"I want to learn how to write stories. Can you tell me how?" – David Thorpe

"Excuse me. I want to learn how to write stories. Can you tell me how?"

"You must first have a terrific character – or three – to make a story about."

"Must I? But why?"

"All stories are about people."

"What if they're about animals? Or things?"

"They're characters too, for the purposes of the story. So, okay, all stories are about characters."

"Not about ideas?"

"Sometimes they are idea-led. But really, people read stories because they like to care about the characters in them, so you can't have a story without characters doing things. And so you need believable characters."

"I see. Hang on. How do you make a believable character?"

"Let me tell you a story, and perhaps at the end of it you might have a clue...

"Once upon a time there was a man who wanted to be a writer. But whenever he sat down to write a story he was struck by the artificiality of what he was doing.

"Surely," he said to himself, "if I set out to construct a character, it would be obvious to any reader that the character has really been created by a writer to seem convincing, and therefore the reader will see right through any of my paltry attempts to make a character realistic. How can any self-respecting, intelligent reader bring themselves to care for a character that has been made up? For they will tell themselves at every point – like when I make something bad happen to that character – 'Pah! He's not real anyway. What does it matter what happens to him? I've enough on my plate worrying about my sick mother – who is real.' I'm doomed before I even start."

"This writer had a point. For him, the apogee of good writing was represented by novels such as 'At Swim Two Birds' by Flann O'Brien or 'Breakfast of Champions' by Kurt Vonnegut, wherein the authors openly acknowledge that their characters are mere artifices and satirically play with this joke.

"Needless to say, this writer's early attempts at writing a successful novel came to nothing. The only thing he seemed to be good for was writing comics, which, as everyone knows, are not literature, and contain only two-dimensional caricatures for characters."

"Hang on–"

"But then a funny thing happened to this writer. You see, all his life he had suffered from cerebral palsy, but only in a minor way. Nothing dramatic needing a wheelchair or anything. In fact, people often would not think there was anything physically wrong with him beyond a certain awkwardness, a jerkiness, a lack of coordination.

"But when he was a child this had led other children, who can be very cruel, to pick on him, to call him names – or perhaps worse. This had made him defensive, even aggressive, to others, and unable to trust them not to hurt him, and this shell he had made around himself made it hard to make friends. He could never admit anything was wrong for fear of being hurt.

"He did not understand what made people tick. He could not be open and honest. He even forgot the words 'cerebral palsy'."

"Poor man."

"What, are you saying you care for him?"

"Well, of course! He must have been lonely."

"Hmm. Let me continue my story.

"One day his condition worsened. He developed a limp. A limp was something he could not hide. So he found people he knew stopping him in the street and saying things like, "You are limping. What's the matter?"

"Now he could no longer pretend there was nothing wrong with him. He had to answer honestly. And, to his surprise, his friends did not turn on him. They did not laugh or insult him or walk away. No. Instead, they began to tell him about their own health issues. They began to open up to him. And in return he began to open up to them. It was difficult at first but after a while he found that it transformed his relationships with people. He developed deeper friendships and was no longer lonely.

"He was amazed."

"What's this got to do with his writing?"

"Patience. I'm coming to that.

"A few months later he heard about a competition being run by a big publisher to find a Major New British Children's Writer. They gave a whole year to write the novel so he thought, "Why not? I'll have a go."

"This time he wouldn't write what he thought a publisher might want. This time he would write for himself. And he would put into the main character all of his feelings about his body (but disguised, of course – it's fiction after all).

"He wrote about loss and love and pain and longing and reconciliation and fear and confusion.

"He forgot that this was a fictional creation because it wasn't (for him, although it appeared to be). And so it did not feel artificial or forced. It felt real.

"He sent the novel off to the competition and forgot about it, because he was convinced this would not be the type of writing they were looking for. 

"So no one was more surprised than he to get a phone call a few months later from the publisher's Head of Children's Fiction saying he was in the top three. And then a week later that he had won.

"The novel was published and received fabulous reviews from both children and adults.

"And they loved the characters.

"Do you see what I mean now?"

"I think so. You mean I have to walk with a limp."

"Whatever it takes, bro."

[I am the writer of Marvel's Captain Britain, the sci-fi YA novels Hybrids, Doc Chaos: The Chernobyl Effect and the cli-fi fantasy Stormteller. My writing course, called 'Making Readers Care' can be taken online. Contact me if interested.]

Eureka! Nailing epiphanies – by Rowena House

I’d planned to start this blog by diving straight into the Big Five personality traits – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness & neuroticism (acronym: OCEAN) – and extoll their virtues as the best tools ever for crafting character arcs.

