Mike E. Miller's Blog, page 3

Characters are People too

I said before that picking the right ideas was the single most important thing that would make or break your story, and that was true. If your story doesn’t flow well or isn’t believable, it’s toast, no matter what you do. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other things that can wreck your story almost as easily. One of those is character development.  Believable characters can draw your readers in and make them interested to find out what happens next.  Unbelievable characters can send your readers to find a different book.

What that means is that your characters have to be compelling. They have to be real. They have to be interesting enough that your readers want to get to know them. And you have to paint them in enough detail that your readers can get to know them. The real question, though, is how you know if you have pulled it off. How do you know if your characters are real enough?

The bad news is that I can’t help you with that. I can’t give you a checklist that tells you if your characters come alive. I can’t tell you what to look for. More than anything, that’s because nothing can. Not really. Even if I gave you a checklist and you followed it to the letter, there is no guarantee that your characters will pop off the page. There is no way to assure you that your characters will come alive in your readers’ minds.

Lots of people try, though. Go look at Amazon or Barnes & Noble and there are scores of books about character development. Look on Google and you’ll find hundreds or thousands of articles and checklists and guidelines. I’ve even tried to follow a few of them. I really have. But the truth is that I get bored. Now, that’s not to say there’s nothing good in them because there is. Some people really appreciate them. My trouble is that I have a hard time being formulaic in my character development. The first reason for that is I’m not nearly disciplined enough. I’m just not. I’ve tried to follow folks’ advice before and I peter out before I make it through even a single character. It doesn’t take very long before I get stuck or bored and move on.

The second reason makes me feel better about the first one. The second reason is that it just feels too flat. It makes my characters feel like two-dimensional, cardboard cutouts. They don’t come alive. They just sit there on the page smiling their artificial smiles and the doggone wind keeps knocking them over every time they try to do anything.

Characters shouldn’t be cardboard cutouts.  They should be three dimensional and they should come alive. In fact, they have to or your story is just as dead as it would be without a compelling story. So, again, you ask me, “How can I tell?” or, “How do I build out my characters?” I said the bad news is that I can’t tell you that, and that is true. The good news is that I can tell you how I do it, and I can tell you a surefire way to tell whether you missed the mark.

The easiest way to tell if you’ve missed the mark is by understanding a fundamental truth. Your characters will never be as real to your readers as they are to you. That means that if a character seems extremely real to you, then she probably is real to your readers. If a character feels flat to you, then you had better look out. That character is an imposter posing as a real person in your story. And those imposters will do a lot of damage.

Try an exercise for me. Pick a random character from a story you’re working on.  Got one?  Now, open up Microsoft Word or whatever word processing software you use and start writing what you know about them. Who is the person? What does their voice sound like? What was their childhood like? How do they behave as an adult? What do they like to do? Ask yourself basic questions that you can answer about the real people in your life.

Now push a little deeper.  How might they react if someone insulted them? Or punched them?  What if someone gave them a present?  How would they react if, say, they got a mysterious phone call telling them they only had seven days to live?  What if they won the lottery?

The point is that you should be able to answer these types of questions even if you don’t have detailed events built out to drive their behaviors. You should know how they would react in a given situation. You should know how they would respond. You should know what motivates them, makes them angry, scares them, or excites them. If you don’t, chances are very good that your characters are too flat. You likely need to do some more work.

With under developed characters, you run the risk that your story could be driving your characters rather than the other way around – meaning that you end up shaping your characters to match what you need to happen in the story.  That’s ok if you’re talking about the story as a whole, but doing that at a scene level can be catastrophic.  It can undermine your characters. At best, it can make them seem inconsistent. At worst, it can make them seem like they have a multiple personality disorders. Either way, it can destroy your story.

Join me for my next post and I’ll explore my process for creating characters. It isn’t perfect, but I like it. Maybe you will too.

Read The Timekeeper’s Son Sample

I’m happy to say that I’ve uploaded the first couple chapters from The Timekeeper’s Son.  I will be publishing it in September, but here is your chance to check it out the beginning of the story before it comes out.  I hope you love it.  I know I do, but I’m probably a little biased…

Read Chapter 1

The Suck Draft

I’ve debated a lot about where to go next.  I think there is more to say about idea generation and I know there is more to do before you get to the rough draft, but I thought I might jump forward a little bit for a minute and do something different.  After all, the suck draft, ahem, the rough draft is where everything happens.  It’s where all those idea seeds you’ve been nurturing get to grow into beautiful plants.  It is what you have to start before you can actually say you’re writing a book or even a story.

