Fiction is Larger Than Life

First, a programming note:

Summer might mean taking it easy for most people and the CountryTime Lemonade dude who seems to think that powdered lemon drink makes the summer an exercise in olde-timey relaxation, but for me, it's hard work.

 I'm my kids one stop entertainment center. the entire day is filled with things I need to give them and boredom I have to vanquish.

It's hard to write. 

So I'm going to pare down to blogging once a week - just Thursdays until the little lovable rug rats go back to school in September.

Would you sacrifice your life for your sister?

Would you kill someone in cold blood?

Would you sleep with your best friend's boyfriend?

Would you lie, cheat steal?

What wouldn't you do, in the right situation?

Over the past month, I've been using Donald Maass's amazing book, Breakout Novel Workbook as a compass as I write the first draft of my current WIP. It's an amazing diagnostic tool - it just gets me thinking deeply about who I'm writing about. Today I'm going to be talking about ways to give your MC larger than life (LTL) qualities. 

I always start my MC as someone like me, someone normal. That's okay, as long as they don't stay that way. If your MC starts normal you have to have her go abby-normal pretty damn sharpish. Have her make a colossal mistake where the stakes are unbelievably high, pile drama after drama on top of her. And it doesn't only have it be external forces that make her LTL, make her decisions LTL. How? Start by making a list:

• What is the one thing your MC would never, ever do?
• What would she never say? 
• When you think of your MC, think about what her limits are. 
• What's a line that she would not cross?

Then? You guessed it. Find a place in the manuscript where she can cross that line, do that thing, say the one thing she promised she'd never say. I'm not saying she has to be some uber confrontational, transgressive mess (though those are interesting,) she just has to go somewhere she never thought she would go. And it also depends on what's LTL for your character. If she's a wallflower with a painful stutter, asking a crush out on a date is HUGE. In my case, I'm thinking about Mop's mom and how they've only had each other, depended on each other almost unhealthily for five years. They're going to betray each other - irrevocably. And Mop is going to do something that she never dreamed herself capable of.

How do you make your characters Larger than Life?

The Voices in My Head - Creating Inner Conflict in your MC

I approached the third exercise in Donald Maass' Breakout Novel Workbook with relief. Inner Conflict? Mother's milk to my MC. She's never meet an inner conflict she couldn't call her own. Or so I thought. But, as usual, Mr. Maass wants you to do more than lip service to your characters. It isn't enough that your MC be angsty - that's only a superficial display of inner conflict (speaking from experience, here.) You need to ask yourself (or rather, your MC) tough questions.

What is the one thing your MC wants more than anything? If you're like me you're answer will resemble an onion. The first layer will seem easy, but you'll soon realize it's not the one thing - there are several things your MC wants. You need to dig down and find out which are red herrings (or really just  different manifestations of the same desire) and which is the real deal. You peel back layers until you get to the heart of the thing. My onion looked like this:

What does Mop want most?
To find out who killed Daisy
To find her father
To be normal
To be accepted for who she is
To find out who she is.

That's what Mop really wants when she decides to use her talent to help Mr. Blank find Daisy's killer. She knows she's not like everyone else and this might be the only chance she has to find out what she is like - and if there's anyone else like her.

OKAY! We're getting somewhere. Oh. Wait. Mr. Maass has some additional work for us.
Write down the opposite of what your MC wants. Why, Donald, why? I thought we were friends!


Here's the deal. The opposite of what your MC wants most can absolutely (and probably should) be something they also want. In Mop's case, the opposite of finding out who she is, is the safest bet - forgetting about who she really is. Keeping the status quo. Not to go looking for answers. It's a powerful desire, especially as she comes to understand that finding out the truth about herself will endanger her mother, her friends and herself (of course) but it will also endanger her fragile sense of self. She might not be strong enough to handle the truth. Who wouldn't have a strong desire to run and hide? Thus, inner conflict.

So, how do you create inner conflict in your characters?

Adding Dimension OR NO Cardboard Characters Allowed

The next exercise in The Breakout Novel Workbook is about adding dimension to your MC. Some books you read, (popular, successful books) the MC is so one dimensional that if you took her out of her setting and tried to figure out what she would do, say, if she got stuck in an elevator, or if she missed a flight and had to sleep in the airport, you couldn't. You just don't know enough about that character to imagine her in any other situation (and maybe you have trouble imagining her in her current situation.) This is a Flat Stanley character and it cannot be allowed to happen in your book.

Flat Stanley in NY

For me the hardest part is excavating those extra dimensions. The only way to dig them out is to ask questions. Would she give up her subway seat for a pregnant lady? Would she apologize first in a fight - would she rather eat dirt than apologize, even if she was in the wrong? These kind of questions (and the many-layered answers you get) give a fuller picture of your MC. So when you're ready to put her in absurd, dangerous, tense situations, you know she'll be active, not passive. You'll know exactly how she'll react.

