Wounds matter in life and in fiction. We’ve all been hurt in some way and to some degree. Just goes with being human.

Admitting weakness, failure, mistakes, and flaws isn’t always easy. In fact, it can be downright terrifying for even the ‘strongest’ of us. It’s an especially daunting task in a world that idolizes something none of us will ever be…perfect.

Wounds are part of the human experience. When we understand the nature of wounds, our fiction becomes all the richer just by adding in these layers.

All genres and all stories require wounds. No wound and no story. Even The Little Engine That Could had self-esteem issues and a confidence problem .

Wounds provide friction vital for conflict. No conflict, no story. Conflict turns pages, sells books, and cultivates fans. Remember, last time, we discussed how the market is BEYOND GLUTTED with BAD STORIES? How can we possibly stand out in against millions of titles, when even the ROBOTS are competing?

No one wants literary meatloaf. Boring=DEATH

One tried and true way to stand apart is the ‘No, duh.’ Tell AMAZING stories. We MUST come up higher. Again, no one wants literary meatloaf. This said, one of the BIGGEST weaknesses I see as an editor is writers holding back. You cannot afford to be meh. Definitely not in fiction. Wounds are THE best way to sell a story and cultivate an audience, especially these days.

Which is fine, because we are all feeling a bit damaged lately—writers & readers—so it is wonderful to escape in a story where a) the characters are wounded, too b) we can relate and maybe work through our demons and drama and c) there is resolution (and maybe even a happily-ever after!).

The entire point of stories is a flawed character overcoming some internal issue (damage) in order to triumph over an external problem. It’s why readers read fiction.

Undamaged characters aren’t simply boring, but the audience won’t be able to relate with them. How can we empathize with someone who lacks a past? Who’s never made a mistake, has no regrets, or has lived a charmed and problem-free life?

Short answer? We can’t.

In fact, the more messed up a person (or character) is, often the more interesting they become. Give them a shameful past, enough secrets to stress out Homeland Security, and more skeletons in the closet then a royal family. Audiences LIKE messed up people because they are a) the same but different (usually) b) they are unpredictable c) they inject excitement/drama into the everyday.

Remember Fight Club? When we meet the narrator and MC, he is dull as dirt…until MARLA. Who makes TYLER DURDEN emerge. So even if your character is a Safe Susan or Dull Dave, toss a lunatic character (and their peaceful, quite lives) into a blender then hit HIGH and watch the FUN.

Suffice to say that, today we will talk some about craft, and next time I have some completely new content regarding how to build your platform, identify your readers then connect with them and build a thriving fan base. It is a topic I have kept solely for classes and conferences, so should be fun.

Moving on!

Wounds: Genre Dictates Damage

All this said, the wounds we (writers) create need to fit the genre because genre acts as a guideline for reader expectations. Our goal as authors should be to meet then exceed reader expectations.

Stories are all for the reader or should be, which is why genre constraints can be very helpful for writers.

No one expects a cozy cupcake mystery to explore the nature of evil. Readers who gravitate to this genre are wanting a lighter read and will resent us playing Dostoyevsky.

Conversely, if a reader is in the mood for a story that probes the depths of the human condition, they’re probably not picking up a novel about a cupcake baker who solves local crimes.

Many emerging writers often shy away from damaged characters and use genre as an excuse to avoid the uncomfortable. Big mistake.

A cozy cupcake mystery can give the reader the light entertainment she craves and also offer emotional resonance she needs…without being Crime, Punishment and Cupcakes (though that’s a killer title, LOL).

When we understand wounds better, it helps us cultivate layered characters who’ll make for page-turning stories, regardless of genre. Let’s look at some common sources for wounds.

Pain of Perfect

First, what is perfect? Good question. Humans all across time and in every culture idolize perfect (always have and always will) though what perfect is varies vastly and changes all the time.

Just take a moment to google female beauty standards across the ages and it’s easy to see how, while the world around us might change, people don’t.

We are still ridiculous.

