Are Your Friends or Family in Your Books?

I have this habit of reading TV recaps even though I don’t watch the shows (is this weird? I don’t even know if it’s weird). Anyway, apparently Gossip Girl had a storyline this week where Dan got a book published, and it got me thinking.

I’ve already seen several blog posts that discussed how unrealistic the whole “book acquisition process” was in that storyline. Which is to be expected—it’s TV. They get CPR wrong every time, too. But what snagged my interest was the fact that apparently Dan had based all his characters in the book on the people in the show—Blair, Serena, Chuck, etc. Naturally, drama resulted from this, because people were pissed about the way they’d been portrayed.

It got me thinking. I actually get asked somewhat frequently if I base my characters on real people. People ask me, “Am I in your book?” Or, "Do you write books about people you know?"

No, you're not. And I don't.

I don't write real people into my books. At least not all of real people.

To make an analogy—if writing a character was like drawing a picture, I might use my best friend’s ears, my mother’s nose, my sister’s hands, my own chin, Mona Lisa’s smile, and hair and eyes straight out of my imagination.

So a character might have my husband's tendency to be on time, my love of unicorns, and my mother's work ethic. My characters are mishmashes of people I know and people I observed in the store or met once or even simply dreamed up. And sometimes they're more influenced by fictional characters than real people (hello, Han Solo)!

I have multiple reasons for this. 

First, putting people you know into your novel seems like a bad idea (at least to me), especially if you have any deeply flawed characters who do bad stuff. 

But besides the potential damage to interpersonal relationships, trying to fit an already fully-formed individual into a book just doesn't make sense to me from a creative standpoint.

Maybe it's just the way I write.

See, 90% of the time I begin with a scene or the plot itself.  Then I ask myself, "What kind of person would get into this situation? What kind of person would act the way they need to act in order for the story to go the way I want it to go?" And there are so many nuances to that question, little quirks and facets to the character’s personality that will explain all these choices. It’s pretty unlikely that I would just plug my best friend into the story and have all her quirks and neuroses line up with the necessities of the plot like that.

Of course, plot and character are just two parts of the same rope. Plot affects character, but character also affects plot. I’ve had stories neatly planned out only to discover that my character wouldn’t do the thing they’re supposed to do in order to make the plot work, because by now that character has become a huge part of the story and the plot is beginning to shape itself around them.

But I digress...

So if I write a story about a girl with a mean sister, or a boorish cousin, or a hateful friend—I’m not writing about my own sister, cousin, or friend. 

 Writers, do you base your characters on people you know? Or do you make a mishmash of traits? Are your characters 100% fictional, even?

How Do You Feel About Love Triangles?

I was rereading one of my favorite contemporary YA books the other day, Scarlett Fever, and it has a love triangle,* and that got me started thinking about love triangles in books in general.

I’ve been trying to decide whether or not I like them.

First, let’s define a love triangle. I’m talking about REAL love triangles. Not a genuine love interest and then some sort of relationship red herring, or a jerk who is being forced on the heroine, or so forth … for instance, once I was reading this review for the movie Titanic (it was part of some series where the movie critics reviewed uber-famous movies they’d never seen, which was why I was reading a review for a movie from the 90’s in like 2009, anyway, I digress) and the critic spent a really long time talking about the “love triangle.” Okay, hold up. That was not a love triangle. Rose most certainly didn’t love the douche bag. (The critic even went on the bemoaned countless plots where the girl can't wake up to the fact that the guy’s a jerk. I was like, did you watch the movie?) Another instance... Wickham in Pride and Prejudice is just a red herring. That's not a love triangle. I don't think anybody was rooting for that relationship to work out.

No, when I say “love triangle” I mean a character is genuinely torn between love, or at least attraction, to two other characters, both of whom have a legitimate chance of being chosen in the reader’s mind.

Now, I was thinking about all this, and about the plethora of romance-related geometrical shapes I’ve seen lately in YA in general, and I starting wondering.

What is so popular about them?

