Verbalize

Characters are the power source of all stories. We plug into them and they flow through us.

The secret magic of great characters happens inside their audience. Miss Marple, Lestat, Celie Harris, Edmond Dantès, Hermione Granger, Hannibal Lecter, Idgie Threadgoode, Easy Rawlins, Mrs. Whatsit, Nick Charles, Scout Finch—whatever feelings you harbor about beloved characters are based more on their provocative gaps than the exhaustive details the author provides. Writers provide jungle gyms for the reader’s imagination.

Great characters seem so lifelike that we treat them accordingly, a habit that’s emotionally logical but professionally nonsensical. Because characters make us remember events, feel emotions, and discover truths about our actual lives, it’s tempting to overdetermine and mythologize their creation. Most discussion of fictional characters analyzes them from the audience’s impressions rather than the author’s task, a bit like trying to deduce a recipe by the expressions on diners’ faces.

Unforgettable characters throw long shadows, but as authors our job is to focus on the original creation to learn from our artistic ancestors. As Picasso said, “No artist is a bastard. We all have forebears, and we build on the work of others.”¹⁴

Part of the rampant impersonal ad trend dates back to the rise of mass media and the popularization of psychology.

Back in 1933, Shakespearean scholar L.C. Knights published a watershed essay entitled “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” mocking critics who wasted time analyzing characters not as dramatic constructs, but as if they were actual human beings.

Knights’ question was ironic; we don’t need to know how many heirs Macbeth’s Mrs. bore because those children aren’t part of the play. Shakespeare mentions her offspring in passing without bothering with specifics because their names, number, and nature don’t matter to the story. To paraphrase Knights, the complex emotional response experienced by audiences happens without (and in spite of) extraneous character details. Shakespeare ignored them because they didn’t matter.¹⁶

Shakespeare created a character, not a woman. In a play that’s just over two thousand lines long, Macbeth’s Lady only has 252. Hell, she’s one of the most famous characters in literature and Shakespeare doesn’t even name her.

Knights objected to critical attempts to fabricate a three-dimensional human from dramatic scraps. Not only was the exercise silly, it led criticism into circular, cynical arguments about authors’ “real” intentions and a text’s “hidden” meaning based on fabricated, extrapolated evidence. The appeal was obvious: if everything could mean anything, then all opinions deserved an airing—great fodder for professors publishing for tenure but ridiculous and downright masturbatory as a way of analyzing art or improving the creative process.

For over a century, this rampant psychological approach has encouraged bizarre speculation and trivia to distract from actual analysis of literary craft and technique in favor of subjective interpretation. Sentimental “psychologizing” has nothing to do with the writing process but throws the doors open to theory and opinion unmoored from the actual text. It sidesteps research and language in favor of moods and gists. Some readers might dig that kind of musing, but for writers it can be paralyzing.

Aside from its devastating impact on American theater and film, psychologization still creates actual, practical problems for writers who have been told to make characters more “real” to improve their books. Characters reflect psychology as a matter of coherence, but they cannot have psychology because they do not have lives. Even an autobiographical character is an artificial construct with careful emphasis and elided details. Worse, you can only psychoanalyze a character after the fact, so the exercise has zip to do with actually putting people on paper. Psych!

The modern obsession with foibles and appearances has infected a lot of writing advice. Obsessing about imaginary psychology and trivia can cripple your process. Aeschylus and Cervantes and Austen did not create characters by picking neuroses and eye colors. Even details like temperament or birth date are useful but auxiliary. Your readers don’t need to know every sliver of trivia for your characters to come to life. Piling on meaningless detail is where a lot of young writers go off the rails and into the swamp of blather and backstory.

Sometimes an unforgettable character can be sketched in a few sentences and alter millions of lives. Witness To Kill a Mockingbird’s Boo Radley, Dracula’s Renfield, or The Princess Bride’s Inigo Montoya. Those aren’t three-dimensional humans, but narrative devices created by words to inspire feelings.

But characters are “so real,” readers say. Nope: the story just feels real. It needs to feel real. The emotions are real, but their origin is fictional. In the emotional roller coaster you’re building, your characters carry your readers for the duration of the journey. They are the car, not the ride. Your job is to build something sturdy enough to transport your audience.

