Developing Characters

 

The protagonist in my current work-in-progress has to give a keynote speech on developing characters. The majority of the speech goes horribly wrong, but it starts well. In fact, I’m so much in love with her opening that I have used it in the next two paragraphs. What follows them is an abbreviated version of how Jo might have continued if she hadn’t been burned out. The writing project I reference is one of my own, however.

William Faulkner said, “It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.” That’s been my experience, too. As writers, we don’t create our characters. They create themselves.

So where do we find them, and how do we keep up with them once we do?

Every writer is different, but here is my process.

Unlike Faulkner, I begin with a plot idea, but, like him, it is my characters who shape the story. I find them in bits and pieces of the people around me in real life, and, occasionally, in books. My mind accumulates the knowledge subconsciously, and it pops out when I need a character.

Imagine Lewis Carroll creating the Mad Hatter and his friends. He can’t have known anyone with those exact personalities, and obviously the traits he used were greatly exaggerated. But he must have known people with the seeds of those characteristics or he couldn’t have painted such a convincing picture.

I create the characters, and I get to tell them what to do. But sometimes they have a mind of their own. When that happens, it’s my job to decide whether to let them follow it.

For example, I have been working on a story where a girl heads out west in a wagon train with her older sister and brother-in-law. Although all of them are inexperienced, my original plan was to make both the sister and the brother-in-law particularly naïve and helpless. It wasn’t long before the brother-in-law rebelled, however.

To put it in Faulker’s words, the character stood up on his feet and began to move, and I had to trot along behind him trying to keep up. Fortunately, he knew himself better than I did, and the book is better for letting him take the lead.

In the long run, it’s my book, and I get to decide how my characters will act. But forcing them to do things they don’t want to do creates cardboard cutouts. It also proves the truth of a quote by G.K. Chesterton, “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

Because sometimes the characters know themselves better than I do.

__________

The image at the top of this post is one of John Tenniel’s illustrations for the original 1865 edition of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. It is in the public domain because of its age.

Plotting a New Book

 

I’ve just begun the first draft of a new book. This one is women’s fiction about a writer who is burned out. No, it isn’t me, especially not the burnout part, although we do share the same writing philosophy and practices.

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the landscape is set out like a giant chess board and Alice has to figure out how to get across it to change from a pawn into a queen. That’s sort of how I look at setting out to write a book.

What follows is a reprint of my July 20. 2020 post. The murder mystery that’s referenced is my still unpublished COVID-19 project.

The Power of Flexibility

Writers are sometimes classified as either plotters or pantsers. Plotters have every twist and turn planned before they even start writing, while pantsers start with a germ of an idea and then sit down and write by the seat of their pants. Then there are the many writers, like me, who fall somewhere in between.

I start with an outline. I know the beginning and the ending and then pencil in each chapter. That’s sort of like deciding where to go on vacation and then choosing the route to take. Maybe we want to get there quickly, so we stick to the freeways. Or we decide to take the scenic route. Or maybe we want to see specific places that require us to go out of the way.

The outline is what gets me started, just as a trip itinerary does. But although the destination rarely changes, the route may.

As a trip planner, I know every stop I intend to make. Then one site takes less time than we expected so we add something else nearby. Or another site is so fascinating that we spend extra time there and may cut something else out. We may even decide to leave the freeway and wander along the scenic route or vice versa. To be honest, though, that doesn’t happen very often. My trip planning is more rigid than my writing outline.

As I write, new ideas pop into my mind. They often fit within the current structure, but that isn’t always the case. I’ve already added two unplanned chapters to the first draft of my murder mystery because I need them to round out my main POV character. I have also cut—or rather combined—several chapters after I realized that my secondary POV character wouldn’t be present for those events and would have to learn about them second-hand rather than by participating in them. Sometimes telling is necessary, but it takes less space than showing does.

If I didn’t start with an outline, I would soon get lost. But if I stuck to it rigidly, I would miss out on the scenes that pop up along the way.

