May 19, 2006: Characters Behaving Badly

Pssssst.... Want to know a secret? I’m writing a novel, and I’ve just finished my first draft! And I’ve finished going through it and ruthlessly editing it. Now comes the hard part that I’m still working up the energy for: the rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, until I satisfy my toughest critic. ME.

The basic plot is about a mother and her 16 year-old daughter, and trying to survive “those” years... and the things that happen to them along the way (and the things that happened to the mother when she was roughly that age). It includes boyfriends, best friends, some embarrassing moments, some dramatic moments, and hopefully more than a few places that’ll make the reader bust a gut laughing. It’s not, by any stretch of the imagination, autobiographical. Nor do the characters really exist, not really.

You see, I take the “Mr. Potato Head” approach to character development. You remember Mr. Potato Head, don’t you? You could give him one blue eye, and one googly eye, a goofy nose, and an ear that looked like it belonged to a cat? If you felt silly, you could mix up the body parts, or if you didn’t, you could try to go for a “look.” Well, let’s say a close friend asks me, “Am I in your book?” I have to answer, “Yes.” They say, “Which character?” That’s when it gets tough. “Um. All of them?”

Some of the events really happened (and you’d be surprised if you knew which ones), but most of them are figments of an over-active imagination. And the rest of the book just unfolded before me, like a movie... which leads me to the title of this entry.

So, how do you write a book? Well, I knew where I wanted to start, and where I wanted to end up, so I would put my characters (who I’d written biographies for and gotten to know very well) together in scenes, and just sit back and watch them work it out. Then, all I have to do is write down what they said to each other, how they felt about it, and what they did. If I’m lucky, they say some really snappy things, and there is some pretty nifty action to go along with it. If not, I need to figure out how to coax it out of them, and maybe throw a monkey wrench into things... A writer is really a voyeur with an active imagination.

My “bad guy” from mom’s high school days is such a jerk that I want to kick him in the you-know-whats, or kill him off, or have someone jump out from behind the lockers and beat the living daylights out of him. He’s one that I have to keep finding a reason to keep him alive, and I keep having to change the circumstances so that he can be nice, and make the people around him want to give him another chance, otherwise everyone else reading would feel the same way about him, too. It’s nice to have a villain, but make him too villainous, and the reader kills him by shutting the book. Even Hannibal Lector had his redeeming values... not many, but enough to keep the pages turning.

I have 2 critics who are invaluable for keeping my characters in line: my daughter (who NEVER minces words, and who keeps my teenaged characters SOUNDING like teenagers), and my dear friend Aimee, who will read a sentence or two any time she has a free second, even if it’s just a cereal box. She’ll tell me if the voices aren’t unique enough for each character, or if someone is too annoying, or if they change personalities mid-way through, or if something isn’t consistent with paragraph 5 way back in Chapter 4 (how does she remember that???). They’re pretty much the only ones who’ve had a chance to read along with me yet--the torture comes for my other friends when I’m farther along with it. Ha! Ha!

My writing Blog is HERE.