The Confabulator Cafe

Category: Process

  • I Hate You! Please Hang Out with Me.

    Hard truth here: I freaking HATE my characters.  And not just the current batch either.  I’m talking all of them.

    Now before you get all judgmental, hear me out.  Your characters are not your friends.  They are lazy, needy little bitches who expect you to do all the heavy lifting.  I, for one, am tired of it.  So I’ve started fighting back.

    When I’m setting up a scene, or even a story for that matter, I usually start with a goal.  What is the overall story question of the book?  In this particular scene, what is the protagonist trying to accomplish?  Does he or she get it done?  Regardless of the answer, what are the consequences of the outcome?

    I put a lot of thought into the architecture of the story, and along those same lines, I have very specific ideas about what roles the characters will play in each of these scenes.  Ideally, you could add a face and a name to each of these roles, and then wind ‘em up and let ‘em go.  But ideally makes for a shitty read, and this is where characters really start to piss me off.

    (more…)

  • A Living Hobby

    “When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.” – Ernest Hemingway

    As a short fiction writer, I have never concerned myself with character development. I start writing, and the character comes out subconsciously. When the first draft is complete, I have gotten to know my character.  I’ve spent time with him and know who he is. During the second draft, I bring him more into focus in the early parts of the story.

    The good side of this is that it is very organic and spontaneous. It is beautiful, like watching a flower bud bloom before me in time-lapse vision. The bad side is that I am flying blind, and significant parts of the story will have to be re-written.

    When I wrote my novel, I felt I needed to do a little more planning. I decided to utilize something closer to my method when writing screenplays. The way I was taught, in order to write a screenplay, you need to do a lot of preparation. You have to know your character before you start the first page because you don’t have the luxury of finding him in that format.  Instead, you write character biographies, as in depth as you can, about the character and his life.

    This is written as quickly as you can write it, much like laying down a short story. You don’t want to over-think the biography. Let it flow.  Let the character speak through you. Don’t speak for him. If you think too much, you run the risk of making your character seem to convenient, or too stock.  Don’t concentrate on the character’s actions within your conflict.  Look at his characteristics away from it.  What was your character like before his life went to Hell?  You may not use it all, but you never know what may become important later.

    If you are a writer, chances are you are a people-watcher, as well. Your mind has picked up various ways of speak, mannerisms, habits, and all sorts of character traits that you aren’t even aware you saw. As you work, these will flow through you. (more…)

  • Character Development (Week of 20 February 2012)

    Characters walk in and out of the cafe all the time. Some are interesting, some merely background players in a larger story, but all of them get some time on the stage here. Guitar-slingers, demon hunters, chrononauts and closet monsters alike mingle with main characters running gauntlets that real people would quail at. The Confabulators paint every character in our stories with the same care but to varying degrees of completion.

    Some of us need to know more about some characters and some a little less. This week we’re going to share our process of learning about people we create out of thin air and then do horrible things to. Bear with us if it seems as though we’re enjoying our godlike powers of creation. It’s one of the things that makes us what we are: storytellers. Come on in, rub elbows with our characters. The coffee is hot and your table is right here. Maybe you’ll recognize yourself in something we write.

  • Complicated + Ugly = Wrong.

    I’m a technical writer. I get assignments, with requirements and (horrors!) deadlines. The content and general format are usually specified. But the way I present the information is up to me.

    There’s a rule of thumb in computer programming. If an algorithm is complicated and ugly, it’s wrong. The same rule applies to technical writing. If what you are writing makes no sense, then you need to simplify. Hard concepts require short choppy sentences. Don’t worry about style. Worry about communicating.

    Recently I was asked to help update a program manual. The previous version was, in a word, awful. The original author wrote it ten years ago, and he was good at writing regulations— which showed in spades. This book could be prescribed as a cure for insomnia, except we were worried about side effects. The whole project got dumped on my desk with the terse order, “Make it better.”
    That manual was complicated. It was ugly. It was oh, so wrong, on so, so many levels.

