EMAIL
Can’t Live With It, Can’t Live Without It
What Is the Protocol for Writers
Emailing Their Managers & Agents?
Email is the major time-devouring dragon of our times. We all know its advantages, but its disadvantages—inundation, infinity, etc.—so often outweigh the advantages that many execs end up discontinuing personal responses in favor of handing all email off to assistants. If we spent all our time answering email, there’d be no time left to develop or market your projects—which is our priority. If you don’t want to end up completely out of touch with your rep, consider the following protocol:
1) Don’t send your agent or literary representation more than one email every couple of weeks. If you have that many needs, you will end up on his “life is too short list” before you know it.
2) Consider getting your questions answered another way (from a third party, by calling or emailing the rep’s assistant, from a book, from the Internet, etc.).
3) Keep your emails short—no longer than three lines max. The people we email daily (buyers, financers, publishers, producers, studios, agents, lawyers) normally communicate in tiny bytes—2 or 3 words!
4) Don’t put more than one subject in an email. This causes “time block.” Can’t answer the entire email until we know the answer to each question so it goes into the “later” file immediately.
5) Don’t email unnecessary follow-ups, like “thanks.” They just add to the burden.
A NOVELIST’S TOOL KIT- Part Three
A NOVELIST’S TOOL KIT
Continued From previous post: How to Publish Your Novel by Ken Atchity
Chapter Thirteen: Perfecting Your Craft
Action line
Action isn’t the same thing as plot. Your action line is the direction in which your story moves. If you’re writing a tragedy, your story has to move from happiness to unhappiness. If your novel has a happy ending, you have to put your character in a hole and make him dig his way out—you have to start him out unhappy and let him make the journey to happiness. Whatever the case, there has to be a change. Your story has to move from one state to another. If it doesn’t, it will meander, sputter, and lose its drama.
Here are some of the fundamental attributes of your action line:
1.) Conflict: As we discussed, action occurs when your protagonist meets obstacles to his goal. Whether he succeeds or fails with a given obstacle depends on who he is, and on the mythic pattern that is the underpinning of your story.
2.) Turning Points: During the natural course of the story, your protagonist will encounter turning points, so called because they literally spin the story off in a different direction. Your protagonist will come to the first turning point early in the story. It’s the event that launches him off on his mission. The second turning point comes toward the end of the story. It sets the stage for the ultimate confrontation that will culminate in your story’s climax. Both turning points are intimately connected to your protagonist’s motivation.
3.) Plot Twists: Twists, also called reverses, are exactly what they sound like: an unexpected turn of events, or a revelation, that accelerates the action. Your action line doesn’t have to contain twists, but they help. Often your second turning point will be a twist, though they can happen at virtually any time. The twist in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game comes at the very end, and gives the previous climax scene an entirely different meaning.
The trick to writing an effective twist is to make it so that your readers don’t see it coming, but when they look back on it, they couldn’t imagine it happening any other way. There can be no clearer example in recent memory than the stunning revelation in The Sixth Sense, which had film audiences all across the country exclaiming, “How could I have missed that?”
4.) Climax: Your obstacles have been getting tougher throughout the story, but the crisis your protagonist faces at the climax blows all the others away. This queen mother of all obstacles brings your story to its darkest hour, the point which Joseph Campbell in A Hero’s Journey named “the Inmost Cave.” If your protagonist can rise to the occasion and face this challenge, he opens the door for the resolution of his problems.
The triadic shape of all good fiction
All good fiction has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Borrowing from screenwriting, these are in essence your First Act, Second Act and Third Act. Each has its own shape, nature and function. Your First Act brings you from the protagonist’s initial introduction and the setup of the situation to the first turning point that launches your protagonist into his mission. Your middle, or Second Act, the most challenging portion for many writers, shows that your protagonist is developing as he tackles an ever-escalating series of challenges. Your Third Act, your resolution, is the place where your protagonist overcomes his difficulty and achieves his mission.
You’ll need to have these portions of your story clear before you begin to write. But don’t become a slave to your structure. Plot your way through your first draft, then when you revise, throw your outline away and just tell the story.