Flexibility is key.

__________

The image at the top of this post is one of John Tenniel’s illustrations for the original 1872 edition of Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. It is in the public domain because of its age.

Celebrating Moms

 

This is the eleventh Mother’s Day that I will celebrate without mine. A year-and-a-half before she died, I wrote a poem to her and all mothers. I suppose it works best for mothers of young children, but it celebrates all of them. Here it is.

For Mother’s Day

 

More precious than diamonds,

     More fun than movie nights,

Sweeter than chocolate,

     Lovelier than roses.

 

Mothers.

 

Necklaces, rings, and bracelets,

     Tear-jerkers and popcorn,

Cadbury, Godiva, and Fannie May,

     Fragrant Damask and climbing Floribunda.

 

Mother’s Day gifts.

 

Best of all are happy children,

     Sentimental verses sincerely meant,

Gifts made with childish hands,

     Burnt toast on breakfast trays.

 

Love.

 

Happy Mother’s Day.

Cheap Art

 

My regular readers know that I love photography. I’ll never be an Ansel Adams or a Dorothea Lange, but I enjoy taking pictures and seeing what I can do with them.

Over the years I’ve used my images for jigsaw puzzles, placemats, note cards, mugs, and, of course, wall art. My office is decorated with photos from my travels and our dining room has a wall of Lake Michigan lighthouses, but my most recent venture is our newly remodeled bathroom. Instead of re-hanging the art we had before, Roland suggested using some of my photographs. And since the predominant color in the bathroom is now grey, I suggested using black-and-white images.

After going through some of my photos, we decided on a waterfall theme and selected three images to enlarge and hang. The one at the top of this post is Multnomah Falls in Oregon, which I took while on a cruise of the Columbia and Snake Rivers in 2025. The two that follow were both taken in Minnesota during a 2015 research trip. The first is the High Falls at Pigeon River, and the second was taken somewhere along Minnesota 61.

The title of this post is a little misleading, though. By the time I paid to get the images blown up to 20 X 16 inches, bought three nice frames, and replaced the original plexiglass in the frames with a non-glare version, it wasn’t cheap art. Still, I’m happy with the result and prefer what we have to something we might have bought “off the rack.”

It’s nice to have a hobby that I can get some use from.

I Thank God for My Beta Readers

 

I am currently revising a middle-grade historical novel to incorporate my beta readers’ comments, and I just received the evaluations back on another one. The responses highlight how important beta readers are to the writing process.

It’s been a while since I was my readers’ age, and when I write for boys I have the further disadvantage of never having been one. So it’s extremely helpful to get feedback from members of my intended audience. Fortunately, a local school has been responsive to my request for beta readers from the third through sixth grades.

One of the questions on my evaluation form asks if the beginning of the story makes the evaluator want to keep reading. Most of the time the answer is “yes,” although the reason might be fairly vague. Each of the last two times I asked for feedback, however, I got a couple of “no”s, and I am taking them to heart.

The book I am currently revising begins in Oklahoma during the dust bowl and started with fears of losing the farm to foreclosure. One of the “no”s said it didn’t grab her attention, but the other was more explicit, stating that “it sounded like a very old boring story that grandparents would tell you.” I hadn’t thought of it that way at the time, but now I have images of the old silent films where a villain with a handlebar mustache is attempting to foreclose and ends up tying the farmer’s pretty daughter to a railroad track. Or maybe she is referring to the type of story where the grandparents walked five miles to school every day and it was uphill in both directions.

Based on those beta reader comments, I revised the first chapter so that the book now starts with a dust storm. The foreclosure subplot still exists but is less dominant, with more emphasis on the physical dangers from the dust storms.

That book has a female protagonist and, therefore, less appeal to boys, so I didn’t have any male beta readers. I did ask for them on the one I just got back, however, since it has a male protagonist and is intended to attract boys.

