Fiction therapy
All characters have desires. Desire is the engine that drives your story, it’s what gives the hero a goal—find the killer, fall in love, destroy the death star.
If your characters get what they want on page one, there’s no story left. It’s your job, as an author, to give your characters what they want at exactly the right time. Or not at all.
Until then, you have to play with that desire, use it to develop the drama that will push the story along and pull your readers with it.
There are a few straightforward ways to use your characters’ desires to inject drama into your story, to fuel that engine that will keep your readers engaged.
These techniques are useful for when you’re stuck, when you’re not quite sure what’s going to happen next. They can also help to get back control of your characters when they run off and do their own thing, when they stray away from your carefully plotted plan.
Hold back
The most obvious way is to keep your character wanting.
As I said, the story (usually) ends when your characters get what they want. Keep that goal just out of reach until you’re ready, until it’s time to give your characters—and the readers—what they want.
Too much, too little, too late
Sometimes you can give your characters what they want and still keep the story going.
If you give them too much of what they want, that will also create conflict. You can even give them too much right at the start and use that as a story premise. Reality shows like The Bachelor use this to drive a full season. He wants a bride and now he has to choose from 25 potential partners.
Giving too much can even be like giving someone dying of thirst a whole bottle of water: if they drink it all in one go, they’ll be sick. Your characters will have to be careful when they get more than they need. Will they have the kind of self control necessary to handle it?
Similarly, if you give your characters just a taste of what they really want, that can lift their desires even higher and increase their motivation to get more.
Money is the obvious example here, but you can use time too. Give them enough to get within reach of their goals, but not quite enough. They will then desperately need that last little bit.
And then there’s when your characters get exactly what they want, but it’s too late. They don’t need it any more.
This works especially well with smaller desires throughout the plot, in scenes or in individual chapters. They find the combination for the bank vault, but they’ve already blown the doors off and now the cops are on their way.
This can be useful to reveal the characters’ frustrations and emphasize how great their desires are, and it can be used to add to humor too, to lighten the mood a little.
And now for something different
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It seems like a tall order, to write something that will change your life. And it is. But I think it’s still worth striving for.
By changing your life, I don’t necessarily mean that you have to write something that will earn you lots of money so you can buy an island or even enough money that you can quit your day job. Although, if becoming rich (or rich enough) is important to you, then that’s fine too.
And that’s the point, to write something that is important to you, something that comes from your heart, something that means a lot to you. As I said, money might be important to you, but it might be worth digging deeper to ask why money would be important.
If you want to use the money to buy a house for each of your kids, then it’s not the money that’s so important but your family’s long-term security. If it is an island you want, then maybe that’s because of your love for nature, quiet and rest.
It’s not always so easy to know what’s truly important to you, but there are—of course—some useful exercises to help determine your deeply held values.
1. Ambitions
We develop many of our most important values at an early age, and one way to find out what matters to you most is to go back and try to remember what your ambitions were as a child.
Think back to when you were young. What did you imagine your future would be like? Did you want a happy life with a family? Did you have a hero, someone you wanted to be like when you grew up? If so, what qualities did that person have that you admired?
Use these questions to write a few lines about your ambitions as a child. From your answers, you should already get a sense of what is most important to you. It could be that family, career, justice, or friendship is what matters most. Other values could be anything from adventure and assertiveness to sexuality and spirituality.
2. The interview
Even if you only write in those few spare moments you have in the week, it’s still useful to think of your work as an author as a career. What, for example, do you want to achieve with your writing? And what special skills do you have to make that happen?
Imagine you’re preparing for a job interview to be an author, your kind of author. Think about some of the following questions and even make short notes if you want.
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“Be a sadist,” said Kurt Vonnegut. That’s number six on his list of eight creative writing 101 tips. He added, “No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them – in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”
Vonnegut knew what he was talking about. He made awful things happen to Billy Pilgrim, his leading character in his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. It was not enough to send Pilgrim unprepared into the thick of World War II and have him captured by the enemy, Vonnegut then sends him into the worst firestorm of the war—Dresden in February 1945. And that was just the start of poor Pilgrim’s problems.
Vonnegut’s inspiration came from his own life. He’d been a prisoner of war held in a slaughterhouse in Dresden in February ‘45. Fortunately, it’s not essential to go through quite such a trauma to create great leading characters. There are far easier ways to give your hero a hard time.
For Robert Towne, who won an Oscar in 1974 for his screenplay Chinatown (remember what a rough time he gave Jack Nicholson’s character, Jake Gittes?), the best way to get tough on your hero is to ask: What are you afraid of? If you can discover your characters’ fears, then continually confront them with those fears, you’ll create memorable, engaging characters.
This might sound like every story should be a horror, but that’s not the case. In Chinatown, for example, Jake is obsessed with being a detective, to the point that he’s willing to work for free. His weakness is women, and he wants to protect them. His fear is that a(nother) woman will be harmed or even killed while he feels responsible for her. This fear and this need to protect leads him to misinterpret events and miss important clues, getting in the way of his obsession to be a good detective.
Fundamental fears
As the author of your story, you can of course simply assign your character a fear. But the best characters, the ones we remember, have personalities—and therefore fears—that are intrinsic to the story. They make sense in the story’s world. To take an extreme example: if the main character of your romance is afraid of snakes, it will only interrupt the story if you then drop that character into a pit of snakes every few chapters for no other purpose than to invoke some tension (except, maybe, if the love interest is a snake charmer).
Here then is one way to get to the depths of your characters’ fears.
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Please welcome Jim Dempsey back to Writer Unboxed today, this time as our newest regular contributor! Jim is a professional member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders and works as a book editor at a company called Novel Gazing. In his own words, Jim tells us that:
I’ve been editing for just over 20 years, and the thing that still fascinates me about literature – or any art – is how it can tell us so much about ourselves and what makes us uniquely human. In that respect, fiction especially has a lot in common with psychology, and I’m always interested in the points where these two meet, and what psychology can teach us about fiction, and what literature can teach us about being human.
You can learn more about Jim and his services on his company website, and by following him on Twitter (@jimdempsey and @novel_gazing).
Three Ways to Discover Your Character’s True Motivation
It might seem obvious to say (or just plain odd), but your characters don’t know they’re part of a story. Except for some metafictional works, your characters think they are real people. They want to behave like real people – and readers want them to behave like real people. That means that the actions they take and the choices they make are all done for a reason. What they do has to make sense to them (and the readers).
Your main character chose to be a hero, at least the hero of this story. Certain circumstances led them to that decision and the position they’re now in. They chose to act in one way rather than continue with how their old life was going. It wasn’t a random decision. It was motivated by events, the past and influences from other characters (who also don’t know they’re in a story).
Your characters – especially protagonists – will make many choices over the course of the novel. They will go this way or that. Knowing what truly motivates your characters can help you decide which direction they, as a real person, will choose and – more importantly – why. This will make your characters even more believable, more human, and the story more engaging.
Readers don’t need to know the precise details of everything that led to this moment in the story except those that are relevant to the narrative. But it is useful if you – the author – know that backstory and what drove them to this point. These three exercises will help you to discover what truly motivates your characters.
1. The opposite job
Let’s start with something fun. The New York Times had an article recently about opposite jobs. Based on the details of the skills required for certain occupations, determined by the Labor Department, the newspaper developed a tool where you can type in your job and it will tell you the opposite job, the job that requires completely different skills.
The tool lists the skills needed for each job, so you can check to see if your character has what it takes to be in that occupation.
The opposite of a writer, for example, is a mobile home installer. The latter are, apparently, better suited to ‘developing and building teams,’ and ‘scheduling work and activities,’ which I think […]
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