As a slight aside, this is one of the main reasons why beginning writers are so often urged NOT to write in first person: because many find it extra-difficult to get into someone else’s head when they’re writing “I” and for so many years “I” has meant them, the author, and not some totally different character. More on this in a minute.

Characters can be unlike their authors in a whole variety of ways, from relatively minor aspects of physical appearance (height, hair length, eye color), to their personality, to the moral and political views they hold, to more substantial things like race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, cultural background, etc. And the first step toward writing somebody different is to notice that they are.

This may sound obvious, but it always surprises me how often people attribute their own life experience to characters without thinking. I ran across a twenty-something writer whose sixty-ish hero made a comment that as a teenager, he’d gotten an eyebrow piercing to freak out his parents. I could only shake my head. Any guy who grew up in 1960s suburbia did not get an eyebrow piercing or a tattoo; if he wanted to rebel, all he did was grow his hair to chin length. Shoulder length or longer, if he really wanted to freak out the grownups.

Even the little things like height and hair length affect your character’s actions. The greater the differences between the writer and the character, the more aware the writer has to be of how the differences affect everything else in the character’s life. Really big differences (like race or a significant difference in age or ability) often require research, even if the writer is working in a completely imaginary world with a made-up history and culture.

What with all those problems, it almost seems as if it would be easier for authors to write about people who are exactly like themselves. Unfortunately, most of us find it far more interesting to write about folks who are different from us (and besides, most of the authors I know have fairly ordinary lives, no matter what all those intriguing author bios say, which means that writing about somebody different makes for a much more interesting story).

So how do you write about somebody different?

It starts by thinking about him/her, and noticing the differences. All the differences, not just the large ones, because not only do all of the differences make a difference, they all interact and affect one another. A 6’7” teenaged boy is probably going to attract interest from the school basketball coach, whether he’s into sports or not; a 6’7” senior citizen is not (though basketball may have been his sport when he was young).

Then you think hard about all the ways in which those differences, and the interaction of those differences, might affect that character’s life experiences and about how they would react to both their past experiences and to the ones they’re going to have in your story. Not how you would react, because for you, suddenly being a different height, age, sex, race, etc. would be a change. For your character, it’s how things are in their life, and the difference that makes in their life experience ripples through everything else. 

From the character’s goals, motivations, and aspirations, to their reactions to other characters, to their speech patterns, anything can be different from your personal baseline, and all of those will be affected by their life experiences, which in turn will be affected by their physical, mental, and personality differences from the writer, so all of it has to be at least looked at and decided about. Even small things make for differences in behavior. The character who’s shorter than I am will have a step-stool handy for getting to the top shelf and use it without thinking; the one who’s a lot taller than me will see things on the top shelf and reach them easily, but might miss important clues that are lower down, and may have trouble banging into low doorways, slanted ceilings, etc.

It’s also important, especially with secondary and minor characters, to think at least briefly about your own reaction to them, where and how that reaction relies on stereotypes, and how you can change things up. Perhaps your first impulse is to make that minor bartender character a middle-aged, beer-bellied, balding dispenser of wise advice; if you stop to think about it, you can instead make the bartender a young woman working her way through college or a middle-aged character actor doing research for a part. It can help to remember that everyone has his or her own story…or it can be a distraction, depending on the writer.

Integrating all this into actually writing the character is another matter. For me, writing characters is a kind of cross between method acting and playing “let’s pretend” from when I was five. There’s always a little part of my brain that’s trying to pretend to be the character, warts and all. There’s another, more analytical part that’s always checking the character’s actions and dialog and reminding myself “This isn’t me here, is it? This is Jennie, or George, or Herman.” It can feel more than a little odd because in some scenes I have to stop every couple of lines to check on a different character’s actions/reactions. And then I do it all again during the revisions.

Some writers find it easiest to learn how to write different characters by writing someone who is very different from themselves right off the bat, because it’s easier for them to spot the places where they get off track. The big difference between them and the character makes it obvious when they slip and start writing their own reactions and opinions, rather than the character’s. For other writers, it’s easier to keep their characters consistent if they start with something closer to autobiographical and work up to the seriously-different characters in small steps. Some writers have to lay everything out in advance; others immerse themselves in research and reading and then wing it.

The exact process by which you get into your characters’ heads isn’t terribly important; as usual, every writer does it a bit differently, and whatever works for you is what you should do (though be aware that it may take a few tries to figure out what that is).

On the other hand, characters who make mistake after mistake, or whose mistakes conveniently occur whenever the plot needs a boost or twist, are equally unrealistic, and seldom work except in the sort of parody where the whole point is that they can never do anything right. Similarly, if the characters never face any consequences from their mistakes, or never appear to learn anything from those consequences, the story is unlikely to feel real or be satisfying.

So how do authors strike a balance between too-perfect characters who never make a mistake and unrealistically stupid characters?

