Does your character have to be as smart as your reader?

Of course not, you'd say. And you'd be right...but. That's the point of this article.

Let's start with the question of what it means for a character to be "smart." I usually think of different kinds of character attributes as contributing to the impression of smartness. The ability to use logic and reason based on experience is one of those. The ability to reflect on and evaluate one's own actions. The ability to communicate effectively can also be interpreted as an indicator of intellect, though it isn't a particularly reliable one.

What the character needs to do intellectually depends on what the story involves. If the character is Sherlock Holmes, he needs to be pretty darned intellectual (along with a host of other things, as watchers of "Sherlock" will testify). If she's out there trying to solve a mystery, she should have the ability to do that, because it will look awfully strange if the protagonist isn't the one to resolve the main conflict. If, as in my stories, she's trying to solve a linguistic mystery, she needs not only mental facility but an expertise in linguistics. There is an endless list of the possible specialties that characters need in order to solve some of those sf puzzles (I've seen chemists, engineers, etc.).

If, by contrast, you're writing something about someone with a divergent mode of thinking - such as the autistic protagonist of The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time - you'll have to gauge carefully how you portray the special characteristics of the person's thinking and then the intellect. They may or may not be related. I struggle sometimes in writing my antagonist Nekantor because he has OCD and is very repetitive - but is also extremely smart, so I have to find a balance in his narrative that makes him plausibly obsessive and plausibly intelligent at the same time.

All right, so let's go a bit further with this. You would put a lot of effort into making sure that you don't make physical or temporal inconsistencies in your story - it's important also to maintain consistency in the intellect of your characters. If a character can use logic to solve a complex problem in one situation, she's very likely to be able to do it in another situation as well. Make sure you don't have your character suddenly lose his mind and behave ridiculously. Sure, there are external influences that can change a character's ability to reason through things (like being in a panic or hurry situation, emotionally distracted, etc.). Just make sure that change is appropriate to the nature of the distractions.

So what do I mean by "does your character have to be as smart as your reader"?

This is a funny one, but to some extent a character needs to share some of the reader's instincts for how stories work.

Particularly if the character is someone who generally comes across as having a strong intellect, or who is having to use reasoning to get through the plot, you don't want (or at least, I don't want) him/her suddenly to catch a case of horror movie stupidity: "Here we are in grave danger from an unknown killing force that seems to come from nowhere but which I've been carefully using evidence to track down - let's split up."

Recently I put down a book because of a different kind of inconsistency. The character I was reading had been spending a lot of time thinking through the motivations of one of his companions, trying to figure out how the guy was thinking, because they were very different types of people - and then suddenly he completely stopped reasoning and decided to take his companion's words at face value (and think worse of him) in a scene where the companion was almost certain to be lying. This is where the reader comes in. Not only was it inconsistent, but I knew the guy had to be lying, and it didn't make sense for the protagonist to think he wasn't. Instead, it gave me the impression (one the author surely didn't intend) that the story was trying to manipulate me emotionally.

In fact, I have run into a very similar situation recently in my own work - where my protagonist has to share some of my own, and my reader's, instinct for where stories usually go. I had my protagonist pursuing someone out toward a waterfall, having some action and argument ensue, and then having the fugitive jump into the waterfall. My critique partner Doug Sharp (yes, he's very sharp) called me on this. He knew the guy was going to jump in the waterfall as soon as he knew that was where they were going, and he was shocked that my protagonist didn't also figure this out.

Oops on me.

So now I'm going to make sure that my protagonist expects that the fugitive will jump into the waterfall, just the way my reader did - and then, I won't have him do it (just to shake things up). After that happened, I caught myself just today realizing I was about to do it again. The previous linguist died mysteriously. Was it an accident? Or was it the evil corporate guys? Well, if you're a reader, it's unlikely to be the former. And if it can't be the latter, then my characters have to entertain the possibility that the natives did it. Because that's the next option for a reader to consider, and not having my protagonist consider it would make him appear stupid.

So while your character doesn't have to be "smart" necessarily, nor should he or she be obliged somehow to match your reader (which would be tough, since you don't know who's going to read it anyway) - it's still good to think through this kind of "knowledge of story/cliché" instinct and make sure your characters aren't dropping the ball at critical moments... or your reader might just drop the book.

And we can't have that!

A character's behavior reveals underlying power assumptions

This is a post about character. It's also a post about the importance of establishing manners and culture in your stories. But it starts with the story of my children crossing the street to school.

The school has two or three different crossing guards. After a few days, while we were walking home, my kids asked me, "Why does the man make us wait for cars?"

It's true. When we arrive with a group of people at the crosswalk, the male crossing guard looks at the street, watches cars go by for a while, then raises his stop sign and walks out into the street. The female crossing guard turns to the street and raises her sign, then walks out into the street.

Both methods work. The man's method makes the pedestrians wait. And as I explained to my children, each one is based on a different set of assumptions. The female crossing guard feels that her pedestrians are more important than the traffic. The male crossing guard feels that the traffic is more important than his pedestrians. When the female crossing guard sees pedestrians arrive, she raises her sign to command the traffic to stop. When the male crossing guard sees pedestrians arrive, he raises his sign to ask permission from the traffic for the pedestrians to cross.

One of them commands, and the other asks permission - and this is played out in their behavior.

Another situation arose over the weekend where I was communicating about a French class I'm helping to arrange. I'm a co-coordinator with another fantastic woman. She has been with this program for the last year. I have not. I found that each time I wanted to communicate with officers of the French program further up the line, I felt the strong desire to talk to my co-coordinator first. Eventually, since I couldn't reach her, I had to communicate directly. What made me hesitate in this situation was that I have certain expectations: 1. about the authority of experience, 2. about chain of command in organizations, and 3. about what to do in situations of urgency. You can easily imagine that if one were to change any one of those three, the results might be very different.

My husband was put in a very interesting situation of this nature when he worked in Japan. He was in the midst of a set of organizational assumptions about authority, experience, chain of command, and dealing with urgency, that differed from what he was used to. This sometimes had distinctly different (occasionally unfortunate) results, and it's not hard to see that Americans and Japanese dealing with matters of this nature would experience friction due to different sets of underlying assumptions.

This is why, when I write other worlds or different kinds of people, I like to track underlying assumptions. I also like to be very careful about how people interact in small social situations - and I encourage you to do the same. My situation from the last post, about how my character would walk out a vehicle into a field of grass, is related to this directly. I hadn't been thinking about it when I first wrote it, but the behavior reveals her underlying assumptions, and those assumptions have to align with the social group she's a part of, and the situation as a whole.

It happens here in our world too, so keep your eye out. That could become quite a resource for subtlety and nuance in your writing.

Point of view and characterization mean divorcing from yourself

I got over a hump in my story yesterday. There was a piece that wasn't working, because I couldn't figure out what my protagonist Adrian's reaction would be to one of the story events. Whenever this happens, it's a sign that something isn't holding together earlier in the story. I went back over it several times and talked through it with friends, and after quite a long while I realized I had missed a step in Adrian's thought process - the point at which he went from thinking the word "liar" was an insult to realizing that "Liar" was a name for a social group. Because my story's climax depends on Adrian fully understanding who the Liars are and what they do, developing this thought process for him is critical to my success. Furthermore, each change in his understanding has to happen on screen, so that my readers can follow it.

So what does this have to do with divorcing from yourself? Well, the reason why I got lost in the first place was that as the author, I have all the pieces of the puzzle already. I know the answer, and all the levels of it. I had put together all kinds of steps from Adrian encountering the social group of the Liars to him understanding what it was for... I had just omitted the step where he realizes for the first time that it is a social label. It sneaked by me because I was concentrating so hard on all those other steps. In order to get this to work for readers, I have to step outside myself into Adrian's point of view so completely that I can understand what he learns and when he learns it (and how) without being blinded by my own knowledge.

Standing outside yourself is hard, especially when it comes to fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality.

I remember the first novel protagonist I ever attempted. I had a scene where she was walking out of a vehicle into a beautiful field of golden grass at sunset. She was loving how beautiful it was, ignoring all the people around her, feeling the free air, etc. All the things I myself would have done in her situation. The problem was, she wasn't me. She was a character from the undercaste of Varin - someone who lived underground, had never seen the sun or felt air move except when it was moved by a vehicle. Moreover, she was someone constantly at risk of abuse or persecution by people around her. What the heck was she doing ignoring people and walking out full of wonder and joy into a field at sunset? The result was that she didn't feel like she belonged in the world, and she didn't feel like she could be the age she was.