The ancient Incas thought being cross-eyed was super sexy. RAWR. They often fitted infants with a plank between their eyes to artificially create this ‘natural’ beauty for those unlucky enough to be born with ‘normal’ eyes. Ancient Greece was hot for the unibrow.

From ideal body type to what constitutes success to what constitutes normal or abnormal is in constant flux, and is different everywhere. It even varies from household to household depending on culture, and you got it…wounds.

This is where writers can have a lot of fun creating mayhem in fiction.

Wounds: Pain of Falling Short

No matter what genre we write, a character failing to ‘live up to’ some ideal is gold.

Maybe your character has spent a lifetime being measured against the ‘perfect’ older sibling, and struggles with self-esteem. This character might flounder trying to create his/her own distinct identity.

Or flip it.

What if the character happens to be the ‘perfect’ older sibling? This character didn’t ask for family or outsiders to pick on his or her younger sibling for not being as smart, talented, pretty, ambitious, etc.

This character never asked to be the standard unit of measurement to judge another human being. How much guilt might come with that? Think of the pressure or even the fear of being exposed as a ‘fraud’?

Also, we have another ‘person’ who lacks a distinctive identity. While we have two very different ‘people’ both characters are defined in relation to the other.

Outsiders have denied agency to both. It’s amazing how something as simple as birth order can create a wound that drives characters and their decisions (good and bad). And notice how this works no matter the genre. From pulp science fiction to an epic Joe Abercrombie A Little Hatred high fantasy (mixed with a smidge of steampunk), this formula WORKS.

Retell an old story using just this framework as a mental exercise, and you’ll see what I mean.

How does Little Red Riding Hood change if she has an older sister who usually does the deliveries to Grandma? What if the Three Little Pigs are actually embroiled in a desperate war of sibling rivalry? Who are they building the houses to impress? How would Sleeping Beauty feel from the POV of the illegitimate and (TRUE) first daughter of the king, condemned to always be in the shadow of the beautiful, cursed little sister?

Just LOOK at how fun these old worn out stories become with a fresh new spin! Take all those battered, broken parts the world likes to throw away and refashion them into something powerful.

We see this sort of sibling wound explored in everything from The Joy Luck Club (literary fiction) to Game of Thrones (epic high fantasy) to one out of every three Hallmark movies .

Wounds & the Diseased Family Tree

Since we’ve all managed to survive a pandemic, many of us recall what it was like to be trapped in close quarters with loved ones. How we might have even become more hyperaware of old wounds that hadn’t healed at all or had healed improperly.

BOOM!

We touched a bit on family damage a moment ago in regards to ‘perfection.’ Family damage can come in many forms.

Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box does a brilliant job of exploring the ‘anti-goal’ which is a common fruit of the diseased family tree.

Judas Coyne is a famous rockstar, wealthy beyond imagination who has everything (including a lot of emotional baggage). Hate, anger and resentment fueled his incredible success, yet false guilt and profound shame keep him from enjoying any of it. A vengeful ghost determined to destroy him body and soul might be the only thing with the power to liberate Coyne from his emotional bondage.

Sometimes the diseased family tree is not as obvious. Often, parents believe they’re giving their children the best, but are actually deluded about the nature of their motives….

Rich Girl Problems

In The Luckiest Girl Alive, TifAni’s mom is superficial, materialistic, and self-absorbed. Her father is an emotionally absentee ghost who resents his life. Her mother pushes for TifAni to attend an elite prep school to give her daughter all the opportunities she missed (code for ‘marry real money’). Dad doesn’t have the spine to stand up and say ‘no.’

Both parents are too self-centered to realize TifAni in that school is a ticking bomb.

Of course, not every character needs to grow up in Season Ten of The Jerry Springer Show in order to take on some damage. The road to therapy is paved with good intentions.

Parents are human, too.

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty explores how the best of intentions can poison everything.

Life Wounds All

Life has 100% fatality rate. No one gets out alive. Also we’re all going to get hurt somewhere by someone (and hurt others, too). Thing is, life is all…pointy.

If family doesn’t make us bleed, then school, peers, romantic interests, work colleagues, social media, well-meaning editors, book reviews, or plain bad luck will.