First off, mistakes in a story work like coincidences, meaning that the bigger the mistake or coincidence, the fewer of them are likely to work in a story. A tale that opens with an enormous, life-changing mistake implicitly promises the reader that the rest of the story is going to deal mainly with the consequences of that mistake. That means that the author can’t use a second enormous life-changing act of stupidity in mid-book in order to change course; whatever happens has to flow in some way from that original giant error. If other characters make mistakes, it’s most likely to work if a) they’re small mistakes, b) they’re very different from the original giant error, and c) they don’t result in a major plot event or twist, but just push the story along in whatever direction it’s currently going.

If, however, the story doesn’t include one single, enormous mistake, the author can often get away with having two large-but-not-enormous mistakes, or three or four small errors of judgement, etc. One ought not to get too carried away by this, of course; there’s a point where one hits “too many” even if they’re all eensy-weensy errors.

Back to the large mistake thing. Once I started thinking about it, I could think of three or four novels that open with a ginormous mistake on the part of the major character, and they generally follow the same pattern. First off, the big mistake doesn’t occur on page 1; it’s usually near the end of the first or second chapter. This gives the author plenty of time to lead up to it…and they do.

In every case I could think of, the events leading up to the mistake are shown carefully and in sufficient detail to make it clear to the reader why the character made the mistake…and each of them has several points at which they could have backed out and changed direction. The characters hesitate briefly, but pride or inertia or drunken bloody-mindedness keeps them on track for the inevitable train wreck at the end of the first chapter.

As a result, the reader can see that the characters are being stupid, but they can also see and understand why they’re being stupid. For this one, it was a combination of being angry, drunk, and too proud to back down once he realized he’d dug himself into a hole; for that one, it was a combination of hubris and fear; for the other one, it was midlife insecurity combined with temptation and needing to prove something to himself. The reader can see and sympathize with the character, maybe even think “There but for the grace of God go I,” even as she’s shaking her head about the dumb decision itself. Yes, the decision is still dumb, but we believe that this character, under these circumstances, really would do it.

It is, admittedly, extremely difficult to do this kind of thing for mistakes that various characters made before the story even began. One can, however, show that they regret the mistake, and that they’ve learned something from having messed up so badly five or ten or twenty years before…and one can certainly arrange for them not to repeat the same mistake. A character doing the exact same stupid thing for a second time tends to really put readers off, even if the first time happened twenty years pre-story and we didn’t get to watch it.

If the pre-story mistake really is vital to the current plot, one can use flashback to show the circumstances and motivation, or one can have some really understanding other character explain it to everyone in the present story who doesn’t know.

In every case, though, it all keeps coming back around to making sure the reader understands the reasons the character made the mistake…and the bigger the mistake is, the more time the writer probably needs to spend setting it up. “Um, sorry, officer, I left my driver’s license at home” needs maybe half a line earlier about how fast she flew out of the house; “Er, I sort of told the Evil Overlord where our Sekrit Base is” needs a lot more advance justification.

About the only time this isn’t true is when one has a central character who is supposed to be an idiot – Bertie Wooster, say – and the whole point of the story is watching him bumble into trouble and watch Jeeves pull him out again. Which works in comedy, but seldom in drama.

This happens not to be the case. Every writer has some kind of blind spot; it’s just that for most of us, it’s something that’s not quite as obvious up front, something more minor than “action” or “dialog,” and we learn to dance around it or compensate for it fairly quickly. It’s more difficult when the blind spot is something central, like description or action, but it’s still possible.

The biggest difficulty, in my experience, is usually figuring out that one has a problem and exactly what the problem is, because of course the salient feature of blind spots is that one can’t see them. Often, the stuff one writes looks perfectly fine to the writer, and it’s only when the crit group or beta readers get at it that the writer begins to suspect there’s something wrong.

Unfortunately, at this point many writers decide that what’s wrong is the readers, not the writing. It always astonishes me when a writer’s first response to “I didn’t understand this bit” is “But it’s right there, see?” If somebody didn’t get it, then they didn’t get it; the question at that point is to figure out why and do something about it.

And yes, sometimes the problem is with the particular reader – but for a writer, that really needs to be the last possible conclusion, and never a final one. Because if you start from the assumption that the problem is always with the reader, you will never find and fix anything that you didn’t notice on your own, and there’s really no point in being in a crit group or having beta readers at all.

Even when you’re pretty sure that this particular reader has a bee in her bonnet about dialog or description or whatever, it’s worth reconsidering her comments from time to time, because as one’s writing improves, one generally gets better at spotting real problems, so it’s possible that in six months or a year or five years, one will look at the story and smack one’s head and think That’s what she meant! Why didn’t I see this before? And then one can proceed to actually fix the problem.

Because the very first thing to remember about fixing anything is that if you can’t see the problem yourself, it is practically impossible to fix it without mucking up everything else. This is what makes dealing with blind spots so extraordinarily difficult; by their very nature, one can’t see them, so how can one fix them?

Reader and crit group comments can alert one to the fact that one has a blind spot – that one always seems to start the story a chapter ahead of where it needs to start, or carry on three chapters past the actual end, or never say what the main characters look like, or never describe anyone’s thoughts/emotions, or whatever.

