Tag: complex characters

Categories
Mystery/Thriller/Suspense

Excuse me, Mr. Bad Guy. Why?

mystery suspense thriller

There’s nothing better than a creepy villain.

A deranged killer on the loose terrorizing your hero and heroine.

A madman who won’t back off.

A serial killer stalking his next victim.

Take your pick. The bad guy (or girl) can make or break a story. The antagonist isn’t a prop but a main character whose development is often overlooked.

Villains are fun to write. Yet, as writers, we tend to focus on the protagonists, creating elaborate backstories for our beloved couple. However, by doing so, we miss an important detail while we think up new ways to threaten our hero or heroine. We painstakingly figure out the goal, motivation, and conflict, or maybe the wound, lie, and fear of our main characters, but we miss the ever so important reason why our villain does what he or she does.

Does your villain have a backstory explaining the reason he or she has become a killer? We cannot forget to focus on the why.

The serial killer was neglected by his mother, and now he hunts and kills women he perceives to neglect their children. He transfers his feelings to these women to exact revenge on his mother.

Or the arsonist’s business partner finds out he’s dealing drugs through their company. He kills his partner and sets fire to cover up the crime and destroy the body. The hero or heroine unknowingly sees the bad guy, causing the arsonist to eliminate the witness.

Maybe the stalker was rejected by his high school sweetheart, and he is determined to exert power over any woman that reminds him of his first love.

Don’t shortchange your villain. Give him or her a solid backstory. And in the process of discovering the why, don’t forget to create weaknesses or vulnerabilities in the villain. By doing so, we can make the bad guy or girl human in the reader’s eye. This allows your reader to connect with your killer in a love/hate relationship or to feel sorry for the poor chump who’s out to wreak havoc on your hero and heroine.

So, go ahead, interview your bad guy. Discover your villain’s secret from his or her past? Find out what makes him tick. Make him or her human.

Remember, villains, are important people too.

What method do you use to create a villain that your readers love to hate?

Sami Abrams grew up hating to read. It wasn’t until her 30’s that she found authors that captured her attention. Now, most evenings you can find her engrossed in a Romantic Suspense. In her opinion, a crime and a little romance is the recipe for a great story.

Sami has finaled 15 times in writing contests, including receiving first place in American Christian Fiction Writer’s Genesis Contest in 2019 and Faith Hope and Love’s Touched By Love Awards in 2018. She lives in Northern California, but she will always be a Kansas girl at heart. She has a love of sports, family, and travel. However, a cabin at Lake Tahoe writing her next story is definitely at the top of her list.

Visit Sami at:

Categories
Talking Character

Your Character’s Backstory—Use It Wisely

Every fictional character has an entire life’s worth of backstory that happened prior to the opening of your novel. A writer’s job is to discover which pieces of the story are important.

Why is backstory important?

Backstory is what brings a character to life. Exploring the events in a character’s past yields nuggets of insight that makes them unique and explains why they act the way they do. The deeper a writer delves into the backstory of her characters, the better she can understand makes them tick.

Backstory also provides information on past events and relationships that are critical to understanding the current plot.

The dangers of backstory

Not every detail of a character’s history is relevant to your novel.

It’s tempting to believe our readers are every bit as fascinated with our characters’ backstories as we are. But don’t be fooled. Readers are only interested in what’s gonna happen next. K. M. Weiland in Outlining Your Novel

Backstories can take on a life of their own and lead unwary writers off-track. The goal of inventing a character’s life history is to discover the key events that influence who they have become. Details that have no bearing on the events of the plot should not be allowed to creep in and divert the story in an unhelpful direction.

How to use backstory effectively

There’s a time and place where backstory belongs—and a time and place where is doesn’t. K. M. Weiland

Like other kinds of research, most of the information about character’s past life will not make it into the finished novel. The trick is in knowing how much information to share with the reader and when it will be most effective to share it.

It’s tempting to explain all the important backstory at the beginning of the novel. Resist the urge. Instead, work the important details into the story on an as-needed basis. In other words, don’t explain backstory details until the moment the reader needs to know them to understand what is happening.

