Posts by Kathryn Craft
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
When you’re in front of an audience, mistakes will happen—you can count on it. From the audience, I’ve seen presenters reassemble pages knocked to the floor after a fumbled page turn. Seen authors squint and scrunch their faces as they try to focus while reading pages from a cell phone. Seen others scroll, scroll through their iPads after one touch from a shaky hand sent it haywire, mumbling all the while, oh no I flipped too far, hold on…
Each of these anxiety-producing incidents could have been avoided by printing out needed pages in a font large enough to see at a glance and then placing them within easy-to-turn page protectors in a small binder. Add a little self-deprecating laughter and you can turn a strained silence into an enjoyable event that will inspire your audience say, upon leaving, “That was great. She was just so…real!”
Unless, that is, fear of public speaking is always along for the ride, waiting for its chance to ambush command central and ruin your moment to shine. I know—it’s happened to me.
I was 19 years old and warming up beneath dim work lights, just before the curtain rose on my first college dance concert. All was well until I heard the stage manager say he was opening the house—and suddenly, my body rebelled.
My heart flopped like a fish out of water. My breath…my breath…too shallow. My mouth too dry. I sought a drink of water and then threw it up. Why had fear yanked me off balance now, when I’d finally graduated from studio to theater?
With the audience filtering in, I had to get a grip—fast. I only had twenty minutes! I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and removed the exclamation point: I had twenty minutes, and I needed to make good use of them. I did not want the grim set of my lips or a glassy stare to suggest that I had forsaken the privilege of engaging with this audience. Nervous performers inspire only one question: If you’re so miserable, why are you putting yourself—and us—through this?
So, while standing backstage, fifteen minutes to go, testing my balance and falling, I asked myself: As an audience member, what would I want for the price of my ticket?
The answer came quickly. Even more than athletic prowess, I wanted a peek inside the heart and mind of someone who has a deep reverence for what they do. I wanted their passion to challenge me, inspire me, and make me feel seen.
For me to express my love for dance, I needed to reframe my studio experience, where energy emanating from my muscles hit the mirror and reflected back judgment. I needed to trust that my muscles knew their craft. I needed to purify the negative energy churning in my gut so it could emanate from my heart and move straight toward the audience members I hoped would be positively affected by it.
Five minutes before curtain, I realized that my focus shouldn’t be on me at all. It should be on what I could do […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
After a string of heavy reads last fall, I wanted to get swept away in some pure entertainment. I figured the light pink, flowery cover of the 2016 mega-seller by a romance author I hadn’t yet read would fit the bill.
Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us did not deliver on the promise of its cover. While the opening did offer a familiar boy-meets-girl moment, I was denied the escapism I sought when the plot evolved toward domestic abuse. Despite the genre switch-up, Hoover did deliver a story that “powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of the survivors,” as its starred Kirkus review claimed.
This critical three-star Amazon review, though, from reader KieraAnne, speaks to the point of this post:
It didn’t really happen like you’d think. There weren’t TONS of red flags she was ignoring (although there were several), so the first time, it really caught you off guard. It was so much later in the story than I expected that, as a reader, I had grown complacent, so it was shocking when it happened, just as it was to Lily. It was easy to see why someone would explain it away and move forward with the relationship.
KieraAnne knew what to expect then forgot to be looking for it; I expected one thing and got another. These results interest me since misguided assumptions about the nature of a novel can often result in a negative review—and yet to date, this novel has an average of 4.7 stars on Amazon with more than 390,000 ratings. How did Hoover pull this off?
She began on page one.
A reader will seek immediate genre clues for reassurance that this will be the kind of book they like. These clues are often subtle, but their cumulative effect establishes a psychological through line that will help the reader keep wheels on the road when negotiating the unexpected turn ahead.
Let’s look at ten of the ways Hoover forewarned her readers, right in the first chapter, of the darkness to come.
1
She worked the word “suicide” into her opening sentence.
