Like me, like me not

April 29, 2010 Gray wrote, I’m writing a medieval fantasy story with a large cast. I have this fear of making my main characters unlikable and completely outshined by my supporting characters. I’ve found this restricts me from creating lots of lovable characters that suck a reader into the story. How do you balance your characters’ “lovableness?”

Sounds like the problem may mostly be making your main characters lovable, a problem I share. According to my editors’ comments after reading the manuscripts of all three of these, Fairest, Ever, and Fairies and the Quest for Never Land, I failed to create sympathetic heroines . Before I revised, I asked the editors to point out the places where the characters seemed unappealing because I couldn’t tell.

I vaguely remember what the difficulty was in Ever, and it went something like this: Kezi believes she has only a month to live. She brought her impending death down on herself by an act of extraordinary kindness, a perfect case of the expression, Let no good deed go unpunished. Olus loves her and wants to help her. She appreciates this, but she doesn’t know him well and she’s a tad angry, a little absorbed in her approaching demise. When she gets mad at him it’s because he’s the only person around. I expected this to be clear, but it wasn’t. The editor found her ungrateful, so in revision I softened her. The book works now and didn’t work then, and I always wanted the reader to love Kezi, but I may have sacrificed a little complexity.

In Fairies and the Quest for Never Land, Gwendolyn, my main character, is living with the fairies. If something bad happened to a fairy, she thought about the consequences for herself rather than about the poor fairy. I did this without realizing because the consequences for Gwendolyn were going to move the story forward, but, alas, she came off as selfish.

You might want to keep these two questions in mind as you write your main character: Are his feelings understandable? Is he reacting in a caring way to others?

It’s a balancing act, as writing so often is. We’re in our main characters’ heads more than we’re in the minds of lesser characters, even if we’re writing in omniscient third person. We don’t want a paragon for a main, or the reader won’t identify. And we don’t want a main whose interior monologue is mean, or the reader won’t identify. We can’t really reflect life, because if a mind-reading device were ever invented, most people would be unsympathetic, at least sometimes. I certainly have unacceptable thoughts and feelings on occasion that I keep to myself.

So how to achieve likability?

If Holly, your main character, is thinking mean thoughts you may want to make her aware of this and self-critical. I hate men who wear tee shirts with suit jackets, Holly thinks. It’s so pretentious. The reader begins to dislike her until her next thought, which is, How can I hate a whole class of people without knowing them? The reader starts forgiving her.

Or Holly can think something horrible and do something nice. She hates these tee-shirt-jacket guys, but when one of them asks her for directions, she helps him to his destination, going way out of her way to do so. The reader notices.

Your main character can be grateful when life is going well, even temporarily. Holly appreciates. The air smells like earth after rain. The sunset is the color of her favorite scarf. She thinks how lucky she is. The reader is happy to be in her company. She doesn’t think, I suppose this is just the beginning of another drought. Good things never last, and a sunset that beautiful means something bad is about to happen. Ugh! Let me out of this character’s head.

You can think of real people you like and what you like about them and insert their qualities into your main characters. Alice is completely dependable. Zelda thinks the best of everyone. Barry has the most astonishing insights. And so on. There are many ways for people and characters to please us.

It may be more difficult to show your main’s good sides than a secondary character’s. For example, if Holly tells Barry about a problem and he gets it instantly and shows it to Holly in a new way, she can think, How perceptive he is, and the reader will like Barry better – and Holly for noticing. But she can’t advise Barry about his problem and then think, How perceptive I am, without coming off as boastful and unlikable.

Not that a main character always has to be likable. For example, the main character, Titus, in M. T. Anderson’s young-adult novel Feed (middle school and up, I’d guess) is not likable, not to me anyway. I pitied him, felt for his limited life, and wished futilely that his world would change – and couldn’t put the book down. He’s not even interesting; he’s utterly shallow, which may be the point of the book. In this terrible world, no one can rise above circumstance to develop depth.

The characters in Christopher Buckley’s Thank You for Smoking (high school and up) are not admirable, but I laughed my way to the end. And is Hamlet likable? I’m not sure. He’s terrible to Ophelia and also to her father, Polonius, and yet we feel for him. Few people walk out in the middle of the play.

