Tag: character arc

Categories
Screenwriting

Slow Your Roll

Labor Day weekend, I finally decided to go see the action movie Top Gun: Maverick. It seemed like a great way to escape from reality for a few hours; Robert McKee notes, “Action movies are the most popular genre currently.”

Even Disney is banking on the trend with its Star Wars and Marvel franchises. It’s no wonder this was the perfect time to finally make the long-awaited sequel to the original Top Gun. However, I was pleasantly surprised to be swept away by a more than a typical action movie. Below are some unexpected qualities of the movie.

  • A superb character arc
  • An in-depth romantic subplot

One of my favorite parts of the movie was how the writers expanded on a romantic relationship that was only briefly mentioned in the original movie 30 years ago. In fact, later I had to go back and re-watch the original movie to see where the romantic lead came from.

The writer masterfully intertwined the romantic subplot with both the action and Maverick’s character arc, which in the process, slowed the pace of this full-throttle action movie!

Slow Your Roll

Whether a novelist, screenwriter, or storyteller, you need to understand the concept of pacing.

“Pace begins in the screenplay. We control rhythm and tempo. Progressions must be shaped, for if we don’t, the film editor will.”

Robert McKee

Pacing a story is critical to maintaining the audience’s attention and the focus of our story. As writers, we cannot unpack too much information at one time, because this will overwhelm the audience.

Good writers understand how to pace their stories to help build expectations and momentum. According to Masterclass, narrative pacing refers to . . .

“How fast or slow the story is moving for the reader. This is determined by the length of a scene and the speed at which you, the writer, distribute the information. Generally speaking, descriptive passages tend to slow things down, while dialogue and action scenes speed things up — but slowing the pace of action down at choice moments can also build suspense.”

Seven Tips to Master Pacing

  1. Utilize breathers.
  2. Change the order of events.
  3. Vary your sentence length.
  4. Keep characters physically moving during dialogue.
  5. Reveal information selectively.
  6. Vary your narration.
  7. Read the work out loud.

“A screenplay is different than a novel in this respect: Whereas most novels are written in the past tense, a screenplay is in the present tense.”

Screenwriting coach Scott Myers

Pacing controls the ebb and flow of a story by controlling the story’s present action. Below are a couple of movies whose pacing helps the audience hold on despite continuous fast-paced action scenes. The goal is to tell a story and pace it to balance the action.

Whiplash

The dark Knight

Kung Fu Hustle

Hold On

Good writers know a story’s pace builds both momentum and anticipation of what the audience wants or expects. We must grab their attention as soon as possible and make sure we keep it all the way to the end of our story. Pacing helps us to keep from exposition or emotional dumps that can cause viewers to tune out. Two tools that screenwriters can use to help pace a story are:

  • Pause
  • Beats

Remember, you don’t want to stop momentum of the narrative by either slowing down or speeding up. This is the purpose of writers learning to control a story’s pace.

Martin Johnson

Martin Johnson survived a severe car accident with a (T.B.I.) Traumatic brain injury which left him legally blind and partially paralyzed on the left side. He is an award-winning Christian screenwriter who has recently finished his first Christian nonfiction book. Martin has spent the last nine years volunteering as an ambassador and promoter for Promise Keepers ministries. While speaking to local men’s ministries he shares his testimony. He explains The Jesus Paradigm and how following Jesus changes what matters most in our lives. Martin lives in a Georgia and connects with readers at MartinThomasJonhson.com  and on Twitter at mtjohnson51.

Categories
Romancing Your Story

Hole-Hearted to Whole-Hearted and How to Get There

What hole is in his heart? What hole is in her heart? This is where your romance story begins. Both your main male and female characters—the ones that will commit to one another by the end of the book—need to have a hole in their heart they are trying to fill, or are resisting to fill, at the beginning of your romance novel.