You see, all the stuff you’ve done up to this point isn’t writing.  Not really.  It is the planning stage before you get to writing.  It can be infuriating and fascinating.  It can be torture and it can be bliss.  But it isn’t writing.  Writing is sitting your butt in the chair and typing Chapter 1 at the top of the page.  It is dragging those ideas out of your head and your notebooks and turning them into a story.

I know a couple people who have been thinking about stories for years.  Decades, even.  They have the whole story world mapped out in their heads and they have a rough view of the plot.  They even know who the characters are.  Some of them have even started a rough draft (or several) only to throw it away.  These people are not writing.  They may be eventually, but they aren’t yet.

But you are a writer.  You want to be an author.  Authors write things that get published.  I know, it sounds crazy, but Google it.  If you’ve been following my posts, you know that I spent almost the entirety of my life being a writer, but not an author.  It wasn’t until this year that I changed that.  And the biggest thing you have to do to make that true for you is to start writing.

But I have to caution you.  Writing the rough draft is not for the faint of heart.  It is really, really hard.  It is one of the hardest things I think I’ve done.  You stare at the blank page and don’t know what to write.  You cuss at your computer as you go back and rewrite something you’ve already done.  You doubt the quality of what you’ve written and you question whether you’ve got enough story in you to write a whole book.  

I’m going to quote Laini Taylor again because her description of the rough draft changed the way I thought about it.  I had never written one before this year, at least of this magnitude.  In fact, I had never written fiction longer than a few thousand words.  I had an unrealistic expectation that the story was supposed to just flow out from inside me.  I know it seems silly, but I thought that the process of the rough draft was supposed to be as simple as getting it out of my head and onto the paper.  I could never start a draft because I didn’t feel like I knew enough about a story to do it.  There were other factors too, but this was one of the big ones.

When I stumbled across the Not for Robots blog early this year, I saw the rough draft from a completely different perspective.  You don’t have to have it all figured out when you start.  In fact, no one has it all figured out in the beginning or maybe even the middle.  The rough draft is where you figure that stuff out.

Laini described the rough draft as a vast wilderness.  You drop in at the edge and you have a very important mission: get to the other side.  The other side is the end of your book.  There are forests and lakes and cliffs and all sorts of other obstacles that stand between you and it.  You have to get out your machete and hack your way through.  Sometimes, you may come up against the edge of a cliff and have to double back and try again.

All you have with you besides your trusty machete is a pencil and a piece of paper.  As you hack, climb, and crawl, you are drawing a little map.  And, when you eventually come to the other side, you have a rough sketch to show the way you came, but it isn’t really ready yet.  You have to go back to the beginning and retrace your steps, refining the path.  Maybe there are places where there is a little better route.  Maybe you need to widen the path or dig steps into the side of a hill.  The point is that you aren’t done when you get to the other side.  You just have your route.

It is only once you’ve reached the other side of the wilderness that you have the whole story in your head.  And it may not be pretty.  Laini calls the rough draft the “exploratory draft.”  Some people call it the rough draft, while others call it the zero draft.  In jest, I call it the “suck draft.”  I don’t typically call it that out loud because people look at me funny, but that’s what it is.  I call it that because it reminds me not to strive for perfection at this stage.  Otherwise, it would take forever to get through the story.

Unless you are a writing genius, that first cut through the story isn’t going to be pretty.   I know I’ve repeated this a few times, but I want it to stick.  It is not easy and it is not perfect.  It may have some really good parts, but it is going to need some work.  It may need a lot of work.  And that’s ok.  No, it’s not ok.  It is reality, like it or not.  To me, that was great news.  How about for you?

By the way, I’ve had a lot to say so far based on the areas I’ve struggled with.  If you have topics you would like to make sure I spend some time on, drop a comment below or send me a note at MikeEMillerBooks at gmail.com   I’d love to hear from you.

The Snick

[Note:  I didn’t come up with this term.  I like to give credit where it’s due and The Snick is actually Laini Taylor’s.  She talks about in a small series of articles she put together on writing called Not for Robots.  There is some good stuff in there if you’ve never checked it out.]

There is a whole world of possibilities in front of you.  You can take the story anywhere you want.  You can put any obstacle in their way, or you can give them the key that unlocks untold mysteries.  Each element is an idea – where to go, what to do, how your characters react, all of it.  And picking the right ideas will almost certainly make or break your story more than any other thing you do.  It is more important than character development or writing style.  It is more important than your descriptions, and it is more important than the words you select. 

So, how do you separate the good ideas from the bad ones?  It’s simple, actually.  You have to wait for The Snick - the almost audible sound you get when an idea just fits.  It is that whoosh of excitement when a puzzle piece snaps into place, and you know that piece was made especially for the ones around it.  You instantly know you’ve found the right idea.

