Tag: process

In Case of Emergency, Break Glass

Posted 2 years ago by clpolk

I originally posted this on Twitter.

A screenshot of a document titled "In Case of Emergency, Break Glass." Transcript follows.
This is the transcript.

In Case of Emergency, Break Glass

Comforting Lies
• Charlie Jane said this. Toast her every time you remember: You are not stuck. Your characters are stuck. They are trying to figure out what to do. You are watching them work out what they’re going to do next. You’re just the one who is writing all this shit down.
• The only person who is going to see it in this state is [NAME.] They want to help you. Just write it badly and trust them to help.

Actually True
• You have never published an unrevised novel. You have never published an unrevised act. You have never published an unrevised chapter. You have never published an unrevised scene. You have never published an unrevised page. A handful of sentences and even fewer paragraphs met your standards when written on first draft. But you’re proud of every story you put into the world.
• What that means is this: Write it down. You will fix it. But you can’t fix it until you have let yourself write the awkward confusing version. You can fix it the moment you finish writing it. You can fix it a second time, a third, a fourth-and then you can cut it, rewrite it, restructure it, move it somewhere else, anything. Writing it down is not irrevocable. A clumsy sentence is not a failure. It’s useful material. Seeing how that sentence is wrong refines your vision.
• Getting caught up in what it should be is standing in the way of making it real.

What to do about it
• Forgive yourself for not being alight with the muse. Forgive yourself for days where you don’t feel good about what you wrote. Forgive yourself for all those days perfectionism fooled you and kept you away from the page. Nobody knows how to do this perfectly and nobody ever will.
• Sheer doggedness writes novels, not genius.
• It’s all right if you’d rather dust the baseboards today. It’s a good time to check in with your characters and let them bitch about the mess they’re in.
• The joy of doing it is why you do it. If you’re not feeling joyful, write something that trips the joyswitch.

Let’s do this.

/

It’s been a long time since I published a craft blog post, but I haven’t quit talking about craft. I made a Patreon account, and I have posts there about things like 

a synopsis writing guide that will help expose structural manuscript problems

how to evaluate a scene to make sure it’s doing the right things

how to build a story when all you have is a character

I do a new writing related post every month, available to patrons on a sliding scale basis – pick the level of patronage you can afford and you’re in!

Starting in August I am starting a Live Sessions tier, where I will explore a subject about the craft and business of writing on zoom, where you can ask more questions. Look for it then!

What Makes a Hyper-competent Character Relatable?

Posted 5 years ago by clpolk

The day after I wrote my Ten Questions for Characters post I had a discord conversation about a question asked in the #writerspatch twitter chat on Sunday, Jan 13:

“Does relatability to the reader make a character more believable?”

And sure, the answer is obviously yes. But where’s the rest of the owl? How do you make a character relatable, particularly a hyper-competent protagonist in a book about the space program? (I’m still on my astronaut kick, thanks to reading The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal – A GREAT BOOK that I enjoyed very much, and it’s been lingering in my thoughts for days now.)

But let’s look at the protagonist, Elma (a wonderful person who I admire greatly!)

Elma is a Jewish woman who can do extremely complex mathematics in her head and who wants to be an astronaut in 1950’s USA. She winds up on the headlines of major newspapers, magazines, national television, she’s an expert pilot and a war veteran, she’s a whole barrel of competencies and skills and experiences that I don’t have anything in common with. So where am I connecting with Elma, as I’m reading about her?

One place springs to mind immediately. I remember wanting to be an astronaut when I was a little girl, and being told that I could not be an astronaut because I was a girl. Elma’s experience with sexism is a connection point for me, particularly because of my age (I’m going to be a level 50 human this year.) Her determination to fight a system that wouldn’t even consider her because she was a woman is a point I can relate to.

But there’s another point that makes me care for Elma even if I didn’t have an inkling of what it was like to be a woman before feminism, and that’s her experience with anxiety. I don’t know what it’s like to be able to recite prime numbers into the four-digit range, but oh boy do I know what it’s like to be scared. I know what it’s like to be scared to fail in front of an audience. I know what it’s like to avoid things that trigger that fear. So when Elma has problems facing all the attention she’s getting for being so extraordinary, I get it. I get her.

