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Kill Your Darlings

Have you ever been reading a book, and a character dies, and you’re completely thrown out of the story? It’s happened to me more times than I can count, and it is the worst.

 

If you haven’t guessed by this point, this post is not about the old adage to trim down your novel by cutting words, characters, scenes, subplots, etc, though incidentally I’ve gotten pretty good at that. After talking about creating and developing strong characters, this post is about killing them. If you’ve missed any of the posts in this series on writing characters, you can go read about creating strong protagonists, antagonists, and side characters and about character development in general.

 

Fair warning, I will be using lots of examples in this post, so there will be some spoilers ahead, specifically from the Harry Potter books, the Hunger Games, the Lunar Chronicles, The Book Thief, Tamora Pierce’s Trickster books, and the Mortal Instruments. I will try to keep the spoilers to a minimum, where possible, but you have been warned, so read on at your own peril (but honestly, if you don’t know who dies in Harry Potter by this point, you deserve to be spoiled).

 

So let’s start with looking at some character deaths that drove me nuts.

 

First, Lupin, Tonks, and Colin Creevey. The climactic sequence of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a huge battle, so naturally people are going to die. Lots of people are going to die. I accept that. Among my writing buddies, I am personally known for killing whole bunches of characters ruthlessly. That is not my problem with some of the deaths at the end of Harry Potter. We’ve already lost Hedwig, Dobby, and Fred in this book alone. Oh, and by the way, Harry’s about to go sacrifice his own life. And then we find out, just by seeing their bodies, that Lupin, Tonks, and Colin Creevey are dead. I get that this is the cost of war. But we don’t see them die, and then their deaths pale in comparison to the idea of Harry’s sacrifice. Personally, this combination doesn’t work for me.

 

To give one more example of a death that doesn’t work for me, let’s look at the end of Mockingjay, when out of nowhere, Prim is in the middle of a war zone and gets blown up. I will admit that the movie did a much better job with this and cleared up a lot of the confusion about what happened (in the movie, it may in fact be something I accept), but in the book, it was not okay. First of all, Katniss volunteered for the Hunger Games in the first book in order to save Prim, and by killing Prim, it really makes you wonder, well what was the point of all of this? Furthermore, in the books, Prim is never developed as a character—she is always just an object for Katniss to protect. We are sad when she dies because Katniss is sad, but we are not forced to mourn her in her own right. Finally, though again I think the movie clears this up nicely, there is nothing gained by Prim’s death. She doesn’t save anyone or accomplish anything by dying, and we already very clearly have seen the cost of war *takes a minute to wail “Finnick!”*. And then Katniss votes for one more Hunger Games, for Prim, which invalidates everything even more.

 

These are just some examples of how a character death can fail. In these cases, and I’ve found in almost all cases when I’m annoyed by a character death, it’s because either the character wasn’t sufficiently developed (Prim) or because the character’s death was not given enough attention in the book (Lupin, Tonks, and Colin Creevey). For the record, I’d also like to say that I really don’t like it when the book ends with the main character dying, even if it’s a noble self-sacrifice. It is never okay with me.

 

There are plenty of examples of character deaths that work well for me, though, and I’d like to talk about why. First, look at Dumbledore. He is Harry’s mentor, so it’s kind of a given that he has to die at some point. In order for the hero to go off and kick butt, or at least to go camping for a year in search of butt to kick (I say this with love because I actually have no issues with the camping trip that is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), the mentor needs to get out of the way. Yet Dumbledore’s death works well because it is the culmination of a really dramatic scene. Harry and Dumbledore have stolen the Horcrux and made it back to Hogwarts. Dumbledore is sick, but Harry is confident he’ll be all right once he gets help. But then Snape, you awful person you, and oh yeah the Horcrux isn’t real. Plus, let’s not forget that there’s nothing like the drama of Dumbledore being blasted off the tallest tower. Finally, though we feel like we know enough about Dumbledore to mourn his death, there are also mysteries surrounding his death and also what he didn’t tell Harry in his life.

 

Next, think about one of the first deaths in The Lunar Chronicles series, Cinder’s younger stepsister Peony, who dies from the plague Cinder has discovered she is immune to. Peony isn’t Cinder’s mentor in any way, but she is the one person tying Cinder to her step-family. Though we haven’t spent much time with these characters yet, we already love Peony, not just because Cinder loves Peony but because we’ve gotten to know her ourselves. Finally, the sheer tragedy of it is just beautiful. Cinder is so, so close to saving her life, but she is just moments too late. I love it.

 

For similar reasons, I think all the deaths in Tamora Pierce’s books Trickster’s Choice and Trickster’s Queen work really well. We know the characters and we love the characters, their deaths push the plot and other characters forward, and with one exception, we see it all. Even the important death we don’t see on-screen is done really well, because we have to witness the other characters’ anxiety and grief while they wait for news. I also have no problem with everybody dying at the end of The Book Thief, though I know people who do, and in other World War II books with similar endings, I have been annoyed at the mass slaughter committed by the author to illustrate the tragedy of war.

