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Don’t turn your characters into contortionists


Photo by Ron Sombilon Media, Art and Photography

Don’t turn your characters into contortionists! That’s my big writing lesson this week.

I had what I thought was a good idea. I had two interesting and complex characters, with deep emotional conflict. I had a setting I like, London at Christmas.

What I didn’t have was a story that worked.

My mission is to write a 10 to 15 K romantic novella, based on the song Santa Baby, ready to submit by July 10. It took doing this week’s course homework for the writing course I’m enrolled in to figure out what wasn’t working. A key part of the homework is to write a sentence summarising the story in 30 words or less.

I couldn’t do it! The characters sounded hopelessly unsympathetic for a light Christmas novella, even to me who created them. I needed to explain too much. There was too much in the plot that was dark and heavy (death of a key secondary character). Sheesh, I don’t know that the secondary characters should even have names in a 10K novella, let alone a crucial role to play in the character arc for the hero or heroine!

 The other thing that gave me a big clue was that I really couldn’t fill in the main pre-writing tools I use for these characters as I had them. If I can’t do that, I know there’s something wrong!

I’d spent all week doing story development. Started writing the story, but I knew I just didn’t have it right after one chapter. The characters didn’t fit the story, or the story didn’t fit the characters. I’d had to make the characters do things that were too out of character. I’d turned them into contortionists.  No way was this a story that met the brief. I still think I have the seeds of a good story in there, but not for this Call for Submissions.

In the past, this is where I would have given up on having anything to sub for this Call for Submissions, and grabbed at the next new bright shiny story idea.

This time, I kept playing with it. I’ve promised myself to see through a story once I start it, as I’m a serial non-finisher. Ideas for how to change things kept coming. But I had way too much going on for a short novella. The characters had to change too much to get from where they began to a resolution in fifteen thousand words. The plot was so convoluted I needed contortionists as hero and heroine.

I wrote in the last entry how I realised I had the heroine all wrong. I’d made her relate to the words of the song way too literally. Once I had that, and slept on it, the rest fell into place like dominoes. The hero. The conflict. The resolution.  

It felt almost miraculous how I woke up yesterday knowing just what the story needed. A classic opposites attract romance. Pared right down to the bare minimum, the essence of who the characters are. Yesterday, I did the Save the Cat beatsheet, and the Identity to Essence chart. It worked!

Today, I did an outline, and just finished a very rough draft of chapter one on the Alphasmart so I wouldn’t stop to edit as I went. I feel happy with what I have. It seems to me this is the best story I’ve done, in terms of having the conflict and structure in place, but I’ve thought that before! I’m too close to it to see what I’ve missed or what I have put in that really doesn’t work.

The chapter is too long, at 1800 words, but that’s good because I’ll have lots to play with when the time comes to edit. I’m going to resist the temptation to start tidying it up now. It can stay as it is, gross typos and all, until I have a complete first draft. It should come in at around 18,000, then I’ll need to edit it down to under 15. It I have something that looks a total mess that I HAVE to cut, I won’t be so in love with my own words I miss what need to come out.

That’s the theory anyway!

How much pre-writing planning do you do? Is it different for each story? Any tools you use and recommend?


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A starting point- with my writing room and with the story

Planning is hard work!

It’s been a busy weekend. I’ve planned the work I need to do to transform a small garden shed into a writing room, and I’ve done more planning for my new story, a Christmas themed romantic novella.

I almost have my full shopping list of what I need to buy to fix the shed, I just need to do the sums to work out how much of the timber I need to buy. Insulation, tongue and groove spruce cladding boards to paint a light sunny cream, trim for the edges, perpex to reglaze and double glaze the windows. A big sheet of white coated mdf or similar for the desk, stretching wall to wall, then white bookshelves down either side right up to the door. Touches of bright lime green  and turquoise in the accessories. Cork tiles to use as a pinboard between the desk and a high bookshelf.

I can see how it will look finished. I just hope my skills are up to the job of transforming it!

I’ve decided to leave starting work on this until July. Two reasons- I won’t start the part-time job until mid-July, and I started the new novella with a deadline of July 10. Meeting the deadline will be tough enough without taking more time off from it to work on the shed.

And I’ve just realised tonight while doing the homework for the writing course I’m doing, Holly Lisle’s How to Think Sideways, what it is that’s been niggling me about the story over the past two days. I’m doing lesson 4, Good to Great. I knew I had a good idea, yet I couldn’t get it to work in a way that felt right to me.

In the past week, since I read the Entangled Call for Submissions, I’ve written nearly 6000 words of notes. I’ve almost completely filled in a Beat Sheet (word counts tweaked for a short novella length) and GMC charts for each character (fabulous ones, I’ll post them here as soon as I get time).  I wrote the first 1500 words of the story. But I knew I didn’t have it quite right. My instinct was telling me the story was somehow off, like a wobbly unbalanced wheel, but I couldn’t figure out why or where.

I thought the problem was that I didn’t have a good enough handle on the ending. It was too dependent on outside factors, and not driven enough by decisions the characters make, the emotional growth that’s needed so they can have their happy ever after. I asked before I went to bed for the answer to be in my mind when I woke up. I slept badly, my mind was too active on a million and one things that had nothing to do with the story. I woke up and started morning pages and didn’t have a clue about what the story needed. My mind seemed a total blank.

I asked again anyway. And out it came. the perfect ending to the story. Even five or six hundred words of actual story. Fast and effortless and exactly what the story needed. Amazing. I love it when that happens.

But something still nagged at me, felt off. Not the ending, something else.