That one-two punch of fighting against an obstacle that’s really too big for one woman to fight and Elma’s personal vulnerability – her anxiety – combine in a way that captures my interest and my empathy. I connected with Elma through these struggles – the external and the internal – and so I became so preoccupied with reading the book that losing my Kindle reader for three days was hell because I wanted to read the rest of the story so badly.

This was something that I knew, but never actually verbalized until recently – that readers are connecting to characters through their weaknesses and vulnerabilities – that the personal, internal struggle is the reason why a reader identifies with a character even though their life experience is probably very different from the reader’s.

(Hold on while I indulge in a little rejectomancy, okay?) I think that this might be what agents and editors mean when they say, “I couldn’t connect with the character.” If you’ve been getting that rejection, maybe go back to your opening pages and see if you are showing not just your protagonist’s skills and strengths, but the soft spots/vulnerabilities that relate directly with the character’s internal journey.

The opening of a story introduces a reader to the protagonist and what they can expect, and it’s two threads, not just one: The external struggle the character is going to fight against, and the internal journey to heal or face the problem that holds them back from winning the external struggle. The combination of the two is the intersection where you’re going to find your readers and the people who “get” the story you’re trying to tell.

It’s been a long time since I published a craft blog post, but I haven’t quit talking about craft. I made a Patreon account, and I have posts there about things like 

  • a synopsis writing guide that will help expose structural manuscript problems
  • how to evaluate a scene to make sure it’s doing the right things
  • how to build a story when all you have is a character

I do a new writing related post every month, available to patrons on a sliding scale basis – pick the level of patronage you can afford and you’re in!

Starting in August I am starting a Live Sessions tier, where I will explore a subject about the craft and business of writing on zoom, where you can ask more questions. Look for it then!

Ten Questions I Ask New Characters – And Why I’m Asking

Posted 5 years ago by clpolk

Some people have long and detailed lists of questions they answer for their characters, right down to what they carry around in their pockets. Others simply have characters appear to them, fully formed, ready to live the story from the beginning. I think I have a little bit of the latter, in that characters just show up and demand to have their story told, but in order for me to know what kind of story suits them, I need a little more information.

I start with the basics – GMC (Goal, Motivation, Conflict.) but I like to go a little deeper and more detailed than that, and so I’ve expanded my list of questions to ten – not quite as long as the Proust Questionnaire, but hopefully a candid and intimate look inside a fully realized character.

As of page one of the story, What do they want?

This is the commonly understood character goal – the thing that the character wants. I need to know that my character is going to have protagonist drive, initiative, ambition, whatever you want to call it, so I need to know what they want.

I write character centered, plot heavy fiction, so I don’t really sit well with characters who “just want to be left alone” or “just want to be normal” most of the time. I want a character who wants something.

Why do they want it? is it a good reason, or is there something flawed in their motivation?

And when I say a character who wants something, I mean a character who has hung a lot of meaning and significance to the thing that they want. So when they say, “I want to be an astronaut” and you say, “why?” they have an answer that has a lot weighing on it.

Why can’t they just have it? What or who is standing in their way?

I write western stories, and western stories die without conflicts, obstacles, difficulties and frustrations. So I need a barrier to success that will take a whole book to get past. It could be an antagonist directly opposing them–or fighting for exactly the same thing, but for reasons that oppose the character’s motivations. It could be a force–of nature, or of culture.

I said up there, right off the top of my head, that a character wanted to be an astronaut. Their opposition could be a person who’s competing for the same astronaut spot. It could be that they’re a woman or a person of color, trying to become an astronaut in a sexist and or racist society. Or it could be that someone close to them, someone they love, is opposed to them becoming an astronaut, and they’re trying to push them to be something else.

How will they fight against that opposition to get what they want?