As I sit here with one foot on either side of the ledge, looking down from twelve stories above the streets of Boston, I can’t help but think about suicide.
To instill faith in her female protagonist, Hoover quickly assures us that her character likes her life just fine—she’s thinking about the potentially bad decisions other people make while seeking fresh air and silence on a rooftop. Suicide won’t even be a plot point—but an unsettling seed has been planted.
2
We learn that this woman couldn’t think of anything nice to say about her father while eulogizing him earlier that day. Hmm. Why? By allowing her reader to sit with this question, Hoover colors the interaction to come.
3
Then the protagonist lays some emotional track that, in retrospect, will feel loaded. “I didn’t account for how cold it would be up here, though. It’s not unbearable, but it’s not comfortable, either.” Then in the next paragraph: “I love it when the sky makes me feel insignificant.”
4
The romantic lead makes this memorable entrance: “But unfortunately for me, the […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
The challenge for a novel’s first line is to begin orienting the reader to the story while also raising a question that inspires them to read the next line. Adding quotation marks around that sentence shines an additional spotlight that signals the reader to pay attention—”This will be important.”
That’s a lot of pressure to put on a sentence.
From the manuscripts I see in development, I suspect more writers try dialogue openings than can actually pull them off. While perusing my stacks for published examples, I set aside those that quoted only one word or name that could easily have been left off. One opened with an unremarkable question: “How was school?” (The reply: “Good.” Can you name this novel? I thought not.) In the end, only the following few dialogue openings—representing only 3% of the novels on my shelves—rose to the level of “mad skills.” Let’s see what they have to offer us.
Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White (1952)
Since I suspect middle-grade novels make use of this technique more often, I’ll start with one of the most iconic dialogue openings of all time. If you read this one when you were young, or read it aloud to your children, I’d bet you still remember its opening.
“Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
“Out to the hoghouse,” said Mrs. Arable. “Some pigs were born last night.”
“I don’t see why he needs an ax,” said Fern, who was only eight.
While the dialogue continues a bit further, these few lines meet the demands of the opening: we are oriented to the setting and a question has been raised about a quickly devolving situation. Bonuses: stakes are suggested (the loss of a piglet’s life and a girl’s innocence), the reader is allowed to “see” more than young Fern does, and—at least among those who aren’t pig farmers—the reader is quickly infused with a sense of dread.
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (1985)
The dialogue opening to this middle-grade novel sits beneath the Chapter One title, “Third.”
“I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and I tell you he’s the one. Or at least as close as we’re going to get.”
“That’s what you said about the brother.”
“The brother tested out impossible. For other reasons. Nothing to do with his ability.”
“Same with the sister. And there are doubts about him. He’s too malleable. Too willing to submerge himself in someone else’s will.”
“Not if the other person is his enemy.”
“So what do we do? Surround him with enemies all the time?”
“If we have to.”
“I thought you said you liked this kid.”
“If the buggers get him, they’ll make me look like his favorite uncle.”
“All right. We’re saving the world after all. Take him.”
This is audacious, right? Floating voices, no named characters we can later recognize, no orientation as to where and when we are—and yet we recognize these remarks as coming from a jury of elders discussing a […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Novel openings don’t always start with a bang. Or at a run, such as in the example I analyzed in last month’s post. This month, thanks to a suggestion by community member Barbara Morrison, I’ll look at how three other types of openings invite the reader into the story—and at the end, leave one for you to dissect.
Hit the Ground Walking
Character movement can create the sense that the reader is merging into a story that’s already in progress. Like last month’s example, the character here is moving—but slower. Here’s the opening of The Girl in the Stilt House by Kelly Mustian, set in the spring of 1923.