But during a FB discussion about the Big Five earlier this month for WriteOnCon (an online conference well worth catching next time, btw) I remembered why I’d found them so helpful when redrafting my debut novel:

OCEAN had nailed the problem of how to make an epiphany work.

 

The anatomy of epiphanies had bugged me ever since James Scott Bell’s Writing Your Novel From The Middle persuaded me that a Midpoint Epiphany was a great plotting device. John Yorke’s Into the Woods expands on them at length, but story structure alone wasn’t enough to make mine seem ‘organic’ so I turned to psychology for help.

The Big Five

After millennia of debate about how many aspects there are to human personality, current psychology has (broadly) settled on five categories: openness to new experiences, conscientiousness in fulfilling a task, the multiple facets of extraversion plus all the variations of agreeableness & neuroticism.

Taken together, they express the myriad permutations of personality.

These categories aren’t binary. People aren’t Open or Not Open. Each is a sliding scale from more to less, and encapsulates aspects of personality that tend to go together.

For example, being sociable, talkative & assertive are manifestations of extraversion, while being systematically late, lax and indifferent indicate a low level of conscientiousness.

Under sufficient stress these traits are mutable, evolving in response to major life events – events so important they make us step up to the mark and decide what we’re prepared to do to achieve our greatest ambitions or defend that which we hold most dear.

 

Which seems to me a reasonable description of a character-based plot.

 

There’s loads of stuff about OCEAN on the web if you’re interested (and a bunch of online tests if you don’t mind some random organisation knowing who you are) but here’s a quick summary of each for ease of reference.

 

OCEAN definitions

Factors associated with openness include curiosity, original thinking, insight & creativity, openness to new & unusual ideas. Appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas. Those high in this trait also tend to have a broad range of interests.

Examples of low-score behaviour	Examples of high-score behaviour
Someone who prefers not to be exposed to alternative moral systems, has limited interests, down-to-earth attitudes, non-analytical, narrow-minded.	Enjoy seeing people with new types of haircut, body piercing, curious, imaginative, non-traditional.

 

Conscientiousness: being organised, systematic, punctual, achievement-orientated, dependable. High levels of thoughtfulness, good impulse control, goal-driven. Tendency to be mindful of details.

 

Low score	High score
Spur-of-the-minute decision-making,  unreliable, hedonistic, careless, lax	Never late, hardworking, persevering, punctual, self-disciplined, dutiful.

 

Extraversion: outgoing, talkative, sociable, high energy, positive emotions, urgency, a tendency to seek stimulation and the company of others. Extraversion is the factor most strongly associated with leadership.

Low score	High score
Prefers a quiet evening in, reading rather than parties, sober, aloof, unenthusiastic	Life of the party, active, optimistic, taking charge,

 

Agreeableness: being affable, tolerant, sensitive, trusting, kind & warm. A tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic. Weakly related to leadership.

Low score	High score
Quick to assert own rights with confidence; irritable, manipulative, uncooperative, rude.	Agrees with other’s opinions, good-natured, forgiving, gullible, helpful

Neuroticism: tendency to be anxious, irritable, temperamental, moody. Inclined to experience unpleasant emotions easily, including anger, depression or vulnerability. Sometimes called emotional instability. Tendency towards sadness.

Low score	High score
Not getting irritated by small annoyances, calm, unemotional, hardy, secure, self-satisfied.	Constantly worrying about little things, insecure, hypochondriac, feeling inadequate.

 

Constructing a basic profile incorporating these traits seems to me a more efficient way to create realistic, rounded characters than answering one of those long questionnaires about the colour of their favourite t-shirt & TV shows they watched as kids etc.

Better by far (imho) to know how open they are to new experiences or if they’re vulnerable and anxious.  Not only will this knowledge signpost how a character is likely to react to unexpected events but also what actions they might plausibly initiate at each stage in their emotional/psychological journey.

And once you know their deepest, repressed fears, you can merrily create the kind of obstacles which will test their underlying weaknesses to the utmost.

Think Snakes On A Plane. Who’d give the air marshal in that film a phobia about spiders?

Retrofitting character arcs

For me, OCEAN really came into its own when I had to rework a First World War coming-of-age script after receiving a development advance from Walker Children’s Books. The elements I needed were already in the backstory; I just hadn’t developed them enough.

 

So, in the rewrite, I took my protagonist step-by-step to a more mature place, one where she could – plausibly – reverse her deepest feelings about members of her family.

Spoiler alert: the worked example below is based on an Openness subplot of this novel, which will be out with Walker next year. (Hurrah!) I hope it’s detailed enough to make sense without giving too much of the plot away.

