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Things Your Mother Should Have Told You

September 14, 2013 — Pat Bertram

There is a post going around on Facebook, “Things your mother should have told you,” and I can’t get it out of my head. From the title of the post, I expected advice such as how to get bullies to stop picking on you, how to be strong and graceful, and how to figure out what you want and go after it while keeping your compassion and consideration for others. Instead, it was a list of silly household tips such as how to clean a toilet using Alka-Seltzer, how to soften hard brown sugar, and how to get glossy piecrusts. Really? These are the things our mothers should have told us? Why?

Perhaps in a nineteen-sixties television show where mother is always home, always perfectly dressed and coifed, always cool tempered with a wry smile for the shenanigans of her family, always ready with the perfect solution to any household problem, then of course, these mothers should have told their children such things because it was all they knew. But who lived like that? No mother I’ve ever known has had the time to pass down such inanities, especially nowadays when mothers are more apt to be heading corporations or running their own businesses than staying home and having passels of children. (And the stay-at-home moms have plenty of work to do without worrying about passing on such inane tips.)

Besides, today we have Google. If you want to find out how to keep an ice cream cone from dripping, you don’t have to get the information handed down to you from your mother or from a list of things she should have told you — you can Google it, though I can’t imagine why anyone would want to. (Apparently, dripping ice cream cones is a hot issue. I just Googled “how to keep an ice cream cone from dripping” and got 220,000 results.)

Perhaps the list of things your mother should have told you is a leftover from the nineteen-sixties television show era — some of the tips are rather outdated. For example, one of the things she should have told you is that if you want to see if an egg is fresh, drop it in a pan of cool salted water. If it sinks to the bottom, it’s fresh. Frankly, if I want to see if an egg is fresh, I simply look on the egg carton for the expiration date. The few times I have bought eggs fresh from the farm, I had to trust the person selling me the eggs since at the time I wasn’t carrying around a pot of cool salted water.

I think what bothered me most about the list is that it assumed a mother’s place is only in the home, collecting such tips. Can you see Margaret Thatcher, Indira Ghandi, or Hilary Clinton giving their children such tips? Can you see them caring enough about a little leftover wine to freeze it and use it later, let alone take time out from running a country or a constituency to tell their children about it? Can you see them carrying around a bit of raw potato to remove unsightly food stains from their manicured hands? Or worrying about removing burnt-on food from a pan?

There are many important things our mothers should have told us, but using air freshener to clean mirrors is not one of them.

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Posted in culture, How to, life. Tags: dripping ice cream cone, Hilary Clinton, how to tell if an egg is fresh, Indira Ghandi, Margaret Thatcher, things your mother should have told you. 7 Comments »

Good Grammar is like Good Etiquette

August 28, 2013 — Pat Bertram

I often hear new writers and self-published writers say that it’s okay not to follow the rules. That they can write however they want. That it’s more important to be creative than to be pay attention to grammar. That they need to break new ground.

Um. No.

Certain rules are necessary because they help clarify our writing and convey to the reader exactly what it is we want them to understand. I admit that in many cases readers don’t care. They just want something to titillate them. (How else can one explain the success of the appallingly awful 50 Shades of Gray?)

Still, good grammar is like good etiquette. It’s a matter of respect. You might not think it necessary to thank someone for a gift, but that someone sure think it’s necessary. Besides, it’s the right thing to do, especially if you want them to continue sending you gifts. (Good grammar is also like good etiquette in that both are considered old fashioned and unecessary.)

I’ve given up trying to read self-published books because it’s too hard to weed the good books from the bad ones. So many self-published books seem to have been thrown in the Amazon river without any editing. If those authors don’t have the courtesy or respect to make sure the book is readable, then I certainly see no reason to give them the gift of my time and money. (Yeah, I know — it’s a different world out there. Many writers post a draft on Amazon and use reviews to find out what needs editing.)

A common problem involves wrongly used participial phrases that end in ing. According to The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, a participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject.

The example Strunk and White give is: Walking down the road, he saw a woman accompanied by two children. Who is walking? He is, of course, since he is the subject of the sentence, and the ing phrase always refers to the subject. If the woman is walking, you have to rephrase the sentence: He saw a woman, accompanied by two children, walking down the road. You, I’m sure, would never have to worry about who is walking because you’d never use such an ambiguous sentence in the first place!

The other examples of wrong phrases Strunk and White give are humorous and show why it’s important to follow the rule (the parenthetical comments are mine):

Being in dilapidated condition, I was able to buy the house cheap. (If I was in dilapidated condition, how did I have the strength to buy the house?)