    So I simplified it. I reorganized it into three sections; one for program participants, one for their technical experts, and one for their lawyers. I translated the language from Government-ese to English, added color, “chunked” the information by employing sidebars and call-outs, and modernized the typography and layout. I alternated blocks of technical information with narrative case studies and success stories and added so many graphics the darned thing almost reads like a comic book. I excised the former subtext of regulatory doom and gloom and replaced it with a pep talk. I prepared to defend to the death my decision to use the second person, “you,” when referring to the reader rather than the bureaucratic and distant word “party.”

    Then I printed it out, lovingly swaddled it in my best binder clip, and sent it out to the higher-ups for their review and criticism. Sometimes you just have to let your babies go out into the world and face the slings and arrows.

    My bosses loved it. (Except for that one typo I missed.) It has all the required program and regulatory information, but unlike the previous version it is readable. Helpful. Simple. Elegant. And right.

    (By the way, this is the fourth draft of this blog entry. I started the first three with what I thought was a perfect beginning, after which things got very complicated and very ugly very fast. My “perfect beginning” turned out to be perfectly wrong.)

  • Panning for Gold in the Dark

    A couple of weeks back the fabulous Confabulators weighed in on where their writing ideas come from.  I may backtrack a bit over some of that territory, because where they come from seems to be connected to the ideas I end up pursuing past the ‘idea’ stage.

    Looking back on the thousands of words I’ve written, I sort of see this pattern: for a novel or short story, what usually what gets me going, and keeps me engaged, is something I’m struggling to understand in my own life.

    For example:

    ~The aftermath of the unexplained death of my father became a short story about the changing relationship of two brothers, as one pulls away from what’s left of his family.

    ~Trying to understand marriage became a novel exploring the lives of a girl traded into white slavery and a man raised in the 1960’s “who did everything right and failed.”

    ~The idea of refuge and the families we make became a novel about the friendships between gay theater kids in college and their circle of friends (‘Fame meets Boogie Nights’.)

    ~Addiction, the allure of escapism, and personal betrayals (both perpetrated and experienced) became a book about a young girl’s search for her birth parents in an alternate reality. (more…)

  • Storyteller’s Vagary

    Q: How does an idea get developed?

    A: In the dark with another idea rubbing up against it.

    Q: How does an idea get developed?

    A: One thought plus one notion equals One Idea. Take three or four Ideas, apply Heat and alchemically a story appears in the mist.

    Q: How does an idea get developed?

    A: Ideas + Heat = Story.

    Not very helpful answers to an odd question. These are the sort of answers that I’ve read from several authors, the sort of thing that’s been frustrating as I have tried to grow as a storyteller. It doesn’t really mean any one thing and can be interpreted so many different ways that it’s ultimately meaningless. I’ve tried to relate what I do to percolating coffee, sauteeing vegetables, aging whiskey or fermenting wine. None of them have been good analogies and all have been even worse metaphors.

    Dreams are part of the mix, to be sure. Anything that recycles or goes over an idea until it coheres is helpful. They’re not the most important thing because they’re irregular and for some reason I don’t always remember them. I can do the self-hypnotizing thing and try to remember them, and that works, but it’s not the most reliable thing I can do.

    For me – and I’ve been struggling with how to tell you this – developing a notion into an Idea is kind of mystical. I know, it’s not all that helpful. Being truthful, going back to the Idea Still, it really is a mystery to me how an Idea gets turned into a story. It’s one part Interest, one part Need and who knows what else. What I can and will share with you below (and this is my fourth attempt at quantifying all this) are two things that I do to facilitate the mystical process.

    WRITE IT DOWN

    Easiest thing in the world to do, just put pen to paper and throw down whatever’s coming to me. I’ve got notebooks and scraps of paper everywhere. The best one is a spiral notebook divided into three sections of about sixty pages each and it’s half full of scribblings about this and that. When I use one of the ideas or notions there, I cross it off.

