Creating a Character — Part I

January 6, 2008 — Pat Bertram

Plot without characters to give it life is merely a recitation of activity, and characters without plot to give them meaning go nowhere. The best way to learn about your characters is to throw them into the plot and see what they do, what they say, and what they think. In this bizarre merry-go-round called fiction writing, however, characters drive plot, which means that you need to know who your characters are before you can begin figuring out where they are going.

I have always had a general idea of who my main character was before I started writing a novel, but I have never created a history or a full-bodied character sketch for him or her beforehand. Although the writing experts say such a sketch is necessary, I never saw the point in generating material I would not use. But since I am getting nowhere with my latest writing venture, I thought I would try it. See where it leads.

I decided the hero is going to be a man. Originally I had planned on a woman, but as I said in an earlier post, the man has the stronger story and the more poignant choices to make, so he will make a better point-of-view character. For purposes of this sketch, I will call him Chip.

What I know so far about Chip’s history is that his mother is overbearing and interfering. Though she lives only an hour away, she came to visit and stayed for months. He hates himself for being a wimp and not kicking her out, but she is his mother, after all, and she has no one but him — his father ran out on them when Chip was in grade school. The story begins (and the world begins to end) the night Chip asks his mother to leave.

Chip is thirty-three, the owner of a pet store, and currently without a girlfriend. Perhaps he is leery of a relationship, not wanting to end up with someone like his mother. Other than that, I’m not sure I want to get into his background. Do we need to know where he went to school? What his childhood was like? What his failures and lost opportunities were? Do we care about his politics, his beliefs, his travels, his ex-girlfriends? Seems boring to me, and I can’t see that it makes any difference when the world is ending.

Most books on writing say that an interesting and enduring character must have a strong desire, a goal he will do anything to achieve, but do Chip’s present desires really matter when everything is about to change? To begin with, Chip’s only desire is to get his mother out of his apartment, though later he will want desperately to escape the human zoo where he has been incarcerated. Is that enough to propel the story? Or do I need to give him another desire, one that he has at the beginning and that follows him throughout his adventures, until at the end he gets either what he wants or what he deserves?

I’ll have to think about that and get back to you.

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And Lydia Loretta Stark Was Dead. Again.

November 16, 2007 — Pat Bertram

 Court TV and Gather.com are searching for the next great crime writer.

My novel, More Deaths Than One, is not a detective story, and it certainly is not a cozy mystery, but it is the story of a crime: identity theft. This theft is an actual theft of a man’s identity, not a paper one.

When Bob Stark returns home after spending eighteen years in Southeast Asia, he discovers that his mother Lydia Loretta Stark is dead again. When he attends her second funeral, he sees his brother, his college girlfriend, and . . . himself. Accompanied by a baffling young woman, he sets out to discover the truth.

I am not asking you to vote for me; I am begging you. There are a lot of great entries in the contest, and I need every vote I can. (A vote is a rating of 10 stars; nothing less counts.)

Thank you.

You can find my entry here:

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977138910

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Writing is About the Choices We Make

November 13, 2007 — Pat Bertram

When we choose to write, we are faced with a universe of choices where all things are possible. Many would-be writers never put a single word on the page because the number of choices to be made seem insurmountable. First, we have to choose what to write about. The topic can be anything: love, abuse, super novas. Next we have to choose how to present the topic. As fiction or nonfiction? As a blog? A poem? A short story? A novel? 

By making these decisions, we begin to limit our universe of choices. A blog has certain criteria to be met; it must be brief and interesting or we run the risk of losing our readers. A short story can contain complex ideas, but a novel has the scope for us to develop those ideas more fully.

Suppose we choose to present the topic as a novel. Now there are more choices to be made. How are we going to write it? First person or third? Sassy, sarcastic, serious? Who is going to be the main character? What does she most desire? Who or what is stopping her from fulfilling this desire? What does she look and act like? What are her internal traits, both her admirable ones and less admirable ones? Who are her allies? Who are her mentors? 

And those choices lead to other choices. What does the character need? (As opposed to what she wants.) Is she going to get what she wants or is she going to get what she needs? For example, maybe she wants to be a homebody, to marry the boy next door, but what she and the story need are for her to become a senator and possibly leave the boy behind.

And so the choices continue, each choice narrowing the story’s universe a bit more.

Some writers love the choosing, the creating, but I love when the weight of those choices become so great that the answer to all future choices can be found in past ones. The character might need to fight off an attacker, and when we try to choose between success and failure, we realize there can be only one outcome. Because of who she is and what she has done, she cannot succeed. To succeed might mean to kill, and she cannot kill anyone even to save her own life.

When the story gets to the point where it seems to make its own choices, it takes on a feeling of inexorability, as if there was always only one way to tell the story.

But, in the end as in the beginning, writing is about the choices we make.   

