Karen Sandler

Tag: character

  • Who Are You (woot-woot)?

    Tankborn smlThis week, YA Highway asks the questions How do you decide on names? Would you ever name a character after a friend/family member/ex?

    Back when I was writing romances, I wanted everyday names for my characters. So I kept a baby names book near my computer. I’d flip through it for my hero’s or heroine’s name, looking for one that seemed to match the character’s personality. When I found the right name, a little bell would go off inside me. I could see the character that much more clearly.

    When I started writing the Tankborn series, I couldn’t use a baby name book anymore. The Tankborn trilogy is set hundreds of years in the future. To set the tone for the world, the names needed to be a little more exotic than what’s on offer in the naming books. Also, I had a multi-ethnic cast and I needed names that would suit them. So I had to rely on the Web, and sites that listed, for instance, Brahmin or Chinese or Zimbabwe given names and their meanings. Here’s one of my fave sites for finding international names.

    Kayla, the name of my main character in Tankborn, isn’t super unusual. At least it isn’t now. When I first came up with it, back when I was writing the movie script that later became Tankborn, I thought I’d made up the name Kayla. Not so much.

    When I wrote the first book, I did make up some of the names of other characters: Tala, Jal, Tanti, Quila. In real life, people make up names all the time for their children, why wouldn’t they in my future world? I used made up names mostly for GENs, sometimes for lowborns. And just as with Kayla, sometimes the names I thought were made up, that originated with me, were actually “real” names (Pia and Risa come to mind).

    For my trueborns, I used real names of various ethnicities. There’s Devak (Indian), my main male character, Devak’s friend, Junjie (Chinese), Devak’s father and mother, Ved (Indian) and Rasia, (Indian). Raashida (African), is an important character in Awakening, the upcoming follow-on to Tankborn.

    Do I ever use the names of real people in my books? Yes, although I don’t match the character to the real person. I just “borrow” the real name because I like it and it works for my book. I borrowed Zul (Devak’s great-grandfather) and Azad (Devak’s dead half-brother) from people I actually know.

    How about you? If you write, how do you come up with those character names? If you’re a reader, have you ever stumbled across a name that didn’t seem to fit the character, or a name that was absolutely perfect?

  • 3 Tricks to Energize an Expository Scene

    Has this ever happened to you? You’re working on your manuscript and you’ve come to a point where you need to reveal information to your reader. It might be something crucial to the plot, or a vital revelation about your main character. You start writing the scene, but somehow it’s flat and boring. It sounds like a couple of talking heads. You start to feel completely blocked.

    If it hasn’t happened to you, you’re lucky. I’ve experienced this scenario any number of times writing my 20+ books. Early on in my career, I would flounder for a solution, but now I rely on a few go-to methods to freshen and energize the scene.

    1. Change the setting

    If it’s not working to have your characters sitting in a restaurant while they hash over their next step in defeating the alien zombie-vampires, get them up and moving. Your characters can walk through a park, or drive in a car, or climb up the hill to where they think the talisman is hidden. Sometimes an intimate, static setting is appropriate—in her room, or hidden in the cave safe from those AZVs. But if the scene is coming off too blah, get your characters up and out.

    2. Change the POV

    If you’re using the point of view of more than one character, sometimes all it takes to brighten up a scene is to switch to another character’s POV. That other character will have an entirely different perspective on the situation. That perspective might generate more conflict, which is exactly what will keep your reader reading.

    3. Do it with action

    This is a step beyond just getting your characters moving. Write your expository scene as an action scene. They’re fighting those AZVs, and in the process shouting out to each other what the reader needs to know—that he’s the one who left her that love note in third grade, or she stole from the church donation box to post his bail. Or you reveal information with the action itself—that AZVs have to be staked, beheaded, and tasered to be destroyed.

    So if your expository scene is lying there deader than a staked-beheaded-tasered AZV, give these tricks a try and get your book moving again.

