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 Posted on January 4, 2018 by

Novel characters: 15 top character creation tips

From: https://www.nownovel.com/blog/novel-characters-15-tips

Great novel characters share common features: Distinct, authentic voices, character development, clear goals and motivations, strengths and flaws. Here are 15 of our top character creation tips gathered from some of the best writing blogs and websites:

1: Give your novel characters clear motivations that drive your story

Writing characters who spring to life off the page is partly about giving characters clear motivations. Over at Terrible Minds, Chuck Wendig sums this up eloquently:

‘Characters want things. They need things. They are motivated by these desires and requirements and they spend an entire story trying to fulfill them. That’s one of the base level components of a story: a character acts in service to his motivations but obstacles (frequently other characters) stand in his way.’

For example, many a villian (from C.S. Lewis’ White Witch, Jadis, to Tolkien’s Sauron, desires power; dominion. Their dogged pursuit of greedy goals fuels heroes’ quests to maintain order and justice.

2: Make each novel character identifiable in a police line-up

This is great advice from Word Painting: The fine art of writing descriptively by Rebecca McClanahan (excerpted by Writer’s Digest here):

“My father is a tall, middle-aged man of average build. He has green eyes and brown hair and usually wears khakis and oxford shirts.”

This description is so mundane […] Can you imagine the police searching for this suspect? No identifying marks, no scars or tattoos, nothing to distinguish him. He appears as a cardboard cutout rather than as a living, breathing character. Yes, the details are accurate, but they don’t call forth vivid images. We can barely make out this character’s form; how can we be expected to remember him?’

Make characters real using details of dress, gait (the way they walk), voice, personality and more. [And get our concise guide, ‘How to Write Real Characters’ to work your way through illustrative examples and practical exercises that will improve your characters.]

3: Make characters lovable, loathsome, and everything between

How do you get readers interested in your characters and how do you make them unforgettable?

Eric Patterson gives this simple and vital advice on animation that applies equally to writing:

‘The viewer should care for or be challenged by the characters.’

To do this give your characters at least one of the following, depending on their role in the story:

  • Likable features: These could be positive traits that attract us to people (kindness, compassion, humility, generosity or other)
  • Humanizing flaws: What does your character fear? What mistakes are your characters prone to making? What do they need to learn in life most urgently?
  • Features that challenge readers: Giving your characters elements that the average person can’t relate to also creates interest. Think of series that have serial killers as protagonists. We still feel tense about their predicaments, even if their behaviour doesn’t fit our own ethical norms. Readers don’t have to like every character. Your protagonist doesn’t necessarily have to embody ‘good’, heroic or noble features. If you want an audience, the first rule is to make your characters interesting

George R R Martin quote - writing novel characters | Now Novel

4: Create interesting dynamics between characters and environment

Your characters can be at home in or at odds with their environment.

There’s no reason you have to limit opposition to character vs character conflict. In The Lord of the Rings, for example, Frodo and Sam’s love for their native Shire makes venturing forth on a dangerous quest a much more daunting decision. There are locations throughout the cycle (The Mines of Moria, The Tower of Orthanc, Mordor) where characters’ environs are treacherous.

Texas A&M University’s Writing Center describes using place to writing interesting novel characters:

‘Where does your character live, work, and play? Does your character fit in to the setting or stand out? The setting can help move the story along and define the character. A character living in Idaho who’s from the Caribbean creates an interesting dynamic.’

5: Use secondary characters as ‘foils’

Not every character in your novel needs to occupy center-stage. As the university of Ohio’s fiction writing resources state:

‘[A foil is] someone whose character contrasts to that of the protagonist, thus throwing it into sharp relief. In Connie Willis’s “The Last of the Winnebagos,’ Katie Powell serves as a foil to the protagonist David McCombe. Katie chases after David to [relieve] her guilt over killing one of the last surviving dogs on Earth, while David runs away from Katie and from admitting to himself that he, too, is responsible for the dog’s death.’

A quick-witted character could have a dim-witted foil, for example. Or give a wildly imaginative character a literal-minded foil. Cervantes does this to great effect in his famous Don Quixote. The self-named Don attacks windmills, imagining them to be giants, while his befuddled sidekick looks on. Here, a foil (comedy’s archetype of the ‘straight man’ – a straight-laced character who contrasts with the kook) heightens the comedy.

6: Create profiles to develop your novel’s characters

Your characters should be more than the sum of the lines of dialogue you give them and their immediate actions in the story.

The best characters are so vivid you can picture them having a life outside of the start and end of the story. How can you give your character this sense of personal history and future? By keeping character profiles:

‘[A character profile] can help flesh out a cardboard character and even make you think about facets of his or her personality that you had not considered before. Character profiles are especially helpful for novels which involve several main characters and for stories which use multiple points of view.’

Make notes on elements such us:

  • Where your character was born and grew up
  • What your character’s political, philosophical or religious views are
  • Your character’s greatest fears and desires
  • What your character is most proud and most ashamed of
  • What your character values and dislikes most in others
  • Stock phrases or physical mannerisms that your character uses – these should be consistent with your character’s background and psychology

7: Deepen characters by incorporating research

If you are writing about characters from a particular historical epoch, research common beliefs, cultural practices and other factual particulars from that time.

A little research can furnish details that will make your characters much more lifelike. As Writing Room says:

‘So you have created the perfect character- a Dragon Slaying Knight; he’s young, handsome, noble and afraid of fire. But if you are a fifty-year old woman living in [the] modern day, do you really know anything about him? You need to research to find out all you can. What were the living conditions like? What was it like for young knights back in medieval times?’

Of course, you’re also free to depart from historical fact, to give your characters your own flavour. Hilary Mantel has been criticized for making her version of Thomas Cromwell too much based on ‘alternative facts’. Yet, as E.L. Doctorow said, ‘The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.’

 

8: Show your narrator and other characters’ views of others

Where novels get especially interesting is where different characters observe different aspects of others. One character might find the loud girl at the bar obnoxious and abrasive while another might find her fun and confident. Ask yourself ‘What does this character’s impression of this other character suggest about themselves’?

Angela Ackerman sums it up thus on her writing blog:

‘Show the POV character’s feelings and reactions to the character he/she is observing.

Also, work in the viewer’s emotional reaction to the character. Is the narrator impressed? Intimidated? Fearful? Attracted to them?’

In a multi-character novel, showing characters’ different interpretations of each other this way truly helps to build a sense of complex character psychology and multiple perspectives.

9: Give your characters interiority

What do we mean by ‘interiority’? Your characters have inner worlds that not everyone they encounter has access to.

Think about how your character sees herself versus other people’s impressions and assumptions. WikiHow’s article on describing characters elaborates:

‘You need to know your character in and out to make decisions about what to present. Think about how they see themselves and how others would perceive them. Do these images match or clash?’

10: Don’t let characters know every detail just because you do

As writers we need to sometimes consciously construct boundaries and distinctions between ourselves and our characters.

You might know every detail about your characters’ motivations, their pasts and futures, but your characters don’t need to (and perhaps shouldn’t) share your own omniscience.

Sometimes our own decisions and behaviours surprise or unsettle us. Here’s what author Justine Musk says:

‘There are things we know about ourselves, and that other people know about.

There are things we know about ourselves that other people don’t know about.

[…] The character might think he’s being clever and manipulative, for example, when actually he’s quite transparent.’

11: Use contradictions to make your characters complex

This is great character-writing advice from Becca Puglisi. In a guest post for Write to Done, Puglisi says:

‘Many grandmothers are doting, but what if they’re also manipulative and self-serving?

Create unusual, surprising characters by giving them traits that don’t always go together.

12: Use characters’ names to convey subtle implications

Many names have explicit meanings (Sophia, for example, means ‘wisdom’). When naming your characters, you can add extra layers of meaning by giving them symbolic names. Try names that relate to their story function or personalities. Glen C. Strathy says:

‘You can follow in the footsteps of Charles Dickens and other writers and create character names that convey something about your characters’ personalities. Again, “baby names” websites will tell you what various first names mean, so you can choose ones that fit your characters’

13: Avoid using lazy stereotypes

Stereotypes are at best untrue and at worst explicitly offensive.

In writing novel characters, do your best to avoid characters such as the ‘wise ethnic person’ who gives your protagonist an important, cryptic message. If you must have this scene, think about how you can undercut the cliché of it.

For example, the ‘wise indigenous’ character might be fully aware that’s how your protagonist sees them and could thus play them for a fool. Lucy V Hay at Bang 2 Write says:

‘Know the difference between stereotype and ARCHETYPE.’

An archetype is a character who is a universal, mythic character. The warrior, for example, or the faithful, loyal friend. Using characters such as these does not necessarily make assumptions about entire groups of people based on bias or ignorance, unlike stereotyping.

14: Show characters’ motives through interactions

Rather than say ‘She was jealous of her step-daughter because of the close bond between the child and her husband’, show this jealousy in the interactions between step-mother and daughter.

As New York Writers Workshop faculty member Laura Zinn Fromm writes:

‘Take your characters to parties, gas stations, baseball games, yoga classes and other planets, and make them whisper, yell, confess and interact with other characters. Show the characters’ motives through actions with other characters.’

15: Don’t be afraid to change your viewpoint character if necessary

Sometimes creative blocks can be solved by exploring the voice of a different character in your novel.

Think of how the introductory paragraph of a chapter or essay is often just filler or preparatory work for the real story that starts at paragraph two. Character can be the same – the character you thought was your main character to begin might not be as interesting as another, more complex cast member.

Here is Creative Writing Now’s advice:

‘Is there a character who’s stealing the show from your main character? A character who intrigues you more? Whenever this character comes on stage, the writing flows, and the scene comes to life. Maybe it’s your character’s funny best friend … [or]her boyfriend. Maybe it’s even your character’s enemy. Consider LETTING this character steal the show. Change your story around so that this character becomes the focus.’

