Acting Out of Character

Kristen brought up an interesting point in last night's post. Possums out in the daytime are acting out of character, and that can only mean one thing: Something's wrong with it. The same can be said for raccoons out during the day, or wild animals that seem tame enough for you too approach them. Once, in college, I got within a foot of a fox squirrel. I thought he might be just a little guy who was used to all the people around campus. I would've reached out to pet him, but just then I noticed some kind of nasty festering wound around his neck. Chances are he would've bit me.

Anyway, the whole thing got me thinking. The same 'acting out of character' thing can be used when writing or editing. For writing, it can be one way to show that something really is wrong with your character. If she's normally pleasant and then flies off the handle, it would show the reader something is wrong, or at least foreshadow the possibility she isn't quite herself. And we've probably all seen instances where someone we know is bad acts all sweetness and light - usually right before they shove a knife in someone else's back (either figuratively or literally).

One example I can think of to illustrate the whole 'out of character thing' is the personality of Harry Potter in 'Order of the Phoenix'. Angst-ridden teenager didn't seem like him, and I've talked to a lot of people who found it irritating. I found it annoying myself until I read far enough to realize how JK was trying to show that Harry's life was such a mess it was making him behave like a toad. I don't know whether she consciously did that or not, but once I figured out what was happening, it worked perfectly. Once he felt like he was in control of his life again, his personality came back online.

On the other hand, keeping your characters in character is necessary for the flow of the story. You shouldn't really have them act one way for most of the book and then act totally different in other areas without a good reason (like the ones mentioned above). I know I'm guilty of this during my first draft stages. Early on, I'm still getting to know my characters. Hell, I didn't really hear Vic's voice until most of the way through Nano, and now I have to go back. By the time I'm done editing, he'll sound and act the same throughout the book (unless I need to make him otherwise for the story). Like changing a character's name mid-book. You can do it, but you have to make sure you go back and rename him all the way through. I just wish realigning personalities was as easy as Find/Replace.

Have you ever used this? Have you read anything where a writer used this device? Inquiring minds... and all that.

The Fine Line

Okay, we writers all know that we have to make our characters sympathetic. We have to write in such a way to make the reader feel like they know the characters and that they want to know more about them. But there's a fine line between giving the reader enough information to fall for the people in our stories, and overloading them with too much.

As a reader, I like to know a little something about the people I'm investing my time in. Give me a little something to make the characters human and I'm happy. Make them seem real through their actions and their backgrounds and their habits. But really, I don't want the writer to belabor the point. Mention something once - unless it's integral to the plot - and then let it go. Say, for instance, a character is trying to quit smoking. Having her wrestle with it throughout the book, when she's trying to catch a murderer is too much. Having her partner shoot her dirty looks every time she lights up is irritating to say the least. (The reader - namely me - got it the first time.) Or for instance, delving into the character's home life. If it's not part of the plot, leave it out. So the kids are royal snots, and the ex-husband's a dork. Mention it and then let it go. Unless that's the crux of the story, fine. Otherwise, it's just flotsam. Get your little pool scooper and fling it out.

Now, for those few of you who've read my books, please feel free to shoot me an e-mail and tell me if you ever catch me doing this. I don't want things that aren't integral to the plot muddying up the works.

And yes, I know I mention Jace's fear of fire throughout Manhunter. I do that because it's integral to the plot, but if you think I've laid it on too thick, shoot me now before I get one point-blank between the eyes from an agent.

I think it was Aristotle who said something to the effect of 'In all things, moderation." With my writing, I try to strike a balance, and while it is a fine line sometimes, it's usually wide enough to see.

Without mentioning any titles or names, have you run across any obvious instances where the author laid it on too thick?

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Character Interviews... The Guys

Since my gals are a little too busy to give me an interview, I thought I'd try the guys today. The reactions were a little... Well, they're guys.

Michael (from Spectacle): "If you'd like, Alex could interview me."

Tom (also from Spectacle): "Schedule something with my assistant."