  • Give Every Scene a Purpose

    The other day, I gave a talk to a high school class about how I did the world-building for my SF book Tankborn. This was a creative writing class, and the students were very motivated to learn more about how I wrote Tankborn and about the writing business in general.

    During the talk, I brought up an essential fact about writing fiction: that although real life is full of the trivial and mundane, there’s no room for the unimportant in fiction.

    In real life, all sorts of things can happen. You try to start your car and your battery is dead. So maybe you’re late for work and get a chewing out. Or you happen to meet a friendly stranger at the supermarket and you chat for the few minutes you wait together in line. Or when you get home from the market, you discover you got regular coffee when you meant to get decaf. Or perhaps you spend days at your father’s care home (as I did earlier this year) as he’s dying.

    Could these things happen in your fiction story? Of course they could, whether you’re writing a realistic or speculative story. But here’s the big difference. All of those events, from the mundane (chatting up a stranger) to the life-changing (the death of your father) would have to have a purpose in your story. They should not, must not be there just to fill space on the page.

    For instance, the battery going dead might mean that your main character gets to work late and discovers a police cordon around her office building. Then she sees the bodies wheeled out, including that of the mass murderer who just killed her boss and several co-workers.

    That stranger your character chats with in line could be a harried single father in desperate need of a nanny. Perhaps your main character is in desperate need of a job and she agrees to watch the father’s three unruly kids. This would lead to true love and the taming of the kids (yes, I used to write romance novels).

    That accidentally purchased coffee could have scrawled across the bottom a message that leads the main character to a factory where the employees are victims of a human trafficker. If the character had grabbed the decaf instead of the regular, she might never have seen the message.

    So think about your own story. Does every scene count for something? Are your characters finding clues, are they revealing information, are you raising the stakes for them in ways that moves the plot forward? It’s pointless to have the heroine narrowly avoid being run over by a car (as nail-biting as that might be) unless the person driving the car (or the person who hired them to drive the car) is crucial to the plot. If she slips and falls down a cliff, she’d better find a secret cave or a dead body or a treasure chest. And if she doesn’t get herself out of that fix, the person who does rescue her had better be the love interest.

    If you’re sure every scene in your manuscript does have a purpose, let me up the ante. Find a way for at least some of those scenes to do double or triple duty. Have the scene reveal not only information, but character. Have it expose a character’s weakness and also set up a crucial plot point that will be paid off later. Use that scene to not only describe the setting, but how that setting impacts your character.

    Nearly every scene can do double duty. Many can do triple duty. Your goal is to give the reader aha moments, when she or he realizes, “Oh, that’s why that was in there.”

    Because here’s the thing, here’s the reason every scene must have a purpose. It is the nature of books and stories that as a reader reads, they are accustomed to noticing what happens to the characters. They are used to tucking away unusual events and to consider them important. If you describe your character brushing her teeth every morning, but that never factors into the plot, it will irritate your reader. Brushing teeth is trivial…unless it’s not. Unless that’s how our character is poisoned. Or that’s part of her OCD routine (maybe she has to do it at a set time and for a set number of strokes each day).

    Your reader is going to notice those little details. She’s going to want her payoff later in the story. Make sure she gets it–or hit that delete key.

  • Character Interviews

    First of all, I want to make it clear that I do not talk out loud to my characters (nope, not me…that’s not my voice you hear drifting from my office). But since it’s important to get to know my characters before I start writing about them, I do ask them lots of questions. So you could say I interview them. Just like I would a real, actual person. Except, honestly, I don’t do it out loud. Really.

    The way I do it is I fill out a questionnaire of some kind. Lengthier for main characters, more brief for minor characters.  The questionnaire will include some basic stuff such as the character’s name, height, weight, hair and eye color. Who their mom & dad are, their siblings, where they live. Small details that, believe it or not, I will sometimes forget. For instance, I don’t want my main character’s eyes to change in the course of the book from blue to brown to blue (assuming she’s not changing them with contacts).