 

 Posted on December 7, 2017 by

The 9 Types Of Unreliable Narrator, by Amanda Patterson

From: https://writerswrite.co.za/9-types-of-unreliable-narrator

There is a long history of unreliable narrators in fiction. There is an even longer list in reality. They are called everyday people.

What is an unreliable narrator?

An unreliable narrator is a first-person narrator with a compromised viewpoint. (Read 10 Ways to Tell a Story – All about viewpoint, to understand what viewpoint means.)

Narrators serve as filters for stories. What narrators do not know or experience cannot be shown to the reader. The first-person narrator is powerful because that viewpoint is the only one we have to judge the events on the page. The reader believes that the narrator will be truthful and provide an accurate account of the story.

When we have an unreliable narrator, the reader cannot trust his or her version of the story.

Theses narrators may be insane, angry, strung-out on drugs or alcohol, naïve, foreign, criminals, liars, or simply younger than everybody else. They can be comical or absurd, tragic or serious, terrifying or surreal. The one thing they have in common is that they are deceptive.

At some point in a story, the reader realises the narrator cannot be trusted. Something happens – perhaps a lie is uncovered or an identity shown to be implausible. Readers are forced to form their own opinions about the events, and the characters’ motivations, in the story. If the author has not pulled off the initial deception with enough style or enticed readers with the power of the story, they may abandon the book.

Fiction relies on the willingness of readers to suspend belief. Although most of us do this, some readers jump ship when they realise that even the narrator of this make-believe world cannot be trusted. As Holden Caulfield tells us, ‘I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.’ How can we believe anything he says? 

If unreliable narrators are badly crafted, they can be obvious, manipulative, misleading, confusing and pretentious. If they are well written, they can be powerful, clever and fascinating.

 

Here are nine types of unreliable narrators:

  1. The child. The narrator may be a different age or have completely different life experiences from the other people in the story. They tell their versions of a grown-up story through their limited understanding and experience. Examples: Jack from Room, Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn from The Adventures of Huckleberry Fynn.
  2. The outsider. The narrator may be prejudiced by race, class, politics, culture or gender. If somebody is brought up in a certain way, their version of events will be skewed according to that culture. Examples: Alex from A Clockwork Orange, Nelly from Wuthering Heights, Mrs de Winter from Rebecca, Invisible Man from Invisible Man.
  3. The crazy. The narrator may be going through a difficult adolescence, on drugs, or have an eating disorder: Lia from  Wintergirls, Charlie from The Perks of Being a Wallflower,  Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye
  4. The crazier. The narrator may suffer from hallucinations or dementia, or flashbacks caused by post-traumatic stress. Examples: Pat Peoples from The Silver Linings Playbook, Pi Patel in Life of Pi, Chief Bromden from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Raoul Duke from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the Narrator from Candy
  5.  The craziest. The narrator may have a mental illness or personality disorder: Examples: The anonymous narrator in The Fight Club, the unknown schoolgirl in The Moth Diaries, Barbara Covett in Notes on a Scandal,  Humbert Humbert from Lolita, Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, Barney Panofsky  from Barney’s Version, Portnoy from Portnoy’s Complaint, Teddy Daniels in Shutter Island, Eva in We Need to Talk About Kevin.
  6. The innocent. The narrator may have a lower than normal intelligence, or an inability to deal with reality, or a learning disability. Examples: Forrest from Forrest Gump , Edward Bloom in Big Fish,  Christopher Boone from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,  Bartholomew Neil in The Good Luck of Right Now. 
  7. The criminal. The narrator may be lying to save himself, trying to be persuade you that what he has done is not wrong, or attempting to blame one of the other characters out of revenge. Examples: Nick and Amy from Gone Girl, John Dowell in The Good Soldier, Keyser Soze from The Usual Suspects, Nina and Isobel in Talking to the Dead, Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire, Dorothy L Sayers’s The Documents in the Case.
  8. The ghost. The narrator may be otherworldly. Examples: Dr Malcolm Crowe in The Sixth Sense, Jakabok Botch from Mister B. Gone, Screwtape from The Screwtape Letters, the ghost in The Turn Of The Screw, Lucifer in I, Lucifer
  9. The wilful liar. The narrator is just messing with the reader. This is the least successful type of unreliable narrator and is often the equivalent of someone waking up and declaring it was all a dream. Examples: Pandora in Big Brother, Briony Tallis in Atonement

 Posted on December 7, 2017 by

Truth and lies in fiction—how to write an unreliable narrator, by Arlene Prunkl

From: http://penultimateword.com/book-marketing/how-to-write-unreliable-narrator

I’m excited about this blog post. While most of my articles are on common topics that you can find information about all around the Internet, the subject of unreliable narrators doesn’t get a lot of ink. And that’s probably because relatively few fiction writers know about the literary device of unreliable narration, and if they do, they haven’t any notion of how to create it or use it to best effect. Recently, I’ve edited several authors who inadvertently created an unreliable narrator, but because they weren’t even aware they were doing it, it wasn’t handled as well as it might have been.

Definition of an unreliable narrator
In most fiction, one of the author’s primary goals is to create a strong, sympathetic, vulnerable, likable protagonist, a person readers can relate to, connect with, and root for, a character who creates empathy in readers and has them identifying with that character on multiple levels. In fact, I encourage creating this kind of relatable protagonist in several of my blog posts on fiction writing. The reader has certain expectations of this protagonist—primarily that he or she will be able to trust and believe in this character, and not be lied to or deceived.

But for a twist, if it suits your story, you can create what’s known as an unreliable narrator. This kind of protagonist (almost always written in the first person) will break that trust that’s typically understood between reader and narrator, will mislead and lie to readers, perhaps by omission, or tell them only half truths—whatever suits them and the unfolding events of the story. Unreliable narration can make for exciting plot developments and twists and lots of suspense for readers, who can never be sure whether what they’re reading is the truth, a partial truth, an omission of truth, or a lie. This kind of narrator will usually have values and perspectives that contrast sharply with the author’s, if those are known.

Because of all this, this kind of character is rarely fully likable and, in fact, often worthy of being despised by readers. An unreliable narrator may be a pathological liar, or a narcissist, or simply delusional, causing readers to feel unnerved or even to revolt in disgust. She may appear quite sane and be highly intelligent. To complicate things, an unreliable narrator may believe she’s telling the truth (for example, if she is psychologically unbalanced), but it’s up to the reader to figure out that she isn’t. The challenge, then, for an author is to write a story that will keep readers turning pages even though they may not feel connected to a contemptible protagonist or simply one they can’t always relate to.

Why use an unreliable narrator?
The best reason to use an unreliable narrator is to create suspense, to keep readers guessing, to keep them turning pages. But it won’t work to simply decide to turn your narrator into an unreliable one halfway through your story only because you want to create or add suspense. The unreliability needs to be built into the character’s psyche from the outset, or possibly develop as the plot unfolds, and the plot should be based on this unreliability. In other words, you’ll need to plan your story, even before you begin writing, around your protagonist’s unreliability.

How to use an unreliable narrator
An unreliable narrator is almost always written in the first person, making your protagonist the unreliable party. If you try to write an unreliable protagonist in the third person, that’s going to make you, the author, the unreliable party—and trust me, that likely won’t work. Readers may accept one of your characters as a liar, but they won’t accept being misled by you, the author.

Writing an unreliable narrator well is notoriously difficult. This is primarily because, as I’ve indicated, it’s hard to create a character to whom readers can relate and with whom they can empathize and at the same time have that character lie to readers. Most people suspect when they’re being deceived, and that creates an element of mistrust. So one of your goals is to create a character who has enough empathetic characteristics that readers will still relate to her to a certain degree even though they may not trust her entirely. Your second goal is to create a plot so compelling that readers will want to turn the pages even though they may not like your protagonist. And perhaps most importantly, your prose style must be so good, so smooth, so clever and captivating, that readers will want to read it for its sheer beauty. All in all, this is a tough assignment.

Finally, if you think you’ve got what it takes as a fiction writer to create an unreliable narrator, this literary device needs to be studied and mastered. The two most important things to keep in mind as you write are:

1. Immerse yourself in your protagonist’s psyche. Most regular protagonists have some characteristics of their authors—this is almost inevitable. Authors write their protagonists using the familiarity of their own mental state. However, your unreliable narrator likely won’t be much like you at all—she may feel more like a villain or antagonist. More than with any other type of protagonist, you’ll need to get completely out of your own head and immerse yourself in the alien head of your unreliable narrator, something easier said than done. What motivates her? What are her deepest fears and insecurities? In what ways do these things fuel her actions and the plot?

2. Remember a cardinal rule of fiction writing: you can’t cheat the reader. To avoid cheating your reader, you’ll need to inject clues, hints, and subtle indications throughout the story that show that the reader is being deceived (even while being thrown off the scent) so that he or she is not entirely taken off guard by the revelation at the end. Clues that allow the reader, if they want to go back and reread, to acknowledge, “Yes, there was a clue here and there that I was being deceived, but it was so well hidden that I just didn’t see it at the time. So I wasn’t being cheated after all.” Some of the best stories with unreliable narrators will have you wanting to read them a second time, in order to see which clues you missed the first time. But make no mistake, those clues need to be there, or the reader will feel tricked and ripped off.

Degrees of unreliable narration
Most memorable protagonists in well-written fiction have some degree of unreliability. That’s because our human perceptions are unique to each of us; we see things through our own often skewed perspectives, and in ways others may deem unreliable. So if that’s the case, isn’t all first-person narration unreliable? Well, yes. But readers will forgive a certain degree of unreliability in all fiction characters because they’ll know your characters are just human, after all. However, deliberately setting out to use unreliable narration as a literary device is something different, something taken a step further than ordinary human unreliability.