The age question is a subtle point, and something that many people run into. It's one thing to tell readers that your protagonist is a certain age. "She's nineteen," you say (however you choose to fit it in). But having her act like she's nineteen is something else. The way I wrote my protagonist in the field scene might have worked with her age if she'd been an Earthly nineteen-year-old. But given the social situation of Varin, that kind of attitude made my protagonist feel like she was much younger and more naïve. At the time my critique partners told me she didn't seem like she was nineteen, and I couldn't figure out why they hadn't "noticed" when I specified her age. But then one of the more analytical of them told me that someone of her age in Varin would have learned quite a bit more caution, fear, and manners... and that those would be on her mind in this scene in addition to a natural fear of the surface and the outdoors. This kind of questioning of very basic assumptions is one reason why it's taken me so long to make Varin work to my satisfaction - so many of the assumptions are different that I can't be consciously mindful of all of them at once. I have to identify assumptions, change them, get used to them and learn to use them subconsciously...and then identify the next level, and go through the process all over again.

Really I don't think characterization, point of view, and worldbuilding can be separated from one another. They are all deeply inter-related. Your character has to "come across" to readers in a particular way within the context of your world. Yes, you won't be able to avoid certain aspects of the real world coming in, as readers bring a lot of real world assumptions to their reading. But that's just another reason why worldbuilding is so important to your character's success (as a character). As you introduce your character, you also have the opportunity to introduce those aspects of his/her social context that provide background for the interpretation of their character that you want readers to take away with them. And in order to do this, you need to get as far as possible outside yourself, your basic knowledge sets, and even your knowledge of where the story is going.

It's something to think about.

Tests of Character

What does your character think is important?

All right, now, what does your character really think is important? For what, or whom, would they drop everything and run into battle (figuratively or literally)? For what reason would they disregard personal safety, need for food, etc.?

In my novel in progress, there is a point when the main character falls abruptly ill. This event galvanizes all kinds of people around him, and it's the kind of event that will show what these people consider important.

• The main character's mother cares about nothing more than saving his life - not particularly surprising.
  
• The mother's servant takes her wishes as his own, of course, and he has medical training that would cause him to act - but he discovers he cares very deeply for the main character and drops everything, hardly eating or sleeping for two days in order to get him through his illness.
  
• The main character's brother, by contrast, figures everybody is caring for the main character but nobody has noticed that there was something he was supposed to do, and now nobody is available to do it. He cares far more about the political situation than he does about his brother.

When we hit a catastrophic event in our stories, or even just a deeply important gesture (such as a touch from a person one is attracted to), it provides us with fantastic opportunities to reveal character. In fact, it's worth trying to achieve just this sort of test of character during the course of a story. We're encouraged to ask, "What is the worst thing that could happen from this characters point of view?" and then to try to have that happen. Why? Not only is it dramatic, but it provides a test of character and allows the character to become more deeply human (whether he/she is in fact human or not), as well as giving that character a unique opportunity to direct the plot. Tests of character are where plot and character come together to drive the plot.

If you're in the midst of writing a story, look for places where events could conspire to test your character and cut through to what he or she considers most important. If you're planning a story but have more information about your character than about the plot, look through your character's personality for places of weakness, those funny-bones or Achilles heels that could really use testing. Then use that information to guide your plot choices. Oddly enough, you don't even need to know how the character would react to being tested in that way - only that they should be tested. You can then wait and figure out what happens when you get there.

It's something to think about.

Be Tender; Be Terrible (with your characters)

Do you care about your characters?

I think the question of whether we care - and whether readers care - is one of the most vital in all of writing. If readers don't care, they won't keep reading. If we don't care, as writers, then how can we expect our readers to care?

So how can you make people care?

It's not uncommon to hear writers talk about torturing their characters, doing bad things to them in order to make the story stronger. This is very, very important. If we don't challenge our characters, and if we make everything easy for them, then readers can quickly stop caring.

It's not enough, though, just to do terrible things. We also need other reasons to care. Something good about the person that we can relate to, or a glimpse of the character's tastes that can let us align with them. Even when dealing with an antagonist, it's useful to give them something soft and vulnerable somewhere, to keep the reader's attention riveted.

I've been watching the extended version of The Lord of the Rings, and I've been impressed over and over with how Tolkien - and Peter Jackson's treatment of the story - creates both the tender and the terrible sides of its characters. Interestingly, the extended version adds some time to the terrible events of the story, but adds far more time to the tender events of the story - Merry and Pippin dancing on the table in the Shire, for example, or Eowyn and Faramir meeting in the Houses of Healing.

The experience of depth in a story relies on the presence of both the tender and the terrible. It's a lot like dynamic range in music - a song with both loud and soft moments will leave a deeper impression on us than a song that is all loud or all soft. In fact, I highly recommend that with complex stories, you look for opportunities to provide different dynamic values for each arc that you are creating. The intimate contrasts with the epic. Action contrasts with subtle tension. Strength contrasts with vulnerability. The orcs at the doorstep of Helm's deep look frightening on their own, but they are more frightening when we are shown the families inside waiting to be overrun. Sauron is this overwhelming force of evil, but he can still feel fear, and when that fear is something that our heroes can use to their advantage, how much more interesting the story becomes! Maybe that's what irritates us so much about the Mary Sue - if she's all good, then she comes across as flat.

Some might call these contrasting elements yin and yang, or masculine and feminine - but they're more comprehensive than that. They make the difference between bas-relief and full-scale sculpture, between two and three dimensions. Either one is less effective without the other.

It's something to think about.

TTYU Retro: The Inciting Event and Your World - Revisited

When I was at Westercon over this last weekend I was part of a number of discussions, and one in particular about the importance of details in setting up a story world. This post immediately leapt to mind. It's about integrating character, world, and the beginning of the story in the form of the inciting event.


I've been thinking a bit about inciting events. An inciting event is generally the event that propels you into the main conflict of your story. My friend Janice Hardy mentions it in a great blog post, here (as many of you already know, her blog has tons of great information on the process of writing and on getting published). In her words, "The inciting event is the trigger that sets the rest of the story in motion." She treats it separately from the opening scene, but I'm not sure the two are necessarily separate. When trying to hook your reader, it's good to plunge into the inciting event as early as possible. I've spent a lot of time in my writing career working on the question of where to start my stories, and believe me, it can be tricky - but it's worth thinking seriously about.

Where I want to take this topic in a particularly TalkToYoUniverse direction is by linking the inciting event to the issue of worldbuilding. When you're thinking about how to open your story in a science fiction or fantasy context, you have to take into account both your need to hook the reader, and your need to introduce your world.

We all know the dreaded word, infodumping. We all know we want to avoid it. But how do we go about creating a scene where this information doesn't need to be explained? How do we make it so the information is simply evident in the action?

First, use your POV character. Make sure you know the character's background, culture and motivations to the fullest extent possible, so that you can use the character to help you convey information. This is what I call making your world personal. Think about what your characters care about, and what they don't care about - where they are especially attentive or where they have blind spots and weaknesses. All of these things can become your tools, as you can imbue your narration with a dismissive or contemptuous tone, or a bubbly enthusiasm, or what have you.

Next comes the tougher, more subtle step: working in the things that the character considers normal. Things that are totally normal, entirely obvious to the character, are not things you want him or her to talk about. Talking about obvious things leads to completely cringe-worthy "As you know, Bob" dialog, and we don't want that.

So here's the question: How can we possibly describe the basic parameters of our worlds, when we know that to our character, so much is entirely unremarkable?

The answer is, use conflict and contrast. I have an example of this done simply and elegantly for a real-world scenario, here.

In fact, there's a beautiful convergence here: the inciting event, the trigger for the core conflict of the novel, very often is all about the precise type of conflict that can let you give out world information.

Here's an example from the drafting stage of my story, "Cold Words" (Analog, October 2009). [I read from it at Westercon and it was so much fun!] Consider the list of events below and ask yourself which one is the best to use for an opening scene:

1. A Human ambassador inadvertently insults the Majesty of the Aurrel, placing a spaceport negotiation in danger.
2. The native liaison asks the Humans to send away the failed ambassador and get a new one.
3. The Human ambassador comes to the native liaison to tell him that he's worried about the motives of the replacement ambassador.
4. The native liaison goes to the Majesty to report the impending arrival of the replacement ambassador and try to rescue the spaceport negotiation.

I wouldn't choose 1 or 2. Any event that occurs before a significant lull, like waiting for a replacement ambassador to arrive, is less optimal because it will require a time break and reduce forward momentum. Furthermore, even though the incident of insult is interesting, it would be hard for readers to understand without significant previous context - which, since this is the first scene, they can't possibly have.

When I wrote my first draft, I chose 4. The story is told in the point of view of Rulii, the native liaison, and thus the main motivating force in the story is Rulii's desire to complete the spaceport negotiation successfully (for his own secret reasons). Why not start where you see him pressing his suit with the Majesty, a place where he can show his intense desire for success and share it with the reader?