 

I think how readers feel about character death can be so subjective. It depends on the reader and the book. Some of the situations that I described as not working for me might work for someone else, or might work better in a different book or different context. I prefer happy endings to tragic ones, or at least endings on the positive spectrum as far as endings go, but I recognize that not everyone shares this preference, and I have certainly been won over by books that don’t have happy endings. I’m not sure there are any hard and fast rules on how to effectively write a character death. I’ve killed a hundred characters in one move, and I’ve also killed an important character off-screen, though I can’t objectively say if any of those deaths work. There are all kinds of reasons for and ways to kill characters, whether because the character is a mentor or someone tying the protagonist down, or because the character’s life is part of the cost of war. Honestly, when I’m going into the last book in a series, I feel this awful and wonderful trepidation knowing that in some way, for the story to be significant, someone important has to die, but at the same time I don’t want anyone to die because I love them all so much. Of course, if it’s a long series, people have probably already died, so I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary for someone to die in the last book. Also, I’m definitely a fan of fates worse than death, such as Simon’s choice at the end of the Mortal Instruments series.

 

But while I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules on what makes a character death effective, I will say that for me it’s important that the character is sufficiently developed, that their death is given enough attention in the book, and that it is significant in some way to moving the plot and characters forward. I feel like it’s very similar to what I said a few days ago about developing your characters in general: people want to read about other people. Your characters lives should feel so real that your readers love them, cheer for them, and weep for them, and so should their deaths.

Developing Your Characters

It’s been a while since I last talked about writing characters—I was distracted by other things—but fear not, I still have a few things to say on the subject. So, last month, I talked about how to write strong protagonists, antagonists, and side characters. Now, I want to talk about developing these characters: how do you make these characters leap off the page and into your readers’ minds and hearts? Because, in case you haven’t guessed, it isn’t all about their motivation. Your characters can have excellent goals and excellent reasons for pursuing those goals, but no one wants to read about a bunch of stick figures. People want to read about other people.

 

So how do you turn your characters into real people? You develop them. There are so many ways to do this, and I’m not sure one way is better than another. I know people who write a short paragraph about each character outlining their most prominent traits. I know people who write a simple scene—like an encounter at a supermarket—about each character to get a grip on their voice and their thinking. There are character questionaires all over the internet, or you can create your own. When I was in high school, I used to fill out a 200-question worksheet of my own devising for every single character, but that got to be too much, because I tend to work with large casts, and honestly, no one cares what fruit your character would be if they could be a fruit. So I stopped that.

 

Now, I honestly tend to wing it. A character’s motivation can tell you a lot about the person, so I figure that out first, and then I extrapolate from that, and then I extrapolate some more. Sometimes, when I conceive of a character, I have a very clear picture of who they are, but other times I need to really dig into their personalities. As I write, who my characters are tend to come together for me, and this is even clearer as I revise. One time, when I had a large group of characters to introduce in one scene for the rest of the story, I spent some time looking at tropes of how personalities within groups break down. I figured out who I wanted to be what kind of personality within the group and then how they overlap, and that gave me a starting point to build their characters. When all else fails, I take long walks or long showers and ask myself one question after another until I figure out the basics. All I need to start writing are the basics. The character will grow on their own as I write and revise.

 

There are two things I like to think about when it comes to developing my characters, however. The first is character arcs. Like plot arcs, a character arc looks at the character’s path from the beginning of the story to the end. I examine where the character starts in terms of their personality, and I then look at who they are at the end of the story. Finally, I look at the events of the plot and I decide how these events affect the character—their personality and their motivations. A character’s personal journey doesn’t have to be straightforward. It isn’t just, this is who the character is at the beginning, and this is who they are in the end, and they just slowly change over the course of the book. A character can change suddenly. A character can change in a different way before they grow into the person they will be at the climax and finale of the story. A character can, and should, struggle with their growth and their identity. All these things make a character more realistic and thus more relatable.

 

The other important part of character development for me is looking at personality traits. I hear a lot of talk about character flaws, but I don’t buy that as a way to develop your characters. For one thing, it’s so general and overused that my initial response whenever anyone brings them up is “What does that even mean?” But beyond that, your characters don’t possess flaws. They possess traits. Yes, no one is perfect, and your character shouldn’t be perfect either, but I don’t think looking solely at the ways they are flawed is constructive. It’s much simpler to look at it in terms of traits that have positive and negative sides. For example, someone who is super organized might do really well in school or at work, but the minute something throws a wrench in their perfectly ordered world, they can’t handle it. Or someone who is stubborn or strong-willed might have the perseverance to pursue their goals, even against seemingly unbeatable odds, but it also means they can be single-minded and inflexible, unwilling to consider another approach or that someone else’s goals might be just as important as their own or even that their goals may be impossible. See what I mean? The important thing is the character’s traits and how they can be both positive and negative in any given situation.