This is where I start exploring a character’s competencies and personality. If I have a determined, disciplined character who is an athlete and a scholar striving for the chance to become an astronaut, they’re gonna keep trying. But how? It’ll be different if the character is a bit of a competitive bulldozer who will prove that they have the skills by acing every test put to them, or a socially adept, charismatic people person with top piloting skills who wins hearts and minds through their insight into people.

What will they never ever do, even if it means they’ll get what they want?

This is where I explore ethics, morality, fears, and boundaries, so I will know that my determined, competitive character will never cheat to get ahead, and believes solidly in the idea that merit matters, and my socially adept, charismatic character will draw the line at blackmail or coercion to get what they want. Or maybe they have a looser morality than that. This is where I explore the limits and breaking points for a character, so I know what I’m going to make them face later.

This could be an antagonist willing to break those barriers, or a story where the protagonist is put in a situation where they have to face those limits themselves in the course of the story.

What core belief – about the world, about life, about success – does the character have that protects them from “losing” or being hurt – but ultimately holds them back from true success?

This might be familiar to you as the “Fatal Flaw” or the “Lie the Character believes” or the “Central Misbelief” or the “Moral Failing,” depending on what craft books you’ve read. I see it as a personal obstacle that has to be faced and overcome in the personal journey of the character, if that character is going to succeed at the end of the story. This problem is going to get in their way early in the story, and keep driving them to failure points as the characters learn and develop.

What did they want when they were just a kid? How is it different from what they want now? What happened to change it?

This is an important question to me because it explains the origins of the character’s personality, skills, morality, protagonist drive, and their limiting core belief. I spend some time thinking about the character’s childhood in general, but I always have them complete this sentence: “When I was a child, I dreamed about becoming ______.”

Who or what do they love most in the world?

This is a humanizing touchstone. It’s also a great vulnerability. Wield it with compassion and cruelty.

What are they afraid to lose?

This could be a secret they hold. It might be a possession. It might be a particular person’s good opinion. It could be the neighborhood where they grew up, the country they fled from in the wake of war and conquest. It could be their social status. It might take a while to figure this one out.

What do they regret the most?

Did they regret something they did? Or do they regret something they didn’t do? How much does it weigh on them? Do they have protagonist drive to mend that regret? Do they possess or lack the skills or qualities to make amends or heal the old wound or rekindle the opportunity?

It’s been a long time since I published a craft blog post, but I haven’t quit talking about craft. I made a Patreon account, and I have posts there about things like 

  • a synopsis writing guide that will help expose structural manuscript problems
  • how to evaluate a scene to make sure it’s doing the right things
  • how to build a story when all you have is a character

I do a new writing related post every month, available to patrons on a sliding scale basis – pick the level of patronage you can afford and you’re in!

Starting in August I am starting a Live Sessions tier, where I will explore a subject about the craft and business of writing on zoom, where you can ask more questions. Look for it then!

How I Abandon Organization While Planning a Novel

Posted 5 years ago by clpolk

Sometimes people look at my process and say, “that’s so organized, I have no idea how you do this in such a tidy way, I could never do that. How do you do it so neatly?”

The answer is that I don’t try, at first. That organization is the last thing I do, not the first.

At first I just write whatever is crowding my mind. No order, rhyme, nor reason. I type this out in gdocs, mostly, though I have been known to do it longhand in my notebook and then transcribe. I title the file “Everything I Know About the Story” and it is a celebration of structureless, stream of consciousness process. I do whatever excites and interests me the most without shame or apology, allowing myself to be illogical, liberated, and limitless. I keep at it until I exhaust all my ideas. This usually is about 20-30 pages of the most RANDOM NONSENSE. It usually takes me about twenty hours.

baks clothing co. (1)

Then, after taking a break of 1-3 days (while I fart about on Pinterest building my “visual aesthetic” and building a WIP soundtrack on Spotify) I go back to the document and start making notes. I write expansions, ask questions, make comments. It’s still a mess at this point, so I feel like I can throw anything at it. I still don’t have to know what I’m writing about. I’m still discovering it this fills out ten to twenty hours of work.