The next step is to learn to see the problem for oneself…and decide whether it’s a charming stylistic eccentricity, or a serious problem that needs to be fixed. A character who constantly “sings out” instead of calling or shouting may be fine for one book, though it can become a really noticeable and tiresome tick over a multi-volume series. On the other hand, if there are no action scenes at all (because the kidnapping, rescue, barroom brawl, chase through the ravine, and final shootout all take place offstage), that’s probably a very large problem unless you’re doing something meta and literary and know exactly what you’re doing.

Teaching yourself to see a problem happens in two main ways: by reading other people’s stuff and paying conscious and deliberate attention to seeing what they’re doing that you aren’t, and by going over your own stuff in revision and doing the same thing. This can be extremely difficult to do alone, though it’s not impossible. Sometimes, though, what’s needed is for you to go over the passage in someone else’s book, looking for the action (or description, or dialog tags, or whatever), and then have someone else go through the same passage and highlight it so you can’t miss it.

Once you learn to see when something’s there and when it really isn’t, and have decided that the book you’re writing will be improved by including it, you go to your own stuff and look. This is even harder, especially if whatever-it-is is something that’s missing (like action or description), rather than something that you’re doing too often. It’s relatively easy to go through a manuscript and highlight every spot where someone blinks or rolls their eyes; it’s a lot harder to mark places where there could be action or description or emotions, only there isn’t.

For most writers, especially if they’re still in the early stages of learning to write, this is second-draft and revision stuff. My personal experience has been that going through a manuscript and carefully deleting all the eye-rolls or overused “verys” and “reallys” and “managed tos” is painful enough that after doing it once, I remember and avoid doing that particular thing during subsequent first drafts…but that hasn’t stopped me from making new and different mistakes, which then need to be discovered and corrected. It’s a never-ending journey, but it’s the only way I know to keep improving.

As a result, some writers find it difficult to move beyond the code. They don’t stop to think about all the little things real people really do when they’re listening or fidgeting or concentrating or bored, because they have these basic code phrases already occupying that slot in their minds. And they especially don’t think about how body language can reflect characterization, because really, how much characterization do you get out of a shrug or a sigh or a smile?

But if you stop to think for a minute, body language is about the whole body. It’s not just a couple of gestures; it’s about how individuals move and stand and use every single part of themselves, from hair to toes. People slouch and slump and stiffen; they cough and swallow visibly and sneeze; they tense up, relax, turn red, go pale. Sometimes, the body language is under their control (as with raising her chin or crossing his legs); other times, it isn’t (few people can control their blush reflex). But no matter what else is happening, every single person in the scene is doing something with his or her body (unless they’re dead, and sometimes, even then).

So how do you get at all that stuff, if you’re not used to thinking about it this way?

Well, I suggest beginning with what you have to work with, i.e., what are all the various parts of a body, and what can be done with or to them?

Starting with the head, there’s hair, eyes, eyebrows, ears, nose, cheeks, forehead, mouth, teeth, tongue, lips…and then there are things that go on the head: hats and scarves, eyeglasses and monocles, earrings, nose rings, tiaras, necklaces. And that’s just the head, and I didn’t even try for a total and complete inventory.

So what can a person do with all these bits and pieces? Hair: comb one’s fingers through it, twist it (if it’s long enough), scratch at it (front, back, top, or sides), pull at it (or even pull out a bit of it), braid it (again, if it’s long enough), stroke or smooth it into place, toss it, shake it, hide behind it. Eyes: widen, narrow, squint, flick in one direction or another, close, blink, wink, rub at, tear up, roll, stare intently, glaze over. Eyebrows: raise one or both, bring or draw together, lower, wiggle. Hat: take off, tip, raise, put on, push back/forward, scratch under, use as fan…

You get the point. Each and every part of the body has multiple motions that it can make, and multiple things that can be done to or with it in combination with other parts. Every one of those movements can be used to indicate a feeling, a reaction, or a thought. You can add even more information by describing the way in which those motions are made; “slowly winding a lock of hair around a finger” gives a different impression from “madly winding and unwinding a lock of hair around a finger.”

Some bits of body language are involuntary, like blushing or shivering, but most of them are habits or expressions of an individual’s personality. So the next question is, what is each of the characters like? Who they are affects how they act and react on multiple levels. The guy who reacts aggressively to any criticism may consciously be making a fist, but narrowing his eyes and tightening his lips out of habit, and turning red because of his involuntary physical reaction to becoming angry. The more thoughtful character next to him, who’s a bit more controlled but just as angry, may do the same narrowing of his eyes, but without the red face, and his conscious physical response may be to tap a finger against his lips instead of making a fist.

