Sharon Bala's Blog, page 9

This is the fourth post in a series about novel revision. Part 1 considered characters and pace. Part two covered conflict, flashbacks, and thought vs. action. Part 3 tackled beginnings, endings, and dialogue. Today it’s that old saw: show don’t tell.

SHOW NOT TELL

Here it is, the single most common weakness of every work-in-progress: too much telling, not enough showing. Sometimes we tell instead of show. Other times we show and tell, illustrating a scene in perfect detail only to explain to the reader the very thing they’ve just witnessed. That’s how worried we are that the reader won’t get it. In the case of the latter, the solution is a quick backspace. In the case of the former, the work is more difficult.

Adjectives and adverbs are telling signs. Instead of saying Mary eyed Bob suspiciously, describe what’s suspicious in her manner. What does suspicion look and feel like? Instead of the adverb, show us the feeling or action.

I don’t know who needs to hear this but: you don’t need adjectives on dialogue tags. He said furiously. She asked anxiously. They cried dolefully. STOP. Stick to he said and she asked. If dialogue is accompanied by an emotion, find a way to embody the emotion.

BE SPECIFIC

Abstraction is another telling sign. First drafts, by their nature, tend to lean heavily on words like suddenly and something. I think of these as placeholders we drop in the ground as we write toward a first draft. In second and third and seventh drafts though it’s important to return to those placeholders and fully articulate the suddenness or what the something is. Don’t tell the reader the lights went out suddenly. Make the lights flame out in a way that feels sudden for character (and by extension reader). Hot tip: most of the time you can just delete the word suddenly without doing anything else.

Ditto vague descriptions. You could tell us there were eagles in the sky and rain on the way, sure. Or you could show the eagles “beating muscled wings, threading in and out of black thunderclouds” as Valeria Luiselli does in her Lost Children Archive. You could tell us Edgar feels vulnerable or show him grasping opposite wrists as Ian Williams does in Reproduction. Weeks after finishing the novel, this visual has stuck with me, more importantly the feeling of tenderness it inspired has lingered. That’s the power of specificity.

FILTERING AND MEDIATION

Stories are most immediate and immersive when they can get right in close. But too often writers filter the story through an unnecessary lens. Compare two versions of the same scene:

“Outside, Gillian noticed two neighbours squabbling. She saw them jab their fingers at each other across their property lines and heard their voices growing louder.”

“Outside, Gillian’s neighbours squabbled. They jabbed their fingers at each other across their property lines, voices rising.”

There’s no need to tell the reader that Gillian is seeing and hearing the action. Remove the filter words notice and saw and what happens? The pace quickens and the reader is drawn closer to the action.

Here’s another telling move: mediating flashbacks. Compare two version of the same flashback:

“Jim thought of Blake with a smile, remembering how they first met on a plane to Mexico City. They were stuck in the middle aisle, sandwiched between two frat boys.”

“Jim and Blake met on a plane to Mexico City, in the middle aisle, sandwiched between two frat boys.”

IN CONCLUSION

Narration and exposition have a place in fiction but if that’s all you are doing, the reader will skim. Stick to your bones fiction is writing that reveals, that leaves room for interpretation. Let’s say you have this line: “Marty served his guests tea.” That’s fine but consider this version instead: “Marty’s mugs were a motley collection, branded freebies from conferences and radio station give-aways, the white ones stained with years of tea and coffee, most of them chipped.” The mugs show Marty’s mugs and the reader may draw further conclusions about his personality and home life from those mugs.

Writers have a tendency to worry too much about the reader. Take my hand, dear Reader, we seem to say. Allow me to be your tour guide on this journey. NO. STOP. Create the world, animate the characters, then get out of the way. Let the reader wander unchaperoned. Trust them to read between the lines and connect the dots. Be open to the narrative being understood in a different way than you intended. Your story will be stronger for a multiplicity of interpretations.