Maybe he wants to find a lasting love but comes from a broken home. His parents divorced when he was young after a lot of fighting, and maybe they bounced him back and forth, or maybe one of them completely walked away from him after the divorce. These things cause him to believe that he isn’t lovable or that all marriages are destined for divorce.

Maybe she longs for a lasting love but has been hurt by more than one man she thought was “the one”. Maybe several men who seemed interested, loving, and kind turned into workaholics with no time for her, or verbally, emotionally, or physically abused her. Now she’s afraid to give another man a chance; unsure she could survive another bad relationship, leaving her with a bigger hole in her heart.

These two characters obviously struggle with an internal conflict.

When they are thrown together in your story, in whatever situation you choose, they may feel a physical attraction. They may think “this might be the one”, but their internal conflict is still raw, so an external conflict results. Each of them resist the relationship in some way, trying to protect themselves.

As time progresses and you continue to put them together through the setting or their circumstances, eventually one of them softens and warms up to the idea that this relationship might really work out.

The other one may still resist for a while, but sooner or later, they both soften and their love for one another builds to where they both believe this relationship isn’t like the one his parents had or like the previous relationships she had.

The hole in each of their hearts heals and they commit to one another.

This is one possible basic plot line for a romance story. Every romance novel needs a boy and a girl who want and need love. Maybe the hole in one of their hearts is something that causes them to believe they don’t have time for love and romance. But whatever the hole is will affect the relationship between them.

The romance plot also needs an external struggle because romance stories need conflict. Conflict is the driving force behind a romance story, and maybe the external conflict is the one I mentioned above, or maybe one of the men who hurt your female character comes back seeking another chance just when she thinks she may have some real feelings for the man you’ve recently placed in her life. There are many external conflicts you can use.

But in the end two characters who began hole-hearted, become whole-hearted.

Kelly F. Barr lives in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. She is married and has three sons. She writes historical romance. She has also been a blogger for ten years, and every Friday, you can find her Flash Fiction stories posted for your reading pleasure. She loves her family, including the family dog, books, walks, and chai lattes.

You can find her online at:

Categories
Romancing Your Story

Emotional Logic, Or How to Keep Readers From Throwing Your Book Against the Wall

The basis of every good story is conflict. As writing teacher extraordinaire James Scott Bell often says, “Happy people in happy land” is boring. Conflict is needed and conflict comes from people doing things that don’t come naturally, that forces them out of their comfort zone.

My first writing teacher and mentor liked to talk about something she called Emotional Logic. This is being sure your characters stay in character.

For instance, consider a character—I’ll call her Maisie—who is spontaneous and bubbly. If she suddenly begins scheduling her life to the minute and dressing in all black for no reason, I’ve lost her emotional logic.

So how do we, as writers, get our characters into conflict without sacrificing emotional logic?

With foreshadowing. Drop hints along the way to some of the turmoil your character will experience and changes they’ll have to make.

Let’s return to Maisie. If Maisie wakes up one day, shoves her flouncy pink skirt and heels into the back of her closet, pulls on black leggings and a sweatshirt, and orders a new planner, but I haven’t done any set-up for that change, readers may very well put the book down and not pick it up again. Or at least wonder at what in the world is going on with her.

But if Maisie tells someone in Chapter One that the job she wants will soon be vacant and it involves the ability to multi-task and schedule a group of co-workers, she might realize in Chapter Three that she needs to get serious about organizing her life. And if in Chapter Two, Maisie overhears two co-workers saying her frivolous outfits make her seem unprofessional, she might decide in Chapter Five to stop wearing color altogether.

Titles can be used as foreshadowing devices. Kristan Higgins’ book The Best Man is about a woman who ends up with the guy who was going to be the best man in her wedding that didn’t happen. So he was a literal “best man,” and is the best man for her.

In How to Walk Away by Katherine Center, the foreshadowing is both the title and the first line: “The biggest irony about that night is that I was always scared to fly.” I won’t give away what exactly is being foreshadowed, but I highly recommend that book.

