novelist – Penstricken

A Protagonist’s Anatomy #3: Character Traits

Posted on 12/07/202011/07/2020 by Ndrw

Well it’s already time for part 3 in this little series of posts collectively entitled A Protagonist’s Anatomy. Over the last two weeks we looked at the importance of creating a strong set of motives and goals for your protagonist and how crucial their backstory is in creating a motive which is understandable and believable. This week we’ll focus on adding another important layer which will take the words on your page and make them read like the written record of a real life person: character traits.

Character traits are those little personality quirks that will not only influence the kind of things your characters will do and say but also how they do and say them and you can have lots of fun playing about with different traits to see which ones work the best for your characters. On a more important note, having your character’s traits firmly established in your mind allows you to show your reader exactly what sort of man your character is without ever having to tell them. You don’t need to say ‘Bob was a cold-hearted man.’ You can show us what a cold-hearted man Bob is by the way he interacts with other characters and the kinds of decisions he makes.

There’s no exact rule for determining your character’s traits, but I personally find it helpful to give each of the main players in my stories a balanced mixture of positive, neutral and negative traits, irrespective of whether your character is a good guy or a bad guy. However, while it is a good idea to mix a handful of different traits together to create a reasonably layered and complex character, try to practice a little bit of moderation too. You wouldn’t make soup with peas, brocolli, beef, onions, pasta, cheese, pork, cake, pizza, chicken, tomatoes, salmon, cod, haddock, oranges, bananas and avocados. All of those things might taste nice when combined with the right ingredients, but mixing them all together would be unpalatable. The same is true of character traits. Find ones that compliment each other (without necessarily matching each other) and try not to add too many.

There is, of course, almost no end to the list of possible character traits you might use, but I’ve listed a few below:

Because a character’s various traits must work together to form a single personality, it’s a good idea to experiment with them to see what works. I find writing little zero drafts or character auditions helpful for this process. While some traits may appear to be a more obvious fit for your character based on their motives and goals, there is something to be said for making more unlikely choices. A bitter old man, a hopeless romantic, a loudmouthed blowhard or a mild-mannered introvert may all be motivated towards very similar goals such as the pursuit of love, revenge, justice or whatever other motive you care to mention. The way they pursue their goals and deal with the ensuing conflict, however, will vary greatly. So for example, let’s pretend our protagonist is motivated by a desire for true love and his goal is to woo Jeanie, whom he is in love with. Jeanie, however, only sees him as a friend.

Our bitter old man will respond to Jeanie’s ‘friend-zoning’ with a certain level of resentment. While he may still harbour affectionate feelings for Jeanie, his hurt will likely be manifested in cruel comments and unkind behaviour. Our mild-mannered introvert, by contrast, will disguise how he feels with an easy-going manner and an apparent willingness to be a really nice ‘just friend’ for Jeanie, even though inwardly he still dreams of marrying her. Same motive, same goal, same problem, completely different results.

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ATTENTION AUTHORS:

Every Tuesday, I post a new edition of Spotlight: a short post which shines a proverbial spotlight on a published novel or collection of short fiction. If you would like to have your book considered for a future edition of Spotlight, drop us an e-mail including a short synopsis of your book and a link to where we can buy it. Better yet, send me a copy of your book and I can include a mini-review.

I’m still looking to interview fiction authors here on Penstricken, especially new or indie authors. Whether it’s books, plays, comics or any other kind of fiction, if you’ve got something written, I want to hear about it. If you’re interested in having your work featured on Penstricken, be to sure to drop us an e-mail or message us on Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest.

Please be advised that due to a recent surge in interest, I am presently committed to a significant number of reviews/interviews over the next couple of months. If you would like an interview or review, I would still love to hear from you, though it is unlikely that I will be able to begin work immediately.