This series concludes next week with a laundry list of advice. Meanwhile, here are more thoughts on how to show instead of tell and a case for detective fiction.

ps. If you have a completed draft and are looking for unique and tailored feedback, I’m very good at my job. Character and dialogue, plot and pacing, it’s all my jam. I’m currently taking bookings for the winter so get in touch for more info or a quote.

I’ve been reading two books in tandem this week: Eva Crocker’s All I Ask and Michael Crummey’s The Innocents. It’s by coincidence, not design, that I’m switching back and forth between these two very different visions of Newfoundland. The Innocents is a re-read because I’m interviewing Michael later this month and Eva’s book is hot off the press and I couldn’t wait to crack into my copy.

The Innocents, set at the turn of the 19th century, is about two orphans who eke out an existence in an isolated cove after the death of their parents. They are dirt poor, illiterate, speak in a dialect so heavy it’s nearly a language unto itself, there’s incest, uproarious word play, and a baby seal clubbed to death without fanfare, its bloody heart eaten by hand. The pen of a lesser writer would have reduced this particular Newfoundland story to caricature and farce. But Michael Crummey is no common writer. And what we get instead is the antidote to those stereotypes: a deep understanding for the realities of the time, the place, the truth of the matter, and above all: characters with dignity. Could an outsider have pulled this off? Highly doubtful. Could even a CFA have done it? I don’t think so.

I’m reminded of Alicia Elliott’s essay, On Seeing and Being Seen, and specifically these lines: “If you can’t write about us with a love for who we are as a people, what we’ve survived, what we’ve accomplished despite all attempts to keep us from doing so; if you can’t look at us as we are and feel your pupils go wide, making all stereotypes feel like a sham, a poor copy, a disgrace—then why are you writing about us at all?”

The us in her essay are Indigenous Peoples but that sentiment can apply to Newfoundlanders too. The difference is that Newfoundland isn’t lacking in local authors, and many have significant platforms and wide readerships. This is a very recent phenomenon. Used to be, the books read about this place were written by outsiders and with mixed results at best. The Shipping News, for example, came out a good five years before Wayne Johnston got his big break with Colony of Unrequited Dreams and it took the Burning Rock longer still to fully burst onto the scene. But today we’re lucky to have a parliament of authors* - beloved not just here but far beyond the island - and all of them telling different Newfoundland stories. So it’s possible to read about a pair of youngsters catching capelin in one book and queer, urban 20-somethings protesting in another.

The latter is Eva Crocker’s wonderful debut novel, All I Ask which is so firmly situated in the here and now I could imagine crossing paths with her characters. Eva is a master of enviable dialogue and precise descriptions (we first met in a writing class nearly a decade ago and reading her work influenced my own precise descriptions) but for my money it’s the way she captures real life on the page. You’d swear every word and situation was true. What you get from her work, and this book specifically, is a time capsule of urban, contemporary St. John’s.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has famously warned about the danger of a single story and I was thinking about that too…how necessary it is to have these two books situated cheek by jowl on the shelf. Along with Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club by Megan Gail Coles. And Something for Everyone by Lisa Moore. And Dig by Terry Doyle. And A Roll of The Bones by Trudy Morgan Coles. And Melissa Barbeau’s The Luminous Sea. And Jamie Fitzpatrick’s The End of Music. And Tom Dawe’s poetry. And Mark Callanan’s Gift Horse. These are all different Newfoundland stories and they are also the same Newfoundland story.

*Incidentally, what would be a good collective noun for a group of authors? An excellence of authors? A ream? A procrastination? That’s my favourite one. More funny suggestions here.

This is the third post in a series about novel revision. Part 1 considered characters and pace. Part two covered conflict, flashbacks, and thought vs. action. Today we’ll look at beginnings, endings, and dialogue.