But how will you know where to begin the action? Some writers think it’s necessary to go all the way back to the birth of their protagonist. But not all occurrences are drama. Drama only begins as soon as something compelling is happening. William Goldman counsels writers to start their scenes as far into the action as they can. I’ve often taught my students to look at their first drafts the way they’d look at a fish they’ve just caught and are about to clean. Just as they’d lop off the fish’s head, they should remove and discard any beginning parts of the story where the drama hasn’t yet begun. You wouldn’t serve inedible parts of the fish to your dinner guests; don’t serve un-riveting parts the story to your readers.
The first and continuous question you must ask yourself as you write is, “how will my readers respond if I tell the story in this order?” The second is just as important: “Do I want them to respond that way?”
Dramatic Setting
How do you decide where to set your story? You pick the location that will enhance the dramatic tension the most. When in doubt, look to your protagonist for answers. What kind of location would showcase his motivation best?
Many writers specialize in a location they know intimately: John Irving’s New Hampshire, Pat Conroy’s North Carolina, Anne Rice’s New Orleans. You may choose to explore your own geographic roots this way. But you’re not limited to your own origins. Whatever you can A.) research and B.) imagine, you can write about. But do meticulous, extensive research on the settings you choose, even if you think you know them.
Scenes as units of drama
All drama unfolds one scene at a time. A scene is the basic unit of drama: Ideally, each scene ratchets the story along one step. A scene has a beginning, middle, and end, just like your entire novel does. They generally look like this:
Beginning: somebody is somewhere.
Middle: something is going on.
End: something happens that does or doesn’t solve the problem.
Your scene should also foreshadow a fourth part: what could happen next? This is how you dovetail your scenes to one another, bypassing the need for a transition.
Tone
A single factor determines your novel’s tone: your relationship to your audience. How do you view your narrative position—are you “preaching” it or “offering” it? Are you setting yourself up as an authority to your readers, or are you letting them in on a personal revelation, as you would a friend or confidant? Do you want them to trust what you have to say, or is it more interesting if you deliberately set them up to doubt you? If you’re not sure whether a particular tone is the right one for a given story, try it for a few pages and see if it feels natural. If it doesn’t, let it go and try something different.
These, then, are the essential building blocks of any story: character, action, setting and tone. But how do you make these elements work together to form a great story?
Aristotle addressed this question twenty-four centuries ago, and came up with a single, simple, and completely satisfying answer that is as valid today as it was in his time: unity. In any work of drama, from novel to screenplay to stage play, all the elements must come together to serve one action. In the Iliad, for example, every element serves the same purpose: to deal with the anger of Achilles. Aristotle firmly believed that in the best stories, all the components supported a single plot line.
That’s what makes good fiction so satisfying. It feels like a package. It asks a question, “what would happen if…?” then proceeds to answer it. It has a single clear mission and a definite conclusion.
This why it’s so important for you to get all the elements worked out in your mind before you start to write. Beginning writers suffering from a lack of focus tend to put in too much, because they haven’t yet identified the one line of action that everything else must serve. The best writers put in only what moves the action along in the right direction. They leave room for the readers to fill in the rest with their own imaginations.
To be continued. Check back soon!
Buy How to Publish Your Novel on Amazon.
Continued From previous post: How to Publish Your Novel by Ken Atchity
Chapter Thirteen: Perfecting Your Craft
Action line
Action isn’t the same thing as plot. Your action line is the direction in which your story moves. If you’re writing a tragedy, your story has to move from happiness to unhappiness. If your novel has a happy ending, you have to put your character in a hole and make him dig his way out—you have to start him out unhappy and let him make the journey to happiness. Whatever the case, there has to be a change. Your story has to move from one state to another. If it doesn’t, it will meander, sputter, and lose its drama.
Here are some of the fundamental attributes of your action line:
1.) Conflict: As we discussed, action occurs when your protagonist meets obstacles to his goal. Whether he succeeds or fails with a given obstacle depends on who he is, and on the mythic pattern that is the underpinning of your story.
2.) Turning Points: During the natural course of the story, your protagonist will encounter turning points, so called because they literally spin the story off in a different direction. Your protagonist will come to the first turning point early in the story. It’s the event that launches him off on his mission. The second turning point comes toward the end of the story. It sets the stage for the ultimate confrontation that will culminate in your story’s climax. Both turning points are intimately connected to your protagonist’s motivation.