All readers engage in fiction with a certain level of suspension of disbelief; that is, they’re prepared, willing, and happy to believe much of what a narrator is telling them, to stretch their imaginations while immersed in your fictional world. But when writing an unreliable narrator, be careful of crossing the line to a point where readers can no longer suspend their disbelief. And it’s a fine line, which is part of what makes writing an unreliable narrator so difficult. If the reader begins to feel more cheated than they feel is fair, or if the protagonist turns into a caricature, or if the plot twists turn ludicrous, you’ll lose your readers. Make a habit of asking yourself of any scene you write, will my readers think this is believable and fair, even after they learn they’ve been lied to?

Examples of unreliable narrators
One of the best things you can do to learn more about this literary device is to read well-written stories with unreliable protagonists. A marvelous thriller with not one but two unreliable narrators is Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (Crown Publishers, 2012). It’s an astonishing page turner, a story about a couple, Nick and Amy, who alternate first-person narrative as they each relate the details of their failing marriage through their own damaged perspectives. As you read, you don’t know who to despise more, Nick or Amy, yet you’re still hoping to like at least one of them just a little. Flynn is almost a magician in how she has you not wanting to put the book down despite making you suffer these two narcissistic, sociopathic characters. She plants clues and keeps the reader guessing just enough to make the reading experience tantalizing and not frustrating. I must admit, though, that I found the ending somewhat disappointing, and I feel that’s partly because it’s very difficult to create a satisfying conclusion with two unlikable characters. Still, I could hardly put the book down until the end.

More well-known examples:
• Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• Nelly and Lockwood in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• Lucy Snowe in Villette by Charlotte Brontë
• Huck in Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Humbert Humbert in Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• Screwtape in The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
• Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
• Briony Tallis in Atonement by Ian McEwan
• Alex in A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
• Dr. Sheppard in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
• Christopher Boone in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
• Marta Bjornstad in How to Be a Good Wife by Emma Chapman
• Patrick Mateman in American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
• Pat Peoples in The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick
• Various characters in the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

Pitching to agents and publishers
Even done well, writing an unreliable narrator story is a risk when it comes to pitching and marketing your book. It is a sad but unavoidable fact that, to a great extent, unlikable protagonists do not go over well with agents and publishers. I found it fascinating to read on one acquisitions editor’s blog about how bad she felt that she couldn’t acquire more manuscripts with unlikable narrators. The problem, she said, was that those books just don’t sell as well as others. Readers want likable protagonists, and if they’re disappointed with a protagonist who’s not very relatable, that book will invariably receive poor reviews—at least poorer reviews than those with likable narrators. This editor lamented that she had to turn down manuscripts she would have loved to accept, solely because she knew they wouldn’t pass muster with her sales department. She went on to speculate over whether Gone Girl would have even been accepted by a big publisher had it been Gillian Flynn’s first fiction and had she not already been a successful, established author with her first two novels.

Conclusion
If you think you have what it takes to write an unreliable narrator, then you may well be able to create some very compelling fiction. But tread cautiously. If you decide to write an unreliable narrator, there must be a solid reason for it, a purpose that drives the character and story arcs. A character who lies for the sake of lying isn’t going to add much to the integrity of your story. And above all, prepare yourself. Before you undertake the difficult task of writing an unreliable narrator, study this literary device thoroughly so you’re ready for all the challenges it presents.

 Posted on December 6, 2017 by

8 Tips to Writing Unreliable Narrators, by Deb Caletti

From: http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/8-tips-to-writing-unreliable-narrators

The unreliable narrator … Ah, don’t you love that unsettling, page-turning, blockbuster-making literary device? An unreliable narrator makes for the bad boy of novels—ensuring a delicious but uneasy read, an on-the-edge wondering of what might happen next.

Usually, we feel we’re in good hands with whatever main characters we’re spending time with between the covers. We can count on them, we think, to tell us the truth. But then comes a protagonist you’re just not sure you can entirely trust, and the dark and compelling journey begins. How, as writers, do we take our own readers on such a ride?

Every human being is, to some degree, an unreliable narrator. When we tell our stories to others, and even when we tell our stories to ourselves, we create our own version of events and of our lives as a whole. We don’t necessarily mean to deceive. But we can see and understand our experiences only from our own viewpoint—a shifting viewpoint at that. Facing the truth is a messy business. It involves denial, and pride, and the fact that understanding takes time; it relies on perspective (or lack of it), and the pesky fact that we can only face the truth we can stand to face at any given moment.

Every one of our characters is unreliable, too, whether we intend it or not. They can see only through their own, flawed eyes, same as us. Their singular opinions, blind spots and insights make them uniquely themselves and help lend your work the all-important “voice.” Our characters’ innate unreliability gives them the layers that make them realistic. When creating my own unreliable narrator, Dani Keller in He’s Gone, I didn’t see her as being willfully dishonest in the way she tells her story. I saw her as struggling with a hard truth that she hadn’t even entirely admitted to herself yet.

And then I turned it up a notch.

Because, while every realistic character should and will be unreliable in part, there are times when you want that unreliability to do more than paint the shadings of a convincing character: You want it to propel plot. There’s nothing like a question in the reader’s mind to get the pages turning, and when the question is about who the narrator actually even is, you can guarantee a need to find out.

Whether you want your characters to be deliberately deceitful or not, crafting an unreliable narrator has to be done with deliberate care. Like any relationship, the one between reader and writer requires respect and trust, and if you lose either by going too far, your reader is likely to break it off and move on. The aim in creating an unreliable narrator is to generate just enough suspicion, to withhold just enough information, without losing the reader’s connection to the character.

So, how do you let the reader know that there may be more to the character—and to the story at hand—than even the character himself might admit?

Here are some tips:

1. Make your character a liar.

Lying: It’s the most necessary element of an unreliable narrator, and may even be as close to a definition of the term as you can get. An unreliable narrator—well, he can’t be trusted to tell the truth. One way or another, he has to deceive the reader. The most obvious approach, then, is to make it who he is. Holden Caulfield, one of literature’s most well-known unreliable narrators, admits that there are things he doesn’t want to talk about in the very first paragraph of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. He’s told his brother only half the story, he confesses, and calls himself “the most terrific liar you ever saw.”

Paul Lohman, the voice that drives Herman Koch’s The Dinner, also immediately warns us not to trust him. In the first lines of the book, he states that he won’t reveal what restaurant the titular dinner takes place in, in case people will go to see if he’s there. Mark Haddon takes another approach in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. By the time his autistic narrator, Christopher Boone, tells us that he cannot lie and that everything he has written is true, we’ve come to understand how impaired and literal his perceptions are. We cannot believe his statement, because his truth is not likely to be ours.

When your main character is a liar, the reader immediately knows to be on guard. It’s insta-unease. Whether your character admits this fault outright, contradicts himself regularly in the narrative, or proves to be a liar by his actions, dishonesty is the hallmark of an unreliable narrator.

2. Lie by omission, too.

Rosemary, the unreliable narrator in Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, also lets us know that we should be wary of her—not because she tells lies, but because she’s withholding critical information. She tells us that she’s spent most of her life carefully not talking about her brother and sister. Certain pieces of the narrative are delicately cloaked, as well, so that the big reveal about her sister comes as a shock. “Three children. One story. The only reason I’m the one telling it is because I’m the one not currently in a cage,” Fowler writes, and we are left to wonder what “cage” even really means. Is this a literal cage? A metaphorical one? The lack of clarity lets us know she’s keeping things from us.

In Lionel Shriver’s disturbing We Need to Talk About Kevin, Eva Khatchadourian is also holding back the facts. We are left to wonder about her husband in the letters she writes to him. Where he is and why they are separated are both obviously and deftly sidestepped, so that we’re sure she’s keeping mum. In my own He’s Gone, Dani, too, withholds information. She struggles to remember each moment of the night her husband vanishes, but only later admits to having taken pills that inhibited that memory.

When your character hints that he knows more than he tells, reveals the truth a little later than he should, or has gaps in memory, your unreliable narrator can successfully shake the reader’s trust.

3. Muddy the motivations.

In Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs, Nora is intrigued by the Shahid family. Or, wait—is she obsessed? We hear how close Nora is to them, and yet much of her relationship with them is based in fantasy. She loves them, but doesn’t that love seem ever so slightly … vicious? Is she out to help them or harm them? Her muddy motives set us questioning, and leave us unsettled. We’re not exactly sure where she stands.

In We Need to Talk About Kevin, Eva also appears to be fiercely honest but proves to be increasingly disturbed as she reveals her complex thoughts about her son and motherhood. Is she someone who has loved her son and done her best with a child who was inherently evil? Or has her own rejection and dislike of him contributed to the outcome? Malicious or maternal—Shriver gives us both in Eva.

Provide your narrator with conflicting desires and disparate drives. Keep the reader guessing about your character’s true mindset. When those motives shift, so does the ground under your reader’s feet.

4. Make your protagonist more clever than she seems.

In Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn paints both Nick Dunne and Amy Elliott with an innocent brush—at first. Even if their stories of married life don’t match up, Nick is initially sympathetic, if not harshly straightforward, and Amy is all innocence, if not girlish and naive. The first words we hear from her are giddy and musical: “Tra and la!” Is that a person capable of doing any real harm, save from annoying you to death? Would those words ever come out of the mouth of a sociopath? We think not, until Amy’s intricately planned treasure-hunt traps are slowly revealed.

Another example of sly and surprising narrators can be found in Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette. This is a story that’s told from a host of unreliable narrators, all of whom are a bit eccentric, dramatic and even flaky, the kind of attributes you’re sure will add up only to mishaps and misunderstandings—that is, until shrewd purpose and calculated scheming are divulged.

When you craft a seemingly guileless narrator who hides true cunning, you have an unreliable narrator your reader has mistakenly fallen for.