1) I think the easy answer is that, at least when it’s a girl and two guys (and the reader is a girl), it’s a very powerful ego trip if you’re vicariously living through the character and she's got two men fighting over her. Which is kind of funny too, because honestly, the situation really sucks in real life and you would not want it to happen to you. I was stuck in a so-called love triangle for about six months when I was in college (Long story short, it was awful, and I got accused of all sorts of things, including just stringing them both along for the attention, which I was NOT doing). Real life love triangles suck.**

2) But then on the other hand, they have TONS of drama involved, and drama drives books. So there’s that. Love triangles give you endless potential for stories surrounding the relationship, I suppose.

3) But the other thing, which occurred to me the other day (and I’d never thought of it this way before), is that a genuine love triangle actually shakes up the expectations a little. You know the drill. Love stories are fun, but predictable. Two characters meet, fall in love, overcome obstacles to be together. Nice, but you know what’s coming. With a love triangle, there is some genuine guessing going on as to who the character will end up with, and maybe people dig that. (Although SOMETIMES it's pretty obvious, and people are deluding themselves).

I think I lean slightly towards the “dislike” side of the spectrum when it comes to love triangles, for a single reason. I almost always favor the wrong couple, and it SUCKS! I get very emotionally invested in the cathartic payoff of this fictional relationship, and then … nope. Nada. Nothing. (Although to be fair, I didn’t read Hunger Games for the love story. That was tangential for me. So I didn’t mind too much that she went with Peeta … I expected it. Plus Gale was sort of a dick in the third book). I don’t even like the winning*** guy best in the love triangles in MY books! (I only have two books that have anything approaching a love triangle, and in both cases I came to prefer the guy who I knew would not end up with the girl, for character/circumstantial reasons. I was totally powerless to change it, too…)

Maybe I’m just a sucker for the underdog. Okay, I KNOW I’m a sucker for the underdog.

So at the end of the day I sort of dislike love triangles, because no matter what happens, a portion of the fans are going to be disappointed. As a writer, that upsets me. I want to make everyone happy (which is probably a huge weakness, but I digress). I know I can’t make everyone happy. But still. And as a reader … well. I’ve almost started avoided books with love triangles because seriously. Every. Stinking. Time. 

I'm a bit of a hypocrite, however, because I still totally write love triangles. Sometimes. It's not my general habit, but it happens. They can be fun, if you favor the winning duo, so to speak.

What do you think about love triangles, and why?

*I am VERY worried about the Suite Scarlett series, by the way, and the outcome of that love triangle. I don’t like Eric very much at all, and I adore Max. And I have a terrible track record when it comes to these things.

** Some people get really critical about it and accuse the person in the triangle of nasty things, like just being a slut, etc. Having been in the situation, I can attest that it's a really difficult place to be and I think people are way too hard on the character sometimes. But yes, it's easy to get annoyed about it if you've never been there. Or even if you have.****

***Winning is said slightly tongue-in-cheek. I realize it's not about winning (silence, Charlie Sheen!)

****Also I feel like there's more judgment against a female with two males interested in her than against a male with two females interested in him. Hmm.

Fitting the Character to the Story

Know what drives your characters. Use that.

Today I'd like to talk about a pet peeve of mine: characters who do things that make little or no sense simply for the advancement of plot.

Characters + Plot

If you find yourself having to move your character around in the book like a puppet, pulling strings and forcing actions that don't make logical sense or seem like cop-outs to your readers, then you need to adjust either 1) your story or 2) your character. 

How should the writer handle such a situation in which they need to make a character do something without just, well, making them do it? First, you need to start with your character's personality.

Who is your character?

Would would your character do in this situation, and how is that different than if another person were in the same situation? What motivates your character? What do they want? What are they like?

The story and main characters should flow together in harmony. You shouldn’t be able to have one without the other. The character’s personality, temperament, and motivation should have a direct effect on how that character will behave within the plot.

 Writing exercise ...
 
Here's an exercise to try--swap the main characters from two of your WIPs ... what happens? What is different about the books?

Hopefully a lot. Your character and his or her personality should affect the flow of the story somehow.

