Be a people watcher

Our fictional characters are all around us if we’re willing to look and to speculate. Today a man we’ve seen before waited at a crosswalk for traffic to ease. Slightly stooped, he had a white beard and deep wrinkles, a denim jacket and dirty slacks. Earlier in the week, the desert heat had risen to 106, and I wondered how he’d managed. Assuming he’s homeless—he wouldn’t be the only one in town—he might sleep in a shelter or in a quiet alley, washing himself in a public restroom.  But this man didn’t come out of nowhere. I imagine that back in the day, he’d shown promise in high school football but joined the Army with two buddies and came home from Nam with shrapnel in his skull, which was better luck than his friends had.  In and out of bars and VA hospitals, he could never hold a woman or a job for long. The pawn shop in Flint had given him fifty dollars for his Purple Heart, and he thumbed his way south where he might not freeze solid in the winter. He’d never meant to kill that guy in Metairie, but he doubted the police saw it his way, so he hit the road again. Now he’s here in Las Cruces with a chronic pain in his gut that he fears is cancer. The other day he saw a guy dash out of a Walgreen’s, and their eyes met briefly before the guy drove away in a hurry. Then through the glass door he saw a body lying on the floor in a pool of blood. Calling the police couldn’t end well for him, so he walked away. Apparently only one person has seen him, and that’s the guy who was in a hurry—the killer? And now our street person feels vulnerable out in the open. Will the killer go after the only witness?

If you keep a notebook, try to notice the people around as you go about your daily business. Describe them in your notes, but by all means change the details as much as it suits you. Then imagine interesting backgrounds for them. Don’t worry about story lines or plot. Right now you’re working in your laboratory, creating characters who might come in handy later. And, as with my homeless vet, your characters may well offer you a story line.

Character Goals by Christine Duncan

A recent headline on my browser caught my attention. The Fed declares No Inflation. The Subtitle declared: Consumer Prices not up.

Oh Really? In my neck of the woods, gas is up, the cost for water to my house is up, electric and phone bills have gone up, the cost of banking and owning a credit card has gone up. And well, you get the picture. The headline made me see red. It's all in how you see it, right? Maybe (although a recent trip to the grocery does not confirm this.) food and consumer goods are not up.

And therein is the lesson for those of us who write. It is all in how you see it. Your bad guy is not thinking he's the bad guy in anything he's doing. He has a goal. He wants something. And that something colors his actions.

To my way of thinking, any way of accounting for this economy that doesn't include the necessities like the electric bill is...well, freaking evil. But the Fed isn't trying to be evil. (I think.)

In the same way, your bad guy is just operating the way that will be best for him.

So if your characters need a little lift, sit down and think about it. Take each character separately, not just your hero, and decide their goals and beliefs. You don't have to fill out one of those characterization forms that tell you to put down the character's favorite color. But you do have to know what rocks his world. It will make deciding what they want to do next so much easier.


Christine Duncan is the author of the Kaye Berreano mystery series. Book two of the series, Safe House is available now.

When Men Craft Women, Women Craft Men Fiction

THE PERILS of PAULINE IN THREE-PART HARMONY–

CRAFT COMPELLING FEMALE & MALE LEADS NO MATTER YOUR GENDER

PART ONE

To pull off the so-called “impossible” –getting into the head of the opposite sex and understanding from this point of view, surprisingly enough, surrounds elemental, fundamental reliance on a “woman OR a man of substance” that you embed and imbue inside the VOICE that you create for this character.

VOICE in any dramatic, commercial fiction relies on strong Active Voice over weak passive textbook, WAS/WERE-riddled voices (leave the qualifying voice to the politicians). These basic grammatical decisions (word choice, exorcising qualifiers for absolutes, using active verbs over passives and cripplingly slow helping verbs, and exorcising the verb to be) are the crucibles of language about which E.B. White wrote in The Elements of Style and supported by the fine book Writing Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern. Style comes out of extremely small elements you choose to make work for you—like any electrical plug in the wall. Or items you fail to utilize.

As small as the choice difference between say the word before and ago, maybe and perhaps, this is “shaping” voice. This “becomes you”--BECOMES your style. If you choose a folksy or shoddy or simplistic or complex or formal or informal voice, your reader will know it from the outset, and is normally willing to follow it, so long as this voice remains consistent and consistently believable. But a blowhard voice, a whining constant victim voice, or a wishy-washy narrative voice—no, nah, no way.