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Monday Motivation

Posted on 06/07/202004/07/2020 by Ndrw

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A Protagonist’s Anatomy #2: Backstory

Posted on 05/07/202004/07/2020 by Ndrw

Real people don’t just pop out of thin air fully formed. Everything about them, from the way they speak to the things they believe, to the way they dress and to the decisions they make, is the culmination of what has gone before. This is is why if you want to write a protagonist of any real substance (and you do, dear reader) a strong backstory will be a vital part of his or her anatomy.

So what is a backstory? I hear you cry.

Put simply, a backstory is everything that happened to your protagonist before the events of your actual novel. More precisely, however, a backstory is whatever has happened in your protagonist’s past to make them who they are today. You may recall that last week we discussed character motive; but what is it that happened in this character’s past to endow them with this particular motive? That’s your backstory.

At this point, I would like to sound a note of caution. It can be tempting to write a detailed backstory which documents every single event in a protagonist’s life but this really isn’t necessary. It may or may not be the case that every single day is formative in the development of real life people, but we’re not writing real life. We’re writing fiction and fiction is reality refined to take away all the rough edges. Therefore, focus on what matters.

I find that the simplest approach is think of your character’s backstory like a photograph of the protagonist’s life. If you look at any good photograph (and I realise I’m stepping outwith my area of expertise here), you’ll see two things: the main subject of the photograph which sits in the foreground and the background which surrounds it.

Children holding hands in the foreground; a cobbled road and sunset in the background.

Your ‘background’ is all the basic stuff that goes into a character’s history: where they come from, who they grew up with, education, work, all that sort of thing. This doesn’t need to be too detailed. I find a simple list of basic facts will do for this point. E.g.:

Hometown: Somewhereland
Parents: Betty (deceased) and Bob
Siblings: Tom, Dick and Harriet.
… and so on and so forth.

Our ‘foreground’ backstory, however, ought to be a good deal more detailed. These are key events that have had a significant impact on your protagonist and were instrumental in making him the person he is today. Take Batman for instance. Why does this millionaire playboy feel the need to dress up in a frightening black costume and throw himself night after night into the criminal underbelly of one of the most lawless fictional cities in America?

Because when he was a little boy, he witnessed his parents being murdered. Every single version of Batman I’ve ever come across includes that key moment because that one event, more than anything else, makes Batman who he is. It’s what endowed him with that righteous fury which now serves as the key motivation behind everything he does. Without that righteous fury, he isn’t Batman; and without that painful single moment in his childhood, he has no real reason to be so motivated. It’s worth your while, therefore, writing out events like this in detail, perhaps even in the form of a little stand-alone short story. You don’t need to include this in your published book (in fact you probably shouldn’t), but it would probably be helpful for you as the author to have a detailed record of exactly what your protagonist experienced.

One more thing to remember: your character’s backstory is not the actual plot of your novel. It’s just the history of your character that makes them who they are today. Most of the background stuff will never need to be explicitly stated in the final published version of your story and even the foreground need not be laboured (though it should be gently inserted somewhere non-obstructive). What matters is that your protagonist has a clear origin so their motives don’t appear superficial to your reader, but your readers do not want to read lengthy portions of backstory which interrupt the flow of the actual plot. Click here to read a bit more about presenting a character’s backstory.

Thanks for reading. Be sure to come back next week for part 3, where we’ll be looking at character traits.

Missed part 1? Click here to go back!

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Throwback Thursday: How to Kill Someone (in Fiction) and Get Away With It

Posted on 02/07/202027/06/2020 by Ndrw

Originally published 17/07/2016

SPOILER ALERT

While every effort has been made to avoid any spoilers in this post, anyone who has not read The Green Mile by Stephen King or Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck is hereby advised that this post may contain a few unavoidable spoilers.

As much as I love the BBC sci-fi/drama, Doctor Who, I have to admit that in recent years, whenever one of the main characters die, I react in a way which I am quite sure the writers did not intend me to… I yawn.

