Stakes, bizarrely enough, are a key ingredient missing in many stories. If the characters don’t have skin in the game, why would the audience? The bigger the stakes the better the page turner. Whether on the page or on the screen, what keeps audiences enraptured the most? What makes us spend an entire weekend inhaling a book, a series, or binging that Netflix series?

We want to have to know…what happens.

How does the MC react to a certain problem? Can they recover? Do they win? At what cost? Ultimately, we have to know how it all turns out.

That is the beauty of stories and why we humans love them so much. Real life has stakes but little to no assurances that everything will work out for the better.

Life has plenty of stakes but little to no closure. It is no coincidence that one of the first “matchmaking” sites on the internet was Classmates.com. So many of us, new to the shiny internet, finally had a way of looking up people we once went to school with to see what happened.

Did the Homecoming Court really go on and lead the same charmed life they seemed to enjoy in high school? What about the bully? The smart kid? How about that crush we never quite had the courage to talk to? Did we miss out on a gem or dodge a bullet?

Stakes are the fuel that fires our need for closure. This is critical for any story. Read a book to a five-year-old and try to stop halfway through. Even kids won’t let us off easy. Because of the rising stakes, they’ll want to know, “How does it end?”

Stakes and Structure

Last post, we discussed agency and we took an aerial tour of plot structure. We toured all the major sections of plot, what they do, and how one section should feed into the next.

Now before you guys get the vapors and think I’m boxing you into some rigid format that will ruin your creativity, nothing could be further from the truth.

Plot (storytelling) is about elements, those things that go into the mix of making a good story even better.

Structure is about timing—where in the mix those elements go.

When you read a novel that isn’t quite grabbing you, the reason is probably structure. Even though it may have good characters, snappy dialogue, and intriguing settings, the story isn’t unfolding in the optimum fashion. ~James Scott Bell from Plot and Structure.

Structure holds stories together and helps them make sense and flow in such a way so as to maximize the emotional impact by the end of the tale. How we keep ratcheting emotions is we layer on higher and higher stakes.

If structure is the recipe for a fine meal, the stakes are how, and when we apply the heat. We can buy all the fanciest ingredients for a French meal. Have all the expensive doo-dads. We can measure out every ingredient to the milligram but what happens if we never turn on the heat? Or, conversely, we cook everything on the highest heat possible?

While we DO need to look at how to add the ingredients, timing how we heat the story makes the difference between a masterpiece and a mess.

The Micro-Scale of Story Structure

We’re going to first ZOOM IN and place the novel under a literary electron microscope.

The most fundamental basics of a novel are cause and effect. Super basic. An entire novel can be broken down into cause-effect-cause-effect-cause-effect (yes, even literary works). All effects must have a cause and all causes eventually must have an effect (or a good explanation).

I know that in life random things happen and people die for no reason. While life often IS stranger than fiction, fiction ain’t life.

So if a character drops dead from a massive heart attack, that seed needs to be planted ahead of time.

Villains don’t just have their heart explode because we need them to die so we can end our book. Our MC can’t suddenly discover a journal that EXPLAINS EVERYTHING in the middle of Act Two because we failed to properly plot an actual story and painted ourselves in a literary corner.

Now, all these little causes and effects clump together to form the next two building blocks we’ll discuss—the scene & the sequel (per Jack Bickham’s Scene & Structure). Many times these will clump together to form your ‘chapters.’

Whenever I edit or teach writing, I have a mantra: “Never leave a logical place to put a bookmark.”

Scene & Sequel & Stakes

Word order matters, or we end up with confusion.

Structure’s two main components, as I said earlier, are the scene and the sequel.

The scene is a fundamental building block of fiction. It is physical. Something tangible is happening. The scene has three parts (again per Jack Bickham’s Scene & Structure, which I recommend every writer buy and read and study).

• Statement of the goal
• Introduction and development of conflict
• Failure of the character to reach his goal, a tactical disaster (raise the stakes)

Goal –> Conflict –> Disaster

The sequel is the other fundamental building block and is the emotional thread. The sequel often begins at the end of a scene when the viewpoint character has to process the unanticipated but logical disaster that happened at the end of your scene.

Emotion–> Thought–> Decision–> Action

Link scenes and sequels together and flesh over a narrative structure and you will have a novel readers will enjoy.

Oh but Kristen you are hedging me in to this formulaic writing and I want to be creative.

Understanding structure is not formulaic writing. It is a story delivery system that makes sense on a fundamental level.

Formulaic writing refers to the execution of story structure. It’s a reflection of skill, or rather, lack thereof. So relax, structure is your friend. It will make writing and finishing books easier, and it comes with the added bonus of not confusing the bejeezus out of the readers.

This little recipe also helps us slowly (and later quickly) turn up the heat on our characters.

Skin in the Game

One of the biggest mistakes I see, particularly with new writers, is we can be too nice. There is a good reason normal people (code for “readers”) eye us writers with a deserved degree of suspicion. It takes a certain level of sadism to write great stories. When any mere boring mortal would want to back away from pressure or explain away a problem, we writers must plunge ahead and let the characters and (by proxy) the readers suffer.

The more they suffer, the better.

Why do you think A Game of Thrones was such a worldwide phenomenon? Huge, huge stakes! Global and personal. We, the audience, learned pretty quickly not to get too attached to any one character because they were likely to not only die, but die horribly.

So long as the HBO writers stuck with that recipe, global audiences couldn’t get enough. The minute they rushed the story, broke the rules and took away the stakes? The series imploded into a disaster.

Refer to post: A Game of Thrones: A Song of ‘I Literally Can’t Even’

A major reason the HBO series devolved into disaster is they’d done an incredible job of raising global and personal stakes. Stakes drove audiences to forgive major delays in later seasons. We were all biting our nails to the quick, our nerves shredded…then the characters all got a magical pass.

Spoiler Alert: Ice Zombies no big deal and winter never came.

How Vested are Your Characters?

When we craft any story, we must ask ourselves, “What do they have to lose?”

I love pretty prose probably far more than the next person, but using cerulean instead of blue is not what makes audiences care. We aren’t there for the wordsmithery, yet it is very easy for us writers to fixate on a new way of saying green instead of focusing on the bits that matter.

If you go look at most of the authors who are guaranteed to sell a lot of books, usually the prose is fairly plain. These authors understand it is the story that matters most. Stakes are what will stake our reader in place and refuse to let them go until THE END.

Thus, ask yourself:

What happens if my MC fails?

Who suffers if my MC fails?

How does their world change for the worse if the MC fails?

If nothing changes, we are missing a key ingredient to our story. As the story progresses, the challenges will get harder physically and emotionally. Our characters need a compelling reason to keep going.

Upping the Stakes

Going back to my recipe metaphor, there is a time and place to up the stakes and to back off a bit.

Have you ever been to an action movie that was just fight scene after chase scene after fight scene? You never got a chance to take a breath and walked away needing a nap…or a drink?

Here is an instance of the writers either making the sequels too short in duration or not having enough overall. The sequel is the breather where the characters process and act/react to what’s happening. If our sequels are missing or underdeveloped, this can make our characters come across as one-dimensional.

Audiences don’t care deeply about those kinds of characters.

Then we have the opposite. Sometimes filmmakers try to take stories that are excellent on the page—because audiences have the window into what the characters are thinking via the narrative—and put it on film.

Problem is, you have to cast really, and I mean really superlative actors to pull it off…and even then *yawns*

These are frequently the artsy films that seem to never take off. All the stakes are internal, existential and…meta. While critics might love them, usually these films are a flop with regular audiences.

In fact, any time I see the phrase “a visual masterpiece” I know the movie is likely to suck.

Do both these “genres” have a fan base? Sure.

There will always be people who will go to the next Mission Impossible move just like there will always be folks, pinkies outstretched, who loooove anything at Cannes. Yet, those are the fringes and, if we want to reach the biggest audience, the fat middle part of the bell curve is a better bet.

The Goldilocks Zone

When it comes to most genre fiction, we should look to the scenes and sequels for cues as to where, how and how much to raise or lower the stakes.

If we go back to our example last week with LOTR (Lord of the Rings). When Frodo and Samwise set off from the Shire WE the audience know they are eventually going to have to destroy the ring in Mount Doom…but they don’t. Had Tolkien started off with that, Gandalf would never have pried the Hobbits from under the bed.

On each leg of the adventure, there is a resting period and then Tolkien ups the heat. He makes the invading armies closer than they realized, bigger than they imagined, and he progressively shortens the ticking clock.

What if we aren’t writing epic high fantasy?

Genre and Stakes

I have a post where y’all can go check out the different genres. We need to know what genre we are writing so we know what the rules are. And yes, we need to follow the rules. We need to know the rules to break the rules. That is art. Breaking rules we don’t know is just called being a hack.

If I am writing a mystery, then I know my story needs to open with a crime and that the entire point of the story is figuring out whodunit (And Then There Were None). Writing a thriller? A big bad thing happens at the beginning…and it is a race against time to stop way bigger bad thing from happening (Jurassic Park).

On and on. Look at your story’s genre and see what the reader expectations are…then feel free to break rules to deliver what they wanted but never expected in that way (Gone Girl).

Stake Sizzlers

What are some ways we can organically up the stakes in our story? Remember to Be a Secret Keeper. Resist the urge to explain. Audiences, in large part, are hanging on because they want to find OUT some piece of information. This is why flashbacks, by and large, are a no-no.

If we know WHY Eric Northman (in True Blood) is dark and brooding the first time we see him, it kills the thrill. Yes he is a vampire and they are a notoriously emo bunch, but why is he uniquely emo? Unlike (IMO the tedious Bill Compton) Eric Northman was far more interesting because we didn’t get all this backstory right out of the gate.

He remained a mystery longer, which was why I felt he was a far more powerful driver for the series.

Hold off on self-actualization. Characters who are too sane, too evolved and too emotionally healthy are a fiction snooze fest. The trick is that they are likely to believe they have their sh!t together…when that is far from the case. OR, if they know they’re a mess, they will vastly underrate their faults, over magnify their virtues or completely miss what their issues are altogether.

The story then, should be designed to peel away their self-delusion and make them face their darkness so they can change for the better.

The MC must be sympathetic and redeemable. Before anyone shouts me down, I get this has a lot of latitude. Antiheroes and anti villains are becoming increasingly popular. That said, there are certain lines we cannot cross with most audiences. Feel free to join in the thirteen-year-long argument on my post What Went Wrong with the Star Wars Prequels?

Anakin Skywalker is a little kid killer. Never redeemable. Ever. The end.

What are your thoughts?

Do you struggle with being too nice to your characters? I know I still do. Often I have to go back and write in some mess ups to keep the tension going. Are you bad about over sharing? Over explaining? Can you see some tricks in here to keep audiences wanting more?

I love hearing from you! Anything you’d like to add? Maybe books, series or movies that handled stakes really well? Do you have any questions? Topics you’d like for me to explore in future blogs?

And remember, my perennial author branding book, Rise of the Machines: Human Authors in a Digital World and my mystery thriller The Devil’s Dance are both on sale on Kindle right now for only .99.

Whether it is comments, shares, sales, or reviews, these are the things that keep us content producers (and authors) going and able to keep delivering. I always appreciate your support and love being able to keep doing this for you!

The post Stakes: How to Hook an Audience All the Way to THE END appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Agency means a condition of being in action, instrumental, or possessing some kind of power. It can incorporate not only making decisions, but the belief that we (or our characters) have choice. If we think about it, if there aren’t options, then by default, our characters have no power and are not making any decisions. They are the flotsam and jetsam being flung along by the currents of Fate.

Code for “boring.”

I’ve been editing fiction for over twenty years, and one of the biggest problems I see with new writers is that the “story” is really just a series of bad things happening. There is no agency. The character is totally reactive. To a degree, this is fine in the opening salvos of the story.

To a degree.

If we parse apart novel structure, what we will see (especially with good stories) is that there is a steady progression of agency that flows in tandem with rising pushback, higher stakes, and a steadily compressed ticking clock.

My favorite writing instructor for plot is Larry Brooks. His “How To” Story Engineering, for me, was a game changer. For years I knew how to edit a plot, but when I sat down to write, everything just sort of fell apart. I’d read craft books or take classes and, what seemed so simple and doable, always turned to utter mush roughly 25,000 to 30,000 words in.

Many of you might know what I am talking about.

You come up with a BRILLIANT story idea and begin writing. The first 10,000 words are amazing! The words flow and you write until you think your hands might fall off.

By about 15,000 to 20,000 you begin losing steam.

After 28,000 to 30,000 it starts feeling like it might be easier to do brain surgery from space…with an egg beater. #KillMeNow

Why is that?

Structure and Agency

I love, love, love the way Larry teaches us how to think about plot (and recommend the book, obviously). He gave me a simple way of thinking about all my stories in a way that keeps me always moving forward.

Additionally, if I do get stuck, I can quickly diagnose WHY and where and how I am going wrong.

I prefer to think of story in five acts (just an expansion of Aristotelian three-act structure).

The opening is Normal World. This is usually pretty short, especially in our modern age where audiences have the attention span of a crack addicted fruit fly…that also happens to have severe ADD.

Yet, Normal World is CRITICAL. This is where we (the audience) will meet the protagonist we are supposed to care about enough to dedicate time, money and attention we don’t have for an average of 12-15 hours. It is also where we get an idea of the problem this character will have to face and overcome to be rightfully called a hero.

In the LOTR (Lord of the Rings), we begin in the Shire. Why? Because we have to actually care about the Hobbits and the Shire. We cannot be vested in a people and place we don’t know.

The inciting incident, introduces the core story problem. If there is no hint that Sauron is alive and well and living in Beverly Hills Mount Doom, there really is no point to us even meeting Gandalf and the Hobbits. But keep in mind, no decision has yet been made.

When Gandalf sticks a ring Frodo inherits into the fire, he only believes the ring possibly maybe might be THE RING. For Frodo and Samwise, the adventure has not yet begun.

In Normal World, the character will have very little to no agency…until…

Turning Point to Act One: Agency Sparked

The inciting incident reveals a fork in the road. This is where the MC’s life bifurcates. One road leads to retaining the status quo. The other road leads to adventure.

Yet, the character must choose of their own free will to set out on adventure.

Events cannot simply fling them ahead. Granted, they will be signing up for far more than they can handle, but (at the time) they don’t know that. They also need to have some vague idea of what the adventure entails. To toss characters out into the world and push them from point to point is NOT dramatic tension.

It’s soap opera writing.

Which is fine for fan fiction (episodic writing), but not great for novels, novellas, short stories or screenplays.

When Frodo and Samwise leave the Shire, their goal is NOT to destroy the Ring of Power in Mount Doom. It is far simpler. It is simply to meet Gandalf at The Prancing Pony. While scary and out of the comfort zone, it is (to them) still doable. Additionally, they know the adventure is in some way tethered to a ring dangerous enough to even scare the great Gandalf the Grey.

Act One: Running

In Act One, our MC will be largely reactive. They don’t yet believe they have agency, though they still must exercise it for a good story.

For instance, Gandalf doesn’t force Frodo and Samwise to meet him. They agree to leave the safety of the Shire.

Additionally, it isn’t Frodo and Samwise’s fault they miss Gandalf at the rendezvous point. However, they must choose to trust Strider. They have to choose to either stay at The Prancing Pony (or return after the Black Riders have left and hide) OR to follow a stranger they don’t know into the wild.

We authors must always provide opportunities where, if the character(s) makes a decision, one decision pushes the narrative forward and the other ends the story.

What Does this Look Like?

