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by How to Tell A Story- The Secrets of Writing Captivating Tale (mobi)

  What if, instead, a poor man finds the wallet? This guy is out of work and living in a homeless shelter. His family is hungry, but he returns the wallet anyway.

  There's nothing smug or self-satisfying about this guy. Both he and the rich guy have done the honorable thing, but while readers can admire the rich guy's honesty, they are not particularly emotionally involved in his story or his decision. They are, however, involved in the poor guy's decision, because it will cost him, perhaps dearly. The author has ratcheted up the emotional stakes of the story. Readers know this is a man for whom the right things, principles, are important, and they can admire his act, knowing it could not have been easy. His decision to return the wallet reveals a great deal about his inner character.

  Now, a rich man who keeps the wallet also reveals something about his character. That, too, will involve readers' emotions in some fashion. So good structure, at its core, can be thought of as placing strongly drawn characters in circumstances that will create the most intense drama, that is, the most conflict and emotional impact.

  Dustin Hoffman reveals deep character in Tootsie when he decides to take off the dress on national TV and give up being Dorothy Michaels. In Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, deep character is what Sydney Carlton reveals when he goes to the guillotine in place of the husband of the woman he loves, saying, "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known. "

  You can't change deep-character qualities without completely altering the story, and thus the way it should be put together.

  If you've written a story about a guy who finds the wallet and returns it and a movie producer comes along and says, ' 'I love your story, but let's make it a woman, let's make her black, let's put her in India, and let's dress her a certain way," you can do all those things and end up with a different kind of story, but something that is still in essence the original idea as long as the characters share personality traits. However, if the producer says, "Let's make her a woman who wouldn't return the wallet," he's just changed your story radically.

  Deep character is concerned with why people do what they do, by showing that inner element in a dramatic way, rather than telling us that so-and-so was an honest man or a dishonest one. It is that part of character you cannot change without changing your plot.

  The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, said that only by owning up to our true desires, realizing it is our appetites that pull us to dark and curious stuff, such as stories of satanic worship or UFOs, can we attain self-knowledge. This must also be true of your characters, of course, and the inner engines that drive them to do whatever it is they must do in your narratives. If a desire is bottled up for too long, stimulated continually but unrecognized or repressed, Freud reckons there's a strong chance it will manifest itself in some fashion in sudden and unexpected acts. Something violent may come of suppression and disavowal as appetites grow and the self-consciousness needed to control these appetites fades away or is "Prozaced" out of existence. To know your desires, and those of your characters, is to be able to exert greater sway over them.

  If your plot is in trouble in some way, reconsidering one or other—or both—of these character elements is going to change the structure of your narrative in a substantial enough way that it will allow you to take a fresh look at whether you are recounting your story as effectively as you could. And more to the point, with the right change, you increase the emotional power of the narrative, that is, increase its "grabbing" quality and thus your chances of getting published.

  CHARACTER AND CONFLICT

  Your characters can only be as interesting as the forces arrayed against them. By that, I mean that a character reveals himself by rising to the level necessary to overcome the conflict.

  Consider the character Rocky. Most people forget that in the first movie he doesn't win the big fight at its climax. The path of the character and the story is such that this doesn't really matter. It is the journey Rocky makes that is important. In the first movie in particular, but also in the subsequent ones to a lesser degree, if Rocky was presented as a guy who rose to the level of heavyweight boxing contender by overcoming a parade of patsies, guys who fell over if you tapped them on the chin, what would you have learned about his depth of character, his dedication, his perseverance?

  The answer is, not much. If the people and problems defeated were easily overcome, the story would be neither emotionally involving nor of enough dramatic interest to bother following Rocky's rise to the level of a world heavyweight championship boxer. How do you show great tenacity and strength of character, but by dramatizing strength of will in some fashion. Doing so gives you a basis for inventing incidental and secondary characters who will help you discover these elements in your hero as you watch him rise to fame.

  Rocky works because the character is continually placing himself in increasingly challenging and difficult situations that he eventually overcomes. So, your opposition has got to be as dynamic as your protagonist.

  It's also important you see your characters from their own points of view.

  By that, I mean, don't write your villains so that they come across as moustache-twirling psychotics. Alice Orr, an agent and author, as well as a terrific teacher, put it best I think: "A villain is still the hero of his own story."

  Someone once asked the actor Lee Marvin about playing bad guys for most of his career. Marvin said, "What bad guys? I didn't play any bad guys. I just played guys who were getting through life the way they knew best."

  His point was that inside their own heads, "villains" don't think of themselves that way, and they're more interesting people because of it.

  Try this exercise: Write two or three paragraphs from the point of view of each of your characters from your book. You'll have all of your characters sort of justifying their behavior: "I am Adolph Hitler, and I'm really a pretty good guy once you get to know me. Children call me Uncle Wolfie and like to sit on my knee."