I’ll bet you’ve already figured out that there is a catch, though.  And you would be right.  Recognizing The Snick is a cinch, but finding it isn’t quite so easy.  Waiting for it can be utterly agonizing.  You’re free writing and you’re brainstorming, but it hasn’t happened.  You have a couple ideas that feel like they will work, but they don’t really get you excited.  They are just workable. 

And workable isn’t good enough.  Good isn’t good enough.  You have to push harder than that.  Settling for less is almost never good for your story.  So, whatever you do, don’t fall to the tempatation to go with one of these inferior ideas so you can move on.  Don’t.  You have to wait for The Snick.  If you don’t, your readers might not forgive you.

Let me give you an example.  A real one.  I don’t really like to do this because it almost feels like I’m saying I have this mastered and I don’t.  Lord knows I don’t.  But, since we’re talking about ideas, I want to go all out.  This is a point I really want to get across.

There was a story I read about a year ago by a first time author.  He was pretty good, actually, but he slipped up; he goofed.  He didn’t wait for The Snick.  The result was a story that is full of conveniences – both for the good and for the bad.  The bad guy is always tripping over the good guy no matter where he tries to hide.  The solutions to the good guy’s problems are always conveniently at hand. 

In a specific example, the bad guys have guns and they trap the good guys inside a house.  The hero happens to find an empty coffee can, a package of firecrackers, and a lighter in the kitchen.  Yes, in the kitchen.  And it isn’t anywhere near July 4th.  Anyway, he puts the firecrackers in the can and lights them off, fooling the bad guys into believing he has an automatic weapon.  While his assailants are ducking for cover, he escapes through the backdoor where a car happens to be sitting with the keys in it.  He doesn’t know about the car until he gets outside.

This is just one scene and it is littered with problems.

They conveniently find the answer in a place where you wouldn’t expect to find it during a time of year where people don’t often have fireworks lying around.
Firecrackers don’t have the same sound as gunfire, at least not to an experienced ear.  And I’m assuming that armed assailants would have experienced ears.  So, without the next point, the firecrackers might have bought them three or four seconds at most.
If you’ve ever let off a string of firecrackers, they go off erratically.  There are starts and stops and the spacing between them isn’t consistently even and rhythmic.  Automatic weapons, on the other hand, are very rhythmic even when you fire in bursts.  The cadence is very different from a string of firecrackers.
A car with the keys in it happens to be sitting in the backyard.  Seriously?

There are more still, but I think you get the point.

Now, I don’t want to beat the guy up too badly.  I really don’t.  Like I said, he actually was a pretty good writer.  His descriptions were rich and his writing style was good.  His storyline was intriguing enough that I shelled out the cash to buy it.  Now, I’ve never talked to the author, but I’d be willing to bet that he was too anxious to get the words onto the page.  He had the characters in the house and didn’t know how to get them out, so he grabbed the first thing that seemed plausible.  Of course, it wasn’t plausible, but the unrealistic nature of the solution just adds to it.  For me, the real problem came before I knew the outcome.  I had issues because it was just too convenient.  It was too easy.

Another reason I don’t want to beat this guy up too badly is this: you and I are just as vulnerable as he was.  We want to get on with our writing.  We want to see our words in print.  We want stellar reviews on Amazon and B&N and we want to earn a living doing what we love.  We want to get through that painful first draft because it’s really, really hard work.  But I want to tell you not to settle for passable.  You have to wait for The Snick.  Like I said, your readers may not forgive you if you don’t.

The good news is that I know you have it in you.  But I’ve never met you, you say?  That’s true.  But if you have a writer’s passion and you love to tell stories, I know you can do it.  You can find The Snick – even when it tries its best to hide from you.

You may still make this mistake from time to time.  I know I do.  Heck, I had to go back and rewrite the ending of The Timekeeper’s Son because I did do it.  And you may even catch me not pushing a story as hard as I should have, although I hope I can catch it before you do.  But we don’t have to be perfect.  We don’t even have to strive to be perfect.  We just have to give our writing everything we have.  No one can ask for any more than that.

Watering the Idea Seed

In my last post, I likened story ideas to seeds.  They start out as miniscule things with no real substance.  They have to be watered and nurtured so they can grow into great, flowering plants.  But what do I mean by that, really?  Basically, I’m saying that you have to spend time with them.  You have to pay attention to them.  There’s one thing I can guarantee about ideas: nothing will ever come of them if you don’t think about them.