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You Might Be a Writer . . . If You Agonize Over Commas

November 10, 2007 — Pat Bertram

A fellow writer took exception to my comma usage in Light Bringer.  I reviewed the first page or two of the book but didn’t change anything. If ever I were to sell the book, I will do what my copy editor suggests; until then, the commas remain where they are. I know I used a lot of them, but each one was painfully earned. While writing and rewriting the novel, I would take them out, agonize over them, then put them put them back. The next day I would repeat the process all over again.

There are many rules for comma usage, the main ones being to use a comma between all terms in a series, before the conjunction when joining independent clauses, and to set off parenthetical remarks. I do not need to give you examples; you probably know more about commas than I do. But despite all the rules that have been formulated for commas, there is one overriding rule: use a comma to prevent confusion.

In other words, follow the rules until you can’t follow the rules. Clarity is more important than any punctuation rule.

Beyond clarity, the commas in Light Bringer were used for pacing. I could have used short sentences at the beginning, but short sentences evoke action, and someone driving at night on snowy, unplowed, unlit roads would not be moving quickly. I could have used run-on sentences, but they have a breathless quality, and also seem to evoke speed. Again, not what I wanted. So what I was left with was commas.

A lot of commas. Maybe I really should take some out.

Or not.

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Conflict: Desire Thwarted

November 8, 2007 — Pat Bertram

Someone googled “How do you determine the conflict in a story” and ended up at my blog. Although I have written about conflict before, I had not addressed that particular issue; I wasn’t even sure I could come up with a simple answer if I had to. Then I realized that to determine the conflict, first we have to know what conflict is. In a story, conflict is desire meeting resistance.

Many authors, professional and amateur, confuse bickering with conflict, but unless there is an element of desire, such as one of the characters wanting information that the other doesn’t want to give, then there is no conflict, merely disagreement. I made that mistake in Light Bringer. I had a lot of historical information I needed to impart, so I had a group of people arguing about it in the hope that it would seem more immediate, but since there was no desire, except the relative low tension one of the characters wanting to be heard, it came across as bickering. I kept the section because it was a more interesting way of presenting the material than a lecture, and it did show the personalities of the characters, but there was not the immediacy conflict would have brought to the piece.

In a novel, there are many conflicts.  Characters can be in conflict with each other, they can be in conflict with the environment, they can be in conflict with themselves. As disparate as these conflicts seem, in essence they are the same. Characters wants something and someone or something is preventing them from getting it. The greater the forces keeping the characters from fulfilling their desires, the greater the conflict, and hence the greater the tension. Time constraints add urgency to a conflict, and become a source for conflict themselves, as when one character needs (desires) to rescue another before a bomb goes off.

So, to determine the conflict, figure out what the characters want and who or what is keeping them from getting it. It’s as simple as that.

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A Halloween Story in Miniature

October 25, 2007 — Pat Bertram

A drabble is a short story of exactly one hundred words with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I have been experimenting with this story form as a way of improving my writing, trying to get as strong an image as possible in just a few words. Here is a miniature story for Halloween:

       Cuddling her baby, Cassie went to answer the door.

       Anna, eyes bright beneath hooded lids, smiled at her. “I came to see my newest neighbor.” She bent forward and peered into the baby’s face. “Oooh, he’s so sweet I could just eat him up.” She held out her arms. “May I?”

       Pride welled up in Cassie’s chest. “Sure.”

       With a sudden sinuous motion, Anna took the baby, popped him in her mouth, and swallowed him whole.

       Unable even to scream, Cassie stared at the bulge in the woman’s midsection.

       “What?” Anna gave her a puzzled look. “You said I could.”        

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Scarlett by any other name would have been sweet.

October 10, 2007 — Pat Bertram

Scarlett O’Hara was originally called Pansy. If Margaret Mitchell had kept that name, would her epic novel ever have become so popular? I doubt it. A Pansy would be sweet and biddable with rare moments of stubbornness, but she could never be as strong-willed as Scarlett, and she would never have caught and kept the attention of such a worldly man as Rhett.

Unlike women characters, men tend not to have exotic names. They usually have common, clipped names, which work well enough in most cases, but what if Rhett had been called Jack or Clint or even Brad? Millions of women would probably still have fallen in love with him, but they certainly would not have found him so intriguing.

Clothes may make the man and woman, but their names (in fiction, anyway) define them.

Though Scarlett fits the name of the character in Gone With the Wind, it could not be the name of a medieval heroine. In those days, almost all girls were named Mary, with Elizabeth coming in a distant second.

I suppose if Gone With the Wind were written in the 1980s, Scarlett’s name would have been Heather. Odd to think that in another forty years, youth will scorn that name as being old-fashioned, fit only for elderly women, much like Effie is today. (I shudder to think how many babies being born right now are being named Britney, Lindsay, or Paris.)

But I digress. The point I’m trying to make is that names matter and should be chosen wisely. A book may not be rejected because of a character’s name, but why take the chance?

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Some darlings are hard to kill

October 2, 2007 — Pat Bertram

 

By definition, darlings–those parts of our manuscripts that we love even when they serve no purpose–are painful to kill, but some are more painful than others. This painfully dead darling is set it in Vietnam, but the incident it is based on took place during World War Two.