Effective foreshadowing leaves some room between the hint and the event. Scatter the hints throughout the story. The character changes will feel organic and a natural result of the conflict and your reader will close the book, satisfied with the happily ever after you gave them.

Carrie Padgett lives in Central California, close to Yosemite, but far from Hollywood, the beach, and the Golden Gate Bridge. She believes in faith, families, fun, and happily ever afters. She writes contemporary fiction with romance. She recently signed a contract with Sunrise Publishing to co-write a romance novel with New York Times bestselling author Rachel Hauck that will be published in 2022. Carrie and her husband live in the country with their high-maintenance cat and laid-back dog, within driving distance of their six grandchildren.

You can find her online at:

Categories
Mystery/Thriller/Suspense

Authors as Psychotherapists – Getting into the Mind of Our Characters

mystery suspense thriller

What can authors learn from the world of psychotherapy?

According to the Microsoft Bing definition, a psychotherapist “treats mental disorders by psychological rather than medical means.” Korin Miller offers the reason. “The goal of therapy is to give you the tools and strategies for navigating whatever is going on in your life.”

While I earned my college degree in Human Relations and Psychology, I am no expert, but I can research and ask questions of those who are. Applying psychotherapy technique to our characters is an interesting exercise and may bring an affirming nod from agents, publishers, and readers.

Sitting behind the comfort of our keyboard, we novelists can psychoanalyze our characters’ lives. Of course, we have the advantage since we created those lives! We push them through internal lies, flaws, and wounds as they navigate the storyworld with the tools we provide. The more intriguing the ‘disorder’ we assign our characters, the more invested our readers become.

If our goal is inspiration, our characters journey through hardship and into the light of emotional and spiritual growth. If we leave them in darkness, we may provoke thought, as some novels do, but that makes for a different story than I write. But I recognize the technique.

Most protagonists, and certainly our antagonists in the mystery, suspense, and thriller genre, possess some sort of disorder. The ‘disorder’ falls somewhere on a scale, from what pushes an unassuming village librarian to unravel a cozy mystery to a psychopath bent on world destruction. No matter the genre, our characters’ world is out of kilter and needs righting. A ‘disorder’ can add an interesting element to the process.

Let’s consider a few psychotherapy angles.

Fear, frustration, or hurt

Much of how we respond to life falls under these three emotions. They must be worked through before they lead to anger. If not, anger turned inward can develop into depression, and turned outward, into rage.

For our protagonist – fear, frustration, or hurt can jump-start their journey. They want to solve the murder, figure out the riddle, defeat the bad guy, stop the assassination, wipe out the terrorist. These will either explain their reluctance in acting or push them into their journey. Or it can alter their quest if they spiral into depression or explode into rage. Use this to create twists.

For our antagonist – if they view the protagonist as having initiated fear, frustration, or hurt or one of these emotions has carried over from a difficult childhood, their motivation becomes understandable. Even bad guys can’t be completely bad or they become one-dimensional, boring stereotypes. Everything fuels their rage. Apply these to dig deeper holes for our protagonist.

Reframing the Past

Events stay the same, but the way they’re interpreted depends on the individual and can change the present and future.

For our protagonist – throughout the story they rethink past events. Clues become clearer and redirect their choices, bringing fresh insight. Confidence grows and defeating the foe becomes attainable.

For our antagonist – their reframing is all about putting events in the worse possible light. They see bad where good is, and negative instead of positive, and rush to act. These can create devastating consequences for our noble protagonist.

Three Types of Anxiety – Existential, Chronic, and Acute

Existential anxiety seeks answers for life’s big questions – what’s my purpose? What happens after I die? Ongoing, trying events with no simple resolution lead to chronic anxiety. Acute stress results from a late payment or a mix-up with insurance – something that sprouts up, aggravating but is more easily solvable.