I know, that seems like common sense and it is to a degree.  I’m just trying to make the point that writing is hard work.  Ideas don’t just pop out.  You have to really work with that little seed to get the actual idea to emerge.  And thinking about them is the first step.  I’ll think about my ideas in the shower or on the ride to work.  A lot of times, I’ll bore my wife to tears with some idea that isn’t really baked yet.  I’ll talk and talk but I don’t really know enough about it to say anything meaningful.  But it’s a start.  Like I said, if you’re not expending energy on your ideas, they aren’t going to grow.

But to tell you the infuriating truth, I don’t get much in the way of results when I think about them.  I’ll just kind of spin in a circle, not quite knowing where to go.  There are so many options and it is more rare than I’d like that one of them really sparks my imagination.  I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking that I just said you have to think about them before anything will happen and then I turned around and negated it, right?  Wrong.

Louis Pasteur once said that chance only favors the prepared mind.  Basically, no matter how much work you do, there are still the elements of chance and luck.  But luck tends to favor those who are prepared for it – that is, people who are doing the work.

You see, when I was trying to develop the idea for The Timekeeper’s Son, I did a lot of churning.  I thought about it a lot, but I had no idea where to go.  I knew the story was about a man who travelled back in time as his nine-year-old self.  That’s where my idea stopped.  Now, I did know a few other things, like where he came from and where he went.  That didn’t give me a story.  It wasn’t until I was reading On Writing by Stephen King that inspiration hit me in a very unexpected way.

He made an innocuous mention of dogs and how two different people can look one and perceive it in two different ways based on their experience.  That has nothing to do with a thirty-five-year-old man finding himself in a child’s body, right?  Wrong again.  It had everything to do with it.  Instantly, I envisioned a scene that would be the catalyst for the rest of the story.  I hadn’t felt like I was making any progress, but the logjam broke loose in an instant.  And I had no idea it was going to happen.

You see, if I hadn’t been exerting so much energy trying to work through the story, that wouldn’t have happened.  I would have read King’s comment and probably found it interesting, but that’s it.  I would have just cruised right on by without ever noticing how important it was.  The opportunity would have been lost.

So, that’s what I mean when I talk about nurturing an idea.  You have to be digging at it, exposing it little by little.  The way I’ve already mentioned is by thinking about it, but there are other ways too.  I think the biggest one is free writing.  Write everything you know about the story and don’t stop.  A lot of it may not be helpful.  But all you need is one sentence that is.  Maybe even a word.  Somehow, somewhere, there is going to be a spark that ignites your idea into something huge. 

But it still isn’t a story.  When my logjam broke and I knew where to go, I still didn’t have a story.  I didn’t really know who the antagonist was.  I didn’t know why Andy had travelled back.  I didn’t know anything except that he had come back and someone didn’t want him changing stuff.  That wasn’t enough for a story.  But breaking the logjam cleared the way for more things to come.  I kept thinking and I kept free writing and the little pieces started to congeal, bit by bit. 

Some of you might be asking how long this took.  Well, from the inception of the idea to the epiphany from King was about three weeks.  It was still another couple weeks before I was even ready to think about starting a rough draft.  And I still had no idea where I was going to end up.  My next book has been rolling around in my head for two months and I haven’t made a whole lot of progress.  But guess what?  I also haven’t been devoting the kind of energy to it that I did with The Timekeeper’s Son.  I’ve been too busy getting ready to publish.

Now there’s one other thing I should highlight.  Did you notice that I wasn’t actually thinking about my story when inspiration struck?  I was reading a book and my story was the farthest thing from my mind.  Except that it wasn’t.  I had been spending a lot of time with it, so it was still there, right under the surface.  Once you really commit to the idea, you never stop thinking about it, really.  Or at least I don’t.

That isn’t to say that you won’t have a great idea while you’re thinking about it.  It only means that you may not and that’s ok.  Go on with life.  Whether that means reading, watching TV, eating dinner with your spouse and your children, or even taking an African safari, writing comes from life.  The nutrients you need to make your seed grow can come from the most unexpected places, but only for the prepared mind.

Catching Ideas

So, where do ideas come from anyway?  I used to wonder where the great, big stories came from.  You know the ones I mean: stories like Starwars, The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, or whatever.  I had this weird idea that these folks were creative geniuses that had all these ideas rolling around in their heads, fully formed.  Now, I’m not saying that they aren’t creative geniuses.  I’m just saying that there is a lot more to it than that.  I have no doubt that those ideas took a whole heck of a lot of work before they even started to resemble the finished products.  Never mind the actual stories.  Ideas have a long way to go before they become stories.

