Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 41

Writing Wednesday: Minor Characters

Working through my last revision of the WIP, I was working hard to make sure that my minor characters felt like more than just window dressing. Some tips:

1. Give your minor characters a history. Just a paragraph of them saying who they are and how they came to the place they are at can do wonders.

2. If minor characters are going to die, make some part of it unexpected. You don't need them to be heroic at every moment. Make their death original and unique.

3. Minor characters should not just help the main character in his/her quest. They have their own goals, and as the writer, you need to let minor characters occasionally take over the plot. It may not last for long, but let us see what they would do if they were the main characters.

4. A few physical details can help us distinguish one minor character from another. But be careful of making distinctions that are twee. Don't give each minor character a tick or a certain recognizable phrase. And don't make each one from a different race.

5, Write fuller histories of minor characters, but then cut them out. They don't often belong in the pages of the book you are writing, but a hint of the larger picture can be a wonderful thing.

6. Let your minor characters argue with the main character. Let us see that the main character has flaws and that there are other sides to the story.

7. Give a minor character a gift, a penchant for beauty or some artistic skill. It can tell us a lot about a character to know what they find beautiful even in the worst of circumstances. It also tells us about the world.

8. Love your minor characters enough that you feel like you could write a whole other novel about what their version of events is, or about what happened to them before and after the novel itself.

5 Ways to Make Me Love a Character

1. They are outsiders. They don't fit in and they see the world differently. Sometimes they have to disguise themselves.
2. They do things. Thoughtful characters are great, but if they think and never do, they feel weak.
3. They read books. I love characters who read. They feel like a reflection of me and my reality, where my friends are readers. Also, I love me some books where libraries and librarians play a big role.
4. They are doing what has to be done, even if they know that they will be rejected and blamed because of it. They have some sense of right and wrong, though they may pretend they've lost it.
5. They are vulnerable. I don't like weak characters, but I love characters who care enough about things that they can be hurt. A character who truly has nothing left to lose is a lot less interesting to me to read about.

Monday Book Rec--The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls

This is a memoir of a difficult childhood. When I tried to talk about it to my kids, I completely failed. In delivering the details about how her parents moved around from place to place in her early years, escaping the consequences of using too much credit, and then eventually ended up in a small mining town in West Virginia where they had no indoor plumbing and the house gradually fell apart around them, I made my kids wonder why in the world I liked this book. It sounded like a horribly sad, miserable way to grow up. And that could have been the way that Jeanette Walls told it. But it wasn't.

She does the amazing trick of telling about how terrible her childhood was, while also telling the reader the wonderful parts of it. Her father, who always has big dreams for the future, who gets her to be his champion in building his plans for "The Glass Castle," and the independence that a neglectful childhood can sometimes bring. I connected with the mother in this story over and over again, as she alternately demands time and space for her dreams of becoming an artist, and yet gives up those dreams to work as a teacher and feed her children. When Jeanette gets the chance to be in charge of the money her mother leaves behind for the summer while she retrains as a teacher, she gets to experience what it is like to say no to her gambling and alcoholic father. She can't do it any better than her mother does.

The final chapter of the story is when the children band together as teens to save money (and hide it from their father) to get the oldest daughter out of West Virginia and to New York. Gradually, each subsequent child gets a start by the older ones in New York until they are all there, away from the parents. Until the parents move to New York, too. But it isn't as bad as you think. They don't try to live with and mooch off their kids. Much. And as always, Walls' deft writing shows us the good and the bad side of her parents. A fascinating story and one that ends with a triumph of determination.

19 Stupid Things to Say to a Grieving Person:

This will pass. Time will heal all wounds.

This will make you stronger.

This happened to you for a reason. You were chosen for this.

Your loved one is in a better place; you should be happy.

You're being selfish to be so sad.

Focus on helping other people.

God wants you to be happy. Not being happy is a sin and an insult to God.

You have a lot to be grateful for.

Think of other people in the world who have it worse.

You should just stop feeling so much.

I knew someone who went through the same thing, and they dealt with it so much better.

You need to move on. Find something else to do with your time other than grieve.

God would never give you more than you can handle.

You're just not trying hard enough to feel better.

You need to pray for forgiveness because you must have done something wrong.

You should sue someone because there has to be someone at fault in this.

Bad stuff happens everywhere. Did you think you were special?

Give your pain to God and He will take it so you don't have to feel it anymore.

You will look back on all of this and be glad that it happened someday.

