GENREALITY

This is a summary article I did for the Novelists Inc Newsletter after last Years conference. I’m reprinting it here because I was asked to do a post about Conflict, and this is better than me trying to explain it myself.

In order to write create great characters and write compelling stories, we need to understand the psychology of our characters. It’s easy to think Goal, Motivation, Conflict, but in reality we know that creating memorable characters is not so easy. With that in mind I stepped into the conference room at the Tradewinds Island Grand and prepared for Dr. D.P. Lyles workshop The Psychology of Character Motivation-Understanding the Whys of Character Thought, Action and Dialogue.

Admittedly, I was worried that taking a workshop from a Dr. on the psychology of character motivation might be a bit too, oh I don’t know… school-ish for me. You know what I mean? I’ve never been one to read textbooks and I don’t have much love for big ten-dollar words. I like it when things are explained to me in a simple straightforward way. Dr. Lyle did even better than that – he used examples that made things crystal clear.

I’m going to jump right in with the recap here and start with his slide show. It looked a little like this….

Tough Guy ——————————————————– Whiner
Team Guy ——————————————————– Rebel
Artist ——————————————————– Dreamer
Smarty ——————————————————– Dummy
Blooming Rose ——————————————————– Wallflower
Grinder ——————————————————– Lazy Dog
Goody ——————————————————– Baddy
Believer ——————————————————– Doubter

For the workshop he used the character and story line of Silence of the Lambs for an example.

First we went over each line asking which side of the board Hannibal was on at the start of the book. Then again at the end of the book. Then we did Clarice, start and end of the book. Sometimes the character fell in the middle, but often it was closer to one side than the other.
See an example of the Clarice chart below.

Tough Guy —————————————-S————— Whiner
Team Guy –S—————————————————– Rebel
Artist ———————————————–S——– Dreamer
Smarty —————————————————S—- Dummy
Blooming Rose —————————————————-S— Wallflower
Grinder ———————————————S———- Lazy Dog
Goody —S—————————————————- Baddy
Believer –S—————————————————– Doubter

Now keep in mind I can’t remember exactly where Dr. Lyle put them, so these are my remembered interpretation.

Basically, at the start of SOTL Clarice was a rookie FBI agent who followed all the rules, did her job, and didn’t think much for herself or stand out from the crowd in any real way. But as the story changed, so did she. She learned, and grew and changed until at the end of the story she ignored procedure, and her own safety by going into the basement after Buffalo Bill (bad guy serial killer) to rescue the girl. At the end, her chart was drastically different than it was at the beginning. Everything changed. Clarice, and her belief system, were changed forever by the choices she’d made during the story.

Hannibal, however, changed very little throughout the story. The one thing that did change was essential though. That change was that at the beginning of the story Hannibal was simply the bad guy. Sure the way he killed was disgusting, and what he did (eating the victims) was gross, and we all knew he was evil, but that was pretty much the same at the end of the story. The change in him was brought on by Clarice. The change was that he grew to admire and care about her, and that added dimension not only made him human, it made him even more terrifying.

What we need to learn from these examples is that characters are people. People we create who grow and change as the story moves forward. And change is essential. Our characters come from our imagination, we give them names, jobs, desires and foibles. They have good traits and bad, they are not flat, or one dimensional – at least we don’t want them to be! We want them to be three-dimensional. In order to accomplish that they have to grow and change, the same way we do.

“Let them live. Let them breathe,” Dr.Lyle says when talking about character. “Then pressure them into changing.”

Why should we pressure them into change? Because people don’t change unless they have to. Pressure makes things move and people change.

Not to mention pressure creates tension, and tension makes for great storytelling. So, how do we create this pressure?

Dr. Lyle’s answer is “No win creates pressure.”

This is where we get into what the conflict zone is. Dr. Lyle says that when in the zone “characters have to chose A or B, and that choice will change them forever.” We as the authors build tension and pressure by showing what the character wins and what they lose with choice A. Then show the same with choice B. and by doing that we show that there is a win for the character in both options, and a loss for the character in both options as well. This is what makes the choice so difficult, and builds the pressure. That pressure can be stretched over months, or flash in seconds.
Again, Dr. Lyle gives us an example of it broken down into something simple so we can grasp the concept, and adapt it to our own stories.
His example is that of a woman with three children, at home, and the house gets on fire. She manages to get two of her three children out of the house before it becomes clear that she might not succeed if she goes in after the third.