For instance, in the movie Labyrinth, we meet Sarah faffing off in a park in costume reciting lines from a play. In Normal World, Sarah is flaky, entitled, immature (but also clearly hurting).

The inciting incident is when she discovers her missing teddy bear and decides to be emotional and take her out anger on her infant brother. She chooses to recite the call to the Goblin King to take her baby brother.

Granted, she has zero clue it will work, BUT when it does work and David Bowie materializes—looking far too sexy for a grown ass man in makeup and big hair—and offers her a chance to have all her dreams…the story truly begins.

One decision lets him rule her, give her all she ever desires…if she only turns over her baby brother. The other decision is to race against the clock and see if she can rescue her brother from the center of the labyrinth.

Obviously, if she gives up baby brother, the story ends. And an entire generation of preteen girls, myself included, took 25 years to work out why she didn’t grab the deal.

Quick Note on Labyrinth

Movies can be a lot of fun to study, especially good ones. If you haven’t seen Labyrinth or have slept since then, I recommend going back and watching. I learn something new every time. In fact, the last time I watched it I learned a whole new level I’d missed, but had been there all along.

Roll with this and indulge me, it’s actually cool/important.

Sarah arrives late to babysit her brother. We (the audience) are somewhat misled. The stepmother points out exactly what Sarah’s problem is. Sarah is stuck and not growing up normally. The stepmother tells Sarah that she can say if she has plans, that they want her to have plans and she should have her own plans, but Sarah balks. She treats her like the evil stepmother out of a storybook no matter what she says.

Dad backs up stepmother. This event is what drives Sarah into a temper tantrum.

But pay attention.

Dad is obviously remarried and remarried long enough to have an 18 month old baby. One would assume, given the times, that Dad and Stepmother had dated and married before the 9-10 months to have the brother. This means a minimum of 2.5 to as much as 3 or more years has passed since Sarah’s mother was in the picture.

My entire life, I assumed Mom had died, since Hollywood loved killing off parents. Watch the introduction when she is in her room. Played at normal speed, we see playbills with the mother and even with Sarah.

Okay, so mom was an actress and daughter is a theater nerd following in mom’s footsteps.

Or is she?

Now PAUSE the MOVIE

Now, go back and rewatch and hit PAUSE. If you do this, the entire story changes. Pay attention to the newspaper clippings taped in her vanity mirror, the clippings that at normal speed I’d assumed were likely an obituary or newspaper articles about a famous but now dead mother.

Whose face do you see?

JARETH, the Goblin King.

In among the articles and scrapbook clippings a whole new story emerges.

Jareth looks just like the mother’s costar. What now seems far more likely is the mother ran off with another man and abandoned her daughter at roughly age 12-13…exactly the time she should have started transitioning into adulthood.

This is a whole other level of emotional damage.

It now makes perfect sense why Sarah is emotionally moored in childhood. Additionally, a sparkly, charismatic man offering to take care of her if she sacrifices a child in her care, has a whole new twist.

If great movies understand the power of Normal World, we should too. Every story should introduce the Big Boss Troublemaker right from the start.

In Labyrinth we get this in the park where she’s reciting the final lines to take down the Goblin King. BUT, we ALSO see him again in her bedroom in the moments before she recites the incantation that sets off all events from there.

Act One: REACTIVE

Once our MC decides to step out on adventure, sure, there will be a lot they cannot control. Yet, they still must have agency, meaning options.

New writers can be very bad about making the MC far too passive. They have no other choice but to do X, Y, Z. This is author intrusion.

Now, I am not suggesting to make the options silly. The Hobbits aren’t choosing between trusting Strider and certain death. They could circle back to the inn for shelter or decide to hide in the woods and wait it out for Gandalf. The choices might suck, but they are at least doable.

Agency is limited in Act One because not only should we have a plot arc, but a character arc. If characters are too perfect and can handle everything the story throws their way with dignity and aplomb? That is a snooze fest.

There has to be something emotionally undeveloped that must change by the end of the story.

For the Hobbits, they believe their happiness and fulfillment lies in adventure, in anywhere BUT the Shire. The very place they despise for being boring will be the one place they’ll (eventually) be willing to sacrifice their lives to save from certain destruction.

For Sarah, she’s stuck in nostalgia and is refusing to evolve. Again, when she steps into the magical realm, who does she meet? Hoggle. Again, Hoggle tells her what her problem is, but she is not yet matured enough to appreciate the advice. He tells her, “You take too much for granted.”

Taking things for granted is a hallmark of childhood. It is, in fact, a mark of ZERO AGENCY.

Act Two: Warrior

Act One is relatively short. How do we spot the turning point to Act Two? This is when the MC shifts from running to fighting. In Act One, circumstances bigger than them are beating the hell out of them. They fight back but are really hitting in the dark. They are unaware of what the larger story problem is and probably still unaware of their character flaws that are holding them back.

Act Two is when some sort of event or information changes the MC’s perspective and their level of agency. They go to being a mix of reactive and increasingly proactive.

When the Hobbits take refuge with the elves, Gandalf confirms that Sauron is back and there is only way to stop him. At this point, the Hobbits still can go BACK to the Shire. Rather, they willingly decide to keep going. Frodo will bear the Ring and Samwise will act as a helper/bodyguard.

In Labyrinth, Sarah is stuck in an oubliette (a small prison cell). The adventure has effectively ended. Hoggle comes to her aid and is happy to lead her back home and out of the labyrinth. If she goes home, story over. Yet, we are in Act Two. Sarah bribes Hoggle to help her solve the labyrinth.

She has effectively taken on a new level of agency.

Act Two will be the longest act. Again, I recommend Story Engineering. Larry has some great diagrams and formulas and examples. But, in Act Two, the thing we must remember is our characters must have increasing levels of agency.

NO CHEATING!

Maybe your character is far too perfect. Or the opposite. They don’t have any of the right answers…they are just luckier than a leprechaun dressed in a coat made of rabbit’s feet.

Bad thing happens—Oh no what will we do?—then some existing character or new character rescues them out of the mess at zero cost and with no effort from them.

NO.

This is the part of the book where many new writers decide to leave a convenient journal, video, have a new character appear with all the abilities and answers. NO.

Y’all might know I love horror (supernatural type books), and I read…a lot. Recently, I listened to a book with a premise that had a lot of promise. I couldn’t finish it.

The characters had no agency. Instead of them actively having to find answers to why crazy/life-threatening stuff was happening in their basement, the author used a crap ton of seriously convenient “dream sequences” that served as flashbacks to spoon feed vital details.

NO.

Flashbacks are a sign of weak/lazy writing.

Before anyone argues with me, check out Why Flashbacks Ruin Fiction and Time as a Literary Device. Can we mess with time? Sure! I love doing that. But like all things in writing, the rules exist for a reason. There is a certain WAY to go about using time.

Tossing in hidden boxes of journals or videos slipping in dream sequences absolves the characters of responsibility. In short, it takes away agency. Handing characters the answers all-but-spelled-out is cheating.

Bright Idea Fairies and Agency

Since Act Two IS so long, you’ll have what are called “pinch points.” This marks how our character is not only progressing along via plot, but how they are emotionally maturing. Since they are not yet fully evolved, they’ll try to rely on their old ways of thinking. They haven’t yet come to understand that their old habits/worldview etc. is precisely part of the problem.

Which is why, as they are trying to solve the core story problem, they will have what I call “bright idea fairies.”

Usually the “bright idea fairy” will be in some way related to the character flaw. If your MC is a workaholic who needs to appreciate life and family, expect them to orchestrate events where they can have BOTH (Inviting the wife and kids to a company event).

Maybe your MC is a fighter. Their instinct will be to fight. If they hide and avoid, they’ll look for better ways to hide and avoid. If they’re a control freak, they’ll keep white-knuckling and refuse to trust others and delegate.

In Labyrinth, Sarah is taking on increasing levels of responsibility, but not enough. She is still far too reliant on her allies.

Bright Idea Fairies (BIFs) are directly responsible for the False Victory and, by default, the Darkest Moment.

The False Victory is the Big Boss BIF, the brightest of the Bright Idea Fairies. It is the last event that should prove to our MC they must make those final changes that transform them from a lowly MC (protagonist) into a hero.

The Darkest Moment is where everything has failed and the protagonist is dumped unceremoniously at the final crossroad. One road leads home (and to failure), the other plunges ahead into certain death (or at least implied certain death).

Agency Unleashed: Act Three HERO

After the darkest moment, we usually see the rally of the allies. Once everything has been stripped away, what matters is restored. HOWEVER. The difference here is that the hero finally understands they must go it alone. Only ONE character can take on the Big Boss Troublemaker.

***Or two if this is a Buddy Love structure like LOTR or a romance. Yet, the two have effectively become one. In romance, guy and gal must come together if they hope to be victorious. Yes, they can spend the entire book driving each other bonkers BUT they must come together like VOLTRON in order to win.

This is the climax of the story. The odds should be total sh!t. In fact, the worse the odds, the better the story. That and time should be almost out. If the MC fails, super bad things need to happen or we will not care.

These can be large-scale catastrophic implications. Sauron rules Middle Earth and destroys all Frodo and Samwise hold dear, OR personal catastrophic implications. Sarah loses her little brother forever.

By Act Three, your character has ditched the old self and is now battling the BBT (Big Boss Troublemaker) on new terms. Frodo and Samwise willingly accept a suicide mission to protect the Shire.

Sarah goes in to face Jareth on her own. How does she win? She claims her AGENCY.

“You have no power over me.”

Once she finally realizes that Jareth only has as much power as she has been willing to relinquish, he loses his hold over her.

The Denoument: Agency Realized

After the battle is won, the world might be in shambles but everything has changed for the better. Yes, the end of every Marvel movie means some big city is reduced to rubble, but the greater threat has been neutralized.

At the end of LOTR, we see an interesting bookending in the movie.

In the beginning, the Hobbits (mistakenly) believe adventure outside of the Shire is the key to personal fulfillment. They are naive and childlike which is largely why Sauron never offered them jewelry.

He underestimated that the very qualities that nearly get them killed (frying bacon on a mountain with dead kings on their trail) is also what makes them remarkably resilient to the sway of the Ring (and arguably the only reason they succeed when all other races have failed).

Yet, there is a cost.

Unlike the opening in Normal World, our heroes aren’t bouncing along getting into mischief. They sit, somber and broken at a table, forever changed. Their fellow Hobbits laugh and drink and joke in the background, oblivious to the sacrifice these Hobbits made to make that a reality.

They have learned that self-serving adventure is not the secret to happiness, rather sacrificial love is the key to joy.

The book is vastly different than the movies. In the book, the Shire does not survive in tact.

It is razed, and the Hobbits killed or enslaved. Life is no longer beautiful and innocent. Those in the Shire live in fear and are barely surviving.

Our band of heroes return expecting a hero’s welcome only to come to the horrible realization the battle is far from over. The biggest fight is yet to come. They must liberate the Hobbits and rebuild what remains of their home.

That said, while everything they knew and took for granted is obliterated, they can finally rebuild in a world that is no longer under constant threat.

Unlike the other Hobbits who have bowed down to their oppressors, Frodo, Samwise, Merry and Pippin pass on their lessons and show their fellow Hobbits they have more power than they know.

Using Agency in Our Writing

The key thing to remember about agency is that our character must always be actively involved in the decision making process. They can and WILL make a lot of bad decisions. Yet, over time, as they mature, these decisions will vastly improve.

I use this when I am writing. It doesn’t matter if we are a plotter who loves outlines or a pantser (write by the seat of our pants). In fact, for the pansters here, having an understanding of agency is KEY. It’s likely even more important since we rely more on intuition to write.

I am a Plotser

That means I create a log-line that says, overall, what my story is ABOUT. But it serves as a guideline to keep me pointed in the correct direction. If I know (usually by word count) that I am well into Act Two, then I know when my MC is being too passive.

Are they relying too much on others? Do they still react to everything as opposed to becoming increasingly proactive? Am I offering actual choices to my character, or am I just letting them drift along the riptide of bad situations? Am I cheating and allowing my characters to rely too much on luck?

Trust me. All these years later, I still have to delete sections because I recognize either the character is too evolved for so early in my story OR they need to do better because they can’t be so passive and dull-witted halfway into Act Two.

I hope you will now watch movies and read books with fresh eyes. Being a writer is a fabulous calling because watching movies, series, and reading books are all considered professional development.

I guarantee that if you see a story that breaks these rules, it is probably a story you either struggled to finish or didn’t like (but might not have been able to articulate WHY you didn’t like it.)

What are Your Thoughts?

Does this idea of agency help you better understand story flow? How you can use it to ratchet dramatic tension? Few things will make us turn pages like a character who has decisions but is making the wrong ones. Conversely, few things will turn us off like a character who keeps making the wrong decisions and fails to ever learn.

Does this help you in a place where you are stuck? Maybe offer some insights into how you can up the stakes? Can you now see better why you loved some stories or grew tired of others?

If we think about agency in terms we are familiar with, what comes to mind. Literary agent? This is a person with power we don’t have to make decisions where we cannot. Now zoom in on that feeling and make sure it’s in your stories.

I love hearing from you!

And remember, my perennial author branding book, Rise of the Machines: Human Authors in a Digital World and my mystery thriller The Devil’s Dance are both on sale on Kindle right now for only .99. Also please grab a copy of Larry’s book! Especially for those who struggle with plot.

Whether it is comments, shares, sales, or reviews, these are the things that keep us content producers (and authors) going and able to keep delivering. I always appreciate your support and love being able to keep doing this for you!

The post Agency: The Critical Component of ALL Great Stories appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Ah, culture. One word that can encapsulate so much. It’s nice and bendy, too, which is fabulous for story ideas (or for injecting more conflict in a story that feels flat). Put more than two humans together and somewhere, somehow they will find something to fight about.

They might be from the same country, but a different region (a New Yorker and a Texan) or from the same state but different part (Manhattan versus Buffalo). Even if they are from the same city, they might have a different heritage (Latino versus German). Maybe conflicting occupations. Think engineer and yoga instructor.

There are a gazillion ways that we humans can stumble into conflict. Age, sex, race, religion, socioeconomic status, education, hobbies, political views, on and on and on invariably impact our perspective. It’s a clash of cultures, so to speak.

One of the main reasons I love the idea of a “clash of cultures” is because this allows us (Author God) to create tension that feels organic and begs for us to keep turning pages (or watching). In fact, it is a long time staple of some of the most successful stories.

What is literally every Hallmark movie? The workaholic executive (insert Type A high achiever here) meets the down-to-earth organic grocer (insert chill Type B/recovering Type A here). A crowned prince falls for the everyday girl. Billionaire falls for the wedding planner. Heiress falls for the activist. Or flip that.

Why do we love these stories? Because they are fun. One world trying to understand and work around the other, butting heads, but then finally coming together at the end and being better for knowing one another.

Audiences cannot get enough of….

The Odd Couple

This trope works wonderfully for romance, comedy, romantic comedy. You guys remember the show Dharma and Greg? For those who have followed my blog for a while, I hammer on log-lines. Can you tell us what your story is about in 1-3 sentences?

You can almost SEE the book/series/movie with just that snippet.

How is this for a great log-line?

You can see the delicious conflict right off the bat with just the couple, but what about their respective cultures?

Dharma’s father is a paranoid pothead who doesn’t trust the government and her mom is an Earth mother hippy who reads chakras and cures all that ails you with a crystal. Her parents are very bohemian. Contrast that with Greg’s parents, who are elite, moneyed, and politically conservative, and….

…the jokes practically write themselves.

Notice in that wonderful IMDB log-line, whoever wrote it goes on to explain why this odd couple works. They each have something the other party needs. Therein lies the rub. We humans can sense what we need intuitively long before our brains catch up.