If I say Perry Mason or Mrs. Danvers or Captain Frederick Wentworth, you may have memories or feelings about those characters. Perry Mason appears in over eighty Erle Stanley Gardner mysteries—we literally have much more of him than we do Wentworth (Persuasion) or Mrs. Danvers (Rebecca), several hundred thousand more words characterizing him. Do we know Mason better or believe he’s somehow more real just because there are more words on various pages about him? Is Twilight’s Bella Swan more believable or alive than Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet (who inspired her) because her author filled several sequels with her?

Characters are not people; they’re purpose-built narrative tools to extract satisfying emotion from your audience.

Stories are sketched in strokes, not photographic detail. No story, not even biography, requires the creation of an “entire” person, whatever that would look like. Rather, the author provides the specifics necessary to create a satisfying emotional ride for the audience. Artists should unlock audience imaginations. Most of our feelings and fantasies about fictional characters feel personal to us because they happen inside us, glorious creations hung on pegs provided by the author.

In that sense, A character in a story is not a person, a profile, or an archetype, but an action figure, an entertaining device designed to perform a function within a story. A character has parts and joints, limits and features, a set appearance and a specific range of motion that encourages play.

There is no such thing as a three-dimensional character. Only the illusion of existence, evoked by a few telling details. What you leave out can be as important as what you include. Trying to flesh out an entire life in exhaustive detail on the page is a waste of time and energy. What we want is not “real people” but action figures…resonant, fascinating, and fun to read and write and play with.

With well-conceived action figures, the writing becomes easier and more entertaining. The reading, ditto. Even the selling of the book ends up less of a chore if you start with the emotional experience readers expect.

Genre writing is not for the fainthearted; make certain you are tall enough to ride that ride. Unless you’re doodling and scribbling for your own amusement, art needs an audience, and that means you need to earn the attention of other folks. Art is the business of attention: earning, shaping, deserving, and directing it.

For genre authors in a crowded market, anything that distracts or derails your audience weakens your book and blunts your story’s point. You forfeit attention at your peril. Every tool exists to control attention. Every flaw or weakness in your work degrades attention. The more you can manage different types of attention, the better your writing will be. Otherwise, why should anyone bother?

At first glance, stories are pointless. Life is rich, beautiful, and complex, so why do we spend so much time focused on narratives that revisit the past, extrapolate from our present, or imagine possibilities that can never actually happen? Why are we so addicted to story?

Words don’t create characters, emotions do. If you want your books to move people, the burden falls to your characters. What makes a character more or less real is the emotion they elicit within us, which explains why reading is so personal and fandoms are so passionate. The emotions are real because they happen inside living, breathing readers, the characters only provoke them. Powerful emotions create powerful characters; words are just the medium of transmission.

Stories allow audiences to experience emotions beyond the scope of their everyday lives at a safe distance. Readers trust writers to take them on a fascinating journey. As Dr. Keith Oatley puts it, “The job of the writer is to present emotionally significant events at an aesthetic distance that enables us to recognize them, experience them, and assimilate them to ourselves.”¹⁸ Books let audiences experience other lives and worlds with startling immediacy so we can

All your readers have to give you is attention for you to turn words into worlds. The appeal of great genre fiction is that it offers audiences a perfect blend of certainty and surprise.

Like a roller coaster, the audience chooses to take the ride. Your story waits for readers to buckle themselves in so that you can take them on a well-crafted emotional journey that will surprise, gratify, and delight them before returning them safely to their regularly scheduled lives. At the end of a roller coaster, the punters unbuckle, climb out, and head back to their real lives, but the emotions linger. You want them raving about the ride afterward.

In genre fiction, the author’s constant opponent is boredom. Plateaus and repetition give everyone permission to tune out or forget. Once a character has overcome difficulty, lesser difficulties and even identical difficulties will leave your readers cold. The outcome is inevitable. Without stakes there is no story. In genre entertainment, the name of the game is escalation.

