Strange habits and traits give your characters specificity

We’re all a little strange.  All of us.  Even your friends who you think are really quite normal.  They’re hiding things.  They have habits, desires, peccadilloes that if you knew of them would really sound quite odd.  I know someone who closes his his eyes when he turns out the light.  He doesn’t know why he does this, he just does.  My mother saves answering machine messages from me and my sister in case anything should happen to us.  She hasn’t admitted this (the reason behind saving them) but I know her well enough to know that’s why she does it.  Someone else I know can’t stand to see one of her long hairs on the bathroom counter.  She has to stop everything she’s doing and throw it away. Another friend can’t stand the sound of brushing his own teeth.

Your characters should be like this too.  They should have things that are particular only to them.  And I’m not saying they should be good dancers, though you can certainly add that to their repertoire of personality traits, I’m saying give them something unusual, something well, a bit weird.  Now think about the whys of this oddness. If you are stuck with your novel, or work in progress this weirdness may galvanize you.

Examples:

Sredni Vashtar, by Saki:

“Every Thursday, in the dim and musty silence of the tool-shed, he worshipped with mystic and elaborate ceremonial before the wooden hutch where dwelt Sredni Vashtar, the great ferret. Red flowers in their season and scarlet berries in the winter-time were offered at his shrine, for he was a god who laid some special stress on the fierce impatient side of things, as opposed to the Woman’s religion, which, as far as Conradin could observe, went to great lengths in the contrary direction.”

This peculiar habit, giving offerings to a hen provides a form of respite for Conradin.  So frustrated and thwarted by his aunt is he that he creates his own brand of religion in which the hen has mystical powers to thwart Conradin’s aunt.  Why does he do this? Because the ritual brings him comfort.

“The Things They Carried,” by Tim O’Brien:

“First Leuitenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day’s march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there.”

We learn so much about Jimmy Cross in these first few lines.  The zinger though for me and what really sticks, is this image of him licking the envelope flaps.  It speaks to his desperation, his sadness, his longing.  And it does it almost instantly.

I tried this recently in my story Sugar Packets.  One of my characters writes on sugar packets.  He writes little messages on them and leaves them behind in coffee shops, hoping someone will find them.  I think it’s his way of reaching out, of trying to connect, like a modern day version of sending a message in a bottle.

Give this a try, especially one you’re having trouble with and give that character something unique and slightly odd about them.  See where it takes you.

When working at home isn't working, it's time to go somewhere else.

Location matters.  I’m not talking about the setting of your novel or work in progress;  I’m talking about the place in which you write.  I’ve come to realize that home is not it.  Not by a long shot.  I can set aside a “special” place to write.  I can devote an entire room to it.  I have a spare room that is actually a study, yet I never sit in it.  I find it impossible to write my novel home.  And yet.  I keep trying.

So today I fled home for the library.  And magically I wrote.  What I’ve realized is that I associate home with work – kids, cooking, housework, the grind.  I can carve out whatever space I want at home, it’s still home.  The strange thing is I seem to have no trouble writing short stories from home, especially when there is a deadline involved.  I have three stories out to literary magazines at the moment, all the result of a deadline.  The novel though just won’t be written at home.  I don’t know why this is exactly.  Perhaps it’s too expansive or unformed or maybe I just need to shoot the thing. I’m not sure.  But one thing is clear, I’m not getting any closer at home.

The other problem with home is the siren song of the internet.  When stuck with a piece of writing, I suddenly need to pay bills that aren’t even due with bill pay.   Suddenly it’s critically important I find a reason to research tulip bulbs, though I have little interest in gardening.  I once spent an entire day researching the Wizard of Oz because I was writing a story set during the filming.  I used research as an excuse not to write.  My friend Ellen Sussman, a great writer who has a new novel coming out with Ballantine, says that instead of wasting writing time on research she just skips over whatever needs research and simply writes in parenthesis: (research).  She knows she needs to go back to it later, but when she’s on a roll, she won’t let herself get derailed by the rabbit hole that is the internet.  That was a lot of mixed metaphors I think, but you get the idea.

So be honest with yourself.  Is home a problem either because of the distractions or the internet?  If it is, try somewhere else.  Even better, try somewhere with no internet.

* Heard of a contest? Running a contest you’d like writers to know about? Email me and I’ll put it up! taratara at killthe muse dot com. Or tweet me!

NPR's Three-Minute Fiction Contest

Sunday morning, I got an email in my in box from NPR.  Part of a story I had submitted for NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction was going to be read on All Things Considered.  I’d written the story just a few days before, and it probably took about two hours.  I’d been cruising around the web looking for contests to post on this blog and found the NPR one and thought, well, what the hell.  It was selected as a favorite on NPR’s site and Alan Cheuse, an author and the contest’s judge wanted to read a bit of my story on air.