As for secondary characters, go ahead and make them lovable, as many as you like, in my opinion. You may need bad characters for tension, but you can still populate your pages with charmers. In Ella Enchanted, Mandy is a delight, and her delightfulness doesn’t lessen Ella’s appeal. Adorable secondary characters may even help your main be more adorable himself. In life we sometimes judge people by their friends. I’ve doubted people who seemed nice but whose friends made me uncomfortable. You may have had the same experience. And I may trust someone more if I like her friends. Besides, it can be enjoyable to travel through a book in pleasant company – not always possible; it depends on the story.

Here are three prompts:

• Your main character Yvette is popular. She’s with several of her friends at a school function. An odd, unpopular boy is there, too, and Yvette goes out of her way to be cruel to him. Write the scene and make Yvette sympathetic even while she’s behaving badly.

• Four friends are hiking together. Make each one likable in a different way.

• Same friends, same hike. They run out of trail mix. One sprains an ankle. Rain starts to fall. Camp is still three miles off. Make them all deteriorate into annoying people. Create a crisis and bring them back to likable.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Brain Jumping

On April 25, 2010, Mya wrote,

...how do you change viewpoints in a story without making it confusing? I know you did it in Ever, and I have a story that goes the same way, but it’s not working out.

In Writing Magic I define the various points of view (POV), and there are many other sources as well. Also, my post of October 21st, 2009, is related to this one.

When I wrote the first draft of Ever I wrote it in third-person omniscient. The effect, alas, was that the reader couldn’t feel close to anyone. Third-person omniscient doesn’t have to work out that way; I just couldn’t get it right in this case. Then I tried first person from Kezi’s POV, put she isn’t present for many plot developments. If I’d stuck with just her, the reader would have been unaware of them either, which led me to the alternating narration.

If you and I enter the same party or walk into the same store or even examine the same pair of slacks, our attention will be drawn to different things. With the slacks, you may be looking for quality; I may be a complete sucker for black-and-white checks (actually, I am) and not care about anything else.

Same with characters. When you switch from one first-person POV to another, you take on the world view of each character. If Willis is a cynic examining slacks, he may be looking for quality, but he’ll be expecting to find a flaw. When you switch over to Allie, who’s easily pleased, she falls in love with seven pairs of slacks in seven seconds. In writing the scene, you need to reflect their different thoughts and feelings in their separate narrations.

Their voices on the page need to differ too. In Ever, the male character, Olus, is educated, and Kezi doesn’t know how to read. The vocabulary in his chapters is harder, because he knows more words.

In the example of Willis and Allie, here’s Willis: I turn the pants inside out, frowning, then erase the frown because Allie is watching and she likes to tease me, but it’s an effort to keep my forehead flat. No lining, naturally. What do you expect for eighty-nine dollars? Especially when the sweat-shop laborer probably earned eighty-nine cents, if she was lucky.

This could be Allie: Wow! I love this store. Listen to the music! Great beat. Slacks, slacks, slacks. OMG. It’s Slacks City in here. The buyer must be a genius.

You have vocabulary, sentence structure, emotional reactions, and thought content as your tools for creating distinctive voices. And maybe more elements I haven’t thought of. Please weigh in with comments.

An interesting example of multiple POVs is Bat 6 by Virginia Euwer Wolff, which is about a girl’s baseball team, and there are twenty-one – count them! – first-person POV characters. It’s a fascinating book that can be read by middle-grade readers and up. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver is a tour de force of multiple POVs. I read enough to know what an accomplishment it is, but I didn’t stick with it. This one would be for high school and above.

If you read these books, notice the devices the authors use to create unique voices. I remember from The Poisonwood Bible that one of the main characters is a master of palindromes. How original!

Shifting POV makes storytelling more complicated. Possibly my biggest problem as a writer is that I tend to over-complicate. I’m always spinning ideas on top of other ideas, and the task of getting through a book becomes much harder. Of course, layered, complex stories are good. So can be simple, direct ones. I’m thinking of The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, both for high-school level and above. The point is that you should consider your reasons for multiple viewpoints.

Here are some occasions when it may be worth the work. These are just what I can think of. I’d welcome more ideas.

1. It’s fine and brave to try something new. If you’ve never written from more than one point of view and you want to see how it goes, that’s an excellent reason all by itself.

