Character motto?

I was listening to some of the Tropical Storm Isaac coverage, and they said the convention in Tampa was postponed a day: "Better safe than sorry!" they said. And I thought about my dh's grandmother, whose motto, he said, was "You can never be too careful."

These "character mottoes" tell something about the person-- in this case, that safety is of paramount concern, but what's under that-- a persistent pessimism that you can't trust fate, that you have to be careful?

How about let's come up with mottoes for our own characters? Here's an article (scroll down) by Susan Gable which lists some of her characters' mottoes:

• The glass is always half-full.
• Do unto others before they do unto you. (Imagine how different that person would be than the one who believed the "right way"-- Do onto others as you would have them do onto you.)
• Life’s short; eat dessert first.
• Trust no one.
• If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.
• Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me,

 So what about your characters?  If they were to give a life philosophy, or a motto by which they live (and they were honest, which of course we can't assume), what would the motto be? To make this fun, let's use a proverb or slogan in common usage that everyone will recognize.

Examples, and as you read them, imagine what actions, motivations, and conflicts this character would have:

Grab all the gusto you can in life.
Love is all you need.
Family first.
Women and children first.
It takes a village.
Where's the beef?
Curiosity killed the cat.
A secret shared is a secret revealed.
 A man's home is his castle.
A penny saved is a penny earned.
A prophet is not recognized in his own land.
A rising tide lifts all boats.
A rolling stone gathers no moss.
Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Don't burn your bridges behind you.
Half a loaf is better than no bread at all.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone.
Let sleeping dogs lie.
Seeing is believing.

What are your characters' mottoes? And what do they mean? How does that internal motto manifest in action?

For example, I have a character who thinks,  "You can never be too careful." That doesn't mean she's a stick-in-the-mud. She's actually had an exciting life. But at every stage, she is very cautious. She's always trying to control the situation by taking great care. She never acts spontaneously or thoughtlessly. So when someone from her past appears and is going to tell her secrets, she acts to shut him up. She first diverts her lover-to-be by making him a lover-in-fact. Then she bribes the man from the past to leave. Everything in her life is done with care and thought... because otherwise, the dire forces will overwhelm her.

Her lover, however, is a rational man who believes that everything can be figured out: "It's better to light a candle than curse the darkness." Whenever there's a mystery or a secret, he wants to find out the truth. For him, "knowledge is power." "The truth shall set you free." So of course he's drawn to the woman who keeps so much of herself secret. But he does this by "lighting a candle" rather than, say, trying to force her to be open with him. He doesn't want her to -tell- him. He wants to figure it out. So he's trying to gather clues (as well as solve the murder of the man from her past).

Your turn! What's your character's motto, and how does that manifest in his/her actions?

Alicia

Typo spotted in the wild

"Hypnotically speaking,...."

I'm assuming the writer intended "Hypothetically speaking," but spell checker or autocorrect or some other demon fixed it for them. This is why spell checker isn't enough! Proofread, too. We all make typos, and it's not a deal breaker in most cases, but it's always best to avoidable laughable gaffes if we can.

T

Competing Goals

Often when we think about goals, we think about external goals that come in the form of antagonistic opposition. That is, Character A has a goal and takes (or attempts to take) action to advance the goal. Character B says, "Bitch, please," and takes (or attempts to take) action to prevent the completion of Character A's action. This is the classic character-versus-character form of external conflict. But what happens if there's no Character B, no "Bitch, please," no antagonistic opposition from outside forces?

There can still be conflict. You can put one guy in a room all by himself, and he can be overflowing with conflict without any help -- or hindrance -- from anyone else. This doesn't have to be angsty, actionless conflict, though it can be purely internal. Or it can still directly connect to the outside world and outside acts. It's all in how you manipulate it.

The basic technique is pretty simple. Give the character two positive goals, and then make it impossible for her to achieve both goals at once. Create a scarcity of time (if she spends Friday night on a date, she can't also spend Friday night building a new porch swing) or of resources (lost in the desert, and just enough gas in the tank to drive to the sheriff's office before nightfall or deeper into the wilderness where the villain's secret lair might be). Create geographical limitations (if she goes north for a job interview, she can't make it back south in time to stop the bank from foreclosing on her grandmother's house). The point is to put the character in a position to have to choose between two positive, worthy goals.

Then, with the choice clearly delineated, the character's actions will show her values. For example, let's consider the character who is lost in the desert with limited gas in the tank. We might be tempted to describe this limitation as a conflict, but actually, it's probably better to call it an obstacle. She has two goals: (1) go to the sheriff's office to report a crime, and (2) pursue the criminal, who is racing toward a hidey-hole. She can achieve one goal, but not both, because the limited gas is an obstacle to achieving both. This obstacle creates conflict because now she must decide between two competing goals. What does she value more?

-- Safety. Going to the sheriff's office guarantees she won't be stranded in the desert at night, and what is she doing chasing badasses with secret lairs in the first place?

-- Justice. Chasing the criminal will allow her to bring him to justice and see order restored.

