an editor who said, “I think the book needs a second point of view.” She was right, but it meant writing another entire story. That took another year. After all that, I wrote my third novel in eighteen months.
Based on all this experience, what do I know now about how long it takes to write a novel? Honestly, almost nothing. It’s like having kids: You have one child and think you have parenting figured out and you have another child and realize you know nothing about parenting. I’m working on a new novel after a six-plus year hiatus from fiction, and while I’m 20,000 solid words in to it, every day I think, How long is this going to take?
According to this nifty infographic from Writer’s Digest, it took Charles Dickens six weeks to write A Christmas Carol, while Stephanie Meyer spent three months penning Twilight and Emily Bronte took nine months to produce Wuthering Heights. Audrey Niffenegger wrote The Time Traveler’s Wife in four years (a length of time close to my heart), and the 18 months I took to write my third novel matches the amount of time it took Rudyard Kipling to write The Jungle Book. All of which tells us pretty much nothing about how long it will take you or me to write our own novels.
Here’s what I do know about how long it takes to write a novel:
Writing every day does make a difference. As my mother always said, Clichés are clichés because they’re true. While writing my third novel, I participated in NaNoWriMo—not because I expected to finish my novel in a month, but because I wanted the structure and accountability and challenge. Writing 1,000-1,5000 words a day for one month seemed like a doable thing to me, and it was. I wrote 30,000 words in 30 days, and much of it was good. Every time I commit to a daily word count or number of writing hours it helps.
You can’t build a house without a foundation. I am a pantser and not a plotter. With all of my novels I knew the climactic scene, I just wasn’t sure how to get there. But with each book I have spent more time thinking through the steps along the way, and it helps. Right now I’m working with Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat beat sheet, and knowing the “beats” of my story has made the writing process go much more quickly.
It doesn’t matter what anyone […]
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Like most of us, I have my quirks. I can’t sleep at night unless all the closet doors are closed in my bedroom. I hate elevators and will walk up many flights of stairs to avoid them. Condiments—especially mayonnaise—send shivers down my spine. If there is Motown music playing anywhere, I am dancing. Even in the grocery store.
We all have our peculiarities; the habits and superstitions and likes and dislikes and fears and fondnesses that make us unique. So too, with the characters we create. Quirks are one of the most essential aspects of creating characters who feel real and relatable. From Don Quixote to Dickens’ Mr. Micawber to Phoebe Buffay of “Friends” fame, fictional characters are memorable because of their unique foibles. In some cases, a character’s quirks are a key aspect of plot. In fleshing out your fully realized characters, consider:
Are your character’s quirks an essential part of your story? In the South Korean TV series “Extraordinary Attorney Woo,” the title character, Woo Young-woo, is an autistic rookie lawyer hired by a major law firm in Seoul. She’s socially awkward and blunt, definitely odd, obsessed with whales, and avoids eye contact. Yet she’s smart and emotionally intelligent and has a photographic memory. The things that make her different also make her very good at what she does. Her quirks are not a side aspect to her character, they actually drive the plot.
Why does your character have this idiosyncrasy? Did something happen in your character’s backstory that led to the development of their particular fear or habit? I have a friend whose brother had a pet bird when she was little, and one time the bird flew out of its cage and onto her head, where it got tangled in her hair. She’s still terrified of birds 50 years later. If it’s a quirk that holds them back, will something happen that enables them to either overcome or accept that peculiarity? How does this quirk affect the way other people view them and how they perceive themselves? What does this quirk reveal? One of my daughters twirls her hair with one finger when she’s anxious. If I was writing her into a novel, I’d show her twirling her hair around and around her finger every time she’s in a situation that unsettles her.
Does your character use their eccentricities purposefully? Sometimes, people are aware of their own quirks, and use them to charm or unnerve others. In the BBC mystery series “Vera,” Detective Chief Inspector Vera Stanhope ambles around in an ill-fitting overcoat, calling everyone, from her co-workers to suspected murderers, “love” or “pet.” Using terms of endearment to address someone you suspect may have killed someone else by whacking them in the head with a poker seems odd at first. Yet when it comes out of Vera’s mouth, that term of endearment can feel like a knife held to the throat. “You weren’t really at home that night, were you, pet?” she might say.
Don’t overdo it. It’s a fine line between a quirk that helps define a character and a quirk that makes a character annoying (just as in real life).
How important are quirks to your characters? How do you decide what quirks to give […]
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My father served in the Army Air Corps, the precursor to the Air Force. Often on training runs he would tell his buddies, “If something goes wrong, you’re going have to push me out of this plane.” Even with a parachute and several years of training, he was convinced he would never willingly jump. Then one day he was in a plane that developed serious engine trouble. Who was the first person standing at the cargo door, ready to leap? My father. “Never say ‘never,’” became one of his favorite mottoes.