This becomes the conflict zone with choice A or B.
A
Go in after the third child
WIN if she saves the child
LOSE if they both die and the 2 outside are orphaned.

B
Stay with the 2 outside.
WIN, she still has 2 children, and they have a mother.
LOSE: she loses the third child.

Both choices have a win and a lose side to it. So which does she chose?

“We are all trapped by who we are,” says Dr.Lyle. Meaning this is the type of pressure and conflict that changes your character. No matter what choice she makes, she will never be the same person she was. These are the types of conflicts we need to think about. We need to understand who our characters at the core, not just on the surface, in order to put them under pressure and create the changes in them that come with great characters and major storytelling. Once you’ve put your character into the conflict zone, and you’ve made it clear what the win/lose options of both choices are, you need to decide what choice you can you use best in your story.

There was also a bit of talk about how different it is when you’re writing a series. Series characters don’t need to, and really shouldn’t change so massively in each book. If you’re writing as series you can’t have them change so drastically in each story because then you risk losing your readers. Readers follow a series because they like the character. They want to see the character challenged physically and intellectually, they want to see his belief system challenged, but they love the characters the way they are, and don’t really want to see them change fundamentally in each story.

The final message of the workshop is that often we get too caught up in the writing. We need to take a step back, breath, and think. List all the options your character has, then make the right choice for the story-which is not always the right choice for the characters well being. Sometimes people do bad things for good reasons, and vice versa, and we need to think of our characters as people or there’s a chance they might become flat and one-dimensional.

This workshop was the second of the day for Dr. Lyle, and when it was over I was lucky enough to get a few minutes alone with him and my video camera for an on the spot interview. Take a peek.

Please check out Dr D.P. Lyles website at http:///www.dplylemd.com. Not only is he a wonderfully dynamic speaker, but he is generous with his knowledge and thoughts on his blog as well. His Writers Forensic Blog (http://writersforensicsblog.wordpress.com/ ) is a highly recommended resource.

Be sure to check out the list for the 2012 Novelists Inc conference. October at the Tradewinds Grand Resort in St.Pete Beach , Florida.

Since it’s conference week for Romance Writes of America, I figured I’d make an effort to give more of “writing craft” post than normal. Still, I’m a big believer in people doing what works for them, and in not over-analyzing my own ways, so don’t expect too much no matter what I titled the post.

One of the most common questions I get asked by new writers is how to write hot sex. I’ve written too many sex scenes to count. Sex in private, sex in public, menage, male/male, kink, masturbation… and in my mind the one thing they all have in common is emotion.

I can’t stress this enough. Emotion is what makes a sex scene hot. Now, the next really important thing I want everyone to pay attention to is that emotion does not always mean Love or romance. Plenty of times lust comes first, and sometimes before lust comes anger. Anger can feed lust. Sometimes there’s no anger, just the rowdy, raunchy joy of naked skin against naked skin or doing something taboo. It’s not always love and romance.

Next big thing is word use. I’m so not a fan of flowery purple prose, but I’m also not a fan of the overuse of explicit crude language. Don’t get me wrong I think the well placed use of words like c*nt or c*ck can be magical, but the key phrase there is “well placed”.

Variety of description is another big part of hot sex scenes, and that means having a plethora of words to chose from. Some words just scream sexy and erotic. Words you might not normally think of to use in a sex scene…like appetite, crave, demand, greed, hunger, longing, ravenous, relish, thirst, urge, voracious, yearning.

Alone, those words might not make you think sex, but simply because we’re talking about sex, the words feel different when you read them here and now. Get the idea?

Writing hot is about vivid description of the emotions and sensations the characters are experiencing so that the readers can feel the heat come off the pages.

Instead of saying “pleasure washed over her” describe what that pleasure feels like. “liquid heat flowed through her veins” or “calloused fingertips skimmed over my too sensitive skin and my muscles tightened in anticipation of a heavier touch.”

Craft is important. Technical writing skill is always a good thing, but if you want to write hot sex scenes, you have to remember the magic that comes from using words to elicit emotion.

Erotica is all about emotion-the emotions the characters experience within the story, and the emotion the readers experience when reading it.

I’m going to use yesterdays post from Carrie as a springboard for my own, today.

I want to talk about how I write. The other night a friend and I were were talking about character development, and story ideas, and which comes first…among other things. My friend is a newbie in the pursuit of publication, and I’ve been trying to help her only to discover that I completely suck at explaining craft. Okay, so I sort of knew that. I know what I do to write, but I also know what I do isn’t going to work for everyone.