Habits, in particular, can tell the reader something about both the character’s personality and the character’s past (the habit had to come from somewhere). Whether it’s the little dip and swing of the character’s head whenever she turns it (obviously, she used to wear her hair long and loose, and hasn’t yet lost the habitual motion she needed to toss it over her shoulder as she turns), or the way he half-reaches for his breast pocket every few minutes but stops midway (gave up smoking recently, didn’t he?), little non-standard habitual movements can make the characters feel more like real individuals than like standard roles (The Hero, The Ingénue, The Sidekick, The Comic Relief). Even characters who make a point of not showing emotional reactions can have habits that betray them in small, unconscious ways.

Obviously, the writer does not need or want to describe every twitch and wiggle that every character makes. And there’s certainly a place for simplified body-language-as-punctuation code like “he smiled” or “she shrugged.” But if all you’re using are the compressed code phrases, you might want to take another look for places where you can take things one step deeper by describing the narrow eyes, tight lips, and slowly tapping finger instead of saying “he looked angry.”

OK, I get that a lot of people really, in their heart of hearts, want a quick-and-dirty paint-by-numbers approach to writing a great book. I also realize that a lot of people don’t want to read more than one screen’s worth of blog post (or so several of the How To Do A Great Blog web sites claim). Lists of tips and tricks and common mistakes seem like a perfectly reasonable way to get at both things at the same time.

The trouble is that, in my experience, a short list of tips or mistakes just doesn’t work very well when it comes to helping people improve their writing. (I can’t speak to the thing about sticking to one screen per blog post, except to note that I obviously don’t follow that advice, either.)

Writing a short story or a novel is complicated; every bit of it affects everything else. It’s easy to focus down on one particular aspect of writing, like dialog or endings, and dash off a list of dos and don’ts. But in an actual story, it’s not so simple. That #3 “Don’t…” from the dialog list, for instance, may be both thematically appropriate and more perfectly in character than any of the alternatives, not to mention being the ideal way of moving the plot along. #10 “Do make sure you…” from the characterization list may be impossible to make work, given the constraints of the style and setting.

But there are several sorts of lists that I find extremely useful. They just don’t have anything much to do with writing technique.

The first set of lists is stuff I use during the first draft to save time. For instance, I have one possible-next-book that involves characters from several different imaginary countries/backgrounds. I want their names to sound as if they come from different places with different languages and naming conventions, and I don’t want any of them to be token representatives of their cultures. That means that eventually, when I’m making up secondary characters like the barman and the traveling salesman, I’m going to need more names that sound as if they came from the same places, and maybe a few others from completely different backgrounds.

So I make a set of lists: six to ten male and female names that would come from each country, along with six to ten family/clan/house/tribe names for each country that mix and match well with the personal names I’ve picked. When I need the traveling salesman, all I have to do is decide which country he’s from, and pick from the list.

Or I make a list of place-names so that when they pass by that small town, I can grab a name on the fly. I’ll also make lists of things I’ve mentioned in passing, like local foods or animals I’ve invented, so that I can use them again if I need to (and so I can make sure that I didn’t name the fish stew “kishta” and the tiger with antlers “kitsa” – far too confusing, not to mention the potential for tragically horrible typos…)

The other kind of lists I find useful are checklists of things to do during the first round of revisions. There’s an ongoing, ever-changing list of all the phrases I tend to overuse, so I can do a search-and-destroy on them easily. There’s a list of things to check for consistency and continuity (I have a really bad habit of changing the spelling of a character’s name by one letter somewhere in the middle of the story, or calling someone “Anthony” for two chapters and then switching to “Andrew” because I couldn’t be bothered to look up which male-name-beginning-with-A I’d used, and I was sure it was Andrew…)

In other words, all the lists I find useful have to do with the content of the story: names, places, descriptive phrases, etc. That’s what I need to keep track of when I’m writing, not the five dialog mistakes that I may or may not be making in any given scene, or the twelve dynamite endings that don’t fit the story I’m trying to tell.

Back about sixty or seventy years ago, there was something of a fad for analyzing and classifying plots in various ways. Georges Polti came up with thirty-six dramatic situations in a stunningly boring book that, when referred to, is nearly always condensed down to a list that occupies about two pages. Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch classified plots according to seven types of conflict (Man against Man, Man against Nature, Man against Himself, etc. Unaccountably, his list omits Man vs. the IRS). And Robert Heinlein summed it up in three: Boy Meets Girl, The Little Tailor, and the Man-Who-Learns-Better.

Looked at a little more closely, these classifications are actually looking at different things. The 36 situations are about content, and fairly specific content at that. “Adultery” (#25 -Two Adulterers Conspire Against a Deceived Spouse) is barely different from “Murderous Adultery” (#15 – Two Adulterers Conspire To Murder the Betrayed Spouse). The “seven types of conflict” are about the sorts of obstacles the protagonist can face: other people who don’t want him/her to succeed, natural disasters, the narrator’s own internal prejudices or flaws, etc. And Heinlein’s three basic plots, if one looks carefully, are the three things that result in change/growth in the main character, that is, people change because they’ve established (or want to establish) a new relationship, because they have to grow in order to face an external problem that looks bigger than anything they ought to be able to cope with, and because they have to face themselves and their own wrong judgments and mistakes.