Wondering irresolutely what to do next, the clock struck twelve. (Hmm. The clock wondered what to do next? Smart clock!)

As a mother of five, with another on the way, the ironing board was always up. (Wow! That’s a lot of ironing boards!)

In case you don’t know how to rephrase the above sentences, here are my quick efforts:

Because of the dilapidated condition of the house, I was able to buy the place cheap.
As I wondered what to do next, the clock struck twelve.
A mother of five, with another on the way, I was never able to put the ironing board away.

Another ing problem comes from simultaneous actions, when an author has a character do something that’s physically impossible. For example: Pulling out of the driveway, he drove down the street. He cannot be pulling out of the driveway at the same time he’s driving down the street. He pulled out of the driveway, then drove down the street.

I know you know all this, but such sentence structures do slip into our writing. It’s up to us to wring the “ings” out of our work, and show respect for our readers.

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Posted in culture, How to, writing. Tags: grammar rules, ing phrases, participial phrases, Strunk and White, The Elements of Style. 6 Comments »

Creating Incredible but Credible Characters: Sex Scenes (Part 3)

August 17, 2013 — Pat Bertram

[This is a continuation of previous posts Creating Incredible but Credible Characters: Sex Scenes (Part 1) and Creating Incredible but Credible Characters: Sex Scenes (Part 2)]

Each book I write has less sex in it than the last. In Light Bringer, my fourth novel, the characters didn’t have sex at all. But what can you expect from aliens? Still, it never occurred to me that I had left off any mention of sex until a reader pointed it out to me, because my characters connected in a way that served the story, as the following voyeuristic scene shows.

Teodora went still. The moment she’d been waiting for had finally arrived. Ninety-nine and a half percent of the subjects’ DNA tested as human, but the remaining half percent remained unidentified. Now, perhaps, she would see that unidentifiable half percent in action.

On the other side of the one-way window, the female cocked her head, and her face took on a rapt expression as if listening to a distant melody. When the male entered, her incandescent smile seemed to brighten the room.

The two subjects moved toward each other. The light became more radiant. They stopped an arm’s length apart. For a second Teodora thought she saw a rainbow between them, then they were in each other’s arms. An auroral glow drifted and whirled around them.

Something as delicate as a spray of perfume touched Teodora. Her skin drew tight, and she felt an immense thirst. She fixed the feelings in her mind so she could take them out and analyze them later, then she set them aside and concentrated all her attention on the subjects.

Hearing a faint thread of music, she held her breath. The music seemed to swell into a heart-breaking song of joy. The colors dancing around the subjects grew in intensity, colors she had never seen before. A distillation of rubies. A blue moon shimmering on restless waters. A green so pure it might have come out of the earth itself.

In the spaces where the colors overlapped, Teodora knew she was seeing the color of love, the color of total harmony and acceptance.

The colors echoed in Teodora’s emptiness, and she felt herself crying deep within her soul. This was something she wanted, but could not have. Maybe no human could.

Later, Teodora discusses the episode with her boss, the head of International Institute of Scientific Advancement.

“It was not like watching humans,” Teodora told Berhard Petri after reporting what she had learned about the subjects.

His eyebrows shot up, and she realized he’d caught the unusual touch of animation in her voice.

She modulated her tone. “It was like watching a higher form of life.”

“It hasn’t been established that they’re a higher form,” Petri said. “They could be a devolution.”

“You did not see. Theirs was an interaction on a higher plane, not about individual parts, but harmony of the whole. With humans, it is all about the body parts, the physical attributes. They do the act, but there is no resonance, no color, no song. It is as if humans have an ancestral memory of seeing the gods in love, and now they are trying to have what they had once seen, but only managing the visceral part. Like the ancient Egyptians trying to emulate the pyramid builders from an earlier age, they cannot get it right.”

Sex scenes don’t need to be deeply meaningful to be effective. Sex scenes can simply bring the couple together or show the intensity of a relationship. Sex scenes can create a change of pace, either as a diversionary tactic or as a quiet time between hectic scenes. A sex scene can be a fast-paced action sequence to get the reader’s blood roiling. A sex scene can even be playful or humorous. What it cannot be is a scene thrown in there just because you thought it was time for a sex scene. Such scenes need to be as germane and as necessary to the story as a plot twist or a revelation. If the scene can be removed from the book without leaving a hole, it should be removed or rewritten—unless of course you are writing erotica or another genre that demands lots of titillating sex. In which case, you are probably making a fortune and have no need for these tips.

***

This article is anthologized in the Second Wind Publishing book: NOVEL WRITING TIPS AND TECHNIQUES FROM AUTHORS OF SECOND WIND PUBLISHING, which was the 100^th book released by Second Wind.

