Week 8 -- Focus on Fiction

Week 8 -- Focus on Fiction

Setting and Characterizations



The topics for this article are from a different source, and you’ll notice a difference in the author’s terminology. Once again, I want to acknowledge that the predominance of this information is taken directly from Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel and the companion workbook, published by F + W Publications, Inc., 2004. Both are filled with valuable information for writers, and are highly recommended at items to purchase for your own writing bookshelf.

Time and Place

Many novelists seem to think of setting as something outside their story. It is necessary, but it is a bother. It has to be included, yet ought to be dealt with as efficiently as possible. After all, who wants to read pages and pages of description?

Just as many novelists seem to feel that setting is one of their novel’s most important elements. They open their works with establishing passages that set the mood and thereafter catalog the surroundings in every scene.

Which approach works best for the breakout novel?

In my experience there is no advantage to being pro-setting or anti-setting; however, one is at a distinct advantage by feeling indifferent to the time and place in which one’s story is set. Relegate setting to the back seat, or make it the chassis on which everything else rides, but do not ignore it.

The truth is that every story has a context. It is there whether you put it into words or not. Those novelists who eschew description are probably infusing other aspects of their story with a strong sense of time and place: their dialogue, for instance. A novel is a world unto itself. It is not the real world, though it may reflect it, but it is a world that lives and breathes, alternates between day and night, changes and grows, acts upon the characters or is indifferent to them.

In nineteenth century novel writing, it was usual to treat the landscape as a character in the story. In the twenty-first century, we may have less patience for scenery, but we certainly expect a novel to show us the world as a vital force in which the characters move. It may be hostile or seductive, sprawling or confined, gritty or charming, closely observed or wildly improvisational. Whatever the author’s approach, we want to live in the world of the story.

Proof of this can be found in the highly popular fields of science fiction and science fantasy. Here, scene writing is a high art. Because the worlds of science fiction and fantasy authors can be vastly different from our reality, they construct their settings in logical and exhaustive detail.

Their process is called world building. Simply put, it is a disciplined method for creating an alternative time and place. Most elementary world building goes like this: Take our history and change one thing about it. Now, project the implications for us today in as many ways as possible. Certain things about our life will now be different. The South won the Civil War? Well, okay, today we could be driving six-wheeled vehicles. Huh? An expert world builder will not only spring surprises but will base them so thoroughly in logical extrapolation that they are utterly convincing.

One of the most dazzling pieces of world building in science fiction literature is William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer. This prescient novel not only introduced the world to the term “cyberspace,” it projected a near future in which hard wired information wranglers plug into a web, a virtual reality, as a way of life, even as a way of crime. Sound familiar? In 1984 Gibson’s ideas were utterly new; indeed, there were as farsighted, yet as chillingly believable, as George Orwell’s Big Brother was upon 1984’s first publication in 1949.

So logically extrapolated was Gibson’s future that when I first read Neuromancer I was overwhelmed. I thought, this is how the future will be. Then, in 1995 a client of mine, British science fiction author Paul J. McAuley, delivered the manuscript of a novel called Fairyland. Later a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Britain’s “Hugo,” McAuley’s novel, cast me forward to a near future in which bioengineering has radically transformed society. Designer drugs give the club crowd highly specific hallucinations, visions, say of the Virgin Mary. Sentient humanoid pets called “dolls” have been created. They are harmless . . . that is, until a rogue designer meets a child genius named Melina, whose goal is to make the dolls an autonomous race. McAuley’s detailed and logical projections come fast and thick. When I read Fairyland I was overwhelmed. I thought, This is how the future is going to be. And, of course, it is nothing like Gibson’s future.

Science fiction and fantasy fans say one of the chief reasons they enjoy that genre is it takes them to alternative times and places that are utterly convincing. They love the details. But what about the majority of fiction writers, we “mundanes,” who merely want to set our stories in the world as we know it.

As our colleagues in science fiction and fantasy have shown us. Building breakout time and place starts with the principle that the world of the novel is composed of much more than descriptions of landscape and rooms. It is milieu, period, fashion ideas, human outlook, historical moment, spiritual mood and more. It is capturing not only place, but also people in an environment; not only history but humans changing in their era. Description is the least of it. Bringing people alive in a place and time that are alive is the essence of it.

Freezing moments with snapshot clarity is valuable but is by itself only the start of creating a fictional world. Highly memorable settings have a palpable reality that is larger than the characters, larger than the story itself. Its boundaries stretch beyond the perimeter of each scene. It lives in the reader’s mind after the plot is forgotten.