One of my favorite old how-to-write textbooks takes a completely different perspective on plot, classifying stories as Character Story, Complication Story, Thematic Story, and Atmosphere Story, and the Multi-phase Story (a combination of two or more of the other types). It’s a very dense text, but as near as I can make out, the classification is based on where the plot’s main focus of attention is and/or where its driving force comes from.

All of these things are important, but none of them say much about the movement of a plot. That’s left for a different set of classifiers, who generally draw diagrams and graphs to represent tension over time, or complications, or the protagonist’s situation (good or bad). The classic one is the saw-toothed triangle, with the rising action, the climax, and the falling action, but there are others. One of the older texts I’ve been looking at separates plots into three types: a cup-shaped one it calls the Comic Plot Arc, which begins and ends with the character in a good situation, but which dips in the middle where the character is in trouble; a hill-shaped one it calls the Tragic Plot Arc, which begins and ends with the character in a bad situation, but which rises in the middle where it looks as if the character is going to make it out of the mess; and a flat line which the book call the Modern Story, in which the protagonist doesn’t struggle against Fate but passively accepts whatever events come his/her way.

And then there are the folks who attempt to deal with non-linear storytelling (which deserves, and will eventually get, a post all to itself), using circles and spirals and chains of linked boxes and arrows to try to sort out and classify plots that don’t move in strict chronological order.

All of these different ways of looking at plot are valid. Internalizing this is really useful; it means that when you are looking in despair at a plot whose action doesn’t follow the classic saw-toothed triangle pattern, you can switch gears and see it as a spiral Man-Learns-Lesson pattern, or perhaps as a Character or Atmosphere story whose primary plot-pattern isn’t on the action level at all. When there’s a problem, one doesn’t have to look only at the movement of the story; one can look at the obstacles, or the focus, or the content, or the shape.

The thing I like about all this is the richness of all the different ways of looking at plot, what constitutes plot, and what’s important about plot. It allows for much greater complexity than the basic plot skeleton and/or three-to-five-act structure that is the main substance of most modern how-to-write books. The basic skeleton and the act structure are, certainly, one set of plot fundamentals…but they’re only one set, and fundamentals are supposed to be something that you learn in order to build on, not something that you learn and then stop because that’s all you need to know.

The first thing that’s obvious is the deep, deep divide in the earlier how-to-write books between “pulp” fiction and “real” fiction (it’s even phrased that way in a few). In the earliest books, there is “good fiction” – that is, the literary fiction that was respected – and that other stuff. Consequently, there are two kinds of how-to-write books: the ones that take a literary approach, and the ones that talk bluntly about what kinds of stories the popular audience wants and how to deliver them.

Among my collection of how-to-write books, the division is not nearly so clear. There are books that were pretty clearly written to be textbooks for college-level creative writing classes, but they don’t have the same condescending attitude (for the most part) toward popular fiction as their predecessors. The less academic books talk about things like quality, style, and theme as well as about the practicalities of writing action, structuring plot, and composing realistic-yet-readable dialog. The divide is still there to some extent, but it’s much less deep.

The second thing that is evident is that sixty or seventy years ago, the short story was the crown jewel of literary achievement. Hardly any of the older books on the literary side talk about writing novels; on the other hand, there are a number of them that are essentially collections of highly respected short stories with a few “study questions” at the end. The same authors appear over and over: Hemingway, Jackson, Thurber, Chekov, James, Twain. It’s the how-to-sell books that talk about novels, and even some of them involve a lot more short story examples than book-length works (though of course, the short story market was a lot larger in the 1940s and 50s than it is now, so it’s understandable).

The modern part of my how-to-write collection contains a few books that use the short-stories-as-examples technique, but far fewer of them (possibly reflecting the collapse of the short fiction market; possibly reflecting the difficulty of getting reprint permissions; but possibly reflecting as well a change in the philosophy of how teaching folks to write fiction should happen). The two (out of at least fifty titles) I can think of both use similar formats: the author writes about some particular aspect of writing, then has the short story that exemplifies it, followed by an analysis. In other words, the authors do a whole lot more work than just coming up with a set of leading questions.

The third big difference between the older how-to-write books and the newer ones is that all of them are overall, general texts. They all talk about all aspects of writing, from writing the first draft to plot and dialog to revising. Even the ones that are little more than collections of short stories look at different aspects of the stories they’ve collected: the first story will have questions that focus on structure; the second, ones that focus on dialog; the third, questions that focus on writing comedy, and so on.

From where I sit, I can easily count fourteen newer how-to-write books with titles like “Revising” “Plot” “Dialog” “Handbook of Short Story Writing” “Fiction Writer’s Research Handbook” … and that’s not even counting all the genre-specific stuff like “Creating Fantasy” and “How to write Speculative Fiction.” In other words, a sizeable number of the modern how-to-write books focus on one specific area or aspect of writing.