Very often we are attracted to the very people who make us crazy. We gravitate to the culture that makes us bonkers. Frankly, I think it is why most writers are married to an engineer or an engineer-type personality.

***You know who you are.

Whether it is Green Acres, The Odd Couple, Dharma & Greg, The Big Bang Theory, or every Hallmark movie ever made, it WORKS.

And culture is a FABULOUS area with a lot of unexplored terrain. Guess what? This trope also works for mysteries (Sherlock Holmes), science fiction (Star Trek) psychological thrillers (Fight Club), action movies (The Bourne Identity), kid movies (Finding Nemo), fantasy (The Witcher) etc.

The Fish Out of Water & Culture

We all recognize the “fish out of water” story, right? Whether it is a rags to riches (Goodwill Hunting) or a riches to rags (Uptown Girls), or a little of both (Trading Places) audiences cannot get enough. And it works for every genre from campy comedy (Green Acres) to action-thriller (Safe House).

I recently discovered a new favorite movie, The Farewell. If this movie doesn’t make you cry a little…you might not have a soul. When it comes to clash of culture this story hits on ALL cylinders and I promise NOT to ruin it.

Though there is plenty of drama, there’s also loads of laughs. Not only do you have a clash of culture between young and old, but the literal clash of cultures between…well, cultures.

Granddaughter Billi is a typical Chinese-American girl living in NYC with her immigrant parents. Though Billi lived in mainland China when she was a child, she’s been in the USA so long she is thoroughly American.

Her parents try to act as a bridge between the old country and new. When Billi’s grandmother gets a diagnosis of Stage Four cancer, Billi is utterly mystified why no one in the family will tell her. Yet, Billi’s mother says it perfectly:

Chinese people have (a) saying. When people get cancer, they die.

Lu Jian in “The Farewell”

Culture Shock

The family plans a trip to China, telling the grandmother that the spur of the moment gathering is for a wedding. Secretly it is a way they can all see her one final time before she dies. Billi is not welcome to come along because the family is afraid she will blow it. Then, add on TOP of that family that has immigrated elsewhere. One of the uncles moved to Japan and his son (groom) has a Japanese bride.

All of this makes for a beautiful, heartwarming story that will make you laugh and cry and—regardless where your family is from—maybe hug them a little tighter.

The Generation Gap

Regardless where we are from, our occupation, our gender, there is one conflict that transcends them all…AGE. This is true with siblings, relatives, bosses, or just LIFE. If there is an age gap, there is fantastic room to grow an amazing story.

Some of our most timeless stories capitalize on this trope. The Joy Luck Club (both the book and the movie) is a wonderful tapestry of three generations of Chinese women. In present-day the mothers and daughters seem to do nothing but fight. Why? The mothers only want what is best for their daughters. They were once young, too and they also saw their own mothers struggling with the same issues.

The moms want the best for their daughters and yet the daughters cannot seem to “see” anything but their mothers’ disappointment, disapproval, or disdain. The point of the story is to iron out the wrinkles that keep coming between two generations of women and make a way for a better future.

Mentors & TOWANDA!

Who doesn’t love a good mentor/mentee story? The mentor is a mentor because that person has more experience and, therefore, is likely older. There is a generational gap and a culture clash. A great example is the movie Fried Green Tomatoes (based off the novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe) .

Evelyn Couch is a middle-aged doormat who puts up with far to much bullsprinkles from her husband and family. When she meets a mysterious nursing home resident, they strike up an unlikely friendship. Ninny Threadgoode spins a tale (set in rural America in the 20s) about love, loss, life…and even some murder.

Over time, those stories serve as a beacon in the dark that leads Evelyn on a journey of self-discovery, evolution, and finally…empowerment. #BestSceneEver

The good thing, again, about a generation gap is that it works for all genres. Fried Green Tomatoes is a drama with elements of comedy. So is Steele Magnolias, The Karate Kid, and (the book) A Man Called Ove or the movie.

Though we wouldn’t, per se, classify any of these stories as a straight up comedy, they cannot help but make us laugh when generations collide.

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice!

Talk about a story that also hits on all cylinders when it comes to the culture clash. Today, we will stick to the original Beetlejuice because the new one merits a standalone post.

It…is…AWESOME.

There are all KINDS of perspectives log-jamming with each other. The Living (the Deetz family) and the Recently Deceased (the Maitlands), edgy sophisticated NYC/versus L.L. Bean, teenager versus parents, dead people who want to be alive and a teenage girl who wishes she were dead. Everywhere you turn in this movie, there is conflict and tension.

Which is why the movie is still fantastic…34 years later.

Everyone wants something different, yet who they are/where they are from (perspective/culture) creates problems. Whether it’s the newly dead Maitlans who need answers yesterday. Or the overworked and long dead social worker from the other side, Juno who measures her schedule in decades.

Nothing comes easily.

Charles Deetz wants a rural escape, but his high-strung, neurotic wife needs to create…starting with his house. Lydia, the teenager who wants to disappear is the only one who can help the Maitlands, who want nothing more than to be SEEN.

And, if that weren’t enough drama, toss in a lunatic unemployed trickster spirit. Nothing like mayhem to generate some teamwork, right?

Can’t Have CULT, Without CULTure!

Culture is a word with a lot of variegated meanings. It can also be as broad or narrow as we want or need it to be, as you can probably tell from the wide range of examples I gave from virtually every genre. If you are trying to create a story that is “same” enough to resonate, but “different” enough to spark interest…try starting with a culture clash.

I used that technique to fix my first novel, The Devil’s Dance.

When I wrote my original story idea, all the beta readers…hated my MC. They loved all the supporting characters, but something just wasn’t connecting with the MC.

Sigh. *bangs head on wall*

My idea: Riley was a combat vet, recently home from Afghanistan who’s family unintentionally runs afoul of a major cartel.

Problem was? According to the beta readers, though they liked the idea, my MC wasn’t relatable.

I rethought my approach, shifted from third-person close to first-person and then used my campy blogging voice.

The Devil’s Dance

Instead of Riley Romi being a bad@$$ but damaged character who was more than capable of handling a cartel, I changed her into a hot mess fish-out-of-water up against impossible odds (and that’s just her FAMILY).

Romi grew up white trash in a tiny town on the road to nowhere. She “escapes” and gets her education and a premium job in tech sales…only to be left holding the metaphorical bag when her rich fiancé pulls an Enron-like scandal, disappears, and leaves her as the FBI’s prime suspect.

Broke, blackballed and out of options, she has no choice but to slink home, defeated and humiliated, to her Jerry-Springer-crazy-as-a-bag-of-frogs family…and THEN she and family run afoul of a cartel.

To make matters worse, the FBI thinks she’s making a run for the border (not Taco Bell).

LOADS of worlds colliding that makes for a hilarious, nail-biting read (if I do say so myself *gets cramp patting own back*).

See how I had a story that was “meh” but was able to save it simply by pivoting a little toward the zone with the most conflict? Culture saved my story idea. Though I kept the same kernel of an idea—a small town with a dark secret, a family up against the cartel—the story was 180 degrees different and a million times better.

What Are Your Thoughts?

Do you see how culture is far more influential that a lot of people might imagine? Nerds versus Normies? Old versus young? The jaded versus the neophyte? Can you see how just even on a micro-scale, you could inject more dramatic action, tension and subtext by simply playing up each character’s cultural perspective?

What are some other movies, books, or series that you now see executed the culture clash with particular brilliance? In a world being deluged by same old same old, what are some crazy cultures you might be able to force together in a story? Same…but DIFFERENT?

REMEMBER: Last post How to Create YOUR Audience: Identify, Connect, Convert, we talked about how to make the author brand more manageable and authentic. How do you connect to then curate your unique audience? I am still eager for victims volunteers for when I post on what exactly we do with that word cloud. This is to help you work smarter not harder. Though my other personalties are happy to help, this is a sweet chance to get free consulting for those brave enough to post their word clouds in the comments.

Remember the longer the cloud the better and also tell me what GENRE you write.

Until next time!

The post Culture, Conflict & Creating Fresh Stories People LOVE appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Redemption is a much more prolific theme than most might realize.

Whether it is a fun, romantic Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones Diary), a gritty Cormac McCarthy (The Road) or a therapy-inducing Ken Follett (Pillars of the Earth), they hold one common thread.

Redemption.

Will Bridget finally see the truth of herself—that she’s shallow—before she commits to loving the wrong man?

In a world gone mad, can the actions of a Man and a Boy redeem faith in humanity?

In a world of unspeakable violence and savagery, will justice ever be served? Is Tom Builder—a man who abandons his newborn by his wife’s grave—worthy of redemption?

Whether the story is a short cozy romance or an epically long historical, we still see this embedded desire that even bad people deserve another chance. I believe this is a good thing, and demonstrates that hope springs eternal with us humans.

Thus, today, we’ll explore the notion if all characters can be saved? Should they be? And how far can we push the line before readers no longer care? What does the undertone of redemption add to story and what do we risk losing without it?

***Feel free to skim for what applies to you. My blogs are long, but I guarantee you they are a LOT shorter than the thousands of pages of reading I use to boil down for this “bone broth.” Moving on….

Flawed Characters ALL Require Redemption

This weekend, Spawn and I (horror junkies that we are) watched Emesis Blue on YouTube. Overall, enjoyable. Some INCREDIBLE imagery. Very well executed. But, since once an editor always an editor, it is almost impossible for me not to find SOMETHING that could have been done a bit better.

So far I have only discovered about 5 perfect books in the thousands I have read that I wouldn’t change a word (FYI: None are mine). Same with movies.

The ONLY thing I could pick on was the film didn’t make it really clear WHO I needed to “root” for. Horror can, like literary, be a genre that is ALL BAD PEOPLE. You literally find yourself simply siding with the least bad, bad guy…which is fine.

But do you want your story to be “okay” or “fine” or “Good enough”? Or do you want it to go to that next level?

This is where character arc can be a game-changer. When I mention “redemption” it implies the character needs to learn, change, grow or evolve in some way.

When characters are “too perfect” or the converse “too horrible/stupid to live” the story can stall. This isn’t the 1950s. Shock value and BIG THINGS HAPPENING are okay, but they’re sorely lacking when it comes to hooking an audience for the long-haul.

We can have the most amazing writing, prose, setting, and even clever plot, but if readers don’t CARE about the characters, they grow easily bored. Bad things need to happen but….

BAD THINGS Alone are NOT Conflict

Conflict is simple. Two people with different levels of POWER wanting their own thing…collide.

That is it. Simple, but not easy.

In police procedurals, the BBT (Big Boss Troublemaker) is the CORE ANTAGONIST responsible for creating the story problem in need of solving by THE END. Often it is a killer, criminal, thug, or someone breaking the law in some way.

BUT….

Where the MC will often experience the MOST pushback will be from those closest. Every scene needs an antagonist. We need to make the audience worry. If everything is too happy-dappy and everything is sunshine and rainbows, that is not a novel. It is an overly long Hallmark card.

Back to the police procedural and uneven power.

Detective Hardnose WANTS to hunt down KILLER.

Police Chief Blowhard WANTS to win an election.

Detective Hardnose’s methods are unorthodox because that is only way to catch the killer BUT Chief Blowhard is getting bad press. HE wants the killer caught…but with kid gloves that don’t upset voters.

See the power imbalance? Detective Hardnose STILL needs to stop a killer. He STILL knows conventional policing won’t work, BUT he needs to use his skills and brain to figure out a workaround.

Whether it is conflict with a superior officer, Internal Affairs, the Feds, meddling politicians, or even the detective’s own FAMILY…note the power struggle. THIS is what turns pages.

CAN the detective catch the killer, please his boss, keep his badge and maintain his marriage and relationship with his kids?

We WORRY and WORRY IS FICTION GOLD. Regardless the genre, your reader needs to worry every single page all the way until THE END.

An EVEN BIGGER KAIJU!

There is a great little flick called Pacific Rim. And forgive me because it will seem like I am contradicting myself, but bear with me. Pacific Rim is a fantastic flick for young boys. I grew up on anime (Voltron, Transformers, Robotech, etc.) so it was a fabulous throwback to that.

This said….

The entire plot is basically some inter-dimensional rift has opened up along the—you guessed it—the Pacific Rim, where giant monsters wriggle through to unleash mass destruction on large cities (popular back when we still found CGI fascinating).

Mankind creates basically giant robot suits to battle Godzilla-esque creatures.

The ENTIRE plot is really just…a BIGGER KAIJU! Then a BIGGER KAIJU! And, in a totally unexpected plot twist…the BIGGEST KAIJU EVER! (Until the next movie).

That is it.

And if you’re writing campy stories/movies that appeal to predominantly young boys, teen boys and/or middle aged women with the sense of humor and tastes of a 9th grade boy…FABULOUS.

LOVE SHARKNADO! Almost as much at Lavalantula.

But these are B-movies people enjoy for the precise reason they are so wonderfully BAD. I bet you most folks couldn’t NAME a single character from any of these kinds of movies. We also really never worry in any of these “stories.”

When it comes to BOOKS? Here’s the problem.

Most People Don’t Like to Read

It is an old post but a lot of my content is evergreen. Check out Why Traditional Marketing Doesn’t Sell Books for a more in depth breakdown. Everything in that post from 2011 is true today. Actually much MORE SO since we have so many other mediums of entertainment all clamoring for our attention.

But, when surveyed, something like 94% of people admit that reading is something they want to do more of in theory, but never DO. If asked to list the top 10 or even 20 things they believe they’d like to do with their spare time…reading doesn’t make the list for MOST literate people.

That’s the “bad news.” The “great news” is people LOVE to read…they just don’t know it yet.

If you don’t believe me, how many people have you told you were a writer and the FIRST WORDS out of their mouth were, “Have you read 50 Shades of Grey?”

They might not read ANY OTHER BOOK, but “regular people” (code for “future readers”) are absolutely CULT-LIKE when they find a book (or series) they fall in love with. They’ll genuinely believe they still hate to read…but they love everything Harry Potter, Hunger Games, 50 Shades, etc.

They’ll practically have a SHRINE with all the hardbacks, the merch, the movies, etc.

What this means is we writers have to do better. We can’t hook like 1950s pulp novels that sold like hotcakes because what else would someone do on a long bus ride, in a waiting room, during bad weather, etc. What this ALSO means is that stuff that hooked 20 years ago, just will not work today. Apps and games and YouTube are low-hanging and shiner/easier fruit.

Readers are Narcissists

HUMANS are narcissists. Use that. Why do we (the nerdy readers who cannot FATHOM NOT loving books) get hooked on certain books or series? Usually, it is because we see something of ourselves. We cling onto particular characters because they reflect us in some way for good or bad. What we are, what we wish we weren’t, what we aspire to be.

This is why that redemption aspect is SUCH a game changer.

We cannot relate to super perfect people. In fact, there is a human psychological phenomenon referred to as Schadenfreude that explains exactly why we’re more prone to root against perfect people.

I get it sounds horrible, but back in the day of tabloids, what sold more copies? Super Hollywood Starlet with cellulite? Or Super Hollywood Starlet looking freakishly and inhumanely gorgeous?

Cellulite obviously.

It’s nice to nice to knock perfect people “down a peg,” WHY? Because it humanizes her. It wasn’t per se we wished anything horrible on her, only we couldn’t see her as one of “us” so long as she had unfathomable natural beauty, the perfect body, a gazillion dollars, and was even NICE!

***Feel free to insert whatever superstar/rockstar, etc.

We were fascinated not by “bad things happening to her” as much as realizing she was a person just like us.