How does one establish a setting with such an expansive living feel? How can you get some of that feeling into your own novel? Let us examine some of the techniques involved.


The Psychology of Place

Have you ever said to yourself, “This place gives me the creeps?”

If so, you have experienced the psychological influence on inert surroundings. We are affected by what is around us. Architecture, the art of enclosing spaces, is founded upon that fact. So is scenic design on stage and in film. Interior design has a vocabulary, rules and schools of thought. Why shouldn’t novels use place as deliberately?

If written well, they do. What is less well understood is how they do it. The most common technique that authors report using is making place a character in the story. But what does that mean? Reappearances? Changing moods? A story arc of its own?

Well certainly not that, but without a doubt a good setting has an impact on the characters.

How does your setting make people feel? That is the key, not how a place looks but its psychological effect on the characters in your novel.

It is the details, the nouns and verbs rather than any adjectives or adverbs, that visually fix the scene. You can deepen the psychology of a place in your story by returning to a previously established setting and showing how your character’s perception of it has changed.

If you’ve ever returned to the place of your childhood, you may find it to be smaller than you remember. Has the place changed, or has the individual grown and changed. The difference is on the inside, in the person observing the place. I would like to suggest that a useful principle for making place an active character is to give your characters an active relationship to place; which in turn means marking your character’s growth (or decline) through their various surroundings.

That is not as easy as it may sound. It is an effort to chronicle that changing dynamic. Places do not speak dialogue. They do not take action. To characterize them you must force a pause; or, rather, go inside your characters and allow them a moment to discover their feelings about the place into which you have just delivered them.

That, in turn, determines that you be writing from a strong point of view, regardless of whether your novel is first or third person. Place presented from an objective or omniscient point of view runs the risk of feeling like boring descriptions. It can be a lump, an impediment to the flow of the narrative.

Point-of-view description, on the other hand, is essential to the narrative because it is integral to character, or, better still, a marker of character development. Do you have plain vanilla in your present manuscript? Try evoking the description the way it is experienced by a character. Feel a difference? So will your readers.

Exercise 1 . . .
The Psychology of Place

Step 1: Pick a high moment, turning point, or climax involving your protagonist. Where is it set?

Write this answer now, as a new item in your portfolio. You can add all your answers for this week’s exercises to the same item. Title it appropriately.

Step 2: Write a paragraph describing how this place makes your character feel, or how your protagonist feels about this place. Start writing now.

Step 3: Move forward one week in time or backward one week in time. Return your protagonist to this place. Write a paragraph describing how it makes your character feel now. Start writing now.


NOTE: Many workshop participants find that they would like to use the paragraph they wrote in step three. There is something powerful about returning to a place of significant action and discovering how it feels different. Did you ever return to a childhood home and find it looked smaller to you? Then you know what I’m talking about. By the same token, your protagonist will never feel the same way twice about a particular place. Pinning that down in using the psychology of place, that is, employing the perception of place as another way to measure change.

Follow up work: What is the setting that recurs most often in your novel? From whose point of view is it most often seen? Count the number of times that character is in that place. Write a list, and for each return to that place find one way in which that character’s perception of it changes. (Add this as an additional paragraph in the item you have used for the exercises for this week.


Conclusion: Bringing to life the world of your novel is more than just describing it using the five senses. A place lives most vividly through the eyes of its characters. The unique way in which each one sees what is around him is how the setting itself becomes a character in the story. Think about it: By itself, landscape is unchanging. It takes a person to perceive its differences over time. Delineate those evolving perceptions, and the world of your novel will feel rich, dynamic, and alive.

Multidimensional Characters

One-dimensional characters hold limited interest for us because they are limited as human beings. They lack the complexity that makes real-life people so fascinating. In well-constructed fiction, a multidimensional character will keep us guessing: What is this person going to do, think, or say next? Furthermore, we are more likely to identify with them. Why? Because there is more of them to see.

Eoin Colfer’s young adult novel Artremis Fowl was billed as a dark “Harry Potter,” a description that intrigued me. I grew even more interested when Artremis Fowl hit the New York Time’s Best Seller List. The novel’s twelve-year-old protagonist, I had read, was a criminal mastermind. How could a novel with such a dark protagonist be so popular?

