Friday, June 11, 2010
Thursday, June 10, 2010
What makes a backbone character
Who is my backbone character?
A backbone character is the character in your story who plays the most cohesive role and binds one end of the story to the other. Without the backbone character, the story can't succeed; in fact, when I can't identify my backbone character, I can't even manage to finish a first draft.
Here's the tricky part. A backbone character is usually your main character - but isn't always.
Sometimes a character will appear spontaneously in your head and start telling his or her story, and you'll write it down, then look back and say to yourself, "Gee, that wasn't difficult." Other times, it will be less clear who's holding this story together. Several factors may make identifying the backbone character difficult.
1. You have a story situation in your head, not a person.
If you know more about the world and the danger situation than about a character in the situation, try to zoom in. Figure out who it is who stands to gain most in that situation, by taking risks and possibly losing everything if they don't drive through all the way to the end. Make the situation personal, and you'll have found your backbone character.
2. Your main character isn't doing much "protagging."
Sometimes you can be sure that you know who your main character is, but that person doesn't seem to get anything done. He or she spends a lot of time observing, and when the chance comes to act, typically he or she retreats from doing so. Sometimes it's that you just need to get your protagonist to be more active; other times, you should consider changing who the main character is. Still other times, it's the observer who serves as backbone because even though he or she has fewer opportunities to act, there are still other reasons why that person binds the story together in a way that others can't.
3. You have two or more characters vying for the position of main protagonist.
Choosing who your main character is can be tricky if you've got multiple protagonist points of view. Of the Hero and his Sidekick, which is the backbone character? Well, it depends on what you're trying to do with the story, and how you want its events to be interpreted by readers (as guided by the characters).
4. Your main character is too unreliable to be the primary narrator.
I'm grappling with this one right now. My main character isn't too unreliable yet, but will shortly be descending into madness, and can't serve as a cohesive influence from one end of the story to the other. Therefore, I have to have another person serving as backbone and holding the story together.
5. Your most cohesive character isn't present at the start of the story.
This one is looming in my future. It's really a revision question: I have this story and I always knew who the backbone character was, because without her to pull other elements of the story together, the whole thing would fall apart. The problem with the original draft was that I had the backbone character begin the book - but she isn't the one who starts the conflict. The other characters do that job. It has taken me years to figure out that I need to get the conflict started with the other two active characters, with their goals and stakes, and then bring in my backbone character when her influence can make a measurable change to the trajectory of the main conflict - i.e. when her role as backbone character is most strongly noticeable to readers.
The real challenge in finding a backbone character is to think through what your story is about, and what its core is really made of. The character who has goals and actions and terrible things at stake (the protagonist) may be the same one who endures through the whole thing and keeps the story connected with its core. But it's important to be aware that this isn't always the case. Especially if lots of people have goals and actions and terrible things at stake in your story (which is a good thing!), it's a good idea to think through which character serves as the central organizing influence.
Ask yourself: Who is the character who binds this story together, rather than letting goals and stakes take them off the main conflict in tangential directions? That person is the backbone character, and deserves as much attention as your main character if you want the story to work.
A backbone character is the character in your story who plays the most cohesive role and binds one end of the story to the other. Without the backbone character, the story can't succeed; in fact, when I can't identify my backbone character, I can't even manage to finish a first draft.
Here's the tricky part. A backbone character is usually your main character - but isn't always.
Sometimes a character will appear spontaneously in your head and start telling his or her story, and you'll write it down, then look back and say to yourself, "Gee, that wasn't difficult." Other times, it will be less clear who's holding this story together. Several factors may make identifying the backbone character difficult.
1. You have a story situation in your head, not a person.
If you know more about the world and the danger situation than about a character in the situation, try to zoom in. Figure out who it is who stands to gain most in that situation, by taking risks and possibly losing everything if they don't drive through all the way to the end. Make the situation personal, and you'll have found your backbone character.