“As someone who constantly evaluates novels for publication, I was astonished at the breadth and clarity of the wonderful advice contained in this handbook. It addresses concerns as grand as plot development and as simple but essential as formatting your submission. It offers crucial advice on literary topics ranging from character development to the description of action. Virtually every subject that is of great concern to publishers — and therefore to authors — is covered in this clear, humorous and enormously useful guide.” –Mike Simpson, Chief Editor of Second Wind Publishing

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Posted in How to, writing. Tags: creating credible characters, creating incredible characters, Light Bringer, Novel Writing Tips and Techniques, Second Wind Publishing, writing: sex scenes. Leave a Comment »

Creating Incredible but Credible Characters: Sex Scenes (Part 2)

August 16, 2013 — Pat Bertram

[This is a continuation of a previous post: Creating Incredible but Credible Characters: Sex Scenes (Part 1)]

The most explicit sex scenes I’ve written are in my first novel, More Deaths Than One. My character, Bob Stark, is stark in everything he does, but the more one learns about the character, the more extraordinary he seems. His first sex scene is with a stranger. Her manner seemed to be that of a person who had decided on a course of action and now wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible, but Bob turned out to be something of a pro at satisfying women. Since the skill seemed so out of character, I explained it with a flashback, though I do not advocate flashbacks during a sex scene. Of all scenes in a book, sex scenes are the most immediate, and should be done in the present, but in this case I followed an even more important rule: everything in service to the story.

He moved in her, slowly, steadily. He caught the scent of frangipani in her perfume. All at once sixteen years disappeared, and he was back in Thailand, the first time he’d gone to Madame Butterfly’s.

The sex scene that followed is graphic, too graphic to add here, but the point is the perfume. Smelling the frangipani catapulted him into a reverie, where the woman beneath him became unimportant, but later in the book when he makes love with a significant woman in his life, the scent has a completely different effect on Bob.

Twining her arms around his neck, she brought his mouth to hers. The kiss was hard and short, but immediately her lips sought his again.

He gathered her closer. Their kiss deepened.

All at once she pulled away and hopped out of bed. “Omigosh!”

“What?”

“I forgot. I have a present for you.” She flashed an impish smile and darted into the bathroom. She emerged a few minutes later wearing a dark rose cheongsam that accented the swell of her breasts and the taper of her waist. “I bought it in Chinatown. What do you think?”

He couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. She looked flushed, radiant, beautiful.

She jutted out a hip. The side slit parted, giving him a glimpse of shapely leg.

He felt a shock that started in his groin and radiated upward. From the glint in her eyes, he knew she was aware of the effect she had on him.

He slid off the bed and moved toward her, stepping slowly and carefully as if he were in danger of falling off a precipice. As he neared her, he smelled her new perfume—frangipani. From now on, he knew, whenever he caught a whiff of that scent, it would remind him of this moment, of her, of the teasing look in her eyes.

***

This article is anthologized in the Second Wind Publishing book: NOVEL WRITING TIPS AND TECHNIQUES FROM AUTHORS OF SECOND WIND PUBLISHING, which was the 100^th book released by Second Wind.

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Posted in How to, writing. Tags: creating credible characters, creating incredible characters, More Deaths Than One, Novel Writing Tips and Techniques, Second Wind Publishing, writing: sex scenes. 4 Comments »

Creating Incredible but Credible Characters: Sex Scenes (Part 1)

August 15, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Many new writers (and even some published authors) have a difficult time writing sex scenes. They worry about how their friends and family will deal with idea that their son/brother/daughter/mother knows about sex. They worry about when and where to insert a sex scene, and they worry about how graphic to get. One thing writers don’t seem to worry about is the purpose of their sex scene, and that is something they should worry about.

Some romance genres require a lot of hot sex, other genres, like science fiction, don’t put much emphasis on sex, so be sure to find out the expectations of your genre. Even when titillation is the goal, the scene should also fulfill a story need, should respond to the demands of the story.

An effective scene—sex or not—serves multiple objectives. Scenes advance the story, show us more about the characters, show us how the action changed the hero or show a change in the relationship between the participants. Scenes are always about change, about action and about reaction.

Once you know the objective, you can write a fitting action/reaction sequence (which is the basic building block of a scene). If comfort is the objective, you can show the couple together at the beginning, close the door during the action, and show them cuddling afterward. If tenderness is the objective, you can show a bit of the action in addition to the before and after. And of course, if their desperation for each other is the objective, you will need to leave the door open during the scene.