Fatherless Artremis Fowl, the scion of a famous Irish criminal family, is indeed diabolically clever and bent on a wicked scheme: restoring the family fortune by obtaining the gold that is set aside to ransom any fairy, should one ever fall into the hands of the Mud People; that is to say, humans.

If that was all there was to Artremis, he would indeed be difficult to like. But Colfer does not expect us to sympathize with a one-dimensional, amoral adolescent. Early in the novel Colfer begins dropping hints that there is more to Artremis than that; indeed, that he is a boy with a range of feelings like any other, as we are shown when Artremis visits his mentally frail and bedridden mother:

He knocked gently on the arched double doors.

“Mother, are you awake?”

Something smashed against the other side of the door. It sounded expensive.

“Of course I’m awake! How can I sleep in this blinding glare?”

Artremis ventured inside. An antique four-poster bed threw shadowy spires in the darkness, and a pale sliver of light poked through a gap in the velvet curtains. Angeline Fowl sat hunched on the bed, her pale limbs glowing white in the gloom.

“Artremis darling, where have you been?

Artremis sighed. She recognized him. That was a good sign.

“School trip, Mother. Skiing in Austria.”

“Ah, skiing,” crooned Angeline. “How I miss it. Maybe when your father returns.”

Artremis felt a lump in his throat. Most uncharacteristic.


Artremis is trying to deny his longing to see his father and his grief over his mother’s condition, but Colfer makes sure that his readers do not miss them. Later on, Artremis succeeds in capturing a fairy, Holly Short, a high tech-equipped officer in LEPrecon, the elite branch of the Lower Elements Police. Artremis lays a deadly trap for Holly’s superior officer, Commander Root, aboard a whaling boat and blows up. Root is nearly killed; meanwhile, Holly suffers (or appears to) in captivity. Artremis gloats over his success, but mixed with his glee are other emotions.

Artremis leaned back in the study’s leather swivel chair, smiling over steepled fingers. Perfect. That little explosion should cure those fairies of their cavalier attitude. Plus there was one less whaler in the world. Artremis Fowl did not like whalers. There were less objectionable ways to produce oil by-products . . . .

Artremis consulted the basement surveillance monitor. His captive was sitting on her cot now, head in hands. Artremis frowned. He hadn’t expected the fairy to appear so . . . human. But now, seeing one like this, in obvious discomfort—it changed things.

Artremis Fowl believes himself to be single-mindedly focused on his goal of extorting fairy gold, but again and again his author show us that Artremis has other, more human sides. These added dimensions make Colfer’s hero a complex criminal mastermind—and one for whom we can feel sympathy.

Plot events themselves can provoke the emergence of a new side of a character. Ann B. Roth’s fourth novel, Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind scores a hit with its portrait of Julia Springer, a wealthy, sixty-ish lady in a small North Carolina town. Miss Julia is a proud, frugal, orderly, banker’s widow. She is well acquainted with the ways of a small town. When her dead husband’s nine-year old bastard son is dumped on her doorstep one day, Miss Julia is mortified—and knows that gossip about this development will ruin her life. She is terrified. What to do? After considering her options, Miss Julia makes a surprising choice:

”Here’s what I’m going to do,” I went on, feeling my way as I talked. The first thing I’m not going to do is call one of those child welfare agencies. Keeping this child is my cross to bear, even though I don’t deserve it, and it’s the only way to get back at Wesley Lloyd. He hid this child for a decade, but I’m not hiding him. And I’m not going to hide my face, either. None of this is my fault, so why should I act like it is? There’s not a reason in the world. They’re going to talk about me no matter what I do, so I’m going to give them something to talk about. I’m going to hold my head up if it kills me, and I’m not going to protect Wesley Lloyd Springer from the consequences. This is his son, and everybody’s going to know it, without any guessing. I’m going to flaunt this child before the whole town, so let the cookies crumble.

Miss Julia’s suddenly stiff backbone becomes not only a reason for reader sympathy, but a plot spine as well. With a sharp eye, and sharper tongue, Miss Julia sets about transcending the town gossips and inheritance grabbers—mostly.

This new character dimension is not the first that Ross reveals. Although Miss Julia claims to be tenderhearted when it comes to children, there is little material warmth in evidence as she regards her husband’s illegitimate son:

Not hearing any movement behind me, I turned to see Lillian’s arms around the little bastard, his head against her white nylon uniform. He turned loose of the grocery sack long enough to wipe the sleeve of one arm across his running nose, smearing his glasses even more. It was enough to turn your stomach.