The answer to that question is this: if he's alone with the Majesty, he's in a completely native context where everything is normal. And that means that every piece of normal world information will be really difficult to put in.

So in the end, I chose 3. There's conflict in that scene, because the human ambassador brings a warning that may put the negotiation at even deeper risk. More importantly for this discussion, though, scene #3 puts our native liaison in direct contact with a human. There's conflict, and there's contrast. There are opportunities for the human ambassador to demonstrate his own cultural biases, and for Rulii to remark on them, thus putting his own world forward for readers to explore. Better yet, the sense of contrast continues forward as he goes to see Majesty, because with the human interaction foremost in his mind, Rulii is more likely to remark on the quirky cultural things inherent in their interaction.

So, when you're looking at your own stories, consider the kinds of conflict or contrast opportunities that appear in the opening scene as you've written it, and then ask yourself how you could tune the circumstances of that scene to make your job easier.

Finally, in the spirit of making a world personal, I'm posting this list of eleven questions [which also appears in the "Know Your Character Inside and Out" post at left]. You've probably seen questions like these before, but worldbuilding questions are often phrased in a very impersonal way, and that's not what I'm trying to do here. All of these questions are deliberately phrased to relate directly to a protagonist's view of the world, and participants in my workshops have found it a helpful exercise to answer them using the voice of their POV characters.

Here are the questions:

1. What is my home like? How do I visualize its boundaries?
2. What weather and physical conditions do I consider normal? What do I fear?
3. What kind of topography did I grow up in, and how did it influence my physical condition and my concepts of comfort?
4. In what kind of place do I feel most at home? What shapes and textures give me comfort, or discomfort?
5. Who is in charge here? Do I respect them, fear them, both?
6. How do I show who I am in the way I dress? What is comfortable? Will I endure discomfort for the sake of looking good or looking powerful?
7. Where do the things I own come from? Do I worry about getting more?
8. What is delicious to me? What do I consider unworthy of consumption?
9. What are my most prized possessions? Do I hoard anything? Do I have so much of anything that I care little if I must give it away?
10. Who do I consider to be unlike me? Are their differences charming or alarming?
11. Am I in control of my own actions and the happenings around me? What or whom do I believe in?

I hope you may find this exercise helpful in your writing process.

Heightening Emotional Impact

How can you get your reader to feel emotionally moved by your story?

Well, first off, you can't just tell them, "you should be emotionally moved." This is obvious, I think. I had been thinking about the topic of emotional involvement and creating intensity at particular points of the story, and then I ran across this article by Lydia Sharp, where she gives the following quote from Donald Maass:

You can’t expect your reader to feel what your protagonist feels just because they [the characters] feel it. Only when that emotion is provoked through the circumstances of the story will your reader feel what you want them to.

Lydia then asks:
"So what does this mean? For starters, it goes back to the age-old advice of "show, don't tell." Where emotions are involved, it's best not to simply outright tell your reader what the characters are feeling. Let the reader experience it.

"And how do you do that? By not being obvious."

All of this, I agree with. If I were to take the Donald Maass quote and give my own take on it, I would have to say that our impressions of the emotional experiences of characters grow more out of our own emotions in a particular part of the story than the other way around. In other words, it is our own emotional understanding of the story that deepens the character's experience, rather than the character's emotional state deepening our own.

In a way, this makes sense. Because the character inhabits the story, he/she is limited in his/her ability to grasp the entirety of the story. The reader usually does not have these same limitations. I'm going to come back to the idea of the entirety of the story in a moment, but first let me address Lydia's advice.

Lydia suggests we should let the reader experience what the characters are feeling, rather than telling them, by not being obvious. An excellent point. There are a number of ways that emotional states can be shown. One way is to describe the internal physical sensations of a person - adrenaline surges, feeling hot or cold, and many different kinds of metaphorical descriptions of pain, fear, embarrassment, joy, etc. can be of use for internal points of view. Another way is to show the external behaviors of a person feeling an emotion. If the point of view is external, you can show facial expressions; this is awkward to do with internal points of view, but you can still show actions of rage (as one example) like throwing things across the room, or pacing, stomping, etc. Still another way is to have the emotional state of the character in a scene be reflected somehow in the way that person perceives things around him/her, by including a sense of rage or other emotion in the surrounding descriptions of setting, descriptions of the actions of others, etc. There is a descriptive passage in Snow Falling on Cedars where the destruction wreaked by a storm is treated in intensive detail...and that reflects the inner state of the protagonist, Ishmael.

All of these tools are at our disposal. All of them fit with the idea that comes from qualitative anthropology about field notes - as I've discussed here before - that a researcher should not try to lay out any deductive conclusions in field notes, but simply observe the details of what is there, write them down, and let the reader taking in those details formulate the same conclusions that the researcher did. (I consider this a very extreme form of show-don't-tell.)

But if we're talking about overall emotional impact, this isn't everything. Here is the point where I return to the idea of the entirety of the story.

Anyone who writes with the thought of story arcs in mind knows that there are large-scale patterns in a work. Small points link together across the story to form this larger structure. We talk about character arcs, and plot arcs. I suggest we also think about emotional arcs for the reader. By seeding small details one after the other, we can create an impression that builds up in a reader's mind.

I'll give an example of a situation that I created in my novel that I'm currently writing. This one was very difficult because the situation was so awful it made me sick. I knew what that situation was, but I also knew that my viewpoint character wasn't going to be in the room with it - only listening in from outside. I realized pretty quickly that there would be no way for a simple emotional description of the pov character's reaction to have impact unless readers knew what that situation was. However, I needed the impact to hit all at once. No time for lengthy description (which would defeat the point anyway because it would come across as strenuous). So I had to set it up by seeding it earlier in the chapter.

This is tricky because the list of elements is long, and it's not like reading the text itself (obviously) but I'm going to do them as bullet points, and insert my own commentary in certain places. Critical elements to piecing together the unseen situation are marked in red.

The characters: Lady, Lady's servant, Husband, Husband's servant

The scene begins with Lady and Lady's servant in a room with her sleeping teenage son, who is recovering from a deadly illness. Previous chapters have established that both of them are exhausted and rather upset about this whole situation. This establishes a state of vulnerability which contributes to their reactions to the ongoing events.

• Husband enters, and Lady instantly goes on the defensive; Husband embraces Lady and she goes stiff.
  
• Husband and Husband's servant together try to force Lady to give up control of Lady's servant to them for political purposes.

This establishes that the Husband will not hesitate to threaten them even when they are in a state of vulnerability.

• Lady's servant worries whether Lady will cave to Husband's wishes, but decides not to try to influence Lady because he would be punished for presumption
  
• Lady takes charge and with Lady's Servant's help, denies Husband control of her servant.

Because of the early vulnerability and husband's threat, this is a point of triumph for the Lady. It also brings her closer to her servant and makes her servant feel that she cares about him. He cares for her more deeply as a result (this question of whether the two of them have a relationship of trust has been established over a large portion of the story to this point). This is a reader emotion arc going from sympathy to triumph on behalf of the Lady and her servant. Now we go into the next piece.

• Husband leaves, angry.
  
• Lady's servant realizes that the denial was presumption and punishment will be coming.
  
• With Husband gone, Lady begins to relax and speak trustfully to her servant
  
• Lady's servant confesses to Lady that Husband's servant frightens him.
• Lady confesses to her servant that Husband's servant frightens her too. Says she hates his eyes.
• Lady's servant says his watching is normal because of his servant's training.
  
• Lady insists that this form of watching is not normal.
• In conversation about an earlier life experience, Lady says she wishes she had taken action at that time, in defiance of Husband, even though she knew the consequences.
• Husband returns with his servant.

At this point it should be pretty clear that he is back to deliver punishment, most likely with his servant watching, and that both the Lady and her servant know it. It should be clear also that the Lady has experienced this before. Because of what has been previously established, the Husband doesn't need to show anger overtly here; in fact, it's creepier (in my opinion) that he doesn't. On to the next piece, where I'll give some attention to the servant's emotional state (since he's the viewpoint character). I'm marking the causes of his emotional reactions in orange, and the reactions themselves in blue.

• Lady's servant expects her to become defensive, but instead Lady is submissive and tells her servant to leave on an errand while she speaks to Husband alone. His expectations of her courage, and their mutual trust, are defeated.
  
• Lady's servant is very worried leaving her alone with angry Husband, but must obey. He runs the errand.
  
• When he returns, Lady is not there.
  
• He searches for Lady, demonstrating signs of panic; a more experienced servant looks uncomfortable, tells him to be careful.
• Lady's servant chastises himself for leaving her, can't understand why she would send him away when she knew she needed help.
• Lady's servant turns on a speaker to hear what is happening in Husband and Lady's room, expecting to hear argument.
• He hears "bestial, rhythmic grunting."
• Lady's servant feels nausea and shakes with rage.
  