I know. I missed my calling writing inspirational cards .

Why am I talking about all this? Because of what we JUST talked about. Writers have more ‘competition’ than any other time in human history. With no gatekeepers, discoverability is a nightmare. There are a gazillion choices for books and most of them (like cable channels) are a waste of what little free time we have.

More is Not Always Better

From movies to television to books, audiences are deluged with tired tropes, boringly predictable plots and characters with the emotional depth of a goldfish. We can see this ‘glut of meh’ as a problem or use it for our advantage.

If we know why readers read, what they want, then we can work hard on what matters.

Readers long for emotional connection and stories that help them deal with pain, ease their pain or maybe even solve/release their pain. They want hope that messed up people overcome big problems in spite of, or perhaps because of, wounds and flaws.

Audiences yearn to believe that, on the other side of their problems, there is joy, peace, true love, freedom, fulfillment, healing, understanding, wholeness!

Wounds are healed and victory sealed. Who doesn’t want more of THAT?

What Are Your Thoughts?

Getting tired of the same old same old? From Hollywood to books it feels like it’s just the same stuff over and over. I get giddy when I discover something truly excellent. Some of my best therapy and a-ha moments have come from fiction.

What about you?

I love hearing from you!

What are your thoughts? We need to write the stories that change the world because, if one looks back? That’s what writers do. The world is ailing and our stories provide the medicine, if not the cure.

Global politics, the economy, work, one crisis after another! The world needs an escape. WE NEED AN ESCAPE. So can you think of ways to put that imagination to use in ways that will help those Normies out there cracking up?

What are some ways that you can reimagine wounds? Have you had to narrow of a definition? Are there some ways you can think of to delve deeper than the surface? Who are some of your favorite wounded characters from the page and/or the screen?

The post Wounds & Characters: The Damaged REBORN! appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Evil fascinates us, and has since the dawn of human consciousness. I continually emphasize that humans are story creatures, which is good news for writers, since we’re in the story business.

Though not all stories face off evil directly, all stories must include conflict to be considered a story. Conflict isn’t, per se, evil, but great storytellers paint with words and black is only the farthest extreme. Some stories might demand a LOT of black, but others will likely run along the spectrum of “evil.”

No, the department’s budget cuts that force your MC (Main Character) to lay off twenty hardworking people she cares about isn’t, per se, evil at work, but maybe it is. For your MC? It sure feels close to it in the moment. Especially when the cowards higher up force her to wield the ax hand out the pink slips…a week before Christmas.

***Quick question. Does anyone know what jerk made the official note you have NO JOB…pink? I could google it but I bet y’all have WAY better “answers” (place in comments, please) #PlotBunnyAlert.

Moving on…

Writers Must Embrace “Evil”

No, I don’t mean sacrificing your kid’s Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups that you took as a Halloween “Candy Tax” to the Dark Lord to become best-selling authors. I mean that one of the reasons writers freak out ‘normal people’ is guess what, Kiddies?

Y’all ain’t normal.

Sorry. Maybe I should have led into that. Prepped y’all better. Eased you into it.

Alas, sadly (or awesomely) The Normal Ship sailed away long ago while we were all looking at new journals many of us will never write in #TooPretty.

Now that we’ve settled that you’re not normal, it’s okay because normal is highly overrated and frankly doesn’t exist…aside from being a setting on the dryer.

BUT, just because y’all might be ‘Abby Normal,’ doesn’t mean you (we) don’t need to grow *stern face* .

Why authors, particularly really amazing authors, fascinate regular people is that they have the capacity to torture their characters.

In fact, the mere existence of SO MUCH angst, drama, upheaval, and inner and outer turmoil in REAL life is precisely WHY audiences love to read the same stuff in amplified form in books or watch it in movies or television series.

Authors like J.K. Rowling, George R.R. Martin, J.D. Robb, Isaac Asimov and other legends (too many to name) have learned not to pull any punches and to keep going for the T.K.O. until the bitter end.