So, if we KNOW humans are wired this way….

USE IT!

Make Characters NEED Redemption

Even if we go to the Hallmark movies, please appreciate that millions and millions of people love watching every year, especially at Christmas. We can easily see the human need for redemption. Hallmark (as formulaic as it is) still offers super perfect but FLAWED characters.

Obviously the plots are usually over the top because, while Hallmark might be formulaic, the formula WORKS.

Same with cocaine, FYI.

Even if the main love interest is the heir apparent to some tiny country no one’s heard of, something in him is missing/damaged/broken that only the love interest can fix. Is he too serious? Has he become unbalanced? All work and duty and no fun? Does he take his role for granted?

Same with the gal. Maybe she is a spunky assistant who’s pretty and clever and kind…but she is usually a hopeless klutz, is super insecure, is socially oblivious, is overshadowed by a sibling. Whatever. OR, she could be the one who is the “ice queen” who is all work and no fun.

Doesn’t matter.

It does mean your characters need to be their own worst enemies and the PLOT is all that can save them from themselves.

Redemption to Scale

The great part about thinking in terms of redemption (instead of “character arc”) is that it makes it a) practical and b) scalable.

Obviously if I am writing a cozy mystery, then an MC with a habit of cocaine and hookers is a poor choice. Instead? A hopeless busybody who’s meddling comes back to bite.

If, however, I am writing a gritty action thriller, then a well-meaning busybody is a poor choice. And cocaine and hookers for the win!

For those who want to do or even TRY NaNoWriMo (which I always recommend), this “redemption” idea will be important to keep you going for the long-haul.

I recommend starting with a NEW idea (especially if you struggle with finishing). Seems like bad advice, but bear with me. I’m going to offer you a new process to try.

Get your “idea” then whittle it into ONE SENTENCE.

What is your story ABOUT? I have a walk through here HOW to do this.

Pitch Your Story in ONE Sentence

Once you have that sentence, think about what would make your character emotionally intriguing? Sure, they’re a 100th degree blackbelt, know 15 languages, do parkour like Jackie Chan and all that is great…

But the more superlatives we add, oddly enough the less interesting the character becomes.

All those “bad@$$” qualities aren’t what make the character interesting. What makes them interesting is they have 100 superlative qualities but THIS FLAW lays them low.

Will They EVER Succeed?

Okay, so flaws. This is where we have to do some of the more delicate work in our craft. AGAIN, genre will inform this. Hallmark-style romance is NOT about hard-boiled terrible people doing terrible things to even more terrible people. Converse is true as well.

Y’all got that because you’re super smart.

With the lighter reads, we have to be careful we don’t make everyone too perfect. When it comes to other genres, this starts to scale.

On one end of the spectrum is Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. Former M.P. who lives off the grid for whatever reason and always seems to find trouble. His flaws? People skills are often terrible, he pisses off authority figures, and his personal life is…yeah.

The other side of the spectrum are your anti-heroes. They’re SO BAD but you cannot help rooting for them. Think Lestat in Interview with a Vampire.

So get your idea into ONE sentence then CAST appropriately. What does THIS story problem (plot) have that will serve as the crucible to refine that flaw?

The HBO Series True Blood did this phenomenally! Eric Northman is the oldest of the vampires and he’s lived SO LONG life has no meaning…until he falls for Sookie. BUT, his Viking/Vampire ways, while his greatest asset, also create the most problems.

With Redemption, Balance is KEY

This is where a LOT of intentional reading is your friend. You do not have to reinvent the wheel. The wheel works. And odds are, if you read enough, you’ll have enough pieces to create something wholly unique. The same but also totally NEW! Reading will also train you in certain techniques.

Back to balance.

We cannot write a book everyone loves. EVERYONE is not my audience or yours. I absolutely loved The Girl on the Train. The MC is a really, really bad alcoholic, thus an unreliable narrator. I had no problem with her, but she wasn’t for everyone.

Conversely, I read a “suspense/thriller” that was traditionally published and had a gazillion 5 star reviews…and the character was too dumb to live. I finished it because I am stubborn and I think we can often learn more from bad books than good.

It was as if the author had never read the genre and all I wanted to do was scream and throw the book…which I would have done except I read on my phone and that’s too expensive to break.

Proving my point that everyone is different.

How to Redeem the Seemingly Irredeemable

So for those who read the lighter genres, make sure to give them some relatable flaws. For everyone else….

Anti-heroes are difficult. There is a fine line we have to tread. We will not be able to make everyone happy. My new anthology WTH Did I Just Read? has a sampling of my writing. I LOVE anti-heroes and unreliable narrators. Will some love EVERY character in every story?

Duh, obviously *hair flip*

Kidding. Even I know that I might totally turn readers off on ALL of them or some of them or one of them.

If, however, you want a gritty character, tips for “redemption”….

1. Make them the lesser of evils.

Dr. Hannibal Lecter might be terrifying, but not nearly as terrifying (or reprehensible) as the men he takes down (Eg. Mason Verger).

2. Give them a glimmer of a characteristic that is deeply likable.

Jessica Knoll’s The Luckiest Girl Alive features Ani, who is a scheming, shallow, conniving “Mean Girl.” At first glance, she is a horrible human being. She’s vain, gold-digging, and will do almost anything to get ahead professionally. Yet, in one of the opening scenes, Ani is interviewing for the very coveted position as her intern at a super prestigious fashion magazine.

How does she choose? She takes the applicants for coffee downstairs at the little newsstand where a disfigured immigrant named Loretta works. When the stand first hired Loretta, people complained because she was unsightly (burn scars), spoke broken English, and had a bit of body odor.

ANI, however, noticed all the coffee was fresh, including the creamers (even the soy milk). The store was always spotless and the magazines were artfully displayed.

Ani not only notices what others do not, she JUDGES others on how they TREAT Loretta. The minute they whisper anything cruel or degrading, Ani blackballs them.

She is deliciously awful.

3. Make them sympathetic.

Yes, in The Girl on a Train, Rachel is a spiraling alcoholic…BUT when you learn what she survived and WHY she is using booze to cope, it “can” soften you enough to give her the benefit of the doubt hoping she’ll get her act together with the addiction.

Structure can also be your friend.

IF you struggle to make them sympathetic, then have another character who sees the good in them. This worked with Sookie and Eric.

I just finished listening to an audiobook that is among those elusive “perfect books” I mentioned earlier. Old Country is a ghost story/psychological suspense/horror that left ME shaking. I vacillated between I dreaded to read more, but also could not read FAST ENOUGH.

One of the reasons I LOVE the horror genre is it is the toughest genre to write well. For the story to work, you really kind of need characters to do dumb, counterintuitive or even self-destructive things.

How did Old Country pull this off without characters falling into unlikable/too stupid to live? There are two MC POVs, one the husband and the other the wife (a.k.a. the “Buddy Love” structure).

The husband is belligerent, stubborn to the point of ridiculousness, self-destructive, impulsive, etc, etc. which the story demands for plausibility and also for one HELL of a knockout ending.

We “get” he’s a combat veteran in the opening scene, so we already forgive A LOT.

But not everything…

THIS is where the author did a brilliant job by adding in the WIFE’S POV. Wives have a way of seeing in ways we cannot, in ways their husbands cannot. True in life and in fiction.

The wife serves as a foil. She’s a sort of an advocate there to tell us (the reader) as well as other characters that “this reaction was over the top, even for him.” Or that “something had to be terribly wrong because, while he definitely had an anger problem, he’d NEVER ONCE raised his voice like that, so he HAD to be TERRIFIED.”

The only thing I would caution here is that this partner character needs to serve the story more than just being there to “explain away” bad behavior.

But the cool thing is…they can explain away bad behavior. They can smooth the rough edges that might, otherwise turn a reader totally off our story.

Think Frodo and Samwise or Dr. Watson and Sherlock.

The “Buddy Love” structure is fantastic if you need to balance out a particularly irascible character. They can also help the other character arc because that character is just too blind/damaged to do it on their own.

Redemption is wonderful in life and it is fiction GOLD.

***Why else would we have rooted for SPIKE all those years in Buffy?

Redemption makes characters fascinating. They’re such a danger to themselves and others we wonder if they’ll ever get their act together. We want them to because if THEY can do it, so can we.

I LOVE Hearing from You!

What are your thoughts on redemption? Do you see how common this theme really is? Does it add that little extra je ne sais quoi to a story for you, too? Who are some characters you never thought could be redeemed? Are there others you wish HAD been redeemed?

To prove it and show my love, for the month of OCTOBER, everyone who leaves a comment, I will put your name in a hat.

***I actually have landed agents for people who’ve won this contest. Agents like me because I make their lives easier.

If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice.

What do you win?

The unvarnished truth from yours truly (and maybe even time with an agent).

I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less). People with superlative writing, I (with your permission) have been known to pass you onto an agent.

Anyway, I look forward to reading your comments and your writing!

The post Redemption: Can All Characters Be “Saved”? appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Darkest moment is a term you’ll hear a lot, especially when learning how to plot. Last post, we discussed how critical normal world is for hooking the reading audience early, then never letting go until THE END. Every piece of the “plot” serves a critical function and understanding that function, I feel, makes us better writers.

Oddly, as many years as I’ve been blogging, I don’t recall ever dedicating an entire post to exploring the “darkest moment,” what it is, why it matters, and the difference it can make in the overall quality of our stories.

Why “darkest moment” as a topic?

I can’t talk about it, but my family was hit with a major tragedy unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.

At close to fifty years old, I’ve been through many losses, but nothing like this. Just imagine bad, then multiply that by a factor of a thousand. I only thought I understood the darkest moment until this summer.

***It’s okay. We’ll get through it. We are slowly righting from the blow, but it is/was…bad.

And, since we writers are a thrifty lot, nothing in life ever goes to waste…especially trauma.

What is the Darkest Moment?

Seems like a simple answer, but is anything but. Commonly, we hear that the darkest moment is that point in the story, close to the end of the book/movie, when the main character (usually the protagonist) loses all hope. We ALL know this point, even if one is not a writer.

All of us have watched a movie where it looks like the good guys totally have it handled, the plan is brilliant and SURELY they’re going to win.

But wait…there’s thirty-five minutes left in the movie.

We (the audience) inherently sense something is up.

The team is ready, we have had the montage and are ready for ANYTHING!

*sings* If you need to learn a lot in a really short time, you need a montage! A montage!

Or we read a book. Same thing happens. SURELY the character(s) have this down! What can go wrong? Except there’s another fifty pages remaining. Something definitely sus is going on there.

So WHY?

Everybody Arcs

A novel has a LOT of moving parts. Nothing about writing fiction is easy. We are tasked with creating a captivating story that can span anywhere from 50K to maybe as many as 200K words (think Lonesome Dove or Pillars of the Earth).

We need to have a plot, tension, conflict, relatable characters, great dialogue, immersive prose, pacing, theme, world-building, character arc, plot arc and on and on.

Also, the difference between reality and fiction is that everything in fiction has to make sense.

*nods to Tom Clancy*

In life, random bad things happen ALL the time. There is no rhyme or reason. In fiction, however, everything is cause and effect. Everything has to be planned (at least from our end, the author).

Whenever we come up with a plot/story idea, we have to cast the story. Ideally, the MC/protagonist lacks some critical element that would mean immediate defeat. The MC must endure the story gauntlet to even hope to succeed against the antagonist.

Maybe they don’t have enough knowledge, training, or confidence. Think newbie FBI agent, Clarice Starling, in Silence of the Lambs. Perhaps they’re a loner who needs to be better at relying on a team (E.g Tony Stark/Iron Man).

Perhaps they’re too clingy and need to venture off away from toxic “support” that is actually holding them back. Think Evelyn Couch in Fried Green Tomatoes (based off Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe) .

They have no choice BUT to evolve and grow. As the late, great Blake Snyder said, “Everybody arcs!”

False Gods

When I teach character creation, I challenge writers to ask one question about all the characters, but the protagonist and antagonist in particular.

What is their false god?

Can you name what THING the MC falsely believes is the solution to all their problems?

Is it more money, status, power? How many stories have we seen where an MC loses their way chasing power? Devil’s Advocate is a great example. The most powerful law firm on the planet recruits Kevin Lomax, a small town, idealistic young public defender who’s never lost a case.

Ultimately he has to choose between unlimited power and his conscience.

What about someone who’s false god is “freedom” which actually isn’t freedom at all, rather it’s really just avoiding responsibility?

In Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer, defense attorney Mickey Haller is terrified of responsibility. He never defends ANYONE he even remotely thinks is innocent and only takes cases for (basically) scumbags.

Why?

Because he did defend an innocent early in his career, lost the case, and the kid he defended is sitting on death row. He cannot bear to go through that again. Haller worships his self-delusion that he doesn’t actually care about innocence and guilt…but does he?

In Bridget Jones Diary, Bridget (NOT a lawyer) genuinely believes losing weight and finding love will make her whole. Her false god is this rather superficial view of life, love and romance.

Why False Gods?

If we look at all civilizations throughout human history, it’s easy to see that we are wired to worship something. What do “gods” usually have? Altars. What do worshippers place on an altar in return for “favor”?

Those things they prize the most.

Thus, if we have an MC who dedicates his life to being the best, the richest, the most powerful, whatever…what is he likely sacrificing on that altar?

Anything that actually is worth having: love, family, friends, relationships, etc.

Because he is (possibly) operating out of a WOUND (growing up poor), his vision is distorted as to what exactly he needs and what would ultimately make him happy/safe/fulfilled.

And I just gave y’all the plot to probably fifty Hallmark movies.

No shade on Hallmark, because they do a brilliant job of telling stories audiences love and can relate to. Even me, the gritty, weird horror/speculative fiction writer.

We all cheer when the filthy rich workaholic FINALLY has an epiphany that he’s empty and alone and has been accepting a shill over true bliss. His net worth might be billions, yet it is all meaningless without (insert whatever HERE).

And we can do this with all kinds of “false gods.”

Bridget Jones eventually sees the truth about Daniel Cleaver, the man she’s been obsessing over. He’s narcissistic and shallow (and, to her eventual chagrin, a reflection of who SHE is). Over time, as she matures as a person, she sees the “antagonist” Mark Darcy in a new light.

Darcy, a man that initially drove her to madness, actually is the real deal. He represents a romance with roots, one that can endure. Love isn’t always shiny with bows and ribbons and loving for the long haul requires learning to accept flaws (like her extra few pounds and Darcy’s often acerbic nature).

Darkest Moments are Pivot Points

Why the darkest moment is so critical is because it marks the point in time just before the breakthrough. Everything our MC has relied on–connections, money, power, family, bright ideas, super powers, good looks, charm, etc.—FAIL them.

When I teach structure, I “joke” that Act Two is really a bunch of increasingly dumber (smarter) “Bright Idea Fairies.”

The MC is still trying to do things the old way. BUT, if we do our jobs, we, as Author God, should craft an antagonist the MC cannot defeat until they gain a designated level of self-awareness.

If they are a loner, they cannot win unless they have a TEAM. If they’ve always used money to get out of everything, put them in a world where money means NOTHING (E.g. The Game).

In fact, the 1997 movieThe Game (image above) is a fantastic study in this brand of darkest moment. Nicholas Van Horten is just stupid wealthy. Everything (externally) has always fallen in place for him because he isn’t merely wealthy, he also comes from wealth. Problem is, he’s never dealt with his father’s suicide and how that impacted him.

We see his money and power as assets, when in truth, they’re a shell he can use to hide from his inner demons.

When his little brother, Conrad—the family screwup—gives him a GAME as a birthday present, Nicholas has no idea what to think about such a seemingly odd gift.