As with all resonating scenes, when it is over there must be some reaction, some change to the character or the direction of the story. And the objective dictates that reaction. If the scene is about bringing comfort to the characters, we need to know whether they found comfort or failed to find it, and we need to know the characters’ emotional response to the success or failure of that objective. This reaction, in turn will help set up the next scene.

A good use of a sex scene would be to show the ebb and flow of human connection. For example, you could have three scenes spread throughout the story. In the first scene, perhaps, the man climaxes, feeling connected to the woman. When he immediately goes to sleep, she feels disconnected. In the second scene, he can’t get it up, leaving him feeling disconnected, but since he tries to make it up to her by cuddling her, she feels connected. In the third scene, they climax together, perhaps cuddle afterward, so they both feel connected.

In addition to the sex, then, you show a pattern of connection and disconnection between the couple (in other words, conflict), you show a new perspective of the characters, and you show a change in their relationship. You also end up with a subplot that adds to the overall richness of the story. In other words, you end up with a series of sex scenes, not just sex scenes.

Scenes help show who the characters are, and where better to do this than when the characters are at their most vulnerable. One of my favorite scenes in A Spark of Heavenly Fire is when Jeremy King, a world famous actor, has sex with Pippi O’Brien, a woman he just met in a bar.

The sound of weeping woke Jeremy. He turned his head toward his companion and saw one trembling shoulder and a tangle of gleaming hair.

He stretched luxuriously. The red hair hadn’t lied. The girl had been all fire, kindling a passion in him he hadn’t felt in years. The memory of it made him hard.

He reached over and pulled the girl into his arms. He smoothed back her hair and kissed away her tears, murmuring, “Honey,” and “Sweetheart,” and “Dear.”

“I’m such a terrible person,” she said, sobbing.

“Shh. Shh,” he whispered between tiny kisses.

Her arms stole around his neck, and her lips sought his. In a surprisingly short time she bucked beneath him, calling out his name.

You’ve still got it, King, he thought exultantly. Then, after one final thrust, he tumbled into oblivion.

That scene might not be very graphic, but it did what I wanted it to—define the characters, Jeremy especially. Pippi called out his name, but he didn’t care enough about her to think of her by name. He cared only about himself and his performance. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that, during other times of vulnerability in the story, he also thought only of himself.

A sex scene is a good time to show a character confronting her essence, to play on her self-concept (the treasured idea the character has of herself). What if a character were making love to a person other than a spouse? Would this lovemaking enhance his or her self-concept, or would it go against it? If the scene enhanced the character’s self-concept, we would learn much about the character. Perhaps she sees herself as a great lover, in which case nothing mattered except the lovemaking—not her marriage vows, not her husband, not her children—and so we would learn kind of character she is. If the scene went against the character’s self-concept, then we have a character with inner conflicts. Perhaps the character sees herself as a faithful, till-death-do-us-part wife. In which case, no matter how exciting or tender the scene, it leaves her in turmoil.

In the previously quoted scene from A Spark of Heavenly Fire, Pippi is obviously experiencing turmoil. She had been in the bar to meet her boyfriend, Greg Pullman, to accept his marriage proposal, and instead she ran off with Jeremy. She’d been dazzled by the actor’s star power and hadn’t given poor Greg a single thought, but in the night, after her passion diminished, she confronted her truth.

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This article is anthologized in the Second Wind Publishing book: NOVEL WRITING TIPS AND TECHNIQUES FROM AUTHORS OF SECOND WIND PUBLISHING, which was the 100^th book released by Second Wind.

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Posted in How to, writing. Tags: A Spark of Heavenly Fire, creating credible characters, creating incredible characters, Novel Writing Tips and Techniques, Second Wind Publishing, writing: sex scenes. 3 Comments »

Creating Incredible but Credible Characters: Dialogue (Part 2)

August 14, 2013 — Pat Bertram

[This is a continuation of a previous post: Creating Incredible but Credible Characters: Dialogue (Part 1)]

Dialect and regional accents are especially tricky to write. It used to be that writers tried to show dialect and accent through the laborious use of phonetic spellings and a blizzard of apostrophes. Today, though, we readers don’t like having to decipher the author’s personal code. Nor do we writers need to take the time to create the code. It’s better to use colloquialisms and broken language to show regional differences. For example, “I done died and gone to heaven.” Not an apostrophe or phonetic spelling in sight, though you know immediately the speaker is not a high-toned college professor from Boston.

If your character has a foreign accent, you don’t have to bludgeon a reader with it. All that is necessary to portray an accent is to say the character speaks with an accent. If you wish, you can use phrasing to remind the reader of the accent, such as, “We will go to the store. No?”