I yawn because I just know they’ll be back. No one ever really dies on Doctor Who anymore, or if they do, some wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey thing happens to bring them back. The same goes for the bad guys as well as the good guys; The Master, Clara, Davros, Rory (Okay, strictly speaking he was erased from history, but still the principle remains; he ceased to exist and should never have come back) – they always find a way to cheat death just when all appears to be lost. Which means that for the viewer, all never really appears to be lost. It doesn’t matter if they get vaporised, blown up along with their spaceship or erased from history; the viewer always knows there’s a good chance that somehow, with a little sprinkling of TARDIS magic, they’ll be back.

Dear reader, what a waste this is. In real life, death is final; that’s what makes it such a big deal and why it is such a valuable tool for stimulating the audience emotionally. While killing a character only to bring them back later might seem like a cheap and easy way to make your story more exciting, it robs death of its sting if the audience knows that in this story, death is not final. If you want to produce any kind of reaction in your audience other than a bored yawn when you kill off a character, you’d better make sure the Reaper’s grip is as tight in your fictional world as it is in reality.

Moving on from implausible resurrections which suck all the drama out of fictional deaths, there are a few other unfortunate ways your audience might react to the death of a character. If you read last week’s post, you will no doubt be aware of how fickle a thing the audience’s support for your character can be. Just because you, as the writer, have decided who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the reader will like, support or sympathise with the characters you want them to like, support and sympathise with. The reason John Coffey’s execution in The Green Mile was so sad was because over the course of the book (or movie, whichever you prefer…), we begin to sympathise with him more and more, especially when it becomes clear that he was not guilty of the crimes he was convicted of. If, however, he really had raped and murdered the girls he was accused of, I doubt very much that the typical reader’s response would have been quite so favourable towards him and it would have completely undermined the bitter note on which The Green Mile ended.

There is another point which is also loosely connected to this. Not only is it important that the audience has the right level of sympathy for the character you plan on killing, but the audience also has to have the right level of sympathy for the surviving characters too. After all, what really makes a death scene tragic is often far more to do with these characters than the ones who actually die. In the final scenes of Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, one of the protagonists – the simple minded Lennie – accidentally kills a woman (‘Curley’s wife’). Most of the other characters in the story get the wrong end of the stick and decide to lynch Lennie. His friend, George, knows Lennie too well to really believe that he ever killed the Curley’s wife out of malevolence and ends up shooting Lennie in the back of the head to save him from being lynched. There are really two important deaths here: Lennie himself and Curley’s wife. Both of these characters have another character closely related to them with whom the reader has varying levels of sympathy (in Lennie’s case, it is George and in Curley’s wife’s case it is, of course, Curley). George, being one of the protagonists, garners considerable support from the audience on account of his protective behaviour towards the more vulnerable Lennie; Curley, on the other hand, is an altogether unlikable little man who is jealous, quick to anger, full of his own importance and who sees Lennie as somebody he can bully.

We’re not meant to like Curley. He’s a nasty little man from the moment he first appears so when his wife finally does die, all he is concerned about is having his revenge on the naive and lovable Lennie. In fact, the only time Curley ever appears to truly admire another character in the story is when he finds George standing over Lennie’s body and assumes that George heroically wrestled the gun out of Lennie’s hand and exacted revenge on Curley’s behalf – not realising that George killed Lennie as an act of compassion. It is almost impossible to truly sympathise with this man on account of his loss (no matter how tragic his wife’s death may have been) because his own reaction is one of hatred. He always hated Lennie for how he (accidentally) injured and humiliated him earlier in the story and now he finally has an excuse to kill him. That’s all his wife’s death means to him: an excuse to kill a guy he took a disliking to earlier in the story. George, on the other hand, clearly cares about Lennie, despite finding his behaviour challenging at times. Lennie’s death occurs only a few paragraphs before the story finally ends, but in those few paragraphs, George displays more genuine grief and regret over the death of his friend than Curley displays anywhere in the whole story. Thus, a certain bitter poignancy is added to Lennie’s death by George’s reaction, which is not so obvious in the death of Curley’s wife.