 

So, that’s how I approach character development. This is what works for me, but like I said, there are so many ways you can do this, and I don’t think any one of them is better or worse than the others (except I really don’t think looking at character flaws works). However you develop your characters, it is an extremely important part of the story. You are asking your readers to spend time with your characters, to invest themselves in their lives and their problems, to cheer for them when they conquer challenges, to yell at them when they make bad decisions, and to scream and flail when they suffer. For your readers to do that, they have to feel—really, they want to feel—that these are real people.

Music in Writing

I am still reveling in the publication of “Dissonance” (and if you haven’t read it, go do so, now), and since it’s relevant, I wanted to take some time to talk about music in writing. If you didn’t know this already, music is very important to me. I’ve played the clarinet since I was eleven, and I enjoy singing (though usually in the shower). So it stands to reason that music works its way into almost everything I write. But for me, music in writing is a two-fold concept, and I’m going to talk about both aspects here.

 

First for the obvious part, literally writing about music. I’m not talking about stories that are solely about music—though I do have several of those kicking around. I’m talking about the role music may play in a story. When you think about it, music is a huge part of our culture. You can’t go anywhere without hearing it, and it affects you. You have favorite songs and songs you like but don’t want to admit you like and songs that oh my God if you hear them again you are going to yank your ears off. Why shouldn’t it be the same in your writing?

 

I have stories where the entire world’s magic system is based on music—like “Dissonance”—and I have a novel series I’m working on where the main character’s magic operates through music. But it doesn’t have to be so big and grand at all. In almost all my other stories, my characters have songs that hold special meaning for them, and beyond that, music is always part of the world—whether fantastic or real. It is played on street corners or in restaurants and stores or over the radio in the car. People sing, hum, or whistle, or they tap their toes in fingers in time with whatever song is going in their head. It is music’s all-encompassing presence that I try to incorporate into my stories, even the stories that aren’t about music at all (though it’s considerably less encompassing for those).

 

This is all well and good, you might say, but how can you pull it off without being obnoxious? No one likes it when authors include singing in their stories. Before I read Lord of the Rings, I never understood this viewpoint. I liked songs in writing. Then I read Lord of the Rings, and I got it completely. I was less than a quarter of the way through the book when I was like, “oh God, if there is one more song, someone’s gonna die!” My trick is to keep it short—no more than six lines at a time. If I have a longer song, I break it up with description of what the characters are doing or thinking or feeling. If there’s a chorus, I intimate that it will repeat, but don’t actually write it out. I also make sure that it is relevant—to the story, to the character, to the setting, something—relevant in a way that can’t be accomplished just by describing the music.

 

The point is, music is a huge part of our world and our culture, so I try to make it part of the worlds and cultures I create in my stories. But believe it or not, I’m not always writing about music, which leads me to the other aspect of music in writing I want to talk about, because even then, there is music in my writing.

 

I’ve seen a lot of writing advice given about finding your voice as a writer, and I never really got that, honestly, because I try to develop a different voice and style for each story I write. What’s important to me is finding the musicality in the writing—the rhythm of the sentences and the lyricism in the words you choose. This is why I believe that reading out loud is such a fundamental part of the editing process, because it springboards your words off the page and into life. It doesn’t just show you places where your prose need smoothing, it lets you hear the music of your words, which are the heartbeat of your story. If you can manage it, read out loud to other people, because they might spot something you don’t.

 

I don’t believe there’s one right rhythm for sentences (in fact one of my friends and I always seem to have just slightly different ideas of what sounds good to us). I don’t believe that only certain styles produce lyrical prose. I don’t even believe that lyrical prose is always called for. But I do believe that music and writing are not separate entities. I believe that they are, in fact, so tightly entangled in each other that it would be difficult to separate them. Even if you aren’t writing about music, the music is in the writing.

Dissonance

It is here! And it is not an April Fools joke! My short story “Dissonance” has been published in Abyss and Apex. Go read it here. I hope you enjoy, and if you do enjoy, please share it.

 

And after you’ve read the story, if you’re curious about where the idea came from, what revisions I made, and other fun facts, check out this page. Bonus: you’ll get to see my own illustration of the story.

What I Learned at the Disabilities Rights Center

Last October, after I took the LSAT, I started volunteering at the New Hampshire Disabilities Rights Center. I wrote about this a bit before Christmas, but now I’ve worked there for six months, and yesterday was my last day. I’m about to embark on the epic road trip of visiting law schools, and after that, my landlady and landlord from Italy are coming to visit, but I was very sad to be leaving.