That doesn’t mean playing unfair with readers. By providing hints that a character has certain past events that affect how they act, the writer can withhold the details until the moment of greatest impact.

For example, in Kristen Heitzmann’s novel Secrets, she hints early on that protagonist Rese Barret was traumatized by her father’s death, but only gradually reveals the whole story. If Heitzmann had explained the entire backstory at the start readers might feel sympathy toward Rese for a page or two. In contrast, doling out the father’s story in snippets keeps the reader riveted chapter after chapter.

To summarize, backstory is what turns a cardboard character into a vivid and complex person. A wise writer selects only those details that enhance the plot and explain character’s motives and attitudes.  Or, to quote from Outlining Your Novel one last time:

[bctt tweet=”The best backstories are those that influence a story without obstructing it. K. M. Weiland #writers #writetips” username=””]

Categories
Child's Craft

Revealing Your Character’s Character

In her book The Art of Characterization Fay Lamb proposes that writers “use the other elements of storytelling to cast your novel with unforgettable characters.” (page 5) She includes the following in her list of elements: deep point of view, actions, thoughts, experiences and dialogue.

How can I use these elements of storytelling to create complex characters as Lamb suggests?

I’ve been chewing on her suggestions and have customized them a bit for myself.

Lamb tells us to develop or reveal characters first of all by using what she calls Deep Point of View. I must admit I’m always intimidated by the many explanations of point of view. It’s like trying to remember the 50 states and their capital cities 50 years after high school!

Lamb says that Deep Point of View “immerses the reader into the head of the lead character through that character’s actions, reaction, thoughts, experiences and dialogue.” Okay.

Let’s take those elements one at a time.

I can reveal the body and mind, the heart and soul of a character through their ACTIONS. Makes sense. I must SHOW the reader what the character does, and how they do it sometimes, as a means of revealing a bit about that character with each scene.

This is especially true about their reactions, I think. How a character relates to other characters in the story can definitely reveal secrets or truths about them.

Revealing a character through THOUGHTS can be trickier. The most difficult thing for beginners is to resist the urge to have too much introspection or thought life. That slows the pace down and makes readers misinterpret that character’s psyche, I think. For the same reasons I also avoid characters talking aloud to themselves very much.

EXPERIENCES, on the other hand, are the stuff plots are made of. Action, reaction, escapades, accidents. The character going places, doing things, meeting people, learning, loving, hating, fearing and their reactions to these experiences show me bit-by-bit who my character really is, or who they are becoming.

Last on Lamb’s list is dialogue.

DIALOGUE is a fun puzzle to me as a writer. I’m still learning, but I love the game of creating realistic, effective dialogue. Accurate, effective dialogue reveals a character’s culture, era, education, place of origin or residence, profession, personality, age and more. Peppering dialogue with a few clues helps the reader figure out who this character is.

Lastly, in my opinion dialogue must always do double duty. It must move the plot along getting me from one scene to another, AND, it must reveal something about the people who are talking—something about them personally, or about their plans or problems or hopes.

Each conversation may show only tiny specks of these things, but, for me, if a piece of dialogue can’t do both of those things to some degree I eliminate that conversation from my manuscript.

I believe that character drives story. So, it’s only natural that I, as a writer, would follow Lamb’s method of using the elements of storytelling as a vehicle to parade my characters before the readers.

To me one of the clearest books about writing dialogue is Renni Browne’s and Dave King’s Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself into Print. They devote a chapter to writing convincing dialogue and another to writing natural beats. I’ve read the book three times and refer to it often.

“That book’ll help you, I bet,” I said.

“Think so?”

“Yep. Bet you this 1939 genuine copper penny it will!” I flipped it over in my palm to show off the shine.

“Thanks! I’ll just mosey on over to Amazon and order one of those books for myself.”

I gave you a thumbs-up.

And you were gone.

Jean Hall lives in Louisville, Kentucky. She is represented by Cyle Young of Hartline Literary. Her premier picture book series Four Seasons was recently signed by Little Lamb Books. Jean is a member of the SCBWI, Word Weavers International, and the Kentucky Christian Writers. Visit Jean at www.jeanmatthewhall.com, on Facebook at Jean Matthew Hall, and on Twitter as @Jean_Hall.