This snippet from Daughter Am I shows Crunchy’s difficulty with English:

“Mary’s trying to find out about her grandparents,” Kid Rags said. “His name was James Angus Stuart.”

Crunchy shook his head. “Don’t know no James Agnes Stuart.”

“What about Regina DeBrizzi Stuart?” Mary asked.

“Don’t know her neither.”

Dialogue is an artificial construct. Dialogue does not mimic conversation but instead gives readers the impression of realistic conversation.

Books on how to write dialogue often suggest listening to people talk to learn how to write dialogue. Seems like good advice, but have you ever truly listened? “We . . . um . . . we, like . . . you know . . . we stammer and like we repeat ourselves and um . . . you know.”

Even when we speak coherently, we don’t converse. We lecture. We tell long, boring, convoluted stories. We interrupt others and talk over them. We use clichés. We tell jokes that take forever to get to the punch line. None of which helps us write dialogue. If characters in books talked the way we talk in real life, who would bother reading? We want our characters to sound like us, just not talk like us. We also want their conversations to be witty, to the point, and conflicted.

In life, most of us cannot come up with that clever quip when we need it—it comes to mind (if at all) late at night when no one is around to be impressed. Our characters don’t have to suffer from that malady because they have us and our late night epiphanies on their side. We can change their words as often as necessary to get it right.

And get it right we must. Good dialogue advances a story and shows character interacting with other characters. Good dialogue makes a reader keep reading. Bad dialogue, no matter how crucial to the story, makes readers go in search of other amusements.

The following is another excerpt from Daughter Am I showing the use of dialogue.

* * *

Mary noticed, for the first time, her father’s receding hairline, the deep crinkles at the corners of his brown eyes. Soon he would be as old as Kid Rags, Teach, and Crunchy.

Tears stung her eyes at the thought of her father living alone in a dingy hovel, and she vowed she would not let that happen.

Realizing the silence was stretching out awkwardly, she opened her mouth to speak, but he held up a palm to forestall her.

“I don’t want to know what you’re doing,” he said. “Whatever it is, I know it’s something you feel you have to do. I thought you should be aware you’re upsetting your mother.”

“I don’t mean to.”

He heaved himself out of the chair. “That’s all I came to say.”

“I’m glad you stopped by,” she said. “I planned on calling you later anyway to tell you I’m going to be away for a few days.”

He stared at her for a moment, then shrugged. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to accomplish, but I suppose you know your own mind.”

You are so wrong. I don’t know anything.

He walked to the door, paused with his hand on the knob for a second, then turned to face her.

“I love you,” he said softly.

She swallowed. “Oh, Dad. I love you too.”

He opened the door. “Be careful, okay, honey? You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”

***

This article is anthologized in the Second Wind Publishing book: NOVEL WRITING TIPS AND TECHNIQUES FROM AUTHORS OF SECOND WIND PUBLISHING, which was the 100^th book released by Second Wind.

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Posted in How to, writing. Tags: colloquialism, creating credible characters, creating incredible characters, Daughter Am I, dialect, dialogue, Novel Writing Tips and Techniques, Second Wind Publishing. 3 Comments »

Creating Incredible but Credible Characters: Dialogue (Part 1)

August 13, 2013 — Pat Bertram

One of the hardest techniques for new writers to handle is dialogue. When I first started out, my characters never just said something. They agreed, cautioned, reminded, mimicked, answered, contributed, guessed, explained, responded, admonished, confessed, encouraged, clarified, blurted, pointed, winced, replied, corrected, acknowledged, returned, laughed, challenged, chided, objected, contested, quipped, offered, moaned, complained, repeated, stammered, pleaded, inquired, mumbled, interrupted, confirmed, addressed, countered, advised, completed, allowed, supplied, ordered, asked, continued, chided, answered, whispered, teased, requested, hollered, echoed, declared, informed, spoke, bellowed, spit out, thundered, hissed. All within a few pages. Whew!

Even worse, I would sit and agonize over the way my characters spoke. “He responded sparingly.” “She informed him haughtily.” He mumbled sadly.”

It was a joy to discover that modern dialogue relies primarily on “said,” such a common word, the reader’s gaze glides over it as if it were invisible. It was even more of a joy to discover that adverbs are frowned on. The dialogue itself, or the beat—the bit of action accompanying the dialogue—should show the character’s emotion. “I hate you”, she said angrily tells us what the character is feeling. She picked up a rock and threw it at him. “I hate you!” shows us what she is feeling, allowing us to become intimately involved with the character. The only time an adverb is necessary is when the character’s words are at odds with his mood, such as: “I had a great time,” he said sadly. You can also use an occasional “ly” adverb to describe the tonal quality of the character’s voice. “I hate you,” he said softly.