For our protagonist – anxious thoughts drive their actions, and ratchet up tension and conflict. They may stress over life’s purpose or the opposite, feel confident about eternity because of a certain worldview. The chronic effects of a poor childhood may bubble up and alter their journey for a time or they experience a flat tire while rushing for a job interview. Utilize these for cliffhangers.

For our antagonist – the future matters little as making others miserable in the here and now is paramount. Pain from their past drives their actions. Every new decision by our lovely protagonist throws their plans awry, while raising the stakes and their level of rage.

Putting into Practice

Character-building is a challenge for even the seasoned author. Do your research. Throwing in a ‘disorder’ may raise your story’s stakes and create memorable characters. Consider the techniques psychotherapists offer as another avenue to set your story above the rest.

Write well, my friends.

PJ Gover encourages her readers to live the thrill one story at a time. She wrote her first thriller at age nine, all of six pages, but only returned to creating suspense/thrillers years later after unearthing her deceased father’s secret work designing missiles for the government. After thirteen writing awards, including five for first place, her high school English teacher must be shaking her head in disbelief. A ranch in Texas serves as home base. Offer her well-crafted chili rellenos or anything gluten-free and you’ll have a friend for life. Jim Hart of Hartline Literary represents PJ.

She’d love to hear from you!

Categories
Platform and Branding

How to Market Your Book in 2020

The difference between filing your carefully edited pages on your computer and readers reading those pages, is marketing.

Books come alive when readers read them, but in order to read them, they must know it exists. It’s the imagination that puts skin on characters and personalities in dialogue. Without readers, your book is a black and white stack of words.

One of my writing friends once said: “The brutal truth is you may have the greatest book ever written, but if you cannot pitch it, no one may ever know.”

Swap the word pitch with market, and you get a similar result.

So, how do you market your book, especially when life looks quite different now than it did a year ago?

Start with your pitch.

Online marketing can help you so much right now. You can do it from home, but still reach hundreds if not thousands of potential readers. However, just as every word counts in writing, every word counts in marketing. For someone to be willing to stop their scroll, it’s important to be succinct and catch their attention.

If you’re on Twitter, try formatting your pitch to target potential readers (and don’t forget to hashtag #WritingCommunity!). This will hopefully pique interest and if you leave it with a question, opens the door for comments.

Market your protagonist’s character arc.

Readers connect with the human side of characters, and often the humanity of characters means they have flaws. You want to keep the ending a surprise, but give enough to engage their desire to find out what happens. What’s your inciting incident, how does your protagonist respond, and what does this say about him? These can be good questions to ask when considering how to portray character arc.

Note: Keep your target audience in mind, because you want to remember not just what you’re pitching, but who you’re pitching to.

Shine a spotlight on your theme

              Your theme is what holds your book together. It’s the current that carries your protagonist, and your readers, from the first page to the last. It’s what makes them pick up your book instead of the one next to it on the shelf, or add your book to the cart instead of one in the customers-also-bought list on Amazon.

Let your passion for your book overflow as you market, but remember readers often purchase not just because of the genre, but because of the story in the genre. Your theme is what sets your story apart and your character arc helps hold up your theme, whatever it is.

Best wishes as you spread the word on your project!

Sarah Rexford is a Marketing Content Creator and writer. She helps authors build their platform through branding and copywriting. With a BA in Strategic Communications, Sarah equips writers to learn how to communicate their message through personal branding. She writes fiction and nonfiction and offers writers behind-the-scenes tips on the publishing industry through her blog itssarahrexford.com. She is represented by the C.Y.L.E Young Agency.

Instagram: @sarahjrexford
Twitter: @sarahjrexford
Web: itssarahrexford.com

Categories
Talking Character

How Characters Evolve in a Series by Lisa E. Betz

Why do we love a good series? Because we love the characters and the kinds of situations they get into book after book.

Once upon a time the characters in a series often remained static from book to book, but most series published today feature characters that evolve gradually over time. Think over your favorite TV shows or book series. Are the main characters unchanged or do they evolve along with their relationships, career, or life goals?