12 Tips on Writing About Grief

Write about specifics, not generalities. What was lost will always feel specific. Also, the experience of grief is specific, the circumstances specific.

Write sensually. How grief feels visually, tactilely, smells, how it sounds. Write about every part of the body experiencing grief. This is not a time for social niceties. Grief sometimes smell of vomit or pee.

Write real emotions, even the unpleasant ones. Grief often comes out as anger. Or terror. Or sometimes a numbness that makes doing even the simplest tasks impossible.

Grief isn't rational. Don't try to write the reasons for the turns of grief. Sometimes there are no reasons. There are only things that set it off and those may make no sense and no pattern.

Part of grief is laughter, relief, and pleasure. Don't forget to balance the nasty side of grief with this other side. Those who are grieving are those who live on, and part of living is good. Always.

Grief is about guilt. Guilt is about control. If we can see what we did wrong, we can make the past ours again. We can change what happened, or at least make sure it never happened again.

Don't write about some stages of grief crap that you read in college. If you really have never experienced grief yourself, go talk to someone who has. The stages of grief do not usually map well into reality. And no one feels like they are going through a stage.

Grief is never over. There's no closure to grieving, so don't pretend that there is. Every moment you think it is gone, it will come back and strike again.

Remember that whatever problems you see come out of someone after a grieving experience, they were there before. They don't suddenly appear. Grief may trigger a more intense reaction, but people are basically who they are.

If you think that grief is a group experience, as one of my therapists suggested to me, I think you're crazy. Grief is a solitary journey and no one, even those who are also grieving about the same thing, can really go along the same path. Many people who are grieving will push away all contact with others because it is simply too much work to grieve and deal with relationships at the same time.

Some people find a way to memorialize their grief in some majestic way, like founding a charity in the name of a loved one. Some people go on a pilgrimage or other great quest to find closure. These people are not better and are not dealing with their grief better than others. They are dealing. That is all.

Remember that the people who are trying to “help” the grieving person are often going to be the ones who are targets of a backlash. This is partly because the anger has to go somewhere, but it is also because people say the stupidest things in the face of someone else's grief. Seriously, stupid.

Book Recs--Tess Hilmo's With a Name like Love

I don't know why it took me so long to get around to reading this wonderful book by local Utah author Tess HIlmo. Three starred reviews and me weighing in on it two years later. But nonetheless, I loved this book from the first page. The voice is spot on and I felt like I was in the setting immediately. I loved the big family dynamics (5 girls stuck in a trailer for years on end). As someone who grew up in a bigger family (11), I know the nice parts and the bad parts. I was also surprised to find that hidden inside what seemed a family story was a mystery, as well. I love a good mystery, and this one had several great twists, in addition to an interesting motive. I always like mysteries based on motive rather than method.

The only thing that made me sad was that the main character, Ollie, didn't get to stay in the town that she wanted to stay in. I guess that her younger sister's complain that she gets everything she wants is proven most untrue by this. It wasn't that I thought it was a wrong choice by the author, just that as I reader, I was sad. But I also felt like Ollie was right to look at what other people wanted, and to realize that for her family, moving on was the better choice.

The sweet almost-romance of this book was also dear to my heart. I love romance in all its forms, but I do sometimes get tired of the eternal love-passion kind of thing that seems so common in YA of late. A romance full of longing and kindness is a great thing. Good job, Tess!

Book Recs: Faerie After by Janni Lee Simner

I love the mix of post-apocalyptic dystopia and fantasy in this series. Love, love, love! And I can’t say that about a lot of dystopian books, which don’t work for me on either an emotional level or a logical level. Faerie After (and the other books in the series) worked for me on both levels. Liza has been a great female lead from the beginning, but in this book she has some really difficult choices to make. I loved that the romance with Thomas takes a back seat to her development as a hero. This isn’t primarily a romance. It’s an adventure, and it’s a great, thought-provoking, heart-wrenching one.

I love also how Janni depicts the world of faerie here, as scary and different, but ultimately, a part of our own world. There is a section near the end that I don’t want to spoil but just gutted me, where we realize where Faerie comes from. I am still thinking about the implications of that moment, and I think all readers young and old will do the same thing. This is what speculative fiction does that realistic fiction doesn’t do as well. It makes us think we are getting a fun story, and then there’s a twist and we realize we are suddenly looking at ourselves in a new, and not always so happy way.