My belief is that even if you start with a story idea, the character is what drives the action of the story. Their wants, their needs, and their personality are not only what makes the reader care, it’s what gives us the course of the story. And this is why character development is so crucial. This is why you have to know your characters better than they know themselves.

We talked for quite a while and I tried to explain how it all worked in my mind, but to be honest, I think the more I tried to explain the more confusing I sounded. Then when I read Carrie’s post yesterday, I saw a sentence that summed it all up for me.

“This is what got me Kitty’s House of Horrors and Kitty Goes to War — ideas I really wanted to deal with, that are perfect fits for Kitty, and they work because the plots grow out of Kitty’s reactions to the ideas. “

Now doesn’t that make sense? Simply put, the plot (or events of a story) grow out of the characters reaction to things.

That’s a nice simple way to explain not only WHY the author needs to know the characters inside out, but how to plot the story after the inital idea. If you know the character the way you should, and you have the initial idea for the story line, then write about how the character reacts to the idea, and that’s your story.

Make sense to anyone else but me?

I was trying to think of a blog topic for today, and I couldn’t settle on any one. Settling seems to be a problem for me lately. So I’m going with it. I figure I’ll just share some of my rambling thoughts with you, since this is part of my life as a writer….pretty much everything is part of my life as a writer right now.

As far as writing and career planning I had a bit of an epiphany the other day. Planning has never been one of my strong suits, and it hit me that when it comes to story telling, the whole lack of planning skills is my strong suit. One of the things I hate most as a reader is a cliched story. I hate it when I’m watching a movie and I can predict everything that’s going to happen before it happens. So, when it comes to writing stories my lack of planning can help. Sure it can also cause me to paint myself into a corner every now and then, but hey, thats can make a story exciting, right?

I made the mistake of starting to watch the TV series JUSTIFIED. I say it’s a mistake because I am now addicted. I love the family angle, the outlaw angle, and think Walten Goggins is fabulous as bad/good/bad guy, just as he was in The Shield.

I finally found a buyer for my 4 years old iMac. It’s a great computer, which is why I wouldn’t sell it cheap, but I’ve been doing more and more photography and digital art lately and the program I use (aperture 3) eats up all the ram, so everything slows, and it gets annoying. So I wanted a new, bigger faster one., and now I get to have one! 

I put up a poll on my blog over the weekend, to see what readers would like the most from me. And I have to say, I’m surprised at the results so far.

Some other writer friends and I have been chatting about jealousy lately. How we all feel it sometimes, and what to do about it, How to turn it into something productive instead of destructive. Basically we boiled it down to this. You can let it eat you, or you can acknowledge, and use it to work harder, and get better.

I’m going to leave this little ramble with a favorite quote of mine. One that applies to writing, and life.

“The first step is to find out what you love — and don’t be practical about it. The second step is to start doing what you love immediately, in any small way possible. I’ve seen what happens to people when they get to do what they love. They light up. They glow. They have a kind of energy that’s wonderful.”-Barbara Sher

It’s crucial to the success of an authors career to understand that writing a great story is work. Some ideas will flow and grow naturally, and some will take every ounce of heart you’ve got, along with some blood, sweat and tears. That does not mean you don’t try them out…it just means that you need to learn when to call it quits.

Not every idea you have is going to be an easy one, and it’s imperative you realize this. Sometimes, an idea seems perfect and magical until you actually start working it out. Then holes pop up and characters become unbelievable, or worse yet, turn to cardboard.

Knowing when to push through and make a story work, and when to walk away and leave it for another time is a big thing.

Some author friends tell me they’ve never run into an idea that they haven’t been able to make work, but a couple of  others have let me know that I’m not alone because I, for one, don’t always get it right. There are times when pushing and pushing has worked, and times when it hasn’t, and I’ve sat down and tried to work only to stare blankly for a couple of hours before forcing myself to actually get words on the page, then hate those words and trash those pages forever.

I wish I could tell you how to know the difference, but I’m still working on that myself. What I can tell you is that it’s my belief that as long as you honestly put everything into each and every idea you try to make work, you won’t regret it when you realize that one of them isn’t working. It’s important not to give up or walk away too early, because that can become a bad habit.  So instead of giving advice this week, I’m asking for advice. Tell me in the comments if you’ve ever walked away from an idea, and if you have, how did you know it was time?