I think that the closing of the gap between so-called literary and so-called pulp fiction is a good thing. I’ve never met a writer who didn’t care about the quality of his or her work, regardless of what they wrote, and I think it is a good thing for this to be reflected in the books that try to teach fiction writing. The slow demise of the short story, I’m less happy about. I’m a novelist myself, so seeing more representation of novels and talk about how to write them in the how-to books seems to me like a Good Thing, but I don’t like this complete reversal. On the other hand, the market is what it is, and there’s no getting around the fact that there are very few short story markets left.

That last point, though…on the one hand, it’s nice to be able to dig into a single aspect of the writing craft in depth and detail, and some of those one-aspect books do exactly that. Others, though, don’t have depth so much as the illusion of it – many pages of questionable advice that makes it sound as if this one thing is the key to writing great/selling fiction. And even if the advice was brilliant…well, a book with one brilliant aspect and everything else mediocre-to-bad is not what most of the writers I know want to write.

On the plus side, the number of how-to-write books that take completely different approaches to writing fiction means that people who are more intuitive than analytic, or more practical than academic, or vice versa, have somewhere to go. No matter how many times someone says “There is no One True Way” or “Everyone works differently,” it’s a lot easier to believe it when you have an actual how-to-write book in front of you written by someone who does it similarly to the way you do.

I do think that it’s worth looking back at some of those older books. Some of them have things in them I haven’t seen anywhere else…and I like having my preconceptions shaken up every now and then. So I’m going to spend the next few posts talking about ways of looking at writing that I’ve found in some of those older books. Maybe some of the newer ones, too.

To write a novel with lots of subplots and arcs that need to intertwine, a writer needs to 1) keep track of what’s going on offstage in all the threads that aren’t currently at the front and in focus, and 2) make sure he/she doesn’t focus on only one plot thread at a time for too long (because that makes for lumpy, uneven pacing, and in extreme cases, for readers who’ve forgotten half of the important things going on).

Basically, keeping track means taking notes and updating them regularly. There’s no other way to do it, really, unless you have an eidetic memory. Notes can be done in advance or after-the-fact, or both at once (if you check in at the end of every scene, you’re also checking in before the beginning of every scene that comes next). I’m a check-in-after/before-every-scene writer; before I start in on a scene, I want to have some idea what’s going on in each of my subplots. And since my scenes rarely go quite the way I’d planned, I need to look at them as soon as I’m done writing them and figure out how what did happen onstage is going to affect the way all the offstage plots are developing, which in turn will affect what the next scene is and what happens in it.

One of the ways I keep track is with a calendar, because most of my stories are told in chronological order over a period of weeks or longer. I usually set up a one-month template in Excel (because it gives me more control than a real-life calendar program) and as I write each scene, I log in what happened, time and viewpoint (if those are relevant or not obvious), place, and any important events (e.g. “G and J picnic in Central Park; Uncle W interrupts; J loses necklace”). This gives me a picture of what my characters actually have done (as opposed to what I’d planned) and when, and whether it’s plausible to have G foil the villain’s bank robbery in Paris at 3 p.m. when he was picnicing in New York with J at 11 a.m.

For the Frontier Magic books, I had a list of what-happened by year and how old the main character was (because those three books cover nearly twenty years). I also had a chapter summary at the start of each draft chapter that said something like “1843 – Eff is four/five; family leaves for Mill City late summer” so that if I had to move scenes or bits of narrative around, I’d have some idea whether I’d have to check all the age and date references or not (if they went in the next chapter, “1843 – Eff is five; arrival and settling in to new house” then no; if the bits moved three chapters forward to “1849 – Eff is 10; Eff is 11; McNeil Expedition leaves town,” then definitely yes.)

Making sure you don’t focus on just one plot thread at a time again requires awareness, first of all. Once you know it’s something you need to do, there are two basic techniques for doing it: first, you balance the scenes, interleaving the various plot threads so you don’t have eight action scenes in a row and then eight romantic ones; second, you incorporate more than one plot thread into the same scene as often as possible.

One technique for balancing the focus is making a color-coded scene list. Again, you can do this before you start writing, build it as you write, or use it as a tool for analyzing your first draft once it’s complete. List the scenes in the order that they appear in your manuscript (“G and J picnic” “L kidnapped” “Q steals secret bomb plans”) and then color code them according to whether they’re part of the main action plot, the sidekick’s romance, the annoying little brother’s subplot, etc. If things are well interwoven, the list will end up looking like a rainbow, with colors changing quickly; if not, it’ll look like large blocks of color stacked one on top of another with little overlap.

When I do this, I get a zillion different colors of Post-It-Notes and assign them to the different plotlines, then lay them out in order on the dining room table. This lets me move scenes around easily once I’ve noticed that I have six bright green Post-Its in a row and then no green ones at all for the next 20 scenes. Using Post-Its also means they stick to the table so the cats can’t scatter them all over. Also, I can stick two different-colored Post-Its together when I realize that I can have the kidnapping happen during the romantic picnic and get a scene that’s a two-fer. I also look for scenes that I can delete entirely. You don’t actually have to dramatize everything, just because you can; it’s OK sometimes to say “After three hours of shopping, they finally had all the parts for the bomb” instead of writing three scenes where they stop at different hardware stores to buy what they need.