 

I’ve had plenty of experiences where I’ve learned so much in a short time—not just in terms of knowledge but also in terms of myself—and these six months were no exception. I learned a ton, so much, it’s difficult to quantify.

 

I performed research—of the legal sort as well as your garden variety google searches. I learned how to find and read federal and state laws. I learned all sorts of new words, like “pursuant” and “furtherance.” And I researched and wrote a brochure on service animals and the Air Carrier Access Act as well as an article on the rights of students with traumatic brain injuries.

 

After Christmas, I worked with the Help America Vote Act team. We worked on publicizing the new accessible voting machines. We also wrote a pamphlet on creating an accessible campaign—through events, website design, and mailings—and contacted all the campaigns, planned monitoring visits of polling places all over the state to get feedback on the new machines and to check on basic accessibility requirements, and coordinated with the national organization RespectAbility to get people with disabilities to campaign events and to get disabilities rights issues on the table. I even got to do all investigation—by which I mean call a bunch of town clerks, ask them about absentee ballots that weren’t counted because of mismatched signatures, and hope they were honest with me. It was all super fun.

 

I also got to observe several stages of a case concerning denied eligibility of services, from its preparation and filed motions to the pre-hearing conference and the hearing itself. I worked on several stages of a different case myself, drafting Right to Know letters—the New Hampshire state equivalent of a FOIA request—and then I read, organized, and cataloged all the evidence we received from those requests—the discovery part of the case.

 

I did research for our policy director that he used in meetings with the state legislature. I reviewed specific facility policies and compared them to state laws regarding seclusion and restraint practices, and then I drafted a letter highlighting the areas where the facility was out-of-compliance. Finally, I learned about the immensely complicated and scary process of legislative history. (It became much less scary once I found my way to the state library where a lovely librarian found everything for me.) Basically, I went back into the history of a 1947 state law and read the original bills and the notes in the House and Senate journals for the original law and then several relevant amendments, all of this in order to determine the law’s intent. Legislative history is something, I’m told, that most law students don’t do until their second or third year.

 

So yeah, I did a ton, and I learned, and I’ll probably be starting law school in the fall with a bit of a head start. But my experience at the DRC gave me more than that. I had so much fun going to work every day, because every day I was working on something different and learning something new. I loved having lunch with all the attorneys and hearing about what they were working on and how they planned to approach it. And I will be forever grateful for all the support and advice they gave me as I went through the application process for law school, received all my acceptances, and began working my way towards a decision (a decision I still haven’t made yet, hence the epic road trip of visiting law schools I’ll be starting next week).

 

But it’s even more than that. I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again many more times, but a year ago, I was absolutely miserable—the rejections for the MFA programs I’d applied to were piling up, I’d decided I didn’t want to get a masters in comparative literature after all, I was not really enjoying teaching, and on the whole I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. Somehow, I clawed my way out of that mess of disappointment and uncertainty, and I took all the experiences I’d had and decided I wanted to go to law school. I put all my energy into studying for the LSAT and applying for law school. But at the same time, in just the last few months, everything I thought I wanted to do with my life had been turned on its ear, and right then I wasn’t sure I could trust that my decision to go to law school was really right for me. What if I hated it? What if I discovered something else I liked more? What if I was just unhappy right here and right now but I was still giving up on all my dreams? But after just a week at the DRC, I was confident, and that confidence has only grown over the last six months. Now, I am absolutely sure I am on a path to a career that matters to me and that I will enjoy every minute of. Now, I just have to pick a law school.

Mopsy Goes to Florida

As you might have guessed from the title, three weeks ago I went with my sidekick, her parents, and her younger brother to Pass-a-Grille, Florida. It was lots of fun. For one thing, it was terrific to escape the never-ending winter-without-snow of New Hampshire. It wasn’t hot enough to swim, but it was still very warm. I got to canoe, terrify some enormous birds on the beach, relax in the sun, and overcome my fear of dogs.

 

Now I know most of you have heard stories of how I’m not a huge fan of boats. I’ve gone kayaking with my sidekick before, and let’s just say it didn’t go so well. She couldn’t do any paddling because I was either trying to drink the ocean—which she tells me is a bad idea—I definitely wouldn’t be wagging my tail if she let me try it—or I was trying to jump into the ocean. Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t want to go swimming. I don’t like swimming that much either. I just wanted out of the boat. I really wanted out of the boat. After that, my sidekick usually left me at home when she went kayaking with her family, and I was pretty happy about it. But in Florida, she didn’t want to leave me in our hotel, because I wasn’t that familiar with it and she didn’t want me to get anxious. I might have been fine staying behind, but it turns out I like canoes better than kayaks. There was room for me to flop down on the bottom between my sidekick in the front and her dad in the back, and I got this nice combination of warm sun on my fur on one side and the cool bottom of the boat on my other. My sidekick said she was very proud of me. I did almost tip the boat with my wagging tail.

