IN the on-going series of Thinking Like a Writer, everyone can recite the plot diagram of rising action which ends in a climax and denouement. But writers can’t just recite the particulars of a diagram; instead, we must create a plot that changes a character in some way.

One way to get at that change is to start by writing the Before and After character sections. Where is the character at the beginning of the story and how have they changed by the end.

For example, in the Before section of “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge is miserable and miserly in three ways: toward the poor, toward his nephew, toward his employee and his family. He meets three ghosts, which leads to the After section, where he is kind and generous in three ways: toward the poor, toward his nephew, toward his employee and his family.

You may have a character moving from shy to bold.
What scene, description, and/or character set-up will Show-Don’t-Tell that this character is shy? How can you contrast that with the After scene?

First, identify the character arc for your character.
Then write a Before and an After.

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How Does Your Character Change?

You know your character must change somehow over the course of your novel. But how? And more than that, how do you sync the changes with the external plot? The middle of a novel can suffer from the dreaded “sagging middle” and it’s mainly because you don’t have a firm handle on the character’s inner arc and how it meshes with external events.

I’ve found three approaches to the inner arc, each trying to laying out how the character changes. While these overlap a lot, there are differences in how the emotional changes are approached.

Hero’s Journey: Quest for Inner Change

In the Hero’s Journey, laid out so well in Christopher Vogler’s book, The Writer’s Journey, a character receives a Call to Adventure that takes him/her out of the normal and ordinary world into a world where they must quest for something. One of the key moments in this paradigm is the Inmost Cave where the character faces his deepest fears.

Melanie as an Example

So, we’ve got Melanie who wants more than anything else to get her mother’s approval, but can’t because her mom’s a chef and Melanie can’t cook worth a flip.

In the Hero’s Journey, Melanie might get a Call to Adventure: a challenge to create the world’s largest hot fudge sundae. Her darkest moment will come when she realizes Mom think’s she’s real goof-up and she’s not up to the task. Of course, she wants to give up, but somehow manages to rally (perhaps, recruiting friends to help, learning to make a sundae, etc.) and create something that makes Mom proud.

Iron Sharpens Iron – Friendships

As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Proverbs 27:17
In this paradigm, two characters cross paths in Act 1 and usually hate each other, but Act 2 throws them into a situation where they must act together. Here, the characters’ strengths and weaknesses work to create change. It’s an up and down battle of learning to trust each other and ultimately find some sort of love, whether it’s platonic, romantic or maternal. Key moments are the midpoint when they totally lose faith in one another and a re-commitment to each other as they move from Act 2 to Act 3. Act 1 and 3 focus on the external story, while Act 2 follows how the friendship affects the characters.
For more on this paradigm, read, Emotional Structure: Creating the Story Beneath the Plot by Peter Dunne.

Back to Melanie:

Melanie agrees to participate in the Biggest Sundae Ever contest, but as the contest starts she’s assigned a dunce to work with, Phillip RunnyNose. They clash immediately and have different ideas on how to create the required masterpiece: Melanie wants total creative control, while Phillip wants to just take pictures of the masterpiece. During their practice run–about the middle of act 2–Phillip leaves the ice cream out to soften up, but it melts, ruining the practice sundae. Of course, they fight and demand new partners, but that’s denied. Finally, they find that Melanie is great at building the base of the sundae, but Phillip is better at decorating it (characters have changed, because they accept different roles: Melanie does the basic work, Phillip the artistic/creative work– but they are better together than alone.) They go into Act 3 still unsure of each other’s roles, but committed to trying to create that Great Sundae in the sky and eventually Melanie earns her mother’s approval.

Flawed Way of Coping

Jeff Gerke, in Plot versus Character, describes a different way of dealing with the inner narrative arc. For him, the main character has developed a coping mechanism for dealing with a situation and it’s flawed, inadequate. The change that comes through the course of the novel exposes that coping mechanism as flawed and insists that the MC find a new way of dealing with things. It’s a journey from dysfunctional to functional (or at least some improvement in the way of functioning.)