BEGINNING

If you are new to fiction, if this is your first novel, odds are good the true beginning of your story is lurking somewhere past the first few paragraphs/ scenes/ chapter. It’s very likely your prologue, beautifully written though it might be, is unnecessary. Especially if it spoilers the ending. Go find the real start of the story and then delete all the stuff that comes before.

Does your novel begin with a character waking up? (Mine does!) It might be fine but be warned that character getting out of bed is a very, very common and cliched beginning. And now that I’ve told you this, you’ll start to notice it everywhere.

ENDING

I’ve blogged about endings before but it bears repeating: Do you need that epilogue? Really? Are you sure? Because 99.9% of the time, epilogues, like prologues, are unnecessary. In fact, the last sentence/ paragraph/ scene/ chapter of an early draft is usually redundant. Resist the urge to tie up all the loose ends. Trust the reader to get the story.

An earlier draft of Butter Tea at Starbucks had this final sentence: everything feels miraculous. Someone in my writing group suggested that last line was too on the nose so I removed it and sure enough, the ending was stronger.

DIALOGUE

A common issue in early drafts is an over-reliance on dialogue. It’s the rare, exceptional author who can successfully use direct dialogue to carry a story. Remember that there are many, many other ways to convey information to a reader including: action, narration, and scenery. And when you’re writing dialogue, don’t neglect summary and indirect dialogue.

Coming up next week: show don’t tell. Meantime, here’s a series of posts about how to write excellent dialogue and some thoughts on quotation marks.

ps. If you have a completed draft and are looking for unique and tailored feedback, I’m very good at my job. Character and dialogue, plot and pacing, it’s all my jam. I’m currently taking bookings for the winter so get in touch for more info or a quote.

This is the second post in a series about novel revision. In part 1 we considered characters and pace. Today we’ll tackle conflict, flashbacks, and thought vs. action.

CONFLICT

Or rather, lack thereof. After flat characters, lack of conflict is the second most common problem in manuscript after manuscript. Including my own! Being a published author doesn’t make you immune to shitty first drafts.

Are your characters too virtuous? Are they too obliging? Does every conversations end with everyone getting exactly what they want? Are you letting your characters off the hook too easily or too quickly? Put your characters in peril. Make them morally complicated and imperfect. Make the people in their lives intractable and difficult. Let bad things happen to your beloved protagonist. A common pitfall: dumping all the problems on the side-kick. That’s how hard we work to spare the protagonist! But now your sidekick has the more compelling storyline so why should the reader care about the supposed main character?

There is a scene in The Boat People where Mahindan is in a detention camp in Sri Lanka. The war is over and he’s trapped in a literal hell. In a very early draft, my writing group pointed out that in the entire scene, Mahindan was the only character who didn’t seem hungry/ in pain/ in physical discomfort/ scared. This was a huge failure of imagination on my part. I went back to the drawing board. Added hunger pains, insect bites, the ick factor of being without a bath, the hum of anxiety, the high pitch of terror. It took time to really settle into that uncomfortable difficult place with Mahindan. But writing is work. Suffer for your art.

FLASHBACKS AND OFF-STAGE

A while back I read a manuscript by a promising and talented author. Most of the scenes were framed inside a flashback. Now this framing structure can work well. The novel A Little Life is narrated in this structure and the device adds to the sense that life is happening in a circular way for the characters, blurring the lines between past and present. For that book, with its particular themes, and its excess of conflict and tension, the flashbacks worked. But that’s rare.

More often flashbacks, like minor characters, can be vestigial organs. You started writing without really knowing what was going to happen and mid-way through a scene you realized “oh, this important thing has to come first” and rather than pause the flow of your work, wrote that thing as a flashback. That’s a reasonable first draft strategy. But later, in revisions, scrutinize those flashbacks. Would the action unfold better in real time?

