Sandra Orchard: How to Make Your Characters Mind Without Losing Yours

Soon after my first grandchild started walking, my daughter discovered the book How to Make your Children Mind without Losing Yours. Oh, how well I remember that book from the days that very same daughter challenged every request we made.

These days, uncooperative characters are proving to be my nemesis!

They have minds of their own, utterly oblivious to the fact that I created them!!

But seeing my daughter perusing that book again a couple of years later, now with two adorable children to rein in, reminded me of the key lesson that I never forgot from reading it:

Let your children experience the consequences of their choices.

“So, Kate,” I said to the heroine of my Port Aster Secrets series about this time last year, “if that’s really the road you want to go down, guess what? You can live with the consequences.”

And they will be bad. Very bad.   ~hee, hee, hee~ (she said, in a sinister voice)

Yes, as oftentimes happens with children, characters need to learn their lessons the hard way.

The harder the better for the reader. Wouldn’t you say?

So I threw out my neat little story outline, and put my characters on the therapist’s couch and had a serious heart-to-heart with each and every one of them. Wow, was I surprised.

In some cases, the emotional baggage that I thought was driving their inner conflict wasn’t it at all! I had one character who wasn’t even who I thought he was!

Needless to say, finishing the series turned out to be quite an adventure. My hero and I very nearly had a rough-and-tumble fistfight over the “consequences” I allowed to befall Kate.

Now I understand why writers who write by the seat-of-their-pants enjoy it so much.

Every day is an adventure as you wait to see what happens next.

Of course… I remember having an eerie feeling that I’d start losing my mind again during the editing phase, but why worry about tomorrow when today has enough trouble of its own?

As it turned out, the editing phase wasn’t so bad, but just as my daughter returned to the book with child number two, I’m having to do the same with my newest baby, ur, character.

Your Turn: What lessons have you, or your characters, learned from having to face the consequences of your actions?

P.S. Deadly Devotion, the first book in the Port Aster Secrets mystery series, is available as a FREE download at all major online book retailers.

SANDRA ORCHARD is an award-winning author of mysteries and romantic suspense with Revell Publishing and Harlequin’s Love Inspired Suspense imprint. A mother of three grown children, she lives in Niagara, Canada with her real-life-hero husband and writes full time…when not doting on her young grandchildren. Subscribe to Sandra’s newsletter to receive a subscriber-exclusive mini-novella. Learn more about Sandra’s books and bonus features, as well as writer helps, at www.SandraOrchard.com or connect at www.Facebook.com/SandraOrchard



Book Blurb:

Desperate Measures

The Final installment in the Port Aster Secrets mystery series officially releases June 2, 2015. However, some stores already have it on their shelves, and have begun shipping it. 

Kate won’t be safe until all of Port Aster’s secrets are revealed

Researcher Kate Adams has finally pinpointed the supposed “miracle plant” that tore her family apart years ago. She’s certain that discovering its secrets is her only hope of solving the mystery surrounding her father’s disappearance. She’s willing to risk anything to find the truth, including her relationship with Detective Tom Parker. But with so many people in pursuit of the plant, going it alone might be a fatal mistake.

Award-winning author Sandra Orchard pulls out all the stops in this breakneck and breathtaking conclusion to the Port Aster Secrets series.

 

Ane Mulligan: Unforgettable - That's What You Are

What makes a character unforgettable? Why is it some live on in our hearts long after we finish the book? The answer is depth; characters that are concrete, vivid, with easily identifiable character traits.

That's all well and good, but how do we make them that way? I'm glad you asked.

Psychology 101 – Lies

From the study of psychology, we learn that most people have a Lie they believe about themselves. These Lies are embedded before the age of 5. A child that young doesn't reason the lie away, they simply believe it. It could come about from a careless remark by a frustrated mother who asks, "Can't you do anything right?" to outright abandonment or abuse. Whatever the cause, the Lie colors the child's view of self and their motivation rises out of the Lie.

So how does that translate to fiction?

The Lie the characters believe is the key to their motivation. Motivation is the key to great characters and plots. Yes, you read that right - because you can plot via character motivation.

