Tag Archives: Magical Words

Professional Wednesday: Adding Characters To Spice Up a Story

Many years ago, several of my writer friends and I were involved in a joint online venture — a writing blog called Magical Words, where we offered writing advice for free. We posted new content nearly every day, each of us taking one day out of the workweek to write, we commented on one another’s posts to create a writing dialogue, and we garnered a pretty significant following. The roster included regulars Faith Hunter, Misty Massey, A.J. Hartley, John Hartness, C.E. Murphy, Stuart Jaffe, Edmund Schubert, and me as well as a host of terrific guests including James Tuck, Mindy Klasky, Lucienne Diver, and Gail Martin, to name just a few. I know, quite a line-up, right?

How To Write Magical WordsWe kept the site going for nearly a decade (thanks Todd Massey), and the site still exists, for those interested in wading through the extensive archives. We also produced a writing book, which is still available.

I bring all of this up because recently I have been thinking about the advice I offered on that site, with the idea of revisiting some of the topics. And I’d like to begin doing that today . . . .

I have posted before about different ways we might breathe life into a story, book, or series that has gone a bit stale. This is a fairly common problem, one I have dealt with throughout my career, and one I have thought about recently as I contemplate what I might do with a new Thieftaker installment, or a return to one of my other projects.

A great bit of advice in this regard comes from Faith whose approach to the problem is fairly simple, not to mention ruthless. When your plot starts to feel flat, she has often said (paraphrasing here), kill off a character. This will change your story’s dynamics, give your writing a burst of emotional power, and almost certainly result in shifts in narrative tectonics you can’t even anticipate. And I agree with this: It’s a great way to shake things up. But there is another way to breathe life into an older project, and it’s actually the direct opposite.

One of my favorite characters in the entire Star Trek franchise was Ensign Ro Laren (played by Michelle Forbes), the Bajoran-rebel-turned-Starfleet-officer. She was introduced to viewers of Star Trek: The Next Generation in an outstanding episode that aired in the 5th season, and it was clear from her very first scene that she would be a terrific character. She was surly and abrasive, disdainful of authority and deeply proud of her Bajoran heritage. Starfleet was always portrayed as the ultimate melting pot — characters from different planets were expected to subsume their native cultures to the shared values of the larger organization. She refused, which made her compelling, fascinating even. Adding her to the cast shook up the somewhat tired dynamics of the show and yielded several memorable episodes.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, another of my favorite series did something similar in its third season, when it introduced a second slayer, Faith Lehane (Eliza Dushku) to the mix. Faith joined Buffy’s Scooby-gang, but she brought a rebellious, morally-ambiguous quality to the show that had been missing previously. She disrupted Zander and Willow’s friendship, defied Giles’s authority, corrupted Buffy, and eventually turned on her, becoming a dangerous rival. Again, the addition of a new character altered familiar dynamics and infused the franchise with new drama and energy and power.

A third example: My favorite show of all time is The West Wing, which, in its second season, introduced a character named Ainsley Hayes (Emily Procter) to the Bartlet White House. Ainsley was a Southern conservative Republican, whose political views were diametrically opposed to those of Josh, Sam, C.J., and Leo, and whose keen intelligence and sharp wit made her a worthy foil for all of them. The West Wing hadn’t had time to grow stale at that point, but Aaron Sorkin, the show’s creator and chief writer, seeing the potential for such a thing, acted preemptively. By adding Ainsley to the cast, he sent the show in new and unexpected directions and brought additional tension, humor, and resonance to a show already brimming with those qualities.

Three different shows, three powerful, dynamic women added to the storylines. In each case, the addition of one character completely altered the tone and feel of the series.

The lesson here should be fairly obvious. Yes, killing a character can jump-start a plot. I use that approach quite often. But adding a character can do much the same thing. And if I am working on a longer project — a multi-book series — I often find that killing off someone important isn’t enough to infuse the franchise with the needed energy. Introducing a new character, however, particularly someone who is going to prove disruptive to my plotting and uncomfortable for my established characters, can really shake things up. And sometimes that’s exactly what we need.

Storytelling is about conflict and tension. When we find a book or series going flat it is usually because those two qualities — conflict and tension — are missing, or at least lagging. That’s why it’s not always enough to add just any new character. Sure, a new love interest or sidekick can spice things up a little. But if this new person fits in too comfortably, the point of adding them might well be lost. If instead we bring in someone who is going roil the metaphorical waters, we stand a much better chance of achieving the desired result: namely more drama, more emotion, more trouble for all concerned. Our readers will eat it up.

Keep writing.

Quick-Tip Tuesday Post on Breaking Out of Routines

I have a process that I tend to follow book after book. I’m stubborn, and a creature of habit. Having written all four Thieftaker and all three Fearsson books largely by following my regular creative routine, I fully expected that this book would behave and let me write it the same way. But like children, not all books are the same; some listen better than others.

Quick-Tip Tuesday has rolled around again, and I have my usual post up at Magical Words. This week I’m discussing the value of breaking out of our creative routines in order to infuse our work with something fresh and new. You can find the post here. I hope you enjoy it.

And keep writing!

A Quick-Tip Tuesday Post About Deadlines

“But,” you say, “what if an editor asks me to make that two month deadline?”