 

And I almost tipped the boat because of the birds. My sidekick was not so proud of my interest in the birds.

 

They were pelicans. They were everywhere—on the beach, on the piers, out on the water—and they were big. Really big. Huge. Bigger than me. And I kind of liked to leap at them and watch them fly off. I know. Not super good Seeing Eye dog behavior, but how often do you get to chase a pelican?

 

But while I did chase the pelicans once or twice, I was very good about not chasing dogs. I’ve been having some problems with dogs ever since Italy, so this was a big big deal. Lots of tail wags.

 

Here’s what happened. We’re in Assisi. The drivers are crazy people, and they just keep driving where we’re supposed to be walking. They’re pulling in front of us, creeping up behind us, screeching to a stop exactly where we were a second ago. I already let my sidekick get hit by one car—and we were on the sidewalk!—and there’s no way I’m letting it happen again. I will drag her into a hedge or up a tree if I have to (and I had to). So I am seriously wound up, and this is just outside. Inside, we have people yelling at us and blocking turnstyles. My sidekick describes riding the bus on the way to school (with all the students), like a claustrophobic roller coaster where you’re standing up, and she wasn’t the one looking at a hundred kneecaps (she learned to be very forceful with her elbows so that I didn’t get trampled).

 

Add to all this craziness the large dogs—either stray or off-leash—who came charging at me barking, and I forgot my training a little bit. Maybe a lot. Hey, they were scary, and they could understand me. I was working. I had a very, very important job—keping my sidekick alive until we could get home. So I barked back. I’m not supposed to bark ever. I know that. And no way am I supposed to get distracted by other dogs when I’m working. But they were bigger than me, and they were coming at me, and I couldn’t let them distract me from my job, so I had to tell them to stay back.

 

When we finally got home from Italy, my sidekick started working with me to stop the bad behavior, but by this point I had it in my mind so firmly that other dogs were bad—scary, even—that we weren’t making much progress. She called my school, The Seeing Eye, several times. They gave her advice about how to correct me and told me that whenever I barked at dogs she had to put the gentle leader on me. The gentle leader is not a muzzle. It doesn’t keep my mouth closed. It doesn’t prevent me from barking. It just puts pressure around my face on the points where my mommy would pick me up when I was a baby and liked to chew on her ears. It reminded me to stay focused on my job and not bark at the dogs. I didn’t like the gentle leader, and I knew I needed to stop barking at the dogs. I knew when I did it right, because my sidekick would get very excited and give me lots of pets and even kneel down so I could lick her ears. We both thought we were making progress, but then, every time, I would get startled by a dog, and I would bark, and we would be back to where we started.

 

Around Christmas, my sidekick tried a new tactic. Instead of just correcting the bad behavior, my sidekick started rewarding me with kibble every time I was a good girl. We’d gone to New York to pick up her brother from college, and we spent the day walking all over the city with her mother. When a dog was coming, she had me sit and focus on her and the treat until the dog passed, and if I didn’t bark and pull towards the dog, I got the treat. If I did, I got the gentle leader. It was slow going, but now we both felt like we were finally making progress. I don’t need to be afraid of walking past dogs: there are treats on the other side of it. Pretty soon, my sidekick didn’t have to ask me to sit. She could just tell me to leave it, and I would trot right past the dog. We kept practicing, and she starting weening me off the treats, replacing them with pets and cuddles and lots and lots of praise, which I like too, especially if it comes with the chance to chew her ears. (I like chewing ears.)

 

Which brings me back to Florida. We were walking on the beach, when we wandered into a section where dogs were allowed. Now, I’m a special dog—I have a mission—so I’m allowed to go anywhere with my sidekick, even if other dogs can’t. But all of a sudden, we went from having the beach to ourselves to being surrounded. And I mean surrounded. There were maybe fifty dogs, all off-leash, playing in the water, chasing balls, running around with each other. I slowed down a bit and looked at my sidekick. I was a bit nervous about all this. But she said “Leave it, Mops. Let’s go. Good girl!” And I kept right on going, right through all those dogs. I was so proud of myself, and my sidekick was so proud of me! We both knew I’d been making progress, but this really sealed the deal.

 

The dog problem isn’t behind us. If a dog appears suddenly, I still startle, and I might bark or just pull too hard on the harness, but we’re working on it, and I’m confident I can do it. If I can handle those fifty dogs in Florida, I can handle one, even if it’s giant and sneaky. I got my sidekick through Italy, and I’m going with her to law school, and no dog is going to stop me.

 

So thank you, Florida, for the springtime, for the relaxation, and for showing me that I don’t have to bark at dogs to do my job right.