Ada smelled the swamp before she reached it. The mingling of sulfur and rot worked with memory to knot her stomach and burn the back of her throat. She was returning with little more than she had taken with her a year before, everything she counted worthy of transporting only half filling the pillowcase slung over her shoulder. It might have been filled with bricks, the way she bent under it, but mostly it was loss that weighed her down. The past few days had swept her clean of hope, and a few trinkets in a pillowcase were all that was left to mark a time when she had not lived isolated in this green-shaded, stagnant setting. When she was a little girl, she had believed she loved this place, the trees offering themselves as steadfast companions, the wildflowers worthy confidants, but passing through now with eyes that had taken in other wonders and a heart that had allowed an outsider to slip in, she knew she had only been resigned to it. As she was again.
In addition to putting the protagonist in purposeful motion—Ada is is not meandering, but showing agency by pursuing a goal—this opening creates story movement by:
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
In the masterful first paragraph of her debut novel, River Sing Me Home, British novelist Eleanor Shearer shows that you don’t need a cascade of words to set multiple levels of story movement in play.
It’s always fun to see what you can glean from an opening while approaching a novel stone cold, so let’s give it a go.
It was the blackest part of the night and Rachel was running. Branches tore at her skin. Birds, screeching, took flight at the pounding of her strides. The ground was muddy and uneven, slick with the residue of recent rains, and she slipped, falling hard against the rough bark of a palm tree. She slid down to the soil, to where ants marched and beetles scurried and unseen worms burrowed through the earth. With ragged breaths she gulped the heavy, humid air into her lungs. She could taste its dampness on her tongue, tinged with the acidic bite of her own fear. What had she done?
Line by line, let’s look at what Shearer accomplishes in only these 106 words. At the end of each explanation I’ll identify in blue the factors contributing to story movement.
This story literally hits the ground running by setting the protagonist in motion—at night. A question is immediately raised: “Why?”
Character movement, anticipatory atmosphere, question raised
This short, declarative sentence leaves no room for doubt—at the moment, Rachel cannot think of her comfort. Nature itself conspires to hold her back. We are entering a story in which stakes are attached. The question evolves: “Why is Rachel doing this dangerous thing?”
Obstacle, interactive setting, stakes, prose support, story question extended
Rachel blasts through obstacles with pounding strides, exposing her desire and proving her agency. Shearer’s verb choices—“screeching” and “pounding”—extend the sense of danger. Commas spotlight the reaction from the birds.
Desire, agency, specific verb usage, an interactive setting, prose support
Whatever is going on with Rachel will have an impact on her world.
Interactive setting, foreshadowing, spreading stakes, anticipation of an off-screen antagonist, fear
Nature continues to pose obstacles, this time causing her to fall. The palm tree, and the humid air to come, place the story in a tropical locale. As she suffers this mishap, the forward pace of the prose is slowed with longer sentences, and multiple commas, as if the reader herself was mired in mud.
Obstacles suggest a gauntlet, interactive setting, conflict, setting orientation, consequences, prose support
Rachel’s flight intersects with a universe in which living beings come and go, appear and hide, and go about their work as […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
To study writing craft is to learn techniques that support your reader’s perception of its reality. When done well, this provides your reader with an immersive experience.
When done too well, the reader assumes it is the author’s lived experience.
At least that’s true when the writer is a woman, claims B.D. McClay. In a recent New York Times essay, “Sally Rooney Deserves Better Than This,” McClay writes of Rooney (Intermezzo, Normal People): “She’s come to understand herself as having been selected for the role of the voice of a generation by a capricious literary establishment, a role she has neither encouraged nor enjoyed. She believes this has a lot to do with how young women are catapulted to positions of hypervisibility and not anything in particular to do with her books.”
If it were up to Rooney, McClay reports, she’d prefer to divorce her own life from the discussion of her work.
Ah, wouldn’t that be nice, to let your novel stand on its own as do other artworks, allowing readers, critics, and history to make of it what they will without you having to detail every aspect of its inspiration. But that is not our current promotional reality.
Those of us who love the art of story are drawn to the way it inspires us to seek universal truths about issues such as justice, societal responsibility, and how to emerge intact from the thorny interplay between love and loss. But these days, it is often the case that those attending promotional events and book club discussions—despite the fact that what they had chosen to read was fiction—want the facts. What aspect of your life inspired your story’s events? Who inspired this character? Which events really happened?