2. Your main character isn't doing much "protagging."
Sometimes you can be sure that you know who your main character is, but that person doesn't seem to get anything done. He or she spends a lot of time observing, and when the chance comes to act, typically he or she retreats from doing so. Sometimes it's that you just need to get your protagonist to be more active; other times, you should consider changing who the main character is. Still other times, it's the observer who serves as backbone because even though he or she has fewer opportunities to act, there are still other reasons why that person binds the story together in a way that others can't.
3. You have two or more characters vying for the position of main protagonist.
Choosing who your main character is can be tricky if you've got multiple protagonist points of view. Of the Hero and his Sidekick, which is the backbone character? Well, it depends on what you're trying to do with the story, and how you want its events to be interpreted by readers (as guided by the characters).
4. Your main character is too unreliable to be the primary narrator.
I'm grappling with this one right now. My main character isn't too unreliable yet, but will shortly be descending into madness, and can't serve as a cohesive influence from one end of the story to the other. Therefore, I have to have another person serving as backbone and holding the story together.
5. Your most cohesive character isn't present at the start of the story.
This one is looming in my future. It's really a revision question: I have this story and I always knew who the backbone character was, because without her to pull other elements of the story together, the whole thing would fall apart. The problem with the original draft was that I had the backbone character begin the book - but she isn't the one who starts the conflict. The other characters do that job. It has taken me years to figure out that I need to get the conflict started with the other two active characters, with their goals and stakes, and then bring in my backbone character when her influence can make a measurable change to the trajectory of the main conflict - i.e. when her role as backbone character is most strongly noticeable to readers.
The real challenge in finding a backbone character is to think through what your story is about, and what its core is really made of. The character who has goals and actions and terrible things at stake (the protagonist) may be the same one who endures through the whole thing and keeps the story connected with its core. But it's important to be aware that this isn't always the case. Especially if lots of people have goals and actions and terrible things at stake in your story (which is a good thing!), it's a good idea to think through which character serves as the central organizing influence.
Ask yourself: Who is the character who binds this story together, rather than letting goals and stakes take them off the main conflict in tangential directions? That person is the backbone character, and deserves as much attention as your main character if you want the story to work.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
My Debut at Science In My Fiction
Coming up on Friday I will have an article appearing at Science in my Fiction, the blog of Crossed Genres magazine. This is a great blog which talks about how to incorporate real science and scientific principles in writing fiction. Entries are written by a list of authors who have expertise in different scientific areas. The post is called "A Different Value: Nature" and I'll repost it here, but I'll let it appear first at the SIMF blog to tempt you over there. This blog is a great resource, so check it out!
Wonderful Parallel Languages
I was researching the Romansh language, spoken in Switzerland, and discovered the Wikipedia article has a great chart comparing the forms of core words across eight languages (eight plus, since it includes six dialects of Romansh). If you like historical language links, you'll get a kick out of this.
The link is here.
The link is here.
How Language Reflects Good and Bad in the World
Here's a really interesting link that I ran across on the UC Berkeley Found in Translation blog. A study has shown that there's more good than bad in language, in much the same way that there's more good than bad in the world (trust me on this one; read the article if you're curious).
Monday, June 7, 2010
Don't Try to Be Someone Else
Are you a writer? I bet you got into this whole thing because you read. Even if you started writing when you were a kid, there was someone, some author whose work you read where you thought,
"Wow."
Maybe you wished you could do something like that. Or, like me, maybe you didn't think about the writing at the time, but wished you could be inside the story, to have it happen to you. But either way, I think when we start writing, most of us have people we'd like to emulate. And the further we go, the more we discover other writers and their great works, and we say to ourselves,
"I wish I could write like that."
It's good to have role models, even idols. It's wonderful to admire, to read and analyze, to try to achieve something you've seen in an author you love.
There's an in-between space, though, that you should watch out for. When you start being a member of a writing field, you see people in all different places along a career trajectory (and those career trajectories take very different forms). Sometimes you see people who are "ahead" of you. Be careful.
Don't envy them, and don't ever try to become them.