Tonight I figured it out. I completely misunderstood my heroine and her motivation and what Christmas meant to her and what that song meant to her (the brief is to write a short romantic novella based on the song Santa Baby). I didn’t have the hero right, either. I have to scrap my first idea of who she is and who he is, and almost do a 180 on it, but it’s right. It makes sense of the story. It fits the ending and the middle I see.

So strange how that happens, but I know it’s right. The story developed way past my initial very literal conception of her character and how she related to the song, but I clung on to it anyway and tried to shoehorn it into the story it didn’t fit any more. 

Now all the pieces click together, with that lovely satisfying clunk, I can really start to write. I have the feeling this story could be less of a challenge than turning the interior below into a cosy all year round writing space!


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Why is this hero perfect for this heroine?


Photo by h.koppdelaney

I know I should be writing. I have been, promise!

It’s 100% pure dreck, but at least I finally got my hero and heroine on the page together. I think I’m going to have some cutting to do so that happens sooner. Always the same issue- too much scene setting and internal monologue before I cut to the real stuff.

Anyway, I’m doing a bit of blog surfing in a ten minute break. And I’m thinking about my character and what her emotional growth will be through the story.

I tend to have an issue here. I want my characters to be likeable, so I make them too nice to start with. I don’t give them enough room to grow.

Now, sometimes being overly nice and agreeable is a character flaw in itself and that character’s arc might be to start developing some no-power and stop letting everyone walk all over them. Or it could be that I suck at writing characters who actually have realistic emotions and characters!

I realised early on than in first draft my hero forgives the heroine far too soon. He’s not angry enough. He can quite rightfully be pissed off with the way she’s behaved. That will be tricky for me to handle, but I can see it’s needed.

What I hadn’t realised was that she also forgives him far too soon.

She starts off angry and upset and determined not to get close and them wham halfway through the story it’s like one slow dance later and she’s melting in his arms, all is forgiven? Come on! Time for me to get real here. There needs to be a bit of a growth process here. The one-step-forward-two-steps-back dance of can-I-trust-him-or-can’t-I, has he really changed?

I realised something big last night. She’s not just angry with him over what he did to her when they dated in their teens. She’s taken that hurt and attached a whole lot of other stuff to it, stuff other people did to her that she’s kidded herself she’s totally okay with. In her mine, he’s the only person who’s hurt her, the only person who’s done something so bad it’s unforgivable. Because he’s wearing her anger over EVERYTHING that’s gone wrong in her life. It makes no sense why she’s as angry with him as she is, why she didn’t just demand he explained it then and there, back at age seventeen when it happened. It also makes perfect sense looked at another way.

Not only is her sudden jump from anger to forgiveness in the first draft not the least bit believable, she’s also being too nice. She needs to be a lot more angry. A lot more hurt and resentful. A lot less likely to forgive. It’s going to take far more than one slow dance to get over this one!

Lightbulb moment- characters don’t have to be ”nice”. Their feelings don’t have to be the least bit rational. They just have to be understandable.

I read a good little free e-book on Crafting Unforgettable Characters last night, by K M Weiland. She said a lot that resonated with me.

When we write characters who are fighting both their circumstances and their own natures, we create characters who are instantly real.

 That’s external and internal conflict explained in a single sentence!

Then today during my ten minute break that seems to have stretched just the teensiest bit, I read a post on Natalie Hartford’s blog, quoting a line from This Means War.

Don’t choose the best guy, choose the guy that brings out the best in you!

That’s exactly why Morgan is the only man for Tash. He may be the man she sees as her worst enemy, the man she loves to hate. But he’s also the only man who will see past her prickly defences and help her change, help her heal her past, help her find the courage to love. He’s the only man who sees the truth of who she is.

And now, that brings me back to what I already knew and had forgotten, Michael Hauge’s advice on writing romance. The reason the characters should be together is because only with each other can they be all they can be. Only with this man, this woman, will they be the best self possible. He talks about the other character being the only one who can see through the self-protective mask the hero or heroine wears, to see the real person within. They may clash on the superficial level, but at the deeper level they, and only they, connect. I bought the recording of his lecture at the RWA Conference last year, which is amazing. He also has this article among many others on his website that are all worth reading- Writing Romantic Comedies.

This quote always makes me get all teary-

In movies, as in real life, both the joy and terror of intimacy grow out of our exposure to those we love. To be accepted for who we are is magical. But once we allow ourselves to be seen in this way, all the dark parts of our personalities – our weaknesses, desires, fears and shortcomings – are brought into the open. The possibility that someone might peer beneath our carefully constructed persona and see who we truly are becomes terrifying. So the dance of pursuit and retreat continues endlessly.

Conscious or not, the lies in romantic comedies are always designed to protect the hero’s image. Better to lie to the person he loves than to expose the unworthy person he believes himself to be.

But of course, the hero’s deception can never work, because it is only by standing up for who he truly is that the hero can achieve real fulfillment and self worth, and connect with the love of his life. The romance character is TRULY the hero’s destiny; she’s the reward for finding the courage to grow and change.

Romantic comedies concern the continual battle between comfort and longing, between fear and desire. We’re all terrified of intimacy, pain and loss, so we all shut down emotionally in one way or another. But the beauty and power of a romantic comedy is that for two hours in the dark we can identify with a hero facing the same eternal struggle. And in the movie theater, we will always grow, and we will always win.

I hope and pray I can bring that level of emotional realness to my stories. Tash isn’t just lying to Morgan about how she feels and how her past has affected her, she’s lying to herself. I hope I can write well enough to do her justice.

And now I better go actually do some more writing instead of talking about it! Back to work tomorrow and I have nowhere near as much written as I hoped to.

Just wondering- what is it that makes your characters perfect for each other in your WiP?

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