“Evil” Lite

I’m not picking on anyone in particular, because I did the same thing when I was a new writer. Ironically, the very quality we absolutely must possess ‘to DO’ our craft can be actually be our undoing.

We LOVE…words. Often, too much.

In my early attempts at writing stories, everything was amazing, each detail finely and intricately crafted down to the tiniest detail. The problem, however? Everything was awesome.

*hums song from The Lego Movie*

I wrote ‘scenes’ of lazy days in bookstores, fun-filled shopping sprees, dancing in Paris, traveling The Med, on and on. I used words to paint worlds I never could visit in real life, and never wanted to leave. That, however, was not fiction.

Much to my dismay.

Fiction, is an escape…but in a very different way. It isn’t a cruise ship, it’s catharsis. When we strip away all the evil, take away the troubles, flaws, trauma, setbacks, and dirty deeds done dirt cheap, we’re handing our readers a shill.

Or a shell. There’s no STORY.

“Evil” is Essential

See, the entire POINT of story is there is a lot of crap in life we struggle with. Life is messy, chaotic, unfair, unjust, cruel, and sometimes downright terrifying.

We see evil in all its many shades wending through our lives, the lives of others, and often we feel powerless and hopeless. Life is wonderful and precious and beautiful, but those attributes can only be fully experienced when cast against the backdrop of loss, frailty, hardship, pain, and suffering.

The point of all this isn’t to depress you, dear writer, rather it is to clarify your mission. There are hurting people out there living in a world where the rules are patently unfair. STORIES, however, allow them an escape where the rules work in their favor for a change.

Even those stories where everything isn’t neatly wrapped up with a bow at the end, the story itself brings order to chaos, which offers the tormented soul a respite.

Good stories make us think, talk, question, examine, and reexamine not because the writer wrote a glorious description of a moonlit night, but because the writer posed questions not easily answered.

For instance, Josh Malerman’s Bird Box, is a terrifying story just by genre. I’ll grant that.

Beautifully written novel. Yet, what grabbed me more than the prose was the story, the people and how they all reacted so differently to the same problem. What still staggers me is how many questions this story engendered, questions that I can’t easily answer.

Exactly what were people seeing that made them react that way? Were the crazy people really immune or simply crazy? If my survival rested on moving silently without use of my primary sense (sight), could I?

*crinkles bag of chips while pondering*

Nope. Strong nope there. Okay, ONE easy answer.

Chaos & Clarity

This blog covers many genres and forms of writing. Maybe you aren’t writing horror, dystopian, thriller, or science fiction. It doesn’t matter. Think about some of the most successful ‘book empires,’ for lack of a better term.

Debbie Macomber has written more books than I care to count. Her Cedar Cove series was adapted into a television series of the same name. No serial killers, doomed spirits, warlords, exorcisms, or fallen gods visiting Earth through a rip in space-time.

Nope.

Just humans, doing very human things, making very human choices/mistakes and having very human flaws and failings.

But why was a series like Cedar Cove so incredibly popular? Because, first of all, her world became a character (that’s for another post). Also?

She was brave enough to be honest.

Granted, my personal preferences are far more gritty (which is likely why I probably creep people out WAY more than a meeting with the lovely Debbie Macomber).

But, the first book in the Cedar Cove series, 16 Lighthouse Road, is about a woman who falls in love with a Navy submariner just after New Year’s Eve, gets pregnant, then complicates her life even further by marrying him. Complicates, as in she’s ill-prepared for the nomadic and lonely aspects of military life.

While her husband is at sea, their daughter is born premature and with a heart issue. Celia is forced to make life-and-death decisions by herself. Then, her daughter dies and Celia must bury her baby alone. Her mother tried to be there, but a storm delayed her flight. And her father? He’s is emotionally unavailable, and only good for a hastily written sympathy card, and little more.

Though Celia had sent message after message to her husband, Ian, about the problems with their infant, she never received a single reply. Her husband was on a nuclear sub under the polar ice caps at the time. The Navy limited all messages to 50-word “family grams.”

To make matters worse, Ian’s commanding officer decided to withhold the messages until he completed his ten-week tour. Not that it mattered much. Even if he’d known, what could he have done? Or said?