  LET YOUR CHARACTERS BE THEMSELVES

  In your stories, whether they are fictional or re-creations of real events, it's important your characters act out of their own natures, rather than be manipulated by the demands of a plot. This is a common mistake with beginning writers. They want something "exciting" or "important" plotwise to happen in their stories, and regardless of the kind of characters they have invented to populate their Active worlds, these authors are going to make this excitement happen. An absurd example of what I'm talking about would be to cast Huckleberry Finn as the lead character in William Goldman's Marathon Man.

  Sometimes a writer gets to a point in the plot when he needs something to happen and he just has the character do it. The reader, though, instinctively senses that something is wrong. It's just a little too convenient, a little too contrived. That's because the character has acted in contradiction to her nature.

  One of the classic examples of this kind of problem is in the old John Wayne movie Stagecoach. It's about a group of people traveling in the Old West in a stagecoach. They are attacked by Arapaho as they are crossing the plains and have to take refuge in a way station. Most of the film is about the personal conflicts of the passengers under the stress of imminent danger from the threatening hostiles just outside the walls of the way station. It's a great movie.

  Only one problem: Traditionally, when the Native Americans attacked a stagecoach, they would shoot the lead horses in the team pulling the coach. The horses in the rest of the team would stumble, and before you knew it, the coach would either stop cold or overturn and crash. Either way, the hostiles then made short work of the passengers. But the writers wouldn't have had a story had they done that. So they ignored the problem, and as a result made the Native Americans look stupid. Luckily, this was a movie about the characters' relationships with each other, rather than about the Native Americans, but it's a classic example of plot taking precedence over logic or character truth.

  Here's ano
ther example of what I mean. A student of Gary's wrote a story about two men who come over to her house. One of the men is a pretty timid sort, and yet, out of the blue, he volunteers to help find her missing brother. The question immediately becomes how come all of a sudden he's brave enough to volunteer to go off and look for this missing brother? What's his motivation? The answer is, of course, that the author needed him to do that and didn't bother to establish any kind of credible motivation. The character's actions just weren't real.

  So the author and Gary brainstormed a little, and they realized that the problem with the story was that the character was acting against his own nature. The solution was to go back and create a situation where the character is hoping to meet a potential wife or girlfriend, and when he's visiting this woman, he's struck by a vision of her as a potential mate.

  Now, when he volunteers to look for the brother, readers know, without necessarily being told, that he's thinking, Gee, you know if I go looking for the brother, I'll have to come over and visit this house a lot and maybe I'll see this beautiful woman again, and maybe we'll get closer and become friends, and then lovers and then... So, of course, he agrees to do it, and he's acting against his own timid nature but for a credible reason. But more importantly, by taking a weakness and working on making it a strength, he becomes a more interesting character. He wants to be around to see this woman again, so he's overcoming inner demons and flaws to achieve his goal. That's the point.

  Make sure the character's doing something he wants to do, not just something you want him to do. Listen to what your characters tell you, particularly the good guys who do bad things and the sick and twisted psychotics who stalk through your stories.

  Characters have to decide their own fates. Nobody wants to read a story about a woman who's on a ship and there's a storm and she falls overboard with just a small dinghy, and for six days she's in the dinghy working her way to shore, and there are fifteen-foot waves and heavy winds and rain, and she's starving, and she gets six miles from shore and some marine captain comes along and plucks her out of the ocean. That's not good storytelling.

  You don't want someone coming in at the last moment and helping your character out. The fun of reading is to enjoy the emotional roller coaster of the character's experiences during the story and to admire the grace with which characters use their wiles and wit to solve the problems that beset them. So make sure your character is in charge of her own fate, that it's not taken care of for her.

  MELODRAMA

  The word melodrama is one you've probably heard, and it's worth talking about in characterization. Melodrama is often defined as characters overreacting to what's going on.

  A lot of times, writers make the mistake of looking at something they've written, realize that it's melodramatic and cut back on the big scene by diminishing its emotional potential. They suffer what amounts to a sort of loss of creative nerve at the last moment.

  But there's a way to fix this kind of structural problem.

  Let's say the situation is this: A young girl comes home at two in the morning. The mother is waiting up for her. When the girl comes home, the mother just goes crazy, screaming, crying, throwing things, and shouting, "What are you doing home so late?" The reader looks at this and thinks, Wow, this is kind of over the top. Why is the mother overreacting? Your tendency may be to rewrite the scene and play it all down. But what if you try another approach instead?

  Looked at more closely, melodrama is not really about characters overreacting; it's about characters having no appropriate motivation for their behavior, and thus they become caricatures of emotion. The problem is not the reaction but that the character is undermotivated.

  If you want to hold that big scene and reap the rewards of readers' continuing loyalty by giving them a gripping experience, you want to keep a lot of those emotional fireworks. What you need to do is foreshadow the character's reaction in the scene by thinking about a better motivation for her behavior than just the girl arriving home late from a date.