    Writing things down solidifies them in my mind. I’ve got so many things vying for my attention in my head that if I tried to hold on to things in there alone I wouldn’t be able to access them. I know some writers can do that, I can’t. I have to write things down.

    WALK IT OUT

    The best thing I can do for my writing is to exercise on a regular basis. My favorite thing to do is take a three-mile powerwalk first thing in the morning before the chickens are up. That part of the day where the city is just waking up and the possibilities of the day are endless is where I get a good chunk of thinking done. I often come home from that walk with an insight into the story I’m working on. I’ve solved plot problems, work problems and any number of other things on that walk.

    I can’t emphasize enough how important exercise is to a writer. You have to move your body to stimulate your mind. It’s science, look it up. The data is there.

    It’s difficult to synthesize what I do into five or six hundred words. I hope that the more I think about it, the more I walk it out, I’ll be able to give a more concise and satisfying answer. Maybe not though. Perhaps it’s best that some things are more mysterious than others, yeah?

  • But does it lead down the primrose path?

    Every writer has the moments of doubt and indecision, asking herself, “Is there a story there?  Would anyone ever want to read this, anyway?” Usually the answer to both those questions is no, if you consider it too rationally, and she must learn to ignore the nagging voice that insists all ideas are bad, and no one would ever want to read anything she wrote, and instead persevere with the hope that all the ideas are good at heart, that the muse will triumph if you just start writing.  It’s not about the story, it’s about how you tell the story.  Any story can be made interesting, right?  Remember The Social Network?  The concept behind the movie sounded so dull, but the movie was so entertaining, even suspenseful!

    Alas, this is not always the case.  After watching the Social Network, I had to conclude not that it was a good movie about something boring, but that I was wrong about the original concept, which the movie revealed as an important and interesting topic.

    I believe that most ideas will eventually produce some good writing, if one explores the topic enough and allows it to branch and lead to new topics, twining itself into a world of interest.  But every once in a while, a true stinker of an idea does come up.

    Generally, if I have to work too hard to develop an idea, if it doesn’t help me at all by suggesting its own new directions, I eventually abandon it and return to a better-traveled path.  Good concepts do branch and twine and scaffold, and help bulk themselves up into a novel.  Bad concepts can be just carbohydrates–that quick burst of energy that fails right around 10:30, too early for lunch but too late for second breakfast.

    If I can’t stop thinking about an idea, I figure there is something to it; if I follow, it will lead me to some good thinking and writing.  But sometimes, if I forget a project, my potential audience probably would too.  The worst ideas will be naturally abandoned, and that is as it should be.

  • Pants are optional. Plans are not.

    I’ve tried lots and lots of different things in the pursuit of cultivating story ideas. As an avid NaNoWriMo participant, many of my manuscripts have been an exercise in pantsing, where the story develops while my fingers are typing it. However, I’ve found over the years that a pure pantsing technique doesn’t work that well for me. For one thing, my characters tend to lead me off in strange and unpredictable directions (a phenomenon many NaNo novelists experience in November), but those directions are often dead-ends, and boring ones at that. For another, when I approach a novel with absolutely no planning at all, the ending tends to be…not. No wrap-up, no conclusion, no sense of fulfillment. That’s less than ideal for both me and my prospective readers.

    The alternative to pantsing is careful, meticulous planning. Outlining every scene, detailing every setpiece, crafting thorough background stories for characters and extensive histories for your world. I know many authors absolutely love this process of world-building, and I’ve certainly dabbled in it and enjoyed it as well. I’ve taken online classes that explore theme, and the hero’s adventure, and story arcs, and all kinds of other very important things.I’ve filled a white board with color-coded index cards, and used Scrivener to map out every scene, character, and setting in meticulous detail. I’ve even gone so far as to try rigid plotting techniques like the Snowflake approach.The problem I’ve had with these methods is that by the time I get to the actual novel-writing, I’m bored. All the excitement of creativity is leeched out of me during the outline process, leaving me uninspired and disinterested. Clearly not the right mindset for tackling a novel-length writing exercise.