When does the game begin? How can he know?

This movie is from 1997 and it is still incredible because we watch Nicholas lose everything. In the beginning, he’s the guy with the private jet that can get into any restaurant without needing a reservation. By the end? He’s literally buried alive and has to claw out of a shallow grave (MESSAGE!).

Once free, he is dirty with no money, no shoes, no nothing. To get home to San Francisco, he must humble himself enough to beg for even the most basic of “luxuries” like food or a ride home. All these “things” he took for granted, he now must humble himself enough to grovel for if that’s what it takes to get answers.

Yes, spoiler alert, but y’all have had since 1997 to see it . Also, that isn’t the whole story so totally worth a watch and a study.

You Have NO IDEA Who You REALLY ARE

And neither do I.

Until we are tested, we have ZERO idea who we really are. I know that might not be popular to say, but it is true.

I would LOVE to believe that, if aliens invaded, or the zombie apocalypse hit, or whatever, that I would be noble, kind, just and brave. That is being human. We don’t want to think we’d be the one hiding under the bed, running away, or using that obnoxious neighbor as a human shield.

Should have picked up yer dog poo off my lawn, Buddy.

All kidding aside, we tend to have a far rosier view of ourselves than is usually accurate and that is okay. We also, conversely, underestimate what we might be capable of under the right circumstances.

Maybe we will be courageous. Perhaps we will do the right thing even when it will cost us everything. We simply don’t KNOW until those beliefs are tested.

For a great example? Bird Box (movie and book). The character, Douglas, though a hard pill to swallow, makes a lot of great points about this exact topic.

We have no idea what we are capable of doing—good and bad—until tested. Thus, the point of every (good) story is to show this aspect of life in distillate.

Audiences yearn to see that regular people can do extraordinary things or even extraordinary people have to learn lessons we mortals struggle with.

Come on! Even the Norse god THOR battles with pride, ego, arrogance, entitlement and being fickle and shallow. Yes, even the Norse god Thor loves his brother, hurts that his family is estranged, wants love and acceptance, and seeks deeper meaning to his existence.

Darkest Moment in Action

In my opinion, the darker the darkest moment, the better the story. This is the part where we cannot hold back. When I train writers, I have a saying, “Make it worse until you make it weird.”

We should throw everything including the metaphorical kitchen sink at our characters (the MC in particular). The story is the the fiery forge that is going to remove those character impurities and mold a lump of undisciplined, clueless blech and then allow conflict to hammer that MC into someone magnificent.

What refuses to bend eventually will…with enough heat.

We pile everything onto the MC (and allies) and at the end of Act Two, when the Bright Idea Fairy fails them all, we strip everything away.

The darkest moment is the critical point when the MC finally has a Damascus Road experience. The scales are removed from their eyes and, for the first time, they see the truth about themselves and others and how to be authentically triumphant.

Right after the darkest moment is when our MC finally transitions from a mere protagonist to being worthy of the title HERO.

We Develop in the Darkest Moment

Darkest moments are like dark rooms in photography. Very counterintuitively, we must immerse ourselves in the blackness to reveal the true picture.

I imagine most of us cannot make it too long in life without tragedy visiting. All of you have your stories, which is probably why you’re here. Writing is cheaper than therapy, right?

We love working through our traumas, heartaches, disillusionment by telling stories.

Which is great because humans are a story people!

Whether it is a cozy romance that reminds us love is still alive and romance still possible or an action-packed thriller where bad people get justice not plea deals.

We need catharsis!

Fiction operates in extremes. We love the characters who stand a snowball’s chance in hell (E.g. the Hobbits in LOTR), who have so much to learn that we have NO idea how they’ll survive. But they do. And they WIN.

Yet, we ALSO love the stories involving characters with everything going for them, who finally come up against a problem/foe that demands more than the obvious trappings of power (Dr. Strange, The Game, Stepford Wives, Game of Thrones).

Stories matter. What we write matters. Writers carry the torch of hope and, as long as there are stories, people will have footsteps they can follow from the pages into their own lives.

When We LOSE, We WIN

Fiction shows us that, no matter how bad things get, there is always a chance at a new beginning.

Ultimately, I believe hope springs eternal so long as there are writers in the world. Ideally, now that we’ve taken a deeper dive into what the darkest moment is, what it means and why it is SO important, you’ll look at your stories with fresh eyes.

Maybe people need to remember there is still goodness in the world, that good guys win, justice can happen, the odds are never too great, one is never too old or too young or whatever.

The darkest moments in life—and in story—often mean more than we realize.

The darker the night, the more spectacular the dawn.

What are YOUR Thoughts?

I’ve missed y’all! What are some of the most profound darkest moments you can think of in cinema or books? Have you ever had something happen in life SO AWFUL that the only way to make it make any sense was to turn it into story? What are some of your favorite comebacks? Any thoughts on the darkest moment at all? Y’all always have such brilliant perspectives.

I LOVE COMMENTS!

To prove it and show my love, for the month of AUGUST, everyone who leaves a comment, I will put your name in a hat.

I actually have landed agents for people who’ve won this contest. Agents like me because I make their lives easier.

If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. What do you win?

The unvarnished truth from yours truly (and maybe even time with an agent).

I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less). People with superlative writing, I (with your permission) have been known to pass you onto an agent.

Anyway, I look forward to reading your comments and your writing!

The post Darkest Moment: Why Losing Everything Matters appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

The HERO. We’ve all grown up with heroes real and imagined and, though all “grown up” we still can’t get enough of them. Heroes come in all forms, and we find them all along the continuum from the idealist goody-goody to the brooding/shady anti-hero.

Which begs the question. How do we transform our MC (main character) in ways that stand above all the other heroes out there vying for the spotlight?

Humans are a story people, meaning we all share one thing in common—we LOVE characters that embody all we wish to be. Yet, crafting a hero isn’t as simple as one might think. In fact, new writers generally serve up a “hero” too soon. They fail to understand that the title—HERO—is something that must be earned.

In fact, the harder it is for our main character to attain this noble title, the more valuable it is. The greater the opposition (externally and internally), the sweeter the prize.

To be blunt? Story participation trophies are about as exciting as real-world participation trophies.

A Hero is the FINAL Product

Before we get to any tips, let’s first make one thing clear. The hero is the final product forged in the fires of adversity. This might seem obvious to everyone who hasn’t tried to write a novel. When you’re new, though? You’re insecure.

Hey, I’ve been there.

I thought my main character had to be perfect for readers to like/want to root for her. Adding any flaws made me nervous.

I know! Give her ninja skills, too!

Frequently, new writers want their MC to be everything amazing. He/She has the looks and the moves. They’re larger than life and super *add in whatever superlative here*.

Yet, when it comes to great stories, this is a formula for a snooze fest. A hero, by definition, must overcome something to be worthy of the appellation. The story, then, is the account of the overcoming.

When we start the story, we begin with a rough protagonist, riddled with flaws who then crosses paths with the antagonist’s agenda. Once the protagonist makes a conscious decision to step out of his/her comfort zone and agree to the journey, the transformation process begins.

Rough Flawed MC—>Evolving Protagonist—>Hero

As we go through these tips, keep in mind that genre will heavily dictate each of these factors.

#1 Give Your MC (Hero) Weaknesses

One of the reasons we want to give our MC some weaknesses is that no one is perfect. We (readers) can’t relate to perfect people. While it is scary to admit our protagonist is flawed, flaws are what will help readers connect and the story resonate.

Fear of failure, lack of confidence, lack of experience, gullibility, overconfidence, fear of abandonment, trust issues, insecurity, addiction, etc. are all very human weaknesses we can exploit for maximum tension.

Once we flesh out a protagonist and his or her weaknesses, we’ll have a better idea how this character will need to grow. The ideal story problem won’t have the MC operating in her strengths, rather it will have hit her right in her soft spots.

This will give only two options: change and grow stronger or collect allies to buttress areas of weakness.

Today, I’ll try to use two very different genres as well as examples I’ve not used before. No Lord of the Rings, today.

Stranger Things: Even Superheroes are Weak

For instance, in the popular series Stranger Things, the MC, Eleven, escapes a secret government facility that’s been using her to spy on the Soviets as part of black bag operations. She has strengths (mental powers), but these powers are majorly hindered due to the fact that she’s never lived out in the real world.

Her naivete makes her extremely vulnerable to recapture. Until she can learn how to function outside of a lab, she’ll have to learn to trust her new allies (and trust is NOT her strong suit either).

Though Eleven has crazy mind powers, we can relate to her because her weaknesses make her more like us.

…unless you have mind powers. Then look me up because we totally should be friends.

Isn’t It Romantic? Everyone Wants Love

Since not everyone is a science fiction buff, I’ll use another example from a light comedy I absolutely LOVED. In the movie Isn’t It Romantic, Natalie, a woman disenchanted with love, suddenly finds herself trapped in a romantic comedy.

The main character (played by Rebel Wilson) is not the kind of gal normally cast as the heroine of romantic comedies…which is much of the point of the movie. She’s overweight, insecure, and lets her colleagues run roughshod over her.

Because of her low self-esteem, she fails to demand the credit she’s due as a talented NY architect and, instead, tolerates terrible treatment (like when a major client sends her out for coffee when she’s the project manager not the coffee gopher).

Though Natalie has clear surface weaknesses—her weight, lack of fashion sense—she has some internal weaknesses as well. She’s bitter, doesn’t believe in love, is very judgmental, and automatically seems to assume the worst.

Don’t know about y’all, but I can relate to a lot of this, especially the part about being a doormat. One phrase: GROUP PROJECT.

Enough said.

#2 Give Your MC (Hero) Wounds

We don’t have to live very long in this crazy messed-up world before we get sucker-punched. Ideally, our MC will have a “life” before the beginning of our story (backstory).

Genre will dictate what kind of wounds and the level of damage, but my point here is that pain is pivotal for any good story. Perfectly adjusted people make for lousy fiction (provided such people even exist).

All of us have been hurt and, when put under pressure, these are the weak seams most likely to burst.

Hero Wounds Don’t Have to Be Weird

Using my first example above, Stranger Things, Eleven has suffered serious trauma. She was torn away from her biological mother at an early age then imprisoned in a secret government facility. Her short life has been nothing but a series of terrifying and morally repugnant experiments.

The government has also harnessed her powers and forced her to do a lot of very bad things, leaving her with crushing guilt.

Remember, Eleven already had trust issues before she escaped. She won’t last in the outside world all on her own. But, her false guilt and abandonment issues only fuel her fear of trusting anyone.

Additionally, Eleven believes she’s poison because life has taught her that life is nasty, brutish and short for those who get too close to her.

The problem, however, is if she fails to trust, she has no hope of survival, let alone living long enough to be a hero. Though most of us, I assume, don’t have amazing psychic powers, we can at least understand what it’s like to be betrayed and how hard that can be to overcome.

We might also feel false shame or guilt over events that weren’t even our fault.

So, hopefully, y’all can see that even though Stranger Things involves some seriously extraordinary elements, the connective points that resonate with the audience (us) often are actually very common.

Hero Wounds We Can All Relate To

Going back to Isn’t It Romantic, there are so many scenes in this movie that resonated with me. Early in the movie, young Natalie is watching Pretty Woman. She’s obviously enraptured in the story when Mom bursts her bubble:

“They’ll never make a movie about girls like us, and you know why? Because it would be so sad that they’d have to sprinkle Prozac on the popcorn or people would kill themselves.“

Once we see this critical moment in Natalie’s past, it becomes pretty obvious why she’s grown into a jaded and lonely adult. She believes love (respect) is only for the perfect women in ads, magazines and in the movies. Her mom’s crappy comment left a deep wound that never healed.

Because of this wound, she acts out in ways that reaffirm this untruth. She pushes people away, doesn’t recognize those who really do care for her and value her, and she fails to see love that’s right in front of her face.

This is all because deep down, she doesn’t believe she is worthy of love.

#3 Give Your MC (Hero) a Blind Spot

The blind spot is directly related to the MC’s weaknesses and wounds. We meet our MC in normal world, and, without any opposition, it’s tough to see weaknesses.

For instance, I have no idea if my arms are weak until I try to pick up that fifty pound bag of dog food and suddenly find that I can’t. So long as my husband always carries in the dog food, I might keep on believing my upper body strength is just fine. Only when my strength is tested will I be able to see I’m somehow lacking.

The same is true for wounds. Maybe I believe I am a super-confident person because I’m always in charge and get things DONE. But, when faced with a challenge too big for me to handle alone, circumstances will force me to face the fact I’m not confident at all, rather I’m an insecure control freak.

This is the point of the story problem. It reveals weaknesses and wounds that LOOOVE to hide in the blind spot.

Protagonists with no weaknesses and who are fully self-actualized are boring. It takes a hero to face the darkness, especially the darkness lurking inside.

Another tricky thing about blind spots is they tend to offer false confidence because they often masquerade as strengths.

Superhero Blind Spots

Eleven escapes the government facility and, over time, forges friendships and allies (though not easily). Why? Because if Day One she showed them her powers and detailed the government experiments, it would have been a pretty boring story.

Too much too soon.

Withholding information creates tension that keeps audiences riveted. What better way to do this than have an MC with serious trust issues?

Eleven’s justifiable paranoia keeps her withholding critical information. But, it isn’t just her trust issues that keep her from spilling the tea.

She actually cares about the first real friends she’s ever made and doesn’t want any harm to come to them. Yet, in her misguided desire to protect them, she ironically places them in much more danger.

In ways, she’s overconfident that her abilities can be enough to keep them safe. Even if that isn’t true, she underestimates their abilities in comparison to her own. Her underestimation of the collective power of her team is what steadily draws them all deeper into danger and steady raises the stakes from Eleven simply remaining free to her placing their entire plane of existence is in danger.

Until Eleven becomes aware of her blind spot, she has no chance of being a hero.

Holding Out for a Hero

I really loved the movie Isn’t It Romantic because it did a really great job of teasing the audience along what we believed would be a predictable rom-com ending. The only difference would be the overweight acerbic architect would find true love as opposed to the standard rom-com MC we all expect.

If you haven’t seen the movie, I highly recommend it. It’s just a fun, good time.

When Natalie (through an odd twist of events) finds herself thrust into a world where everything is a rom-com, it forces her to face who she is and why she believes what she believes.

As is true with the blind spot, Natalie soon starts noticing how she’s part of her own problem. Others walk all over her because she allows it, then goes off and complains instead of changing her behaviors. If she acted like a top end architect, the odds would improve that others would treat her as one.

She also realizes the biggest blind spot of all—WHY she’s so bitter when it comes to romantic movies (and how this is spilling into real life).

Natalie’s journey isn’t as much about a new wardrobe or makeover as it is about remembering the core pain and finally recognizing that it never healed. She never found love because she didn’t see it even when it was right next to her.

This is when Natalie becomes the hero in her own story. She can’t give to others what she doesn’t even have for herself…LOVE.

Build-A-Hero

After all of this, can you look at your main character and give them some relatable flaws? A protagonist with a secret, struggling with an addiction, has a hard time trusting, doesn’t believe they are good enough/strong enough/talented enough to get the job done?

Maybe someone so damaged they’ve gone off course believing they’re doing the right thing, only to learn how misguided they’ve become?

Think of your favorite stories and what flaws made the protagonists into the most interesting heroes (I.e. Forrest Gump, Bones, Deadpool).

What about wounds? Would Monk have ever been Monk if his wife hadn’t died the way she did? If he didn’t carry the false guilt that propelled an obsessive need for control? His wound created the flaws that makes him an unparalleled investigator.