So her choice is about more than which way to point the car. The choice is between her values. If she values safety over justice, she goes to the sheriff. If she values justice over safety, she finds the lair and kicks the door down. But this is only the starting point for the negotiation. The next question is whether she can satisfy both values with either choice.

-- Safety. Going to the sheriff is safer, and she might also get justice if the sheriff helps her track down the baddie. (Or not.)

-- Justice. Chasing the criminal makes it more likely that she'll catch him, and she doesn't have to kick the door down. She can find some other, safer way to capture him. (Maybe.)

This analysis is interesting to readers because it portrays an inner conflict and an attempt to solve a problem. The reader might agree or disagree with the rationale or with the ultimate decision, and either way, they'll continue to read to discover the outcome of this choice. But it's important to remember that when we set up these kinds of value-based choices, close calls are more interesting than clear winners. That is, if the heroine knows she has a gun and the baddie doesn't, the safety concern is diminished. If she suspects the sheriff is in cahoots with the baddy, she's less likely to get justice from that choice. But if the choices are roughly equal, then the decision becomes harder to make. And the importance of values becomes more exaggerated.

Notice, too, the lack of antagonistic opposition. Nobody is in the passenger seat arguing with her. She doesn't say, "Let's chase the baddie," and have to argue with the passenger, who wants to go to the sheriff. No outside force is trying to prevent her from reaching either goal. It's merely that she can't possibly accomplish both.

Think, for example, of a high school senior trying to choose a college. He wants to be an engineer, and he's accepted into the two top engineering schools in the country. His parents will approve either choice, so there's no opposition from people whose opposition might act as a veto. Both schools will give him full scholarships. (It's a fantasy. Stick with me.) In fact, let's say everything is equal except for climate. One is located in a warm and sunny beach town, and the other is located in a cold mountain climate. If he likes to surf, he chooses the beach. If he likes to ski, he chooses the mountains. But what if he likes both, and likes them enough that he would really hate to give up one sport? It's the roughly equal status that makes it a hard choice, and his ultimate choice will tell us which sport he truly prefers.

Of course, it's rarely that easy. If we start layering in other choices, in fact, the problem grows more interesting. The mountain school is large, with hundreds of students in a class, and he gets a little anxious in crowds sometimes. But he was on that beach campus for a visitation day, and half the students wore bathing suits and shorts to class, and that won't help his concentration much, either. (Social anxiety versus sexual temptation -- how else might these two factors affect his decision?)

In any case, this is how competing goals can cause conflicts even when both goals are good and there is no direct antagonism to either. And the resulting decision can say a lot about a character's values, so make sure they choose carefully. :)

Theresa

Theresa, this is about our Chicago-accented relations

Theresa and I both have generations of family history in Chicago, and I expect we both are quite familiar with the "youse guys" Chicago accent. Probably everyone is familiar with a bit of it because of all those SNL skits about the super "Da Bears" fans.

I've always so much associated this with Chicago area, I was quite surprised to hear a very similar accent in Cleveland and Buffalo. It's a Great Lakes accent, really, though I don't think those on the north side of the lakes (Canadians) have much of the accent. To some extent, it crosses the class barrier (that is, a banker might sound that way, as well as a steelworker), but not the race barrier (African-Americans and Hispanics, even those with generations in the region, tend not to have those distinctive vowels). The further you get from the Great Lakes cities, the less you'll hear it. I live 100 miles south of Lake Michigan, and no one around here sounds like that-- we Hoosiers are more likely to flatten out vowels than shift them.

Anyway, here's an article about the Northern Cities Shift ("NCS") or Great Lakes accent which points out the funniest aspect (apart from "youse," which I can tell you from my own experience is actually the possessive pronoun used by the purest speakers) is: If news of this radical linguistic shift hasn’t made it to you yet, you are not alone. Even people who speak this way remain mostly unaware of it. Dennis Preston, a professor of perceptual linguistics at Oklahoma State University—he doesn’t merely study how people speak, he studies how people perceive both their own speech and the speech of others—discovered something peculiar about NCS speakers when he was teaching at Michigan State University. “They don’t perceive their dialect at all,” he says. “The awareness of the NCS in NCS territory is zero.”

Point is, while we tend to mourn the loss of American dialects due to mobility and TV, this accent is actually become MORE distinctive. Interesting!

Alicia

For those of us who grew up reading Bradbury:

This is too cool. A recorded voice from Mars. Sorry. I'm tearing up. I wish old Ray was still here to know what he inspired (and yes, I bet everyone of those astrophysicists in there read The Martian Chronicles in childhood).

The power of imagination made real.

Alicia

Tough verb agreement question

Ugly sentence alert! But the question is:  Attract or attracts?

It's more memoir and non-fiction that attract lawsuits.

It's more memoir and non-fiction that attracts lawsuits.

Ruling and rationale?