Incorporating more than one plot thread into the same scene uses exactly the same sort of skills that writers use to put plot, characterization, and background into the same scene, or dialog, action, and summary. There will be some scenes that can only do one thing – it doesn’t make sense for the hero to stop in the middle of the crucial fight with the villain to worry about his grandmother’s illness, for instance – but a lot of the time, you can work two or more subplots together (as in the action-kidnapping interrupting the romantic-picnic mentioned above).

This multiple-plotlines-per-scene technique is particularly painless when two or more characters are in a position to talk for a while. Whether it’s a tea party scene or two characters talking on the bus or at the water cooler, conversations can be full of gossip that covers several other characters’ romances or financial problems (and their associated plotlines) in addition to whatever planning/plotting/clues the scene was originally thought up to provide. The trick here is usually to pick one main subject of conversation (presumably whatever the point/plotline the scene is supposed to focus on), and then look for places where the characters would naturally get off course and talk a bit about seeing George at the bar with a shady-looking character last night, or just how Jin is supporting her shopping addiction. One can also occasionally have such a scene interrupted by a phone call, letter, or the arrival of someone new with a message, which gives the illusion of bringing some of the offstage developments onstage temporarily.

Also, do remember that for a lot of writers, doing this kind of in-depth scene-balancing analysis is something that’s only necessary when they’re stuck or when there’s a problem that they can’t put their finger on. I don’t haul out the Post-Its for every book I write, and even when I do, I don’t always haul them out in advance.

It is amazingly easy to forget this, when we are constantly bombarded with visuals in our everyday lives, from movies and TV, to YouTube and those animated ads that are all over the Internet, to the photo of Cousin Greg’s new puppy that he emailed everyone. We’re conditioned to think visually.

This can become a problem for writers, most especially for the sort of writer who gets a strong mental image of a place or scene that they want to convey to the reader exactly as it appears to them. Unfortunately, writing is a highly imperfect form of telepathy. Furthermore, it is inherently linear: it arrives in the reader’s brain one word at a time, one sentence at a time. A three-page description of the view from a mountaintop or the chaos of a battle is never, ever going to have the same instant impact as a three-second shot in a movie.

So what do you do if you want that kind of impact in your story?

First, you have to accept that you aren’t going to get the same effect, and what you do get is going to have to build up, rather than arriving instantly. What the camera does is different from what words do; trying to imitate the camera with words is never going to be really satisfactory. Second, you remember that what you are after is the impact; the actual description is simply the means to an end. So, third, you look at all the things words can do that a camera can’t do, and you focus on getting the impact you want through them. In other words, you play to the strengths of the written word.

Smells, textures, and sensations are not things that are easily conveyed by a photograph or movie. A written description of a mountaintop view that includes only the sharp peaks and sweeping vistas is missing a bet. Oh, you want the peaks and so on, but sketching them with a light hand and then mentioning the snow-cooled breeze and the scent of the pines, or the cold damp seeping through the POV character’s boots as the snow melts, or the slip of stones or crunch of snow underfoot, will make the scene more vivid and personal in a way the camera can’t.

Which brings me to my second point: writing can be personal in a way the camera isn’t. Cold water seeping through boots, the gag reflex triggered by a nasty smell, the sting and itch of a mosquitoe bite – all can make prose more immediate, because seeing someone else get bitten by a mosquito isn’t the same as putting the reader in the head of the character who’s just been bitten.  Two of the most commonly used viewpoints, first-person and tight-third person, let the writer give the thoughts and feelings of the viewpoint character; omniscient allows for the thoughts and feelings of anyone who is present. And since the whole point of describing a majestic view or a chaotic fight is usually to make the reader feel the way they’d feel if they were there, this is a huge advantage. Showing the reader both the scene and the viewpoint character’s emotions/reactions can go a long way toward making a scene feel overwhelming or confusing to the reader, as well as to the character.

In first-person, and to some extent in tight-third person, one can sometimes slip into stream-of-consciousness writing for a paragraph or two, to really get the viewpoint character’s feelings and reactions across. This is particular useful during battle scenes, disasters, and at other times when the character is getting a confusing amount of information all at once. It’s also fun to write, which means that one has to keep an eye out for doing too much of it at once and ending up with a confused reader.

The history of a place or the background behind some action is another thing that the written word can do more easily than the camera, though this is something that the writer needs to handle carefully. It’s easiest to slip in smoothly in omniscient; in tight-third and first-person, getting this kind of backstory in depends on the knowledge and personality of the viewpoint character – what they know and what they would think about when faced with the particular situation. Knowing that the peaceful valley the character is looking at has been the site of key battles for centuries can create a lot of emotional resonance; on the other hand, one has to be careful that one doesn’t end up with a boring history lecture rather than something that actually deepens the effect of the scene.