  In this case, it might be that the mother had an older daughter who died in an automobile accident at two in the morning six months before. All the memories are still fresh and raw. The surviving daughter stays out late, and the mother's memories of that tragedy build up. When the daughter comes home late, the mother explodes. The solution is to raise—or clarify— the motivation, rather than lower the emotional temperature.

  The biggest structural problems can be reduced to coming up with believable answers to the question why, especially when it concerns a character's behavior. And now we've come back to characters being plot again.

  THE SUN AND ITS PLANETS

  Your main character can be thought of as the sun of your fictional universe.

  Picture this sun with all these planets, the minor characters of your story, orbiting around it. These minor characters are vehicles for the progression of the narrative story lines, but they should also reflect varying aspects of your main character's personality.

  Let's say you have a character named Dennis. Dennis may have a number of character traits. Suppose you make him antagonistic, bashful, cunning, and desperate. In your book, he's going to be revealed via a number of minor characters whose structural role in the book is going to include reflecting these qualities.

  Dennis is antagonistic: You'll show this through his relationship with his boss, someone Dennis doesn't get along with. To reinforce this, you can develop a subplot about whether Dennis is going to lose his job.

  He's bashful: He meets nurse June. He'd like to go out with her, but he's afraid to call her.

  He's cunning: He figures out that his sister-in-law Carol knows June, and he gets Carol to find out if June likes him enough to go out with him.

  Dennis is also desperate: He's bet every cent he has on a horse, Biscuits for Dinner, and this desperation is reflected in the character Louie, who is Dennis's bookie.

  The broader point here is that ideally everything in your novel should have a purpose for being there, including the minor characters who come on stage to give the main character a clue or point the way ahead. Narrative is a very considered art form, and it is reflective of real life only in the sense that what we read should be credible, believable. So spear carriers should have a function besides being eccentrics, objects of humor or thrills, or just people you've discovered you like whom you want to include in your story.

  PICK AND CHOOSE

  While you try as much as possible to plan and develop a character in all the variety of his personality, you may end up using only little clusters of that information as it relates to the story you're developing.

  I'll give you an example. A real person might play golf, listen to rock and roll, enjoy basketball, read Moby Dick, eat Thai food, and take part in amateur ballet dancing. That may seem too much, or at least contradictory, and have no real shape or direction, but few of us have distinct patterns in our lives except in hindsight.

  However, when you write that character, readers only need to know what is necessary for the telling of that story. The rule of thumb is: If it is an important enough character detail for readers to know, it is important enough to dramatize.

  Mark Twain once said: "Don't tell me there was a little old lady. Bring the old bag out on the stage and let me see her." That was his not so subtle way of saying, show, don't tell, your characters.

  Bring your character onto the stage and let the reader see who she is and how she feels by how she acts when alone and with others, not by what she says or thinks.

  VIEWPOINT

  Character has two other structural jobs in the narrative: It is the deciding factor for a writer's choice of which viewpoint to use to tell the story, and how many, and it gives description a function in the narrative that is more than just words setting a scene.

  It's important to remember that when you were in school you learned in English that first person is I, and second person is you, and third person is he or she or it. This is not to be co
nfused with viewpoint. When I say something is in a person's viewpoint, it means that for a least that part of the book that character is telling the story in some fashion.

  Try this exercise. It's very bard, so you'll need to really concentrate. You're going to describe a house. It can be any house, it doesn't matter. There are rules to this exercise about how you describe your house, however:

  • You can't imagine it and describe it from the front

  • You can't describe it from the back

  • You can't describe it from either the left side or the right side

  • You can't describe it from above looking down

  • You can't describe it from the basement looking up

  • You can't describe it from inside.

  In fact, you're not any place in reference to that house. So how do you imagine it and describe it? Is this an impossible exercise? Of course it is! You can't picture the house—or anything else—this way. It can't be done. Why? Because you have no frame of reference.

  We call that frame of reference viewpoint.

  In order to really grasp the concept of viewpoint, try thinking of it as if it were a matter of camera placement. You're going to see later that it's not quite that simple, but it's a good place to start.

  In the narrative, your reader has got to be somewhere in reference to everything you write in order to understand and experience your story. What's more, to maximize the emo-tional content of the book, you should establish this viewpoint from the outset of the story. Like the exercise with the house, if you don't start out with clues as to whose eyes readers are looking through or whose shoulder they're looking over, the description will sit like a lump in gravy and the book will lack emotional punch.

  Try this exercise. (I promise you this one is a real exercise. No more tricks.) Write no more than one page for each of the following four descriptions:

  A baby lies in a crib in a nursery. Choose the child's age and any other details you wish, such as whether the baby is in a home or in a hospital. It's all completely up to you. Just describe the room.