Motivation engages us; we can relate to the character's motivation. Readers will follow characters through anything they do or any way they act if the motivation is strong enough. Based on a Lie, the motivation will be strong and believable.

There are the 8 basic Lies:

To each of the basic lies, there are shades and symptoms.

 
1.   I'm a disappointment.
2.   Not good enough (this is a very strong lie, often used

      for men and strong female leads)
3.   I'm not enough – or defective
4.   I'm too much to handle and will get rejected
5.   It's all my fault
6.   Helpless – powerless to fix (this leads to a fear of 

      being controlled)
7.   Unwanted/unloved
8.   I'm bad (which could possibly be used as a symptom

      or excuse for another lie)

Your characters will either fall victim to their lie or they will try to combat the lie, proving it wrong. While a person could have more than one Lie, for fictional characters, it's best to stick with one. Otherwise you dilute the power and focus of their motivation.

Playing Journalist

The first thing to do is interview your character. Play journalist, asking tough questions. You might discover their Lie during the interview. Next, write a free flowing backstory. Pantsters rock at this. Go as far back as you have to, even to prior generations, until you discover what happened to cause your character to believe a Lie and which one. Remember, we're all the product of our ancestors' worldview. We either adopt it, reject it, or tweak it to be our own.

For one manuscript I'm working on, I had to go back 4 generations to discover where my character's ancestors' worldview began. Through that great-great-great-grandmother, I found the foundation for her mother's worldview and thus, my character's Lie.

Word of caution: 95 percent or more of the backstory will never make the pages of your novel. It's what helps you to fully understand your character and what makes him or her tick.

Once you know the Lie, you can see how it would color his or her motivation, determine their reaction to events, and how they would make decisions.

In my debut novel, Chapel Springs Revival, Claire charges into situations without thinking, because deep within her, she wants to be a hero—superwoman come to save the day. And gain respect. Her lie is it’s all her fault. Yet, with all the crazy things that happen, I never have her consciously think it’s her fault. But she believes her antagonist thinks that. She believes her husband thinks it, too. That's how I get her Lie across without ever mentioning Lies.

Chapel Springs Revival

With a friend like Claire, you need a gurney, a mop, and a guardian angel.

Everybody in the small town of Chapel Springs, Georgia, knows best friends Claire and Patsy. It's impossible not to, what with Claire's zany antics and Patsy's self-appointed mission to keep her friend out of trouble. And trouble abounds. Chapel Springs has grown dilapidated and the tourist trade has slackened. With their livelihoods threatened, they join forces to revitalize the town. No one could have guessed the real issue needing restoration is their marriages.

With their personal lives in as much disarray as the town, Claire and Patsy embark on a mission of mishaps and miscommunication, determined to restore warmth to Chapel Springs —and their lives. That is if they can convince their husbands and the town council, led by two curmudgeons who would prefer to see Chapel Springs left in the fifties and closed to traffic.

While a large, floppy straw hat is her favorite, bestselling novelist ANE MULLIGAN has worn many: hairdresser, legislative affairs director (that's a fancy name for a lobbyist), drama director, playwright, humor columnist, and novelist. Her lifetime experience provides a plethora of fodder for her Southern-fried fiction. She firmly believes coffee and chocolate are two of the four major food groups. President of the award-winning literary site, Novel Rocket, Ane resides in Suwanee, GA, with her artist husband, her chef son, and two dogs of Biblical proportion. You can find Ane on her Southern-fried Fiction website, Google+, Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Lynn Chandler Willis: Character Description

Lynn Chandler Willis

Above plot, dialogue, setting, style and anything else you want to add, the heart of a good story is the characters. There are many ways to make your characters leap off the page and into your readers’ hearts. One of my favorite ways is to add description. Not just “he had red hair” description but in-depth, down to the soul description. You're the creator of this character—their DNA is in your hands and it's up to you to show it to the reader.

How to add physical description without it looking like a grocery list:

He has red hair. How red was his hair? Candy-cane red or blaze orange? There’s a difference. Did he also have freckles? Many red-heads do, you know. Pale or tanned or sunburned? Many redheads easily sunburn. Perhaps he smells

like sunscreen. Does he like his red hair? Maybe he has a perpetual frown because he longs to be dark-headed?