Writing a Synopsis at the Last Minute

A few weeks ago, I wrote about beginning to query agents for my novel. All very exciting stuff, and it’s getting more exciting. When I left you, I said all I had to do was polish my query letter and finish up my synopsis and I’d be set to go. Well, the synopsis wasn’t going so well, but I didn’t want to lose all the momentum I had going, so I said, I’ll pick five agents who don’t require a synopsis for my first round of submissions, and once I query them, I’ll really get down to editing the synopsis. So that’s what I did.

 

Except for the synopsis part.

 

Before I submitted my queries, I had written a five page double-spaced synopsis that took a reader through the entire book, blow by blow. I had then edited it down to three pages. Most agents want a one-two page synopsis, and this was where I was struggling. If you’ve never tried it, describing a 330-page manuscript from start to finish in one page is really hard. Really, really hard. Throw in the fact that this 330-page manuscript has two storylines—one from the protagonist’s point of view in the present and one from her parents’ points of view in the past—and it gets even harder. So yeah, I was pretty stuck, and I was pretty much ignoring it. I figured I had until I was rejected by all five agents before I needed a synopsis for the next batch, and that was plenty of time.

 

Until one of the agents didn’t reject me and instead requested sample chapters and, you guessed it, a one-page synopsis. It was a moment of great excitement—my query works!—but also sheer terror. Now I needed a working synopsis—a working, one-page synopsis—and I needed it now. Actually, I really needed it yesterday so I could be submitting it now. And, oh yeah, I still didn’t know how to do that.

 

The good news was I wasn’t starting from scratch. The bad news was I felt completely overwhelmed. I had a three-page synopsis that was split into the past and present storylines, similar to how the book is set up, but it was awkward and clunky and way too long, and even I—with my expert cutting skills—was having trouble making it shorter. I started to panic. I wanted to get these sample chapters and synopsis off to the agent as soon as possible, but I wasn’t ready, and I didn’t know how to make myself ready to do that. And did I mention I should have had this done yesterday?

 

Once upon a time, I was crazy organized and on top of things. I had homework done a week in advance—that sort of crazy. Then I went to college, discovered television and a social life, and learned to procrastinate. And as I remembered after the fact, this is not the first time I’ve been caught off guard and had to produce something at light speed. And it worked out really well then, too (I got into Alpha). But this wasn’t a short story. This was a whole book boiled down to a page.

 

I panicked for about half an hour all over my skype writing group and some people from Alpha who’d helped me with my query. Finally, they managed to get me calmed down enough to think straight. They reminded me that the synopsis isn’t really that important. It’s not something to blow off, certainly, but many agents view it as a formality, a way to tell that your story has a beginning, middle, and end, and nothing whacky flying out of left field in the last sentence. My sample chapters were good, they reminded me. I just had to calm down, finish the synopsis, and get it out the door.

 

And that was all well and good, but I still didn’t know how to fix the synopsis. A couple people suggested that, since the parents’ storyline really is a subplot, it didn’t need to take up nearly as much room in the synopsis. I could just include a quick paragraph about it when the protagonist finds out the relevant information. I went back and forth on this. The parents’ storyline is really important to me. In earlier drafts of this novel, I had people insist that I cut it all together, but I really felt like it added a whole other layer of complexity to the novel and to my protagonist’s motivations, so I stuck with it. So I didn’t want to just eliminate the parents from the synopsis, because I reasoned, if they aren’t important enough to include in the synopsis, why are they so important to the novel? And I couldn’t say something along the lines of “The novel is told in three points of view,” because according to all my research on how to write a synopsis, you aren’t supposed to get that meta—no themes or motifs or even discussions of writing or point of view—just the plot and characters and some stuff about the setting. But this idea of boiling down the parents’ storyline into a short paragraph and then inserting it at a critical point in the synopsis clicked with me. Best of all, it allowed me to focus my wildly scattered panic into motivation and energy and get to work.

 

I cut out all the stuff about the parents, getting the synopsis down to just over a page. Then I wrote my short paragraph about the parents and stuck it in where I thought it should go. Now, instead of a three-page synopsis, I had a page and a half. Much more manageable. I went through sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, restructuring and trimming until, at last, it fit on one page. I was victorious! And best of all, when all was said and done, I was actually pretty proud of my work. It didn’t feel like something I’d thrown together in a few adrenaline-fueled hours, it felt strong and polished, like it might stand a chance at convincing an agent that I know how to tell a story.

 

There’s a lesson here. If I had finished the synopsis earlier like I’d meant to, I could have avoided losing my head. Unfortunately, I didn’t learn that lesson. But here’s the thing, all that time that I was “procrastinating” on the synopsis, it was still stewing in the back of my mind. That’s why the new take on how to handle the parents’ chapters clicked with me so quickly—my subconscious was probably already halfway there. So when someone lit a fire under me, I had everything I needed to get it done and get it done well. And now, if anyone else asks for a synopsis, I have it.