Let’s look at a great blind spot. Think of what created the immortalized version of Sarah Connor. Terminator was a good movie, but Terminator 2 is MODERN MYTHOLOGY.

Why?

Because Sarah started out as an everyday waitress thrust into extraordinary events. In her single-minded mission to protect her son and the planet, she unwittingly transformed into the very thing she sought to destroy.

In the end, we all love to make our characters larger than life, cool and kick@$$ in every way. Don’t let me stop you. We still can!

Just keep in mind that layering a healthy dose of flaws, wounds and blindspots can elevate a story from meh to magical. Even all our favorite comic book heroes have issues, blindspots and drama.

What Are Your Thoughts? I LOVE Hearing From You!

Who are some of your favorite heroes and why? I think a lot depends on my mood. Stranger Things is a really cool series because, while Eleven has the spotlight, every character is a hero in his/her own way and I could write a month of blogs easily on all the different characters.

They did an excellent job of layering in flaws, weaknesses, blindspots, and then using those to arc the characters into fantastic and fully formed heroes!

In fact, I think a lot of the best writing is coming out of series these days so it’s tougher to give good examples from the movies without reaching back in time to examples I’ve used plenty of times before.

But chime in! Have one place on the internet that is a little bit fun, right? What’s your favorite movie? Favorite hero/heroine and why?

The post The Hero: Taking an MC from “Meh” to “Myth” appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Fast drafting is a technique that I have used successfully on quite a few books. What is fast drafting? Fast drafting is when we sit down and write a book within a given amount of time. It can be as short as two weeks, but I don’t recommend longer than six.

WHY, KRISTEN? WHY????

Many new authors slog through that first book, editing every word to perfection, revising, reworking, redoing…and they never finish. So they start another book and edit and nitpick and…don’t finish.

Wash, rinse, repeat…mildew.

When I used to be a part of critique groups, it was not at all uncommon to find writers who’d been working on the same book two, five, eight and even ten years. 

I have been guilty myself…which is exactly WHY I fast draft.

Every time I’ve ever fast-drafted all the way to The END? I have published that book. Comes in handy when you’re also ghostwriter.

Conversely, every time I thought I was too smart and I didn’t NEED to fast-draft, I’ve stalled.

Those ‘bright ideas’ are all sitting in my Documents hanging out with the digital dust plot bunnies.

Fast, Slow & Author Process

Before anyone shouts me down, let me make this clear. HOW we write books is called ‘author process.’ When we are new, likely we’ll have to experiment.

Guess what? If you’ve never finished a novel, might be at least a good idea to emulate or learn from those who have. I learned from Candace Havens because she’s written, finished and published a gazillion books.

Seriously, click that hyperlink. Candy is amazing!

Great, maybe Kathryn Stockett, the author of The Help took five years and 62 revisions to get her story published. Awesome for her. And yes, her book was a runaway success, but this isn’t the norm. We are also now in a totally different publishing world.

This said. I don’t care if your writing process involves writing 100 words a day while wearing a unicorn outfit. Some people do super detailed outlines. Others write by the seat of their pants and are allergic to outlines.

If it works and you are finishing books? Who cares? I don’t.

So if you’ve tried fast-drafting and it doesn’t work, then fine. You at least gave it a try OR you know how to finish. I’m not talking to y’all. You’re set.

But for others, it might just be the key y’all need to break out of perfectionism.

Perfect is the enemy of the finished.

Fast Times in Indie Publishing

For those who want to make a living writing, here is the tough talk. If we keep perfecting and going back and revising and rewriting, then guess what? We are not finishing.

Why is this important? Well, first of all, most people are not interested in buying our clever and perfect half-finished manuscript.

Readers find a book, author or series they love and they will inhale everything. In the ‘Not So Good Old Days’ most authors were limited to publishing a book a year, maybe two. This was why, in large part, authors had a 96% failure rate (actual 2004 numbers from Book Expo America).

It is also why it took FOREVER to make excellent money as an author. One had to build up a backlist, while also being hindered by an outside editorial calendar over which authors had NO CONTROL.

Now? If you want to publish a book a month? You can do it. I don’t necessarily recommend it, but no outside force is going to limit you.

Notice I said, I don’t necessarily recommend it. If you want to fast-draft ten books, position each in a queue, then release a book a month? Awesome.

Regardless of how we write/publish, we must pick up the pace to make a living.

Does Writing Quickly Produce Inferior Work?

I’m a huge fan of fast drafting, if you haven’t caught that. As I already mentioned, Candace Havens teaches this technique, and it works. In fact, I think she has an upcoming class on this.

Candy is hardcore. She pushes you to write your novel in two weeks. I know right now there is great gnashing of teeth. I thought it was insane as well…until I did it. And my first novel was a product of that fast-draft session.

When we fast-draft, of course we do a little planning. What is the story about? Who are the main characters? But limit this, and I’ll explain why in a bit.

Why do we need to do some planning? Because…

Ultimately, our story needs to make sense. There is cause and effect, things cannot happen for no reason, and everything must be set up ahead of time or the reader WILL call “Foul!”

This aside. The point of fast-drafting is to simply write. No looking back. Always forward. You can fix stuff later.

I’ve heard some writers criticize this method, believing that writing at this increased pace somehow compromises quality. Many writers are afraid that picking up speed will somehow undermine craftsmanship, yet this isn’t necessarily so.

Some Fast Examples

To prove my point, here are some interesting factoids about writing hard and fast, some taken from James Scott Bell’s WONDERFUL book The Art of War for Writers (pages 79-82):

• William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks.
• Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises in six weeks.
• After being mocked by a fellow writer that writing so fast created junk, John D. MacDonald wrote The Executioners in a month. Simon & Schuster published it in hardback. It was also serialized in a magazine, selected by a book club, and turned into the movie Cape Fear TWICE.
• Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in nine days on a rented typewriter.
• Isaac Asimov was the author/editor of over 700 books over the course of his career.
• Stephen King writes 1,500 words a day every day of the year except his birthday. He’s published over fifty novels, and I don’t even know how many short stories and novellas. Let’s just say he’s written a LOT. Could he have done this writing a book every three years? Every five?

NO.

Meet “Captain Kirk Brain” & “Spock Brain”

Here’s my explanation of why writing faster than we ‘are comfortable’ can produce fiction just as good (if not better) than a work that’s been written slowly and deliberately.

And, since all roads that do not lead to LOTR, lead to Star Trek…

When we write quickly, we get into The Zone and pass The Wall. We become part of the world we’re creating. Fatigue wears out the cerebral cortex (the ‘Inner Editor’ which I will call our ‘Spock Brain’).

Fatigue diverts us to the Limbic Brain (also known as the Reptilian or Primal Brain, or for today’s purposes—‘Captain Kirk Brain’).

Captain Kirk Brain is emotional, visceral and has no problem kissing hot, green alien women or cheating the Kobayashi Maru. He out-bluffs Klingons, outruns Romulans, starts brawls and throws the rulebook out the window. He’s pure instinct, raw emotion and all action.

Live Fast, Write Fast

In short, Kirk is the stuff of great stories because he doesn’t stop until he gets what he wants. No one ever got to the end of a book and said, “Wow, that book was riveting. The grammar was perfect.”

Captain Kirk Brain can do it’s job better—write fiction—when Spock Brain isn’t there saying, “But Captain, you’re being illogical. It clearly states in Strunk & White….”

The BEST line Star Trek: Into Darkness is when the villain of the story (Kahn) says to Spock, “You can’t even break rules, how can you expect to break bones?”

So, I’m going to apply this to writing.

Many writers hold back emotionally when writing. Why? They aren’t going fast and hard and so Spock takes over and he wants us to use a seatbelt and our blinkers.

He isn’t the guy you want in charge if you’re going for the GUTS and breaking bones.

Kirk is for Action & Spock is for Rules

Spock Brain is a perfectionist and wants us to take our time, make sure we follow all the rules and put the commas in the right spot. He’s seriously uncomfortable with ‘suspending disbelief’ and he tries to explain everything so others don’t get confused.

The trick is to hop on a cerebral crotch-rocket and outrun Spock. He is seriously uncomfortable with speeding and you can easily lose him in the school zones or the parking lot of Walmart.

Don’t worry, Spock will yell at us later…at the appropriate time which is during revisions.

Thing is, Kirk and Spock make the perfect team, whether on The Enterprise or in our head. They balance each other, but they are also antagonists. Kirk wants to put phasers on KILL, and Spock wants to check and see if the rules for the Oxford Comma allows this.

Write Fast and Write Frequently

Tonight, I am teaching a class on Blogging for Authors. Why do I want authors to blog, other than it is one of THE BEST ways to cultivate an audience who will love our writing and buy all our books?

The reason I encourage writers to blog is that blogging is writing.

WHO KNEW? Yes, y’all are here reading WORDS from MY HEAD! Amazing!

And the more we write, the leaner, meaner, faster and cleaner we become. We learn to finish. It helps us override our need to ‘perfect’ everything.

Blogging helps us ship and get comfortable with going FAST. No, maybe every blog isn’t the quality of a New Yorker article, but who cares? It’s a BLOG.

We aren’t looking to win the Pulitzer. We’re looking to get better riding a Cerebral Ducati and ignoring all of Spock’s protests that “This isn’t safe” and “Where is our helmet?” and “Clearly the speed limit forbids you going this fast.”

When we get the stories out faster, they’re more visceral. We get more practice with more stories since we aren’t letting Spock nit-pick for the next ten years…which he will do if Kirk doesn’t go running the other way despite Spock’s protests.

The Fast Zone

As I mentioned in the beginning, if we want to fast-draft then I recommend a little bit of planning. For instance, I am fast-drafting a novel right now. I have written over 15,000 words in the past few days.

Before I started, though, I had to do some basic world-building. It’s a dark comedy but set in the future, so I had to work out how my world would look. Then I needed a rough idea of my main characters, and I also came up with the log-line.

What is my story about in ONE sentence?

Once I know that? Then I know the POINT of my story. How does it end? Who needs to arc and how?

Do this planning, but don’t camp here. Planning is productive procrastination. Limit how long/how much you plan.

Since I already know all of the core information ahead of time, fast-drafting becomes a lot easier.

You know what is toughest? To keep moving forward no matter what. I have already caught myself a few times wanting to go back and ‘fix.’ NO!

As an added bonus, when we fast-draft, we literally are rewiring our brains. Neurons that fire together wire together. Ever wonder how the prolific authors seem to only get faster? Practice! There is a reason Dean Koontz’s first-draft is his final draft. He never revises.

How can he do this?

He has written so many books that story structure is hard-wired into his brain. Fast drafting might not pay off the first time, the second, the third. But we are training our brains how to FINISH. We are hard-coding storytelling into our neurons.

Ultimately, over time? We only get better with practice.

In the End

Perfect is the enemy of the good and death to the finished. There is no such thing as a perfect novel. Also, guess what? No half-finished ‘perfect novel’ ever became a runaway global phenomenon BUT plenty of ‘terrible but finished’ novels have.

What Are Your Thoughts?

Other than you cannot possibly fast-draft. I get it. Not your process and that is perfectly fine. Would you have ever believed that Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in NINE DAYS?

Have you had good experiences with just writing? NaNoWriMo is great for this, though I recommend a little planning ahead of time.

I love hearing from you! And I like to reward those who chime in!

CONTEST

What do you WIN? For the month of MAY, for everyone who leaves a comment, I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice.

The Prize?

The unvarnished truth from yours truly. I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less).

CLASSES!

***All classes come with a FREE recording

TONIGHT!

Spilling the TEA: Blogging for Authors

TUESDAY, May 31st, 7:00 PM E.S.T. to 10:00 P.M. EST.

Use code New25 for $25 off Sign up HERE

The Art of Character: Writing Characters for a SERIES

Thursday, June 9th 7:00-10:00 P.M. NYC Time

For more information, SIGN UP HERE.

Practice Your Pitch: Master the Log-Line

Thursday, June 16th, 7:00-9:00 P.M. NYC Time. This is a TWO-HOUR INTERACTIVE WORKSHOP!

For more information, SIGN UP HERE.

The Write Stuff Special: 20 Pages of DEEP Edit ONE LOW PRICE HERE. Only 10 slots available and open until June 9th.

The post Write FAST & Furious! Outrunning “Spock Brain” appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Fiction filler is like fillers in food. It makes a little bit of good stuff go a lot farther, but at what cost? How much of this pink slime prose can we really get away with before readers feel ill?

Almost everyone has padded some form of writing—a school paper, essays, presentations, resumes, etc. In college, I used to write in the passive voice because, over the span of a research paper, I could squeeze in at least 30-40 extra words.

The Indonesian government was taken over by a CIA coup (passive voice).

A CIA coup took over the Indonesian government (active voice).

Add in a bunch of extra modifiers? Easy peasy!

A nefarious CIA coup secretly took over the legitimately elected democratic government of Indonesia, much to the population’s deeply profound dismay.

WINNER! …or not.

Trust me, when you’re barely squeezing over that 20-page limit? Every bit helps. And, if a little filler goes a long way, then a LOT of filler should go much farther straight into the trash.

With non-fiction, it’s often expected that authors will pad the work but even then? Don’t get crazy.

Why Use Non-Fiction Filler?

Non-fiction filler is so common, most people don’t notice it. For instance, testimonials are a common way to pad the word count. If you read most diet books, the authors will almost always include personal stories how X eating plan changed lives among those in their target audience.

These filler sections teach nothing directly about the diet, workout plan, budget guide, or ways to start a small business, but they do add credibility to the experts and their books.

If I write a non-fiction about how to lose a hundred pounds or more, then it’s a GREAT idea to have testimonials showing I might actually know what I’m talking about. Testimonials demonstrate, via anecdotal evidence, that my methods not only work, but that my results can and have been duplicated by others.

Think about infomercials.

How much of the infomercial is about the actual item versus people using the product or telling how X gizmo did something amazing?

Other non-fiction filler might be exercises, examples, or addendums (I.e. sample budgets, diet plans, meal plans, goal sheets, etc).

Non-fiction filler serves another, and fairly obvious, purpose. It can make the work long enough to justify people buying the physical BOOK (hopefully in hardback). For those who are pre-published and might not know, we need to reach a certain word count for a printed work.

If our work is too short, we don’t have a book, we have a pamphlet. We need to have enough content to make a decent book spine that is wide enough to showcase the title and our name.

While some people are happy to sell only in digital form, NF authors like to be able to sell ‘the book at the back of the room.’ NF authors also need a print book in order to negotiate placement with retailers (I.e. airport newsstands, Costco, Target, Walmart).

What about Fiction Filler?

Writers will pad a work of fiction because—DUH—they also want/need it to be longer. Perhaps the story isn’t quite robust enough to be a full-length novel. If I want a book to hold in hand, it needs to be a certain word count…so I add a little extra.

No problem, so long as I don’t get crazy.

Or, say if I want to list my book on Kindle Unlimited, I know I’m paid more for a longer book (KU pays per page read). Thus, there is a temptation to add in extra words so I can, theoretically, make more money.

To a degree, this can work. Yet, there is a certain threshold we reach where it just becomes bad writing. It won’t matter HOW much KU pays per page if readers want to throw their Kindles across the room twenty pages in. It will be MUCH harder to encourage future readers if most of our reviewers are wielding digital torches and pitchforks.

***I cover some of how to remove the major offenders here in my post, Editing for Authors: 7 Ways to Tighten the Story and Cut Costs.

All this said, I LOVE description. For me, there is nothing better than a novel with prose so rich and yummy I want to dog-ear, highlight and pillage for my collection of shinies. THIS, however, is a stylistic choice, and has nothing to do with skill level.