Don’t they understand that fiction relies on creativity? Or do they ask so as to unlock its mysterious alchemy?
Noting a “tendency to conflate female novelists with their characters,” McClay opines that there seems to be an inequality at play—the assumption that women aren’t capable of using their imaginations to explore, through story, the themes of interest to them.
While I’m not usually quick to hop on the misogyny train, McClay may have a point. Can you imagine someone sitting in a bookstore audience, circa 1900, asking L. Frank Baum which real-life harpy was the inspiration for his iconic villain in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—even though, in his introduction, he claimed that his novel was written solely to “pleasure children today”? And I can testify that not one reader attending Chris Bohjalian’s 2018 talk in our local bookstore asked him if he’d ever been a flight attendant who woke up covered in the blood of the dead stranger he’d slept with the night before.
Of course genre, not author gender, could be at play in those examples. In her Times essay, McClay quotes interviews in which Rooney claims that she is “not all that interesting.” In a review for USA Today, Clare Mulroy writes that in Intermezzo, which follows two brothers in the aftermath of their father’s death, Rooney continues her exploration of what it means to be […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Back when I was an arts journalist, a friend who had just read my latest dance review said to me, “I’m sorry you didn’t like the performance. What a waste of time.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. I couldn’t possibly have written about dance for two decades without believing that every opportunity to engage with art—whether or not I “liked” it—is a growth process. Recognizing this in your own life can be a springboard to leveling up your writing game.
The most enjoyable part of your ongoing education as a novelist is having a tax-deductible reason to get swept into a fully immersive story that suspends time and leaves an aftertaste of revelation. Now, though, you’re reading for two. For your inner writer, any warm, fuzzy feelings that remain after closing a novel’s back cover will be secondary to a higher goal: what you might learn from the story, even if it disappointed you.
So before you unwittingly echo some version of the refrain, “I wasted good money/ten hours of my time on this book that I’ll never get back,” consider leaving that complaint to those readers who never push themselves to grow. Writers benefit from reading widely. Period.
Let me count the ways—six of them, anyway, as I’m sure there are more—that you can move a disappointing novel from the “I didn’t like it” column to the “This book was a good teacher” column. I’ve organized the list by complaints that, on the surface, seem justifiable.
1. I refuse to finish—I have to watch what writing I pour into my brain.
To inspire my own novel writing, I tend to read fiction that is more literary than my own. Such image-rich craft jump-starts my imagination and ensures that I’ll stretch to the limits of my capacity. And yet my teaching and developmental editing require that I am conversant with a range of published material along the commercial-to-literary continuum—one can’t expect everyone to write like Toni Morrison. Author Katherine Center (The Rom-Commers) even stopped setting that expectation for herself when she left behind her MFA-inspired literary projects to embrace the contemporary romances that shot her onto the New York Times bestseller list.
To honoring both inner reader and writer, I no longer set aside a novel before asking myself what lessons it has to offer. Why did this story fail to engage me? Why couldn’t I relate to this protagonist? What prose patterns ground on my nerves? What weighed down story movement to the point that setting the novel aside occurred to me in the first place?
2. But it was a New York Times bestseller!
We’ve all heard writers claim that their oft-rejected novel is better-written than the bestseller they just finished. That may well be true. But that disappointing read from the list still has much perspective to offer writers about the industry they hope will one day support them. The hardest lesson is this: Publishing is not a meritocracy. It’s commerce.
These days, it’s rare to find a title that was elevated to the list due to a growing, merit-based swell. Bestsellers are now “made” through advance campaigns publishers employ to safeguard profits […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
With a plot that is literally moving from one place to another, a story structure that relies on a geographical tour seems ready made for story movement. But can such a tour cough up enough emotional import to serve as the beating heart of a novel? It can—but there’s nothing automatic about it, as mixed results from two recent, highly-anticipated releases will show.