5. Use your secondary characters.

It’s true in our own lives, and it’s true in our fiction—catching someone in a lie can be more unsettling than having someone admit to one. A reader can “catch” a narrator in a lie through a writer’s use of secondary characters. Most simply, a secondary character can reveal that he’s the victim of your narrator’s lie. Better yet, a secondary character can reveal a truth that your narrator hasn’t yet told. In The Dinner, Paul’s brother, Serge, reminds Paul in dialogue about a shocking wrongdoing of his from the past. Since Paul never mentioned that little fact, he’s been caught.

The manner in which secondary characters treat your protagonist can also speak to her unreliability. Their personal histories with your narrator may expose a side to the narrator the reader hasn’t seen. Whether it’s a relative, a neighbor or a law enforcement officer, a secondary character with the inside scoop can alter a reader’s perspective. Christopher’s arrest and his treatment by the police in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time suggest he might not be as innocent as he seems. A police interrogation also serves to expose a lie in He’s Gone. Whether it’s through casual dialogue, a confrontation or a dramatic event, consider how your own secondary characters might help convey who your protagonist really is—much to the shock of your unsuspecting reader.

6. Add in an unpredictable act.

When a thoughtful, responsible or otherwise dependable character suddenly does something highly questionable, he becomes unreliable. Imagine that your previously predictable neighbor, known for mowing the lawn every Saturday, lights it on fire instead. In real life, this would forever change the way you saw him—and would also make you eye him carefully whenever you met at the mailboxes. What is he truly capable of? Who can say?

So it is in fiction. An erratic move on the part of your narrator will handily unnerve your reader.

In We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Rosemary is a kind and careful person. But after she throws a milk glass on the floor of a restaurant, causing a scene that gets her arrested, we’re never quite sure just what else she might do. Nora, the “straight-A, straight-laced, good daughter” teacher narrating The Woman Upstairs, also does the unpredictable when she disrobes in her friend Sirena Shahid’s art installation. In He’s Gone, Dani, also a thoughtful, straight-A good daughter, heaves the clay bust of her missing husband off the end of their dock on Lake Union.

It’s worth noting, too, that your narrator doesn’t have to be good to catch readers off guard with something bad. Instead, the shock might come when the bad do worse than your readers ever suspected. What’s important is that some surprising, revealing act makes your reader view your protagonist with heightened suspicion.

7. Make your protagonist a bad guy … or don’t.

Quite a few unreliable narrators are unlikable and even sociopathic. You wouldn’t want to have dinner with Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, or with Lolita’s Humbert Humbert, and even the bestselling story of the dinner with Paul Lohman makes a reader squirm. Often, an unreliable narrator is a manipulator, a narcissist or a person who’s losing (or has lost) her mind.

But not every unreliable narrator is evil, dangerous, unhinged or even just plain unsympathetic. Some are simply telling their own truth as they see it, or are working understandably hard to justify a bad situation. Their reasons for being less than forthright might come from a personal struggle, a trauma, memory loss, a hesitation to divulge family secrets, or their own slowly dawning acceptance of their situation.

Even nice people lie sometimes, and even good human beings hide hard truths.

Make your unreliable narrator a deliciously dark villain, if you wish. But also remember that a likable andunreliable character makes for especially complex fiction, and for a realistic, compelling read, as well.

8. Keep it believable.

Fiction is most powerful when it comes from an honest place—even when your narrator doesn’t. When you’re toying with the trust of your readers, it’s especially important to keep it believable.

When Rosemary throws that milk glass and gets arrested, the scene works because it’s a milk glass and not a machine gun. The small moments with Paul Lohman at dinner are so utterly convincing—his insecurities, his feelings about everything from corn salad to a waiter’s pinky hovering just over his food—that his larger acts feel credible. Holden Caulfield’s voice is so emotionally on point that both his past and present make sense. Stay in the realm of the real with telling detail and authentic voice, and don’t drift to melodrama.

The unreliable narrator is an effective technique that makes for such a rich reading experience because we are all familiar with our own deceptions, confusions and egos, and with the times we wish the truth were different. The humanity of your protagonist is key. If the little lies and the tunnel vision and the character flaws that you create are those we know from our own lives, your reader will stay connected to your character. Finding the truth in the untruths will elevate your story. An unreliable narrator is not just a device, but also the skilled portrayal of a realistically flawed human being.

 Posted on December 6, 2017 by

Interior Monologue, by Richard Nordquist

From: https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-an-interior-monologue-1691073, by Richard Nordquist

DEFINITION

In both fiction and nonfiction, an interior monologue is the expression of a character‘s thoughts, feelings, and impressions in a narrative.

An interior monologue may be either direct or indirect:

  • direct, in which the author seems not to exist and the interior self of the character is given directly, as though the reader were overhearing an articulation of the stream of thought and feeling flowing through the character’s mind;
  • indirect, in which the author serves as selector, presenter, guide, and commentator.

(W. Harmon and H. Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 2006)

INTERIOR MONOLOGUES IN FICTION

“I looked into the reception room. It was empty of everything but the smell of dust. I threw up another window, unlocked the communicating door and went into the room beyond. Three hard chairs and a swivel chair, flat desk with a glass top, five green filing cases, three of them full of nothing, a calendar and a framed license bond on the wall, a phone, a washbowl in a stained wood cupboard, a hatrack, a carpet that was just something on the floor, and two open windows with net curtains that puckered in and out like the lips of a toothless old man sleeping.

“The same stuff I had had last year, and the year before that. Not beautiful, not gay, but better than a tent on the beach.”
(Raymond Chandler, The High Window, 1942)

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself. Do not come and worry me with your hints that it is time to shut the shop and be gone.
I would willingly give all my money that you should not disturb me but let me sit on and on, silent, alone.”
(Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931)

INTERIOR MONOLOGUE IN TOM WOLFE’S NONFICTION

“[I]nterior monologue is appropriate with nonfiction, provided there’s fact to back it up. We can’t get into a character’s head because we suppose, or imagine, or deduce that’s what he or she would be thinking. We have to know!

“See how Tom Wolfe does it in his book about the space program, The Right Stuff. At the outset he explained that his style was developed to grab the readers’ attention, to absorb them. . . . He wanted to get into the heads of his characters, even if this was nonfiction. And so, at an astronauts’ press conference, he quotes a reporter’s question on who was confident about coming back from space. He describe the astronauts looking at one another and hoisting their hands in the air. Then, he’s into their heads:

It really made you feel like an idiot, raising your hand this way. If you didn’t think you were ‘coming back,’ then you would really have to be a fool or a nut to have volunteered at all. . . .

He goes on for a full page, and in writing this way Wolfe has transcended usual nonfiction style; he’s offered characterization and motivation, two fiction writing techniques that can bring the reader in lockstep with the writer.

Interior monologue provides a chance to ‘see inside’ the heads of characters, and we know that the more familiar a reader is with a character, the more the reader embraces that character.”

(William Noble, “Writing Nonfiction–Using Fiction.” The Portable Writer’s Conference, 2nd ed., ed. by Stephen Blake Mettee. Quill Driver, 2007)

STYLISTIC CHARACTERISTICS OF INTERIOR MONOLOGUE

“Sentence fragments may be treated as interior monologue (direct speech) or regarded as part of an adjoining stretch of free indirect speech.

“Interior monologue may also contain traces of non-verbal thought. While more formal interior monologue uses the first-person pronoun and finite verbs in the present tense,

He [Stephen] lifted his feet up from the suck [of the sand] and turned back by the mole of boulders. Take all, keep all. My soul walks with me, form of forms. [. . .] The flood is following me. I can watch it flow past from here.
(Ulysses iii; Joyce 1993: 37; my emphasis)

In Ulysses James Joyce conducts more radical experiments with the form of the interior monologue, especially in his representation of the thoughts of Leopold Bloom and his wife, Molly. He eschews full sentences with finite verbs in favour of incomplete, often verbless syntagms which simulate Bloom’s mental leaps as he associates ideas:

Hymes jotting down something in his notebook. Ah, the names. But he knows them all. No: coming to me.

— I am just taking the names, Hynes said below his breath. What is your christian name? I’m not sure.

In this example, Bloom’s impressions and speculations are confirmed by Hyne’s remarks.”

(Monika Fludernik, An Introduction to Narratology. Routledge, 2009)

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND INTERIOR MONOLOGUE

“Although stream of consciousness and interior monologue are often used interchangeably, the former is the more general term. Interior monologue, strictly defined, is a type of stream of consciousness. As such, it presents a character’s thoughts, emotions, and fleeting sensations to the reader. Unlike stream of consciousness more generally, however, the ebb and flow of the psyche revealed by interior monologue typically exists at a pre- or sublinguistic level, where images and the connotations they evoke supplant the literal denotative meanings of words.”

(Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray, The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, 2nd ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003)

 Posted on December 6, 2017 by

Inner monologue examples: Writing characters’ secret lives

From: https://www.nownovel.com/blog/inner-monologue-examples-in-novels

Internal or inner monologue is a useful literary device. Dialogue reveals character relationships, their converging or competing goals. Inner monologue gives readers an x-ray view of characters’ more private feelings and dilemmas. Read examples of inner monologue that illustrate how to use it well, along with tips:

First, what is ‘inner monologue’?

A ‘monologue’ literally means ‘speaking alone’, if we go back to the word’s roots. In a play, especially in Shakespeare, a monologue (such as when the villain Iago in Othello expresses his wicked plans to the audience) is often used to reveal a character’s secret thoughts or intentions. In prose fiction, inner monologue is used more typically to reveal a character’s private impressions, desires, frustrations or dilemmas.

How and why might you use internal monologue?