How to add to the characterization without the reader knowing it:

What kind of clothing is he wearing? A business suit? Jeans and a t-shirt? Even the t-shirt can tell a reader something about your character. Does it have a logo?  Nike—he may be athletic. Duck Commander—he may be an outdoorsman and hunter. Grateful Dead—may be an aging hippie, music lover, art student, yard sale shopper. Does his shirt have a funny saying on it? Is it political? Sexy? Redneck humor? Any one of these shows the reader who the character is without telling them he is a business man.

How to bring a character to life:

So now the reader knows our character has orange hair, freckles and is wearing a Grateful Dead t-shirt. What else can we add to bring him to life? A limp? A stutter? A scar? Was he born with that limp or did his foot fall asleep from sitting cross legged while meditating? Is the limp a war injury? A football, basketball, or car-racing injury? A personal injury lawsuit in the works? Or maybe he’s not really injured…. All of the above helps bring a character to life. And, it can be done in a few short sentences.

Example: His hair looked like tiny orange spikes pushing through the top of his head. A Grateful Dead t-shirt stretched across his sagging belly. He shuffled over to the counter, a painful limp contorting his grizzled face. “‘Nam,” he said as if that explained it all.

This character has now become real, a three dimensional being rather than a stick figure. The reader now has a vivid image of what he looks like, how old he is, and a glimpse into his past without even realizing it. The description didn't need to drag on for paragraphs—everything the reader needed to know at the moment was shown to them in a few sentences.

So the next time you come to writing a character description, don't tell the reader the man was wearing a hat. Show us he was wearing a NY Yankees ball cap, backwards.

The Rising:

A little boy, beaten and left to die in an alley.  A cop with a personal life out of control. When their worlds collide, God intervenes. Detective Ellie Saunders's homicide investigation takes a dramatic turn when a young victim "wakes up" in the morgue. The child has no memory prior to his "rising" except walking with his father along a shiny road. Ellie likes dealing with facts. She'd rather leave all the God-talk to her father, a retired minister, and to her partner, Jesse, a former vice cop with an annoying habit of inserting himself into her life. But will the facts she follows puts Ellie's life in mortal danger? And will she finally allow God into her heart forever?

About the Author:

Lynn Chandler Willis is the author of the bestselling True Crime book Unholy Covenant (Addicus Books, 2000), Grace Award finalist The Rising (Pelican Book Group, 2013), and the forthcoming Wink of an Eye, winner of the 2013 St. Martin's Press/Private Eye Writers of America Best 1st PI Novel competition. It will be released by Minotaur Books Nov. 2014.

Heidi Glick - Six is a Crowd: Limiting the Number of POV Characters

Heidi Glick

Although a fictional story may contain multiple characters, generally, when writing using third person limited POV, you should limit the number of POV characters to a total of five. The reasons for the limitation are because of genre norms and publishing standards, and to allow readers to connect better with characters.

How is a POV character different from a regular character? Using third-person limited POV, authors focus on one POV character per scene, through whose consciousness, events are relayed. A scene includes whatever the POV character hears, smells, sees, etc. A scene may contain any number of regular characters but should only contain one POV character.

So what should you do if your current work in progress contains more than five POV characters?

·              Check out the norms for your genre. If you are unsure, read several books in your genre and see how many POV characters are used in those stories. For example, romance novels typically contain two POV characters: the hero and the heroine. Suspense novels or thrillers might contain three or more POV characters (the villain, the hero, and the heroine). Also, if you have a publisher in mind, check the publisher’s guidelines to see what they prefer or read several books released by the publisher to see how many POV characters are used.

·              Decide on the most important characters in the story (but no more than five). Tell the story through their eyes. When choosing POV characters, keep in mind that not all characters will be present in every scene. So if your hero and heroine are not in a scene, but your villain is, then you will need to include a scene with the villain or find another way to relay the information from that scene later in the story.

·              Make sure that the POV characters are connected. If you introduce a different character per chapter, readers will want to know how the characters are related. Failure to connect the dots might cause a reader to stop reading. Gone to Ground by Brandilyn Collins is a good example of how different POV characters can be introduced properly.

So are you still not convinced that you should use less than five POV characters?