2. You can’t tell your story in the first person because your main character isn’t present for extended events that the reader needs to know about. I say extended because short events can be communicated by phone, email, text messages, even a magic book, as I used in Ella Enchanted.

3. Your story belongs to two or more characters more or less equally, and you don’t want to jump within a scene from one character’s head to another, which is what you’d have to do if you wrote in omniscient third person.

4. Your main characters are distant from one another in time or place or culture.

5. Your main character is an unreliable narrator, and you want another voice for balance and objectivity.

6. Truth is elusive in your story. You want the reader to piece it together by combining points of view. This approach is probably too sophisticated for any but young adult (and adult) readers.

7. Again, truth is elusive. You are going to go over the same events repeatedly from multiple points of view. Your reader will figure out what really happened. This also may be only for older readers. The classic Japanese movie Rashomon (high school and above again) is a mystery told this way.

In numbers two through four above, you might also write in omniscient third person, a perspective I love and find difficult to pull off. An omniscient narrator provides a consistent voice, but this POV can distance you and the reader from your main characters, since the narrator is on the outside. Or a cacophony of thoughts and feelings can slow your story down to a glacial pace.

Here are two prompts:

• Dream up five characters on an urban commuter train. Write a page from the POV of each of them. Reveal why they’re on the train, what’s awaiting them at the end, the issue that’s uppermost in their minds. Some calamity happens: the train hits a tree or runs somebody over or a passenger becomes ill – whatever. Write what ensues from the POV of each of them, a page for each. You can either advance the story with each shift of POV or retell the same events. If you need to, go back and revise any of your first pages to fit what follows.

• Tell a story from the points of view of the pets in a household, more than one species. How would a dog think? A cat? A fish? Turtle? Parrot? There is a long tradition of storytelling through animal voices. One of my favorites when I was little was Black Beauty, which I reread not too long ago and still enjoyed.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Death and Dying

On April 16, 2010, Ezmirelda wrote, How do you kill a character you’ve become attached to? If the plot needs for a certain character to die how do you do it? Have you ever done it before?

I’ve killed characters, but not many. The mother dies early on in Ella Enchanted and in The Princess Test, and Dave’s father dies at the beginning of Dave at Night. A few characters bite the dust in The Two Princesses of Bamarre, but I won’t say which ones for those who haven’t read the book. I’ve even knocked off a few fairies, tra la, in the Disney Fairies series.

Getting very serious – briefly – people I love have died, real people. I’m sure many of you have lost loved ones too. My father died when I was thirty-eight, my mother when I was thirty-nine. Their deaths were a long time ago; I’m sixty-two now. But I still miss them and think of them often. A situation arises, and I imagine what my father would make of it. In a group of people, it often seems to me I’m observing through my mother’s eyes. Sometimes I picture their astonishment at the technological miracles that have come along since their deaths. The frustration of course is that I can guess what they might say and do; I make them characters in my internal narrative, but I can never be sure if I’m correct. Their absence in flesh and blood will remain sad forever.

If you’re feeling pain at the prospect of killing a character you love, I hope you’ll take comfort. When characters die, they’re not fully dead. I – or you – can bring the dead back to life in imagination. I can make up a new flashback or write out future scenes as if the character hadn’t died. Take Ella’s mother, for example, I could write her first meeting with Ella’s father, Sir Peter. Maybe she’s heard rumors about him. People say he’s dangerous, so she’s curious. Before the ball where he is to be, she dresses with particular care, to Mandy’s dismay. They dance, and she finds the courage to flirt. She tells him about her day, her family, secrets she’s kept for years. His eyes never leave her face. He smiles and compliments her. She hasn’t lost her sense of humor, so she tells herself that this is ridiculous and happening too quickly. Alarms are going off, but she’s taken in anyway. If I like, I can write what she says and how he answers.

Or I can jump ahead and bring the mother back for Ella’s wedding. The reader can see her joy at her daughter happiness. And so on.

You honor your beloved dead character by making the reader love him too. Don’t hold back on giving him qualities you adore, and go easy on the faults. In Dave at Night, I made Dave’s father pretty saintly, so the reader would feel Dave’s grief. You can make the character’s faults endearing ones. Even a villain can be lovable if you make the reader understand the villainy and see where it comes from. It is fine to do in a character for plot reasons, but make the death resonate if this is an important character. What we don’t want to do is rush the death to reduce our own pain. Death is an occasion for wallowing.