3.) Plot Twists: Twists, also called reverses, are exactly what they sound like: an unexpected turn of events, or a revelation, that accelerates the action. Your action line doesn’t have to contain twists, but they help. Often your second turning point will be a twist, though they can happen at virtually any time. The twist in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game comes at the very end, and gives the previous climax scene an entirely different meaning.
The trick to writing an effective twist is to make it so that your readers don’t see it coming, but when they look back on it, they couldn’t imagine it happening any other way. There can be no clearer example in recent memory than the stunning revelation in The Sixth Sense, which had film audiences all across the country exclaiming, “How could I have missed that?”
4.) Climax: Your obstacles have been getting tougher throughout the story, but the crisis your protagonist faces at the climax blows all the others away. This queen mother of all obstacles brings your story to its darkest hour, the point which Joseph Campbell in A Hero’s Journey named “the Inmost Cave.” If your protagonist can rise to the occasion and face this challenge, he opens the door for the resolution of his problems.
The triadic shape of all good fiction
All good fiction has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Borrowing from screenwriting, these are in essence your First Act, Second Act and Third Act. Each has its own shape, nature and function. Your First Act brings you from the protagonist’s initial introduction and the setup of the situation to the first turning point that launches your protagonist into his mission. Your middle, or Second Act, the most challenging portion for many writers, shows that your protagonist is developing as he tackles an ever-escalating series of challenges. Your Third Act, your resolution, is the place where your protagonist overcomes his difficulty and achieves his mission.
You’ll need to have these portions of your story clear before you begin to write. But don’t become a slave to your structure. Plot your way through your first draft, then when you revise, throw your outline away and just tell the story.
But how will you know where to begin the action? Some writers think it’s necessary to go all the way back to the birth of their protagonist. But not all occurrences are drama. Drama only begins as soon as something compelling is happening. William Goldman counsels writers to start their scenes as far into the action as they can. I’ve often taught my students to look at their first drafts the way they’d look at a fish they’ve just caught and are about to clean. Just as they’d lop off the fish’s head, they should remove and discard any beginning parts of the story where the drama hasn’t yet begun. You wouldn’t serve inedible parts of the fish to your dinner guests; don’t serve un-riveting parts the story to your readers.
The first and continuous question you must ask yourself as you write is, “how will my readers respond if I tell the story in this order?” The second is just as important: “Do I want them to respond that way?”
Dramatic Setting
How do you decide where to set your story? You pick the location that will enhance the dramatic tension the most. When in doubt, look to your protagonist for answers. What kind of location would showcase his motivation best?
Many writers specialize in a location they know intimately: John Irving’s New Hampshire, Pat Conroy’s North Carolina, Anne Rice’s New Orleans. You may choose to explore your own geographic roots this way. But you’re not limited to your own origins. Whatever you can A.) research and B.) imagine, you can write about. But do meticulous, extensive research on the settings you choose, even if you think you know them.
Scenes as units of drama
All drama unfolds one scene at a time. A scene is the basic unit of drama: Ideally, each scene ratchets the story along one step. A scene has a beginning, middle, and end, just like your entire novel does. They generally look like this:
Beginning: somebody is somewhere.
Middle: something is going on.
End: something happens that does or doesn’t solve the problem.
Your scene should also foreshadow a fourth part: what could happen next? This is how you dovetail your scenes to one another, bypassing the need for a transition.
Tone
A single factor determines your novel’s tone: your relationship to your audience. How do you view your narrative position—are you “preaching” it or “offering” it? Are you setting yourself up as an authority to your readers, or are you letting them in on a personal revelation, as you would a friend or confidant? Do you want them to trust what you have to say, or is it more interesting if you deliberately set them up to doubt you? If you’re not sure whether a particular tone is the right one for a given story, try it for a few pages and see if it feels natural. If it doesn’t, let it go and try something different.
These, then, are the essential building blocks of any story: character, action, setting and tone. But how do you make these elements work together to form a great story?