Melanie as Dysfunctional

Melanie agrees to participate in the Greatest Sundae Contest in order to impress her mother, who runs a bakery that is slowing going out of business because of lack of customers. Mel practices once and gets 100 scoops one on top of each other, then stops to take pictures of the project, but it falls apart just as she snaps her pictures. Mom is furious at the mess in her bakery, but Mel’s pictures are interesting and catch the attention of the newspaper, who publish them, resulting in more business.
When Mel tries again, her masterpiece again falls apart when she starts to take pictures; Mom is even more furious; this time the pics get picked up by a state magazine, resulting in even more business.
Mel persists. A key moment comes though, when she realizes she likes the photography process and decides to do more of it, moving into Act 3. She creates the masterpiece, but this time takes pictures of the entire process from start to–inevitably–collapse. (of course, you’ll add lots of conflict: icing on the camera’s lens; dead battery; etc.) By now, though, Mom is excited by the pictures and realizes she’s got a goldmine in advertising revenue. I’m proud of your photography, she tells Mel. Will you photograph me while I decorate a cake and we’ll use it in advertising.
In short, Mel tried to impress Mom with her skill in creating a sundae, when what really impressed Mom was her photography. She’s replaces an inadequate way of coping (impress Mom with her cooking) with an adequate one (impress Mom with her photography).

Comparing the Paradigms for Character Change

Each paradigm comes with different requirements and different key moments that your plot must provide.

Required Characters

• Main Character Alone: In the Hero’s Journey, it’s a lonely quest where the main character changes him/herself. Yes, there are supporting characters, but they are secondary to the internal arc.
• Friends: The Friendship arc requires two people who appear to be polar opposites, but eventually change each other.
• Either: In the Dysfunctional arc, you can feature another character, or it can be against a situation or event.

Key moments:

• Fears. Hero’s Journey requires an Inmost Cave, the moment when the character faces his/her worst fears and comes out changed.
• Difficult Relationship. The Friends arc requires a blow-up in a relationship, with some compelling reason to later recommit to that relationship.
• Coping. The Dysfunctional arc has that moment when the dysfunctional coping crosses paths with the functional coping and one takes precedence over the other.

What I like best about these paradigms is that they give me a way to navigate the difficult Act 2.

What other types of character arcs are there? Probably several. Do you have a favorite way of thinking about the character arc? Do you naturally think in terms of one or another? I’m still trying to think about this whole topic and would love a discussion.

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Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

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We all know that a character must grow throughout the course of a novel. But how do they grow and how do you Show-Don’t-Tell that growth?

It helps to know the beginning and ending points. And often, I like going straight for the end to see where I’m aiming. Let’s say that a person needs to decide to become a doctor. The opening scene is going to entice them somehow: they react to a medical emergency and do a good job.

Great. But something compelling–internally–also needs to keep them away from the medical profession. It can’t be just outside factors such as, my parents don’t want me to be a doctor. If this is the internal arc, it’s got to be something else.

For example, it might be that I want to be a great novelist instead. That was Michael Crichton’s dilemma: he went to medical school and paid for it by writing novels.

What readers want is to experience with the character the internal struggle: art v. medicine. Entertain v. heal.

Once you know the conflict that must take place, then you must devise intermediate steps. The enticement to heal v. enticement to develop your artistic skills can take several forms. IF you want the character to say YES to the medical field, then s/he needs to be firmly committed to the artistic field and fighting against every encounter with the urge to heal. S/he will only give into that urge when the situation demands it: perhaps, dear ol’ Dad is sick and the character must help heal him. (Or course, our character can’t do it entirely alone, since s/he is untrained, but s/he can do something to stave off an infection, give first aid, etc. until real help arrives.)

Once you know those intermediate steps, then you can go back and make each decision extremely painful for your character by playing with the plot.

It’s not easy to see this progression sometimes; but it’s essential.

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Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

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Top 5 Tips for Dynamite Scenes

Guest Post By Roz Morris

30 Days to a Stronger Scene Table of Contents

Have you got a scene that’s looking lifeless? Here’s how I pep it up.

Have something change.

No scene should ever go as the reader expects. If you have a character set out to buy a pint of milk and all they do is amble to the shop, buy their stuff and walk back, you’ve hit the snooze button. Instead, take that scene somewhere the reader is not expecting. It needn’t be a big twist. It could be tiny – a change of mood, a resolution to do something. But if nothing changes, the scene isn’t worth showing.
To keep the sense of progress through the story, a scene should always contain change. Otherwise it hasn’t earned its place in the story.