 

Act 1
1	Pre-story trait to be transformed	Stubborn loathing of family member X (a soldier killed in the Battle of Verdun).
2	Initial openness behaviour	Down-to-earth, non-analytical, limited life experience, defensive about her opinions of her family
3	OCEAN traits permitting transformation	Openness: a vivid imagination Agreeableness: capacities for empathy & kindness
4	OCEAN traits preventing transformation	Openness: refusal to accept alternative points of views about her brother Neuroticism: an unconscious desire for a substitute father
Act 2
5	Transitional behaviour	Aroused curiosity about the outside world as she starts her journey; fails first test by focusing narrowly on her quest rather than the suffering of others
6	Pre-epiphany behaviour	Forced to consider profiteer’s point of view, forced to consider strikers’ PoV; forced to consider the suffering that led to ex-soldier Y’s disabilities.
7	MIDPOINT EPIPHANY	While assimilating her feelings about Y, she recognises the narrow self-interest that prompted her quest, but remains resistant to re-examining her feelings about X
8	Post-epiphany behaviour	Being more open, she observes the world more closely, leading to true empathy for others.
Act 3
9	Completion of consequences of EPIPHANY	On eve of the ‘final battle’, makes her peace with X
10	Final Openness state	In epilogue, evidence of new open attitude to disabled soldiers

 

 

 

Twitter handle: @HouseRowena

 

 

TOM, TOBY AND ME by Penny Dolan

This post isn’t about a children’s book but it is about writing. At least. I think it is . . .

My news: recently I read a book. Yes, that thing. Not just any book. This was a special book. It was a “Book Group” book.  Aha!  

Now, as many of you will know, Book Group books can become a slight burden (especially when you should be busy writing something else) because not only do you read the book but you should absorb the plot and the characters and the setting and all the deeper issues and all well enough to be able to recall the novel at the next meeting, which could be several personal book-readings away on an avid book month. Despite the slight air of protest, I must add that such reading is a good & beneficial task for greedy-rush-through-the pages readers like me, too prone to skimming and forgetting.   

Last month, the book group book revealed something about character that I'm still pondering. The novel that had been chosen was CAPITAL by John Lanchester which is about the interwoven stories of several nationalities all living or working in Pepys Street, South London, at the very moment when ordinary, "cheap" terraced-house prices soar beyond a million and a big financial cloud is gathering and about to crash. 

The book was a rich read, especially in the year of Brexit or Remain, but that's not what I want to talk about right now.

 

Now, if there's a choice, I much prefer reading any book before seeing the film version; however this time I'd already seen CAPITAL on screen before I was given the book. Watching it in late 2015, I'd half-noticed vague criticisms about the actor chosen to play the role of the wealthy capitalist banker Roger Yount but hadn't pursued the grumbles to any named person.

Many other characters in CAPITAL are more admirable than top-of-the-heap Roger, who lives in the biggest, most-renovated house on Pepys Street with his elegant, avariciously awful wife and his two young sons left in the care of daytime and weekend nannies. Roger’s whole lifestyle is only be kept in balance by an expected million pound bonus which, one day, will not arrive.

Roger – bear with the detail, please - is described in the book as being over six foot four. He is the kind of man who can “fill a doorway”, physically fit and fairly good-looking.  Roger sounds the kind of handsome, rich everyman role that might perhaps - before The Night Manager -  have been played by Tom Hiddleston. 

In this visualisation, Roger’s story would be about one of the beautiful & entitled people who get their deserved come-uppance. We would never, really, be on his side. This suave Roger would be too visibly of the elite for the viewer to feel sympathy or warm towards him.

However - and here’s my main point – the actor chosen for the screen version was Toby Jones: a “hero” of short stature, an uglyish face and a hang-dog expression. Spot the difference? Do you feel the change in your feelings towards this character?

This “screen” Roger’s physical appearance suggested to me that he had got his position against the odds, that he was a bloke who had won through to a lucky position despite the elite of the Eton bankers. 

Therefore when Roger’s luck runs out, (partly through office politics and partly through his own ineptitude) I could feel some of the pity for him that I freely gave to the other characters who were leading much more desperate lives.

Subtle tweaks and changes were fed into the Roger story, as well as into the other characters lives, as happens in screen adaptations, but - to my mind - that Toby Jones casting balanced the story. His slightly comic looks positioned the screen version firmly in the world of gentle satire and comedy – as well as the world of small, individual tragedies – all of which made the televised CAPITAL work as a whole, positive experience for me, if not for everyone.

And the point of this ABBA post is?