Gray (from Caldera): "Do you want to interview me about my job as a park ranger or my involvement with the charitable trust? If it's another interview about the volcano business, I'm not at liberty to talk about that right now."

Daniel (from Blink): "If I was still the Captain of the Union's special guard, I'd have to kill you just for asking. As it is, though, I have to protect Mary and talking to you publicly would probably be a bad idea."

Finn (from RTL): Whereabouts unknown.

Ben (from Manhunter): "I'm guessing you'd have to talk to someone at the Special Crimes Unit."

Jack (from Nano): "Randi would kill me if I talked to you about what's happening. If you want to talk about my company, though, I'll have some time at the end of the month. If I'm still alive, that is."

Dennis (from AWJ): "I can't talk during an ongoing investigation, but despite what Jillian has to say, she is not a suspect. At least not in my mind... Well, not anymore."

Tomorrow, we'll see if the villians are more forthcoming. ;o)

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Character Interviews...

The good news is I'm feeling better this morning. The bad news is I have to go pack up all the leftover stuff and finish cleaning the old house. Ugh.

Anyway, it's obvious my brain has been on other - less interesting - things lately. My books are still sitting, waiting for me to write them. My blog posts are bleh. So, I decided to ask my heroines to help with today's blog post by granting me interviews... Needless to say, the responses were... ummm... interesting.

The heroines -

Alex (from Spectacle): "Shouldn't I be the one interviewing you?"

Myke (from Caldera): "I don't have time for this."

Mary (from Blink): "I'd let you interview me, but then the Union would find me, and I'm not a big fan of disappearing."

Rachel (from RTL): "Giving you an interview could get me killed."

Jace (from Manhunter): "I'll be happy to give an interview but I have to catch this bitch first, and even then you have to clear it with my boss."

Miranda (from Nano): "No comment"

Jillian (from AWJ): "You've got to be kidding me. An interview? What, so you can help them pin these deaths on me? No way in hell."

Ummm... In the interest of keeping the girls safe and happy, I think I'll just wait until tomorrow and find something else to blog about. Maybe I'll see what the guys have to say...

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A Little Insane

Okee Dokee. All this time, the real problem was Dennis wasn't talking to me. Dirty rotten bugger. Well, now I have him on the ropes. We have an understanding. He's my character and he'll damn well talk to me, or I'll delete him. I can replace him with a dozen different men, and still have one hell of a story. Take that you obstinate hero. =op

Yes, sometimes writing can be a little insane. Or as I like to say: Have the voices in your head call the voices in mine, and we'll do lunch.

How are things in your little corner of insanity?

Character Problems

Rewriting this sucker has been like pulling teeth. I don't think I've had this hard a time yet with anything I've edited.

On the bright side, I think I hit on what was killing me on this. I hadn't found what was making my MC tick. His voice wasn't ringing true for me. Well, I think I hit it tonight. Might have to go back over the first couple bits again to make sure everything is consistent, but it shouldn't be a problem.

Heh. Thought you could get away from me, eh Dennis? Well, I'll show you. Bwa ha ha. Another character falls under the writer's spell.

;o)

Snippets at Tabula Rasa

I just posted a couple of snipped bits over at Tabula Rasa. They're basically background on one of my secondary characters from Fear Itself (aka Spectacle).

Actually, Tom Sheldon is probably my favorite character from that book. Not that I don't love them all, but Tom's got a special place in my heart.

Do you have a favorite character you've written? Come on, spill. Your other characters won't mind. Okay, how about a favorite from something you've read?

Details, Details, Details

Laying in bed last night, I got to thinking about my book (as usual - I'm surprised I ever get to sleep). I realized I need to beef up the details.

No big surprise. My first drafts are always short on details. I usually have whole pages full of nothing but dialogue. Sometimes, though, I write the details because they're necessary to the story as I'm writing it.

As the saying goes, the devil is in the details.