Later in the novel, after little Lloyd Jr., has been taken away by this televangelist uncle, Rev. Vernon Pucket, to be reunited, Miss Julia is told, along with his mother, who is going to a hairdressing school in Raleigh, Ross reveals another side of Miss Julia.

Oh, there were a lot of things I could’ve done and should’ve done, and now I had to live with it all. I got up sometimes in the middle of the night and walked across the hall to little Lloyd’s room. The empty room made me realize how empty my house was, and maybe my life, as well.

I was just a selfish old woman with nothing but a few million dollars to her name. No husband, no children, nothing to look forward to except more of the same. Even the thought of writing checks and buying things couldn’t lift my spirits.

I cried. Sitting there in little Lloyd’s room, not a light on in the house, an old, slightly blue-haired woman who’d thought of nothing but herself all her life. Yes. I cried.

Miss Julia’s motivation changes from protecting herself to protecting little Lloyd Jr. Ross gives her a material side, after all.

How many sides of your current protagonist do you reveal? I know what you are thinking: my hero is multidimensional. My hero is complex! But let me ask you: Is your hero complex and multidimensional only in your mind, or actually on the page?

Take a careful look at your manuscript. On which pages, exactly, do you specifically unlock extra sides of your protagonist’s personality? Can you highlight the passages? How many of them are there? List the page numbers. No, really don’t just read through this paragraph and congratulate yourself. Do it for real. Scroll or skim through your manuscript, highlight, and count.

Come on now, did you really count? Okay. Now, how many extra dimensions of your protagonist do you actively show? If you cheated and avoided counting, I promise you that there are not as many as you think. If you really counted, now is the time to increase the number of dimensions that your hero has. The more extra work you do, the more interesting and involving your novel will be.

Exercise 2 . . .

Opening Extra Character Dimension}

Step 1: What is your protagonist’s defining quality; that is, how would anyone describe your protagonist? What trait is most prominent in his or her personality? What kind of person is he or she?

Write it down (in an aptly titled article in your portfolio).

Step 2: Objectively speaking, what is the opposite of that quality?

Write that down (in an additional paragraph in your article for these exercises. Write in complete sentences so it will make sense later on.).


Step 3: Write a paragraph in which your protagonist actively demonstrates the opposite quality that you wrote down in step two. Start writing now (adding this paragraph to the ones already written in this exercise).


NOTE: Many workshop participants want to incorporate the resulting paragraph in their novel. Why? It shows a character’s conflicting sides. Such a multidimensional character is more involving to read about. He is more realistic, more human, and incidentally, gives your reader more opportunities for identification with him.


Follow up work: Define a secondary character quality; write down its opposite; write a paragraph in which this character demonstrates the opposite secondary quality. In the same way, open third and fourth additional dimensions to your protagonist.

Conclusion: The second most common reason agents reject manuscripts (after low tension) is poorly developed protagonists. Now that you have opened extra dimensions to your hero, you will have an easier time building into this character a fundamental and full-blown inner conflict

Character Delineation

Now is the time to take steps so that your characters appear, sound and act differently from each other. That is the business of character delineation.

The USA Today best seller list is a great place to spot breakout novelists, particularly those whose work appears as original paperbacks. One author who has made that list is Barbara Freethy. Novels like One True Love, Some Kind of Wonderful, and Love Will Find a Way establish her as a storyteller with a gift for warm, family-oriented stories—usually with a primary romance, a secondary couple, and a long-held secret driving the plot.

In Summer Secrets Freethy takes character delineation a bit further. This time there are three women: Sisters, bound together by the secret of what happened on a round-the-world sailboat race that brought them fifteen minutes of fame, a winner’s trophy, and a boatload of secrets. Among other things, Freethy faces the task of making these three sisters different from each other, and she does this effectively.

The oldest is Kate, protective, responsible, and understanding, as well as bossy, opinionated, and critical. She watches over their once magnetic father, Duncan, now a land-locked alcoholic. Formerly a wild adventurer, Kate is now (perhaps) a play-it-safe bookstore owner on the island of Castleton in Puget Sound:

Kate loved her view of the waterfront—loved the one from her house in the hills even better—but more than anything, she appreciated the fact that the view didn’t change every day. Maybe some would call that boring, but she found it comforting.