Readers like characters that are three-dimensional enough to grow. However, readers don’t want your characters to change too much. They want each book in the series to feature the same characters they loved in the first book, and they won’t be happy if those characters transform into someone that is drastically different. Therefore, you must plan the character’s arc for a series, just like you plan a character’s arc for a single book.

You main character’s series journey

A series arc deals with incremental steps in a longer journey toward the character’s ultimate goal. What kind of goal? In a single story, the heroine’s goal is connected to the plot, but in a series the goal must rise above the plots of the individual books.

In the case of a female private investigator, for example, the series goal might be finally winning the respect of her male peers—and each successful case takes her a little closer to realizing that goal. Alternately, the series arc might be more concerned with the heroine’s domestic issues as she matures in her relationships, with an ultimate goal of a finding the balance between work and motherhood.

How to define a series arc

Think about your primary characters. What larger goal might drive them from book to book? Is it related to their career? Their relationships? Is there a stubborn character flaw they can slowly work to overcome? A particular person they will eventually impress or conquer? Will their goal change over time, as they achieve one milestone and look onward to another?

Perhaps most importantly, will your readers like the ultimate version of your hero better than the original version? Your series arc should take your main characters on a journey that has your readers cheering them on the whole way.

Evolving secondary characters

What about secondary characters? Do they need a series arc as well? Not necessarily. Some secondary characters need to remain the same to enhance the consistency of your story world. Consider some of your favorite series. Can you name a minor character  you looked forward to meeting in book after book, even though they never changed? Those characters are reliable pieces of each story, part of the fabric that makes the series enjoyable. They don’t need to change much, although a few tweaks now and then will keep them interesting.

However, some secondary characters refuse to remain in the background. They might start out with a brief cameo then slowly gain importance in subsequent books. Those characters need to evolve as their role grows.

Try This: Choose a favorite book or TV series and track how the characters (both primary and secondary) evolve as the series progresses. What do you learn? What techniques can you adapt to your own work?

[bctt tweet=”How will your characters evolve across an entire series? #writetips #writer” username=””]

Lisa E. Betz believes that everyone has a story to tell the world. She loves to encourage fellow writers to be intentional about their craft and courageous in sharing their words with others. Lisa shares her words through dramas, Bible studies, historical fiction and her blog about intentional living.

Connect with her:

Website: www.lisaebetz.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/LisaEBetzWriter/
Twitter: @LisaEBetz

Categories
Talking Character

Which Comes First, Plot Or Character?

Plot and character. Two halves of any great story. Both are critical, whether you are telling a character-driven literary story or a plot-driven spy thriller.

Disagree? Consider this quote:

Plot and character are integral to one another. Remove either one from the equation (or even just try to approach them as if they were independent of one another), and you risk creating a story that may have awesome parts, but which will not be an awesome whole. K. M. Weiland in Creating Character Arcs.

Or, to put it differently, consider this statement from Lisa Cron in Wired for Story:

Myth: The plot is what the story is about.
Reality: A story is about how the plot affects the protagonist.

So then, a good story is one where the plot affects the main character. Does that mean plot comes first?

Not necessarily.

I don’t think it matters where a writer begins, so long as you remember that the two are intertwined.  The character must have goals and issues that are challenged by the plot. The plot is nothing but a series of unconnected events unless there is a character whose struggles give them meaning. A writer cannot get too far along in one before he needs to consider the other.

The big mistake is to forget they are two sides of the same whole. The great discovery is when you allow your developing character to spark plot ideas, or vice versa.

Where do you start?

 

Character first

If you are a character-first writer, you begin by crafting an intriguing character. But at some point the character will need a goal, and obstacles that stand in his way. Remember, it is a reader’s anticipation of what the character will do next that sucks them into the story. A protagonist without a clear goal gives a reader no reason to care—and thus no reason to keep reading.

