Personal Stakes

whist markersGambling was a part of life in the Regency Era. Card games abounded: faro, whist, hazard. Fortunes were won and lost on a nightly basis in the clubs, gaming hells, and card rooms of London. But I don’t want to talk about those kinds of stakes today.

Moving forward again in Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass to chapter 7: Defining Personal Stakes.

This is digging in even deeper on the WHYs instead of just the WHATs that your protagonists are doing. Why does it matter in some profound and personal way? How does the plot shape, mold, twist, and otherwise reveal your protagonist and what do they stand to gain if they succeed in their goals or lose if they fail or just walk away?

In many ways, this is another digging down deep exercise. The question here isn’t WHY so much as “What would make their goal, need, desire, conflict, yearning matter even more?” Also, we’re supposed to be looking for inner motives more than outer motives here.

Maass asks us to exhaust our imaginations not once, not twice, but three times in coming up with ways to increase these personal stakes. He notes that when he teaches this in a workshop setting, the participants say the resulting lists look like plot complications. You want the character to be driven forward using as many of the possibilities you come up with. The more rocks you throw at your protagonist while (s)he’s up in that tree, the more interesting their journey should be.

I suspect this exercise is going to take some thinking and percolation since for the book I’m working on this area also seems to be rather weak or at least one sided. My heroine has some personal stakes she’s up against, but the hero remains a little lump of latent clay. And looking at some of the books I’ve really enjoyed lately, this is a make or break part of a book for me.

Inner Conflicts

ripplesI’m sure everyone is going to be sick of the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass by the time I’m done, but I’m finding it useful to think about these topics from outside the point of view of thinking only about my characters and I hope it provides someone else some insight along the way. So, thanks for putting up with it.

Looking back through some of my previous posts here, I think this is one of the areas where I need work. The idea seems simple enough: find a goal for the character and find something diametrically opposed or at least mutually exclusive to it and make the character want to strive for both equally. For romance novels, this seems to work best when both the hero and the heroine’s goals are mutually exclusive as well. Finding this sweet spot is proving elusive for me.

I went back and reread parts of On Writing Romance: How to Craft a Novel That Sells by Leigh Michaels mostly just to remind myself about how the hero and heroine need to be forced together into the same problem and writing this post led me back to the post I wrote reading this book the first time: Ker-Snap!

Now, it’s annoying to realize that I wrote that post last March and that I still haven’t managed to pound these ideas into my head, let alone make it work in my manuscripts.

So what’s this have to do with “inner conflicts” and my current manuscript? Both my characters have inner conflicts. Check. Do they have a problem that they’re trying to solve that threatens to keep them apart? Not particularly. The problem is the hero currently is just along for the ride. He’s very reactive, not proactively seeking anything at all.

So… back to digging deeper and figuring out not only what makes this guy tick, but also how what he wants creates conflict between him and the heroine that needs to be overcome. It’s not simply the fact that they like to inhabit very different social roles, but what exactly that is, I need to work out.

Countdown: 1!

One day until the blessed silence returns.
One day until blessed silence returns.
Tomorrow’s the big day. DD’s first day of middle school and DS’s first day as a BMOC — yah, he’s a fifth grader. Today’s kinda crazy rushing around trying to get everything finished and together for tomorrow. I really didn’t like the alarm going off at 6am in preparation for this momentous occasion. We’re also expecting a phone call from the boy’s teacher to find out who’s class he’ll be in this year.

The past week has thrown my writing schedule for a loop, but tomorrow should see a good 5 hours of silence. It’ll probably be TOO quiet. I won’t know what to do with myself again. I’ve been rethinking things since showing the first several pages to the DH the other night. Don’tcha hate it when they’re right? It’s even worse when it’s something you knew all along too. This means I have a week and a half to write this story and get it to Bria to trade. Yikes! I mean, I’ll make it!

In the meantime, I’m also contemplating more time for learning and studying for myself. No, I still haven’t caved to sign up for that Conversational Spanish class. But with the copious amounts of free time in my future, I will be adding more study time back into my weekly goals. I just need to figure out some practical methods instead of just cramming in more theory.

I’ve also been listening to random lectures from the 2007 RWA Nationals disc that Jodi sent me from this years. Thanks again, Jodi! It’s interesting to hear some of the people I’ve read speak and wonder how they can sound so good on the page, but so stilted and boring at the podium.

The one that caught my attention the most so far was Todd A. Stone’s Novelist’s Boot Camp. The idea of “Who is the Opposition?” really drove home a problem I keep running up against. Maybe I’m just too nice to my characters. I mean really, I made them to go together like a matched salt-n-pepper set, so umm… what do you mean I have to keep them from getting together, but not let them get too far apart? *sigh* I know it can be done, it’s just figuring out the puzzle of it and applying the pressure and shaping the conflict in meaningful ways.