Don’t let them hop off the ride. At every moment, you want your audience thinking about all the ways that make putting down the book, even glancing away, less likely. Through steady escalation, you teach your audience that they dare not waver for a moment. Whatever is happening on the page at this moment must be more fascinating than what was happening a moment ago. Tension creates attention.

Readers will accept anything you don’t give them a reason to doubt. Any time readers cannot understand a character’s actions or can predict a scene’s outcome, you give them a chance to slip away. And there’s the rub: clichés, logic leaps, shoddy research, and all other failures of craft loosen your hold on the audience, give readers a chance to wake from the dream you’re spinning. No tension, no attention.

When you are looking for ways to make a scene more dramatic, don’t be afraid to push events to extremes. Asking “what if?” or “what happens next?” only keeps the scene moving at its current intensity. Instead, try to imagine what the worst possible development might be. Push the possibilities in a believable way, and you give your characters a chance to exceed expectations. Think laterally, not literally.

Studying melodrama, farce, and pulp fiction can liberate a writer from the everyday constraints of taste, caution, and timidity. As legendary writing teacher Dwight Swain teaches us, disasters demand decisions, and decisions unleash ever more intense disasters.¹⁹ What reversal, discovery, or transformation would require a change of tactics from all the people involved? How can you escalate a choice, a moment, a situation to the outer limits of dramatic possibility? Your job is to entertain people and make them feel things outside their experience.

When people ride a roller coaster, what they remember is the rush and climb, the adrenaline and relief. The punters pay money for the experience and what lasts is the emotional effect. With painstaking attention, engineers have milked those feelings in a calculated flow, but the public doesn’t take pictures of the rails or the rivets. Joyful mobs don’t line up to study the blueprints and the rigging.

All the structural decisions of a satisfying roller coaster take place prior to the ride and offstage behind the proverbial curtain. You don’t learn to build a roller coaster simply by riding a bunch of roller coasters. You study the fundamentals and learn the limits so you can push them.

You have to lay the rails, and the character is the car readers climb aboard at the beginning for the best point of view to bring them back safe and sound at the end. Not every ride is the same, and different genres shape the reader’s emotional experience differently. Certain basic structural features recur, so each new attraction must balance expectations and innovation.

Readers will pursue and avoid certain emotional rides based on their history, preferences, and word of mouth. Some readers are omnivores, happy to veer between mild and wild diversions, while others stick to a narrow slice of the spectrum. Popular fiction delivers an intense emotional ride, but all the danger is imaginary, the variations carefully and skillfully wrought, and the conclusion safe and satisfying.

The audience will get on board with anything as long as you can make them care. The moment they stop caring, they will stop reading. Your job is to make them care enough to keep turning the pages, and for them to care, you must care even more.

Your job is to create coherent characters who must deal with unlikely pressure believably. Allow your characters to have remarkable reactions to everyday situations and vice versa. The uncertainty of their circumstances is such “stuff as dreams are made on.”²⁰ Rather than waiting for lightning to strike, get down to the business of telling the tale the best way you know how.

Pay attention to your writing so that you keep exceeding your own expectations. As long as you keep paying zealous, ruthless, joyful attention, readers will return the favor.

Yes, large bodies of salt water cover most of our planet’s surface, but the division and dissection of the Earth’s salt water is arbitrary. “Ocean” is an abstract word we use to describe a matrix of phenomena that share certain powers, features, and boundaries. Dip your toe in the Atlantic and you’re touching waves created by the weather patterns in the Pacific. Glacial thaw in the Arctic Circle affects oil rigs off Scotland and the migration patterns of whales in the Indian Ocean. Tidal flows can kill off species and boost an entire ecosystem in the opposite hemisphere.

No one can study and understand oceans at a glance. Their complexity overwhelms us, so we break them into manageable parts for analysis, research, and industry. As we come to understand them, the overlaps and symbiotic relations between those parts reveal themselves. We study the water to see the sea.

As a subject of study, fiction is oceanic and equally indivisible. Studying any portion of the writing process trespasses upon every other writing topic. Trying to separate character from plot, pace, POV, dialogue, voice, intimacy, worldbuilding, comedy, symbol, theme, and anything else is almost impossible. Like any living thing, storytelling involves a complex matrix of interdependent organic systems.