Aristotle addressed this question twenty-four centuries ago, and came up with a single, simple, and completely satisfying answer that is as valid today as it was in his time: unity. In any work of drama, from novel to screenplay to stage play, all the elements must come together to serve one action. In the Iliad, for example, every element serves the same purpose: to deal with the anger of Achilles. Aristotle firmly believed that in the best stories, all the components supported a single plot line.
That’s what makes good fiction so satisfying. It feels like a package. It asks a question, “what would happen if…?” then proceeds to answer it. It has a single clear mission and a definite conclusion.
This why it’s so important for you to get all the elements worked out in your mind before you start to write. Beginning writers suffering from a lack of focus tend to put in too much, because they haven’t yet identified the one line of action that everything else must serve. The best writers put in only what moves the action along in the right direction. They leave room for the readers to fill in the rest with their own imaginations.
To be continued. Check back soon!
Buy How to Publish Your Novel on Amazon.
A NOVELIST’S TOOL KIT- Part Two
Continued From previous post: How to Publish Your Novel by Ken Atchity
Chapter Thirteen: Perfecting Your Craft
All five of these elements must be present in your protagonist. And as you’ve no doubt noticed, all of these attributes link directly to your novel’s action. Because in a good story, the action happens as it does because of who your protagonist is. Conversely, your protagonist develops as he does because of the way the action unfolds. Action and character drive each other.
All the elements in your novel must support this single line of protagonist in action. This holds true as well for all the other characters who populate your novel. Whether major, minor or functional, characters only belong in your story to the extent that they serve the action line.
Minor or supporting characters have a “tag”: a single attribute that defines them and makes them memorable. Any supporting character who isn’t memorable should be instantly thrown out.
A minor character’s “tag” can be just about any attribute: greed, lechery, or like Sally’s friend in When Harry Met Sally, an all-consuming desire to get married. Don’t spell it out, though. If a character is absent-minded, show it in action, thought and dialogue, don’t use the phrase “absent-minded” or you rob audience of the chance to figure it out for themselves.
A minor character can have a motivation but not a mission—that’s your protagonist’s job. They, too can evolve, but not along the same lines as your protagonist. Your minor characters are there to make his life more interesting. Establish them quickly, then move on.
Function characters play an even less important role than supporting characters. They perform a single function without being involved in the main character’s motivation. They ride in at sunset to deliver the fateful telegram, then ride away again. They serve the drinks, drive the cabs, do their duties, then go upon their way. Unlike your protagonist and minor characters, they’re supposed to be forgettable.
Keep function characters simple. If you spend too much energy on them your readers will start to think they’re more significant than you mean them to be. Then when the character disappears, it will feel to your readers like you left something dangling, or worse, like you misled them.
Keep in mind that your characters are not real people but devices that you invented for the sole purpose of capturing and holding your reader’s attention. As such, it’s your primary responsibility to keep them interesting. The best way to do that is to give them, at all times, something significant to do.
Your audience wants action. The best writers don’t get wrapped up in the complex psychological machinations of their characters. They write to satisfy their readers’ expectations. Your audience wants more than anything to see how your protagonist gets out of the corners you paint him into. All you have to do to create a compelling novel is: don’t disappoint your readers!
Continue reading. Buy How to Publish Your Novel on Amazon.
Myth to Movie: Pygmalion
First published in Produced By, the official magazine of the Producers Guild of America
Myth to Movie: Pygmalion
By Ken Atchity
The wish-fulfillment archetype —the dream become flesh—finds perennially poignant expression in stories based on the Pygmalion myth.
A Cyprian sculptor-priest-king who had no use for his island’s women, Pygmalion dedicated his energies to his art. From a flawless piece of ivory, he carved a maiden, and found her so beautiful that he robed her and adorned her with jewels, calling her Galatea (“sleeping love”). His became obsessed with the statue, praying to Aphrodite to bring him a wife as perfect as his image. Sparked by his earnestness, the goddess visited Pygmalion’s studio and was so pleasantly surprised to find Galatea almost a mirror of herself she brought the statue to life. When Pygmalion returned home, he prostrated himself at the living Galatea’s feet. The two were wed in Aphrodite’s temple, and lived happily ever after under her protection.