Back to the drawing board…

Conflict Again

Compromise isn't easy!
Compromise isn’t easy!

It’s time to talk and think about conflict again. I just noticed the last time I touched on this topic was March. I should have paid more attention to it then and maybe I wouldn’t be such a tight corner now.

The craft books keep hammering on how you need to have conflict to make your characters work for their goals. Nothing can come too easily for them or it’s just not believable. That’s exactly where I’m stuck. I’m in the last third of FQD and everything’s just falling into place and it’s just not interesting. If I’m not interested, there’s no way anyone else is going to be. I was telling Andi, I’ve got all these loose ends to tie up and she asked if it was really necessary. Well, yeah, if it’s a romance, they have to get together. That’s a pretty big loose end to be flopping in the breeze. There’s lots of smaller things too, like why the heroine was off at this house party in the first place. What if she gets home and her father could care less if she brought what she thought was this big prize for him back home with her? Arrrgh.

Methinks something seriously went awry in the planning of this one. I looked back at my early posts and they focus on the hero. Somehow my working outline only brings through the heroine’s story. What’s REALLY annoying is that this is the same thing that happened with Revealed. I started out with the hero in mind and whoosh, everything ended up flipped upside down on the heroine’s side.

I suspect this happens because in both cases I had an idea of the hero in my head and absolutely none of the heroines when I started working on these stories. Thinking I was in good shape with the heroes, I neglected them to concentrate on what made the heroines interesting both to me and the heroes. Yeah, good, but that’s only HALF the equation. In both cases, there’s very little conflict between the main characters. They’re both on the same side. There’s very little tension either and there’s definitely nothing keeping them apart. There’s nothing grand and passionate or filled with sacrifice or even really a question in anyone’s mind as to why these characters have to work through anything in the end.

Andi’s challenge brought up some interesting ideas for the main character in FQD, but I’m going to have to go back and restructure everything again. I guess it’s a good thing that I’m not satisfied with these two as they are and I want to go back and fix them instead of just abandoning them as would have happened by now in the past.

So what I need to do is come up with some good ways to put my heroes and heroines on a chair like the one pictured. Make it so no one is satisfied and on solid ground until the very end. I think I’m going to have to revisit Leigh Michael’s book again. I’m also going to have to take my time building those conflicts and tensions into the story and not just hope a basic situation is enough. The more facets they have that exist in contrast, the more interesting it will be for me (and the reader) to untangle the knot while still getting them to their Happily Ever After.

Thanks for putting up with me thinking out loud again. 🙂

Frustrated

Ok, so I had this great aha! moment and now trying to work with it, I keep running into a brick wall.

I spent a good chunk of time today taking the writing exercises at end of Chapter Five on Conflict in Leigh Michael’s book On Writing Romance. I got a bit closer to figuring out how the conflict might work in Revealed. I think the one with the Duke and Duchess from that story actually works best and I was even able to do a little brainstorming on how to make the Food Critic one work better. However, the one that’s frustrating me is this Flower Queen’s Daughter story.

On one hand, it feels like I’m trying to start the story WAY too early for a romance. On the other hand, it’s just way too hero-centric for a romance. It’s possible I picked a horrible story to try to do this with, but I’m stubborn (if you haven’t figured that out by now). I will make this work.

Brainstorming conflicts that met the criteria Michaels sets forth for workable conflict (related short-term and long-term problems combined with a force that keeps them from walking away in frustration), I came up with the idea that he feels obligated to rescue her or afraid the gypsy will curse him, but perhaps the heroine wasn’t entirely upset by “being kidnapped” in the first place? Maybe she thinks she’s just been invited to stay at their country house for a while? The long-term problems are even fuzzier. Why would these two make the worst match possible on first impression?

It makes so much more sense when I’m looking at this from the outside.

Ker-Snap!


Amazing book! Romance Writing How To written by Leigh Michaels

I mentioned in a comment of my previous post on trying to figure out how to structure a new romance story that I’d just purchased two craft books and experienced one of those Aha! moments while reading the first one: On Writing Romance: How to Craft a Novel That Sells by Leigh Michaels.

I shall now go bang my head against my desk.