 

And now that it’s done and I’ve caught my breath, I can take the time to really savor how exciting all this is. It may turn out that this particular agent isn’t the right fit, but maybe she is, and anyway it’s great to know that my query has grabbed someone’s attention and that I’m on to the next step. So keep your fingers crossed for me.

 

The Other Guys

In the past couple weeks, I’ve talked about what makes a strong protagonist and antagonist. This week, I’m going to talk about the side characters (as far as I know, there is no “agonist” term for these guys). These aren’t the good guys or the bad guys of your stories—though they will certainly have their own alliances. Personally, I find creating strong side characters can be more complicated than creating a strong protagonist or antagonist, but it’s also sometimes more interesting. Don’t get me wrong, I love my good guys and bad guys. It’s their story I’m telling after all. But the other guys can be lots of fun.

 

In some ways, you don’t have to know quite as much about your side characters as you do about your main characters. Of course, this depends on how important each character is, both to the plot and to your main characters. You don’t need to know as much about these characters because they aren’t going to be claiming center stage, but you need to remember that they are often important people in your main characters’ lives—friends or family or coworkers—and this means you probably want them to feel important to the reader as well. And even though they aren’t the protagonist or the antagonist, they’re still going to have goals of their own, and those goals are going to contribute to or complicate the forward momentum of your plot (this is one way you get subplots). I feel that side characters, like antagonists, should think of themselves as the protagonists of their own stories.

 

But the big difference between your main characters and your side characters is in how you have to develop your side characters, their contribution to the main plot, and their own subplots. In most cases, you aren’t going to be telling the story from your side characters’ point of view. You’ll be telling the story from your protagonist’s, or sometimes maybe your antagonist’s, point of view. It’s very rare that you’ll be telling significant portions of your story from a side character’s perspective, though it can be done. (Never fear, I’m going to talk more about point of view in a few weeks.) So, most of the time, while you’re working with your main characters from inside their heads, you’re working with your side characters from the outside. So your readers perceptions of your side characters will be colored by your main characters’ opinions of them. This can lead to interesting complications—if your main character misinterprets your side characters’ actions, for instance.

 

Complicating matters further is that not all side characters require the same amount of development or attention. The cashier at the grocery store on the corner, for example, probably doesn’t matter as much to the main character as their best friend or their sister or their love interest, and consequently the cashier probably won’t be influencing the plot as much. So you won’t need to devote as much time to him as you would to someone else. Your characters best friend or sister or love interest, on the other hand, will probably have strong influences over the main character and their decisions, as well as their own decisions and goals that could influence the story in their own right.

 

While I find working with side characters a bit more difficult than working with the protagonist or antagonist, I also sometimes find them to be more interesting and even more fun. There’s so much you can do—so many factors you can play with. Think of it this way, if you are the protagonist in your story, you do not stand alone. We do not exist in a void with our nemesis. We all make choices, at least in part, because of other people. We are social creatures by nature. Even introverts have family and friends they rely on. And if you want your characters to ring true to your readers, they have to be the same.

I Read Too

I talk a lot about Braille literacy. Many of you have probably heard this before—multiple times—and I’m sorry for repeating myself, but I’m going to anyway. Actually, I’m not sorry at all, because it just keeps coming up. This is the area of disability rights that I am most passionate about (at least right now), and for obvious reasons: I love to read. Books have always been my best friends.

 

So like any bookworm, I measure time by when books I want to read are coming out. In the last two weeks, two books I’m excited about have been released: The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home by Catherynne Valente and Lady Midnight by Cassandra Clare. Just today, I found out about another book I want to read that was released today—Seven Ways We Lie by Riley Redgate (a current Kenyon student). Later this month, the third Colours of Madeleine book—A Tangle of Gold by Jaclyn Moriarty—will be coming out. But I don’t know when I’m going to be able to actually read these books. Not because I’m super busy (I always make time for books), but because they aren’t available in Braille yet. They will be, I’m sure, but I have no idea when.

 

This has been an issue my whole life. I had every single Harry Potter book spoiled for me except the last one, because the publishers gave an advance copy to the National Braille Press so they could translate it into Braille and ship the books to arrive on the release day. And that was a big deal. It shouldn’t be a big deal anymore. Technology has advanced so much since 2007, what with the proliferation of eBooks and Braille displays alike. It should just be the press of a few buttons to take a digital file of a book and translate it into electronic Braille. So why isn’t it happening like that?

 

The answer is that it’s probably a matter of some complicated subsidiary right that hardly anyone thinks about because the blind population is so small and the Braille reading population is even smaller. Which brings me to Braille literacy. Now, I enjoy a good audiobook as much as the next person, but I prefer to read in Braille. And the idea that the Braille-reading population is so small they don’t warrant the same attention as the general populace only perpetuates the problem.