Though it was never absent from western literature, this transformation myth resoundingly entered modern consciousness with Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, which enlisted it to explore the complexity of human relationships in a stratified society. My Fair Lady, based on Shaw’s retelling, took the myth to another level of audience awareness.
The obligatory beats of the Pygmalion myth: the protagonist has a dream inspired by encounter with an unformed object (“Look at her, a prisoner of the gutter!”), uses his skills and/or prayers to shape it into a reality; falls in love with the embodiment of his dream, and lives happily ever after, or not.
Essential to the pattern is that the dreamer-protagonist is rewarded for doing something about his dream, for turning it from dream to reality with or without a dea ex machina. Thanks to the infinite creativity of producers, directors, and writers, Pygmalion has generated countless wonderful movie story variations: Inventor Gepetto, in Pinocchio (1940--with numerous remakes), wishes that the wooden puppet he’s created could become the son he never had; a department store window dresser (Robert Walker), in One Touch of Venus (1948, based on the Ogden Nash/S. J. Perelman musical), kisses a statue of Venus (Ava Gardner) into life— trouble begins when she falls in love with him. In 1983’s thenEducating Rita (from Willy Russell’s play), a young hairdresser (Julie Walters), wishing to improve herself by continuing her education, finds a tutor in jaded professor (Michael Caine), who’s reinvigorated by her. In a reverse of the pattern, as quickly as she changes under his tutelage he resents the “educated” Rita and wants her, selfishly, to stay as she was.
Alvin Johnson (Nick Cannon), in 2003’s Love Don’t Cost a Thing, a remake of Can’t Buy Me Love (1987), comes to the rescue of Paris (Christina Milian) when she wrecks her mother’s Cadillac and can’t pay the $1,500 for the repair. Alvin fronts the cash with his savings and, in return, Paris has to pretend to be his girlfriend for two weeks; Alvin becomes “cool” for the first time in his life, but learns that the price of popularity is higher than he bargained for. In She’s All That (1999), the pattern is reversed as Freddie Prinze, Jr., is a high school hotttie who bets a classmate he can turn nerdy Rachel Leigh Cook into a prom queen but, of course, runs into trouble when he falls in love with his creation. In The Princess Diaries (2001), Mia (Anne Hathaway), a gawky Bay Area teen, learns her father was the prince of Genovia; the queen (Julie Andrews) hopes her granddaughter will take her father’s rightful place as heir, and transforms her from a social misfit into a regal lady but discover their growing love for each other is more important than the throne.
Pretty Woman (1990) is my second favorite example of the tirelessness of the Pygmalion myth. Taking the flower-girl motif of My Fair Lady to the extreme, Vivian (Julia Roberts) is a prostitute (albeit idealized) and Edward (Richard Gere) a ruthless businessman with no time for real love. As he opens his credit cards on a Rodeo Drive shopping spree, we experience a telescoped transformation-by-money accompanied with the upbeat music that reminds us that we love this highly escapist part of the Pygmalion story, the actual process of turning ugly duckling into princess swan.
My favorite example is La Femme Nikita (remade as Point of No Return, 1993, with Bridget Fonda), because it shows the versatility of mythic structure, taking Pygmalion to the darkest place imaginable as it fashions of street druggie Nikita (Anne Parillaud), under Bob’s merciless tutelage (Tcheky Karyo), a chameleon-like lethal sophisticate whose heart of gold allows her to escape both her unformed past and her darkly re-formed present.
So popular is the Pygmalion myth with audiences that it crops up in the most unlikely places. In Pao zhi nu peng you (My Dream Girl, 2003), Shanghai slum-dweller Cheung Ling (Vicki Zhao) is thrust into high society when she encounters her long-lost father, who hires Joe Lam to makeover his daughter to fit her new status. In Million-Dollar Baby (2004), the unformed matter (Hilary Swank) reports for duty and demands to be transformed. Instead of falling in love, the boxing instructor (Clint Eastwood) is reborn, reinvigorated, re-inspired, learns to feel again—thereby revealing the underlying emotion that drives the Pygmalion myth for both protagonist and the character he reshapes: rebirth into a more ideal state of being.
