Holding Out For A Hero

I find myself rather annoyed with Hugh Daniel Leighton, Viscount Barrington.

Last fall, he whispered sweet seductions in my ear like the practiced rake he was, urging me to tell his story. So I abandoned the ms where he’d been a secondary character and found him a nice girl with a few quirks of her own.

Was the wretch grateful in the least? No! Every time he was on stage, he wanted off again. He hadn’t struck me as the shy nor reluctant type. Maybe this was he way of pulling a joke on me. He’s rather fond of getting attention that way, always trying to make someone laugh.

Everything I thought I knew about him, as a secondary character, also seemed to disappear during the month of November. His feisty, dragon of a grandmother, POOF! Billiard games with his best friend and wagering on them with reciting bad poetry as the forfeit, POOF! The sneaky debutantes who were trying to lure him into the parson’s mousetrap, POOF! About all that remained were his name and the fact that he was a charmer, who liked to play jokes (a recent development).

Ok. A bit more than that remained, but re-reading the ms revealed huge, gaping holes where his side of the story should be. Like the original 2400 word draft, there are clues and vague hints at goals and motivation, but nothing concrete or developed. His character arc seems to be missing. There was too much focus centered on the heroine and her story. DH’s biggest complaint is still that Barrington hasn’t earned anything along the way, it just happens to him.

So I complained about this troublesome hero previously and Jodi suggested reading Creating Unforgettable Characters by Linda Seger. The book had a lot of common sense advice. It’s not a workbook/worksheet type of book. I’ve looked at those types of character sheets before and gone, ‘Uh, yeah, but most of this is too modern pop-pysch for someone who lived 200 years ago!” What I ought to do is just start writing in his POV and see what happens. I’ve done some work on his GMC. Goal and Motivation, check. Conflict, hazy at best.

Last night I came across some old notes for the story where he’d been the secondary and I had one of those ‘Aha!’ moments. I’d worked out three separate story arcs with creating conflict through the gaps in each characters expectations. I’d ignored that little exercise for this one. No clue why, probably too excited about exploring Dunne’s structure at the time. So that’s also on my to do list.

Seger’s approach includes defining the character through consistencies and paradoxes. Ok, skipped that big-time for him. There are hints, but I need to expand on them and nurture them into something meaningful.

I need to go back and look at their relationship again as well. In those old notes I found the following quote: Dilemmas: mutually exclusive goods or lesser of two evils. Whoa! *head smack* How is it I can think I’ve learned something and then space it so completely, so soon? There’s very little conflict on his side of the relationship right now. He’s pretty clueless about the whole thing and seems to just go along for the ride for no real reason. He cares, but he’s been rather bashful about admitting why.

Learning more about the editing process beyond the word/sentence level helped none of these issues only compounded them. So, how about all those scenes? Didn’t I spend a month last fall dissecting scenes? Didn’t I think about the purpose of each scene, what the characters in the scenes might want to accomplish and how they’d go about creating that conflict necessary to keep the interest and tension going? Didn’t I have a nice little format for thinking about this already worked out? Uhh… no. Apparently, the panic of 1,667 words a day with very little preparation sent all thoughts of that approach right out the window.

Keeping forward momentum in multiple story arcs is exponentially harder than just one.

Sometimes I think I’m cramming too much into my brain. Getting everything to gel together into a coherent and working mindset is proving difficult. I’ve got a lot of habits to break too. He verbed/She verbed is still my favorite sentence construction. One interesting comment that DH was regarding how often my word choice wasn’t quite the most effective one to show what I wanted.

Back to the story board…

Oh, and blame Dana Belfry for the length of this post because she called me a blog slacker. Sometimes stuff has to percolate in the grey matter for a while.

6 thoughts on “Holding Out For A Hero

  1. You are a blog slacker! However, given the current state of of your stubborn viscount I think that might be forgiven. Perhaps you should threaten to dress him in pink and change his name to “bo peep”?

  2. The good news is that DD’s temp is below 100 and DS’s hasn’t gone above it. Just have to keep them well enough to get through a dreaded field trip tomorrow while DH’s out of town.

    Hmmm. If it meant the heroine would smile at him, he might just go for that costume for the ball. I’m thinking of interviewing him for a TT tomorrow since I’ve been avoiding those like the plague lately and to see what he has to say for himself. Hmmm.. off to find some leading questions…

  3. sometimes you need that time to percolate. Instant coffee doesn’t taste the same.

    Yeah, writing is hard. Bad writing is easy as all hell. That’s why there is so little “good” writing. It’s like the brain goes somewhere when you sit down. That’s why rewrites are so important. Once in a blue moon, the words will come out right, but blue moons only happen once every two months, so creating a skeleton to flesh out, and yes–change the words for greater impact–happens all the time.

    Linda Seger is a pyschologist, lol. She approaches characters like Pimsleur approaches learning a foreign language. Tools create knowledge and using a tool creates “roundness”, you know–that feeling you get when you think someone can literally walk off the page.

    Believe me–I know, good writing, good mechanics and logic create a stellar impression. Probably because so little of it is out there.

    🙂

  4. Jodi, I wasn’t complaining about Seger’s approach at all. I found the section on consistencies and paradoxes as well as the psychology of the character interesting.

    It’s those character questionnaire sheets with questions like:

    Favorite Movie/TV Show, Favorite Sport, Favorite Restaurant/Ethnic Food, Salary, etc….

    Now, put in the correct context, they can be useful, but not the details I’m interested in. But they also strike me as a lot of busy work, which I detest.

    KIDS UPDATE: DD went to field trip with DH whose trip was completely cancelled! Yay! DS is home again. grrr.

  5. lol, I didn’t think you were. You’re amazingly analytical. I thought a new approach would work better for you than the dreaded interview sheets. And yes, they’re busy work. It’s like the people who write to be seen, 🙂 Busy being busy.

    I think I was just writing to work stuff out in my head, sometimes you have to talk about it to get it straight, and unfortunately blogger and wordpress doesn’t have an “edit after commenting” feature.

  6. Jodi, I think I just misread your “LOL” after that sentence. I agree — I hate the fact that you can’t edit your own comments. Very irritating.

    I’m gonna have to reread Seger’s book. I’m very analytical yes, but usually through some practical application. I like knowing the whys and all, but sometimes seeing the hows isn’t so easy. Dunne’s book was better for me in that respect. Not a magic pill, but something I could take and reshape to my own purpose.

    Reading workshops is kind of similar. Usually, I find lots of great info, a lot of it very common sense-ical. However, they often leaving me sitting there going, yeah… but HOW do you set that up so the WHY works? I know: practice. I need to be a patient little grasshopper.

    I know, I said I hated busy work and then went and did it for today’s post. Go figure. The questions were more relevant to the types of questions I needed to answer about him. Or that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

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