1. Use inner monologue to show characters’ unspoken thoughts

In many cases, your protagonist, if they’re also the narrator, might simply state how they feel in narration. For example, ‘I was apprehensive when I approached the derelict building.’ Or, if you’re using third person limited point of view, ‘Luisa was apprehensive when she approached the building.’ These approaches to show characters’ feelings are fine. Yet you can also create immediacy, an engaging sense of a character’s state, by making characters’ actual thoughts intrude on the scene.

Here’s an example from David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. The character Luisa Rey, an investigative journalist, has found out about a dangerous environmental coverup. This example occurs when her boss is berating her for missing a meeting:

Grelsch glares at her.

‘I got a lead, Dom.’
‘You got a lead.’
I can’t batter you, I can’t fool you, I can only hook your curiosity. ‘I phoned the precinct where Sixsmith’s case was processed.’

Here, we read Luisa’s thoughts about her boss while she’s in trouble. The monologue reveals:

  • The power Grelsch has over Luisa as his employee – it shows Luisa’s awareness of the balance of power in this conversation
  • Luisa’s knack for using stories to get herself out of trouble

Inner monologue here, by revealing Luisa’s unspoken thoughts mid-dialogue, adds to her character as well as illustrating her relationship with her boss.

2: Describe others from a character’s POV using internal monologue

When your protagonist is the first-person narrator in your story, they can describe other characters simply in narration. For example, your character might see a frail looking man and narrate ‘he looked like he had a week to live.’ But in third person limited, a little internal monologue can be a useful filtering device for slipping into a character’s private consciousness and describing their impressions.

Take this example, also from Cloud Atlas:

The elevator doors close just as Luisa Rey reaches them, but the unseen occupant jams them with his cane. ‘Thank you,’ says Luisa to the old man. ‘Glad the age of chivalry isn’t totally dead.’
He gives a grave nod of acknowledgment.
Hell, Luisa thinks, he looks like he’s been given a week to live.

Why is this internal monologue effective? Firstly, it gives us a keen sense of Luisa’s voice (her use of the curse word ‘hell’ indicating her ‘tough cookie’ persona). Secondly, it succinctly reveals a key detail about the other character’s appearance.

When you’re writing in third person narration, you can use italics like this to take us deeper into a character’s mind. This will reveal their impressions in the moment. [To get constructive help with POV and narration in your story, join Now Novel.]

3: Show characters’ private dilemmas

Inner monologue is useful for showing characters’ private dilemmas, their internal conflicts. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is full of good examples, because the protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov commits a crime, murdering a pawnbroker. Throughout the novel, we witness Raskolnikov’s anxious, paranoid state of mind. Dostoevsky uses internal monologue expertly to show his character’s complex fears and choices.

In this scene, Raskolnikov is about to make his getaway after committing the crime. Note how even though the author narrates the passage in third person, the wording makes it feel as though we are in the character’s mind:

But at the same instant several men talking loudly and fast began noisily mounting the stairs […] Filled with despair he went straight to meet them, feeling ‘come what must!’ If they stopped him – all was lost; if they let him pass – all was lost too; they would remember him […] they were only a flight from him – and suddenly deliverance! A few steps from him, on the right, there was an empty flat with the door wide open, the flat on the second floor where the painters had been at work, and which, as though for his benefit, they had just left.

The internal monologue shows the character weighing different outcomes – meeting the men on the stairs or not. This gives the scene tension and immediacy (a sense of engaging involvement in the action).

Use internal monologue similarly, when needed, to show your characters at important decision-making crossroads.

4: Reveal characters’ self perceptions

As thinking, questioning beings, we often engage in self-talk, reflecting on our actions. For example, if you were to knock over and break a glass, you might say to yourself ‘why are you so clumsy?’

Inner monologue in a story may be used to reveal a character’s self-speak and preoccupations. For example, in a story where a character’s primary or secondary struggle is accepting their body, there may be a scene where they’re looking in a mirror:

He turned and stood at an angle, sucking in his belly. God, how did I get to this?

Or, imagine a character preparing for a job interview:

He lifted his chin, pulling the knot in his tie a little tighter. You’ve got this. He winked. Stop, definitely don’t wink at them. He pulled a stern face. No, you look like you’re interviewing to be someone’s damn body guard.

These lines convey that the character is nervous about the interview and self-conscious about how he will come across visually.

5: Use to show a character’s personal associations

People often use ‘inner monologue’ to mean ‘stream of consciousness’. Yet stream of consciousness is a specific literary technique. We associate it with Modernist authors such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

Take, for example, this passage of internal monologue in Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse:

But what have I done with my life? Thought Mrs. Ramsay, taking her place at the head of the table, and looking at all the plates making white circles on it. ‘William, sit by me,’ she said. ‘Lily,’ she said, wearily, ‘over there.’ They had that – Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle – she, only this – an infinitely long table and plates and knives […] And meanwhile she waited, passively, for someone to answer her, for something to happen. But this is not a thing, she thought, ladling out soup, that one says.

It’s clear from Ramsay’s inner monologue that she has mixed feelings about the confinement of her life to serving dinners and entertaining guests. This piece of monologue suggests Ramsay associates domestic life with lack (‘she, only this – an infinitely long table’).

Woolf’s use of stream of consciousness – and by extension, inner monologue – is effective because we see characters’ complex psychology. Note, too, how Woolf:

  • Blends inner monologue with dialogue and descriptive detail: We see the ‘white circles’ the plates make; the people seated around the table
  • Anchors internal monologue in three-dimensional action: We read Ramsay’s thoughts as she takes her place at the head of the table and serves everyone.

If you use stream of consciousness to reveal a character’s private desires or frustrations, remember to blend it with action and setting too. This ensures a balance between characters’ hidden inner lives and the material world around them, along with the cause and effect of their words and deeds.

 Posted on December 6, 2017 by

The Complete Guide to Interior Monologue

  • Stream of Consciousness. This is where an entire novel, or at least large chunks of it, takes the form of the central character’s thoughts. Such novels tend to be light on plot, so I wouldn’t recommend this device. A good example is James Joyce’s Ulysses.
  • Soliloquy. This is where a fictional character voices his or her thoughts out loud, as in Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech. Talking aloud to yourself at any length is frankly strange, so always keep any interior monologue unspoken unless you have a good reason not to.

Why Interior Monologue Matters

The ability of readers of fiction to hear a character’s thoughts directly is one of the huge advantages that novels have over films. You can’t hear what’s going on inside a movie character’s head.

You can’t hear a person’s thoughts in real life, either – unless of course they voice them out loud. But even then, you don’t know if they’re being altogether truthful.

Sure, you can guess what a person (in real life or on the screen) is feeling and thinking by looking at…

  • their body language
  • their facial expressions
  • and so on.

But the only time we get to hear another person’s thoughts word for word is when we read interior monologue in fiction.

And guess what?

This ability to experience what life is like inside a fictional character’s head – hearing everything they think and feeling everything they feel – is one of the main reasons people read fiction in the first place.

When movies were invented, it was supposed to mark the beginning of the end of novels. The same thing was true when television came along a few decades later. But it never happened.

People continued to read novels, and they probably always will.

Now, I’m not arguing that written fiction is superior to stories on the big and small screens, because films and television clearly hold many advantages over books (not least, visual advantages).

But novels have their advantages, too, including…

  1. Novels are user-friendly. You can’t easily watch a movie in the dentist’s waiting room. Plus, films are best seen from start to end, whereas novels are easy to dip in and out of.
  2. Novels fire the imagination. In a movie, the fictional world is created for you and projected onto a screen. In a novel, you can create the world in your mind’s eye and picture something more in tune with your personal tastes and preferences. When we picture a beautiful landscape in a book, for example, we will each have slightly different mental images. When we see a beautiful landscape in a film, we’re all stuck with the same image.
  3. Novels contain interior monologue. Like I said, it’s only in novels that you can get inside another person’s head and experience life from a totally different perspective. And that’s kind of cool!

The third of these advantages is, I believe, the fundamental reason why written fiction will never die. Put simply, you can establish a far more intimate relationship with a character in a book than a character on a screen.

Heck, sometimes you even lose your heart to them!

And it’s all because you have direct access to what the character is thinking.

Bottom line? A character’s thoughts are important in written fiction because it’s the only place you can find them. So if you’re planning on not making much use of what is going on inside your protagonist’s head, and writing in a more distant and cinematic style, think again…

Interior monologue is one of the most powerful tools in your toolbox. And this article tells you everything you need to know to write it like a pro.

The Two Types of Interior Monologue

Okay, let’s start with the basics. The two varieties of interior monologue found in a novel are long ones and short ones.

So far, so simple!

A short interior monologue tends to happen in the middle of a scene. Because scenes are generally characterized by talk and action, you don’t want to destroy the pace with too many lengthy thoughts from the viewpoint character.

That is why you tend to get just a line of thought here and there – enough to directly connect us to the viewpoint character’s mind, but not enough to disrupt the flow of the scene.

All other clues about how the viewpoint character is feeling can be presented indirectly – that is, through their words, actions, facial expressions, and so on.

Here is an example of a short interior monologue from Nick Hornby’s novel Juliet, Naked. The viewpoint character, a man called Tucker, is having a talk with his son…

Jackson was in his room, bashing the hell out of the buttons on a cheap computer game. He didn’t look up when Tucker opened the door.‘You want to come back downstairs?’

‘No.’

‘It’ll be easier if the three of us talk.’

‘I know what you want to talk about.’

‘What?’

‘”Mummy and Daddy are having problems, so we’re going to split up from each other. But it doesn’t mean we don’t love you, blah blah blah.” There. Now I don’t have to go.’

Jesus, thought Tucker. Six years old and already these kids can parody the language of marital failure.

‘Where did you get all that from?’

‘Like, five hundred TV shows, plus five hundred kids at school. So that’s a thousand, right?’

‘Right. Five hundred plus five hundred makes a thousand.’