I'm not going to spell out anything more about the situation in the story. However, I think it's useful to point out a few things.

1. When you're working to create an emotional high or low point, think about what kind of initial emotional conditions would contribute most effectively to the magnitude of the impact (in this case, the establishment of vulnerability for Lady and servant/threat and lack of remorse for Husband and servant)
2. Make sure to include any necessary information that will contribute to the reader's understanding of what is going on. In this case, that includes all the red-marked phrases, including the Lady's dislike of the Husband's physical contact, the idea of punishment for defiance, etc.
3. Make sure that the causes of your protagonist's emotional state precede the protagonist's emotional reactions. What should be happening is that the circumstances that cause the protagonist's emotional state will be causing a strong emotional state in the reader, a split second before the reader actually reads what you've written about the protagonist's reaction. If at that point the protagonist's reaction matches the reader's reaction, the impact will be magnified (which is what I was trying to do). If it doesn't match, then you'll get an entirely different effect, turning the strength of the reader's reaction into a judgment about the character who has the unexpected reaction.

A story contains innumerable links across it (arcs, patterns of repetition, etc.). The further you go in, the more the significance of each word or event depends on everything that has come before it. I often call this phenomenon resonance. When I get something right, I feel like I can hear the entire story ring like a bell. When you're trying to create emotional impact, this is an enormous advantage.

It's something to think about.

Character Personalities as Story Forces

I had this story draft, and it was missing something. (If you have written for any length of time, this may sound like a familiar scenario.)

I figured it out eventually: it was being too well-behaved. Following to the outline, characters doing what they were supposed to do - for perfectly good reasons, mind you, but they were awfully obedient. Too obedient.

They needed personality.

Of course, this will surprise no one. Certainly characters need personality! But what I needed from my characters - what was missing - was not so much backstory and general motives but a sense of each one as a force in the story.

This is what I mean. A character who is a force in the story will be a force for good, or evil, or for chaos, or a force for goofiness, or something like that. When that character walks into a room, you immediately say, "Okay, now things are going to get _____" (Fill in the blank with good, evil, chaotic, goofy.)

I picked the following quote up from Jamie Todd Rubin's website where he recently reviewed a book by George R. R. Martin:

"Another remarkable aspect of A Clash of Kings–for me at least–is that the characters are by now so well developed that as a reader, I felt like I knew them and could guess their reactions to various events."

This is something like what I mean. Because you know what kind of person they are, and what they'll do in a certain situation, they have more dimension. This can be big stuff, like mental illness (for my character Nekantor who is a force for order, and not in a good way) or heavy backstory. It can also be little stuff, like some detail of their self-image that affects their interactions.

I'll give you the example of the characters I've been working with: Adrian Preston and his wife, Qing Preston. Both are linguists. Both are accustomed to working with aliens and taking them seriously. So far so good. But they weren't different enough, and they weren't forces. So I decided to go further with Qing's Chinese background and give her a Chinese nickname for her husband. I looked around on the internet and came up with Big Bear (this is of course the translation). Then I suddenly realized that Adrian should be a genuinely big guy - and self-conscious about it. But then I decided he couldn't be so self-conscious that he was timid. More playful. And from there I got to the fact that each one of them loves being a linguist, but for different reasons. For him, language and culture are all fun, never work, and he just can't get enough. For her, language and culture are such serious business that she devotes herself entirely. Suddenly I saw both how they would be able to work toward the same goal and how they would encounter conflict along the way. They would be able to do what I needed, but they would have personality, and each one would have a different form of influence on the story.

All of a sudden I really want to go write this thing.

It's something to think about if you ever feel your characters aren't quite coming to life.

Merging Experience and Fiction (Write what you know)

I just finished writing a chapter that I would not have been able to write ten years ago.

This is not entirely true; I could have written the chapter, but it wouldn't have come out the way it did. I mean, I know my characters really well. I've thought through their personal histories and their cultural backgrounds and all of that, which puts me in a good position to delve into the layers of their reactions to events. I know, for example, that my antagonist is not going to respond to a pass in the way normal people would because he's more interested in experiences that can stop him from entering obsessive thought cycles than he is in falling in love, or even experiencing simple physical pleasure. Since I'm not subject to these obsessive cycles myself, this kind of writing does not access my own personal experience...except inasmuch as I'm very good at internalizing certain kinds of language patterns, so I've "learned his language."

But for the chapter I just wrote, I used my own experience - of childbirth, and motherhood.

I've spoken to a couple of people about this chapter, and on both occasions I was asked whether this was my own experience. My husband even asked me if I was ever afraid that my son was going to die. In fact, I wasn't at all - never once.

So what did I actually give to this chapter from my own experience?

In this chapter a critical female character is speaking to her servant about the birth of her son, while the two of them watch over him in a sickbed (he's in danger of dying). My gloss for what she would speak to him about was this: "She talks about what her son means to her." Super-vague. When I got to the point of writing it I realized that she could explain what her son means to her by telling the story of how he was born, and illuminate aspects of her own life experience at the same time. I didn't hesitate to go to my own experience at this point - as a resource which I could then fit to the needs of the story.

Here's sort of how the process went.

1. "I need to have her describe a difficult first birth experience."
2. "Hey, my first birth experience was difficult!"
3. "Yeah, but she can't have had a C-section. No problem, I'll just say she didn't have one."
4. "Even if she didn't have a C-section, her baby can still have been weak at birth and taken away for treatment, like mine. That totally fits with the whole weak-blood-of-the-nobility thing."
5. "But because she's scared in this chapter that he'll die, she has to have been scared back then too that her baby would die. So I'll say they kept him away longer than mine."
6. "Hey, I bet I could also use that frustrated feeling I got with my second child when they didn't show her to me for an hour. An hour would be a good time frame."
7. "Shoot, and she's got this cad of a husband (unlike me!!!) who cares more about sustaining the population of the nobility than he does about her, and so she must have been really worried about how he'd react if the baby died."
   
8. "Boy, I remember how I felt when I realized my son would be okay. So that means she won't have been able to be happy precisely, but that she'll have cried and promised him the two of them would be okay."
9. "And that means that she'll want more than ever in the current scene to promise him that he'll be okay."
10. "And imagine how helpless she'd feel! Wow, that's exactly what I've felt like when I have been up late at night over a baby with a fever and the telephone next to me in case the advice nurse calls back."
    

It was therefore on the basis of this thought process that I wrote the chapter in question. I think it's interesting to note that I didn't use only one of my own experiences. I used three. The framework was my own first birth experience, but on two occasions I accessed other emotional states that I had experienced with my children - the delay in seeing my newborn daughter, and the fear of sitting up with a sick child.

What is in the chapter now isn't my experience at all. It's entirely hers - her trials and her fears in her social context. But because I experienced something like it, I know that the feelings that I'm trying to evoke are real, and that the chapter is stronger as a result.

The Scope of the Conflict

When you're writing a story, there needs to be conflict. Person versus person, person versus extreme environment, whatever it is... conflict is a necessary ingredient for making a story work. You may also have noticed that it's good to have both internal conflict and external conflict - conflict within the main character gives that person more dimension and also gives them a trickier time resolving the save-the-world conflict part. It's important also, I think, to consider the scope of the conflict that you are working with.

When considering scope, you can always start with two basic questions:

• how many people are involved?
• how many people are affected?

The scope of the conflict will influence how much work you'll have to do to make your story hook readers.

If the scope of the conflict is too small - only one person is involved, and nobody is affected - you may find readers going "so what?" You can make a story work with a conflict that involves and affects only one person, but in that case it will be very important to answer the question of why it matters that this person get through the conflict. Maybe in the case of personal moral dilemmas the significance comes from questions about the nature of human morality - the individual symbolizing us all, and thereby giving the small scope a larger meaning.

On the other side of things, you have the save-the-world/universe conflict, in which you have a large number of people involved, and absolutely everybody is affected. The number of people involved will be somewhat limited by what the narrative can bear without confusing readers. In The Lord of the Rings, we're dealing with all of Middle Earth falling into darkness, and so many people are involved that the narrative splits in order to deal with them all. Furthermore, almost anyone can be enlisted from the population of passersby to act on one side or another of the conflict, because it affects all of them.

In the case of The Lord of the Rings, everybody knows about the conflict and it's easy to get everyone involved. In the Harry Potter books, I found it interesting that the scope of the conflict kept increasing. At first it seemed like just Harry was involved, and maybe a few more people. Then the further we went the more it became clear that all of the wizarding world was involved, and by the end we were starting to see that even the Muggle world was involved. Good stuff.