Besides helping identify who is speaking, beats help set the stage, tell us about the character’s personality, and vary the rhythm of the dialogue. Overdone, the beats are as distracting as any other speaker attribute, so the secret is to pay attention to the flow. Do you want short snappy dialogue? Don’t use beats. Do you want to slow things down a bit, keep the dialogue from seeming too disembodied? Use a few beats.

It’s hard to write crowd scenes and keep each character identified without resorting to copious “said”s, but beats keep the scene moving and, if you use beats that are specific to your character, you make the various characters come alive.

This excerpt from my novel Daughter Am I shows the use of beats. The scene is between my hero Mary, a young woman in search of her grandparents’ murderer, and a group of feisty octogenarians who are trying to help.

* * *

The man stopped bouncing and let his arms drop to his sides. Now that he stood relatively still, Mary could see he was skinnier than she’d first thought. A gray slouch hat tilted toward one eye, but the baggy pants cinched high above his waist and the bright flowery shirt several sizes too large marred the jaunty effect. His hands shook uncontrollably. Parkinson’s disease?

“You must be Happy,” she said.

Frowning, Happy patted his torso. “Must I be happy?” His voice deepened to what Mary assumed was his normal tone. “Can I be happy? Can anyone truly be happy?”

“His name is Barry Hapworth,” Kid Rags said, flicking a bit of lint off his navy pinstriped suit jacket. “For several obvious reasons, everyone calls him Happy.”

Mary glanced from the bus to Happy. “Were you driving this thing?”

Happy puffed out his meager chest. “Sure was.”

“And did you almost run over Mrs. Werner’s cat?”

“I’ll take the fifth.” Happy paused for a fraction of a second. “A fifth of bourbon.”

“Did someone say bourbon?” Kid Rags removed the flask from his hip pocket, took a swig, and passed it around.

“Who are all these people?” Bill asked from behind Mary.

Mary turned, wondering how she could explain the situation to her fiancé, but Teach saved her the trouble and made the introductions. Arms still folded across his chest, Crunchy nodded to Bill, then stepped close to Mary. Happy punched the air, but stopped when Bill showed no inclination to fight.

Kid Rags shook Bill’s hand. “You’re a lucky man.”

“What are you all doing here?” Mary asked. “I was supposed to pick you up. And why is Happy here?”

“Happy is a friend of Kid Rags,” Teach began, but Kid Rags interrupted him, saying hastily, “Not a friend. Just a fellow I know.”

“Happy knows someone who knows Iron Sam,” Teach continued, “and since we knew your car wasn’t big enough for all of us, we accepted Happy’s offer to drive us in his bus.”

“Who’s Iron Sam?” Bill asked, sounding plaintive.

“Butcher Boy,” Kid Rags said.

Bill’s eyebrows drew together. “Butcher Boy? Mary, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

Mary laughed, suddenly feeling lighthearted and carefree. “I haven’t a clue.”

***

This article is anthologized in the Second Wind Publishing book: NOVEL WRITING TIPS AND TECHNIQUES FROM AUTHORS OF SECOND WIND PUBLISHING, which was the 100^th book released by Second Wind.

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Posted in How to, writing. Tags: creating credible characters, creating incredible characters, Daughter Am I, dialogue, Novel Writing Tips and Techniques, Novel Writing Tips and Techniques from Second Wind Authors, Second Wind Publishing. 2 Comments »

Creating Incredible but Credible Characters: Change

August 12, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Change is the reason for a story. Without change, you have an anecdote, perhaps a description of a life or a time, but no story.

Whenever there is change during the course of the story and—more immediately—during a chapter, a scene, a page, even a paragraph, it advances the story. These changes should be interesting and compelling in themselves, but they should also worsen or improve the status of a character, raise new questions in readers’ minds as to the story’s outcome, and prepare for scenes to come.

Changes can be major alterations in a character’s life, such as the death of a loved one, or they can be as subtle as the touch of a hand. Changes can jolt the reader or give them a false sense of security so you can hit them with a major change later to better effect.

Writing doesn’t just happen, nor does it happen in a vacuum. Our stories change us every bit as much as we change our stories, in an ever tightening spiral. We create episodes of change so that the characters will change, which in turn change the plot, which in turn change the whole focus of the story, which in turn changes our relationship to the story.