For instance, I had a a problem last week. You see, part of the book is set in Racine, WI. Now, I've never been to Racine, but I used to rep a company based there, and my brother shoots over there maybe twice a year (so he can vet the description for me, if need be). The problem I ran across is I assumed Racine was way north in Wisconsin, and had written the details to reflect that. Then as I was wrapping the scene up, I had to figure out which major airport my characters would need to use, and out came the link for City-Data.com. I typed in Racine, WI. Right on Lake Michigan... Check. Scroll down... Crap. Racine is in southern WI. Midway between Milwaukee and Chicago. Double-crap. The first victim has to be from Racine, or it throws off the whole plot. (I thought about using Green Bay, but the city's too big for my purposes.) The tie-in to all the other bodies has to be in northern WI, or again, it throws off the whole plot. How to fix... How to fix...

After a while, the answer came to me, and everything dovetailed nicely together, but I got hung up in those details. I could've rewritten the whole thing to make it work, and trust me, I thought about it. Thank goodness I didn't do it. The answer really was very simple once I thought about it.

Now, as I was laying in bed last night, I realized the details I haven't yet written are going to hang me up a bit. Not badly, but it's there and I have to deal with it.

I may have mentioned before that I wasn't sure if this book was going to be straight suspense or romantic suspense. Early on, I couldn't see how this tough chick heroine with her hands-off attitude toward the male species could ever make time for romantic involvement. She's fairly well a self-contained individual who doesn't need a man to complete her life. Except that isn't the point of romance. Not needing a man to complete you doesn't mean you never need a man.

So, her romance crept up on her and hit her out of the blue. Hit us both, actually. I wasn't expecting this to happen either. (Funny. That's pretty much how I met my husband, but I digress.) She doesn't want or need a man in her life, but there he is.

Of course, this means I have some major re-writing to do with the first 100 pages, but it'll be worth the work. This, unlike Racine, can be fixed with minimal plot shifting. Not too much, mind you, because I want the reader to be as surprised by this turn of events as she is (and as I was).

I love the details. Sure, the devil's in there, making more work for me, but in the end, the story will be stronger for it.

Have you ever been tripped up by your own details? Have you ever read a book where the author got the details wrong, and how much did it irritate you?

Oh, and speaking of things thought up while laying in bed, I have a way to turn this into a three book series, if the situation arises. I haven't got the plots laid out yet, but I have the two secondary characters in place who could carry their own books.

PS. Speaking of Racine, if you've never had a Danish Kringle, they are the most delicious, to die for pastries ever.

The Plan is Coming Together

In the words of "Hannibal" - I love it when a plan comes together. (For those of you who didn't live through the 80's, Hannibal was the leader of The A-Team. He was a cigar chomping, balls to the wall, kick ass kind of guy.)

Last night I managed to get the scene written, and it's the key to a major plot point. I had a general idea how it was going to work in my head, but it came together so much better than I planned. It also flowed like water from a burst dam, and I wrote almost 2K words in 90 minutes.

The villian is deliciously demented with a side of sympathetic (a very small side of sympathetic). Readers should be able to see where she's coming from, understand what's driving her, and still have their skin crawl.

Anyway, this is a good one. It should sell well, and it's fun to write. Looks like I got over my previous thing about writing on it every day. I'll admit, it's still draining to write - something about the action it the book sucks the energy right out of me - but I'm forging ahead regardless. I'll just have to make sure I recharge my batteries at some point during the day, so I can keep this up.

And... I need to send a batch of queries out today. I've got it so I send out a few at a time with about a week between. It takes longer than sending them all out at once, but it gives me a chance to tweak my materials in between, if need be. *shrug* Try new things and see what happens. Or to use the old standby quote "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten."

What's new in your world?

The Murderous Writer

:sings: Nighttime is the right time for writing...

Ahem. Umm. Bent over the keyboard, cranking out writing... climbing into the head of one seriously deranged chick. Doesn't make for the most mentally stable blogging.