But if we're to talk about potential problems with the scope of story conflict, I have to mention the Harry Potter books here too, because I had a quibble with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on the level of scope. I entered that book with the impression that the conflict would center on Harry and his friends as both the primary people involved, and those affected - but it turned out that there were many more people involved, and that Harry and his friends were occupying a small corner of the affected area, in such a way that I wasn't convinced there was any way they could actually have resolved the conflict on their own. This isn't something that will bother everyone, but it bothered me at the time.

If the scope of your conflict is too large, readers may be confused. Make sure that you're showing all the people involved, and taking the necessary steps to imply the number of people affected. If the scope is too small, relevant only to the main characters and not to anyone else, make sure that you're showing readers why such personal stakes matter.

The reader's understanding of the full scope of your conflict isn't something that should necessarily remain the same, either. Expanding the scope of the conflict - at least in terms of the number of people affected - is part of what raises the stakes as the story progresses. You can plan ahead for moments that reveal expansions in scope: that moment when suddenly you realize that more people were involved than you ever suspected. Or the moment when you realize that a single decision that rests on one character's conscience will affect everyone you have read about so far.

Of course, the issue is more complex than I can really explain through generalities, so here are a few of my thoughts about scope from my writing of my new novel, For Love, For Power.

I'm finding that I have to keep reminding myself about issues of scope. The main characters are all members of a single nuclear family which has lots of internal struggles, and at the same time, they are involved in a larger-scale conflict over the leadership of the nation of Varin that will affect everyone. Where the question of scope becomes more complex is in the fact that their nuclear family is part of the larger group called the First Family, and that there are twelve Great Families in the nobility, all of whom have a stake in the leadership struggle. Because of this, I have to decide how many of them are involved in events (say, attacks and attempted assassinations, meetings and negotiations) that directly affect the First Family and my characters. Logically, since everyone is involved in the process, the events that affect my characters are not the only ones that are going on at any given time. I'm finding that I have to build in ways for my characters to get information about aspects of the ongoing conflict that don't directly affect them. Otherwise it would appear that the First Family is the only important group here, and then why would the struggle for leadership have any meaning? Thus, if the First Family is attacked, then very likely several other families will suffer attacks on the same day (and some may be initiated by the First Family!). If people who attended a particular event are getting sick, then maybe my small group of First Family members should get a message letting them know how many people are ill and how far it affects the nobility as a whole. At the same time, I also have to realize, and try to hint to readers, that the First Family is not the only group experiencing internal struggles. Otherwise their efforts to affect the First Family would be too effective. In fact, I am planning deliberately to have some of the other Families' efforts to affect the power struggle fail because of internal problems in their group. I guess I would call it a question of making sure that I imply the scope of the type of conflicts and setbacks that the First Family suffers, and not just the scope of the overall power struggle.

It's something to think about.

Bringing characters together

Personal alliances can be critical to the success of a story. To me these include acquaintances, friendships, close friendships and romances. I find that it's really important, if I'm going to have two characters who have a friendship, to understand why it is that they are friends. One of the potential pitfalls of writing stories is that we can set up our cast of characters and place them on stage, announcing, "these people are friends" without deeply considering what they have in common and what brought them together. When we have two people fall in love, this can (I suppose) happen instantly and simply through pure physical attraction, but I like to consider a little more than just the "hhhot" factor when trying to get two people together. Indeed, I find it even more fun when the people are coming together in a more complicated way, as through adversity, overcoming dislike, becoming attracted without realizing it, etc.

I'm going to consider some basic alignment ingredients first, and then talk about engaging in the process of bringing two people together for an unlikely romance.

My current protagonist, Tagret, has three friends he always hangs around with. They have ended up together partly because they're all well-bred boys with a lot of money, a good deal of kindness, and an interest in school. However, each of them has an additional reason to hang around Tagret, and that affects how they deal with him. Gowan is very politically oriented, and not only does he like Tagret, but he recognizes the strength of Tagret's political position (through his father) and thinks it's advantageous to hang out with him because of that. This means the other boys are inclined to ask him for advice on political matters. Fernar is secretly attracted to Tagret, making him more inclined to physical games. He's also the strongest and everyone wants him on his side in a fight. Tagret's best friend is Reyn. Why? Because both of them share the experience of living alone with a sibling and a house full of servants while their parents have been sent to other cities for jobs. Because of this, they stick together and help each other through trouble more than the others. Details like these not only make it plausible that these boys would be friends, but allow each person to interact differently with the others.

We can think of these as things that the characters have in common. We can also bring characters closer in a story through letting them face adversity together. Events that bring characters closer are generally increasing the ways in which the two people align with one another.

Okay, so let's look at romance for a minute. The #1-A thing that everyone is going to think of to bring two people together is physical attraction. Yep, no surprise there. But particularly if a romance is going to be building over the course of an entire story, and ending in a lasting relationship rather than just a one-night stand, there has to be more to it than just hotness. I will tend to think of it in terms of two lists: 1. the list of things that separate the two people and 2. the list of things that they have in common. If I cause events to negate the effects of anything in list 2, the people will fall apart. If they are going instead to form a lasting relationship, any extremely serious objections or separation elements from list one have to be directly and deliberately countered by adding elements to list two.

In my Varin world, caste level distinctions are huge - cultural as well as legal - and not easily countered. One of the cross-caste relationships in my books results because a servant sees someone else disguised as another servant, and becomes both physically attracted to her and intellectually engaged with her before he realizes his mistake. Importantly, thought, he is also at the same time learning things about the historical origins of the caste distinctions that cause him to doubt what he'd always believed about them. Another relationship begins more subtly, because one of the characters feels so intimidated by the physicality of the other that his physicality impresses her more than his caste. Here the intimidation itself is an influence that keeps them apart - however, because it causes her to disregard his caste, I can then work on removing the sense of intimidation, and thereafter the caste factors will have less power to separate them.

I keep the alignment/separation lists in my mind when I'm writing conversations, and when I'm writing descriptions. If one character expresses unadulterated admiration for another, then that is going to suggest bringing them together - but it may not be realistic or appropriate for that person to express such admiration. I therefore play with ambivalence by putting expressions of admiration and separation in the same sentence or internalized description. "Alien but beautiful" might express one kind of ambivalence. "Possessing refined warmth" also suggests a contrast that might be meaningful to a different person.

Whenever we work with close relationships, we end up playing right along the edge of discomfort. Getting closer with someone else involves considerable risk. This should be reflected in the writing. Often events that tighten alignment also cause discomfort or a sense of invasion. Then the question becomes what to make of that discomfort - whether to soothe it, or to intensify it, etc. Discomfort is an opportunity for a writer who is trying to align two people, because situations that are uncomfortable are often perfect for initiating change in a person's mind.

When you're working with relationships in your stories, do take the time to ask yourself some questions like those below:
1. Why are these people friends? What specific things do they find most compelling about one another, and why?
2. Does this relationship require a backstory of specific aligning events, such as hardship? Or does it simply require basic common conditions?
3. How big a role does physical attraction play in the relationship between these characters?
4. What keeps or pulls these two people apart?
5. What ingredients might be able to counter the factors listed in question 4, and bring them together?
6. Can I use common experiences to erase the effects of prejudgment?
7. Can I align these two people in a similar way relative to a third party, event or task?
8. Are these people aware that they are coming together? If they are, how do they react to the knowledge? If they aren't, why aren't they? Is there something about the nature of the separation factors that keeps them from considering the possibility of their attraction?

Please be aware (though it should be no surprise to most of you) that I'm coming at these questions from a human-relations and anthropology viewpoint rather than a romance-writing viewpoint, so I can't speak to the particular requirements of the romance genre. However, I hope that these considerations can help you in thinking about relationships in your own work.

TTYU Retro: Companions

Companions. Doctor Who is famous for them - Leela, Peri, Sarah Jane Smith, Adric, etc, etc - but almost everyone has them. In some cases they're sidekicks of a sort for a single main character. In other cases a larger group sticks together. Frodo has Sam. Aang has Katara, Sokka, Toff (and Appa!). Zuko has Iroh. The list could go on and on.

Why are companions so important?

One reason is social realism. There aren't that many complete loners out there. People have friends that they live their lives with.

Another reason is that the main character needs help. When you look at the Avatar group (Sokka wanted to call them "team Avatar" I believe), it's balanced between different types of people. There's an air-bender, a water-bender, an earth-bender and a warrior. That gives them a wide range of skills and strengths that they can use to get through their stories successfully.

Another big reason is information management. The Doctor has mountains of specialized skills and knowledge - because he's a Time Lord! - but without the companions he'd have no reason to explain any of it. If you have a major character who's an incredible specialist on some topic, you can always show him or her doing what he/she is good at... but if you build in an information imbalance between that person and someone else, it gives him/her an opportunity to explain where that skill came from, or how it works, or any number of other things that would otherwise feel like blatant infodumping.