By the time her husband returns, he’s a wreck, but no explanations or apologies are enough.

She wants out. The only answer is divorce.

Or is it?

“Evil” Has Layers and Hues

The reason books like those in the Cedar Cove series resonate is they are LIFE in distillate. All of us (whether we read this genre or not) can relate to some aspect of all the story contains. Sometimes life hands us a no-win situation. We might not make a bad choice, only choose the least crappy of all way crappier choices.

We understand anger, rash decisions, disease, death, heartbreak, others who fail us when we need them most, or even judging people too harshly because we’re trapped in our own shame and guilt.

When people think “EVIL” or even about “CONFLICT” they immediately conjure spy movies, thrillers, horror or dystopian, but didn’t your guts just twist with that little bit of description of a HALLMARK STORY? Did anyone do anything particularly evil or even WRONG? Yet what a MESS! How many of us understand messes like these all too well?

So I ask you. When it comes to storytelling, how many of us are holding back?

We fashion our worlds or characters as if they’re blown glass, when they shouldn’t be.

Blown glass characters are good for sitting on a shelf…much like boring, unread books.

Characters and stories worth reading (and then worth reading again and again) are forged in the fires and furnaces of literal or personal HELL. They are pounded, forged, hammered, reshaped, tossed back into the forge again and again until they finally emerge as something magnificent.

Bad Decisions Make Great Fiction

Villains are incredibly interesting characters, though not exactly the same as what I call the Big Boss Troublemaker (core antagonist). Not all stories have villains, but all stories must have a core antagonist that creates the main problem in need of resolution by Act Three.

Yet, though the antagonist creates the problem, it’s actually the MC and his/her allies who generate a lot of the page-turning tension. It’s their human failings, weaknesses and bad or at least less-than-perfect decisions that make the story interesting.

Readers love stories for many reasons. It’s comforting to know that even people who make dumb (or horrible) decisions can turn out to be heroes. We like to know we’re not alone, and stories allow us to experience emotions in a sort of ‘safe space’ through imaginary people in a made up world.

They give us tools to handle life and see it through many different lenses to enjoy it more fully. We forgive ourselves or others, feel empathy, compassion, see life through perspectives other than our own. All this makes us more fully…human.

Stories aren’t there to offer spa music, unobstructed vistas, massage chairs and endless buffets of treats.

That’s an oasis, not an odyssey.

In the end, be bold! Forget blown glass worlds, blown glass stories peopled with blown glass figurines. They’re pretty to behold, but can’t withstand pressure required to deliver a heart-pounding story guaranteed to keep readers up way past bedtime wanting to know how it all works out.

A Little More “Evil“

Here are some other posts that might help you on this topic that I’ve pulled from the archives.

The Brain Behind the Story: The Big Boss Troublemaker (BBT)

The Evil Has Landed: Villains Could Be Much Like You…or Even Me

Bring on the BINGE! Creating Villains Audiences Can’t Get Enough Of

How to Create Legendary Villains

Enemy Without a Face: When Dealing With a Different Sort of ‘Villain’

I hope this all helps you guys with your writing journey!

What Are Your Thoughts? I LOVE Hearing From You!

And I am NOT googling who made pink slips pink. Though I am TOTALLY open for the best conspiracy theories in the comments! The wilder and weirder the better. Come on, we all need a good laugh right now.

Did this help clarify what might be missing in your writing? Are you coddling your characters too much? Maybe being too heavy handed with BLACK instead of layering in some pearl grays here and there? Can you see areas where you might be able to make your characters work that much harder?

We (readers) LOVE that! Who wants to watch any sports match where the score is like 120 to ZIP? BORING! We want characters (heroes) to suffer! To work for it! Yes, we will scream and shout and call you names, but we’ll love you in the end after we forgive you for keeping us up until 4:00 a.m. #PinkiePromise

So let’s chat!

The post EVIL: Our Love-Hate Relationship With Mischief, Mayhem & Destruction appeared first on Kristen Lamb.