Be honest with her. Tell her that two months won’t work, but you can get it done in three, or three and a half. When it comes down to it, the editor is going to get the book at the same time no matter what. You can only write so fast. Faced with the choice between A) an honest assessment of your writing pace and a book handed in when she expects it, or B) a book promised on an unattainable schedule and then handed in a month late, just about every editor will choose A.

Today’s Quick-Tip Tuesday post is up at the Magical Words blog site. Todays topic: Deadlines! We writers hate them, but meeting deadlines is part of being a professional. My post offers a few tips for setting realistic deadlines and sticking to them. You can read the post here. I hope you find it helpful.

Keep writing!

Keeping On With a New Quick-Tip Tuesday Post

It would be so easy to give up, to set writing aside for a while. Because when we write, by necessity we access emotion, and that’s not a place I particularly want to go right now.

To which my inner voice says, “Too fucking bad.” Emotion informs art, and art is what I do. It hurts a little more at the moment. So what? Given the shit I do to my characters, I really have no right to complain.

Today’s Quick-Tip Tuesday post is up at Magical Words. It’s been a tough fall for many of us, and this is a post about soldiering on, taking stock, moving forward. It was helpful to write, and I hope you find it worth reading. You can find the post here.

Keep writing, friends.

For Melanie

Which brings me to today’s Quick-Tip. It’s a terrible cliché, but clichés arise because on some level they convey an essential truth. As much as I would encourage you to write, to devote yourself to improving your craft and following your ambitions, today I want you to do the opposite. Put away your computer, your writing pad, your pen. Kiss the person you love — not a peck; kiss with passion.

Today’s post on Magical Words — a Quick-Tip post of a different sort — is for my friend Melanie Otto, who was taken from us far too soon.

Read it, share it with someone you love, please take it to heart.

We live in a time of division, of conflict, even of hate. Let’s try something a little different today. For Melanie.

The post is here.

Quick-Tip Tuesday Post on Music and Writing

I usually write with a good deal of structure in my process, and so I thrive on relatively unstructured music to inspire my creative process. So, I thought, what if with this project, to which I’ve taken a relatively unstructured approach, I listen to classical music and use that high level of musical structure to impose some order on my writing?

My apologies for this going up so late. I’m on the road and didn’t have access to the internet for much of the day. But today’s Quick-Tip Tuesday post at Magical Words is now up and ready for viewing. It’s about a couple of lessons I learned last week while attending a phenomenal concert. One concerns sharing works-in-progress with audiences. The other focuses on the ways in which the music we listen to as we write can influence our creative process. You can find the post here. I hope you enjoy it.

Keep writing!!

Quick-Tip Tuesday: More Fixes for a Broken Manuscript

By the time we hit that 60-70% mark, things look dire for our good guys.

And at that point we often discover that we have no idea how to get from where we are — often a world gone to shit — to the happy ending we’ve intended to write all along. There seems to be this unbridgeable chasm between the story as it exists, and the final product as we’ve envisioned it. Cue panic.

It’s Quick-Tip Tuesday over at Magical Words, and I have a post up on more ways to fix a broken manuscript. As some of you may remember, I tackled this subject a couple of weeks ago, but there are always more ways to get at a problem. So if you’re dealing with problems in your work-in-progress, this newest post might help you out. You can read it here.

Quick-Tip Tuesday and a Blog Tour Update

It’s Quick-Tip Tuesday, and I’m back at Magical Words with a post about how to establish and meet work goals without setting ourselves up for disappointment and discouragement. You can find the post here.

Children of Amarid, by David B. Coe (jacket art by Romas Kukalis)And the Summer/Fall 2016 Blog Tour rolls into SFF World today, where a new review of Children of Amarid has just been posted. For those who don’t know, Children of Amarid is my first novel, originally published in 1997. It, and the rest of the LonTobyn Chronicle, my first trilogy, won me the Crawford Award and established me both commercially and critically. But it also suffered from many of the flaws one finds in a first novel. So, I have recently reissued the Author’s Edit of the book. The review is of this new version. You can find it here.

Quick-Tip Tuesday: Emotion and Narrative

So how do we imbue our prose with emotion? Well, we DON’T do it with a sledge hammer. I am not telling you to bludgeon your readers with paragraphs-long explorations of your characters’ emotions. That would be no better than a data dump. Sometimes all we need is a gesture or moment’s expression — the twitch of a lip, a nervous gesture with the hands, the refusal to look someone in the eye. Delving into emotion doesn’t mean eschewing subtlety.

Today’s Quick-Tip Tuesday post is up at Magical Words, and it’s about imbuing our writing with emotion. To my mind, few things are more important for effective story telling. Read more here. Enjoy, and keep writing!

Quick-Tip Tuesday: More on Self-Editing

This is still the work of an inexperienced writer. Comparing The Outlanders to the work I’ve done more recently, I still cringe a little at the habits of that younger me. But I also see growth, a writer beginning to master elements of his profession.

And, to my surprise, I see as well things that I need to be reminded of today as I think about where I ought to go next with my career and my craft.

Today’s Quick-Tip Tuesday post at Magical Words again discusses my revisions of my first series, the LonTobyn Chronicle, and what I have learned from that younger version of myself. It’s not just a matter of correcting youthful mistakes; at times, I’m finding that I need to emulate more some of the things I used to do. Sounds interesting, right? Then read the post! You can find it here.