For example, my character Briand from DRAGONSAYER is impulsive, defensive, and tomboyish. Shana, a main character from another MS I'm writing, is calm, pensive, and calculating. In Shana’s story, she is sentenced to six years in a mining colony, but before her sentence can be carried out she is offered a job as a spy in the queen’s court in exchange for her eventual freedom. If Briand was dropped into this circumstance instead of Shana, she would most certainly get into a knife fight, blow her cover, and run away. But Shana takes the job and does it well because this is the sort of person she is, not just because I, as the writer, forced her character to do so.

In Briand’s story, she is hated outcast living in her uncle’s house. She's constantly getting into trouble and she's about to be shipped off to an apprenticeship as punishment, which sets in motion the rest of the events of the story. Shana, being the practical, quiet, clever person that she is, would not have made Briand’s mistakes. And without Briand’s impulsive and troublesome behavior getting her into one scrape after another, we wouldn’t have the story at all. 

Conclusion?

Character and story should be inseparable. Make the story fit the character, and the character fit the story. This might mean that as you write your story and further discover who your characters are (if you're an in-advance plotter, that is) you're going to have to make some changes to your plot along the way. But don't worry about that now. Be flexible. Allow your plot to unfold organically. Just don't make characters do things for no reason. Let their motivations come from who they are.

Don't make characters do things just because you need them to. If that's the case, you probably still have some adjusting to do somewhere else in the flow of the story.

"Plot springs from character ..." ~ Anne Lamott

Work In Progress Wednesday

Well, I'm a fan of disorganized structure.

"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say." ~Anaïs Nin

I am a great fan of structure (probably because I impose very little upon myself in everyday life). So I am attempting to give this blog some structure. So I’m declaring Wednesdays to be focused on my WIPs, whatever they may be at the moment. If you follow me on Twitter you might have seen some of my whining about the 5 WIPs I have been working on lately. I know. Bad idea. Don’t do it, kids!!

At any rate, I’ve gone back to just one for now because I JUST CAN’T LIVE THAT WAY. But the single MS I’ve chosen to focus on is giving me fits. FITS.

It occurs to me—the subtitle of this post really ought to be In Which I Moan About This Book I’m Writing. Cuz that’s what I’m going to do.

Writing is hard even when you know exactly what you’re doing. But right now, trying to write this particular story feels like trying to select the perfect mother’s day gift at a jewelry store in complete and utter darkness while wearing boxing gloves and trying to hold an agitated howler monkey under one arm.

 In other words, darn near impossible.

"I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head." ~John Updike

Me too, John, but first I need to figure out the snarl in my own.

I guess this is part of the process. And also, to some degree, I feel like I never learn. If any of you haven’t read Hyberbole and a Half’s amazing post on this subject, do so now.

Anyway, I say I never learn because I’ve been here before. The last MS I completed, which is currently in a stalled state of revision (hey, DaVinci hardly ever finished anything either!), gave me the same sort of trouble.

Ultimately my biggest problem wasn’t plot (I figured that out partly on the fly and partly through an agonizing process of outlining).

It wasn’t the matter of writing itself, although you know my thoughts on that subject (I’m looking at you, dead elephant carcass).

It was the characters.                                                           

I have a whole blog post cooking on this subject (maybe I’ll post it soon). But basically the characters weren’t coming together right. It was mostly a matter of motivation. What was driving them? What were they trying to do? I didn’t have it figured out at the time, and until I knew what I was doing I was just spinning my proverbial wheels in the mud.

“Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

So I guess that’s what I’m doing now. I sit and I write a little bit and then I read it and grimace and then I eat ice cream cake. It’s a deadly spiral, folks. So right now I’m mulling the story over. I’m thinking about the characters and their wants and needs. What is driving them? What needs to be driving them?  I’m on a quest to figure out exactly who my MC Shana is, and exactly what she wants. Some of this I will discover as I write the book, and some of it I already have.

I was going to post a small bit of the current MS since this is WIP Wednesday and I want to do more than just complain about it, but I can’t find a single segment that doesn’t need hefty editing.