So is VOICE the single most important element of your story? Absolutely, and yet it is created of all the other elements and choices you make, from setting to dialect to no dialect to the difference between between and betwixt, leaped and leapt, or using a comma for a dash. I personally make a habit of using contractions, dashes, and mixing sentence types from simple to compound to complex to compound-complex. All my choices…all lessons we continually need to relearn with each book.

All good writing relies on the reader ‘falling for’ your Feminine or Masculine authorial\narrative voice, the point of view speaker, the mind you set your reader down into comfortably or awkwardly. If it is an ill fit, little wonder. The holy all of it is this: an author is a trick cyclist on the unicycle juggling twenty four plates in the air, spinning each ‘choice and decision and element’ at the end of long sticks all at once! Each plate, each stick, each prop is an important element, but they all culminate in the overall greatest EFFECT or illusion we writers create. The effect that your story has on the reader’s ear and mind’s eye. (A story is only as good as the lasting effect it has on a reader. Do you recall the details of your favorite child’s book?)

If I had said the writer is LIKE a trick cyclist rather than stating it as a fact, it rings a different bell, sends a different and less powerful blow. The use of LIKE and AS is terribly overdone in some “voices” in female-lead crime fiction. As are adjectives. As are adverbs. As is the use of passives, especially the WAS/WERE verb—a major killer of action and visualization. These mistaken choices riddle even a great deal of published fiction, and especially in the first person narrative along with the personal pronoun references to the narrator: I, me, my, mine, myself, often using the personal pronoun three and four times in a given sentence.

What a reader hears and pictures comes about as result of our giving him a believable SOUND in his head—along with images. The author’s voice, or the narrative voice (not always the same) or the character’s voice creates that sound. A “qualifying” character’s voice can be filled with qualifiers, but you are damned if your narrator or main character’s voice is riddled with qualifying, iffy, wishy-washiness. An absolute gives the same sentence the mental Kodak moments that look, feel, taste, smell, and sound like IMAGES. Images are made of this; they are not made of lines like: He was standing as if in a trance, and was soon climbing through a reddish fog that seemed to be lifting amid the treeline that almost acted as a filter to the sunlit Georgia hills. But rather: In a trance, Mick stood and climbed through a coppery red fog filtering through the Georgia treeline.

Thanks much and know that today's thoughts come straight out of DEAD ON WRITING, available in paper from http://www.wordclay.com/ and in ebooks at www.Amazon.com/Kindle.com

Name My Next Book Contest & Vote ongoing can be found on Google at Dirty Deeds - Advice

Rob with hopes you'll leave a comment!

Blonde or Brunette?

How do you choose the physical attributes of the characters in your stories? If you knew a gorgeous guy named Gordon in high school or college, do you find all your heroes tend to have the same dark, wavy hair as Gordon? Could your fictitious Gordon’s name be a derivative of his – Gord, Gordon or Don for a first name, or maybe Gordo, Gordin, Gerdon or something similar for a surname?

Did your favorite teacher stand only five-six, so your hero is a compact man? Or does he have the long, lean build of the track captain you had the big crush on?

Was the librarian a tall, willowy blonde woman of statuesque proportions and you see her in every heroine? Just because she saved books for you by the authors you liked best? Maybe you had a thing for your next door neighbor and every heroine has the same green eyes as hers.

Then there are the villains of the pieces. The bully who tormented the other kids could lend some of his or her characteristics to your novel's bad guy or gal, as can the perpetually grouchy clerk at the video store. Not that they’re villains in real life, any more than the tall librarian from your childhood could necessarily face down mobsters or murderers! But it’s easy to draw a trait from an individual we know who we really like--or don’t--to help create a person in our story. That doesn’t mean he or she “is” your heroine or your villain, of course.

But many authors will not give a fictional character the same name as someone they know, simply because it’s too hard for your story’s “Laura” not to become the organized multi-tasker your college roommate was! Of course, there are authors who include friends, thinly veiled, in the cast of characters in a book and acknowledge them in their notes! That’s okay if they’re part of the chorus, so to speak, and not one of the main movers and shakers.

So, how do you create your villains and heroines?

Libby McKinmer
www.libbymckinmer.com
www.twitter.com/libbymckinmer.
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