The wind lifted the hair off the back of her neck, changing that feeling of comfort to one of uneasiness. Wind in her life had meant change. Her father, Duncan McKenna, a sailing man from the top of his head to the tips of his toes, always relished the wind’s arrival. Kate could remember many a time when he had jumped to his feet at the first sign of a breeze. A smile would spread across his weather-beaten cheeks as he’d stand on the deck of their boat, pumping his fist triumphantly in the air, his eyes focused on the distant horizon. The wind’s up, Kate girl he’d say. It’s time to go.

And they’d go—wherever the wind took them. They’d sail with it, into it, against it. They’d lash out in anger when it blew too hard, then cry in frustration when it vanished completely. Her life had been formed, shaped, and controlled by the wind. She’d thought of it as a friend; she’d thought of I as a monster. Well, no more.

She had a home now, an address, a mailbox, a garden. She might live by the water, but she didn’t live on it.

The middle sister, Ashley, now a photographer, is the most fragile. Since the race eight years earlier she had grown afraid of boats and the ocean, as we learn early in the novel when during a Castleton race week as she tires to board a boat to snap a portrait of the crew.

Water splashed over the side of the dock, and she took a hasty step backward. She felt small and vulnerable on this bobbing piece of wood with a storm blowing in. The sea had often made her feel that way. Her father had always told her to look the ocean right in the eye, never back down, never give up, never give in. There was a time when those brave, fighting words had given her courage. Then she’d learned through hard experiences that the ocean didn’t back down or give in either. That if it were a man or woman against nature, nature would win.

The youngest is Caroline, a reckless young woman who smokes too much, drinks too hard, and flirts too easily. A hair stylist with piercings and a tattoo, she is also impulsive and rebellious. The contrast between the three is pronounced, and nicely summed up in one early moment when the three sisters contemplate whether or not to tell their father that their boat named Moon Dancer, sold years before, has now sailed back into Castleton’s harbor—and with it the one man who knows the secret of what happened during the fateful race:

Once again, both sisters looked to Kate for the answer to their problem. They’d played out this scene many times before—Caroline eating chocolate, Ashley biting her fingernails, while Kate paced.

The exercise underlying this chapter works toward creating a point-of-view vocabulary that will distinguish one character from another; however, it is not always necessary to be inside characters’ heads to accomplish this delineation.

How are your characters different from one another? In your mind I am sure they are all quite different—but how is that specifically conveyed to your readers? Use charts to create separate character vocabularies, traits, habits, actions, and more for each of your major characters. You will be surprised how much more individual they become.

Exercise 3 . . .

Improving Character Delineation

Step1: In the following chart, the columns A, B, and C are for different points-of-view characters in your story. Add more columns if you need them. For each character, work down the list of common words on the left, and then write in the word character A, B, and C would use instead.

* A B C

sofa

bureau

dress

pants

shoes

auto

soda

coffee

alcohol

cash

“Hello!”

(expletive)

“Cool!”

“Oh well.”

God

mother

father

partner/spouse

man

woman

attractive

unattractive

music

periodical


Note: You can, of course, lengthen the list as much as you want. The point here is to find a unique vocabulary for each character, and to use it when writing from that person’s point-of-view. That distinctive way of “speaking” helps to distinguish, or delineate one character from another.

Follow up work: For each point-of-view character list unique gestures, rationalizations, ways of procrastinating, peeves, hot buttons, sentimental triggers, principles to live by, superstitions, or anything else that bears upon the way this character speaks or thinks. Use them in writing from his point of view.


Conclusion: Have you ever read a novel in which all of the characters talk alike and seem alike? That is weak point-of-view writing. Strong point-of-view is more than just the words the character uses. It is his or her whole way of feeling, thinking, speaking, and believing. One character’s choice for sentence structure and cadence will be different from another’s. So will his words, so will his thoughts, so will his actions, and reactions. Make your characters different from each other, just as are people in life. That way, your novel will have the variety and resonance of real life too.

This week’s topics covered 14 typewritten pages, which is a stretch for my concentration and my typing skills. However, starting with a different book, Writing the Breakout Novel, and the workbook there were lots of topics to select from. I, myself, enjoy reading the examples and figuring out how to incorporate them into my writing. I was so excited by the vocabulary delineation exercises, which I just had to share them with you this week.

If and when you are able to do the exercises for this week’s readings, I do hope you’ll save them as an item in your portfolio, as well as posting them to the group space -- "Week 7 Exercises -- Focus on Fiction" 

Your facilitator thank you for your interest and patience. Have a good day-to-day-to-day of writing,

Patrice

WC 4740