Conflict is another reason to have companions. Conflict can serve the purposes of information management, as when two people start arguing and that lets them divulge information to the reader that the characters already know (without using as-you-know-Bobs), but I've separated it out because it actually does a lot more than that. Conflict is an enormous source of drive in the plot. Ongoing disputes (of the right variety) between a character and her companion can influence where the story goes and keep us wanting to see what happens. Conflict can also drive character development.

Dealing with an introverted character is a lot easier if that person has a companion. You can make good use of internalized thoughts when you're working with the written rather than the visual medium, but still, internalization can only take you so far. A companion gives the introverted character a reason to try to speak - or perhaps a reason to try not to speak! A companion will bring certain topics into the introverted person's thoughts. Appa gives Aang a reason to talk out loud even when he's alone, which is very useful to the storyteller who can't make any use of internalization. This is also a big motivator behind the presence of animal sidekicks in the Disney movies (that, and humor).

Companions also create wonderful opportunities to explore language. Some companions maintain an ongoing banter which can really add to the ambiance of the whole story. Their talk can be helpful for a story not only for content reasons, but for dialect reasons, and for the way it reveals aspects of the social contract in the community from which they (or each one) comes.

I'm not going to end this by saying you need to go off and give your protagonist a companion. Sometimes that's the right thing for a story, and sometimes it isn't - but it's worth considering. Even if the companionship is short-lived within the story, it can still be a valuable addition to what you're creating.

Chances are that if you've gotten much of a story written (especially a novel) you already have companions built into it. If you do, then it's worth looking at them and thinking explicitly about how they are functioning and what kind of work they are doing for you, the writer, as well as what they're doing for the other characters. That way you can deepen them, tune them, and strengthen them so that they're making a bigger difference for your story.

It's something to think about.

How and where to begin a story

How and where to begin a story is always - always - a hard question. I have gone back and changed the beginning for nearly every story I've written. In some cases, I have changed the beginning multiple times over the course of revision. It's enough to make one go batty!

The fact is, while there is no absolute rule, a story generally should begin with:

• the main conflict, or some event that is a direct tributary of the main conflict
• the main character

This may sound simple, but there's more to it than that.

I put the main conflict first because the main conflict is what drives the story forward, and sometimes the main conflict does not start in the same place that the main character does. Often in works where a murder mystery occurs and where the antagonist is mysterious, the book will start with a segment from the antagonist's point of view. This establishes the stakes, i.e. why exactly it is that a reader should care about what the main character is going to try to accomplish. Thus, when we get to the point where we're seeing the main character - likely doing something far more innocuous - we already get a sense of danger, anticipation, and most importantly, curiosity about what happens next. When, as in Janice Hardy's The Shifter, the character has a secret and her safety depends on nobody finding out about it, it makes perfect sense for the story to begin with a scene that results in this secret being discovered. That's what I would call a tributary scene, where the scene has its own natural stakes and drive, but delivers us into a place where the main conflict has clearly begun. For my current work in progress, the opening scene is one that shows the main character in a situation where it is important for him to pay attention to how he and his reputation are perceived by others, and then shows him being driven step by step off his comfortable ordinary concerns into a place of extreme danger, not because of the antagonist, but because of a contagious disease and the fear that the disease causes in people around him. The disease then becomes a driver that leads to a second major change, the death of a person in power, that propels the story toward its conclusion.

I'll return in a second to the issue of "being driven step by step off his comfortable ordinary concerns," but before I do that I want to address the question of backstory.

I often feel like choosing an opening scene for a story is like trying to create a see-saw. You have a big piece of story (it might even be your protagonist's whole life!) and you have to balance it on that opening scene. The part that chronologically precedes the opening scene is the backstory; the part that follows is the story. My rule of thumb is this:

Any piece of backstory that contributes directly to the identity of the protagonist, his/her culture, his/her self-awareness, and his/her basis for decision making can be portrayed indirectly through the protagonist's actions, and thus need not be included in the main story.

You may have noticed that I've arrived at "the main character" here.

Point of view is my ultimate ally in this. I think about it in the following terms: we judge our experiences and choose our actions on the basis of our personality and experience; thus, aspects of personality and experience can be included at points where our protagonist judges events, and chooses to act.

Here's an example from For Love, For Power of me doing the backstory thing with character judgment. Tagret (my main character) is going to a concert in the ballroom and one of his friends tells him that a new Cabinet member will be announced at the event, and that it might be Tagret's father. Here's how Tagret responds:

"It wouldn't matter," Tagret said. "My father wouldn't risk coming all the way back across the continent just for a Cabinet seat. He's too happy ruling Selimna where nobody can reach him." No Father meant none of Father's nasty surprises, and it would be preferable to keep him there, except that his last and worst surprise had been taking Mother with him.

The fact that Tagret's parents have been gone in a place so far that they can't come back to visit, that he hates his father and loves his mother, and that his father is important enough to consider a Cabinet seat not worth his while - all of these are important pieces of information for understanding the story as it continues. They are relevant here not because Tagret stops out of his ordinary concerns to muse on them, but because he's using them as a basis for his evaluation of the ongoing talk, and his response.

The fact is that an opening scene is strongest when it's a point of convergence. It shows conflict, it shows character, and it shows world (you didn't think I'd forget world, did you?) all at once in an active and engaged way. At the beginning of the story, a reader needs to be grounded in all three.

Grounding is absolutely critical in an opening scene. This is the word I give to basic reader orientation. The reader needs to be oriented - in some way - to the who, what, and where of the story. These elements can be presented in different sorts of balance, as when our protagonist is feeling disoriented and not knowing where he/she is, but they are very important. Imagine the main character as a runner, and you're about to be tied to that runner with a rope so you can follow along at (possibly breakneck) speed for the entire story. If you are going to be able to do this, you have to have your feet on the ground. Otherwise the runner will end up dragging you, spinning and yelling, until you manage to untie yourself and get away.

This is why starting in the middle of extreme action is not a good idea. Everett Maroon had a good post on this issue, here. In your opening scene, your main character should be doing something that requires him/her to indicate to readers who he/she is and what his/her normal concerns are. Until "normal" is established, the abnormal will have no meaning. Even if your character is disoriented, he/she can still try to make sense of what is going on around him/her in terms of what would be normal under ordinary circumstances.

Similarly, starting with simple introspection or gazing out at views is not a good idea either. It's not just that you've omitted the conflict. It's also that you've shackled yourself in terms of backstory and world. It's not only that people don't sit down and contemplate the basic normal conditions of their lives for no reason. It's that backstory and world belong in the background, and if there is nothing going on, they will necessarily take the front seat. By starting with your main character in a situation of conflict that leads directly to the main conflict of the story, you do several things:

1. You give your main character an opportunity to introduce him/herself through action and judgment
2. You give your main character the opportunity to introduce his/her world through action and judgment
3. You orient readers and establish where the story will be going next
4. You place the drive (the hook!) of the story front and center so readers can catch hold
   

As you consider where to place your opening scene, think of the two basic criteria of main conflict and main character - but if it's not obvious where that scene needs to happen, think through the more detailed questions. Ask yourself:

• in what context could the main character best demonstrate his/her core motivations, possibly through indirect reference to backstory?
• in what location the main character could best portray the conditions of his/her world that have the greatest bearing on the story as it goes forward?
• in what situation would the significance of the main conflict to this character become most evident?

Once you've arrived at an answer, don't figure it's the answer. Be aware that it's perfectly okay to start in the wrong place - if I didn't realize that, I would never finish anything. In the first draft, the most important thing is to find a point of entry where the story starts telling itself to you. Then you can go back later and refine the placement of that scene so it does the most for the story as a whole. After all, sometimes you don't know where the story is going until you've finished it. And since a major point of an opening scene is to show, or foreshadow, where the story is going, you'll be able to place it a lot better if you actually know where the story is going!

Dive in and go for it. These are just a few things for you to think about as you prepare to do so.

Do characters really need to be likeable?

I've seen multiple discussions recently, in various locations, of whether characters in stories need to be likeable. At last I was inspired by Janice Hardy's post yesterday on what makes one POV "better" than another to write out my thoughts.

I don't personally think that all characters have to be likeable - not by a long stretch. I can see the point of those people who say much of a story may be lost if everyone has to be likeable. But I do remember feeling that I just couldn't stand the characters of "Seinfeld" - and for that reason I couldn't be bothered watching them for more than five minutes without feeling they'd robbed me of valuable time. What is the critical criterion?

My answer is going to seem overly simple, but I think characters have to be relatable, not likeable. There has to be some quality about them that makes you feel like you recognize them, and that they are real.