One sneaky way we writers avoid conflict is by making it happen off-stage and/or in flashbacks. Flashbacks can be useful but they lack the immediacy, the heart-stopping quality, of real time events. So be sparing when you are utilizing it to relay senes of conflict. Similarly, if Banquo’s going to get knocked off, bring the action centre stage. Don’t fade to black just as the tension is rising and then have some characters recounting the big fight in the following scene. (Booooo! complains the reader)

THOUGHT VS. ACTION

Perhaps because the stories take place inside our own heads, many of us have a penchant for letting characters live too long inside their own heads too. Even if your main character is in a coma and the entire story is taking place in their dreams, there will still be action, right? The character will think they are out in the world running and jumping and having fights about the fence with the belligerent neighbour. And you have to convey those memories or dreams in such a way that it feels like it’s really happening.

Conversely, some manuscripts are all action and zero interior thought so that characters become puppets. The balance between inner and outer life will be different for every book but it is a balance. You can’t just have a character involved in a high speed car chase - say - without giving us some idea of what she’s thinking, how her heart is pounding, how her mind is racing, how her reflexes are taking over, why she’s doing this, what she hopes to gain, what she fears to lose etc.

Next week we’ll cover beginnings, endings, and dialogue. Meantime, here are some tips on conflict and an example of a story that gets it right.

ps. If you have a completed draft and are looking for unique and tailored feedback, I’m very good at my job. Character and dialogue, plot and pacing, it’s all my jam. I’m currently taking bookings for the winter so get in touch for more info or a quote.

Manuscript evaluation is one of the things I do for a living. In a nutshell: I read someone’s manuscript and return detailed notes to get them started on re-writes. Every story is unique but there are several common issues that plague all our drafts (mine too). If you’re struggling to revise your manuscript, here are three things to watch for:

UNFORMED CHARACTERS

In early drafts most secondary characters are blanks and the antagonists are one-note. Protagonists might be morally complex and more fully formed but there’s often something still missing, usually motivation. What’s making them act destructive? Why are they so helpful? Why do they care so much about this issue/ person/ place/ thing? When it comes to characters, you need to interrogate them thoroughly until you know everything about them.

TOO MANY CHARACTERS

Squint at each character. Make sure they earn their place. Sometimes characters are vestigial organs. Though necessary at the start to help you understand the protagonist, you might find they’ve served their purpose by draft two or six. Thank them for their service and then let them go.

Two or more minor characters can often be merged into one. A couple of years ago I was reading my friend Jamie Fitzpatrick’s novel, The End of Music. There’s a character who appears on the first page, who sparks a nostalgic memory for the protagonist, Carter. Later, she re-appears unexpectedly as the manager at his mother’s nursing home. She’s a pretty minor character but plays a necessary role. In earlier drafts these had been two different characters but somewhere along the way Jamie’s editor advised him to merge them. The merger makes the story stronger. It gives the reader a little dopamine hit to meet the woman again and remember her from the first page. And her presence in both parts of his life strengthens the theme of nostalgia and memory (which his mother in her old age is losing).

PACE

When it comes to our own work, most of us are terrible judges of pace. But readers are very very good at sensing slow parts of the book. Does every scene advance plot and/or character (ideally both). If not, jettison the scene. Or strip it for parts to graft on elsewhere and trash the rest. Much of revising is also moving the puzzle pieces around. Swapping around scenes and chapters, shifting beats within a scene, passages of prose, action and so on. Think about arcs, not just character arcs, not just story arc, but the smaller arcs that happen within a scene or chapter or even a conversation. Are the stakes present early enough or do they arrive at the very end like a footnote. And if so, is this what you intend?

This is part one of a series on re-writing and revising. Next week we’ll cover a few more problems that plague many early drafts. Meantime, here are some thoughts on the tyranny of italics and the stupidity of glossaries.

ps. If you have a completed draft and are looking for unique and tailored feedback, I’m very good at my job. Character and dialogue, plot and pacing, it’s all my jam. I’m currently taking bookings for the winter so get in touch for more info or a quote.