The death of a main character can easily be one of the main turning points in your story. A skillful author can use it to provoke any number of responses from all of the other characters, as well as further taking the reader’s sympathies in almost direction you like. Don’t spoil it or cheapen it by killing characters unnecessarily. If you’re going to kill a character then I implore you… don’t remove the fear of death from your story. Make sure dead characters stay dead, no matter how difficult it makes things for your other characters and be sure to do the proper ground work to get the correct response from your audience.

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Monday Motivation

Posted on 29/06/202027/06/2020 by Ndrw

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ATTENTION AUTHORS:

You can check out our previous interviews here:

A Protagonist’s Anatomy #1: Motive, Goals, Conflict & Epiphany

Posted on 28/06/202027/06/2020 by Ndrw

Well, it’s been a while since I did a series of posts so here begins my brand spanking new four post series entitled A Protagonist’s Anatomy. Over the next four weeks, I’ll be breaking down some of the most basic and essential elements that go into forming a full fledged character. This will be very much a whistle-stop tour of the various different elements that go into creating an imaginary person.

And so for the first post in the series it seemed only right that I begin with the four things that form the beating heart of any good character: motive, goals, conflict and epiphany.

I’ve written about these things on this blog a lot. Regular readers (♥) may feel like I’m repeating myself in this first instalment but I make no apology for that. Even if you have meticulously crafted every other element necessary to make a good character (we’ll come to those in the next couple of weeks), your character is as good as dead if they do not have a strong motive informing a clear goal hindered by a substantial conflict resolving in some kind of epiphany. This will not only produce a strong character but it will form the foundation of your story’s whole plot, so neglect it at your peril.

Motive

The most foundational element involved in making a character of substance is motive. This is, in the most simple terms possible, what gets your character up in the morning. Sure, the antagonist might be threatening to commit an act of unspeakable evil which will spell the end of life as we know it for all humanity, but why should the protagonist take it upon himself to do anything about it? Why not just leave it to the police? This is your motive; not what the character is trying to do but why they’re trying to do it. Ask yourself: what matters to this character more than anything else (e.g.: revenge, love, to escape their destiny, etc.). Then you will know their motive.

Goal

This, on the other hand, is precisely what your character is hoping to achieve before the end of the story (e.g.: to get to a certain place, to find a certain object, to marry a certain person). Try to be as precise as possible in your mind as to what your protagonist’s goal is because this also forms the foundation of the actual plot. The reader will intuitively understand that there is something that the protagonist must do, and that the story will not be finished until that goal has been decisively accomplished or thwarted. No goal, no story.

Conflict

This is where characters and the overall plot really start to overlap: something is keeping your character from accomplishing their goal. In the best stories, most characters will struggle against both an external conflict and an internal one.

The external ones are usually pretty obvious, such as an antagonist whose own goals stand in direct contradiction to the goals of the protagonist, thus bringing the two characters into conflict with each other. However this will usually make for pretty bland reading if the protagonist does not also struggle with an internal conflict: personal demons that they carry with them wherever they go which they must overcome in order to accomplish their external goals. For instance, in the original Star Wars trilogy there is the obvious external conflict between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, but there is also an underlying internal conflict where Luke must learn to use the Force to defeat Vader without succumbing to the ‘dark side’ as his father did. In most stories, the protagonist finally triumphs over the antagonist only once he has overcome his own inner-conflict.

Epiphany

There is an old cliché that says we should not be called human beings but human becomings, because we are all in a constant state of change (hopefully for the better). If you want your characters to read like real live people (and you do, dear reader) then you absolutely must reflect this in your writing. Your protagonist must evolve between the first and the final chapters, usually by learning an important lesson having finally put to bed the inner demons they have been wrestling with throughout the story.

Thanks for reading. Be sure to come back next week for part 2, where we’ll be looking at developing a protagonist’s back story.

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Throwback Thursday: Can’t Afford Scrivener? Try yWriter.