Make that change have consequences for the characters.

Suppose you add something to your milk-buying scene – the character realises her boyfriend claimed he bought a certain brand of cigarette from the corner shop, but that shop doesn’t sell them. So where did he get them? And isn’t it odd that they are the same brand smoked by his ex? Are they seeing each other again?
If a change has happened, it should have a lasting effect in the story. Again, it could be small, or it could set them on a new and dastardly path. Good scenes don’t exist in isolation; they affect what comes after them. And they are affected by what happened before.

If you have to fill a blank, bring something in that you introduced earlier.

In the thick of a scene, you often have to invent details off the top of your head. Where was your minor character John last night? The cinema, you write, because it doesn’t matter where he was, he’s not very important. But go back and look at what you’ve written about John before. Is there something else you already invented that you could bring in instead? Three chapters ago, did you send him, quite casually, to choir practice? Why not send him there again, or to the chemist to get throat lozenges? Now we’re fleshing John out and with very little effort.

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Bringing back ideas you used before is a great way to make the world of your story feel more solid.

Even if what you’re using is trivial it can build up – and who knows where it might lead? It’s a technique called reincorporation. It makes stories elegant and satisfying. And it adds to the feeling that everything matters.
Keep a list of everything you plucked off the top of your head because you needed to fill a blank space. You’d be surprised how useful it will be.

Have a sense of purpose coming into the scene and going out.

Screenwriters have a mantra: ‘come in late and go out early’. When I’m revising one of the major problems I find is that the first half of the scene is throat-clearing before the interesting stuff happens – the revelation the reader doesn’t expect, the point where it all goes wrong. They’re having a chat on the way to work and then the car blows a tyre. But it would be far better if they got into that car with a sense of urgency from a previous scene – instead of marking time until the tyre causes a problem. Perhaps one of the characters is spoiling for a showdown – and then the tyre ruins the moment because they have to co-operate to get out of trouble.

Have conflict.

Conflict is the engine of story. Whole books have been written about it, but in essence, it’s when things aren’t going smoothly. One person wants something, the other has it. Or is oblivious to the other person’s need. Or is competing for that same thing. This tension creates drama. If a scene needs more sizzle, could you add some conflict?
Change, consequences, reincorporation, purpose and conflict – you may not need them all at once, but these five elements will make your scenes go with a bang.

Roz Morris is a ghostwriter now being represented under her own name. Her blog is www.nailyournovel.com and she is on Twitter @dirtywhitecandy. She critiques for a top literary consultancy and is the author of Nail Your Novel – Why Writers Abandon Books and How You Can Draft, Fix and Finish with Confidence, available from and outside the US from Lulu http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/nail-your-novel/5301103.

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Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

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Character Revision: 8 Ways to Jumpstart a Make Over

You have a first draft, but you realize that your character needs work. How do you retrofit a character when you revise?

I don’t think of a personality transplant. Instead, I try to add to and enrich a character. Here are 8 suggestions on how to revise your novel’s character.

1. Change the name. The apocryphal story is that Gone with the Wind‘s Scarlett O’Hara was named Pansy in the first draft. Sometimes a simple name change will resonate throughout a text.
2. Change the gender. Yes, a basketball player can become a female and a cheerleader can become a male. Sometimes this change will create a unique character with lots of nuances as they work against gender stereotypes.
3. Give the character a more interesting job/role/activity. In my Creative Writing for Children class, one common problem was that students concentrated on developing the character relationships to the exclusion of anything else. They did a good job of laying out the emotional conflicts of the story. But the characters were boring because they weren’t DOING anything. For example, one YA story had a young man who was being bullied by football players. When I suggested that the main character become the sole male on the cheerleader squad, the story took on a vibrant tone. The character had something to DO, while the relationships were happening. Another student had a family in the throes of divorce and step-parents became an issue. When she gave the main character a goal of winning a title showing horses, the story became concrete and believable. The horse story became the backdrop and the mirror for the family story.
4. Create internal conflicts. What does your character want or feel? What is the opposite of that? Can your character want both things at the same time? Depending on your mss’ length, find several specific spots where you can add this type of conflict. For example, one of my current characters is bathing at a lake and takes mud and smears on himself. Then he gazes at himself in the still waters. He’s ashamed of who he is and wants to become someone greater–which is in direct opposition to his usual pride in himself.
5. Create zig-zags in the emotional pacing. If I look at the first 100 lines of Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty,

   I find these emotional zig-zags: surprise, disgust, fear, argue with Mom, defiant, sarcastic, misery at heat, annoyed, thinks of father, mother sighs, rejected, ignored, longing, stranded, misunderstood, lonely, annoyed, bored, satisfaction, hope.