Deadlines have a way of doing this, of forcing creativity.  Faced with a looming deadline, a word count limit (the contest allows no more than 600 words so it can be read in three minutes,) and a photograph meant to inspire the entries, I was able to write something, and write it fast.  And yet given all the time in the world and no restrictions whatsoever, I seem to get stuck with my larger pieces.  My novel is at the moment very stuck, and though I am using the methods I write about on this blog to get it going again, it remains much harder than what I was able to pull off the other day with the NPR contest.

What these contests can give you, in addition to a burst of welcome creativity is a bit of fame, and sometimes that’s what we need when we are slogging away thinking, “…and why am I doing this again?”  Even if you don’t get recognition in the contest you enter,  you will have written something and I can pretty much guarantee that even if you aren’t thrilled with the piece, you’ll be happy you produced something and got writing again.

Here are a few contests that might get you going.  I’ve focused on flash fiction here, though there are a lot of contests available here:

American Short Fiction Flash Fiction Contest

1000 word limit, $500 prize; both first and second prize winners get published in the mag.  Deadline May 1st.  American Short Fiction is an outstanding magazine and stories they’ve published have been chosen for BASS (Best American Short Stories) collections.

Fish Publishing One -Page Story

300 word limit.  This is a British publication and the prize is 1,000 euro.  Deadline is March 20th.

Flash Fiction Contest sponsored by Rhode Island Writers Circle

1000 word limit, $500 prize.  Deadline is June 10th, 2010

There's a story in there somewhere

I’m not exactly sure where to put this category wise, but I think it’s a prompt.  I feel like there are stories in here, mounds of them.  Strange, eerie, sad ones perhaps, but then a lot of fiction isn’t terribly cheerful.

They say truth is stranger than fiction, and this list proves it.  The list starts in 430 BC when Empedocles, a Pre-Socratic philosopher, jumps into an active volcano.  It continues to modern day – a recent entry from 2009 records the unfortunate death of Sergey Tuganow who bet two women that he could continuously have sex with them both for twelve hours. He won the bet but had a heart attack, apparently because of the full bottle of Viagra he downed.

While some of these are just too odd to be useful, there’s sure to be one here that will spark something.

And so I give you Wikipedia’s List of Unusual Deaths.

The Story Generator needs no batteries.

I learned this technique once in a short story class.  It’s a bit like Mad Libs and really works when you are stuck as hell.

1. Take five 3×5 note cards and on each write an occupation:  maybe firefighter, sword swallower, lawyer or drug dealer.
2. Take another five cards and write a behavior, the stranger the better since it’ll inspire you:  maybe, collect sugar packets, put gummy bears in the sock drawer, bury the photo album.

Now, shuffle the decks individually and flip over one from each pile.  Now create a “why” sentence.  So you might get:  “Why did the drug dealer bury the photo album?”  Or “Why did the firefighter collect sugar packets?”  When you’ve got one you like answer this question through a story.  You can do this two ways:

1. Imagine this is the last event of the story, the culmination of everything that happens.  Think of your conflicts, your setting and your back story.  Why does the character do this in the end?
2. Or you can simply use this image as a starting point.  Maybe the story opens with the drug dealer burying a photo album.  As I wrote about in my post starting in the middle, you should always be dropping your reader into the thick of things.

If you don’t have note cards, don’t worry about it.  Don’t make it into an excuse for a trip to Target, which is what I’d do.  Any paper will do.

I wrote a post the other day about beginning at the end.  When you’re stuck and don’t know where to start, sometimes it’s helpful to figure out where you’re going to end up.  Beginnings are daunting, probably much more so than endings.

In this post, I’ll talk about first lines.  We tend to do a lot of throat clearing, scene setting and meandering in our beginnings.  It’s boring for your reader, who wants to get to the meat of the story.  Worse, it’s a deal breaker for an agent who has limited time.  First sentences should be like that time you walked in on an argument or overheard a discussion you weren’t supposed to.  You don’t know how things started, you were just thrust into it.  You can do this with a story or a novel.  They say you should never start a novel with weather.  Plenty of novels do, but the advice is valid.  All you’re doing is unnecessary throat clearing and stage setting.  Take a look at a story or opening chapter of yours and see if it draws your reader in right away.

Now take note of these first lines:

Paul Auster in City of Glass begins his novel:

“It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.”

Here Auster unnerves us, drawing upon something familiar that has happened to all of us.  We want to know what the wrong number started exactly.  What is the “it” that got started because of this simple wrong number?  Why did they call in the dead of night?  What was the emergency?  The novel could have begun with a long description of the narrator’s house or  bedroom, maybe a description of him getting into bed and so forth.  But it doesn’t.  It also puts us squarely in the future of the story.  He’s looking back, he’s telling us what started it all.  It’s already happened, and if we want to know what it is, well we’re going to have to keep reading.

Another example:  In Cathedral by Raymond Carver, Carver opens with this line:

“This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night.”

The reader doesn’t enter the story hearing about the weather or with the wife and the narrator discussing whether or not the man is coming to stay.  It’s been decided.  He’s on his way already.  Only one of them knows the man, and furthermore he’s blind.  And like that, you’re along for the ride.