Can I also say that I have cover envy? I love the cover in this series. I also happen to know what Janni is working on next and I am so excited to see readers’ reactions to her new books. In the meantime, go find this series if you haven’t already and if you have, make sure you read the last installment and tell all your friends about it!

Book Recs: Case File 13 by J. Scott Savage

I have so many fond memories of Scooby Doo as a kid. But Scooby Doo was all about the reality of life that monsters aren’t real. Then came Buffy, which was all about monsters being real, with her own Scooby Gang. And now Case File 13 is that same fun mix of monsters and kids who are doing things that adults would never want them to do—like sneaking into a cemetery at night and putting on a voodoo necklace and then turning into a real-live zombie, complete with fingers and ears falling off and having to be sewn back on by a friend who thinks it is all cool and wants a chance with the necklace next.

I admit, there may be people out there who think this book is “gross" and “juvenile." And those are people who have no idea what is great about kids, boys and girls alike. The adventures in Case File 13 are just plain good fun and the kids are real, powerful, and funny. If you have a kid who likes good books or you are an old fan of Scooby Doo or Buffy yourself, go find a copy of this book and you will be waiting eagerly for the next installment like we are at our house.

14 Questions to Ask Before Signing with an Agent

1. What genres does the agent represent and not represent?

2. How much editing does the agent do? T

3. What is the agent's idea of a good career or a bad career for a writer?

4. What is the biggest mistake a writer can make? You want to know what would piss your agent off.

5. What will the agent do if you send in a manuscript that you love and the agent hates? Or feels s/he cannot get behind? Or simply thinks will dilute the quality of your name as an author?

6. What is the agent's ideal client like?

7. What are the agent's favorite books published in the last year? 

8. What changes does the agent think the publishing world will go through in the next year?

9. What does the agent do if a client is unhappy with a book cover? Or if the client's editor is laid off or quits? T

10. How does the agent sell international rights? Does s/he go to Bologna? To Frankfurt? To the London Book Fair? Does s/he have a foreign subrights agent? Also, film rights. Does the agent handle those? Has the agent sold film rights? To what projects? Have they actually been produced?

11. How does the agent feel about author branding?

12. Is there anything an author can do to get on a best-seller's list? Or to win an award?

13. What do you do when an author's career appears to be stalling?

14. Does the agent have an assistant or co-agents in the same agency? What is the agent's vision of the future for him/herself? Is there a number of clients after which the agent will consider no more clients?

More on these questions in The Business of Writing: http://www.amazon.com/The-Business-of-Writing-ebook/dp/B00DMMM768/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&qid=1373321343&sr=8-14&keywords=mette+ivie+harrison

20 Universal Signs of Bad Writing

Tolstoy says that all happy families are happy in the same way, but that unhappy families are all unhappy in different ways, which is why, I suppose, he finds it interesting to write about the unhappy ones.

I think that bad writers are all bad in the same way, but that good writers are all good in different ways. And these are the ways that bad writers are bad:

1. They don’t tell a story.

Usually this is because they are so focused on the words at a sentence or phrase level that they have forgotten what the bigger picture looks like. They might not even be aware of this. I’m sure I was not. Sometimes better writers will sit down and ask them what they are really trying to write about. It is not always possible to figure this out.

2. They are never concise. Sentences are never short. And there is no sense of pacing the language.

I think this must be partly because of the habit everyone gets into in high school, when you have to write a certain length of paper, and so it is always better to say something the long way (and over and over) than the short one. You just tend to get better grades. I know I did. I don’t know why I did, but that’s the way it is.

3. They use an abundance of adjectives and adverbs.

I think this is because they are trying to follow some rule of “good writing," they’ve been told, where they have to give a “sense of place," or “use all five senses in the opening paragraph." But it’s an external rule, that has nothing to do with the actual story that is being told here and now, on this page.

4. They do not know the meaning of the word “subtle."

Nothing is so unimportant that they can’t tell you exactly how it fits into the story their way. In a way, this is a kind of insecurity, not believing the reader can or should be allowed to interpret things on their own. Also called “hitting the reader over the head."

5. They do not allow any surprises to be discovered by the reader along the way.

This is partly because they are not sure themselves what is going to happen next, so they are trying to think about it. This often appears as the viewpoint character thinking about what to do next, or telling the reader what is going to happen next and how he feels about it, in advance.

6. They do not understand viewpoint and are constantly telling the reader things that the viewpoint character can’t know.

Writers who can deftly move out of one character’s head and into another’s without confusing the reader and very rare, and only the most experienced should try this. Otherwise, stick with one viewpoint character and everything that is said must be what they know or can see.