Therefore a character-first writer will need to consider the complex, flawed character you have created and ask what climax moment will force the hero to face the strongest of his inner demons. Come up with a climax that forces the character to dig deep, to strive against the enemy with every fiber of his moral and physical being, and then work the plot backwards from that moment.

Plot first

If you are a plot-first writer, you start with an intriguing what-if or an awesome idea for an amazing climax scene. But at some point you will need to create a character worthy of your plot. One whose inner demons threaten to keep her from defeating the opposition.

The most powerful stories are built on a character whose exterior plot goal is in direct conflict with her inner story goal. This is true whether the story has a classic character arc or not. Even in stories where the character does not change (a flat arc) she still needs to overcome something beyond the antagonist’s evil plans. That something might be as simple as convincing everyone around her that the evil villain is truly an evil villain, but the plot must force her to dig deep inside herself to find the strength to keep fighting when no one else believes.

Therefore, plot-first writers need to stop and consider what conflict of inner need and outer goal will might work with the plot. Create a believable character that embodies those two things, (giving the character enough backstory to explain the why of it) and you are well on your way to a great story.

[bctt tweet=”The character drives the plot, and the plot molds the character’s arc. They cannot work independently. K. M. Weiland #quote #writer” username=””]

Lisa E. Betz is a Bible study leader, drama director, and aspiring novelist. She lives with her husband and a neurotic cat in a scenic corner of Pennsylvania. When not teaching or sorting books at the library, Lisa blogs about intentional living at www.lisaebetz.com.

Connect with her:

Website: www.lisaebetz.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/LisaEBetzWriter/
Twitter: @LisaEBetz

Categories
Talking Character

Your Character’s Skewed Worldview

In any good story, the protagonist can only achieve her external story goal by first overcoming a deep inner issue. (Her character arc is her journey to discover, wrestle with, and overcome this issue.)

What is this inner issue?

A belief or fear that gives her a skewed view of the world. In other words, her inner issue is a big fat Lie she believes, a Lie that leads her to act in ways that are unwise—and will ultimately lead to her failure unless she confronts the Lie and discovers a better truth.

Where does this inner issue come from?

Somewhere in your character’s past he encountered a traumatic event, or Wound, which initiated his skewed thinking. This does not mean your character must have been abused or suffered severe trauma. The Wound might be a broken promise, or a word of condemnation, anything that incites the character to believe some lie about himself or how he must survive in his world.

You must know precisely when, and why, your protagonist’s worldview was knocked out of alignment. Lisa Cron in Wired for Story

If you know what initiated your character’s belief in the Lie, you’re halfway to helping him overcome it. K. M. Weiland in Creating Character Arcs.

An Example:

In my current manuscript, a Roman aristocrat named Avitus was badly burned as a youth, and as a result his face, chest and left arm are scarred. Because of this scarring, he was ridiculed and rejected by the peers who had once been his friends.

That rejection is his Wound. It caused him to believe that he was ugly and unlovable (the Lie). To protect himself from further rejection, he became a loner, only trusting others who, like him, have been rejected in some way.

However, a stipulation in his father’s will requires him to marry before he can inherit his share. So long as he remains in his skewed worldview—where he believes he is unlovable—he will remain safely behind his wall of dispassionate self-control.

In order to win the respect of his potential spouse, he must realize that it is the Lie that made him unlovable, not his scars. Only by dropping his mask of indifference and becoming vulnerable can he hope to convince her to marry him.

Further thoughts on your character’s Wound

  • Identifying a specific wounding event helps the writer create a more authentic character.
  • The Wound often lies in the past, long before the story starts, although in some cases the Wound occurs in the early scenes of your story.
  • The more skewed the character’s worldview (the bigger the Lie), the more serious the Wound must be.
  • In some cases, the character’s wound is revealed as the story progresses. In others the readers never learns about the Wound, but it still informs how the character behaves.

[bctt tweet=”What big fat Lie does your character believe, and what Wound initiated this belief? #amwriting” username=””]