Jackson couldn’t prevent a tiny flicker of triumph crossing his face.

‘OK. You don’t have to come down. But please be kind to your mother.’

Here, we get one short paragraph of interior monologue (‘Jesus, thought Tucker. Six years old and already these kids can parody the language of marital failure.’)

It helps us to experience what it feels like to be standing there in the father’s shoes, but it doesn’t affect the pace of the scene significantly. If you re-read the passage but leave out the monologue, the effect is cooler and more distant.

A long interior monologue tends to happen during the slower bits in between action scenes. Here, a breakneck pace isn’t necessary, and so having direct access to the character’s every thought for a few sentences or paragraphs, or even a few pages, is not a problem.

Also, it’s natural for a character to do the bulk of their thinking in between scenes…

  • During the scene, they’re too busy doing things and saying things, and reacting to things being done and said to them, to have the time for a lengthy internal monologue.
  • Once the scene is over and they can pause to draw breath, they have plenty of time for a good long think. Plus, of course, they will have plenty to think about, given that the scene just ended will probably not have gone according to plan, and they must now decide what to do next.

I’m not saying that all “interludes” (the quiet moments in between scenes) consist of characters thinking. Sometimes an interlude can be a simple “Two days later…” But where you do have lengthy interior monologues in a novel, it’s generally better to have them in the calm period between scenes.

Here is an example of a long interior monologue (or the very beginning of one), again from Nick Hornby’s novel Juliet, Naked…

On the way to the airport, Jackson chatted about school, baseball and death until he fell asleep, and Tucker listened to an old R&B mix-tape that he’d found in the trunk. He only had a handful of cassettes left now, and when they were gone, he’d have to find the money for a new truck. He couldn’t contemplate a driving life without music. He sung along to the Chi-Lites softly, so as not to wake Jackson, and found himself thinking about the question that woman had asked him in her email: ‘It isn’t you really, is it?’ Well, it was him, he was almost positive, but for some reason…

And off the character goes on a lengthy interior monologue…

Novel writers can keep these longer internal monologues going for several pages if necessary. You are not disrupting the flow of the narrative because not much is happening anyway (in this case, the character is simply driving and listening to music while his son sleeps beside him).

And that is all there is to it.

Any internal monologues in the middle of a scene will generally take the form of one-liners, while the internal monologues in the interludes can run on for pages.

Long monologues are easy to handle…

  • You start with some narration, just to show the reader what the character is doing (in the case of the example above, the character is driving and listening to music).
  • Then you launch into the monologue itself, perhaps introducing it with a phrase like “he thought about…” or “she wondered if…” (Hornby wrote that the character “found himself thinking about…”)

Short, one-liner interior monologues in the middle of a scene are trickier, simply because you need to make it clear to the reader that this particular sentence, in the middle of all the talk and action, is indeed the viewpoint character thinking.

To do that successfully – like a professional novelist – you need to understand…

Interior Monologue Mechanics

Everything I’ve said about internal monologue so far has been useful (I hope!) but still kind of vague. What many novel writing students want to know is precisely how to portray a character’s thoughts on the printed page – should they use italics, for example, or a “he thought” tag?

So what is the best way to indicate that a sentence or two of interior monologue in the middle of a scene is the viewpoint character’s thoughts (and not the narrator narrating)?

Here are the possibilities open to you…

  1. Writing the thought in first person, present tense (which is the way we actually think them) vs. writing it in third person, past tense (so that they blend in with the rest of the text).
  2. Using italics vs. using normal text.
  3. Using a “he thought” tag vs. not using one.
  4. Wrapping the thought in quotation marks (either single or double) vs. not using quotation marks.

We can dispense with the final option straight away: Never use quotation marks around a character’s thoughts. Why?

Because the reader will assume the words are being said out loud, and will then have to make an awkward mental shift when they see a “he thought” interior monologue tag, rather than a “he said” dialogue tag, at the end.

We can also dispense with using italicized text when the thought is translated into third person past tense.

The only point of italics is to make a different voice and tense stand out from the regular voice and tense being used. When both the thought and the text surrounding it are in the same voice and tense there is no need for italics.

What we are left with, then, are six possibilities…

1. Thought written in first person present, italicized, taggedMary closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun. This summer has been so perfect, she thought. I don’t want it ever to end.

2. Thought written in first person present, italicized, not tagged

Mary closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun. This summer has been so perfect. I don’t want it ever to end.

3. Thought written in first person present, not italicized, tagged

Mary closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun. This summer has been so perfect, she thought. I don’t want it ever to end.

4. Thought written in first person present, not italicized, not tagged

Mary closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun. This summer has been so perfect. I don’t want it ever to end.

5. Thought written in third person past, not italicized, tagged

Mary closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun. This summer had been so perfect, she thought. She didn’t want it ever to end.

6. Thought written in third person past, not italicized, not tagged

Mary closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun. This summer had been so perfect. She didn’t want it ever to end.

Which of these possibilities is best?

You’ll find examples of all of the above in published fiction, so in a sense it’s a matter of personal choice. The only hard and fast rule that exists is to be consistent throughout…

Whatever method of presenting monologue you use in the first chapter – first person present and italicized text, for example – you should still be using it in the final chapter.

Readers quickly grow accustomed to whatever conventions you use, and not sticking to those conventions throughout will only confuse your audience.

So is it simply a question of choosing a way to present interior monologue, and then sticking with it?

Not exactly, no. And it’s not a question of one method being “better” than the others, either.

So I’ll now run through the advantages and disadvantages of all the ways of presenting interior monologue, then leave it up to you to decide which way is best for your own novel. I’ll start by answering this question…

Should a Character’s Thoughts Be Italicized?

Italics, as I have said, are used to represent a character’s thoughts as they actually think them in their head (i.e. the precise words they use). For that reason, italicized thoughts are always written in…

  • First Person – because we don’t think about ourselves in the third person.
  • Present Tense – because we don’t think about what is happening now in past tense.

(Obviously, we sometimes think in the third person past tense, when we think about what somebody else did yesterday, for example: “John made such a fool of himself last night.”)

The advantage of using italics for a line or two of interior monologue is that they make the thought stand out.

It will be perfectly obvious to the reader that these words are the character thinking, and not the author narrating. And the thought itself, as well as not becoming confused with the rest of the text, gains an extra emphasis, like in this example from Clare Morrall’s The Man Who Disappeared.

Felix, a man whose world has just fallen apart, is standing out in the street watching his family eat their evening meal without him…

He wants to believe in this cosiness, this world of families, this labyrinth of deeply entwined love.That’s the key, of course: love. He has been told this for as long as he can remember. ‘We love you, Felix,’ one of his aunts used to say, ‘and that’s all that matters.’

What have I done, Kate?

Frost glints on the road, nearby car windscreens are clouded with ice. Felix blows on his hands and shuffles his feet around, trying to bring some feeling back to his toes.

The trouble with using italics for character thoughts is that they can be tedious to read. If you use italics for every single thought in the novel, not just the one-liners but the longer ones that run for several paragraphs or pages, the reader won’t thank you for it.

Also, because italicizing interior monologue gives the words much greater weight and emphasis, the effect you create could turn out to be unintentionally comic.

The italicized thought in the example above – “What have I done, Kate?” – is worthy of emphasis. It has even been given a paragraph all to itself (which is another way of making interior monologue stand out). But this device would be totally inappropriate for more mundane character thoughts…

  • What a beautiful morning
  • I wonder what’s for lunch
  • I left my wallet at home

The solution, if you want to use italicized thoughts in the first person present, is to use them very sparingly. Only write a character’s most important and moving thoughts in this way. For the rest, use a more subtle method of presenting internal monologue, like non-italicized third person thoughts.

Clare Morrall did precisely that in the example above…

  • The first two paragraphs are pure interior monologue, but they are written in the third person. (The only reason they are written in the present tense is that the entire novel is; otherwise, they would be in the past tense.)
  • In the third paragraph, she uses first person present tense and italics.
  • The fourth paragraph is regular narration.

The entire extract could have been written like this (with all three paragraphs of interior monologue italicized)…

I want to believe in this cosiness, this world of families, this labyrinth of deeply entwined love.That’s the key, of course: love. I have been told this for as long as I can remember. ‘We love you, Felix,’ one of my aunts used to say, ‘and that’s all that matters.’

What have I done, Kate?

Frost glints on the road, nearby car windscreens are clouded with ice. Felix blows on his hands and shuffles his feet around, trying to bring some feeling back to his toes.

… but in my opinion, the passage would not have been half as effective.

Doesn’t using first person italicized thoughts for some of the time, and third person non-italicized thoughts for the remainder, contradict my earlier advice about remaining consistent?

Nope. The “convention” you would have decided on would be to use…

  • Third person non-italicized thoughts for the bulk of the interior monologue, and
  • First person italicized thoughts in just a handful of places, when the power of the character’s words demand extra emphasis.

The reader will quickly pick up on this convention if you use it consistently. What they would find confusing would be if you used, for example, an illogical mixture of italics and non-italics for those occasional emphatic thoughts.

One last thing before moving on…

  • If you do use this device of writing the occasional powerful thought in the first person present, you really should use italics if you don’t want to confuse the reader, and ideally a separate paragraph too. This makes the first person thought stand out clearly from the surrounding third person text.
  • Next best, if you don’t use italics, is to add a “he thought” tag to the words.
  • And the least emphatic of all is to use neither italics nor thought tags.

Just to be clear on that, here are those three options:

What have I done, Kate?What have I done, Kate?, he thought.

What have I done, Kate?

If you want to emphasize the character’s thought, use the first option. If, for whatever reason, you want to take a more subtle approach, use the second or third.