The point of the hypothetical Tom/Toby switch is that I’m now thinking much harder about the physical appearance and the mannerisms of the many characters in my current work-in-progress.

Do my people balance, and if so, how? Do they fit into the main genre and help the mood I’m intending? Moreover, quite how am I making my people become different experiences for the reader?

And what is the right amount of sympathy to invest in a villain? Just now, I’m starting to see how easily the novel might become my bad guy’s story, instead of the story of the two main characters that I’m intending.

In short, am I writing a devastatingly cool “page-version” of Tom when I should be creating a foolish but sympathetic “screen” Toby?   

Time to look very sharply at all my imagined creatures. I think!

Penny Dolan

Truth - stranger than fiction? By Sue Purkiss

Today I set my weekly writing class off on a story. We started off by looking at some pieces of jewellery I'd taken in - a complete mixture, ranging from a glittery owl brooch my daughter bought me when she was quite small, through a simple one made out of pewter set with an oval blue stone which my mother made at school, to a carved ivory necklace which Mum often wore when she was younger. I didn't tell them anything about the pieces. Everyone chose something and began to think about who might have bought it and why, whether it was a gift and if so what was the occasion and to whom might it have been given - and so on.

This was leading up to a story, which would involve a character which I would help them to build and a piece of jewellery - probably the one they'd been looking at, but it didn't have to be. 

They like it when I give them clues which help them to create a character. There are different ways to do it. Once, I took in a selection of objects; they had to choose three or four and imagine who might have owned them, how they'd come by them, what kind of person might have ended up with this particular selection. Another time, we did something similar using a random list of ten objects, cutting it down to five, and doing the same thing.

My own favourite is using pictures, like those above. I spread out postcards, cuttings, reproductions of paintings etc. They choose the one that interests them and then invent a name and a back story - or maybe write a monologue to explain what's behind the image.

But quickest and easiest, and probably the method most of them prefer, is Character Consequences. Each of us has a piece of paper. At the top, you write a first name. Then you fold the paper over and pass it on. The next person writes a surname. Then it might be the thing the person most wants, or their favourite piece of clothing, or their most noticeable physical characteristic - or the kind of house they live in, or the job they do. They can change or just not use one element, if it really doesn't fit in - but they tend to take pride in managing to finagle all the ingredients into the mix.

I think it was Alan Sillitoe, a lad from a working class Nottingham background, who found success as a writer after someone advised him to write about what he knew. It certainly worked for him, and it's a piece of advice that's often given to aspiring writers. I think there's a lot in it, but like most of the advice writers and writing tutors hand out about their craft, it's not the whole story. The exercises I've described above produce a surprising variety of entertaining work. I think that's partly because they provide a bit of a shortcut, a scaffold, a way in - but I think it may also be precisely because they introduce an element of something outside the writer's easily available normal environment.

What's led me to this earth-shattering conclusion? Well, I've just been away for a few days, staying with relatives not far from a small town in rural south-west Ireland. (I don't think the place is necessarily significant: it's just that it was a different place to the one I'm used to.) They told stories, one after another, about themselves and the people they knew, and I listened, fascinated. The stories - and the characters who peopled them - were dramatic, funny, fascinating - and different. I wish I could tell you some of them, but... best not!

But it did just strike me that these little exercises do something similar. We get used to our own attitudes, assumptions and experiences, and it's easy to draw on them when we write. But a simple exercise like one of those above does what a trip to another community does: it takes you out of your comfort zone and helps you step into the shoes of someone you would never otherwise have known or imagined.

Now, to finish - a little story from Ireland which is nothing to do with characters, but which created a haunting image that will stay with me.

My brother in law lives on a farm which he bought thirty years ago from an old man called Jack, who had been born there. Jack was extremely generous with his time and experience, and he taught the young incomer all he could about farming. He also told him stories of course, and one of them was this. 

In the old days, when Jack was small, the children from all around came to a school in the middle of the countryside, called the Model School. For Jack, it was only a half hour walk across the fields - perhaps a little less. But some children came from the top of the mountain - you can see it in the picture, on the left. Their families were poor, and they walked barefoot, carrying their shoes so as not to wear them out. 

At the end of the day, they had to trudge home again, back along the valley and then all the way up the mountain. The path went past Jack's family's farm, and his mother felt sorry for them and so would come out with a potato or a piece of bread and butter to help them on their way.

Only sometimes, she didn't hear them, or for whatever reason didn't come to the door. And when this happened, they would walk round the farmhouse (on the right there), over and over again till she noticed them. And only then would they continue their long journey home.

And that's the picture that sticks.