You can soothe your pain by keeping the dead character in the reader’s memory. I hate when an author forgets to do this. The character dies; the story is sad for ten pages, and then the character is hardly mentioned again. The consequence is that the living characters who appear to have forgotten the dead one come off as unfeeling. I’ve seen this in thrillers. In the first chapter the hero’s wife is killed. He sets off to avenge her death, which is the whole reason for the book, but the adventure takes over and he stops thinking of her. And I think, How crummy is this! If you go the other way and have the character remembered, whoever is doing the remembering becomes more sympathetic, generally a benefit.

The treatment of a character’s death is masterful in A Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. I read it a long time ago, so I just read a plot summary and almost cried. If you haven’t read the book, it is marvelous.

Guilt often accompanies death. For example, the sole survivor of a car crash is likely to be burdened with guilt, even if he wasn’t driving. He may play out in his mind many scenarios that don’t end in an accident. If I’d done this, said that, he may think, we wouldn’t even have gotten in the car. If I hadn’t turned on the radio… If I had stopped her from answering her cell phone… When you build in guilt, you make the death more believable.

I’ve been a little prescriptive in saying how to treat a death. Each story is different, and you may need to handle it differently. You may have a main character who can’t deal with sadness and deliberately buries the feelings. Disconnection from feeling may keep the dead character in mind as effectively as wallowing. Oh, we think as we read, he’s being callous because he’s in pain. Why pain? Oh, yes, because Juliette died.

Or you may find another approach that works.

Another option, naturally, is not to kill off the character. You may be able to get rid of him without an actual death. Sometimes a character has to die. You feel it as you’re writing. But sometimes there are other options. He can move away. He and your main character can argue irreconcilably and separate forever. He can live, but he’s in a coma and no one knows if he’ll ever recover. It’s worth thinking about why you want to kill him and why you’re hesitating. If you let him live, you can bring him back into the story later on.

Ever, my Mesopotamian fantasy, could have been a tragedy. Initially, I thought it would be, but I couldn’t go that way, so I steered the story in another direction. Tragedy was too bleak for my temperament. Someday this may change.

As for how my characters have died, I’ve used disease, incineration, a fall, disbelief (in the case of one of the Never fairies), battle, even overeating, and maybe I’m leaving out a few. No murder and no humans killing humans even in battle. In fact, I haven’t staged any battles between peoples, only people against monsters. So far I haven’t had the stomach for it, but that may change, too.

I haven’t treated any of the deaths clinically, but there are resources that can help you get inside dying. For one of my books, won’t say which, I needed to know about poisons and their effects, and I found plenty online. Just now I googled “how to write a death scene,” and many entries popped up. I also found a book series called Howdunit, which is for mystery writers but which would probably have other writing uses.

Here are three deadly prompts:

• Your main character’s best friend died of a rare cancer a year ago. Write notes about the impact this might be having on her. Write a scene showing these effects. Write a session between her and a grief counselor.

• Think about killing off a character in a story you’re working on. Consider which character might die and what the consequences would be for your story. Write notes about this. Write the death scene. (You don’t have to really use it.)

• This may not be to everyone’s taste – this entire post may not be – but for the lighter side of death, write from the vantage point of a happy arch villain who is joyously plotting a murder. Get inside her, the more gruesome you can be, the better. Make the character she is planning to kill a great humanitarian whose death will be an enormous loss for all mankind.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Cover Musings

On April 14, 2010, April wrote, On another topic, your aside about how a book cover can make or break a book really intrigues me. Do you have more to say on that topic that could be made into a post? I’d love to hear your opinions about it.

Warning: This post is a departure, not about writing at all, just covers.

Many of my book covers – Ella Enchanted, The Wish, the latest Dave at Night, Two Princesses of Bamarre, Fairest, Ever – were created through photographs. There was a photo shoot of the girl or, in the case of Two Princesses, girls. The artist works from the photograph and paints in the background, possibly also from photographs – I don’t know. In the last few years, my editor at HarperCollins has been emailing me photos of models, and I’ve had a say about which of a small selection of pretty girls will represent my book. Back to Two Princesses again: my editor sent me photographs and I chose an Addie and a Meryl and then neither model was available, and the artist used two different young women.