Now for a closer look at…

Interior Monologue Tags

“Thought” tags are exactly like the ones you use in dialogue – their only real purpose is to make it clear to the reader who is speaking or, in the case of thought tags, that these are the character’s thoughts and not the narrator’s words.

If everything is crystal clear without using a tag – either in monologue or dialogue – don’t use one.

For example, in the case of those italicized, first person thoughts I discussed above, using a tag (What have I done, Kate? he thought) is totally unnecessary. It’s obvious that these words are coming straight from the character’s head.

If a thought is written in the third person, it may or may not be advisable to use a tag. It all depends on where the “camera” is positioned…

I talked about cameras in the article on Writing In the Third Person. Here is the theory in a nutshell…

  • At the start of a scene in a third person novel, the camera describes the scene from above or from afar using neutral and non-opinionated language. This is the part where the narrator describes the rain pouring down on the town, for example.
  • Next, the camera moves in closer and focuses on the characters at the center of the scene, and on the viewpoint character in particular. At this point, the viewpoint character is still being seen from the outside and the language remains neutral and non-opinionated.
  • Finally, the camera moves behind the viewpoint character’s eyes and remains there. The language begins to sound more and more like the viewpoint character’s own first person speaking voice, except it remains in the third person.

At the beginning of a scene, the narration is often called “distant.” That’s because we are not standing in the viewpoint character’s shoes yet. Once we are, the narration becomes “close” – and the longer we spend with the viewpoint character, the closer and more intimate the narration becomes.

What does this have to do with interior monologue tags?

When the narration is more distant than close – or when the scene hasn’t “warmed up” yet – you’ll probably want to use a “she thought” tag.

When the narration is close and intimate, and the language is beginning to approximate the viewpoint character’s own speaking voice, tags won’t be necessary.

In other words, whether or not to use a tag is really a judgment call on your part.

If you believe that using one will help comprehension, use one. If not, don’t.

Just remember that, generally speaking, interior monologue tags will appear during the cooler beginnings of scenes and not after they have warmed up.

The final thing to talk about is how closely interior monologue should match…

The Character’s Natural Speaking Voice

In a first person novel, you hear the leading character’s natural speaking voice directly. In third person, you only hear it directly in dialogue or monologue rendered in the first person (as discussed above).

For the rest of the time, you hear the narrator’s voice, which is less subjective, less colorful, less colloquial than the character’s direct voice.

Like I’ve said, though, the third person narrator’s neutral voice begins to approximate the character’s natural speaking voice when the camera moves behind their eyes, so to speak, and the scene “warms up.”

During the “cooler” opening section of a scene, any lines of monologue are best written neutrally and factually (and should probably be “tagged,” too). Like here…

Sometimes men could be so insensitive, she thought. And Frank was in a league of his own.

Later, once the scene has warmed up, the monologue, while remaining in the third person, can begin to take on the characteristics of the character’s natural first person voice. And you can safely drop the tag, too…

Jesus! She knew a lot of men opened their mouths without remembering to think first, but Frank had turned insensitivity into a damn art form!

What About Monologue In a First Person Novel?

Pretty much everything I’ve said about interior monologue applies to third person novels written in the past tense. (This is by far the most common form of voice and tense used by writers.)

In a third person, present tense novel, it is literally just a case of changing the past tense to present. So instead of writing this…

Mary closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun. The summer had been so perfect, she thought. She didn’t want it ever to end.

You write this…

Mary closes her eyes and lifts her face to the sun. The summer has been so perfect, she thinks. She doesn’t want it ever to end.

Simple. In a first person novel, whether written in the past tense or present tense, interior monologue is easier still. Why? Because it happens naturally, all by itself.

Let me explain that…

The biggest challenge you face in a third person novel is making it clear that the words are indeed the character’s thoughts, and not the narrator’s words.

That is why, when the viewpoint character is being viewed from a distance, you might use a “thought” tag to make it clear that these words are indeed the character thinking, and only drop using tags once the camera has moved behind the character’s eyes, so to speak.

But in a first person novel, the camera is always behind the character’s eyes, and so it’s obvious when we hear their direct thoughts. Like here…

I closed my eyes and lifted my face to the sun. The summer had been so perfect. I didn’t want it ever to end.

There’s nothing to stop you using a tag if you want (“The summer had been so perfect, I thought…”), but it isn’t necessary. It’s obvious that the character is thinking these thoughts in the here and now of the story.

And that’s it – interior monologue in a nutshell (okay, quite a big nutshell!)

If you’re feeling confused right now, don’t worry about it…

As with all the other theories of fiction, handling interior monologue will become second nature once you’ve taken the “rules” on board, relaxed, and started to apply them to your own fiction without over-thinking them.

 

 Posted on November 9, 2017 by

The Essential Ingredient of Hard Choices, by Chuck Wendig

N.B. This is a sanitized version of the essay by Chuck Wendig; please see the original for the more colorful Wendig.

From: http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2017/11/07/the-essential-ingredient-of-hard-choices

I knew a guy named Gil who faced an incredibly difficult decision: his wife and his teenage daughter were both in the hospital at the same time with failing kidneys, the wife from cancer, the daughter from the trauma of a car accident. Grim coincidence, indeed. Both required a kidney transplant, both put on the list requiring donor organs. But Gil, of course, was a perfect match for his daughter, and as it so happened, also for his wife. Trick is, Gil only had two kidneys — he wasn’t like, loaded down with extra ******* kidneys, so he could only give one away. He could give a kidney to his wife, or he could give the organ to his daughter. The one whom he refused would be consigned to wait, ideally getting a kidney from a donor, but that person could also potentially die in the interim.

This was complicated by, well, complications. His wife was older, in her 40s, so was it wiser to give the kidney to his daughter, who had so much more life to live? But the daughter also had other trauma from the accident, and a kidney would not entirely ‘fix’ her — whereas the wife’s cancer had not yet metastasized, and so his kidney would go a greater distance, so to speak, if transplanted into her. Then one wonders, what are the emotional responses? If both survive, will one resent him? Could both? If one died, what would the response be from the survivor?

Needless to say, it’s a lot to weigh.

It is a very hard choice.

Which did he choose?

Neither, because Gil isn’t ******* real. I just made him up. I don’t think anyone is even really named Gil. That’s just folklore, like Bigfoot. We’ve all told the campfire tales about CREEPY GIL THE KIDNEY DONOR, haven’t we? THE KIDNEY IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE CAR, oh no!

But really, who gives a ****? The point remains the same:

Hard choices are interesting to us. And they are interesting to us in the context of fiction, particularly. Which means they are incredibly useful to you, as an author. Hard Choices provide an excellent, versatile tool in your narrative toolbox.

(Also, I’ve gone and tattooed HARD CHOICES across the knuckles of both of my hands. Whenever I lead a writing workshop, I jump through a paper sheet of bad prose dressed in a wrestling onesie, and then I punch the air with both fists — *punch* “HARD” *punch* “CHOICES” *kicks the air* “LET’S WRITE SOME ************* STORIES,” I yell. It’s really successful and you can hire me to motivate you.)

Consider, if you will —

A hard choice provides:

  1. conflict, because it puts the character in conflict with herself and with whatever consequences will come
  2. mystery, because we the reader do not know what the character will choose, and what calculus will lead to that choice in particular
  3. drama, because it will generate scenes of discord between characters, not all of whom will be happy with the choice or the decision
  4. lingering questions, because the reader will be left wondering what exactly shewould have done in exactly the same situation
  5. fun for you, because not only do you get to grapple with the choice on behalf of the characters, you also get to imagine how implementing this choice will make the readership squirm as if their ******************************

Of course, there are tricks to using hard choices in fiction, and you might find it useful to hold onto a few key guide-ropes in the process —

  1. hard choices cannot exist on every page or you dull their impact, it’s not like Gil can have a LIFE OR DEATH, WIFE OR DAUGHTER, HOLY **** WHO GETS THE KIDNEY moment every chapter, sometimes the fiction is about building the narrative infrastructure that gets youto the hard choice
  2. the choice has to be sensible in the context of the story, and the story should feel like it’s leading up to it, not that it’s dropped out of nowhere like a ******* anvil onto the reader’s head (clong)
  3. it should also be tonally appropriate — if you’re writing a light-hearted comedy then suddenly switch gears to some tragic gut-ripping Sophie’s Choice, the reader will have narrative whiplash
  4. the hard choice should actually be complicated— it’s all-too-easy to bunt that wiffle ball and offer the character a false hard choice, and trust me, the reader will smell your weakness like poop on a shoe; if the choice is, GIL CAN EITHER SAVE THIS BASKET OF BABIES OR HE CAN INSTEAD EAT A BURRITO, one assumes that unless Gil is a raging burrito-hound, he’ll make the right choice and skip dinner to rescue the baby-basket
  5. a hard choice speaks to the character, and isn’t just external plot
  6. a hard choice always, always has consequences — emotionally, yes, but also consequences that resonate outward from the world or from other characters
  7. further, those consequences — the stakes (as in, what can be won, lost or incurred) — must be known at least in part before the character makes the choice

So, there you go.

Whether you’re doing NaNiWriMo or just writing a book because, *********, you can, feel free to use HARD CHOICES to juice your narrative and give it some teeth-gritting oomph.

*punches the air*

HARD

*punches the air again*

CHOICES

*high-kick*

*falls down*

*breaks coccyx*

Let’s write some ************* stories?

 Posted on November 9, 2017 by

I Talked to 150 Writers and Here’s the Best Advice They Had, by Joe Fassler

From: lithub.com/i-talked-to-150-writers-and-heres-the-best-advice-they-had

I once heard John Irving give a lecture on his process at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an in-depth account of the way his novels come to be. He kicked it off by writing a single sentence on the chalkboard—the last line of Last Night in Twisted River. All his books begin with the ending, Irving explained, a capstone he works and reworks until it’s ready. From there, he’ll generate a detailed summary that ultimately builds towards the finale, like SparkNotes for a book that does not yet exist. Only when he has the synopsis and last sentence in hand will he actually start writing.

