Tell Me Your Secrets
No…not you guys. *covers ears* My fragile psyche couldn’t handle that. 🙂 My characters, I need them to tell me their secrets.
Sound familiar?
Oh yes, I’ve been here before, I’ll be here again. But this time, it turns out there were still things I didn’t know about The Frenchman and his Fashionable Lady even after having done an entire 50K, polished and done MS. So, after getting some advice from my wonderful editor, I set to work on fixing the problems with the MS.
But it wasn’t going well. I realized something: I had neutered my hero. I was afraid of him being unlikable. So while I had set him up as this man in need of redemption, we didn’t have the full scope of why he might need redemption, of how his mistake had affected his life, of how far he needed to grow as a person. Because I had pulled my punch and like whoa big time.
So, good write friend Lisa Hendrix said, write a scene you would never put in the book. Explore all the things that you think will make your hero too unlikable for print. Let it all go.
And I did. I wrote a scene with the Frenchman at his worst, and I learned so much. From why he lives in the apartment he lives in, to how he reacted to a major, live changing incident.
I was set to go.
Almost.
I thought my Fashionable Lady was all ironed out. I knew her conflict backward and forward. I knew everything there was to know about her.
Um…wrong.
I got to this point in the MS where she was worried about The Frenchman taking so much control over her business and I thought…why? Why does it matter so much to her? And I realized I didn’t know. Beyond the desire to maintain the control, I didn’t know why the business meant so much to her.
So I clicked back over to the document with Blaise’s big unusable scene. And I started writing. I just let Ella talk. Rant, actually, to her parents, about why she’s afraid to lose her business, about how angry she is. And everything just sort of spilled out. And I learned so much about a character I thought I knew.
All her motivations were suddenly there, all of her fears, everything she needs to let go of.
If you’re stuck with your characters, I highly recommend it. It helps you get it all out in a very obvious way so you can work at weaving it into the MS, and I found it more organic than a character sheet. (yes, this is me, the crazy writer talking…we are SO crazycakes.)
Hope some of you find this helpful!
*stalks back to revision cave*
Comments
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Hi Maisey, Great post and good advise. I came across the same thing while reading one of the craft books…
I find character sheets do NOTHING for my process. And it’s amazing how much you THINK you know about a character until they start vomiting up the good stuff 🙂
Aimee
Thanks, Nas! Would you believe…I just don’t read books on writing. LOL. So I have to glom advice from people who do!
Aimee, character sheets are to structured for me. I find reducing a character to points in that way is just not for me. But having a character tell me things, in her voice? Now that works! And I refer back to all her ‘vomit’ when I need to. 😉
I am totally giving this a try. I am stuck with a character who scared to let my hero break her heart. And no matter what reasons I come up with, I’m still stuck looking at it saying but WHY?
Maybe I can go coax her secrets out of her before bed.
Oh yeah, give it a try! And the best thing is, it doesn’t have to be pretty or anything, it just has to be her truth. It lets you cut through all the ‘is this right?’ and get to the heart of it. (says the crazycakes writer again)
Good luck!
No, it’s not pretty, but 1,200 words later I have my answers!
Thank you, Maisey (and Lisa!).
It’s excellent advice! I’ve actually taken to writing those scenes quite regularly. They are fantastic eh? That Lisa knows a thing or two. 🙂
A fabulous tip! Thanks Maisey!
great advice, thanks!
Julia, that’s half the beauty of it! That it really doesn’t need to be pretty. 😉
Jackie, oh, so much!!
Thanks, Lacey and Kerrin!
I love this idea–I do kind of a mix between that and character sheets before I start writing. I also have a love of enneagrams and use those to help keep me on track with the characters on the page rather than me getting them to do something because it’ll make the story flow better.
The other day when writing, my heroine did something which was totally right for her but it means my plans for the next couple of chapters wouldn’t work … grrr on those pesky characters having lives of their own.
Great tip, Maisey-really gets to the good stuff. Thanks! m
I know it, Jo! they can be hecka pesky! They mess up our plans…but sometimes, it means we were forcing them to act out of character and they just have to be them! which makes it better. 🙂
Thanks, Margie! hope it helps. 😉