7. They show too much.

The classic “show, don’t tell" rule is sometimes misunderstood, because authors don’t know what not to show. Obviously, the reader does not want to know everything that happens, detail by detail. They don’t need to know when the character goes to the bathroom. They only want to know the interesting things, the things that tell them about the character, that show conflict, that are fun.

8. They tell too much about themselves

The problem here is that the reader wants to know about the story, not about the author’s personal life. Again, this is a problem sometimes that authors cannot see. They identify so much with their characters that they telegraph to the reader information about their fantasies and their relationships that is just too much. The story isn’t really about the author. It should be about the story

9. They write with bad information

Sometimes even if you aren’t an expert in a field, you can tell that the author is just making things up. Authors make stuff up all the time. It’s what they do. But they have to make up the right stuff. They can’t sound like idiots.

10. They mix metaphors or use them in in appropriate ways. Or just too often.

Metaphors are the stuff of good writing. Everyone knows this from college. Only think about this—a good metaphor will carry an entire book. You don’t want to suffocate the reader in them. Use one really good one, and then don’t use anymore. Or don’t use them at all, if you’re not sure that one is really good. You’ll be better off. I promise.

10.They have characters do things that don’t matter.

Yes, I know that published authors do this sometimes, but even their most faithful readers want to throw the book across the room. If you are going to end the story in such a way as to make what the main character does unimportant, end it a different way. Or have the main character do something else, something that matters. Otherwise why would anyone read your book?

11.They drop threads right and left.

Details matter in a book. Yes, all of them. And you as the writer are the weaver of the tale. You must hold all the threads in your hand and make sure they all end up where they should go.

12.They write about characters who don’t care, who are depressed, or who want to die.

You may think this is “meaningful" literature, or true to life, but if your character has no reason to live, the reader has no reason to read. There has to be something the character wants, or needs, something to propel the story forward. Maybe even something the character doesn’t want, that they have to stop.

12. They have villains who are mysterious and pure evil.

I’m not one into villains. I think you have plenty of conflict when good people simply disagree on what is most imporant in life. But if you do have villains, don’t make them stupid villains who do what they do merely to stand in the way of others. Give them a reason, even if it’s not one that anyone else can agree with.

13. They kill off characters when they can’t figure out what to do with them next. Or send them on a journey and never talk about them again. Or just drop them.

If you’re going to kill off a character the reader is invested in, you better have a damn good reason, and you better make sure that reason is foreshadowed in some way.

14. They use inadvertent rhyme. Or bad rhyme when writing poetry.

Check your words. Make sure you want them to sound that way.

15. They use the same word fifteen times on the same page, like “quietly."

And they try to fix it if you point this out to them by using synonyms for that word. That is not the problem.

16. They tell you how every character says everything. With feeling, while itching their butt, laughingly.

Said is plenty.

17. They tell you how every character feels.

The thing is, we don’t need to know how they all feel. We need to know how the main character feels. It’s his/her story. The rest don’t matter.

18. They have dialogue that doesn’t matter.

I guess they feel like they need to put dialogue in somewhere, but the reader does not want to know—truly— about the conversation they had about boring, trivial things. Unless the book is about a boring, trivial life, and then— honestly, don’t write a book about that. No one wants to read it.

19. They want to tell you about all the things that aren’t written down in the book that make it good.

I don’t understand this tendency. Some writers, I know, write pages and pages about their books, and then figure out what to put in the actual manuscript based on what is important to the story at any particular moment. This isn’t a bad thing per se, I don’t think, although it’s not what I do. But if a reader tells you something is missing, you should never argue with them. This is important information about how to make your book better. It’s your job to do it.

20. They write beginning after beginning, never getting through the middle, and certainly never finding an end. Sometimes they might write the words “The End," but it never is an ending, because there is never any resolution.

Again, if your book is about how life never has any resolution, don’t bother. Readers read fiction because they want what life doesn’t offer them. They want to pretend there is resolution. Really.

By the way, I got all of these examples from my own bad writing that you can sample here. All writers are bad to begin with, and all writers write bad stuff some of the time. Maybe lots of the time. Maybe most of the time. They just learn how to tell what’s bad and throw it out. Or some of them learn what thoughts are bad and don’t ever write those down (so they produce fewer words, but seem like better writers). And I hate them! Bad writers of the world unite—and become better writers!

I think this is because they are trying to follow some rule of “good writing,"