·              Read a book with two POV characters and then a book with five or more POV characters to see what works best for your story and your writing style. I’ve found that if I read a book with more than five POV characters, I tend to lose interest. Even with five POV characters, you run the risk of readers becoming disinterested, which is why I lean toward using the fewest number of POV characters possible.

POV revisions can take time. I’ve done them myself. However, the end result is worth it.

Bio

Heidi Glick has a B.A. in biology, a minor in Bible from Cedarville University, and a passion for writing Christian fiction. Additionally, she is a member of American Christian Fiction Writers and has written two articles for Intercom. Heidi’s debut suspense novel, Dog Tags, was released in June 2013. Readers can learn more about Heidi by visiting her Website and can connect with her via Facebook and Twitter.

 

Dog Tags Blurb

When disabled ex-Marine Mark Graham reconnects with his best friend’s sister, he finds himself falling in love. But Beth Martindale’s presence is a constant reminder of events he’d rather forget. Mark wants to move forward, but the secrets surrounding her brother’s death as well as his own confinement to a wheelchair threaten to tear them apart. 

When a psychopath who calls himself The Knight fixates on Beth, Mark is determined to give her the protection he failed to give her brother on the battlefield, yet he discovers that a wheelchair isn’t the only impediment he has to keeping Beth safe. Will terror win or can Mark find the strength of mind and body to rescue Beth and find his own redemption?

James R. Callan: What the Great Indian Warrior Crazy Horse Taught Me About Writing

My wife and I had visited all fifty of these United States, except North Dakota. So we made a point a few years ago to visit North Dakota. On the way home, we toured South Dakota and stopped at the monument to Crazy Horse.

While there, I discovered this quote by that great Indian warrior.

   

“You are only as strong as your enemy.”

(c) CanStockPhoto.com / Oralleff

I realized he was speaking not only to his people, but to writers. And what he was saying was this. Your protagonist is only as good as your antagonist. If you have a weak antagonist, you cannot have a strong protagonist. You hero must have a formidable opponent to be a strong character. Create a weak, poorly defined antagonist and your main character has nothing to work against. It would be like a six foot seven inch college basketball star playing one-on-one against a five foot tall twelve year-old. No suspense. No conflict. No fun. No interest.

You cannot develop much suspense, or even much conflict, if there is not a strong force trying to defeat the hero. Even if the reader believes that the protagonist will certainly win, there needs to be some doubt. There needs to be some concern over what this will cost your hero, even if he wins. What collateral damage will be done? How will the protagonist’s friends, or people he is trying to protect, be affected?

To this end, it is often a good ploy to make the antagonist stronger than the protagonist. Perhaps smarter, as well. This may be the time the antagonist wins. It is worthwhile to actually build an antagonist and a plan so that he will win. Think like you are a backer of the antagonist. And let this come across in the book.

Then, you must work to let the good guy win at the last minute. But, he cannot win by luck. You don’t want the gods to save him. So, how do you accomplish his win?
Early in the book, you put in place the flaw in the antagonist and the asset in the protagonist that will provide the means for the good guy to defeat the bad guy. You do this casually, at a time when it makes little difference, in a manner that catches little attention. But, those qualities are there. Then, three hundred pages later, those very things provide a logical and believable way for the protagonist to win.

Does this take a good bit of work and planning? Yes. Is it worth it? Absolutely. The conclusion is logical. No one can cry foul. The tools were there, just unnoticed until the crucial time.

So, develop a strong, worthy opponent (with just one little flaw). Now, the protagonist has her work cut out for her. But in the end, she will rise to the occasion and save the day. Good hero. Good job. Good book.


About James R. Callan:
After a successful career in mathematics and computer science, receiving grants from the National Science Foundation and NASA, and being listed in Who’s Who in Computer Science and Two Thousand Notable Americans, James R. Callan turned to his first love—writing.  He wrote a monthly column for a national magazine for two years, and published four non-fiction books.  He now concentrates on his favorite genre, mysteries, with his sixth book releasing in Spring, 2014.

Website 
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Amazon Author page
Twitter:   @jamesrcallan

Character: The Heartbeat of the Novel
(Oak Tree Press, 2013)

Find it on Amazon