In this exercise, Maass asks, "What is your protagonist's defining quality? how would anyone describe your  protagonist?" For my MC, Mop, I think this is a little tricky because she hides herself. I don't think anyone but her best friend and her mom would know that her defining quality is tenacity. All the changes that have rocked her young life has made her averse to change and she's shaped herself to be as constant as she can. It's the only thing she thinks she can control.

Now, says Maass, what's the opposite of that quality? Accepting, yielding. Those are two things that Mop would have difficulty doing. There are superficial things that she can be passive about, but when you get to the core of her, there are some things that she cannot let go. Though I knew this about her, putting it into words makes me realize that this quality and it's opposite is going to get her into trouble.

Finally, as a follow up (because, can you really have too many dimensions to your MC?) define a secondary character quality. That's easy for Mop, because she's already displayed it: Curiosity. Not the run of the mill kind, but the kind that doesn't let her go to sleep when there's a question she can't answer. Her tenacity and her curiosity sometimes pull her in different directions.

So, how well do you know your MC? Is he really multi-dimensional or is he a bit, flat?

Turning Your MC into a Hero

In Donald Maass' Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook, step one in deepening character development is to turn your protagonist into a hero. I didn't know where to start with Mop, the main character in my wip, FIND ME. I don't really even like the word hero. It sounds so grandiose, so comic book cliched that I have trouble seeing my main character as a hero. I often start writing my books about regular people, people like me, that I can identify with. I know, without having to think about it what a capital-H-Hero is - and it's not me. Hero is for soldiers, for mothers who throw themselves in front of speeding cars to save their kids, for fireman.

So how do I make my protagonist into a hero (especially when she's 17, living in the Bronx with an agoraphobic mother and isolated by a strange, unwelcome talent?) The first thing Maass says to do is to think of someone who is a hero to you. It might be your mother, or your best friend or a public person you admire. Don't be like me and get mired in thinking about it too much (yeah, he's okay, but he's like not perfect) You're not looking for perfection, you're looking for someone who you think did something heroic. I finally got mine (no, not telling you - too personal.) Then Maass says to come up with the one quality that makes that person a hero. That was a little easier: Courage.

But how do I find courage in a 17 year old girl who has not saved babies from burning buildings, or over come a crack addiction or survived a horrific incident? I won't lie, it was hard. I started with what I think is a Chekhov quote: "Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out."

How much courage would it take for a girl to lose her father, lose her ability to read and gain an disturbing talent - all at the age of twelve? Then, for the next five years, she would become a sort of surrogate for her mother, having to do everything for her mother, who could not leave the apartment. To me, that's heroic-sized courage.

Then I went back to the first few chapters and picked out areas where I could increase the examples of Mop's courage (again, small-c-courage, not save-babies-from-fire-courage.) I was surprised how easy it was. The opportunities were there, it was like I just had to turn up the volume. And by heightening those elements I could actually see how Mop became even more rounded, real. Damn this book is good.

How do you turn your protagonist into a hero?

Learning New Tricks

I have a really clear memory from high school which begins with me panicking minutes away from the bell ringing for second period English class. All at once, like a douse of cold water,  I remember a) I didn't do my vocabulary homework and b) I didn't do my vocabulary homework so the test I'm taking in 3 minutes will be an excruciating fail.

Like the heroine I usually am in my own mind, I grabbed my friend Joyce's homework, copied the words (kids, don't try this at home. It is CHEATING.) into my book and at the same time committed those words to memory. I aced the vocab test. And ever since, procrastination and last minute inspiration has been my modus operendi much more often then it should.

I write the same way. Pantser. No outlining. No editing during the first draft. Going where my story takes me. I guess you could say I do well under pressure. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I can problem solve, turn on a dime, find a replacement staffer a half hour before show time, pull out a plot twist seemingly from thin air.

BUT.

I'm not sure it's completely working for me. While I was traveling last week, I ran in to some trouble with a scene I was writing. It was stalling. Just kind of sitting there, looking pretty but not going anywhere. I decided to do something I've never done before - write out of sequence. (I wrote about it here on my writing group blog.) I know lots of people do this ALL THE TIME. I know lots of writers who can't even conceive of writing in order and who look at me like I'm certifiable when they hear how I write. But for me it was revelatory.

I don't think the scenes I wrote, which were far down the road in my book, will remain. But they were excellent for taking me out of the very narrow confines which I'd barricaded myself into and giving me distance. I saw that I was meandering. I was word painting. I was effing around, if you must know.

So what's my solution? Do more uncomfortable stuff.

Even though I'm only about a third of the way through this book I'm going to stop drafting and start thinking. My plan is to use Donald Maass for all he's worth (I hear that's quite a lot.)

For the next few weeks I'm going to subject FIND ME to The Break Out Novel Workbook. It's going to be carnage. And it's going to make me slow down and think. I may have to (gasp) outline. I will absolutely have to do some work on my characters before hand, instead of discovering who they are at the end of the book. There will definitely be blood - or ink - spilled. But I'm feeling a little reckless. Like a change is a good thing. And I'll share my experiences with you starting on Thursday with Adding Heroic Qualities.

So, how do you learn new tricks?