Ok. Still here? I can’t believe I’ve been sitting here since August and I haven’t read this book yet. To say, “It’s what I’ve been looking for,” is an understatement. Either that, or the time was finally right for me to find it. It’s not a magic formula book by any means, but Chapter Three (Essential Elements) floored me. It wasn’t the following sentence:

A romance novel is the story of a man and a woman who, while they’re solving a problem that threatens to keep them apart, discover that the love they feel for each other is the sort that comes along only once in a lifetime; this discover leads to a permanent commitment and a happy ending.

Leigh Michaels, On Writing Romance, p. 39

No, that was familiar enough and I’ve read it enough times in the last eight months or so. No, what floored me was the diagram on the next page, complete with its cute little heart. Lemme see if I can do it any kind of justice.

HERO <cute little heart> HEROINE
Pulled together by a PROBLEM, which is the story’s conflict.
ONCE-IN-A-
LIFETIME-LOVE
develops, but will the conflict permit it to blossom?
ACTION (the plot) develops and continues.
The conflict is resolved realistically. The HAPPY ENDING leaves the reader satisfied.

Leigh Michaels, On Writing Romance, p. 40

You’ll have to imagine some lines on your own. One line connects Hero and Heroine to the heart, from there a single line drops to the problem box, then it splits to the Love story and the Action plot to converge again at the Happy Ending. I don’t feel like I’ve done it any justice at all. However, the important thing is that I felt a shift in my thinking. Then as I read through Chapter Five, which is all about the Conflict in a romance novel, I felt things shift again. Getting them up in trees and throwing rocks at them apparently isn’t enough.

Simply giving your characters a problem doesn’t automatically create conflict. Only when the problem involves both of them and creates tension between them do you have conflict.

Leigh Michaels, On Writing Romance, p. 62

The inside of my head must have looked like the bank of paparazzi along the red carpet when a car door opens.

You have to get them up in the SAME tree and it can’t be just any old rocks, they have to be tailor made for them and their internal issues.

No wonder the Snowbound story didn’t really work. It’s also why my masquerade story isn’t quite clicking yet. Barrington cares, but he’s not really affected by her problems. I could go on, but the energy would be better spent fixing the problems.

She goes on to explain about Short Term (External) and Long Term (Internal) Problems that the hero and heroine must face. Pretty standard fare there and made sense as she described how they fit together and gave some strategies for creating them.

Then, I turned the page again and WHAM!

Leigh Michaels deserves a spot on the Jedi Council for her explanation of The Force and how you have to use it in conjunction with the Short Term and Long Term Problems, otherwise your Hero and Heroine, smart and reasonable as you’ve constructed them, will simply walk away. What keeps them together? They have to need each other so badly they don’t want to walk away, one has a good reason for forcing the other into this predicament, or there are outside influences keeping them in close proximity.

I’ve read most of the rest of the book (there’s some awesome stuff in Section Three: Writing Your Book) but I think I need to go reread the first eighty pages again to make sure it’s imprinted on my brain. There are summary questions at the end of each section that are helpful in illustrating the point. It’s not very workbook-like, but if that’s your thing, you can make it so. Or not. Her use of published examples and off-the-cuff throw-away ideas were extremely helpful to me.

So, it’s back to the drawing board for me, but if you’re finding that what you’re writing isn’t living up to what you’re reading, this book may help provide insight on what’s missing and it doesn’t come down on either side of the whole pantser/plotter debate.

Cheese with my whine?

So, I began this writer’s journey in earnest a little over seven months ago. I’m not counting any previous false starts (they never lasted long before) or tangential experiences (we’re talking stringing sentences together, but more interactive and emergent stuff or related non-fiction). What I mean is a serious focus on craft and honest attempts to tell a story from beginning through the middle to the end and come up with something that appeals to others.

DH lends help and support, when I ask. The Divas are simply amazing. Their tolerance for dumb queries and unconditional backing is unbelievable. Jodi manages to ask all the right questions or drop little bombshells of wisdom to make me think about what I’m doing. MamaDivine certainly learned from her! Bria and CC are enthusiastic cheerleaders.

So, what’s my problem?

Why am I still spinning my wheels and going in circles? Is it a lack of “pre-writing” and not knowing my characters enough to deal with their reactions to situations? I suspect the issue remains in my actual plots and structure. The hardest thing for me to do is step back and puzzle out the big picture for my own writing. Gathering the characters I want to throw together and stockpiling rocks to chuck at them seems easier. Often, I can visualize the closing scene/image.

Now, I’m probably whining, but I’m frustrated. I may have made too few attempts to speak with any authority, but I find everything falls apart when I try to go from point A to B and then head for C. My conflicts and dilemmas never seem to be sufficient or the details refuse to come together so things float around in limbo.