   That is, in the margins of the book, I noted what emotions the main character was feeling. Many authors make the mistake of letting the character feel one overriding emotions. For example, anxiety that their father is sick. Most people, though, feel a much wider range of emotions and your characters will be more fully developed, if you give them a wide range, too. When I did this exercise for one of my mss, I found that I had about the same number of emotions in 100 lines, but not the same depth of emotions. Bray?s book had bigger zigs and zags, more variation and deeper variation. Better emotional pacing.

6. Give your character larger-than-life qualities. What would your character never say or do? Of course, they MUST say or do this very thing. And do it with memorable lines. One of my characters knows his place in his world and it’s a humble place. So, when he says he’d be Emperor some day, it enlarges his characterization.
7. Slow down. Big emotions, big scenes, big thoughts–these all require space to develop. Give your characters several pages (and lots of emotional zig-zags) to properly express the development of these Big things. The climax scenes should take up more space than any other scene in your story. Give blow-by-blow accounts of what is happening. Let us feel the emotional tensions as fortunes swing wildly.
8. Raise personal stakes. What’s at risk in the story for your character? What would make the conflicts mean more? What could raise stakes to the highest plane? This is a place where you write down 20 things and throw them out. Write down 20 more things and you might finally be past the cliches and have something worth keeping. Dig deeper to understand what really motivates this character. Why do they care about the outcome of the story? How can you make the outcome matter even more? Put more at risk. Give the character an unanticipated loss. Extend the problem to a different front, from public to personal, or vice versa. Kill off a close ally. Give the character a close call, a mini-disaster, a preliminary loss. Take away a physical asset. Undermine the character?s faith. Or the faith of a supporting character. Set a clock ticking?time is running out. In short?push characters to the edge. Other suggestions?

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

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Yep. You gotta get feedback on your novel and you gotta act on it. On everything? Yep. But what if. . .

Yes! Oh! No? Uh-oh! Huh?

Okay. Here are five reactions I’ve had to recent feedback: Yes! Oh! No? Uh-oh! Huh?

• Yes! It’s great when feedback confirms what you were already thinking needed work. You knew this area was weak, and sure enough, the reader confirmed it. These changes or revisions to your novel are made easier by this confirmation.



• Oh! These are unexpected, new ideas for ways to solve a problem in a particular way. I love it when the reader gets what I’m doing in this novel and suggests a perfect revision. These are often ideas about adding, omitting, changing or rearranging.

  For example, one comment recently was to take a line from page 76 and use it as the opening line. I’m still not sure it will work, but it’s shaken me out of my rut on that first line and now I’m more likely to find the right place to start.

• No? Now what? The hardest comments are those which contradict what I set out to do. Did the reader just not understand the story, or am I not understanding my story? It’s confusing for a while and hard to decide because, in the end, I must trust my own judgment – something every novel faces, but something that takes courage. Fortunately, I’m not getting lots of these, but even one throws me for a loop for a while.
• Uh-Oh! I hate it when I know what I meant, but the reader clearly didn’t get it when they read this draft of the novel. That means the story is still stuck in my head and it’s not on paper yet. Clarity. That’s the goal when facing these type comments. Not changing my ideas, or abandoning them. Just clarifying them, so the reader gets it. THEN, we’ll see if the next reader of the next draft has another reaction. But first, I want my idea to be clear to the reader before I abandon or modify it.
• Huh? I love these wild card comments. My first response is, where did THAT come from? Sometimes, these odd-ball comments on the novel can spark a fresher, more unusual, more interesting way of showing the story. It’s a revision I would never have thought of but – WOW! – what a great idea.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win