She likes to sing while she drives. *shrug*

She's coming together quite well. I'm hoping she gives everyone else the same heebie-jeebies she'd give me if I was only reading about her and not writing her. (Although, come to think of it, she does give me the creepin' willies, even though she's coming out of my head.)

A while back, I was talking to mystery writer, and the issue of writers killing people off came up. In any given book, some of us can kill of dozens. (My record was about a thousand at one time, but that was volcanic in nature.) One would think with all the thoughts of murder floating through our heads, people should be very afraid of us. I pointed out that while we think about murder, since we get all our violent urges out on paper, we're purging the urges. In fact, I'd venture that we're probably some of the safest people on Earth. (Look at Stephen King. If he weren't a BoSox fan, he'd be totally harmless.)

Any time anyone seriously pisses me off, I can create a character and do really nasty things to them. Why would I need to do it in real life? Besides, not only can I knock someone off, I can make them look foolish while I'm doing it. So much more satisfying my way, trust me. Writing it out cleanses the feelings away. Like Drano for the soul. ;o)

Are you a murderous writer? Kill anyone lately? Were you thinking of some total asshole in your own life when you did so? If you've never tried this, it's very cathartic. Forget cold blood. Kill your enemies in cold ink. ;o)

Now it's time for me to get back to Emma and her slow slide into madness. Or to put it another way...

Who do I get to kill now?

Bwa ha ha hahaha hahahahhahahahahahaha

Channeling Paretsky

If you look over there on the right, you may think I'm not doing anything. For the most part, you're right. I haven't been writing new words, and I'm taking a break from editing (long enough to get back comments from my CP and BRs). In short, I haven't been doing anything I can quantify here on the blog, and it makes me look lazy.

I am lazy, but that's beside the point. I made a promise to do something writerly for at least an hour every day. I have been keeping that promise. Yesterday I worked on my synopsis for RTL in the morning, and worked on some character sketches for C&D - because I hit a snag and I need to rework the whole damn thing.

You see, I realized I was channeling Sara Paretsky and my Jordan was beginning to seem a whole lot like Paretsky's VI. Oh, the horror.

Seriously.

Don't get me wrong. I love the way Paretsky writes. I love her books. I love VI. But I would sooner rip off my own eyelids and lay in the sun than borrow any of her stuff. (I could do worse than mirroring her success, but I don't want to get it by riding on her coattails.)

Case in point: Jordan is a no-nonsense, tough broad. She doesn't take shit from anyone, even though she'll happily give it without thinking twice.

Case in point: Jordan has an off-again thing with the hot macho bi-racial cop. (It would be on-again if her hormones have any say about it, which they don't.) I think VI's hot macho cop was black, but close enough to make me shudder.

Case in point (and this is the one that made me stop writing and restart): Jordan's mother came from a wealthy family who disapproved of her marriage, and who now disapprove of Jordan's life.

I think I need to go back and re-read all the Paretsky novels, so I can consciously pick out everything similar in my book and re-write it. Lord knows, the stuff didn't get in there consciously. Mortified doesn't begin to describe it.

I can only be thankful I caught it before I finished and tried to get this thing published. :shudder:

Yes, I realize there are only so many things you can do with a detective series of this nature, but I refuse to be one of those hangers-on. And sure, those are really the only similarities. Our writing styles are different. I'm trying to go for the whole MikeHammer-esque feel with a large helping of humor thrown in.

So it's back to the drawing board, and it's back to researching other authors to make sure I'm not unconsciously borrowing from anyone else. Ack! I never had this problem with my dystopias.

Have you ever caught yourself beginning to sound like someone else?

My Villians are not 'Diet Evil'

Lately I've been wrestling with the idea of making my villians more sympathetic. People want sympathetic villians, right? I've read blogs devoted to the subject, so it must be. But here's my problem...

I'm not one of those people.

I don't like villians with a soft side. I don't want to know if they had a horrible childhood, they lost their puppy, they weren't asked to the prom, they had acne... I don't really care. When I'm reading a really good book, and suddenly it feels like the author is making excuses for the evil characters, it makes me want to throw the book against the wall.