I’m a sucker for rubbernecking at non-CanLit publishing controversies. YA is reliably messy. And last year the Romance world was shook. In the spring we were treated to American author Emily Giffin setting her reputation on fire for no discernible reason save the obvious. Hint: It begins with an R and ends with an -ism.

But the drama that caught my attention came from an unexpected quarter: the cook book scene.

First, Alison Roman - culinary patron saint of Basic Beckys everywhere - took aim at Marie Kondo and Chrissy Teigen for daring to have ambition. The whole story is stupid and boring. TL;DR: Alison showed her ass and some people, yours truly included, caught a whiff of racism. Then Bon Appétit imploded when a photo emerged of its editor-in-chief in brown face. The resulting outrage emboldened staff to spill the tea on systemic racism within the organization, including the fact that only white staff were paid for video appearances. The most recent update is that Bon Appétit are still acting like pricks despite vowing to blah, blah, blah.

Back to Alison Roman who, until recently, was a senior food editor at Bon Appétit. (I’m sure one racism scandal has nothing to do with the other. /sarcasm.) Here’s my beef with the Alison Romans of the food writer world: they pull stunts like #thestew. The so-called stew was a recipe Roman…ahem…”invented”: Spiced Chickpea Stew with Coconut and Turmeric. The internet went bat shit for this concoction that sounded suspiciously like a watered down curry. Except Roman refused to admit it was a curry.

I can’t say it better than Pajiba: “This is colonialism as cuisine… Roman’s refusal to acknowledge the groups and peoples and cultures she’s pulling from allows her to present herself as the sole authority on these kinds of foods… And, if I may be extremely cynical, it allows Roman to play to a certain kind of reader. Someone who doesn’t want to make Indian food because ew, it’s smelly, or Chinese food, because ew, they eat bats, or Iranian food because ew, they’re terrorists. Roman gets to be the next great white hope…”

As Pajiba points out, Roman isn’t the only one guilty of this nonsense. My own adventures in the kitchen have made me notice the near invisibility of Asian food writers. I spent lockdown trying to up my Thai game. Google Thai drunken noodles or panang curry and see how long it takes to get to Recipe Tin Eats or Hot Thai Kitchen. And then pay attention to who the search engine offers up along the way, which food writers are able to present themselves as the authorities on cuisines they did not grow up eating or watching their grannys making.

It’s not that white people aren’t allowed to make curry or pad see ew and brown people aren’t allowed to have viral recipes called #thepasta (JK…brown food writers aren’t allowed to have that). It’s about parity and a level playing field. Navneet Alang breaks it down in this piece on Eater.

There’s a Sri Lankan dish called hoppers. It’s like a savoury pancake but also not. It’s hard to explain but trust me, it’s delicious. You can have it with an egg in the centre so it looks like a UFO. Or you can have it plain. Always with curry on the side. Lankans will go into raptures over hoppers. When I was younger and relations would come from Sri Lanka we always took them to The Hopper Hut. Why? Didn’t they get their fill back in Sri Lanka? Apparently not. Other thing is, it’s cheap, which appeals to our penny pinching ways.

A few years ago, my friend Nadika told me about some silly white girl who went to Sri Lanka, discovered hoppers, and like a good little colonial, brought it back to London where she ran around begging random brown ladies to teach her how to make them properly, after which she opened a restaurant, or maybe it was a food truck, charged an exorbitant price for said hoppers, and then bagged a book deal on Sri Lankan cooking. Because OF COURSE SHE DID. Meanwhile, actual Sri Lankans are slinging authentic hoppers on the cheap and cheerful in Southall. None of them are getting book deals. From what I can gather, the shop has gone under and the book was a flop. Any guesses on the advance?

I live in fear of the day when Sri Lankan food goes trendy in North America and can only hope that our chefs manage to make a big enough platform for themselves before it does. Someone give Roshan Kanagarajah (@kitchenguerrilla) a book deal, quick! If you want a real Sri Lankan (Tamil) cook book, I recommend Handmade. I’m still on the hunt for a Sinhalese one. Send your recommendations. Meantime stop taking Vietnamese/ Persian/ [enter trendy ethnicity here] cooking advice from a random white ladies. Please and thank you.