There are huge risks in this. The most obvious one I can think of is that if you let envy make you get ugly, the people around you won't want to help you any more. The other gigantic one is that if you try to be someone else, you will probably fail.
Writing is very individual. Your voice as a writer is the combined echo of every piece of language you've ever heard, filtered through your judgments and values. Your writing is unique. If you try to imitate, very likely you'll end up disconnecting yourself from the Muse you need to follow.
Don't fall into the assumption that you are in competition with other writers. You're not. That thing you can do is unlike anything anyone else does, for one thing. If you can do it and stand out unlike the anyone else, you can achieve success. If on the other hand your writing evokes the work of another great writer, well, you can share their market. I can't think of any reader who owns only one book! I can't think of any reader who would hear that someone's writing resembled one of their favorites and decide without a single glance that it had to be horrible and derivative. And after all, wasn't emulating the greats one of the things that got you into writing in the first place?
I can't say this enough times: don't belittle the unique background and experiences that contribute to your voice. Be true to yourself and your vision. If you can do that, and keep working hard to improve your craft, you are far more likely to make it. And if you keep working, and reaching out to the people around you, one day you may find yourself having a friendly chat with the very author you've always admired - while somewhere out there new writers look at your work and say,
"I wish I could write like that."
"Wow."
Maybe you wished you could do something like that. Or, like me, maybe you didn't think about the writing at the time, but wished you could be inside the story, to have it happen to you. But either way, I think when we start writing, most of us have people we'd like to emulate. And the further we go, the more we discover other writers and their great works, and we say to ourselves,
"I wish I could write like that."
It's good to have role models, even idols. It's wonderful to admire, to read and analyze, to try to achieve something you've seen in an author you love.
There's an in-between space, though, that you should watch out for. When you start being a member of a writing field, you see people in all different places along a career trajectory (and those career trajectories take very different forms). Sometimes you see people who are "ahead" of you. Be careful.
Don't envy them, and don't ever try to become them.
There are huge risks in this. The most obvious one I can think of is that if you let envy make you get ugly, the people around you won't want to help you any more. The other gigantic one is that if you try to be someone else, you will probably fail.
Writing is very individual. Your voice as a writer is the combined echo of every piece of language you've ever heard, filtered through your judgments and values. Your writing is unique. If you try to imitate, very likely you'll end up disconnecting yourself from the Muse you need to follow.
Don't fall into the assumption that you are in competition with other writers. You're not. That thing you can do is unlike anything anyone else does, for one thing. If you can do it and stand out unlike the anyone else, you can achieve success. If on the other hand your writing evokes the work of another great writer, well, you can share their market. I can't think of any reader who owns only one book! I can't think of any reader who would hear that someone's writing resembled one of their favorites and decide without a single glance that it had to be horrible and derivative. And after all, wasn't emulating the greats one of the things that got you into writing in the first place?
I can't say this enough times: don't belittle the unique background and experiences that contribute to your voice. Be true to yourself and your vision. If you can do that, and keep working hard to improve your craft, you are far more likely to make it. And if you keep working, and reaching out to the people around you, one day you may find yourself having a friendly chat with the very author you've always admired - while somewhere out there new writers look at your work and say,
"I wish I could write like that."
Creative minds have less filtering...
Here's an interesting BBC article which dovetails with the discussions we've had here about creative thought and its relation to divergent mental processes (as well as mental illness). Here are the TTYU posts:
Insanity and Creativity
More on Hypergraphia and Writer's Block
Famous Writers with Epilepsy
Different Minds, Different Voices
Insanity and Creativity
More on Hypergraphia and Writer's Block
Famous Writers with Epilepsy
Different Minds, Different Voices
Possibility of life on Titan?
Here's a link to the NASA webpage where you can find a discussion of new discoveries on Titan, one of Saturn's moons. It's not little green men, but a pattern in the distribution of the chemicals hydrogen and acetylene that suggests something might actually be consuming them. Life isn't the only possible explanation, but the data apparently fit quite well with a theory of how "methane-based life" might function.
Interesting stuff; check it out.
Interesting stuff; check it out.
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