I don’t see plot, character, setting, emotion, voice, and theme as separate things but rather as overlapping lenses that allow us to focus on different tasks of storytelling. For the purposes of this book, our focus will be characters and story planning, which necessarily touch on every other element of writing.

Craft provides a set of tools authors use to grapple with a single strata of the vast matrix of writing. By studying our colleagues’ techniques, we cobble together a flexible arsenal with infinite applications. Analyzing and experimenting help you build the kind of story you want to tell. Solid craft skills will expose dangers and steer you toward safer waters. And because no two authors or books are the same, craft produces infinite variety.

Craft apprises, advises, devises, scrutinizes, and analyzes. It breaks writing’s cohesive living system into manageable bite-sized portions so we can tackle the job at hand without losing our minds or our nerve. Craft anchors all your wildest inventions and steers the process so you can do the job credibly even when you aren’t inspired.

Craft is critical. The muse is unpredictable and inspiration doesn’t operate on a schedule. When you have a deadline and pages due, craft delivers competent work on time with skill. Those tools and tricks come from training and experience, and they will save your butt, repeatedly. Knowing the various options, possibilities, and pitfalls will help you build a glorious whole out of the inert components. But for any project to come to life, it requires wholeness, harmony, and radiance, and that’s where we turn to art.

Exceptional stories spring from a spark of magic. Sometimes a story or a character is so compelling, it supersedes crappy prose and dodgy grammar by touching on…more. Unforgettable books require more than competent prose studded with stylistic garnish.

Art earns the attention of its audience because it distills the attention of its creator into something simultaneously rigorous and vigorous. Art attempts to articulate the inarticulable, to show the invisible, to reveal the spark in the darkness. It turns up at odd moments and often without warning. It’s the monkey in the wrench, the fortune in the cookie, the shine in the diamond.

When I say no two people write a book the same way, I mean exactly that. A hundred authors would produce a hundred idiosyncratic Cinderellas. Our processes may have overlaps and similarities, but a great character or a bestselling book cannot be assembled from a recipe or a kit. The gap between solid craft and moving transcendence is art.

Both are essential to your process: the craft of spinning a yarn and the art of saying impossible things. Art will always be erratic, fickle, and untamed, just as craft remains steady, conscious, and imperfect. You cannot guarantee beauty will turn up every time you put words on a page, but you can pursue beauty with diligence and vigilance…even when the whole enterprise starts to feel as impossible, deranged, and naïve as a blindfolded unicorn hunt on skates.

Knowing theoretically how to write great jokes will never make you funny without serious focus. Reading about pathos and allusion will not make everything you write meaningful or tragic without emotional legibility. Churning out “well-structured” dreck according to some vague, arbitrary formula will never win reader’s hearts. On a starship, Red Shirts will never end up in the captain’s chair, because they aren’t paying attention. Anyone can learn to cut stone, and some craftspeople learn to place stones, but only a very few artists learn how to build palaces.

Just pay attention. Try to ditch the habit of “believing” you’re a writer or “believing” a book will change your career. Belief is a pacifier for people addicted to certainty, and certainty is the one thing in the world none of us can ever have. Kick your belief habit and learn to follow your doubts and questions to their outer limits.

Without art, craft is lifeless. Without craft, art is chaotic. We need the wire and the fire that runs through it. If you are serious about your writing and want to elevate your stories and access their wholeness, harmony, and radiance for your audience, then you go from laying bricks to building palaces.

Art brings all those craft decisions to life, relinking the various areas of your story so they don’t feel mechanical or arbitrary. Art breaks the rules and tests the margins. To extend the oceanic metaphor above, art is what weaves the weather patterns, the tidal flow, the marine life, and the nautical skills together, reconnecting all the various divisions we use to understand the oceans.

At its best, genre writing makes the impossible probable and the improbable possible. Verbalizing your stories will unquestionably highlight other parts of your writing process—and that’s wonderful, but it will also expose all your weaknesses and shortcuts. Learn to swim in your ocean, and eventually your ocean will swim in you.

Chapter 2: DEVICES

Psych

Ride

Process