One of them worked. The other, not so much.
*Before I continue, a note: The intent of this post is to analyze story in a way that might aid our own writing efforts, not to initiate a guessing game. Thanks in advance for honoring this intent in the comments. To protect the authors, I have altered details about their novels.
In Book 1, the protagonist is conducting a grand tour of multiple countries to teach two struggling friends lessons about love. An upcoming event provides a ticking clock. While this goal is met with mixed results, her efforts end up changing her more. No reason that shouldn’t work.
The plot in Book 2 centers around a more localized tour. When the protagonist intends to move away from her new town due to the failed romance that brought her there, a major secondary character is determined to show the protagonist the lesser-known reasons she could still learn to love the area. The protagonist’s determination to leave after the culmination of a major work project provides a ticking clock. This also should work.
Yet all things considered, Book 2 generated more effective story movement. Let’s look at why, through the lens of four questions you can ask yourself about your own plot.
1. Is the movement in the story?
As we discuss often here at Writer Unboxed, plot and story are not the same thing. In short, plot is an external layer of story comprised of the action the protagonist takes toward achieving their story goal and the obstacles that will foil their efforts. A story, on the other hand, explores the way this external plot forces the protagonist to face consequences (stakes) they’d hoped to avoid, resulting in pressures that will slowly but surely move the protagonist along an arc of inner change.
This interweaving of external pressure and inner change creates story movement. Even plot events that include explosive fighting and sexual tension—or both at once!—can stagnate a story if they have no effect on the protagonist.
For the most part, when we humans rise to a challenge and face something hard, we grow—and it’s up to you as author to show your reader how this inner change will be relevant to your protagonist’s particular needs. Why “needs”? Because your protagonist will need to lean on these enhanced skills to prevail during the story’s climactic fight.
By design, the novels I’m comparing for this post both contain plot movement, since their scenes move from locale to locale. But in Book 1, the protagonist is so focused on changing others that she never seems to see the unaddressed problem in her own life, leaving her frustrated by the same things throughout the story. This reiteration results in zero-sum story movement.
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Sometimes, your protagonist just won’t cough up her secrets. Not even to you, her creator. How rude!
As a writing instructor, I must come up with examples of various techniques all the time. Not novel-length examples, of course—I use published works for that—but more like microfiction, whose entire arc can be taken in quickly. After all, a story is a story, and should engage the reader whether its form is short or long—and for that, one needs the protagonist to reveal her depths.
That doesn’t mean they’ll become an open book—that’s not in keeping with someone who has good reason to be reticent. In real life, I know plenty of people who will not reveal their hearts. It’s as if doing so would hurt as much as cracking open their own ribcage. Maybe they’ve been taught that showing emotion is a weakness; or maybe, if they let one emotion escape, they fear that the rest will rush out and drown them in an unstoppable tsunami. Vulnerability may feel dangerous due to previous trauma from which the character has never recovered. Or maybe shame has clamped down those emotions, creating a pressure cooker that will one day blow. All of this could be great for story—if only your protagonist would tell you what’s up. But due to their very nature, they aren’t likely to trust anyone—even you.
Here are the challenge questions I posed to the tormented protagonist I hoped to feature in a recent short example. I took down her answers longhand, as the flow of ink from mind to hand seems to connect us. I write my question in a journal, then write the protagonist’s answers in the voice of the character.
Q: What is your name?
Nada.
We were off to a slow start. But I sensed she wouldn’t talk to me at all until I named her. I called her Patricia Jeffers and moved on to the next question—at which time she butted in to say, “It’s Hannah. Hannah Jeffries.”
Okey doke then.
This isn’t the first time this happened to me. When writing my last manuscript, a featured secondary character I’d named Kristof butted into my writing time one day to say, “Stop calling me that. I’m André.” While explaining the oddities of the subconscious mind is beyond the scope of this post, it makes sense for a character to stand up for themselves. They may not want to vomit up their dark secrets, but their identity is important to them; they don’t want to be manipulated into a role they aren’t suited for any more than you do.