So what makes a character relatable?

This is a question that I've done a lot of thinking about. I write science fiction and fantasy, and that involves creating lots of alienness - alien languages, fantasy cultures, characters who are not human and characters temporally or physically (even physiologically) far divorced from our day-to-day experience. I don't get to work with the girl or boy next door, unless that person is about to encounter something really unexpected! However, in my writing I always strive to give my readers the insider's viewpoint. That means that if I want the story to succeed, particularly if I want to push a reader out of his or her usual way of thinking, it's absolutely essential for me to try to achieve that relatability, in order to invite reader investment in even the most unusual characters.

Every point of view character should have at least one relatable element - even antagonists. It's also likely that you'll want to find relatable elements for non-point of view characters. This kind of element could be:

• a relatable goal - e.g. wanting to fall in love, or wanting monetary or other success, wanting freedom or justice, wanting to create or protect family, or even just wanting to keep a full stomach and a roof over their heads, etc.
• a relatable external conflict - e.g. being up against racial or other discrimination (in the case of sf/f, we often see "other"), facing peer pressure, facing bullying, dealing with bureaucracy, dealing with a rival for the same goal, etc.
  
• a relatable personal characteristic (good or bad) - e.g. being deeply religious, being dedicated to one's work, having a disability, experiencing self-doubt, depression, or a recognizable mental illness, trying to pursue a virtuous life, being haunted by one's past mistakes, caring deeply for others, being unable to make a decision, etc.

At this point I'll give some character examples from my own writing, to try to make this a bit more concrete.

From "Let the Word Take Me":
David Linden is a kid who is trying to win the approval of his father.
Allayo is a gecko-like alien. She is deeply principled and understands her life through her faith.

From "Cold Words":
Rulii is a 6'4" wolflike alien. He is discriminated against as an oppressed minority, and has paid a steep price for the power to help his people: he's addicted to a cocaine-like substance because it keeps him from shivering and thereby losing his ability to work toward justice.

From "At Cross Purposes":
Lynn is an engineer who loves her work and resents a boss who doesn't understand what she does.
Tsee is an otter-like alien. She would do anything to protect her twin brother, and she loves science and beautiful things.

From my WIP "For Love, For Power" (with special thanks to beta reader Jamie Todd Rubin for pointing this out):
Tagret is a privileged boy who loves his mother, suffers because his mother and father hate each other, and experiences awkwardness in trying to approach the girl he likes.
Aloran is born a servant, but believes in gender equality and becomes angry when he sees anyone abused.
Nekantor is a power-hungry boy (the antagonist) who suffers from mental illness including paranoia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

From this list you may notice that I find character psychology to be a great ally. Even a character like Rulii who seems very strange, or someone very unlikeable like Nekantor, can be relatable. Funny enough, suffering for a recognizable reason - and by that I mean really experiencing distress - has huge potential for increasing relatability.

What about your characters do you find relatable? Are they likeable? Do you see a difference?

It's something to think about.

Never "just description": making description subjective

Description is never just description.

It took me quite a long while to figure that out. I suppose when one first starts writing, one begins by exercising one's access to words and images, and thinking of the most beautiful, or the most visceral, or the most fill-in-the blank way to describe what one imagines. When you're using your own voice as an omniscient storytelling narrator, that can work just fine. However, once I started writing in close points of view, I started to realize that every time I went into a "description," I'd lose the sense of closeness. And that was a problem I had to fix.

The fact is that description is always subjective in some way. It is literally impossible to capture every detail about something in the real world. Every time we notice and name an object, that is a subjective choice. Every time we put an adjective on something, that is also a subjective choice. Subjectively, we decide what is noticeable and what is too normal to draw anyone's attention to.

If you keep this in mind, then it becomes possible to discover just how subjective your descriptions can be. Particularly if you work with close point of view, the identity of your character is going to change the way that things are described. Every word you choose is an opportunity to show something about your character.

To make this more concrete, let's play with it a little. I have a room in my work-in-progress, and I just had my main character walk into it. That means I had to describe it. But before I show you how I described it for him, I'll describe it in a few different ways (all third person, just for the sake of consistency).

As myself:

The Hall of the Eminence is a long, rectangular room with stone walls, columns and ceiling arches in the style of a European cathedral. The arches are decorated with mosaic tiles of variegated blue with occasional tiles in gold. Crystal chandeliers hang from the ceiling. The floor is covered in a white silk carpet patterned with the green swirling insignia of the Grobal caste. There are embroidered hangings on the walls, and there is a wooden dais at the end where sits the carved wooden throne of the Eminence.

This description is very informational and makes reference to the real world. It shows no positioning words to indicate any physical point of view. I might as well be hovering above it, or nowhere near it at all. I'm certainly not interacting with it in any way. It reads like a blueprint - good for my personal notes or outline, but useless for the story.

As a member of the merchant caste walking in alone, having never seen the place before:

The room made him want to shrink and retreat. Its arches stretched probably two stories high, and with every step of these ordinary shoes, he risked defiling a symbol of nobility. The chandeliers above and the embroidered hangings on the walls all around would have fetched a pretty price at the Exchange, but nothing compared to the wood of the stage at the far end. Not to mention the throne itself - a single piece of wood so large it would bring more than the worth of his entire family.

This description has a lot more to it. There's an emotional reaction to the sight of the room, and the person assesses its size ("probably two stories"). There's positional information ("the far end"). He draws a contrast between ordinary and noble. His actions have social consequences (defiling). He also shows his own idiosyncratic knowledge base and his personal priorities as he assesses the worth of various objects in the room.

As a fugitive:

She whipped around a corner and burst through the first door she found. Damn - just her luck she'd find the one room in this place where there was nowhere to hide. The place was bright and open, and even the wall-hangings were too flat, too high off the floor to give any cover. Maybe that stage with the big throne? She sprinted toward it, but it was worse - wooden boards that thudded under her feet, sure to announce her presence to any pursuers. With so many doors all around, they could come from anywhere!

Unlike the last person, this person has an urgent purpose in the room. She doesn't care about the richness of the room, but swears about finding a place so large and open. I can let her assess possible hiding spots, and thereby get in a little about the room, but really she doesn't care much about what's in it. She judges what she encounters, and pays no attention to the value of anything except as it serves her goal.

As my protagonist:

Tagret straightened up fast. The Hall of the Eminence was packed with potential enemies. To be on guard, he needed his eyes open. And to be the man Mother wanted everyone to see, he had to stand gracefully, making the high mosaic arches of the ceiling his portrait-frames, and the crystal chandeliers his spotlights. Father's hand stayed on his arm as the rest of their party came in. From the wall-hangings all the way to the dais with the wooden throne, the crowd glittered in ostentatious clothing, muted somewhat by the grieving yellow of mourning scarves. More and more eyes watched him as people entered through the doors around the Hall, clustering by Family. From this vantage point he couldn't see anyone he could clearly identify as either Sixth Family, or Ninth. Eleventh seemed like it might be in the far corner.

Tagret cares far more about people and the interaction he's entering than he does about the place, which is very familiar to him. Therefore, all the information about the room itself is backgrounded to his other concerns. In this scene, the conflict all comes from the interaction, so there's no reason for him to give any direct attention to the physical location at all. However, it's important for readers to know what the place looks like, so I let Tagret use the room's features incidentally to serve his own focus. He's also taller than most people in the room, so he has a pretty good view across the crowd, which affects how he describes it.

I hope these examples give you a sense of how widely descriptions of the same thing can differ from one another. In your own writing, as you approach a description of a place, an object, or a situation, here are some things to think about:

• Does this place/object/situation have a special social significance to my character?
• Is it unexpected, abnormal, or otherwise unusual (will appear in description)? Or is it normal (less likely to appear; more likely to be backgrounded)?
• What is the current mood of my character?
• What is my character's goal and primary focus as he/she encounters this place/object/situation?
• Does the physical position and/or size of my character affect how he/she would describe it?

By thinking through these things before you start to describe, you'll discover many more opportunities to make your description subjective, and thereby to make it unique.

A Character-driven Approach to Kissing Scenes and Sex Scenes

The day I tried to write my first sex scene was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. I'd avoided it for a long time, and then I realized that the story I was writing demanded it (not the first time I'd changed what I felt I was capable of due to the demands of a story). I had this idea of what had to happen, and I tried to write it. When I got through I realized it had devolved into a succession of meaningless generic actions and disconnected body parts.

It was awful. And, I realized, it was "sex-driven" in a bad way, the same way that stories can seem pointless and over-wrought when they are too heavily driven by plot.

Something changed for me at that point. I realized that that the point of a sex scene was not the sex.