My villians are unapologetically evil. I may show why they're evil, but I never make excuses for it. Take Wesley Wray in Spectacle. He's a worm. I do a flashback over his early life, and yes, his father put him on a pedestal and pushed him to be a scientist and thought the sun shone out his tiney-hiney, but Wesley made his own choices. In the end, his choices drive him insane, but before that, he's 100% in the driver's seat with his own life.

My newest villians think they're doing the world a favor, but in the end, they don't really care if they help anyone as long as their cause gets furthered. In fact, they're all quite happy if people die to further the cause. Come to think of it, the idea is the same in Caldera - but the cause is completely different, as are the characters themselves.

The point, I think, is to give your villians sufficient motivation, and then leave them to do their evil deeds. Maybe they don't think they're evil (and in fact, most often think they're the good guys), but it's obvious (at least to me and hopefully to my readers) they're wicked right down to their cores. I want them to slide across the floor like the slime they are.

Now, let's use an example. Let's take Ellsworth Toohey from The Fountainhead. I first read the book as a teenager, and even then there was no doubt in my mind he was bad bad bad. He fairly oozes evil as he slithers his way across the pages. I thought it was obvious. Flash forward a dozen or more years. I'm in a book discussion group, and we're discussing The Fountainhead. Several people in the group couldn't see how Toohey was the villian of the piece, and they didn't really like Roark (the hero). Shocked the crap out of me, lemme tell ya. Even after these people read a glaring example of Toohey's evilness - there's a whole scene where he tells the minor villian, Peter Keating, exactly what he's all about - they still couldn't see it.

Thinking about this now, I would be tickled if certain people couldn't see the villiany behind some of my villians. (And a little sickened, but that's the price one pays writing well, I guess.) Janey in Caldera, for instance, may be sympathetic to some people, and if they side with her, that's fine. They won't like me later in the book, but thems the breaks. Heck, people may like the villians in RTL (I'm sure certain types of people will love them, come to think of it) but it's not intentional. If they do, it'll be more a matter of the readers' beliefs and personalities than anything I crafted.

So what are your thoughts on the subject? Do you like a sympathetic villian? Do you want to cry for them, and feel sorry for them - even as they're threatening the MC's life? Help me understand the thought process here, because like I said, if they're evil with a sympathetic aftertaste, I don't want to know.

(Or to borrow a phrase from Mike Myers: "You're diet evil. Only two calories, not evil enough.")

Playing Frankenstein

Over at Manuscript Mavens, Lacey wrote a post about how she comes up with her characters. In the comments there, I told her my method, but I thought I'd expand on it here.

I play Frankenstein. :insert evil laugh here:

I take pieces from everyone I've ever met - including family, friends, and myself - add in bits of other fictional people I've encountered (from TV, movies, books, stories, etc.), stir vigorously and out pop my characters.

For instance, in Blink, one of the characters is modeled after my maternal grandfather, but since he died when I was ten, the character has his physical traits while his personality is gleaned from a combination of several older men I've known. In Redemption, the MC's fiance is modeled after one of my ex-boyfriends - except for the physical, which I just threw together. For ARJ, almost all of the minor characters are based on people I know, but I've mashed them all together to such a degree, the only person who be able to recognize who's who is me. (One case, for instance, I took a couple and switched their personalities - he's boisterous, she's shy - and even that wasn't enough, so I amplified them both until he came out a mouse and she came out pure bitch.)

It's fun to play doctor. Heh. And on the bright side, my creations won't rise up and try to destroy me.

Of course, this method doesn't give me every character nor every trait even for the ones it does give me. The rest is part of the magic of being a writer. Stuff dribbles out of my conscious and subconscious to form the entirety of a character. (Which is good, because I never want to have to use that clause at the beginning of a book - you know the one. The "Any similarity to anyone real is purely coincidental" one.)

How do you come up with fresh characters? What's cooking in your lab today?