Q: May I feature you in a very short story about a woman who is angry that her childhood climbing tree was cut down?
A one-shoulder shrug. She’s going to be a tough cookie.
As a teaching tool, my goal had been to show how, in a first draft, it can be helpful to overwrite the protagonist’s feelings until you hit emotional bedrock (note the named emotions underlined in the next paragraph). So far, I’d written:
After coming home for summer break […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Early reading influences can have a powerful effect on a future writer. In her May post, In Praise of Passionate Persistence, WU contributor Kristin Hacken South shared an early influence of hers, The Phantom Tollbooth. Her post inspired such nostalgia in me that I wanted to play, too.
When I thought it through, though, the story that offered up the most useful and practical lessons wasn’t one of my favorites. Yet its impact was memorable, and only in retrospect have I appreciated its lessons about story and the writing life.
It began:
In the old days, no one but a king could have a dog for a pet.
Published in 1958, written by Benjamin Elkin, and illustrated by Katherine Evans, it was called The Big Jump. If you’re interested, Grandpa Brian will flip the pages and read it aloud to you at this link. The following plot summary contains spoilers.
When the king walked his dogs, all the boys and girls came out to watch. One day a pup ran away from the king and straight toward a boy named Ben. He told it to go back—he didn’t want to get in trouble—but the pup licked his hand. The king took note.
Ben wanted the dog badly, but alas, he was not a king. Until the king told him, he didn’t even know that to be a king, one had to be able to do The Big Jump. Ben asked what The Big Jump was but the King was gone—and reappeared on top of his palace. If Ben could jump that high he couldn’t be a king, but he could have the dog. For now, he could keep the pup for one day.
At home, Ben stacked wooden crates and practiced jumping. They were nowhere near as high as the palace, and yet he failed, over and over. Then he had the idea to vault with a stick, and was able to jump to the top of four boxes—but no more.
The pup jumped onto the first box, then the second, then the third, and then sat on top of the stack. Ben knew how to jump to the top of the palace. After he demonstrated for the King, the other children mocked him, saying that they could all do it that way. But the King pointed out that they could only do it now because Ben had showed them how. He won the pup.
Here are 8 of this story’s metaphorical lessons for writers.
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Thanks to the 24/7 information kiosk that is the internet, anyone with a smart phone can now become a lay doctor. This can be handy if you wake up in the middle of the night with a stabbing pain and learn that the burst appendix you feared was probably just gas. But for a while now, I’ve been wondering if immediate access to all things medical is always good news for novelists.
Back before it only took a tap of the finger to paste a celebrity photo onto a Pinterest board or borrow a bio from a known sociopath, writers imagined their characters into existence. If that character’s specific story included a mental or physical health challenge, instead of cruising the ’net for a diagnosis, the writer might wonder, If something in a man’s brain made him go blind, how might that test his wife’s assertion that her plastic surgeries were meant to please him? In that story, the husband’s localized headaches and blurred vision might be convincing enough. Consider the law of diminishing returns: these days, a writer can spend hours if not days of their precious writing time googling whether shrapnel from the Vietnam War could migrate slowly through the brain to cause similar damage decades later. (If that sounds oddly specific, um, well, I have no idea why).
I’m not convinced we need to do that.
Prioritizing the protagonist’s character and her story before doing research is still a solid approach. In the May/June issue of Writer’s Digest magazine, author Alyssa Cole spoke about her process creating the lead character for her newest thriller, One of Us Knows, who is the host of a “system”—the group of personalities formed when an individual has dissociative identity disorder. Cole first came up with the basic story idea: “What happens when the main person who is causing trouble is also the one who has to get them out of trouble?” She says, “I didn’t want to read someone’s story and then be like, Oh, let me make a story based on this thing.” Only then did Cole check primary sources to ensure that she was “accurate within reason and respectful.”