Then I start organizing it into a Microsoft One Note Binder, because that’s what I use for my series bible stuff. I will organize things like “characters” and “locations” and “Culture” and file EVERYTHING. I’m still not writing a story – I’m putting the laundry away, so to speak, so I can find my rainbow colored socks when I need them.

While I’m doing that, I start figuring out the story – like, does this society have a rigid class system/social caste? Where are my various characters on the various layers – are they on the come up or the way down? I especially think about characters. Questions like, who are my characters on the inside? What do they want, and who/what do they have to fight to get it? Who knows whom and how do they interact? What are their secrets? What do they regret? What would they never, ever do, say, believe in? And the whole time I’m thinking:

How can I wreck their lives with this information? How do I use this to push them out of their comfortable holding pattern and into the world story? How do they get involved? Why them in particular, and not someone else? How can I make the stakes higher and the situations worse?

uphold the rule of law.

Inevitably I’ll get more ideas, some of them as proto-scenes. That’s when I start a Scrivener file–so I can make scene cards for these proto-scenes. I’m starting my outline now, so I’m going to start thinking about what the characters expect will happen, and how those expectations get upended. I’ll think about essential scenes for the kind of story I’m telling, and for the kind of characters that are populating it. I usually wind up with about 15 of those kinds of scenes, and they start shaping themselves into the story I want to tell.

Then I wrack my brains working on major story points – what happens to make the character actively pursue the story goal? What happens in the middle that changes everything? What does the character have to lose, and how will I take it away from them at the darkest moment? What is the final confrontation where the character realizes what they have to sacrifice to get what they really want? What kind of life are they starting after their climactic triumph (or loss?)

This is the beginning of organizing, for me. This is where I stop and say, “okay, how long is this story? Whose story am I telling? How many POV characters have popped up? What are their personal arcs? What do they need to do? “What do they need to do” gets me started on sub-plots. I write these stories about incredibly busy people, who often can’t just drop everything and go on a quest – they have jobs to do, people who depend on them, a pursuit that can’t just be set aside.

So if I’m writing a story about an entomologist who is fighting to have a species of lycaenidae recognized as a unique discovery when suddenly her friend and mentor – a well known but controversial figure in insect migration dies is murdered, she’s not going to forget about her aim to have the credit for discovering Arcas tuneta jayalethi (she gets to name the insect, too) or having to return home to attend an important life milestone for her daughter just to go tramping after a murderer. So I will often make a character’s to-do list:

  1. Find the murderer of her colleague
  2. Defend the butterfly subspecies discovery
  3. Go home for her daughter’s debut/graduation/wedding
  4. Deal with her ex-spouse’s involvement in her professional field and their daughter’s life

(I’m going to say that from now on, I think four is a hard limit for a character’s plot-centered to-do list. I’m going to knock that down to two, maaaybe three if I have a story that has more than one character with POV and an arc. There is such a thing as too busy!)

These things create more scene cards in Scrivener. I’ll play with the whole board, arranging things in the order I think they happen, connecting scenes through cause, effect, and consequences, leaving gaps where I feel like I need them.

While I’m doing that, i’m still playing what if with my main characters, and that adds scene cards to the file as well. When I have around thirty or forty, i’ve got most of the story – so then I craft a solid scene-by-scene arc for the first quarter of the story, filling in more information in later scenes, but when I have the first quarter of the book, the middle scene sequence, the darkest moment of the story, the high-stakes, win-or-lose climax, and a glimpse of the character’s life Afterwards, I’m ready to start writing, and that’s a different process post for another day.

It’s been a long time since I published a craft blog post, but I haven’t quit talking about craft. I made a Patreon account, and I have posts there about things like 

  • a synopsis writing guide that will help expose structural manuscript problems
  • how to evaluate a scene to make sure it’s doing the right things
  • how to build a story when all you have is a character

I do a new writing related post every month, available to patrons on a sliding scale basis – pick the level of patronage you can afford and you’re in!

Starting in August I am starting a Live Sessions tier, where I will explore a subject about the craft and business of writing on zoom, where you can ask more questions. Look for it then!

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