Remember this when you write and also when you read.  Great first lines almost always drop you into the story without much explanation, without holding your hand, without waiting for you to get your bearings.

Write fiction inspired by this photo. Photo credit: Robb Hill / Robb Hill Photo

Fiction contests are a great motivator.  Contests can earn you a little money and prestige, give you some publishing credits (often contest winners are published) and even bring agent interest.  In a contest judged by Joyce Carol Oates once, I was named a runner up.  No money or publishing credit, but my story was passed to an editor in New York who contacted me asking for more work.  At the time, he wanted a novel, which I didn’t have or hadn’t started.  But when I’m done, he’ll be the first person I call.

To me the main benefit to the contest is the deadline.  Tonight for example, I found this gem, NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction Contest. NPR book critic Alan Cheuse will choose a winning story to be read on-air.  A three-minute story is about 600 words.  This is the third round of their contest and for it they want original fiction inspired by the photograph above. Check out the contest. Enter.  I did.  You may not win, but it’ll get you writing and that’s what counts.

Good enough for Nabokov. Good enough for you.

Recently it was revealed that Nabokov had written an entire novel (unpublished in his lifetime) on 138 note cards.  A WHOLE novel.  Sometimes I wonder if the reason I struggle is because I try to come at the novel as a whole.  And in trying to remember everything I need to do, all the scenes and dialogue I need to get down, I get stuck. Note cards are a clever and deceptively effective way of laying out plot or character or setting for a novel.  For this post, I’ll focus on using note cards to plot your novel.

Write down your major plot points in your novel, one on each note card.  I’ll use Nabokov’s Lolita as an example of what the some of the major plot points would look like:

• Humbert Humbert moves to Ramsdale to write.  He rents a room in the house of Charlotte Haze.
• Charlotte falls in love with Humbert and presses marriage.
• Humbert becomes obsessed with Charlotte’s daughter Lolita.  He marries Charlotte in order to stay near Lolita.
• Charlotte reads his diary and discovers his obsession.  She makes plans to leave.

Obviously there are a lot more plot points in Lolita, as the plot is complicated, but you can see above that plot points are meant to be very bare boned.  The only question you are answering on these note cards is:  what happens next. The great thing about note cards is that you can tack them to a bulletin board, spread them out on your desk, rearrange them to change your plot.  Maybe certain events need to happen sooner in your novel for example.  Or maybe you’re letting the cat out of the bag too quickly and need to slow your plot down, saving certain plot points for later.  Plot is probably my biggest challenge, so I’m going to try this too.  I’ll let you know how it goes in a follow-up post.  Let me know if this works for you.

Put your characters in strange places.

It seems characters are always talking and discussing things in restaurants.  This is true in real life of course too. But for the most part it’s fairly boring scene setting, at least when it’s done over and over again.  And by putting your characters somewhere mundane and expected, you lose a big opportunity.  What if for example, your characters are in a critical conversation on a Ferris wheel?  Perhaps a long day of arguing at a fair has culminated in a confrontation.  It just so happens they are in the air at the time, high above the fairgrounds.  What if your characters are at a costume party, in costume?  Maybe it’s Halloween.  The amazing Lorrie Moore story, You’re Ugly Too, is partially set at a Halloween party.  At the party, the main character is forced to make small talk with a man wearing a woman costume with fake breasts.  The scene is funny, and yet there’s an underlying feeling of sadness.  All night she’s been trying unsuccessfully to connect with people and failing.  And as she stands trying to have a normal conversation with a man wearing breasts, we’re reminded just how alone she actually is.

So your challenge:

Find a conversation in your novel or story between two people that happens somewhere rather mundane -maybe the kitchen, or a restaurant or coffee shop.  Try and find a scene you are stuck with; a scene where something important is being discussed.

• Change the location.  It doesn’t need to be ridiculous, though it can be.  But challenge your characters and your dialogue. You’ll be using the setting to raise the stakes and the tension.
• Don’t get too bogged down describing the setting just yet. Just jump into the conversation they are having and make it obvious where they are, both through dialogue and what is happening around them.
• If you already have an idea, go for it.  If not here are six places to put your characters.

1. amusement park
2. in a car stuck in a snowbank.
3. lost on a hiking trail
4. in a tent
5. in a hot air balloon
6. on an airplane

We all have writing days that are so amazingly productive that we wonder what the other days are all about.  Hey, this isn’t so bad you think.  At the end of your 5 pages, or your 500 words or your blog post, you think, man that was easy.  Every day should be this good.  Only we both know it’s not.  But you can use these days to your advantage.  Not by writing more on those days, though you can certainly do that if you want to.  But when you are feeling that creative, you can use those days to add to your spreadsheet of ideas.  You should always have  a spreadsheet of scenes (if you’re a novelist) or article ideas or blog posts ready to go for those days when writing is like pulling teeth, only without the novacaine.   Then on mornings you are stuck you can refer to that spreadsheet.