Last week I mined a book I hated for some positive lessons I might apply to my own writing. Incidentally, later the same week Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff undertook a similar exercise at the Book View Cafe Blog. A different book, but it clearly drove her nearly as crazy as the one I’ve been wading through. Like Maya, I don’t intend to name my source of anti-inspiration, though there may be clues in the text or elsewhere in the blog.
This week, I’m returning to this rich seam for five final lessons.
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- Make your characters interesting**
It’s worth asking yourself some questions about your characters. Do your characters have depth? Do they embody, or fail to live up to, values. Do they have questions about the world, do they have conflicts internal and external. In short does your reader care about them? If not, you may have a problem. The next two points take this one a little further.
2. Make your characters need something, and make it matter.
Most characters want something, but do they want it enough? Are they driven? Is their need deep enough to involve the reader? And when they are thwarted, must they reach deeper within themselves to find a new plan? Are your characters’ conscious desires at odds with their actual needs? Does that contradiction throw up new problems for them? Most detectives want to solve their cases, just as most plumbers want to fix the leaky pipes they encounter, but that isn’t enough on its own. A set of bland characters more or less keen to overcome a battery of obstacles and misunderstandings won’t make a compelling novel. If the characters don’t care enough, for deep enough reasons, neither will the reader.
3. Make your characters act on the world
Dynamic characters change the world around them. That’s not to say they get what they want, in fact the opposite is probably true. But they provoke consequences, and these demand new actions. Its in the crucible of the relationship between action and consequence that a character’s nature is defined, tested, revealed and transformed. Passive characters, on the other hand, ricochet unchanging from one crisis to another. Because they don’t seize the initiative we never see them truly tested, and they remain two-dimensional vehicles designed to cruise the highways and byways of the novel’s plot.
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- Use repetition sparingly and knowingly**
Repetition is a powerful tool when used cleverly. There’s something about foreshadowing, for example, that is immensely satisfying. There’s a nice click as a pattern set up early in a story reverberates with a more significant but similarly shaped element later on. The running gag relies on repetition, as does the rule of three (where a hero makes three attempts on an objective in three different ways, only succeeding the third time round). In these instances though, repetition is an evolution, not a straight echo. It’s is used with economy and with a light touch.
Overused, though, repetition can quickly annoy the reader. Perhaps a character is in the habit of contradicting in thought the spoken statements of those around her, for example. That’s a nice effect used once or twice. If it’s repeated often and by more than one character, then the device becomes clumsy and irritating. Add repeated expostulations, plot elements, sentence structures, and so on, and reading your story soon becomes a kind of drudgery.
5. Don’t signpost every single symbol and reference
The world of a character can be used to engender emotion. This resonance or ‘objective correlative’ is the stronger for being unstated. If a character is trapped in a situation, for example, and happens to see a poster, or hear a snatch of a sermon that echoes her state, having her explicitly think “just like my life right now!”, can empty the effect of the resonance and make the story seem slavishly literal and empty of mystery.