While writing A Spark of Heavenly Fire, I researched Pingfan and the human experiments that were being done there (some on American POWs) and I thought I’d found something that few others knew. Afterward, in every novel I picked up, there was a mention of Pingfan, so I had to change the focus of the book, which in turn changed the characters and how they got to the end. (The end was a given—I’d written that chapter about halfway through — I just needed to find a way to get there.) Many of the conversations I had about this Pingfan oddity ended up in the book, which gave the story an added depth.

Some psychologists say we never change in any basic way, that our characters and essential personalities are our foundation. We can only change in small ways, such as changing our habits, changing our focus, changing our perspective. This is at odds with those who say that a character must do a complete about face. That about face is possible if it is motivated, if there is a reason for your character’s basic change. Normally, a smart person doesn’t become stupid overnight and a stupid person doesn’t become smart, though abnormal situations can create such changes. Flowers for Algernon, for example, or Regarding Henry.

Although change is important, many characters don’t change—take detective novels, for example. Most of the classic detectives were the same from the first page to the last. But other characters in the stories change, and the situations change, which keep the detectives changing direction and focus. So while they themselves didn’t go through any sort of metamorphosis, the stories still seemed to be about change. And perhaps the truth, as uncovered in a detective story, is a change in itself.

Sometimes a character’s inability to change is the story. For example, if a character was tortured and despite the horrors, never changed, it would tell you a lot about the character, and how his non-change changed the world around him. Forrest Gump comes to mind.

Almost anything can bring about a change. Lies can bring about change, the truth can bring about change, a knock on the door, a trip. Even something so simple as losing weight. I had a friend, a lively teenager who was quite obese. Everyone kept telling her she would be pretty if she lost weight. She did lose a lot of weight—started a diet before school let out and spent the whole summer being active and eating right. She wasn’t more attractive. And she wasn’t more popular. This broke her heart. She became sullen and morose. And depressed. And regained all the weight. Which is an example of another type of change—where the character changes but ends up the same as at the beginning.

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you need to delve deeper into the changes that occur during the course of your book:

What changes do your characters undergo?
Do you keep the changes coming at an ever dizzying rate or do you throw small changes at your characters, changes that add up over time?
Are your characters the same at the end of all these changes? Is their situation the same?
Is the final outcome a major upheaval for the character or merely a change in focus?
Do all your characters change, or just the main character?
How do you bring about the changes?
Are these changes logical and believable?
Are the changes an intrinsic part of the story or just thrown in for the sake of change?

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This article is anthologized in the Second Wind Publishing book: NOVEL WRITING TIPS AND TECHNIQUES FROM AUTHORS OF SECOND WIND PUBLISHING, which was the 100^th book released by Second Wind.

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Posted in How to, writing. Tags: A Spark of Heavenly Fire, characters and change, creating credible characters, creating incredible characters, Novel Writing Tips and Techniques, Novel Writing Tips and Techniques from Second Wind Authors, Second Wind Publishing. 1 Comment »

Creating Incredible but Credible Characters: Keeping your Characters Consistent

August 11, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Consistency makes for a good lemon meringue pie—you don’t want globules of lemon ruining the texture of the smooth filling. And consistency makes a good story—you certainly don’t want globules of untruth ruining the texture of your readers’ belief. I admit I’m stretching for an analogy, but still, the point is that readers will forgive a writer almost anything except inconsistencies that interrupt the flow of the story.

I once started to read a book where a man spirited away the Shah of Iran. According to the author, the Shah lived fifteen years beyond his supposed death in 1980. The operation was so secret and so successful that no one knew about it. But… It took only this one very high profile achievement to assure a solid client base for the man. Supposedly, word travels quickly in the very elite circles of power, and so the demand for the man’s services was always in excess of his ability to produce.

What??? If no one knew that the Shah survived his death, how could word travel? And if word did travel, how could high profile clients remain “dead,” especially since most of them were hiding from those in the elite circles of power? The inconsistency took me out of the story, and I never did finish reading the book.

It’s almost impossible to keep inconsistencies from slipping into a story, which is why self-editing, though vital, cannot be the final editing process. We writers see consistency because we see what we meant to say. Others only see the inconsistency. I am grateful to one of my editors for finding one particular inconsistency in Daughter Am I. The editor wrote, “It’s not clear here whether or not Mary completely removed her shirt. If she did, when she stood up and ran to the bathroom, then turned around and had the conversation with Tim, she’d have been completely topless. Given their feelings for each other, and their state of undress, it seems unlikely they would have been able to have such a lengthy conversation without biology taking over sooner.”