Lush prose (AWESOME) doesn’t automatically qualify as purple prose (NOT AWESOME).

This brings us to our first fiction filler offender.

Purple Prose to Plump the Plot

Purple prose is the literary equivalent of cotton candy. Lost of sugar spun with even more air. A little is fine but too much will make us sick.

Purple prose is defined as:

…overly ornate text that may disrupt a narrative flow by drawing undesirable attention to its own extravagant style of writing, thereby diminishing the appreciation of the prose overall.

Wikipedia

Have you ever read a work that rambled on so long with the description that, eventually, you forgot the point of the story? While purple prose certainly can pad the word count, it’s also a quick way to frustrate readers. Anything that disrupts the story, and thus interrupts the fictive dream, is bad.

For example, if I spend so long describing a magical forest that the reader has to go back to figure out why the MC is even in the woods? This, over time, gets annoying.

There really is no strict rule for what constitutes purple prose. Readers who love Hemingway-esque austerity are prone to think any description is too much description. Much of this is subjective.

So how can we ‘tell’?

One trick is to read your work aloud.

Record it on your phone and play it back. How does it sound? Are there places where you stumble reading it aloud? If the prose trips the tongue, odds are it will trip up the brain and the reader.

Read samples aloud to friends or a critique group. Though we can’t please everyone, if we get more than three people saying they were lost or confused? That’s a good hint we need to refine our work.

Nix redundant adverbs. That is just lazy/amateur writing. If your character yells loudly…um, how else are they supposed to yell? Adverbs can be powerful, but they can also be overused to prop up weak writing.

Check out Six Easy Tips for Self-Editing Your Fiction.

Just appreciate that sometimes, less is more, even in description.

Fiction Filler & Too Dumb to Live

I have Kindle Unlimited because I read and listen to an INSANE number of books. My KU membership gives me access to audio books that I can ‘read’ without using one of my credits.

***This is a fabulous way to attract new fans, most especially if you have a series.

Like I mentioned in my last post, Literary Larceny & Why People Should Be Ashamed, if I discover a new author on Audible, I will donate blood to finish their series/read everything they have available.

While I have scads of favorites, not every novel can be a winner. The last book I tried to listen to is largely what inspired this post. To be fair to the author, the concept was excellent and the story started off strong. Plenty of people enjoyed it.

But, in my POV, the author used SO much filler that they split their audience between those who loved it and those who wanted to set the work on fire, then salt the earth beneath it.

If we pad the run time, we risk making the characters—the MC in particular—come across as too dumb to live.

In this book, the MC had one annoying habit that finally rendered the story unreadable.

She questioned everything to the point of distraction. If she was going out for groceries, we (the readers) were subjected to paragraph after paragraph of annoying indecision.

(My parody to give the gist…)

I was supposed to make dinner, but I hadn’t been feeling well. Since I’d been sick for the past week, the fridge was almost empty. Was I really ready to get out of the house? I wasn’t sure.

What if I saw someone I knew? Worse still, what if someone from my husband’s office saw me? Would word get back to him? I didn’t know if I could take any more of his lectures how I was letting myself go.

Was I really letting myself go? I HAD been sick. Really sick. That should have been enough to not look my best. Wasn’t it? Or was I just making bad excuses?

Maybe I could try harder. I could wear my new sundress. No, too casual. What about my pants suit from the other day? That was nice enough, right? And only buy a rotisserie chicken. That wouldn’t take too long…

FOR DUCK SAKES, MAKE A DECISION!

Though I am being silly here to protect the guilty innocent, my example isn’t too far off from the painful waffling on almost every page of the novel. The MC fretted over every little thing on almost every page, with every…single…decision.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one irritated to the point of distraction.

Word/Phrase Echoes as Fiction Filler

For anyone who’s ever completed an entire book, CONGRATULATIONS! For those who haven’t? I am warning you ahead of time that you WILL have a favorite word or turn of phrase that you’ll use WAY more than you intended.

It happens.

This is why good editors/beta readers are invaluable.

How do you know if you’ve used a word/phrase too many times? Ask two key questions here:

1. If you turned every time the audience read a certain word/phrase in your MS into a drinking game, would readers die from alcohol poisoning?
2. If you answered ‘YES’ to Question 1, then how QUICKLY would the reader die?

Many of these turns of phrase are common just in general. I’ve used the notion of a smile that doesn’t reach the eyes. This is used to convey to opposite of the Duchenne Smile, which is a smile of authentic happiness/enthusiasm.

Someone can be smiling at you, but deep down you sense they’d stab you if it were legal. Thus, their “smile doesn’t reach their eyes.”

Got it.

Nothing wrong with using this once, twice, maybe more. But, when we readers start noticing it to the point of distraction? That is a big problem.

This author was also a fan of ice in physiological descriptions. The MC’s blood turned to ice, her spine turned to ice, her stomach chilled to ice, ice flowed through her chest, her nerves froze to ice….

OKAY I GET IT! THIS BOOK HAS MORE ICE THAN THE POLAR CAPS!

Repetitive Actions/Scenes

One of the main reasons I’m a stickler about tight writing is because clean prose makes it much easier to see if our characters or plot are weak (then strengthen accordingly).

Sadly, what a lot of authors (new authors) do is, instead of fixing the core problems, they use giant globs of Literary Bond-O to hold their story together. How do we spot Literary Bond-O? Repetition.

The MC in this book was constantly drinking, falling or spilling something. I also lost count how many scenes the character was having wine. Which, hey I like wine but there are other background actions a character can be doing aside from refilling her drink.

Get Creative

In one scene, the MC refilled her glass so many times, she went through almost two bottles easily (4 glasses to a bottle). By the time the author got to the end of the scene? The MC should have been wasted.

Lord knows I wished I were…

Not to mention I paid more attention to counting refills than to the plot. No bueno.

I get it. The author was trying to show the MC was nervous. Fine. She’s in a kitchen. Refill the wine, reorganize the cutlery, refold the bar towels. There are a lot of other ‘busy’ activities that can show a character is nervous. Think beyond that ONE thing.

Change it UP!

The MC also kept startling, which is fine. But, again, she kept startling in the same exact way. I lost track how much stuff she dropped/broke/spilled.

Humans react all along a spectrum. Over at Writers Helping Writers, Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi have all KINDS of resources to help us add depth and dimension to our stories. These ladies are the authors of The Emotion Thesaurus, which is a MUST-HAVE in every author’s reference library.

There is more than one way to show every emotion or reaction. True, our heart races when stressed, but we can also get dizzy, have sweaty palms, ringing in the ears, etc. Vary up the physiology.

Yes, we can spill things when startled. Spilling something—coffee, wine, tea, contents of purse—every ten pages?

Everybody DRINK!

How to Fix the Filler

Again, beta readers and a good editor can help. Then there are also common offenders when it comes to repetitive words (look, looked, looking, turn, like, etc.).

If you suspect you might be using the same descriptors, use Word FIND and highlight every time a certain word pops up in the MS. For instance, if I keep using ice (ice in her heart, ice through her veins, Ice, Ice, Baby…) do a Word FIND for ‘ice’ and either highlight it or FIND/REPLACE in all caps with ICE. This will help you SEE just how many times you might be reusing the same word.

***Just expect to also see ‘sushi and rICE’, because Word FIND CHANGE/REPLACE won’t discriminate between ‘ice’ the word and ‘ice’ as part of a word.

Also, search for synonyms while you’re at it (cold, chill, frozen).

Once you’ve found all the offenders and fixed accordingly, then just use Word FIND Change/Replace to revert it back.

In the end, relax. First, give yourself permission to be new. Then, realize even the best writers do it. There is no such thing as the perfect book. As I mentioned with ‘purple prose’…

Some of this ‘filler’ is going to be subjective.

We still need to do the best we can. The more distractions we can remove from our story, the better the odds readers will not only finish our books, but they’ll read everything we have AND recommend us.

While we can’t please everyone, I do hope this post helps y’all trim any fat and get rid of any fiction fluff. Bye, bye, book bloat!

What Are Your Thoughts?

Have you tried to read or listen to a book and couldn’t get past all the empty fillers? Are there some other types of fictional fluff you would add to the list? Does fiction filler not bother you? Do you have a certain threshold you can take and then it’s OVER?

I love hearing from you!

What do you WIN? For the month of APRIL, for everyone who leaves a comment, I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice.

What do you win?

The unvarnished truth from yours truly. I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less).

The post Fiction Filler: Bloated Writing Makes Readers Sick appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Arc is critical in stories. How do the characters change? Who changes and how? What is an arc and do we need a protractor?

In my last post, Personality Traits: Creating Dimensional Characters, we talked about how useful personality tests can be for character creation and balancing the party.

Ideally, we want to have a nice mix of personalities that compliment each other. But, it’s also critical they all generate conflict lest we end up with a snooze-fest.

Stories offer an escape, provide entertainment, teach, and promote introspection and examination. Most importantly, stories expand on the human condition and show us change is possible.

For the record, feel free to skim this post for the highlights. I LOVE examples because that’s how I learn best, and I worked very hard to offer a wide variety of illustrations to demonstrate my points.

Moving on. People change, and…

This change is called arc, by the way.

Granted, there are some characters who never change but they remain the same for an important reason. They’ll act as the lever that forces those around them to arc.

Think Jack Dawson in Titanic or Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise (total coincidence I have two Jacks, for the record).

These characters introduce drama, adventure and chaos into the lives of those around them, people who probably never would have changed had they not crossed paths with one of the Jacks.

Rose would have dutifully married her betrothed Cal Hockley. She’d have lived within the rules, confines and expectations demanded of a lady of her station.

Blacksmith Will Turner, too, would have lived out his life the way social convention dictated. He’d have gone to his grave wondering what might have been. His secret love—the governor’s daughter—would have forever remained that…a secret.

It is only when bad men kidnap Elizabeth Swann and Captain Jack Sparrow subsequently crashes into Will Turner’s life that everything changes.

Mach-IV and Belief

Last time, I introduced the Mach-IV test. The Mach-IV test measures how Machiavellian a person is. High-Mach people tend to be very practical, cynical, ruthless, and highly analytical (they also get a bad rap as all being heartless sociopaths, which is grossly inaccurate).

Low-Mach people generally are more emotional, tend to see the world with rose-colored glasses, believe in the benefit of the doubt and the inherent good of humanity (but they can also be naive and easily duped).

Unlike other personality tests like Meyers-Brigg or the Enneagram test, the Mach-IV changes.

I was an ENFP/INFP in high school, college and today (I score dead even on introvert/extrovert so it is a toss-up). Time, experience, victories and defeats have had little impact on my core personality.

But the Mach-IV is different. It measures how a person sees the world. So say a person generally believes humans are good. They feel honesty is the best policy. They’d NEVER flatter someone in power to manipulate a result.

Nothing wrong with that.

Now toss this person into an unexpected war (or other massive crisis). The person who’d never lie, cheat, steal or manipulate before the life-altering event suddenly has to make some tough choices. Survival is on the line.

Those Who Can’t and Those Who Can

There are those who can change (arc) and those who can’t. These static characters are great for generating tension, but they need to either be limited or offset by more reasonable characters.

Some people, when crisis hits, don’t, can’t or won’t change. Often these people die. At the least, they can put everyone around them in danger.

Depending on your story, the person who refuses to compromise can be an incredible source of tension. This character can exist on either extreme of the Mach-IV spectrum.

Think of a band of refugees running from an invasion who are trapped with the person who cannot ever tell a lie.

Fellow D&D nerds? This is Lawful Good.

Either they can’t lie (some people can’t, which is why they suck at poker) Or, they won’t. Maybe they have strong moral or religious convictions.

If your band of heroes decides to take this person into their party, then they are automatically handicapped. They’re going to have to make sure they can run interference. For instance, if this pathologically honest person is questioned at a checkpoint, everyone could die.

If it would serve the group to sneak up on a guard and stab them in the back, the other characters (Iron Man) will likely have to distract or offset our White Knight who’d never abide by this behavior (Captain America).

A rigid moral compass does little to help expedience.

See, there is nothing wrong with this noble character if used, or offset properly.

We can flip the script and have a super High-Mach person who acts on their impulses. This character believes the ends justify the means and can be extremely chaotic. It’s also hard to trust this person even if they’re very effective. This is when the Low-Mach (Captain America) can offset the chaos of the High-Mach (Tony Stark).

Arc: Changing a Low-Mach into High-Mach

So, if you look at our Low-Mach and our High-Mach, they make for great static characters who can drive change in those around them.

Just note, High-Machs and Low-Machs CAN CHANGE (and it’s really fun to watch them transform).

We can arc a Low-Mach into a High-Mach. Think Sarah Connor in the Terminator franchise. She goes from being a simple waitress who believes what she sees into a one-woman killing machine.

In the beginning, her world is a normal, boring routine. Likely her days are much the same…until a man from the future careers into her life to protect her from a murderous cyborg.

Sarah MUST change if she a) hopes to survive b) hopes to protect her unborn son c) hopes to save the world.

Sarah Connor is a fascinating study in that she arcs from being about as Low-Mach as one can get into a metaphorical representation of the very machine she’s sacrificed everything to destroy.

Think of how Reese explains the terminator:

Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

Kyle Reese in “The Terminator”

This is Reese’s description of the cyborg in Terminator. BUT, how much does this LATER describe Sarah Connor in the sequel, Terminator 2?

Low-Mach to High-Mach an Easier Sell

I believe it is actually easier to arc a Low-Mach to High because that is a character most people will feel comfortable with in the beginning.

Since most people fall in the Low-Mach or at least the middle of the range and VERY FEW score as High-Mach, this character is an easier sell.

Why? They look like and think like most people, so it’s easier to get the audience to like them and empathize. Sarah Connor would have never become so iconic had we met her in her 2.0 version. A naive, struggling waitress is a better place to begin.

Other great examples? Buffy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the group of regular teenagers in Red Dawn, and love interest Dana Cummings in The Accountant.

What about the opposite? High-Mach to Low-Mach?

I don’t believe it’s possible to have the extreme changes going COMPLETELY the opposite direction. It’s much more reasonable for a naive goody-goody to turn very dark than it is to turn someone very dark into a total goody-goody.

Not impossible, merely easier.

One is believable, the other requires either something akin to a Road to Damascus experience, or a trial by fire brutal enough to soften even their hard hearts.

For instance, Road to Damascus moments happen. We have Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. His life might not be on the line, but his salvation is.

What about a former drug dealer who nearly dies after being shot, who then becomes a street minister? A notorious cyber-criminal who changes sides and uses his knowledge to fight bad guys like HE once was? Maybe a hardened prostitute who stumbles across an abandoned baby and it changes her life?

Get CREATIVE!

Don’t have a near-death-revelation to work with? No problem. We ALSO have the massive trial by fire. Life just turns on the heat until the High-Mach softens up.

High-Mach people just aren’t going to suddenly believe the world is all essentially good and see only kittens and unicorns.

While we cannot completely change a them, we can chill them out. We can make them at least a Lower-Mach.

Sherlock (the BBC version) is a good example I introduced last time. By adding in foils like Watson, Lestrade and Molly, Sherlock Holmes arcs and evolves over time into a kinder, gentler prickly pear.

In the beginning, he is solitary, friendless and acerbic to the point of being his own worst enemy.

By the end of the series, he is still Sherlock, but without all the hard edges and points. He’s no longer alone, experiences a semblance of love, and has emotional attachments with the very people who loathed him in the beginning.

He’s even willing to die for them.

While I feel this is tougher arc to write well, if we pull it off, it makes for some of the most timeless stories.