When it comes to the actual visual description itself, less is more. It’s tempting to spend three or four pages waxing lyrical about every detail, but frankly, most readers these days are going to skim or skip any chunk of straight description that goes on that long. Also, two people looking at the same majestic view may both be deeply moved, but it will be different things that move them; consequently, getting too detailed usually means losing more and more of the impact on every reader who does not happen to find the same things moving as the writer does.

On the other hand, if the writer provides a few of the right visual details, plus some sounds, smells, and sensations, plus the viewpoint character’s reaction, the reader will generally fill in what’s missing with his/her own details…and the resulting image will be more powerful because it’s tailored to fit each reader by the readers themselves.

So what these folks really want and need to know isn’t where to get a new story idea; it’s how to get the idea they have to “enough.”

“Critical mass” is what I call that point, and I have about twenty story ideas backed up that aren’t at the critical mass point yet. They’re ideas; they’re interesting to me; but they don’t have quite enough there for them to really start moving. Once I finish the current book, I will consult with my agent and editor, pick one of those ideas, and start developing it. I expect that with sufficient attention, I could get any one of them going within a couple of weeks, but if I give it my best shot and it still won’t start moving on its own within that time frame, I’ll send it back to the farm team and pick a different one.

In other words, I don’t just sit around waiting for one of those twenty-plus ideas to start growing. I work at it, the way gardners work at their gardening. Water, fertilizer, sunshine, drainage…

What does all that mean in terms of story?

For me, working at an idea starts by looking at what I have, and turning it this way and that to see different possibilities. I’ve had two of them start inching through the development stage in the past week. One glommed on to a passing bit of background – a notion I had that wasn’t even really an idea yet, more of a proto-idea or possibility. I was considering adding it to the idea queue, but it wasn’t even enough for that – no characters, no plot, not even a complete bit of background, just an idea of a room and what people did there. And since I’ve been thinking about my idea queue a lot lately (because that’s what happens when I’m a month or less from finishing up a current project), I found myself thinking “You know, this might work in Max’s story…” And the next thing I knew, I was thinking about exactly how it might work, which characters it might affect directly, how that would play into their behavior, all the new plot-possibilities that it would open up…

The other one had about three pages written, but just…wasn’t moving. (It’s one of the ones I put back in the queue the last time I went through this process.) It didn’t need anything new to get it going; all it needed was a shift in perspective. I was running through my list with my agent (see “consult with,” above), when I realized that the problem was that I’d picked the wrong character to be the main character and central viewpoint. “This would be much more interesting if I picked one of the characters things are actually happening to,” I thought, and bingo, large chunks of plot started rearranging themselves in a much more fascinating order.

Both of those story-developments were moderately serendipitous – I wasn’t so much poking at those specific ideas as I was sort of generally thinking about my to-write list and which things I might want to work on next and whether I could actually get any of them going. But I’ve been doing this for over thirty years now, and my backbrain has gotten into the habit of tossing possibilities up in the air when I’m at this stage. (Habit can be a wonderful thing, when it works in your favor.) From here on, though, I won’t be sitting around waiting for something else to bubble up out of the compost. I’ll be poking around and trying out different possibilities.

The way I do this is usually to shuttle back and forth between plot, backstory, and characters, looking at what I don’t know about them yet and trying out different things to see if they fit. Does this main character have any relatives – an aunt, perhaps, or a brother? Maybe a cousin? Aunt doesn’t feel right, nor does brother; I think she’s an orphan. A distant cousin, though…that might work. Put those down on the list as possiblities – orphan, distant cousin – switch to plot. Is she going to save the world? Revamp her society? No, those don’t feel quite right. Staving off some sort of catastrophe, okay, but not a world-threatening one. City-threatening, maybe, or country-threatening. No idea what it could be yet, so on to the next thing.

Background…she’s an orphan, so when did her parents die? Right away, I’m positive she didn’t know them, so it must have happened early in her life. How? War? No, doesn’t feel right. Plague? That works. So there was a big plague about ten to twelve years back. Maybe that ties into my present-day plot? Maybe some industries are still just starting to come back? Not sure; think about that later. Back to the plot and characters - am I going to have a villain? X could make a good one, but I like him too much already…maybe there’s someone in the shadows behind him? Like the emperor behind Darth Vader. Yes, good, that works. So who’s the new guy in the shadows, and what’s his background? What’s he after? No clue, so move on to the next bit; his part will come clear sooner or later.

Eventually, all these bits and pieces will start coming together and I’ll write my first, tentative (and completely wrong) plot outline. This is more to give me something to ring changes on than it is a serious attempt at figuring out how the story will go. I talk with my friends and we toss possibilities around, and I get annoyed with them for haring off in directions that interest them but don’t appeal to me. I may draw a map, or do a bunch of appendix-like background summaries for my own use. Or I may not. I start making lists: of characters, of places, of things I need to research, of things that need to go in, of things that need to stay out.

The point is, by then it’s moving. It may be anywhere from another week to a couple of months before I sit down and start writing, but what I have is not just an idea any more. It’s gotten through the preliminary development, and it’s a baby story.