Oops. I completely missed that. Mary took off her shirt so Tim could massage her sore back, and when the massage turned heated, Mary (engaged to someone else) runs from her feelings and hides in the bathroom. Inadvertently, I had her brazenly opening the bathroom door, standing half-naked, and starting a casual conversation—not at all what my poor innocent Mary would have done. After traveling halfway across the country in the company of seven old gangsters (well, six gangsters and one aged ex-night hall dancer) she’d lost most of her naiveté, but still, she would not have flaunted her naked breasts.

Naked breasts may pale in comparison with unsecret secret operations, but the inconsistency could have dammed the flow of the story for discerning readers. So, the moral of this tale is, if you remove your heroine’s shirt or other apparel, make sure you remember her state of undress and write accordingly.

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This article is anthologized in the Second Wind Publishing book: NOVEL WRITING TIPS AND TECHNIQUES FROM AUTHORS OF SECOND WIND PUBLISHING, which was the 100^th book released by Second Wind.

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Posted in How to, writing. Tags: consistency in storytelling, creating credible characters, creating incredible characters, Daughter Am I, Novel Writing Tips and Techniques, Novel Writing Tips and Techniques from Second Wind Authors, Second Wind Publishing. 1 Comment »

Creating Incredible but Credible Characters: Purposely Flawed Characters. Or Not.

August 10, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Interesting characters make interesting stories, not the other way around. An author develops interesting characters by putting them under pressure, giving them much to lose, and allowing them to change because of their experiences. And the author makes these characters at least a bit larger than life. Who wants to read about characters who sit around watching television all the time or who repeatedly have the same tiresome argument with their children or who can’t resolve their problems? We deal with that every day. We don’t need to read about it. On the other hand, if the traits are too idealized, characters come across as comic book silly.

Depth of character is revealed in the choices a character makes while at risk. Without the element of risk, there is no real story, only a string of episodes. Think what Superman would be like without Kryptonite—totally uninteresting and flawed in his perfection. But Kryptonite is a purposeful flaw, put there to make Superman more interesting, which makes him seem even more of a comic book character. Oh, wait. He’s supposed to be a comic book character!

To offset the problem of idealized characters, many writers try to create a purposely-flawed character, such as a boozing cop or a mother who can’t communicate with her teenager, but this seems an unnecessary distraction unless, of course, it is a vital part of the character’s motivation. So many flawed characters, particularly heroes with a drinking problem, have been done so often they have become nothing but cardboard cutouts. There is a long tradition of hard-drinking detectives, but there has to be a more creative way of giving characters flaws. Or not. Writers are often enthralled with the idea of flawed heroes, that they are missing the point. They don’t have to give their heroes obvious flaws. By making their heroes realistic, the heroes are automatically flawed.

A character must lose occasionally or make mistakes. Where is the suspense if every time a character attempts to do something she succeeds? And in that loss is a shadow of the flaw, because the setback must be realistic. Did the character lose because of arrogance, assuming she knew what to do when she didn’t? Did the character lose because she wasn’t physically fit or knowledgeable enough? Did the character lose because she didn’t plan correctly, because she was unfocused, because of her inner conflicts? Such losses force a fully realized character to change so in the end she can succeed.

In the beginning of Daughter Am I, twenty-five-year-old Mary Stuart has no real direction, no purpose, but when she learns she inherited a farm from her recently murdered grandparents—grandparents her father claimed had died before she was born—she becomes obsessed with finding out who they were and why someone wanted them dead. She drives halfway across the country with a feisty crew of octogenarians, friends of her grandparents, and even though she discovers they all had ties to the mob, she doesn’t let her good sense override her obsession. This understandable obsession is her flaw, and if she didn’t grow during the course of the story, if she didn’t learn from her setbacks, the obsession could have become a fatal flaw. Fatal or not, flaw or not, Mary’s obsession makes her real, makes her a bit larger than life, and makes her interesting.

To be real, a character must have strengths and weaknesses, but it’s not enough simply to assign a special strength or weakness to a character—the quality needs to be tested. You can do this in one of two ways—play on the strength or play on the weakness. For example, if a character is smart but lacks physical strength, you can either place the character in a situation where the character’s intelligence saves the day or you can put him in a situation where he is forced to rely on physical abilities he doesn’t have.

Strengths are arbitrary and can easily become flaws. Independence can become an inability to depend on others, an ability to cope can be seen as indifference, high ethical standards can become intransigency. Which is great for a book—the resulting misunderstandings can cause conflicts among characters allows the plot or subplots to thicken. And your characters become even more credible.

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This article is anthologized in the Second Wind Publishing book: NOVEL WRITING TIPS AND TECHNIQUES FROM AUTHORS OF SECOND WIND PUBLISHING, which was the 100^th book released by Second Wind.

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