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The Mother, The Writer: History repeats itself.

When I was pregnant with my first child, experienced parents approached me and my rounded belly and always smiled an empathetic smile.

One by one, they hinted at what I was in for once that baby arrived: no sleep, life as I knew it would be over, and the crying…oh the crying.

I heard them, but I didn’t heed their words, because I was riding high on the excitement of holding a baby in my arms. Sleep is underrated, I thought. Life is boring anyway, and a baby’s cry? Like the sound of sweet music.

But after my son was born, I realized the crying of which they warned me were the sobs of a new mother. Cries from me, falling apart after several sleepless days and nights and battles with feeding and a moment in the hospital when I feared I would never be a good mother.

“I told you that you’d feel this way,” my sister said, through her own tears, as she tried to comfort me.

My recent attempt at fixing my WIP brought with it a similar flood of emotion and self doubt.

I’ve read over and over how novel writing is hard work – the first draft may come out easy, but the real challenge comes in rewriting. I nodded each time I read those words, because the logistics made sense. A first draft is never perfect. I got it.

Then, I pushed those wise words aside and set my gaze on a dreamy image of me holding a published novel in hand. I told myself, I can do this rewrite thing, chapter by chapter. And, character development (my latest issue)? That’s easy enough. I’m the author. I can make up whatever I want.

But, that’s not exactly true. While I, the author, control all the variables, those variables must make sense in relation to the real world. As Larry Brooks says it in his book on character development*, a character’s “…major behavioral tendencies and specific actions need to be in context to psychological truths, and if [they aren’t] your story will suffer for it.”

After a few days of scribbling notes and typing frantic details into a new document, I stared at my WIP with wide eyes and climbed aboard that same roller coaster that new mothers ride. My head swelled and my stomach fell and soon enough I said out loud, I’m not so sure I can do this. What if I get it all wrong? What made me think I could ever write a novel?

As I write this post, it all sounds so dramatic. But, that’s the way I felt in the last few days. And, I don’t think I’m alone.

Ray Bradbury was talking to some self-doubting writer when he said, “You fail only if you stop writing.”

And, Amy Tan was easing the fears of another writer when she said, “I started a second novel seven times and had to throw them all away.”

Whether I start over completely from scratch, or I get back into the ring with my main character and wrestle her into confession, I’m not sure. Regardless, I have a WIP in my hands, a story that needs finishing, and I am the only one who can do it.

~

* Brooks, Larry. 2010. The Three Dimensions of Character Development: Going Deep and Wide to Create Compelling Heroes and Villains. [e-book] Larry Brooks, available at www.storyfix.com.

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Red Velvet Sunday

Every Wednesday, I write a post based on Today’s Word at Wordsmith.org. You can find past essays or flash fiction pieces under the Wednesday’s Word topic on the sidebar.

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This week on Wordsmith.org, each word of the day is paired with a pictorial representation. Yesterday’s image for Old Man of the Sea (yes, five words combine to make one word of the day) made me laugh, especially after I read the definition:

Old Man of the Sea. noun. A tiresome burden, especially a person, difficult to free oneself from.

I give you my inner editor who, when I stare at my WIP on my laptop screen, demands “more character development and less exposition!”

Too bad these posts aren’t filed under Tuesday’s word.

On to Wednesday.

You might want to do some speech warm-ups before you try to pronounce this word; it’s a mouthful:

Pygmalionism. noun. 1. the state of being in love with an object of one’s own making. 2. The condition of loving an inanimate object such as a statue or an image.

What immediately came to mind for me, after reading that definition, were three words: red velvet cake. A home made red velvet cake – with its magical red chocolate middle hidden under creamy white icing – says, You are special.

A red velvet cake is so extraordinary that one bite will take you out of the moment and into a dream.

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Red Velvet Sunday

When Bethany awoke, the sun had already positioned itself behind the top branches of the tree outside her window. Rays of light shot through leaves that glistened and reflected and pierced her sleepy eyes. She looked at the clock. Eleven thirty. As she sat up in bed, she heard a thud, like something hit the wall of her parent’s room next door. She held her breath. The rumble of her father’s voice made her heart race.

She turned to her window, and a cardinal popped into view. He sat on a branch, cocked his head, and called out a song to her.

On her way to the bathroom, she passed her parent’s door.

Her mother yelled. “Why even bother to come home!”
Her father shouted back. “I pay for this house. I’ll come home when I damn well please!”