A NOVELIST’S TOOL KIT - Part One
From How to Publish Your Novel by Ken Atchity
Chapter Thirteen:
Perfecting Your Craft
Nothing takes the place of practice. A famous athlete once said, “If you’re not practicing, someone out there is practicing. And when he meets you he will beat you.” Writing isn’t just a talent, it’s a craft that requires the honing of skill and technique. In this chapter I’ll give you several concrete suggestions about how you can improve yourself as a commercial novelist.
A novelist’s toolkit
A novelist’s medium is story, his form the contemporary novel. His most basic tools are character, action, setting and narrative voice. From the alchemy created by mixing these, a story emerges. Let’s examine each of these elements in turn.
Major, minor, and supporting characters
Character is by far the most important element of a novel. To the extent that your readers are “on board” with your protagonist, they will stay committed to your story. An unforgettable protagonist, even if he appears complex and multifaceted to the reader, is made up of just a handful of key components:
1.) Motivation: What makes your protagonist tick? What does he want? Your character must be struggling with one of the major human drives, including love, hate, fear, anxiety, vengeance, rage, jealousy, ambition, and greed. Your readers know these drives intimately; odds are, they’ve grappled with them in their own lives. They’ll respond to them.
Identify one drove for each of your characters and develop it. The best stories take a single, profound emotion and plumb its depths through all the characters like variations on a theme in music; the worst stories skim the surface of many different human drives, leaving their readers lost, confused, and unsatisfied. A well-constructed protagonist may possess two drives that are in conflict with each other, but rarely more than this. He is driven by greed and fear, for example, so that each step toward his goal of riches increases his psychological pain. In real life, people run a gamut of emotions, explore many drives, but not in well-made fiction. The beauty of the “what if” pattern (“What if a man driven by greed was as strongly driven by fear?”) is that it allows us to isolate and explore the ramifications of action issuing from such a character.
2.) Mission: Your protagonist needs a job to do, a goal for his drive. If it’s greed you’ve chosen, you may want to be the man who aims at being the top player on Wall Street, the woman who corners the oil exploration business, the couple who want to have more than anyone else at their country club. It doesn’t matter whether the character chooses to undertake the mission himself, or it’s thrust upon him. The mission should relate directly, in one way or another, to the character’s motivation.
The mission must be involved enough and challenging enough to sustain the story for the duration of the novel. It must lend itself to challenges, both in the form of obstacles, and in the form of an antagonist.
An antagonist, by definition, is a force that works against your hero’s mission—your protagonist’s nemesis. Your antagonist will not necessarily be a bad guy—he might not even be a person at all. In Sebastian Junger’s novel The Perfect Storm, nature is the antagonist. It’s the storm itself that foils Captain Billy Tyne’s mission to come home with a boatload of swordfish. In Steve Alten’s Domain, the antagonist is the other-worldly dragon creature who rises from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico after lying dormant for millions of years.
3.) Obstacles: Action happens when your hero struggles against obstacles to his mission. The obstacles you choose to confront your protagonist must be appropriate for him—don’t pit Bambi against the Galactic Empire. Arrange your series of obstacles in ascending order, so that the tension rises throughout your story. Your obstacles, ideally, should relate to one another in some fashion. And like all the other elements of your story, they must have a beginning, middle, and end.
4.) Relatability: If your audience can’t identify with your protagonist, they’re not going to be able to involve themselves in your story. Beginning writers often get the impression that a protagonist has to be likable. But if that were the case, we couldn’t enjoy Bill Murray’s performance as the irascible Frank Cross in Scrooged. Readers don’t have to like your protagonist. They just have to relate to him. They have to see the direction you’re pointing him in, and root for him to go there. If he’s a jerk, the audience must hunger for his redemption. You can’t help rooting for Hero’s Bernie LaPlante, even if you do want to kick him.
5.) Change: Over the course of the story, your protagonist must face his shortcoming, or his fear, or whatever it is that’s really keeping him from achieving his mission. He must grow into his ability to meet the goal you’ve set for him. In real life, human change is nebulous, messy, imprecise. In fiction, it can’t be. Your character’s change must progress in a logical, clear series of steps. See Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing for a thorough discussion of the steps that lead a character from state A to state B.
To be continued. Check back soon!