 

          “I heard about this kid, a gentle kid, really. He was tall, broad in the shoulders, good-looking, with reddish-gold hair. But what really made him stand out was his smile. He always smiled.

          “This kid was so thrilled to be doing something for his country that nothing bothered him, not even the climate. Since he was a swamp rat from Louisiana, he felt right at home.

          “He came from a very large, very poor family who never had enough food; when he was drafted into the army, he felt as if he had won the lottery. He always had plenty to eat and, compared to the meals he had grown up with, it seemed like haute cuisine. He even loved the c-rations, including the ones that everyone else threw away, like ham and lima beans.

          “He was delighted with his government issue clothes, too. In his entire life, he had never worn anything new or had boots that fit. He felt like a king. No matter what happened, it was better than his life back in the swamps of Louisiana, and he could not help smiling.

          “His platoon was stationed near a Vietnamese village. Those people hated the Americans, but for some reason they took a liking to this smiling kid. They called him Wa-ky number one. Wa-ky was what they called the Americans, and number one meant the best. They also called him dinky-dao, which means retarded or mentally ill, because he was always smiling. They thought it was the funniest thing that the best American was dinky-dao.

          “The one person who hated the kid was his sergeant, a really nasty piece of work, who felt he was being mocked by that constant smile.

          “One day, in a fit of anger, the sergeant took an empty sandbag, and made a crude mask by cutting holes for the eyes and nose. He yanked it over the kid’s head, and snarled, ‘I never want to see your fucking smile again.’

          “When the kid removed the hood, he was still smiling—he thought it had been a joke. This really infuriated the sergeant. He slammed the butt of his rifle into the kid’s face, grabbed the hood, and jammed it back on the kid’s head, screaming, ‘I’ll kill you, you motherfucker, if you ever take this fucking bag off again.’

          “After a few days of wearing the hood, a change came over the kid. He would wade into the center of a battle and just let loose as if he thought he were invincible, or as if he no longer cared whether he lived or died. Afterwards, he would bayonet the dead bodies and mash their faces with the butt of his M-l6.

          “All of this made the sergeant very nervous. He ordered the kid to take off the hood. The kid refused.

          “As time went on, the man in the hood—you notice I say man, Sarge? That’s because there was nothing left of the kid he once was—got more and more out of control. He would go off by himself to hunt VC, and would return wearing a necklace of still-warm ears. Everyone was scared of the man in hood, particularly the sergeant, who was certain he would be fragged, but the man just ignored them and went about his job of methodically eliminating the VC.

          “Finally the time came for the man in the hood to be rotated out. That morning he arose, casually took off the hood, folded it neatly, then packed it with the rest of his gear.

          “Everyone gasped in shock when they saw him—his face was hideously deformed. When the sergeant had butt-stroked the kid, he had destroyed the kid’s left cheek and orbital bone, and they had never been repaired; no one even knew that he had been badly injured.

          “He still had a smile on his face, however, but this time it was the rictus of pain, or of death.

          “And his eyes . . . You’ve heard of the thousand yard stare, Sarge? This was a ten thousand-yard stare, as if the man in the hood had looked too long into hell, and now hell was all he knew.”

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Unkilling another darling

October 1, 2007 — Pat Bertram

Originally, in More Deaths Than One, I had a war correspondent tell  Bob some of his experiences. Since the speech did not add to the story, I killed it, but I am unkilling it here. 

 

          “I came here to Vietnam so early in the war that no American flags were being flown anywhere in the country; they were still keeping up the pretense that the United States was merely an advisor to the ARVN, in what was primarily a civil war.

          “I was sending out competent, if uninspired articles, when I stumbled upon the story of a lifetime—the CSG was involved in the drug trade! The Combined Studies Group, as I’m sure you know, Bob, is the front under which the CIA is operating.

          “I carefully researched the story, and discovered that the drug dealing had started out innocently enough, but that over the years the Agency’s role had increased dramatically.

          “It all began when the Agency started to enlist the indigenous hill peoples, the Montagnards, in the fight against the North Vietnamese.

          “The Montagnards hated all Vietnamese, who treated them as if they were less than human, but they had a special hatred for the Viet Cong, who demanded that they pay taxes, forced their young men to join their army, and stole their cash crop—opium.

          “They were eager for the opportunity to kill the VC, but first they had to work their poppy fields and sell the crop. When the Agency agreed to buy their opium, saving them the trouble of smuggling it out of the country, the Montagnards agreed to join the South Vietnamese Army.

          “The Agency sold the raw opium to the Union Corse—a world-wide crime syndicate from the island of Corsica, not far from Sicily. The Union Corse had massive refineries in Marseilles for turning the raw opium into heroin, and a vast network, probably the greatest in the world, for distributing the final product.

         “Much of the Agency’s heroin found its way onto college campuses in the United States. Don’t you find it ironic, Bob, that those anti-war activists who think taking heroin is so hip and anti-establishment are, in actuality, funding the CIA’s clandestine operations around the world?”

 

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