Serving a purpose

This week I started rewriting the first chapter of my novel.

Again.

There have been many first chapters and each time I’ve written them they get slightly better. As it goes, this newest version is my favourite. Mostly because, at last, one of my characters finally has motivation.

Finding motivation for characters that feels honest is very hard. It’s easy to make characters versions of other people, or even just versions of other characters in the book. I think the character who’s now changed, we’ll call him ’2′, was just a slightly less interesting version of my main character. 2 had no real motivation for taking the actions that he did in the book, and without the flimsy excuse I gave him would be more than ready to step into the shoes of my main character and live the life that he is.

Now, he has something holding him back, even if now it’s not something physical. Matters of conscience are a major part of the book so it’s only right that other characters find themselves battling with them too. A lot of my writing doesn’t depend on physical matters getting in the way, more about how people react to each other and the situations around them mentally.

My burst of inspiration came at work (as a lot of them do) and several scribbled notes to myself later, the motivation appeared. Implementing it into a book which is already fully formed without it is going to be interesting, but I’m always up for a challenge. The edits should be minor once I know when and where references need to be made.

As the book goes on, the characters feel as though they are becoming more rounded and have true motivations and flaws. It’s hard trying to make every character in the book different and that’s why there aren’t that many major characters in the book. There’s just not enough time to focus on everybody. Some franchises (Harry Potter…) have the advantage of several books to introduce a large cast of characters over, but because my book in so insular and the narration at times is so focused down to just the inside of the main characters mind, there isn’t time to explore every character. But on the other hand, some of them just aren’t that important.

I’m sure there’s an unwritten rule that every character must serve a purpose but there’s nothing to say we need to know them inside and out. If I had an omniscient narrator who could jump in and out of everyone’s heads, I would, but if I can’t keep track of it, will my readers?

That’s all for now,

Lil

I also should have updated my books read page too, so please check that out!

C is for Characters

Welcome once again to another week of alphabet madness.

This week, something we’ve all probably addressed quite a few time, but as it is C week, I’m talking characters once again.

I think the two of  the biggest challenges when creating characters are making each character distinct from the others and making sure they are not a caricature of a realistic human being.

Let’s address the first point: the more characters there are in a novel, the harder it is to keep track of them all. This may not be strictly true, but if you have ten main characters that your reader is trying to keep track of it could get a little confusing. Two or three core characters is the way to go with the other characters a bit more in the background.

One thing I find hard to get my head around when writing is a scene when three or more people are having the same conversation. The thing I find is differentiating between each character without having “….said” after each sentence. Maybe my characters don’t have distinct enough voices yet, but as a young writer I think I’ve got plenty of time to work and improve on that.

I think another problem with having too many main characters is that you don’t know which one to care about. I think ideally when there is an identifiable bad (I don’t want to use the word villain) character and two main (good) characters, you know who you should care about and why. Sometimes if you’re in first person, the character will even tell you.

Now for the second point – caricatures. I can see how it is easy to create a caricatures of certain stereotypes in life, whether personality traits or national stereotypes but if a writer is using a lazy stereotype instead of creating their own characters, you have to wonder why they’re doing it in the first place.

Then there’s the characters who are seemingly brilliant at everything. Now everybody knows the famous phrase “nobody’s perfect”, and writers should listen to that. It’s so easy to make your character brilliant at everything because that way they are easier to write about. We don’t like people having flaws, but people have them. Characters who are clever, witty, charming, generous and all around good people aren’t that realistic and really aren’t  that interesting.

There is a technical term in literature called ‘the fatal flaw’. Now this may not be the exact use of it but to me it’s the one thing that makes the character do things they probably shouldn’t. For example, in Harry Potter, Harry’s fatal flaw is that he feels he has to be the one to save everything and he has to do it alone (see the end of The Half Blood Prince). He could have sat back, done nothing and let Voldemort conquer the wizarding world but his fatal flaw, his inability to just sit back gets in the way. Without it, there’d be no story.

I don’t actively try and identify my characters fatal flaws (by that I mean I don’t commit to paper before hand what they are) but I do try and give them moments in which the fatal flaw shines through.

That’s all for now, see you next week with D.

Lil

Currently reading: Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie.

On Grief and Killing Characters.

In response to Craig’s post on Friday, I wrote a lovely long comment about grief and character’s perception of it and so on, but for some reason WordPress refused to post it! So, today, you’re going to get an expanded version of it.

Firstly, I wanted to address the point Craig made about how for a book to have a certain level of drama, there must be a death of some sort. Up to a point, I must disagree. While the idea of death and the reactions and feelings that it provokes does provide a wealth of material (and certainly a certain level of drama), I don’t think that authors must put one in if they feel the drama is getting a bit thin on the ground.

I think deaths in books also depends on what genre you are writing. If it’s a murder mystery, then of course you must have one (and if any of the murder mysteries I’ve read are anything to go by, more than one!) or possibly in a war novel. This was something I struggled with quite a lot, having written a war novel and noticing 1) my main character didn’t ever seem to kill anyone (he is an infantry soldier on the front line) and 2) nobody important really died directly because of the war.

In my novel, I kill off my favourite character. Originally, he was thought dead, but it turned out that he wasn’t really, but after reading it again and again I felt it was all a bit too convenient. It would be unrealistic if my main character was to get through the war without losing someone fairly important to him. Because of this I had to consider how he would react and make it appropriate for his situation. As he is already pretty beside himself due to his mental condition, the death of his best friend sends him completely to breaking point.

When writing about grief it is important to consider the different ways that grief manifests itself in people. Different genders may react differently (though if this statement plays up to gender stereotypes, I do apologise), people of different ages may also react in different ways. There are also many cultural variations to how people manage and handle grief.

One thing that is interesting to consider is how perceptions of grief and the way of dealing with it have changed over time, and the way an author writes grief must change depending on the era in which the book is set. For example, mourning in the Victorian era is very different to mourning in the modern day.

An easy thing when writing about grief is that it manifests itself in different ways in different people. Characters may react in a completely different way than the writer would. Drawing on their own experiences bring realism to the work, but the fact that everyone experiences grief in a unique way means that you can never be accused of your characters grieving in the “wrong way”. Who’s to say that someone doesn’t handle grief by going out and buying a new pair of shoes, for example.

When writing the scene in which Laurie (my main character) finds out his best friend is dead, I had to think about, not how I would feel or react, but how Laurie would. It is his story, I have to show his feelings.

 

Writing is going all right – I’ve put in the piece I edited for my dissertation and didn’t change very must so the wordcount has shot up quite a lot. Next Tuesday is the first day of Nanowrimo, so I’ll be keeping you updated on my wordcount with that as well, having finally come up with a plot!

 

Sometimes I think I have too many projects!

 

Current word count: 50, 212
Currently reading: The Absolutist – John Boyne