Examples

One of my favorite examples of a High-Mach to Lower-Mach? Gran Torino. Walt Kowalski is an angry, racist Korean veteran who’s transformed when he stands up for his Hmong neighbor against a local gang…the same neighbor who tried to steal his beloved car.

Kowalski is a miserable human being, but when he chooses to try and reform the teen, Thao, he gets more than he bargained for.

By getting involved with his Korean neighbors, he comes to grips with the pain and loss that’s been driving his racist attitude. He becomes a better person.

Walter serves as a surrogate father to Thao who’s heading down a path that leads only to prison or death. Thao, in turn, transforms Walt’s heart of stone and restores his humanity.

Another fab example? Melvin Udall, the misanthropic romance author in As Good as It Gets. Udall is a miserable jerk who suffers from debilitating OCD. He has no use for humans and, frankly, they have almost no use for him.

It is only when Melvin’s gay neighbor is the victim of a hate crime that we see Melvin begin to defrost. Between that and his relationship with his favorite waitress and her son, Melvin transitions from utterly irredeemable person to someone we eagerly root for by the end.

The Trick to High-Machs

As I mentioned earlier, High-Machs can be a tougher sell. We have to hook the reader early and hook hard. If our character is too off-putting, then that is no good.

We can do something that humanizes an otherwise unsympathetic character.

With Marvin Udall, the writers humanized him by showing his paralyzing OCD and the impact it had on everyday life. Yes, Udall is a b@stard, but when his world doesn’t perfectly line up? He’s a lost, frightened child.

What better way to SHOW (not tell) Melvin’s arc—how he has CHANGED—than have him curled up with his neighbor’s dog, the same dog he tossed down the garbage chute in the beginning of the movie?

We can also use supporting characters to keep the audience vested long enough to start caring for our High-Mach character. This is evident in A Christmas Carol—we care about Bob Cratchit even if we have no use for Scrooge.

Why do audiences love to see High-Machs arc to Low(er)-Machs? We all want to believe in redemption.

Save the Cat

We can also inject what the late, great screenwriter Blake Snyder referred to as a “Save the Cat” moment. Christian Wolff, the CPA/hitman in The Accountant is, on the surface, like trying to relate to a robot.

Not only is Christian’s backstory brilliantly woven throughout the movie, but in the VERY BEGINNING we see him helping an aging couple with their taxes.

He uses his supercomputer brain-powers to navigate tax law and make sure the couple doesn’t lose their farm to the IRS. While not evident in any of his body language, we sense he really does care. Soon after this event, Christian literally saves their lives when bad guys come calling.

***Note how his NAME shows what a contradiction he is—Christian Wolff.

How to Arc a Low-Mach to a High-Mach

While this might seem easier to do, we still have to tread carefully. First of all, we need an event or a situation robust enough to fundamentally alter our Pollyanna’s world view. Obviously, war, disaster, famine, etc. are all doable, but there’s no need to be myopic.

Catastrophes that are personal can actually resonate better. Why? Because most people are far more likely to face down cancer than an asteroid hurtling toward Earth.

Why do audiences love to arc Low-Machs to High-Machs? We like to believe in humanity’s capacity to survive no matter the odds. It’s also a solid reminder to be careful how we judge.

We honestly do NOT know how we’d react in any given situation, and these stories and characters keep us humble.

Never say never.

This is why the series Breaking Bad has been so popular. Walter White is a high school chemistry teacher. His son has cerebral palsy. When Walker is diagnosed with Stage III cancer, what does he have to lose?

He uses what he knows best—chemistry—to provide for his family after he’s dead.

Now, do y’all think Walter just woke up one day and thought, “Hmmm, I think I’ll become a drug kingpin”? Of course not. But the sudden deadline—emphasis on DEAD—is enough for Walter to throw away his moral inhibitions for what he sees as the greater good.

Why is this story so fascinating? Because it forces self-examination. We honestly cannot answer if we’d do any better if faced with the similar life-altering events. Stories like these engender self-examination.

Who do we believe we are versus who are we…really?

The trick to arcing a Low-Mach to a High-Mach is the reason must be big enough for the audience to give them a pass. It needs to hit us in our tender parts hard enough to at least rattle our resolve.

Pacing Character Arc

Sure, I suppose it is possible for someone to instantly change, but that is a tough sell. If we look at Scrooge, the entire point of the three ghosts visiting is to soften Scrooge enough so the audience not only wants redemption, but they also BUY his redemption.

Same in the movie Doctor Strange. Hot-shot surgeon Dr. Stephen Strange is the best in the world at what he does…and he knows it.

He’s a hopeless narcissistic jerk.

In fact, his narcissism is what causes the accident that destroys his hands and effectively takes away his superpower. Losing his status is the only thing that can humble him enough to seek help that isn’t based in science.

He must reach out to those he once mocked. But it isn’t easy. Strange doesn’t show up Day One at the temple in Nepal and the monks instantly agree to make him whole (or actually better than whole). Strange remains a skeptic (and a jerk) for much of the movie.

That is, until he arcs.

Granted, he’ll always be an egomaniac, but he finds a purpose that is greater than simply serving himself. He ego is channeled to service above self.

Arc & Kubler-Ross Stages of Grief

Character arc also needs to happen organically. Often the change will follow the Kubler-Ross stages of Death and Dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

The stages don’t need to neatly go down the line. In fact it is highly common for someone to make progress only to suddenly regress. They might seem to reach acceptance only to go back to bargaining.

By using these stages our character’s arc will feel more authentic. Few people are hit with a life-altering event and jump all the way to acceptance. That just doesn’t happen or happens so rarely the audience won’t buy it.

Denial: This isn’t real. Stuff like this doesn’t happen. This can’t happen to ME.

Anger: What did I do to deserve this? This isn’t fair. How can you expect me to do X?

Bargaining: Okay, things are bad, but there has to be another way.

Depression: How did I get here? Will I ever be the same? Who am I?

Acceptance: Gotta do what you gotta do. I need to change.

I guarantee if you look at your favorite movies, you’ll see this pattern. It might even be subtle, and generally is best if it is lest it come across as stilted or preachy.

Mach-IV and Romantic Arc

One of the commenters (Barbara) asked an excellent question about the Mach-IV scores in the last post. She wanted to know if/how it could be used in a romance. Hopefully, by now, y’all can see how the Mach-IV scale is used in all genres, but romance probably already applies it quite liberally.

How many Hallmark movies revolve around the sweet, sensitive handyman melting the heart of a no-nonsense corporate lawyer and reminding her of the true meaning of puppies, Christmas, then finally love? Or the scatter-brained but tenderhearted nanny who shows the hard-nosed diplomat it is okay to love again after losing his wife?

How many staple romance characters are deeply wounded? They’ve vowed to never love again. They refuse to ever be vulnerable again. Maybe they have a dangerous job or shady past and so they keep everyone at a distance.

Perhaps one of them is seemingly ‘incapable’ of love. In fact, emotionally unavailable men have been a staple of romantic characters since Mr. Darcy at least.

Why do y’all think I have been crushing on Sherlock?

There is a whole canon of fanfic (Sherlolly) devoted to Molly Hooper and the emotionally handicapped Sherlock Holmes finding love together.

Personal vows are a big deal in romance.

Though I don’t want to be overly reductive because romance is a vastly complex genre, the whole POINT of romance is a) opposites attract and b) showing love wins. If there were no barrier to love in the beginning, then we have no story.

The larger the barrier, the more insurmountable the odds, the better the story.

Obviously the two partners are going to have to alter their worldview if they hope to find love. In romance, the love interests are going to have to arc and meet somewhere in the middle if they hope to find their HEA (Happily-Ever-After) or the more contemporary HFN (Happily-For-Now).

What Are Your Thoughts?

Enjoy your Spring Break for those who have that right now. Do you now understand what arc is and how to do it well? At least a little better? Who can add examples from film, television or movies?

What are your favorite High or Low-Mach characters? Do you prefer resilience stories or redemption stories? Or do you love both?

So again, any thoughts, questions, opinions? I do love hearing from you.

What do you WIN? For the month of MARCH, for everyone who leaves a comment, I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice.

What do you win?

The unvarnished truth from yours truly. I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less).

***I will announce previous winners next post and will have new classes available soon. Still getting over COVID so getting there, slowly but surely.

The post Arc: How Characters Grow and Change Organically appeared first on Kristen Lamb.

Horror is in the HOUSE today…and over the weekend for many since, um, HALLOWEEN! So, today I’d like to talk about horror as a genre.

Horror gets a bad rap. Most people automatically default to brainless, low-budget slasher movies. People somehow forget that we can thank horror for some of the greatest works of literature from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein to Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

***For the record. Horror as a genre is still very much alive. It’s just that, after all the 70s slasher movies, these books have been re-shelved as speculative fiction. Books once listed as ‘horror’ we can now find under mystery, thriller, suspense, science fiction, paranormal fantasy, etc.

Horror has always pushed boundaries while shining a light on what we as a culture fear the most. If we can forget the chainsaws and college coeds who trip a lot, horror can teach us all how to be better authors…no matter which genre we write.

This genre fascinates me simply because (as I mentioned earlier), I believe it is the most difficult genre to write. Sure it was probably easier back in the days that movie audiences ran screaming from the man in a really bad plastic ant outfit. But these days? As desensitized as we have become? Unsettling people is no simple task.

That’s why I’d like to talk about it today because no matter which type of fiction we write, we can learn a lot from what horror authors do well.

Horror Evokes Reflection

Powerful fiction mines the darkest, deepest, grittiest areas of the soul. GREAT fiction holds a mirror to man and society and offers messages that go beyond the plot. A really great story should, ultimately lead to some form of self-reflection.

Elisabeth Kubler Ros once stated:

There are only two emotions: love and fear. All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate, anxiety and guilt.

It’s true that there are only two primary emotions, love and fear. But it’s more accurate to say that there is only love or fear, for we cannot feel these two emotions together, at exactly the same time. They’re opposites. If we’re in fear, we are not in a place of love. When we’re in a place of love, we cannot be in a place of fear.

This means, the more we understand fear, the deeper our writing becomes, the more meaningful, visceral, and profound. Yes, REGARDLESS OF GENRE.

In love stories, fear might be of being alone, of never finding ‘the one’ or even losing ‘the one.’ In literary fiction, the fear can be of remaining the same, or of regressing, or of failing to evolve and learn the critical lesson provided by the story problem.

Fear is the lifeblood of ALL fiction because conflict is always generated by fear.

The protagonist wants something BUT THEN… The more intense the fear? The higher the stakes become? The faster the reader turns the pages.

What Horror Says About Conflict

Here is where we need to be careful. There is a fine line between a bad situation versus authentic conflict. This line makes the difference between a meh novel versus something people hold onto and read and reread.

It is what makes the difference between a B horror movie that is utterly forgettable, versus a horror staple that endures for generations (Um, Dracula?).

In horror, bad situations can be monsters or an ax-wielding psycho, but, without authentic conflict added in, it quickly devolves into a sort of wash, rinse, repeat. Oh, he chopped up a teenager! Now two teenagers! Now he skinned them and danced in a woman suit made from their flesh!

This is the basest form of horror, the horror that depends on shock value (gore), and NOT the type of stories I am thinking of while writing this blog.

And before anyone says, “But that is horror, it doesn’t apply to me!” Be careful. I get a lot of new fiction that it is simply bad situation after bad situation—and another car chase—and the reason this falls flat is that the ‘badness’ is purely external. The characters are passively enduring ‘bad things happening’ and the writer leaves it there.

So what makes it conflict and not just a bad situation?

Monsters & Men

I liken humans to a tea cup. Whatever we are filled with is what will spill out when we are rattled.  When the heat is on (story problem) do we rise to the occasion or is our darker self revealed? Or both?

A great example of this is Stephen King’s The Mist. Sure it is a monster story. Scary strange mist, creatures in the mist, tentacles, blood, OMG! And if King had made the focus of the story the aliens, we would have a pretty forgettable movie.

Oooh a giant tentacle!

What now?

A BIGGER TENTACLE!

What now?

Have it eat someone!

Oooh! And now?

Have it eat EVEN MORE people!

ZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Horror & Tedium

You can clearly see how this would have become a seriously tedious story if it simply relied on a string of ‘worsening’ surface situations. But King is too smart for that. No, he appreciated what I talked about a moment ago.

Sure humans are a nice enough bunch so long as there is food and shelter and the power works. But take away the conveniences. Scare people, really scare them and we get to see who they really are.

***Yes I am thinking about every person who bought ALL the toilet paper last year when COVID hit O_o

We take that external problem and make it internal.

The source of conflict in The Mist has far less to do with the aliens outside and much more to do with what that outside problem does to the people trapped in the grocery store.

We see the characters fall all along the spectrum. The ordinary and unremarkable cashier risking his life to help others contrasted against the ‘good church-going woman’ escalating to full scale cult leader (human sacrifice to appease the beasts outside included) in less than 24 hours.

The monsters inside become far scarier than whatever is outside.

If we think about it, this is what makes for a good ghost story, too. It is less about what the ghost is or isn’t doing and more about what it is revealing about those being tormented. A fantastic example of this is Prisoner of Hell Gate which I recommend any time, but especially for those already looking for some really great Halloween reading.

Strand a boat full of college students on an island where Typhoid Mary died…then sit back and watch the fireworks. Again, the horror is less to do with the island and more to do with what the peril brings out in the people.

I also recommend Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island and Dean Koontz’s What the Night Knows.

These Lessons Apply to ALL Great Stories

But as I mentioned, this ‘turning the external internal’ is the crux of all great fiction. Toss in a problem then watch what it does to the people around it. In Big, Little Lies (general fiction) a Kindergarten schoolyard rumor escalates to murder.

The story really has nothing to do with the murder and more to do with how a simple little rumor has the power to unstitch families and unravel lives. It is the rumor that brings out the best and the worst in people.

Fiction is about problems and then putting on the pressure.

The story problem serves as a crucible. We can make our story forge so hot it rivals the surface of the sun, but unless we toss the character(s) in it? Doesn’t matter how hot it is. It is our job (no matter the genre) to poke and prod and expose that which people fear.

Hone in on the pain points and THAT is what makes for dimensional writing—from the fear of outliving our children (Steele Magnolias) to the fear of being invisible/taken for granted (Fried Green Tomatoes) to the fear of crossing that threshold separating the child versus the adult (The Labyrinth).

Writers are brokers of fear . Buuut, excellent horror shows us fear is only part of the recipe. We tap into what people fear BUT THEN show how fear can be harnessed for good.

Fear and Fiction

What are your thoughts? What are some of your favorite horror books/authors/movies? I am a HUGE Koontz fan.

I tend to like campy horror movies since not much really scares me. I LOVE The Babysitter, The Cabin in the Woods, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, and Army of Darkness.

For those who maybe eschew horror, can you at least see how these tools might enrich your fiction?

I LOVE hearing from you!

To prove it and show my love, for the month of NOVEMBER, everyone who leaves a comment I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. What do you win? The unvarnished truth from yours truly. I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less).

***I will announce September and October’s winners next post.

CLASSES

The Edge: How to Write Mystery, Suspense & Thriller is available ON DEMAND (sign up HERE and use Thrill10 for $10 off). The recording turned out FANTASTIC, so check it out. 

***I will be listing new classes so check them out next post.

For those who need help building a platform and keeping it SIMPLE, pick up a copy of my evergreen (as in useful forever) social media/branding book Rise of the Machines—Human Authors in a Digital World on AMAZON, iBooks, or Nook. 

The post How Horror Can Improve Our Writing in ANY Genre appeared first on Kristen Lamb.