 

The idea behind disability rights is inclusion in society at large, but because we can’t read a book at the same time as our peers, we are excluded. At best, we end up playing catch-up to our friends who have already read and discussed the book. But more often than not, especially with the internet and the way it tends to go crazy when long-anticipated books are suddenly available, major plot points of the book are spoiled for us, which could ruin our enjoyment of the book.

 

Yes, I’m blind, but I read too. And the problem of Braille literacy extends beyond fiction to education and employment issues as well.

 

Here’s the deal: only 10% of the blind read Braille—it’s true. It’s also true that hardcopy Braille is expensive and huge, and Braille displays and notetakers are expensive too (though considerably less huge). But none of this means Braille should be abandoned. Braille is the only viable way for blind people to read. A literacy rate of 10% is not evidence that Braille is impractical; it is evidence that 90% of the blind population is illiterate. Studies have shown that blind children who just use audio in school instead of learning to read do not develop the critical reading and thinking skills necessary for success in school and society. Denying blind children their right to be taught because it is inconvenient or expensive—as so many are—is a violation of their civil and human rights. All children who can see learn to read. It should be the same for children who are blind.

 

To give one analogy, the literacy rate of the blind in America is less than the total literacy rate in some of the least educated countries of the world, and it would be unacceptable to say the people of Afghanistan or Mali or Niger or South Sudan are illiterate because it is too expensive or inconvenient to teach them.

 

I love to read, but I am passionate about Braille literacy for reasons beyond my desire to be able to have a book in my hands the day it comes out (like everybody else, I might add). My parents had to fight for my right to learn Braille in elementary school, but many parents don’t have the knowledge or means to do that. When the school district insists that students who are blind don’t need Braille, how can they argue? But there is no substitute for reading when it comes to fostering independence.

 

Braille literacy is an issue all over the world. Programs like Perkins International send teachers and equipment to developing countries to teach Braille, believing that reading is fundamental to education, and education is fundamental to success. Yet Braille literacy is still a huge problem, even in the United States. Almost 70% of the adult blind population is unemployed, and this can be traced back to inappropriate or absent services in school, including lack of training in Braille.

 

On my first day at the New Hampshire Disability Rights Center, one of the attorneys told me about a decision involving a child who was not being taught Braille. The judge gave the decision to the school district in Braille and told them to read it without accommodations. This is the kind of thinking and action that makes a difference. It’s also just plain awesome! But there still needs to be a shift in the overall discussion towards how Braille can be extended to those who need it so the blind can have the same advantages as the sighted and reach their full potential as contributing members of society.

 

The Bad Guys

Last week, I talked about the protagonist, the good guy, and what role they play in the story. This week, I’m going to talk about their adversary, the antagonist: the bad guy. Maybe it’s just me, but a good villain can make or break a novel for me. There is something deeply fascinating about a good villain, about seeing someone cross that line between right and wrong. In all honesty, the villain in my small child magician story is my favorite character in that project. And since I realized this, I’ve been thinking about why. What qualities does this villain have that intrigues me so much? What qualities make a villain in general a powerful opponent for your protagonist?

 

As I was pondering this, the first thing I realized is that the antagonist of a story doesn’t think they’re the antagonist. They view themselves as the protagonist of their story, and as a writer, this is how you should treat them. The antagonist has a goal and motivations behind that goal (usually apart from stopping the protagonist from succeeding, though that usually dovetails nicely with the overall plan), and in their mind, achieving that goal will accomplish something good, whether that’s just for themself or if it’s for the good of a country or world. In the broader framework of the story, the reader and the protagonist agree that the antagonist either has the wrong goal, or they’re going about it the wrong way, but the antagonist needs to believe that they’ve got the right of it, otherwise they can come off as corny.

 

So, just as a protagonist has a goal and motivation, an antagonist must also have a goal and motivation. And just as a protagonist must protag—take action to achieve their goal—the antagonist must antag—take action to achieve their own goal. And these goals, naturally, should come into conflict. Otherwise they wouldn’t be a protagonist and antagonist.

 

Another thing to consider for an antagonist is how powerful they are. They should be sufficiently powerful to pose a threat to the protagonist’s success. As your protagonist is trying and failing to achieve their goal (see my post on plot structures for examples), the antagonist is also trying, and they’re doing pretty well. This gives the protagonist room to grow. It also gives the villain a greater distance to fall, which in my own personal opinion is more fun.

 

There are other qualities that make a villain more villainous. For one thing, the mystery behind an antagonist can add a lot of suspense to the story—for example, I personally found Lord Voldemort a whole lot more frightening before he came back at the end of Goblet of Fire. For another, the lengths to which your antagonist will can also add to their character. But for me, the most important thing is that the antagonoist believes they are the good guy. For me, an antagonist who honestly believes they’re doing the right thing is always a stronger, more frightening, and more realistic villain.