Buy How to Publish Your Novel on Amazon.
Chapter Thirteen:
Perfecting Your Craft
Nothing takes the place of practice. A famous athlete once said, “If you’re not practicing, someone out there is practicing. And when he meets you he will beat you.” Writing isn’t just a talent, it’s a craft that requires the honing of skill and technique. In this chapter I’ll give you several concrete suggestions about how you can improve yourself as a commercial novelist.
A novelist’s toolkit
A novelist’s medium is story, his form the contemporary novel. His most basic tools are character, action, setting and narrative voice. From the alchemy created by mixing these, a story emerges. Let’s examine each of these elements in turn.
Major, minor, and supporting characters
Character is by far the most important element of a novel. To the extent that your readers are “on board” with your protagonist, they will stay committed to your story. An unforgettable protagonist, even if he appears complex and multifaceted to the reader, is made up of just a handful of key components:
1.) Motivation: What makes your protagonist tick? What does he want? Your character must be struggling with one of the major human drives, including love, hate, fear, anxiety, vengeance, rage, jealousy, ambition, and greed. Your readers know these drives intimately; odds are, they’ve grappled with them in their own lives. They’ll respond to them.
Identify one drove for each of your characters and develop it. The best stories take a single, profound emotion and plumb its depths through all the characters like variations on a theme in music; the worst stories skim the surface of many different human drives, leaving their readers lost, confused, and unsatisfied. A well-constructed protagonist may possess two drives that are in conflict with each other, but rarely more than this. He is driven by greed and fear, for example, so that each step toward his goal of riches increases his psychological pain. In real life, people run a gamut of emotions, explore many drives, but not in well-made fiction. The beauty of the “what if” pattern (“What if a man driven by greed was as strongly driven by fear?”) is that it allows us to isolate and explore the ramifications of action issuing from such a character.
2.) Mission: Your protagonist needs a job to do, a goal for his drive. If it’s greed you’ve chosen, you may want to be the man who aims at being the top player on Wall Street, the woman who corners the oil exploration business, the couple who want to have more than anyone else at their country club. It doesn’t matter whether the character chooses to undertake the mission himself, or it’s thrust upon him. The mission should relate directly, in one way or another, to the character’s motivation.
The mission must be involved enough and challenging enough to sustain the story for the duration of the novel. It must lend itself to challenges, both in the form of obstacles, and in the form of an antagonist.
An antagonist, by definition, is a force that works against your hero’s mission—your protagonist’s nemesis. Your antagonist will not necessarily be a bad guy—he might not even be a person at all. In Sebastian Junger’s novel The Perfect Storm, nature is the antagonist. It’s the storm itself that foils Captain Billy Tyne’s mission to come home with a boatload of swordfish. In Steve Alten’s Domain, the antagonist is the other-worldly dragon creature who rises from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico after lying dormant for millions of years.
3.) Obstacles: Action happens when your hero struggles against obstacles to his mission. The obstacles you choose to confront your protagonist must be appropriate for him—don’t pit Bambi against the Galactic Empire. Arrange your series of obstacles in ascending order, so that the tension rises throughout your story. Your obstacles, ideally, should relate to one another in some fashion. And like all the other elements of your story, they must have a beginning, middle, and end.
4.) Relatability: If your audience can’t identify with your protagonist, they’re not going to be able to involve themselves in your story. Beginning writers often get the impression that a protagonist has to be likable. But if that were the case, we couldn’t enjoy Bill Murray’s performance as the irascible Frank Cross in Scrooged. Readers don’t have to like your protagonist. They just have to relate to him. They have to see the direction you’re pointing him in, and root for him to go there. If he’s a jerk, the audience must hunger for his redemption. You can’t help rooting for Hero’s Bernie LaPlante, even if you do want to kick him.
5.) Change: Over the course of the story, your protagonist must face his shortcoming, or his fear, or whatever it is that’s really keeping him from achieving his mission. He must grow into his ability to meet the goal you’ve set for him. In real life, human change is nebulous, messy, imprecise. In fiction, it can’t be. Your character’s change must progress in a logical, clear series of steps. See Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing for a thorough discussion of the steps that lead a character from state A to state B.
To be continued. Check back soon!
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