Put story first
For my debut novel, I decided that a formal diagnosis for my protagonist would fail to communicate one of the most frustrating realities in treating mental illness: it’s the person who doesn’t think they have a problem that must seek the diagnosis. The words “body dysmorphia” also would have ripped the heart from my story. It was her disordered thinking about her body that kept her butting up against the unwanted consequences that pressured her to change. I chose differently for a major secondary character. Her known cystic fibrosis diagnosis averted any “medical mystery” that might upend focus on the story I wanted to tell, of how two woman of the same age—one with a strong body but a weak spirit, the other with a hearty spirit but a weak body—might influence each other.
Impaired characters who remain undiagnosed are common in literature. Since 1843, when Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart was published, it has been critics—not the text of the short story itself—that spoke of the […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
I am drawn to the things that people won’t talk about. That may be obvious, if you know that my first two novels were about body image and suicide. When was the last time you asked a new mom about her poochy, post-baby abdomen, or what it was like for your neighbor to find her son dead by his own hand? Body-altering, life-changing events happen to us every day that most people just won’t talk about, even though staying mum feeds a churning magma of shame.
Secrets and lies are everywhere in contemporary fiction, and will often drive the entire novel, as David Corbett covered well in a 2022 post. For the purposes of this post, if the protagonist participated in “the thing that shall not be mentioned,” it’s probably more like a shameful secret that someone might lie to cover up.
What I want to look at today is a subtler contribution to characterization—unquestioned taboos passed down through your character’s family or tribe of origin.
Our understanding of what behavior is acceptable in society can come from what we’re told—“No sweetie, we don’t bite our friends”—or, sometimes more powerfully, through what’s never spoken about. If you’d like to try this way of enhancing characterization, look for a taboo relevant to your premise that is specific to the character’s family, as in the examples below. Because it won’t ever be talked about, the character may not even know why it’s taboo; they’ve simply accepted it as forbidden. These silent influences can add shading to a character, impact goal achievement, or dam/damn their inner arc of change.
Love. A man approaching a dock in a motor boat is met by a four year old waving his arms. “Uncle Jim, Uncle Jim, I love you!” The man climbs onto the dock, says hello to the child, then marches up to the boy’s mother and asks why her son would say that to him. She says, “Um, because he loves you? Wild guess.” The uncle harrumphs. “Well. We don’t do that.” What if using the word love causes suspicion in a family member instead of pleasure?
Money. Even though your character’s father was a vice-president of a major company, she had no idea what he earned except that according to her mother, the money didn’t stretch far with five children. This might leave the character clueless about budgeting, saving, and investing in ways that could impact her goal achievement. If her best friend hinted at “how much more money” she was making at her new job, your protagonist might feel prompted to ask for the details her friend longed to spill, but, believing it was crass to talk about money, have to force those words through the involuntary constriction in her throat. What if making money made her feel uncomfortable rather than successful?
Age. At dinner, a girl once asked her favorite aunt how old she was. Her mother cut her a stern look. A long, tense pause ensues. Her aunt finally says, “Old enough to know better.” How might this impact the girl? Would she think that aging is shameful and to […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
The email assault continues without rest, its dire warnings and in-your-face messaging delivered in yellow highlighter, handwritten red ink, and ALL CAPS WITH MULTIPLE EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! [Yawn—is it November yet?] I’ve never been more grateful for the phone setting that rejects calls from people who aren’t in my contacts.
But seriously—is a novelist’s life ever truly free of political content? Listen in on some memorable moments I’ve plucked from the last twenty years of my life.
Heard at a recent book club meeting:
When putting forth as our next book club pick Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility, I shared from the book description that one of the point-of-view characters lives on “the second moon colony.”
“No.”
I was surprised to be cut off so soon. Typically we are an open-minded group, willing to read books that fall outside our usual fare. Thinking this was simply a call for further convincing, I shared the accolades: over 26,000 reviews that averaged 4.3 stars, starred trade reviews, “Best Book of the Year” nods from sixteen reputable sources, President Obama’s reading list, plenty to chew on and discuss…
“That scares me too much,” my neighbor said. “I can’t think about that kind of future.”
