Timothy's Thoughts

Y esterday, we looked at safety net characters and said that they lighten a story. It then stands to reason that to darken a story we need a glass ceiling character. This is a character that has the ability to thwart our protagonist’s attempts with impunity. Just as the safety net character is able to aid the protagonist without fear of the antagonist, the glass ceiling character is able to aid the antagonist and nothing the protagonist might like to do will harm this character in any way. This is more than just an antagonist with the upper hand. We all know of scenes in which the protagonist begs the villain not to shoot someone, maybe even reveals a secret to prevent it and then the villain shoots the person anyway. That too darkens the story, but the villain will eventually get his due. A true glass ceiling character is more like these secret organizations that are supposed to be above the law. Our protagonist arrests someone and that person is out of jail in short order becau...

L ast week I mentioned a character who has too much going for him to be a protagonist. Then Ellen came and talked to us. She also has too much going for her to be an affective protagonist. But these characters can serve as safety nets. I’ve used Ellen and her family that way in the past. I had a character who needed a house, so Ellen and her husband went out and bought a house, which they then allowed this character to stay in rent free. Without her successful restaurant, that wouldn’t have been possible. Some people will cry foul, suggesting that it would be better to leave the protagonist without a safety net, but that isn’t the way it works in real life. As much as I hate the thought of losing my job and not being able to pay my bills, I know that in time of need there are people I could go to for help, such as my church or my family. Putting these safety net characters into a story changes it in a very specific way. They help raise a story out of the darkness. Think about the Cin...

S ome authors include alter egos in their books. We have to slip into the heads of all of our characters, but even while doing that, we stay distant from most of our characters. There are things about our characters that we can’t fully understand. A man writing about a woman or a woman about man creates one obvious situation in which a full connection between author and character cannot be achieved. To reach such a connection would be just wrong. Even so, we can achieve some very good stories while remaining somewhat distant from the characters. Then there are those characters that just mesh. In my WIP, there is a character who is that way for me. In many ways, he isn’t like me at all and yet when I think about the story I imagine that if I could slip into that world for a while that he is the character I would want to be. He has a minor role in this story and doesn’t even have a name yet. He’s one of these big picture kind of guys who may not know everything that’s going on, but he h...

Kurt Vonnegut has told writers to be sadistic and make bad stuff happen to our characters. I’ve been messing with a character who is rather wealthy, but he is a family man and loves his grandchildren very much. The plot requires him to want a particular claim that a con artist makes to be true. At first, I thought it would be sufficient for him to be distracted from his work by having a missing grandchild, but it didn’t work with the story. The man has four other grandchildren he knows much more about than the missing grandchild, so it came across as if he just wanted the complete set. I needed something better, something stronger. When I took Vonnegut’s advice, I found the solution in killing off the grandkids. Not just one of the grandkids—all of them. Suddenly, the happiness of a man who invests so much in his grandchildren is invested in the missing grandchild. It also gives a more real quality to the character. As the primary owner of a large company, the man is something of a kin...

I read the article What Agents Hate the other day. It talks about things agents hate to see in the first chapter. One of the things is a backstory or an information dump. That, I am afraid, is one of the things I struggle with. It is my nature to want people to understand where I am coming from with what I say. Even with this post, I told you about the article I read. I could have just gone into what I have to say, but I gave you the backstory first. Fictional characters should be like a carving. We begin with a simple blob that has an uninteresting shape. Slowly, we reveal details about this blob until it isn’t a blob any more, but the shape of a person, or an animal or something else. The worst thing we can do with writing about a character is to simply state what he is. Let’s look at an example. The ball flew high into the air and out over left field. The left fielder watched it and ran back toward the fence. The ball hit the glove and then the player hit the chain link fence. The ...