We all arrive at moments when something we’ve dreaded comes to pass. I’ve survived many things I once imagined would break me, from getting fired to miscarriages to the deaths of my parents. Over a lifetime we all encounter some version of one (or several) of our worst fears; how we handle those encounters both reveals and shapes the very essence of who we are.
One of the keys to writing fiction is to put our characters in terrible situations, circumstances in which they must confront their greatest fears, their deepest insecurities, the rawest versions of themselves. And those moments, of course, are the turning points that shape them from that point on. What do they do? Who do they become?
Here, some things to consider:
Expect the unexpected. When confronting literal or metaphorical monsters, you have to be ready to let your characters surprise themselves and you—often the scenarios that play out in real life are nothing like the ones we may have anticipated in our heads. When thrust into terrifying situations, people are often braver, more scared, stronger, weaker, more rigid, or more resilient than expected, and sometimes they’re several contradictory things at once. The action or reaction that no one saw coming (including the character herself) is often what has the most profound effect. When a fearless hero caves suddenly under adversity, for example, that unexpected moment of weakness may turn our frightened hero into someone more compassionate, more tolerant, kinder, more understanding. Or it may lead to a sense of failure and self-loathing that threatens to undo our hero, to destroy them. Either way, it’s compelling. Or our hero may act nobly when faced with one threat (Michael Corleone in The Godfather saving his father from would-be assassins in the hospital) and then turn into the worst version of themselves when another fear is realized (the murder of his young wife turns Michael Corleone into a calculating killer).
Death isn’t always the worst thing that can happen. Death, of course, is the universal fear, whether it’s our own or the death of someone we love. But there are other, deeper fears. Imagine inadvertently causing the death of someone else or, worse yet, someone you love. Terrifying, right? Aging, dementia, physical disability, illness—they walk side by side with the fear of death but can make living seem even scarier. Then there’s the fear of insignificance. We all want to feel that our lives matter, that someone or something has been affected for the good because we existed. How might your character react if faced with their own mortality before they’ve been able to do whatever it is they feel they need to do to create a meaningful […]
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Since early May, I have traveled alone to Europe, eaten octopus, walked 130 miles of the Camino de Santiago, gone backpacking in a wilderness area where bears live, ridden an elevator to the top of Seattle’s space needle, taken a two-hour sailboat ride with complete strangers, sat alone at a bar to have a drink, and, believe it or not, gotten my first tattoo.
I tell you all this not because I think I’m all that, but because all these things are, without exception, out of character for me. Elevators terrify me, as do bears, foods with strange textures, traveling in foreign countries alone, and pushing my body to its physical limits. I’m not too crazy about heights either, or about doing things like going to bars or riding on sailboats without a friend or partner or relative along for company and moral support. And yes, I worry inordinately about death and disease so getting a tattoo has always seemed crazy (what if the needles aren’t properly sterilized and I get hepatitis C or MRSA?) You get the idea.
One of the most basic elements of story, obviously, is to put characters into situations that are foreign to them and challenge them in new, previously unimaginable ways. But what about the small moments, the times when your character is faced with eating something strange, entering a new situation for the first time, or doing something that makes them really nervous? Why do they choose to do that? What motivates them? How do they react? How does the experience affect them? How does it affect other choices they make in their lives?
Nothing about my summer of adventure was remotely comparable to Frodo’s journey into Mordor. Yet I did emerge from this summer feeling braver, bolder, more self-assured, and more open to new experiences. I experienced a lot of joy and serendipity, as well as moments of doubt and insecurity and fear. Elevators still terrify me and I probably won’t get another tattoo, but I’m not the same person I was in April. All of this has made me think about how I can challenge the characters in my WIP to act differently, to say “yes” when they’d usually say “no,” or to surprise others (and themselves!) by choosing to say or do something unexpected. Consider:
What small actions might be out of character for your character? Why would they choose to try something different? Going to a bar alone is hardly the stuff of action movies or adventure stories. But it’s not something I’ve done before, so wandering into a bar in downtown Burlington, Vermont, on my own to try a maple bourbon cocktail was challenging for me, an introvert who doesn’t spend a lot of time in bars. I was very aware that most men I know wouldn’t think twice about going to a bar alone, which made me perversely determined to do it. I also really wanted a taste of that maple bourbon cocktail. And I’m old enough to care less about what other people think. What small act of defiance or difference could your character do? And what would motivate them to do that?
What fears hold your character back? Where do those fears come from? What would […]
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