Later this month I’ll be interviewing Giller-prize winner Ian Williams about his novel Reproduction. This is part of Writers at Woody Point, a wonderful festival that is, like all good things, going virtual this year. The session will be hosted by Shelagh Rogers and feature music and words by Stan Dragland, Jenina MacGillvary, and Anakana Schofield.

This will be my first time in the interviewer’s chair but Reproduction is an inventive, riotously funny novel that tackles complicated and dark material so there will be LOTS to dissect and discuss. I’m gutted Ian and I can’t have this chat on stage because having been in the hot seat and in the audience for a few of these 1:1 Woody Point conversations I know there’s a special energy in the Heritage Theatre (sob) that comes from the close quarters and the boisterous, generous audience. The upside is that this year all the events are free and accessible to anyone with an internet connection. You can snag your ticket here and note the details: Thursday, August 20, 7:30 NST.

Head’s up Canada Reads fans (nerds?): I dropped into Jael Richardson’s aftershow tea party yesterday to hash out what went down in yesterday’s debate. You can watch a recording of our convo on her instagram (30 mins). Can someone at the CBC please please please give Jael her own post-debate show already?

Today’s the day! The final debate of Canada Reads 2020. No matter happens it will be a groundbreaking year because for the first time ever a book written by a woman and defended by a woman will win Canada Reads AND for the first time the winning author will be Indigenous or a South Asian woman. I’ve read (and loved) Son of a Trickster and I’m looking forward to reading We Have Always Been Here so good luck Eden and Samra and Kaniehtiio and Amanda. Brava to you four women. Winners, all.

It’s Canada Reads week! For the uninitiated: this is Canada’s annual title fight, a live debate where five celebrities choose a book and then champion their pick in a week-long televised debate. This year’s competition is one for the books because for the first time in Canada Reads history a book written by a woman and defended by a woman is actually going to win! It took 18 years and nearly 100 competitors but finally, finally TWO women’s voices will triumph.

A curious thing about this year: the books written by men (2) are being defended by men and the books written by women (3) are being defended by women. Usually it’s a bit more mixed but this year the gender lines are stark. And it has played out in the voting with the men consistently voting against a book written by a woman and the women one after the other voting off the two books written by men. Which is how we are going to end up with a two-woman victory.

And already some men (#notallmen) are whining that the game is rigged. That a woman is going to win only because the ladies have contrived it (consciously or unconsciously). Except let me just remind you that this game we call life is always rigged and has been since the dawn of time; it’s just that all this time it’s been rigged in favour of the patriarchy.

The most interesting part of this year’s competition - for me - has been watching how the guys have dealt with their discomfort, with the realization that no matter what they did or said in the past two days, their books were never going to win. My dudes, I sympathize. I feel your pain. Literally, I feel it every day.

The big question on everyone’s minds is: was the fix in? Did the ladies form an alliance? Or are they each voting purely according to their taste and it just so happens that their taste skews toward female voices? It seemed pretty clear to me that none of them liked the book that got voted off on the first day but the second day, I think something else might have been happening. Sometimes votes are cast not against books so much as their champions. And what was telling was how a certain champion responded after hearing that the three women had voted off his book. “Girls, girls, girls,” he chided. As if they were naughty six year olds who had drawn on the walls and not three grown ass debaters. Doesn’t that say everything though? The unintentional subtext being: you silly girls are just voting for your own. Never mind that they’ve just spent months reading five books and pondering their merits and flaws. Never mind that the three women are clearly the stronger, more lucid debaters. Never mind all of that… I’m just a girl…tee hee hee, I guess. When a woman tells you she doesn’t like something, that she does not want it, no thanks, it is not for her, JUST BELIEVE HER, OKAY?