Her admission sent a thrum through a room gone suddenly quiet.
Instead, my neighbor steered us toward the other novel I’d put forth, Z, A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, written by our WU friend Therese Anne Fowler. I suppose my neighbor’s thinking was that the conflict in a historical—which in this case included the financial and psychological struggles of a life in publishing, a woman’s fight to be heard among the men who marginalize her, and the deleterious effects of drinking to excess on health, relationships, and a career—might produce less anxiety, since it had already been resolved.
Hmm.
Heard at a party, the summer of 2016:
“I refuse to talk about anything political.”
That will be a trick, I thought. But I knew as well as the speaker did that her politics would not be particularly popular in our grouping, so I asked, “What would you like to talk about then?”
She said, “I don’t know, the arts.”
Oh boy did that poke a very political bruise for me, and anyone else present whose underpaid work to enhance and preserve our country’s culture—our very humanity—had depended on grants from the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities. With everyone watching their steps, the topic quickly petered out.
“Okay then, pets!”
Talking about fur babies might sound like a subject insulated from political intrigue, but the one and only time I had to go to court to defend my rights was after a neighbor, ignoring leash laws, allowed her German shepherd to run into the street, pick up my cockapoo by the neck, and shake it until he tore his skin. My peace-loving Max could still walk, thank goodness, but he was so afraid to do so I had to carry him up and down hills for more than a half-mile to get home, even as my own arms were shaking. Then […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
As a novel approaches its final lines, it’s just so tempting—for experienced novelists and rookies alike—to explain its meaning to the reader.
Intentions for doing so are no doubt good. Just in case the reader lost track of all the facets to your plot, you want to offer a review. Just in case they failed to amass the accumulating meaning of the protagonist’s inner journey, you want to hammer home the point to it all so they don’t think they wasted their time by reading it. Unfortunately, instead of just in case, your efforts can come across as, Because I fear you may not be able to follow my brilliant plot, I’m now going to insult what minimal intelligence you might possess by subverting the very nature of story by explaining what just happened.
The reader has a right to her own interpretation. Like all art forms, literature is interactive. Think of a sculpture: after it’s built, and then wrested from its creator’s hands, it is meant to be interpreted by the reader.
In fact, by the time your story reaches readers, your interpretation of it is no longer of prime importance.
Each of your readers will come to your story with their own emotional, psychological, spiritual, and genetic makeup. They’ll have their own formative experiences, from which they’ve drawn their own conclusions. And all of that will feed a worldview that may not align with yours.
But that doesn’t mean you should exclude those people from finding meaning in your book. Their meaning.
If you’ve never belonged to a book club—or heard your own novel discussed among book club members—you may not have experienced firsthand the way readers hold dear their individual impressions of a work. Some who have read my debut The Art of Falling claim greater insight into the eating disorders of loved ones, even though my intention was to create a protagonist with body image issues, not anorexia. Some dislike the director of the dance company who hired my protagonist, saying that he used her; others perceived that despite his love for her, he had a clearly stated career mission to prioritize that was important to him, and my protagonist’s problem was in danger of imploding it.
Who am I to explain the story? Art is subjective; every defensible opinion is valid. I love listening to people hash these issues through.
Because I don’t think any of us would want to send readers the message that their interpretation was wrong on purpose, we writers need to figure out how to look for the sometimes-subtle ways we try to explain our stories. As a guide, consider this quote from Jerome Stern, in Making Shapely Fiction:
The closer and closer you get to the ending the more weight each word has, so that by the time you get to the last several words each carries an enormous meaning. A single gesture or image at the end can outweigh all that has gone before.
With that in mind, here are some actions you can take to ensure your story resolves organically.
Rethink phrases like “she realized” and “she understood”
This can be especially important […]
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