The hard cover of Dave at Night was illustrated by Loren Long. I love it so much that I bought the original art, which now hangs in my living room. The cover reminds me of the work of early twentieth century painter Thomas Hart Benton.

An interesting tidbit is that initially Loren Long showed a waiter balancing a bottle of some kind of alcohol on a tray. The people at HarperCollins felt that liquor wasn’t appropriate on a children’s book cover, so Loren Long replaced the bottle with a goblet and a glass.

A new artist was hired for the paperback. I like that cover too, and it’s effective because Dave takes center stage. It’s probably a more kid friendly cover, whereas the hard cover appeals to grown-ups. The logic may have been that adults buy hard cover books, but children may buy a paperback. Since then, HarperCollins has had a second paperback cover created.

Publishers commission new covers to breathe fresh life into a book that’s been out for a while. That’s why many of my books have more than one cover. A few years ago HarperCollins began putting what looks like a gold-leaf band across the top of my novels and the title in gold lettering. This is a form of branding. My books become identifiable at a glance.

Picture book covers are created by the illustrator, of course. I adore the covers of my Betsy Who Cried Wolf and the soon-to-be-released Betsy Red Hoodie. My Disney Fairies books are illustrated novels with illustrated covers, and the illustrator, David Christiana, is a master.

Lately I’ve been reading complaints by readers that the girl on the cover of this or that novel of mine doesn’t look like the girl I describe. In Ever, for example, I say Kezi has an olive nose, meaning it’s a little droopy and a little bulbous at the end. The artist may not have been able to find a pretty model with this kind of nose, or may not have looked. The chosen model is lovely and vaguely Mediterranean looking.

My complaint about Ella Enchanted is that every time there’s a new cover, Ella’s hair gets lighter. But I haven’t said so to my publisher. I wish the cover of Two Princesses of Bamarre showed the dragon Vollys more prominently, but the covers of both books are fine. Their purpose is to sell books. My books are – from a marketing standpoint – targeted to girls, eight and up. The covers show pretty young women, and potential readers presumably (on a subconscious level) want what these beauties seem to have. Ooh, this sounds crass!

Then, however, if the cover is successful, the girl reads the book and the story takes over. With luck, it’s a good book.

Take my novel Fairest. Aza, the Snow White character, is homely at the very least, except for a brief part of the story when she’s beautiful. If the cover art showed her when she was most unappealing, the book itself would likely have had little appeal. The cover is clever; she seems beautiful, but most of her face is behind a hand mirror.

I hate when a cover hurts a good book’s chances. It won’t be read if a child or parent doesn’t want to pick it up. The Moorchild by Eloise McGraw, which won a Newbery honor, started its life with an unattractive cover, in my opinion, which was then replaced by another bad one, although the third and latest cover looks excellent to me. I can’t say who’s to blame for the first two; they may have been just what the author wanted. I love The Moorchild, but it seems not to be well known, which I blame on the first two covers. You can see the newest one online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble and one of the early ones on Amazon and the other on Barnes & Noble. I think it’s interesting to look, and you may not agree with me. After you look I recommend that you read.

A strange cover fad swept through publishing a few years ago. Somebody got the idea that a cover should feature incomplete people. One of the covers for my novel The Wish was caught up in the craze, and this particular cover shows a quarter of the main character’s face. But the moon is very full and very big.

At the beginning of an author’s career she may have little say about cover art. I’m still not brought in on cover-art discussions, but on the few occasions when I’ve been very unhappy with a cover, HarperCollins has changed it. For example, the proposed cover of Writing Magic seemed wrong to me. I thought it made the book appear to be about magic spells rather than about writing. HarperCollins changed the cover, and now I think it’s perfect. Of course I had a reason for my opinion. I didn’t simply say I didn’t like it.

This is just a mini-prompt: Look at the kids’ books on your bookshelf. How do the covers affect you? Do they draw you in? Do you remember your reaction when you saw them for the first time? Look at new covers in bookstores. Do you see trends? What makes you want to pick up a book? If you can, find out the reaction of someone much older or much younger than you are. An eight-year old may respond differently than a sixteen-year old to the same book jacket. Have fun!