Why do we need sex scenes? I suppose for erotica that they would be part of the point, but in my stories that's not it at all. In my stories, I have two people developing a relationship, and what is most important is what that relationship means to them, and how it changes them. I had already figured that out for kissing scenes, so that was where I went when I had to re-think the sex scenes.

As I see it, a first kiss is a form of communication between the characters. Tension may be building - and this is something I do by having the characters become more aware of one another physically, say, noticing for the first time the way the other person's throat moves when he drinks - but somebody starts it. The other person then has to decide whether to permit the kiss, and whether to return it. Internalization is critical here. Too little internalization and it will seem like I've slapped the kiss on from my position as author. More internalization may make it seem like the poor character is in agony trying to make the decision (which he or she may be!). Occasionally, since this is a big turning point in a story, I'll switch points of view and place the kiss itself at a chapter break so I can then move into the recipient's head and gauge the reaction.

What is important is not the movements. Yes, we can say "oh, this is how far they went this time." But what is important for me in a kiss is the nature of the communication - the psychological conditions that permit someone to take the chance, and the experience of the other person in response.

A sex scene is the same for me. The question is much less "how far did they go" but "what did they decide to do and why, and how did it affect the way they will interact in the future?"

I therefore place my focus on the characters. I start by asking, "What significance does this scene have for the characters, and for the story as a whole?" That will help me gauge what is necessary. If the scene is incidental, like a scene demonstrating that a character has sex as part of his everyday life and doesn't think much of it, then it will get a lot less attention. You'll see where the couple make their decision, and follow through with little detail, the critical ingredient being what the act means, and what it does for the characters, rather than what they do. I have one scene where a character makes love with his girlfriend because this is something relatively normal that they do often, and it helps him to release anxiety from the earlier part of his day.

The buildup for a first sex act is usually much longer. This I think is natural because, compared to kissing, the first occasion of such intimacy has far greater significance - and much greater possible disasters associated with it. Romance novels, after all, spend almost the entire book getting there! What I have found, though, is that in this case the physical act itself is far less important. I can build up the psychological conditions necessary, and once the two characters have made the decision to act, I can end the scene. The only reason I might include physical details is if there is some consequence of the act itself that must be experienced in order for readers to understand the characters as they carry forward.

All of this is to say that I recommend including only the most character-relevant details in a story, either when you're dealing with a kissing scene or with a sex scene (or anything else, for that matter!). Keep the motivations, the decisions, the justifications, whatever it is. Keep the mental states that matter in the front of your lens, and let all physical details follow directly from them. It's the best way I have found to create a scene of intimacy that actually fits the characters I'm working with, and matters to the story, without letting things fall into clichéd motions and lists of body parts.

Because of the subject of this post, I'm going to be moderating comments, but I am interested to hear what you think on the topic.

TTYU Retro: Don't make them all the same

Because I've had a couple of three-day weekends that seriously cut into my work time (and have me stressing about how to keep blogging enough, while writing enough at the same time) I've decided to go back and revisit a few posts from way back at the beginning (2008), when this blog was new and relatively unknown. I'm calling them TTYU Retros, and I hope you find them interesting. Today's was my first very successful blog post, which took me over 100 hits for the first time (a number which I didn't revisit again for a long time). I'll be posting Wednesday Worldbuilding as usual, tomorrow - but for now, here's:

Don't make them all the same

Keeping characters different from each other can be hard. I've noticed this especially when I read a large number of books from the same author; at a certain point, some of the characters will start to blend together across contexts. As a reader I never appreciate this. As a writer I'm always on my guard.

My attempted solution - not that I can swear it won't happen eventually, but I'll do my best - is to make my own characters as grounded culturally and linguistically as I can. To think about them in terms of their genetic background, physiology, upbringing, and personal experience.

I've seen a couple of "character sheets" floating around the forums this week, where people have been asking if they have to know all these different things about all their characters, or if they need to write journals from the character's point of view. I think these things can help, but they can also be hard to do when you're sitting down to start a book. I'd say start with a general sense of the person, their motivations and goals and why these things are important to them. Then, as you go forward, just keep awareness of the different kinds of questions you might like to answer on the more subtle levels. The more you write about a character, the better you get to know them and the more nuance you can add. In my experience, for getting to know a character and how they operate, there's no substitute for writing a story from their point of view - even just starting and attempting one that will never get published. It makes you dig in more than you need to if you're just using a character sheet and looking at them from the outside.

The other thing is, don't make every character from a particular alien or racial group exactly the same. This is what I've earlier referred to as "running true to type." It's fun to have a group of people from different races, whether that be elves, dwarves and humans, Braxana and Azeans (thanks to C.S. Friedman) or the people of Sendaria, Arendia, Nyissa etc. (thanks to David Eddings). But if the belief systems of these people are entirely uncontested, uniform across the race or alien group, the story won't have all the dimension it could.

There are two ways to approach this. One is from the character direction, making sure that your characters are three-dimensional and have motives and inner conflicts and all those important things. That's certainly true of the characters from the authors I've mentioned. The other is to think directly about the character's relationship to the social group they belong to. I couldn't say whether other authors have thought about this; they may well have.

Take a social group that has a particular vocation, belief, or ideology that they are meant to follow. You end up with a situation where children of that group are being told "this is what you are like"; "this is how you are supposed to act." How do the kids then react to that? Do they embrace it? Are they resentful of it? Resigned? Subversive? Do they reject it directly? And if they reject it, do they keep some of the beliefs subconsciously without realizing it? All these are available options.

Ask yourself another question, too: what does it mean to be fortunate among these people? What about unfortunate? Even a group of poor or undercaste will have a difference between the fortunate and unfortunate among them, and so will a group of nobles. And groups like these will always have inner conflicts over things of value, which coexist with conflicts between groups.

Once you've thought through a few things like this, making characters different can be a bit easier. And fun, too!

Multi-character scenes and conversations

Some time ago, I wrote a blog entry called "Three-Person Conversations." Now that I'm writing a book where my main character has three friends, and he's going to parties and public events a lot, I'm finding that I'm revisiting this context, and considering it in terms of multi-character scenes.

These scenes can be disorienting at times for a writer - and if the writer is feeling disoriented, imagine how the reader must feel! My main technique for avoiding confusion (all over my writing) is close point of view. The point of view allows me to provide a single person's understanding of the situation, and to control information by limiting it to that person's perceptions and judgments. Here are some more things to think about as you head into that crowded situation.

1. Consider the entry.
A. Is your character prepared for this situation? Does he/she expect it? What is his/her state of mind? What is his/her purpose in entering?
B. Is your character alone as he/she enters the situation, or does he/she have someone to bring him/her in who will give purpose and direction to their entry?
It's funny, but sometimes when I can't figure out how to get a character to walk into a room cold, I can help myself with the dynamics by giving him another person to walk in with.

2. Consider the character's general impression of the situation.
What does he/she notice first? A particular person, or group of people? An overall impression of chaos? Of bustling activity? Of subdued general chit-chat?
Establishing an initial overall impression of the scene will allow you to set up the general dynamic in the reader's mind; then you can focus on smaller interactions within it, and return to the general dynamic in transitions between those interactions.

3. Consider the drive of smaller interactions.
Is your character's goal the primary thing taking him/her from one interaction to another? Or is your character being buffeted by circumstance from one interaction to another, and trying to stay afloat?
Knowing whether your character or the situation is the primary driver will help you decide how to begin minor interactions and move between them.

4. Consider the dynamic of smaller interactions.
Is your character engaging in one-on-one interactions within the larger situation? What are the conditions under which more people would join each interaction? Interruption? Being brought in by one of the conversation participants? How does your point of view character react to this kind of complexity? Easily, or with some kind of emotional reaction? Are there any times when a single individual gets the attention of the entire group?

5. Within smaller interactions, make sure to consider each participant's motives, background and state of mind.
Even if you're not using other characters' points of view, keeping track of who is interacting and what they want will help you to differentiate between participants, which is especially important when many characters are present.

6. Consider how long each interaction should last.
Is there room within the larger situation for people to have long private conversations? Or does the larger dynamic keep smaller interactions relatively short?

7. Consider how to maintain the reader's awareness, both of the participants in smaller interactions, and of the larger situation.
Is your character aware of things going on outside the interaction in which he/she is engaged? How does that affect his/her engagement in the smaller interaction? Are there people present in the smaller interaction who don't say much but can be noticed in their body language so readers don't forget they are there?

I hope these thoughts give you some ways to analyze those party scenes, playground scenes, ballroom scenes, cocktail lounge scenes, and all the different kinds of multi-character scenes that may present themselves in your writing. I find that thinking these things through can help me improve a scene I've written on gut instinct, or head into a new scene that I'm having trouble starting.

So jump into the group dynamic and have some fun!