Bethany closed the bathroom door and put her hands on the sink. She looked up at her reflection. Her index finger followed the brown shadow that still remained under her right eye – a consequence of her last attempt to break up her parent’s fight.

“Stupid,” she told her reflection. Stupid to get into the middle when their voices raged. But, she couldn’t stand her mother’s screams that day.

She brushed her teeth, went back out into the hall, and raised her right hand to her ear as another barrage of words exploded behind their closed door.

He set her straight. “It’s none of your damn business where I go!”
She threatened. “I won’t lay down for you anymore!”

As their voices crescendoed, Bethany disappeared into the kitchen. She closed the swinging door and turned on her father’s transistor radio. Across the AM waves, a man sang about branches in a tree and reaching for freedom.

‘Cause there’s a place in the sun
Where there’s hope for ev’ryone

She opened the kitchen cabinet and pulled out the flour, sugar, cocoa, and a bottle of Mrs. McCormick red food coloring. While other girls her age spent their babysitting money on cds and t-shirts, Bethany spent hers on concealer and bottles of food coloring. One four ounce bottle was the exact amount she needed for a two-layer red velvet cake.

Continue reading “Red Velvet Sunday”

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Plot Holes and Character Development

Last Tuesday, my WIP was put to the readers’ test. Now that the dust has cleared, and the flurry of emotion settled, I see that some of the feedback I received points to key structural problems in my story: plot holes and character development.

I’m not surprised that my main character lacks depth and definition in many areas. I’m still in the early drafts (as a good writing friend reminded me). But, a recent post this week on Jason Black’s Plot to Punctuation blog (“What potholes can teach you about plot holes”) brought to my attention how underdeveloped characters negatively affect plot.

Jason Black talks about two kinds of plot holes: strange actions and strange inactions.

A “strange action” is when a character does something that makes no sense to the reader. A “strange inaction” means just the opposite: the character sits, unaffected, and doesn’t take action when the reader expects they will. The reader asks, “Why?” She might say, “What the heck?” She might even put the book down.

Those kinds of questions, Jason Black suggests, are clear signs that a story contains plot holes.

After I read Jason Black’s post, I remembered moments during my critique when readers asked why. They said they wanted to empathize with my main character but couldn’t. They said they couldn’t imagine my main character taking any action that might lead to her radical evolution suggested in my synopsis.

I couldn’t give a good answer to their questions on the spot. Later, I realized if I couldn’t explain the why’s or why not’s, I had an even more serious problem at hand: underdeveloped characters.

Of course, they haven’t read the whole manuscript, but their feedback began to make sense as I compared Jason Black’s post to Larry Brooks’s (from Storyfix.com) book on character development (The Three Dimensions of Character: Going Deep and Wide to Create Compelling Heroes and Villains).

In his book, Brooks introduces the first, second, and third dimensions of characters.

The first dimension equates to an “exterior landscape” of the character or – as Brooks puts it – the character’s “surface traits, quirks and habits.”

In my WIP, my main character has plenty of quirks and only a few surface traits, so I already had some revisions on my list. Then, I read this:

“…Newer writers [often] infuse their characters with all manner of quirks and kinks and little tics designed to make them either cool, weird or supposedly – best intentions – compelling. But if those quirks and kinks are all you offer the reader, in the hope that the reader will fill in all the blanks, then chances are you’ve created a one-dimensional character” (p. 17).

Oops. I did that. I created an odd woman as my main character but never explained why she was so odd.

The second dimension reveals the character’s “inner landscape,” the reasons why she does what she does.

“Glimpsing an inner landscape allows the reader to understand, which is the key to eliciting empathy – [and] the more [empathy] the reader feels, the more they’ll invest themselves in the reading experience” (p. 20).

That information about the second dimension suggests I need to create a slew of new scenes that will allow my main character to explain herself. Those explanations might come in the form of backstory or dialogue.

The third dimension gives real definition to the character through the character’s “decisions and behaviors” (p. 23). The reader understands the character’s core being at the beginning of the story, through the character arc, and at the end of the story when the character comes out a changed person.

As a new writer tackling my first novel, I jumped from exterior descriptions of a character to her actions and decisions. That only got me so far with the readers. Brooks makes a good point when he says, each layer – each dimension – of character works together “to create the most compelling, complex, frightening, endearing and empathetic character that you can” (p. 25).

If I neglect to write in even one of the three dimensions, the character falls flat and the plot begins to buckle.

Lesson learned. Now, I get down to business and dig deeper into my character’s psyche.

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