Posted on 25/06/202025/06/2020 by Ndrw

Originally published: 12/11/2017

Many years ago, when I decided to make my first serious attempt at writing a novel, I did what a lot of enthusiastic beginners probably do: I searched high and low for the perfect novel writing app. I didn’t know about Scrivener back then (in fact, I’m not even sure it was available for Windows at that time) but I did come across another app in a similar vein called yWriter by Spacejock Software. I attempted my first ever novel with it and I absolutely swore by it for a long time. Only the discovery of Scrivener for Windows really turned my head. However, in homage to auld lang syne, I’ve decided to download and review the most recent version of yWriter (specifically, yWriter6) for those of you who don’t want to spend any money (for there is no other good reason not to get Scrivener).

yWriter’s main window (fig. 1) is, for the most part, fairly self-explanatory. Like Scrivener, it allows you to organise your various notes on characters, settings, etc. and, like Scrivener, it allows you to organise your work into separate chapters and scenes. You can either begin with a blank project or you can use the project wizard… which is basically the same as making a blank project, only you begin by specifying the title, author’s name and file directory you want to save it to before you begin, thereby saving yourself thirty seconds later on.

The window which you use to actually write your scene is also pretty self-explanatory for anyone even remotely familiar with ordinary word processors. Unlike many modern word processors, however, you are essentially restricted to writing in a rich text box rather than on a virtual page. As such, there is no easy way to format your page layout (rulers, margins, etc). However, in addition to the features you would expect to find on any word processor, you also have the ability to hear your story read out to you by Microsoft David or Microsoft Zira (a feature which can be handy for helping you to edit a manuscript you’ve grown overly familiar with) and there’s a whole host of tabs on this window which allow you to edit all sorts of information pertaining to the scene you’re working on, if you find that sort of thing useful. You can also easily jump from one scene to another using the drop down menus at the bottom of the scene editing window.

Though this app is simple in many ways, and certainly lacks the flexibility of Scrivener, it does boast a plethora of handy little features which you can use or ignore as you see fit. I doubt if you’ll be inclined to use all of them and I don’t have nearly enough space here to mention them all, but suffice to say it seems pretty obvious to me that the developers have tried to appeal to a broad spectrum of novelists by adding a variety of tools.

Personally, I am rather fond of the word usage window, which shows you a list of every word used in your story and tells you how often you’ve used it; a handy feature if you’re given to tediously repeating certain turns of phrase over and over again. In addition, the help menu includes a ‘writing tips’ option, which brings up a simple message window containing a snippet of handy writing advice such as ‘take a 5-10 minute break every hour. Walk, exercise, make a drink’ and ‘sometimes it’s quicker to rewrite a short scene from scratch than to keep editing it’. You can also rate the relevance, tension, humour and quality of each scene you write and collate that information into a handy-dandy line-graph (fig. 3), which could be a potentially useful tool when you come to edit your drafts (assuming you can be honest with yourself about the quality of your work). The tools for developing characters, settings and items which appear in your story are simple enough to use, if a little basic and inflexible, although there’s plenty of room for writing whatever notes you want.

If there’s one major thing yWriter lacks, it is the ability to compile your manuscript into a suitable format for distribution. For instance, with Scrivener, you can easily compile your work into a variety of useful formats including (but not limited to) standard manuscript format, screenplay format or e-book format– and of course, if none of the presets appeal to you, you can customise your own format. You can’t do any of that with yWriter. It does allow you to export your project in a variety of ways, but if you’ve got any serious plans to submit your work for publication, you’ll need to transfer your exported project to a suitable word processor and format it yourself.

I realise I’ve unintentionally spent a lot of time here comparing yWriter to Scrivener but I hope you won’t misunderstand my intentions. I really like yWriter. Yes, there is room for further development but I do think it’s worth trying, especially for new authors who are just dipping their toe into novel writing for the first time. Nevertheless, bells and whistles not withstanding, it is quite limited when it is compared to more expensive tools like Scrivener. My advice would be to give it a go. You may find yWriter is more than sufficient for your own particular needs, in which case you should be able to get your novel written and save yourself a few bob into the bargain.

My rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

UPDATE 25/06/20: yWriter 6 and 7 both export to Mobi and Epub using Calibre to create the final output file. You can also export to Latex to create paperback editions.

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