That story has Matthew and his family traveling to the California gold fields in 1850 using a route that takes them over the Isthmus of Panama. It begins on a farm in New York and, although Matthew is restless from the start, the first chapter is used primarily to set the scene. One of my male beta readers said the beginning did not make him want to keep reading “because it sounded boring to me, like more actionpacked themes.” I assume that he meant he wants more action packed into it, and I will try to do that when I revise the manuscript.

Not that I can accommodate every beta reader comment, however. The other boy who answered “no” to wanting to keep reading gave “it was sad” as the reason. Matthew’s mother and dog die before the story begins, and the farm constantly reminds him of them. That’s part of the reason he is restless, and I think the story will be weakened if I get rid of that motivation. Still, maybe I can tone the references down a bit.

One of my major concerns with that book is whether 14-year-old Matthew’s selfishness will turn off readers, and male readers in particular. I didn’t ask that specific question because I didn’t want to put it in their minds if it wasn’t already there, but I hoped that several of the questions I routinely ask would clue me in. One of those questions asks if the beta reader would want Matthew as a friend. The majority of comments said he seems nice, although one boy described him as “disloyal but nice.”

Two other routine questions can also help me discover the readers’ feelings about the protagonist’s selfishness. One asks if Matthew acted like a 14-year-old boy. One male beta reader said he acted too young, while the other readers classified him as “just right.” More telling is the question whether Matthew sounds like a real 14-year-old boy and asks for reasons. The beta reader who said he acted too young also said he didn’t act like a real 14-year-old boy, but the reader must not have felt Matthew was too far off the mark. As the comment put it, “He sounds 13 so not that big of a difference if he sounded a little more mature he’d make the cut.”

I’ll go through the next draft with an eye to making sure I’m not overdoing Matthew’s selfishness, but I was encouraged by the evaluations.

Beta readers provide valuable feedback that helps me improve my stories, so I literally thank God for them.

__________

The image at the top of this post is from the 1925 edition of Little Men by Louisa May Alcott. The illustrator was Clara Miller Burd, and the illustration is in the public domain because of its age.

A Jigsaw Puzzle World

 

Two or three weeks ago I started a jigsaw puzzle created by Bits and Pieces using a painting of the Last Supper by Ruane Manning. Unfortunately, I didn’t finish it until this Thursday, which was a week after we celebrated the event it commemorates. Nonetheless, it’s never too late to remember the Last Supper or its aftermath.

The puzzle was a fitting activity for Holy Week and the days following Easter. It also reminded me of a poem I wrote in 2022. It’s rather juvenile and will never win a prize, but the thought fits the season. So here it is for your reading pleasure.

A Jigsaw Puzzle World

The world was in pieces,

     Broken by Sin.

Then Jesus came

     To put it together again.

If you’re groaning at how bad that was, I’ll leave you with this cliché.

It’s the thought that counts.

Celebrating Easter

 

With the war in the Middle East, it’s unlikely that anyone celebrated Easter at the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem this year.* In fact, its website says the tomb is closed until further notice “due to the current situation.”

Nobody knows exactly where Jesus’ body was laid after His death, and the Garden Tomb is only one of several possible sites. Still, I celebrated Easter there in 1958 and, as a seven-year-old, I thought it was an awesome experience. I’m sure it would be even more moving as an adult. So it’s too bad that nobody is celebrating there this year.

Still, it is the event, not the place, that matters.

The important thing is that Christ died for our sins and then rose again. To paraphrase Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, if He hadn’t risen, we would still be dead in our sins. Or, to put it in the words of the chorus of the hymn “This Joyful Eastertide” by George Woodward (also taken from 1 Corinthians 15):

Had Christ, who once was slain,

Not burst his three-day prison,

Our faith had been in vain;

But now has Christ arisen, arisen, arisen;

But now has Christ arisen!

 

Alleluia! Christ is risen! Alleluia!

__________

* My father took the photo at the top of this post on Easter Sunday, 1958, as we attended service at the Garden Tomb.