Several different approaches caught my eye or were suggested: Snowflake method, Emotional Structure, Hero’s Journey, and even breaking individual scenes down into notes for Meeting, Purpose, Encounter, Final Action, and Sequel/Aftermath. Each one taught me something about this process, but I’m still not satisfied with the results.

Analytical and highly focused on theory are now attached to my name. I think people are using nicer words than “anal” and “perfectionist”. Complements (and thanks to those who have made them!) must compete with the voices in my head, which are louder and more critical. I realized this would be a problem when I started, but it’s just another thing I wanted to learn about and overcome.

The Romance Divas are doing a free read promotion for Valentine’s Day. I’ve tried not to think about it much, but I may try to come up with something in the next two weeks. That’s scary! What am I thinking? Maybe, I should try a new spin on a familiar story so the plot and framework are a given. I don’t know.

We’ll see.

——

Wow, I think I just realized what the problem is. I’ve been editing. Too much critical thinking and not enough brainstorming and/or just writing. I’ve been skimping on my journal entries lately too. Not a good thing. Need to keep the words flowing, despite my cranky, persnickety, internal editor.

UPDATE: MJ’s written an awesome post on the subject of internal editors. Go read it!

The Plot Thickens…?

I’m stuffing the rewrite of Revealed back into a “drawer” again. I want to wait until a couple people have read it and commented more thoroughly on it before tearing it apart again and just sitting here second-guessing myself. I still don’t have a lot of ideas on how I’m going to fix the hero’s arc, but instead of beating my head against that wall, I decided to do something proactive.

I’m going back to the previous WIP where the pesky fellow was only a secondary character. I’ve been taking my spreadsheet that I based on the diagrams in Dunne’s Emotional Structure and Vogler’s Writer’s Journey. I’ve added a lot of notes to it from various other sources as well, and I hope I have something I can work with to guide my thinking into a workable and interesting story.

The main problem is that I have 25k words written in this WIP already. Trying to determine if the already written scenes need to stay or just move is giving me a headache. I suspect I’m also having similar issues with the GMC of the characters not being defined well enough to propel the plot along in a meaningful fashion.

I’ve also been chasing down a lot of rabbit trails lately. I’ve found a lot of interest in the world of screenwriting. Setups and payoffs, ideas about laying out things to fix in the characters life to make the story pay off, and generally more information to take up space in my brain. I hope they’re worth it as I have been trying to think about how these little tidbits relate to the stories I’m trying to tell.

This new/old WIP has an external conflict that the H/h should be working to resolve, but it’s not gelling very well with the emotional story arcs that they also need to follow. His lack of responsibility and her overdeveloped sense of protecting her brother are nice opposites. He’s being forced to be respectable and she only sees the worst in his little vices (which compared to the examples that her father and brother have provided her of wastrels are rather pathetic).

So far, I think I have the opening worked out for both the hero and the heroine and the middle worked out for the hero. Her middle is a bit more muddled in my head. And about all I know of the ending for either of them is that the external threat is defeated and they have their Happily Ever After.

I also need to write up reviews for two books I managed to finish recently. I’ll try to get those done sometime here in the near future.

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.

Not Your Ordinary Kitchen Remodel

View of Professional KitchenI finally made some forward progress on the Food Critic and the Chef story last night. As you an see, I don’t have a working title for it yet. Nothing has jumped out and grabbed me.

I’m probably going to completely overhaul what I have written so far. I keep reading and learning new and interesting little tidbits about what it’s like to be either a professional food critic/reviewer (as opposed to an opinionated food blogger) or a restaurateur when dealing with either one.

Did you know that for about $1,000 you can take a 6-week course on the craft of food writing? The French Culinary Institute in NYC even has a Dean of Food Journalism who teaches their course. I also learned that while it sounds glamorous to eat out nightly, the reality is that critics and reviewers aren’t always sitting down to the best meals. Apparently, they have to put up with some horrendous food and service unless they’re recognized and even then it’s not a sure thing.

Which is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish lately. Apparently, in the age of Google, anonymity isn’t as easy as it used to be. While some of the food bloggers cum journalists are embracing this, many of the old school types cringe at the thought of their identities being outed and cling to their tried and true ethical standards of not accepting free meals in trade for more favorable reviews. Apparently, it’s quite a jungle out there with many differing opinions on the whole debate. Just Google “food critic blog” for a sampling.

So… what does all this mean for my hero and heroine? It definitely sounds like there’s some more conflicting interests to play up and I probably need to make sure that the heroine has a stronger background in the culinary arts and an explanation for why she’s not using those skills in her day job and why her fridge sits empty. Are she and her rival critic going to come down on the same side of the fence on the debate?