So, how many pages did you manage this week? For me the answer is thirty-six. Frankly, that's not all that impressive. I've done more than that in a day on several occasions, but hey, it's pages. I'm that much closer to the end and if I can keep that pace up, I should have a first draft of this book around the first of May. Figure a month to run it past my writers group, two months for revisions, and I should be ready to darken the in-box of editors and/or agents by the end of summer. That's a novel of over 100,000 words (which I expect this one to be), in a bit over six months, at a rate of less than five (5) pages a day.
Yes, you can sprint through a book much more quickly. My record is ten days; ten really miserable days. But then you can also lose weight by gnawing your own arm off. Like a diet, slow and steady is a better way to win this race.
Okay then, so hopefully you've also made some progress on your own manuscript this week. If you tuned it last week, you caught my mangled re-telling of Algis Budrys' "Sara Jane" story, a little tale that Algis used to teach the structure behind most stories.
This week, I want to deal with the very first element of that structure: characters. To repeat, stories are about characters with conflicts. What happens in a story is that characters try to deal with those conflicts, fail, learn, and try (try) again.
It's certainly possible to write an enjoyable book that focuses on one of those other 'C' words, the context or conflict. Sir Arthur Clarke, whose books I read voraciously as a teenager, was a successful and much admired sci fi writer, but you can't say that characters were ever particularly high on his list of things to do when writing a book. If you ever read the quite marvelous Childhood's End or the less magical but still intriguing Rendezvous with Rama, no doubt you can remember some very clever applications of technology or intricately contrived puzzles. But can you recall any of the characters? If so, you're ahead of me.
It's also possible to write a story in which the characters are not people. Of course you can populate a book with animals, aliens or supernatural thingamajigs. Too often, these are little people in fur suits, or people in bubble helmets, or people with pointy teeth. More rarely, and more enjoyably, writers take the time to think through the implications of physiology, culture, etc and give us non-human characters as enjoyable as Richard Adams' rabbits, or Venor Vinge's pack-mind aliens.
You can even write a story in which a character is not even sentient. This most commonly happens when the line between character and context becomes blurred and the setting itself becomes a not-quite living, not-quite breathing, but still vital player in the tale.
Any of these choices can be quite clever. Often way too clever. Sure, it's all been done effectively and enjoyably, and if you're blessed with brilliant insight on how to tell the story of your local town from the point of view of a parking meter, go for it. However, if those damn muses have not dropped off a fresh case of divine inspiration, I suggest that you stick with people. When you think about the range of lives that have been lived, are at this moment being lived, or could be lived in some indefinite future, sticking with human characters is not exactly a limiting factor.
When writing a book, many people start with an idea – the conflict that the characters are going to face. In fact, that's often how people will describe a book, "it's about this guy in a raft with animals." But I want to suggest to you that when it comes to writing, characters should come close on the conflict. They had better, because when you start writing, it's going to make a huge difference whether that alien invasion is being faced by Elinor Dashwood or Captain Ahab. If you try to think too far down the road without knowing who is going to be leading your intrepid human resistance movement, you’re likely to end up with a different kind of conflict, one between your characters and your plot. That’s the kind of conflict you don’t want. Your story isn’t about the conflict. Your story is about how your character deals with that conflict. So get a character.
People do lots of tricks for making their characters “more real.” I’ve seen everything from post-it notes of hair, eye, and skin color to elaborate pages of back story with descriptions of parents and childhood homes that will never make it “on stage.” I tend to be a bit more Spartan in my character notes, and that’s because I cheat. (see after the break for examples)
Sure, people are going to ask you “what’s your book about?” a hundred times between now and the time you send it off to be published, win awards, and take you away to a life of fame and fortune. You may even be tempted to think of it in that way. Don’t.
Spend this week thinking “who is this book about?” Who’s at the center of that conflict? Who’s in their way? When you understand why these people are in this place, why they are doing what they’re doing, and how far they are willing to go to see the conflict resolved, you’ll be in a much better place to write. You may find that once the characters are there, you actually have a harder time answering that “what’s it about” question, because it’s no longer about winning a contest, taking that hill, or stopping that runaway train. It’s about world-weary Jake, or naive Evangeline, or plucky Sara Jane. You can’t tell it in ten words, because your characters have so many things they want to say.
That’s a very happy place for a writer.
I'm using this chunk of the diary as kind of my "weigh in" on my novel in progress. Feel free to skip over it if you've no interest, but keep reading if you want to see my mental cogs clanking slowly along.
In this book I've decided on three main characters. Dwayne, the guy who featured in the paragraphs I posted last week, isn't one of them. In fact, you've read just about everything on that character there's likely to be. That chapter is a "teaser," an opening set a few months before the main action begins. In this case, that teaser is designed to hint at the conflict the characters are going to face. Those of you who read last week might have spotted mentions of JPL and a gaggle of scientists waiting for images that had taken a decade to collect. For a bit part of the public, that's going to barely tickle their memory, but if you have an interest in space, you probably locked right in on those factoids and have a pretty good sense of where I'm going. Or at least, I hope so. One thing I've learned about my first drafts is that they tend to be "too clever." That is, I tend to leave too much of the story in my head and get too little of it on the page. It's quite likely that those paragraphs will end up being more explicit (not in a four letter way) before the final draft.
This particular novel is a space novel. However, it’s not really sci-fi in the traditional sense. This is another genre, a “secret history” of a space mission that could have happened around 1992. In my head, I'm thinking of it as more akin to a nuts and bolts thriller. That has some implications, for me at least, on both tone and structure. I’ll talk about the demands that genre fiction can put on novel structure in some future week, but it's better now if you not get too lost in those things. That way lies the "how to write a bestseller" school, and that's the kind of advice you don't need from a has-been mid-lister.
In any case: three. That's how may characters are at the center of this book. In the first two chapters, which is what I happen to have written so far, two of those characters get a chapter length introduction. One of this nice things about writing a novel is that you can spread out a bit. You still need to weigh the importance of every word, but if you decide it really does take 500 words to explain who this person is, you can take it. Heck, take 2000... I did.
These are the three people who will be making up the crew of my secret mission: an F-117 pilot pulled out of Saudi Arabia on the brink of the Gulf War, an expert cultivator of cannabis taken from a suburb of Amsterdam, and a college professor at the top of PETA's hit list for a series of very unsavory experiments on dogs.
When I say that I cheat in working out who these people are, it's because I steal from people I've met. The Air Force pilot? As it happens, my wife's cousin married a guy who became an F-15 pilot. So, you're in the book, Matt. Sort of. For the pot-grower extraordinaire, I'm leaning on my memories of a girl I knew in college. Lovely, smart, and very into smokables. I still love you, Becky. The dog-mutilator is a bit harder. It's tempting to base this character on someone unpleasant, but there's more to this guy than my quick summary, so I'm basing him on a professor I had who was nearly as young as the students, energetic, and sharply brilliant. Take a bow, Dr. M.
None of these characters will end up being much like the real people on whom they are based. They'll wander off in minor ways and in major ways. Hell, I haven't seen the real people in decades, and my idea of them is probably as much of a fiction as anything on the page. It's all okay. By the time I get to the end, I'll know these characters much better than the people whose characters I lifted for a starting place. If I'm very lucky, I'll never have to write a note, because doing so would be like writing pages to remind me of what my best friend looks like, or my son. We'll have a relationship, me and these characters, full of love and hate.
Which is really going to make it hard when I kill them.