I remember being fascinated by this. The approach had clearly been successful, and made sense in theory, and yet was so unlike any creative strategy that had ever worked for me. Which is an important thing to keep in mind when trafficking in the familiar genre of writing advice: Just because John Irving does it that way doesn’t mean you should. Not only is every writer different, but each poem, each story and essay, each novel, has its own formal requirements. Advice might be a comfort in the moment, but the hard truth is that literary wisdom can be hard to systematize. There’s just no doing it the same way twice.

And yet. In the five years I’ve spent interviewing authors for The Atlantic’s “By Heart” series—the basis for a new collection, Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process—it’s been impossible to ignore the way certain ideas tend to come up again and again. Between the column and the book I’ve engaged a diverse group of more than 150 writers, a large sample size, that nonetheless has some defining traits. Here are the recurring ideas, distilled from dozens of conversations, that I think will most help you—no matter how unorthodox your process, how singular your vision.

  1. Neglect everything else.

It starts with a simple fact: If you’re not making the time to write, no other advice can help you. Which is probably why so many of the writers I talk to seem preoccupied with time-management. “You probably have time to be a halfway decent parent and one other thing,” David Mitchell, the author of Cloud Atlas, told me. That can mean mustering the grit to let other responsibilities languish. As he put it in short: “Neglect everything else.”

Many authors need to put blinders on, finding ways to simplify their experience and reduce the number of potential distractions. That might mean consistently keeping a single two-hour window sacred, as Victor Lavalle does, morning time he safeguards against the demands of parenting and full-time teaching. For others, it means finding ways to ward off digital derailment. Mitchell does this by setting his homepage as the most boring thing he can think of: the Apple website.

Ultimately, the literary exercise is about finding ways to defend something fragile—the quiet mood in which the imagination flourishes. As Jonathan Franzen put it: “I need to make sure I still have a private self. Because the private self is where my writing comes from.”

  1. Beginnings matter.

Everyone knows that the opening line is a crucial invitation, something that can make or break a reader’s interest in a book. But far less attention has been paid to the role first lines play for writers, leading them through the work’s dark, uncertain stages like a beacon.

“The first line must convince me that it somehow embodies the entire unwritten text,” William Gibson told me, a radical, koan-like conviction that nonetheless seems to be commonplace. Stephen King described spending “weeks and months and even years” working on first sentences, each one an incantation with the power to unlock the finished book. And Michael Chabonsaid that, once he stumbled on the first sentence of Wonder Boys, the rest of the novel was almost like taking dictation. “The seed of the novel—who would tell the story and what it would be about—was in that first sentence, and it just arrived,” he said.

  1. Follow the headlights.

It doesn’t matter if you’re the kind of writer who plans meticulously: Give yourself some leeway in the early drafts. Throw out all your plans and assumptions, and make room to surprise yourself.

Andre Dubus calls this following the headlights: it’s like driving a car down a dark, unfamiliar road, simply describing as things become visible under the beam. “What’s on the side of the road?” he asked. “What’s the weather? What are the sounds? If I capture the experience all along the way, the structure starts to reveal itself. My guiding force and principle for shaping the story is just to follow the headlights—that’s how the architecture is revealed.”

Dozens of writers have told me some version of the same story. “The writing I tend to think of as ‘good’ is good because it’s mysterious,” Aimee Bender said. “It tends to happen when I get out of the way—when I let go a little bit, I surprise myself.”

  1. Sound it out.

Of course, all this is easier said than done. In the absence of a concrete plan, how to know when you’re headed in the right direction? For many writers I’ve spoken with, the answer seems to lie in the sound of the words.

“Plot can be overrated. What I strive for more is rhythm,” the late Jim Harrison said. “It’s like taking dictation, when you’re really attuned to the rhythm of that voice.” George Saunders described a similar process, explaining that sound shows him where the energy is, revealing which aspects of the story are important, which lines to follow. It can help with revision, too. Many drafts in, when he can no longer see the work with fresh eyes, Jesse Ball told me that he turns to his ears. “Sound gives us clues about what is necessary and real,” he said. “When you read [your work] aloud, there are parts you might skip over—you find yourself not wanting to speak them. Those are the weak parts. It’s hard to find them otherwise, just reading along.”

  1. It’s supposed to be difficult.

One of the things that’s surprised me most is how much the process—even for best-selling and critically acclaimed writers—never seems to get any easier. Khaled Hosseini’s piece in Light the Dark is one especially poignant testament to this: material success doesn’t blunt the pain an author feels when the words just come up short.

But writers seem to be masters of deflecting existential despair, the malaise that takes hold in the middle of a taxing enterprise. I’ve covered this in more detail in an essay for The Atlantic, so one example in particular will suffice here: Elizabeth Gilbert’s concept of “stubborn gladness,” a term she borrows from the poet Jack Gilbert. It’s a promise to take things in stride, to remain cheerfully engaged no matter how difficult things get. “My path as a writer became much more smooth,” she said, “when I learned, when things aren’t going well, to regard my struggles as curious, not tragic.”

  1. Keep a totem.

Charles Dickens famously wrote with a series of porcelain figurines arranged across his desk, characters that kept him company as he toiled under punishing deadlines. It’s not as strange as it sounds: Many of the writers I talk to keep a totem—an object of special significance, whether it’s a small trinket or printed slogan—nearby as they work, something that serves as a source of inspiration or a barrier against despair.

Jane Smiley described pasting the phrase “Nobody asked you to write that novel” above her desk, an empowering reminder that creative hardships are voluntarily chosen. Mohsin Hamid keeps a Murakami passage taped to his printer—lines that link creativity and physical exercise, ones that encouraged him to build six-mile walks into his daily writing regimen. And Russell Banks keeps part of an old gravestone in his office, inscribed with the epitaph “Remember Death.” There’s nothing more inspiring than the awareness that time is short, and that the ultimate deadline is soon approaching.

  1. Find the joy.

Ultimately, the writers I speak to seem committed to finding the joy within their work, even if that means looking in the most unexpected places. “One of the things that aids me, and which he helped teach me, is this: fundamentally, I do not believe in despair as a real aspect of the human condition,” says Ayana Mathis. “There is great confusion, there is great pain, there is suffering, all of those things, yes. But despair? I don’t believe in despair, and I don’t write from despair. I write from difficulty, absolutely. I write about people who are in great pain, who are desperate and sometimes even miserable. But despair, to me, means an absolute absence of hope. It is a nothing. There is always hope for betterment.”

But it’s not just leaving room for hope and levity on the page. It’s about retaining one’s own capacity to find joy within the process, making sure the work’s difficulty never fully squeezes out delight.

“The joy of being an author is the joy of feeling I can do anything,” says Neil Gaiman in Light the Dark. “There are no rules. Only: can you do this with confidence? Can you do it with aplomb? Can you do it with style? Can you do it with joy?”.

Find the joy, and when you do, there are no rules.

 Posted on November 9, 2017 by

NaNoWriMo Pep Talk, by Daniel Jose Older

From: https://nanowrimo.org/pep-talks/daniel-jose-older

My favorite advice of all time for writing (and life) comes from a poem by Antonio Machado: “Caminante no hay camino / se hace camino al andar.”

It means, “Walker, there is no path / the path is made by walking.”

This is a perfectly concise way of saying: Kill your heroes, machete chop the barriers you’ve created in your mind, be brave and ridiculous and absolutely you in your journey to the page and beyond.

In that sense, it’s sort of the anti-writing-advice writing advice, holding up the truth that we all will have very different approaches to this messy endeavor; we all have our own paths, our own version of what it means to “make it”. And while it’s true: a lot of the “how to write” formulas they give us can be simplistic and reductive, there is merit in simply saying out loud what has worked and what has sent us crashing and burning—if nothing else because comparing notes is fun!

I’ve come to love and find shelter in the ritual of writing. The days I just sit and try to knock out words in a hurry are usually the days I stare at the screen blankly the longest. But when I slow down, ease into that transition, the process becomes a part of the ritual, the space itself seems to open up to the possibilities of what may happen, rather than the stress of what hasn’t.

Sometimes, after I’ve taken my seat and made a cup of coffee but before I begin writing, I’ll make myself listen to a whole song. It can be any song, but what’s important is that you’re not doing anything but listening and maybe dancing a little or sipping your coffee—enjoying the moment. This allows you to settle in, transition from world to word, from the everyday mundane crap to the realm of creativity.

Check in with yourself. I’ve recently started keeping a writing journal and it’s been a huge blessing to my whole process. First of all, if the first thing you write when you sit down is something no one else will ever see; it eases you into the flow of putting words on the page.

Most importantly though, keeping track of how things are going with your project makes you introspective about your own process, and that is a skill that will carry you far. How are we to make the road by walking if we don’t look down every once in a while and check our stride, our pace, our rhythm. Not only does every writer have their own flow, it’s a flow that changes over the course of our writing lives. I use the journal to keep track of plot points, ideas I’ve loved or scrapped, the evolution of my thinking on the piece, various arcs and possibilities. It becomes a running commentary on process and craft, the story of the story.

If the only blank page you’ve ever stared down is one that’s got a deadline attached to it, it’s easy to develop a singularly stressful relationship to that emptiness. But if you start to connect with yourself via the written word, that page becomes a friend, a confidante. You get to be playful, joyous, courageous.

Writing begins with forgiveness. Let go of the shame about how long it’s been since you last wrote, the clenching fear that you’re not a good enough writer, the doubts over whether or not you can get it done. Sure, the nagging demons will come creeping back, but set them aside anyway, and then set them aside again when they do. Concoct a hot beverage, play a beautiful song, look inward, and then begin.

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