Jael Richardson has been re-capping each debate on her Instagram. I highly, highly recommend watching because she unpacks all of this and so much more! Jael has a brain the size of Alberta and you will be smarter after listening to her. Also tomorrow I’m going to be on with her talking about the day three debate. Now things will get interesting. I for one am very, very curious to hear how the three women critique each other’s books.

There was silence here in May because I was working on two manuscripts. Yes! Two! The upside of lockdown has been a return to deep focus and attention. Now those projects are off my desk (temporarily), I’ve been trying to get going on a brand new novel.

Which has been…. a challenge. Because there’s a creative downside to lockdown too. I miss having access to people, close up views of their foibles. I miss eavesdropping in restaurants, scrutinizing body language out the corner of my eye. I miss parties and collecting anecdotes. All those sources of inspiration are gone. All through June, I’ve been dutifully sitting in the garden with my notebook and pen, trying to conjure characters out of thin air with limited success and much frustration. Finally, I remembered something important (the cure for writer’s block!). Writing is not the only work.

No book exists in a vacuum. A book is always in conversation with others on the shelf. Books that share similar sensibilities, books with overlapping locales and themes. Books that influenced yours whether because of plot or character or prose or narrative style. One thing I’ve learned to do at the start of a new project is to brainstorm a reading list. Books I need for research purposes and ones that might offer inspiration. This week, I’ve been writing very little and reading a whole lot and coming up for air in between to put more books on hold at the library (ours just opened for curbside pick up). Bliss.

Controversial opinion: MFAs are overrated. Certainly they are expensive. You know what’s free? Live recordings of Tin House Craft Talks. Writing is a difficult thing to teach well so on those occasions when an author perfectly enunciates some aspect of craft, it’s worthwhile to pay close attention. This lecture by writer Alexander Chee, on character and plot and early draft woes, was good enough that I listened to it three times, the last time with a pen in hand.

Chee, like me, is firmly in the character first, plot second camp. For him, character is destiny and he offers concrete suggestions on how to interrogate your characters until you discover (I’m paraphrasing here) the specific things that could only happen to them, because of a combination of who they are (fate) and the decisions they make (free will). In this way, you arrive at your plot.

When I’m advising other authors, I say you have to know two big things: what does your character want more than anything? How far will they go to get it? But you can’t jump to these questions first and expect immediate answers (trust me, I’ve tried). You work toward the big questions by figuring out all the other stuff. What family was this character born into or raised in? How many siblings? Was money tight? What about religion? First love? First heart break? Vocation? How do they portray themselves to the world? What are they blind to in themselves? How would their employer describe them? Their best friend? Their lover? Their parent? Who do they envy? Who do they pity? What about themselves do they hate most? Hide most? Chee recommends a number of exercises including subjecting your characters to the questions in a Tarot Reading. He shares Zola’s cue card exercise.

Chee’s lecture was also a timely reminder to slow down. To cultivate patience. Characters are a little like very good friends. Relationships are built over long stretches of time. No one shows you their skeleton closet right away and even if they do, it takes a while before you know them well enough to intuit the secrets they are reluctant to reveal.

And anyway, “the story of a life is not a novel,” says Chee. You dream up a life story, yes. But then, you must be intentional, picking and choosing what to reveal and in what order. Without intentional shape, there’s no propulsive drive, no taut rope leading the reader from first page to last. Chee’s craft talk got my mind whirling. Afterward, I managed to eke out something approximating a scene. Turns out this is also where inspiration comes from: other books, other authors.

Here are more thoughts on why character reigns supreme, another way of thinking about character, and when to cut them loose. If you’ve got a story whose characters could use fine tuning, I can help. I moonlight as a manuscript evaluator which means I give constructive feedback on works-in-progress. Character and dialogue, plot and structure, it’s all my jam. I’m taking bookings for the Fall so get in touch for more info or a quote.