    Once I have the physical details nailed down, I get into the internal issues–family dynamics, moments in the character’s life that had an impact on them. What are her strengths and weaknesses? What is his world view? What justifications does she have for doing what she does? What is at least one quirk that this character has (terrified of spiders, maybe, or extremely clumsy)? I also make sure to give them flaws. Perfect people are boring.

    Before I start writing and as I’m working, I also tend to keep a “notes” document where I keep tabs on certain story and character details. There might be an uncle who died years ago and I’ll make note of his name in case he comes up more than once. There might be some crucial backstory of a monumental turning point for the character that I have to remember to keep track of.

    And if my characters are non-communicative? My antenna immediately go up.  So, why don’t you want to talk, I ask (silently, of course)?  What about your background keeps you mum?  Problems with your mother, your father?  Your ex-girlfriend cheated on you?  Your younger brother died as a baby and you somehow feel responsible?

    No one in this world is a blank slate and my characters shouldn’t be either.  Something made them what they are at the moment my story starts.  I have to create that past life for them. That way I make them real.

  • What do you mean, I need conflict?

    I’ve been trolling through my storehouse of articles I wrote in the past, looking for likely material for my blog. This is partly out of sheer laziness (easier to rewrite something already written than write new), but also because there are some pretty decent musings on various writerly topics.

    The most recent one I’ve pulled out has to do with conflict. Creating genuine, difficult to resolve conflict between my characters used to be the bane of my existence. Okay, sometimes it still is. But it’s also something I enjoy doing because it’s part of characterization, which is my favorite part of writing.

    This particular article came about when a writer related to me how editors would tell her they “couldn’t engage” with her characters, that her characters weren’t sympathetic or dynamic enough. When I first started writing novels, I received similar feedback from editors and it was always a bit maddening because it seemed so vague.  As a consequence, it was difficult to put a finger on what it was about my characters that didn’t pass muster.

    What I learned after years of writing, rewriting, getting feedback, rewriting, etc., is that what was likely missing in my characterization, where it was lacking the “zing” that the editor was looking for, was lack of development of my characters’ backstories and conflicts.  While judging writing contests, I’ve read so many promising, well-written manuscripts that fizzled because the main characters lacked powerful internal conflicts. These internal conflicts, paired with complex external conflicts (e.g., they have to save the world from blowing up) are what invest your reader in your characters and therefore in your book.

    What is an internal conflict?  It’s a problem within a character that only he or she can solve.  Something so deep-seated, it informs every choice the character makes.  Something so enormous, it should seem to your reader that nothing will ever heal that wound. The issue may not completely resolve at the end of the story, but there should be enough of an arc such that the character at a minimum has new insight into this difficulty. Otherwise, your reader may feel dissatisfied with the story’s resolution.

    I like to use as an example my hero Lucas Taylor in the first book I wrote for Harlequin, THE BOSS’S BABY BARGAIN (yes, a bit of a goofy title, but the thing sold like hotcakes).  Lucas’s mother was an alcoholic and he spent his childhood in and out of foster care.  His mother let him down countless times, getting sober long enough to regain custody of her son, then falling off the wagon and losing him again.  Then, when his mother finally seemed to have her act together, was staying clean and sober, she was killed when their apartment caught fire.  Lucas was badly burned while trying, and failing, to save her life.

    Think about the load Lucas was carrying.  He fears caring for anyone–they might disappear from his life at any time.  He doubts the power of love–it neither kept his mother from drinking nor saved her life.  And his guilt over his inability to save his mother is a thousand pound weight on his heart.

    These are big, big issues that will require a novel-length story to resolve.  The trick is to make a sympathetic character out of this harsh and hard-edged man.  I had to make sure there were moments of generosity and kindness that demonstrated his true nature, showed the reader the man Lucas might have been if his life had not been so tragic.

    I always think hard about my characters’ backstories, what in their past has built the walls around their hearts.  I try to make those conflicts seemingly insurmountable, but as the story proceeds, to show glimmers of the characters’ true selves through the chinks in their armor.  Hopefully, my reader will care enough about my characters and my story to read all the way “THE END.”