Alicia 

Quick scene exercise

I'm finding this helpful when I start a scene, just to jot down preliminary answers (which I can, of course, then disregard if something else comes up):

1. What is going to happen in this scene? (Like "While out with Katya, Matt is going to run into his old Navy friend, and they're going to talk about the past.")

2. What is (his or her-- usually the POV character's) goal for the time of the scene? (This can be really minimal, like "Katya wants to get Matt away from his Navy friend and go to their romantic dinner.")

3. Does (he/she) get the goal during the scene? These are Jack Bickham's "ending answers":

• No (why not, like "Matt's now too depressed to take her out because he realizes he made a mistake leaving the Navy")
• Yes, but something else (what) happens too ("Yes, in my scene, Katya succeeds in getting Matt to go to dinner, but the old friend decides to come along too.")
• No, and furthermore, something even worse happens ("No, and they end up having to drive the friend across town.")

4. What surprise or disaster can happen at the end of the scene which changes things and sends the reader to the next chapter?
(In my scene, the friend is going to be accosted at dinner by someone he and Matt know from the past-- who is in next chapter going to end up murdered.)

I always finds it helps to know what's at the end ahead of time, otherwise I would just end the scene at sunset or when the check came.

What are some devices you use to direct scenes, or do you draft and then revise, or????

Alicia

All characters have agendas

“The real hell of life is everyone has his reasons.”
― Jean Renoir

Editing thoughts

Had this in an interview for a newsletter.

Why is it so difficult for writers to edit their own work?

I am actually right this moment revising one of my own books for my publisher (Belle Books), and though theoretically I know what I have to do (beef up the mystery), I find it very difficult to have the distance I need to edit the book. Here are my two thoughts:

 

1) I wrote this book, and it all works for me. I can't "see" where there might be plot lapses or logic gaps, or where the characterization falters. If I knew that, I'd already have fixed it. And the characters live for me, so I don't notice what might seem out of character to the reader.

2) What I love about the book might not be all that important to a reader. I love the voice, and the little clever asides, and the sparkling metaphors. The reader might not be as impressed with my "darlings" as I am.

Oh, I have another reason why it's hard to edit.

3) If we write it, our minds kind of automatically correct problems. Like I changed the venue of the murder in this book, so he fell off a cliff, not out of a window. It's been very hard for me to make the changes necessary so that the cause of death is consistent. In my head, I've already fixed everything, so I have trouble noticing where I need to change details and references.

 

So... it's difficult for writers to edit their own work because it's hard to get the necessary distance from events and characters we've created. That's a good thing, really, because it means that we're close to our characters and our story. 

 

Advice for aspriring writers?

This is going to be contradictory:

Take your time,

and

Don't waste time.

 

But it's not really contradictory. Take your time learning how to write, learning how you write best, learning what your strengths and weaknesses are. Don't be in a rush to get on the publishing treadmill, because the moment you decide to start submitting, is the moment your story ceases to be yours. Let there be years when you just don't worry about what editors want or what will impress agents or what the trendy new thing in the market is. Let there be years where you just enjoy exploring your stories and your skills.

 

But when you are ready to publish, consider what that means. That means getting your book to readers. So be alert for signs that this path isn't going towards readers, and be ready to take another path. For example, you might have your heart set on a particular agent or editor, and keep sending that person manuscripts. 

Maybe she says, "I like your style, but I am only looking for young adult books now." Don't go off and write a YA novel just to win over this agent. That's giving this person -- who doesn't want your current story-- too much control over your life and career. I was just reading that one agent considered 10,000 queries in a year, and didn't take on a single new client. Think about that. Do you really want to change your voice, your direction, your mission, for odds like that?

 

Decide when to cut your losses. If you've tried the agent search for a year, and haven't gotten a nibble, change course. Try going directly to editors (most of them will look at unagented material, though most won't say that out loud :). Try meeting editors at conferences, or becoming friendly commenters on their blogs. Try submitting to contests that those editors will judge.

 

And if, after a year, you can't get an editor's attention, consider what your alternatives are. "Publishing" is about getting your book out to readers. Traditional publishing-- the agent selling your book to an editor at a traditional publisher-- is one very good route to that. But it's no longer the only route.

 

Now of course I have to say that it's very possible your book hasn't gotten an agent or editor because it's not yet good enough. And that's something to consider-- maybe you need to take the book back and make it better. However, many very good books get rejected by editors and agents (I've written a couple of those myself :). So if you're having no success with the conventional method of publication, you might need to spend some time evaluating the book as objectively as you can, or, if that's impossible, having an objective reader do that. A friend of mine recently sent me her unsold book and said frankly, "Tell me what's wrong and how to fix it, or tell me it can't be fixed." 

 

If objectively you decide it really will please readers, then -- perhaps while continuing to look for an agent or editor-- look into other possibilities, like small press publication or indie publishing. 

 

Don't waste years and years going after an agent, and then more years going after an editor. Give yourself a year or two-- whatever feels right-- to achieve that sort of success. If you don't, fold your cards and start considering other ways of improving the book and its chances to reach a reader.

Alicia