So, if they don’t start out that way, what do they look like?  Well, they are often little things that don’t look like they amount to much.  I can’t say what the inception of other authors’ ideas looks like, but I can tell you the idea for The Timekeeper’s Son started out as a couple sentences.  That’s it.  In the beginning, that’s all I would have been able to tell you.

And those couple sentences can come from just about anywhere.  You could be in the shower or at the dinner table.  You could be sleeping, driving, or in the checkout line at the grocery store.  Ideas really can come from anywhere, and they are stealthy little things.  They like to sneak up on you, slapping you in the back of the head when you least expect them to.

Usually, it’s just a little slap, though.  More like a tap.  You really have to be paying attention or you might not even notice it.  It could be a thought about a serial killer biting off more than he can chew or maybe about someone swindling a used car salesman.  Who knows?  The important thing about it is that it sparks something in you.  It makes you stop and say, “Hmm.  That’s interesting.”

That may be all you get.  It may just be a little snippet of a thing and no more.  In fact, you can probably count on it being disappointingly small and that’s ok.  You have to think of it like a seed.  Seeds have to be planted.  They have to watered.  You have to nurture them if you want them to grow into something useable.

That is exactly how ideas are.  When an idea happens upon you, the most important thing you can do with it is write it down.  Write everything you know about it.  Even if it’s only one sentence.  I said ideas were sneaky little things and I meant it.  They can sneak away just as well as they can sneak up on you.  You’ll go to think about it later, but it’s gone as though it never existed.  You have to grab hold and handcuff it to the railing before it can get away.

I have a Microsoft Word document where I keep my little, idea seeds.  Usually I’ll create some working title even if it’s stupid and then I’ll write everything I know about it.  Like I said, sometimes it’s just a sentence or two.  Sometimes it’s a couple hundred words.  Maybe you won’t do anything with most of them for a long time.  Maybe you won’t ever do anything with some of them.  That’s ok.  If just one of them ends up exciting you enough to flesh out, then you have one story.  Chances are that you’ll have more than one good idea, though.  I can almost guarantee it.

The next step is taking that seed of an idea and nurturing it into something beautiful.  That’s harder. We’ll start looking at that in the next post.

All About Writing

I’m a writer.  I’ve always been a writer.  I have always loved to write stories that sucked the reader in from the first few words and then didn’t let them get away.  I wanted people to be riveted.  I wanted them to be in the story.  I loved the way people’s eyes lit up when I hit a home run.

What I haven’t always been is an author.  There is a difference, you know.  Being a writer is something you don’t get to choose.  Either you are or you aren’t.  It’s in your blood.  For me, there has always been this little voice telling me to write.  But I never wrote for real until I was in my late thirties.  I wrote lots of boring technical stuff, but nothing that people would actually desire to read.  That’s why I haven’t been an author.

Authors write.  Authors take the stories that are in their head and put them to paper.  They take the writer’s desire and convert it into action.  That means that you can be a writer, but not an author.  Or, maybe you’re an author, but not a writer.  Lots of people write, but they don’t have that fire that makes them a writer.  And you can see it in their words.

What are you?  Are you a writer or are you an author?  Maybe you’re one of them; maybe you’re both.  Or maybe you’re neither and are just curious.  This blog is all about writers who want to be authors.  No, that’s not right.  It’s about writers who feel compelled to be authors, but don’t know exactly how to get there.

I want to spend some time talking about how writers can become authors.  There was a long period of time where I didn’t really know how to get there.  In some ways, that may seem silly.  If you want to write, then write, right?  For me, it wasn’t so simple.  I spent a lot of years thinking about it, but not doing it.  When I did really start looking at doing it, I didn’t know what to write about.  My brain felt devoid of ideas.  There wasn’t anything I was excited enough about to put the effort into.  Books are a lot of work.  A.  Lot.  Of.  Work.  Seriously. 

I believe that I’m not the only person out there who has had this problem.  I’m not an expert, but maybe I can help a little.  Maybe I can give the right perspective that will help someone make that jump from writer to author.  If I do that, then every sentence I write on this topic is worth it.

Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.

Welcome to my blog.  I’m Mike E. Miller, author of The Timekeeper’s Son, if you haven’t heard.  This blog is all about me.  Ok, maybe not all about me, but I will spend some time talking about my books and my writing career.  Plus, I’m going to add some content about writing. 

I don’t know that I’d call myself an expert, but I’m hoping that my experiences can help out some aspiring authors.  It took me a long time to get to the point where I was ready to take the plunge and write my first book.  Now that I’m in the process of publishing it, maybe someone else can learn from my mistakes, er, experience.