    (more…)

  • To Catch a Wild Idea

    An idea is like a wild animal. At first, I hear it scratching and chittering in the attic. I can poke my head up there to see what it is, but if it’s not ready to be seen, it’ll scurry away into the shadows. The best I can do is let it nest up there and wait for it to come out of hiding.

    If I don’t poke at the wild idea, it’ll get comfortable. It might grow. Maybe I’ll leave some food out for it, coax it out into the light. If it’s a healthy idea, and I don’t force the issue, it’ll come out into the garden in its own time.

    Assuming I haven’t startled it by shouting or trying to trap it in a cage, the wild idea will step out into the sun blinking, as curious about me as I am about it. I can see what it is at last. I can estimate its weight, the sharpness of its teeth, the velvet of its fur.

    This is the tricky part. I have to figure out the approach.

    I circle, examining it from every side. I step forward, change my mind, and step back.

    Maybe I’ll come in from the left, say, going with a third person approach. I croon to the wild idea in a soft voice, let it eat from my hand, then slip a leash over its head. Sometimes this works well and it walks by my side, docile, yet still exotic.

    That doesn’t always work, though. Maybe the left was a poor choice. The wild idea is blind in that eye and startles when I appear out of nowhere. It might dash off, but more likely, I’ll grab it by the scruff of the neck and wrestle the leash over its head.

    You can’t force a wild idea into submission. It’ll get sluggish. It’ll choke on its tether. It’ll wander around in circles making pathetic wheezing noises. The only thing to do is release it, start over, and come at it from another angle until I get it right.

    From the right this time as an omniscient narrator? Maybe straight on, first person? I must go softly. The idea is skittish.

    Sometimes an idea is too wild, too prickly, or even too domesticated. No angle feels right. The idea flops over on its back, sides heaving. I try to drag it where I want it to go. It snuffles and goes silent.

    It’s not dead, but it might as well be. I can do nothing with it.

    Let it go, Rach. Just let it go.

    There’s always some new creature skittering in the attic, waiting for me to offer it table scraps. If I can find the right approach, it’ll follow me to the end of the story.

  • You’d Know Better than I Would

    Hahahahaha. You’re joking, right? You assume that I know when an idea is good or needs to be abandoned.

    That’s what I count on my readers for.

    I’ve thought certain ideas were the most brilliant things since Harry Potter and been informed that they’re more ridiculous than Twilight.

    And I’ve also thought some ideas were absolute garbage that my writing group has told me are worth trying to get published.

    I think writers are too close to their ideas to be able to accurately judge. It’s what we need each other for. We have love/hate relationships with all of our writing and we can’t be trusted to make the decision whether an idea is good or needs to be abandoned.

    I also tend to be a bit like a pit bull when it comes to ideas. Good or bad, I can’t let go. Never give up, never surrender type mentality. Even when I’ve been told an idea sucks, or even if I know it myself, I still tinker with it in the back corner of my mind, trying to figure out how I can fix it up, rearrange it, give it a different coat of paint so that it is useable after all.

    And that is how I develop ideas. I take bits and pieces and try to fit them together, or take them apart and use different pieces in different places. Save some pieces for later if I can’t find a spot for them. Maybe I’m an idea hoarder. Ideas stacked in my mind like leaning piles of decades-old newspapers in an old lady’s house.

    Mostly, I develop my ideas by writing them out. Sometimes it’ll be an outline of events or character arcs, but sometimes it’ll just be a scene, and the story grows up around it. The more I write the better feel I get for whether an idea is solid enough to see through to the end.

    Ok, I might have lied a little bit. I do sometimes know when I’ve got a good idea. It’ll just hit me. Like lightning. An idea. And I think “Yeah, that would make a good story.” There’s usually bouncing up and down on my toes, pacing, and sometimes even hysterical laughter, and that’s when I know I’ve got something good. How could I abandon something like that?