Monsters and Mayhem, Parts 5 & 6

Photo from National Geographic. No, really.

So we finally come to the end. Sorry it took me so long to write about the last classes in this series. To refresh your memory, I took a 6-week course called Monsters and Mayhem at Grub Street, taught most evenings by Sue Williams and KL Pereira. Week Six was really just a workshopping class, where we read excerpts of the works we had been writing in connection with the course, and gave each other feedback. (To my classmates: you guys are fabulous. Really.)

Week Five was taught solely by KL, and was about how context creates plot. (See also character is plot and plot is conflict.)

KL argued that, by placing one's characters in different environments, we can create conflict, expose desires, and thereby tap into plot. After all, if you understand your character, you will know how they will react to any situation or context. What would happen if you took your character and put her somewhere unexpectedly modern? Or historical? Or alien/foreign? Someplace more lonely or more populated?

She asked us to write a number of exercises, but I was most moved by these three:

1. Take a character you are working on and place them in a context in which one of their beliefs about themselves is irrevocably shaken or even shattered. How does your character react?
2. Imagine that your character suddenly loses the ability to speak due to something the encounter in their environment. What would happen? How would your character communicate? Write the piece without dialogue.
3. Take a character you've been working with an write a scene in which their surroundings make them feel with very young or very old.

What do you think? What are the environments you typically write? What would happen to your characters if you changed it up?

Love Your Characters

photo by Jenna

We started talking about it in yesterday's plot is conflict post. If plot is the mechanism by which your protagonist is forced up against her deepest fears and/or desires (tm Steve Almond), then we must know our characters deeply in order to understand what they fear and desire. To quote Grub Street instructor Sue Williams:

So love your characters, no matter how dark. Know what they care about. Put what they care about in peril. And you've got yourself a plot. The plot ends when you find a resolution (even if it's not a pleasant one).

To illustrate this point in class, we then read excerpts from Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs. (Remember, this is the Monsters & Mayhem class, so we're focusing on the dark underbelly of fiction.)

Hannibal Lecter is a perfect example of a beloved, yet monstrous, character. Harris must have loved Lecter, because we loved Lecter. And not just because he's a fun and charming love-to-hate-him kind of fellow. We REALLY root for him: to help Clarice solve the crime, to build that emotional connection with her, to get free... I was in a movie theater where the entire audience (including me) cheered because he was going to "have an old friend for dinner." Let's all admit it: that ain't right.

And yet it is. We don't love Lecter just because he's charming and has good taste in wine. We love him because he has qualities of real virtue: unlike the nasty little Dr. Chilton, he is not petty or hypocritical. (Indeed, in the excerpts we read in class, we see both these characters interacting with our heroine Clarice, and it is certainly not Chilton we want to have guiding her. Lecter is evil, but Chilton is a jerk.) And we can empathize with many of the things Lecter cares about... freedom, an intellectual challenge, and Clarice herself.

So take a minute. Get inside the head of some of your least lovable characters, and find something to admire, to envy, to respect. Find out where their heart lies, because they have one, even if it has been twisted by experience, or by fate.

What do your characters care about? What do your antagonists care about? What would happen if you tried to take those things away from them?

Monsters and Mayhem, Part 4 of 6

Hanya

What can I say, I'm in a devilish frame of mind right now. I'm reading Joe Hill's novel Horns, I'm writing about the devil (one version of her, anyway) for my Monsters & Mayhem class at Grub Street, and I'm re-listening to Mur Lafferty's Heaven series (note that Season Two is called "Hell"). Hanya protected me as I was growing up, and now her mask protects my daughter (and scares visitors), so I thought I'd start off this post with her image.

The fourth class in the M&M series was taught solely by Sue Williams and was subtitled, Plot is Conflict. If you liked my Character is plot post from last year -- and I know a lot of you did --you should have fun with this.

Plot is the mechanism by which your protagonist is forced up against her deepest fears and/or desires.

-- from Steve Almond's This Won't Take But A Minute, Honey

Those of you who've read (or listened to) Stephen King's On Writing know that he thinks that "plot" is slippery and untrustworthy, and that he prefers situational storylines. Sue, however, cleverly pointed out that all of the "what-if" situations presented in King's book are in fact CONFLICTS:

• What if vampires invaded a small New England town?
• What if a policeman in a remote Nevada town went berserk and started killing everyone? (Etc.)

It all loops back to the theory of plot-as-character, because if the reader doesn't care about the people in those small New England and remote Nevada towns, s/he's not going to care about all the exciting things that might happen there. But it's not character alone. Observe:

• What if there was a writer who went to a small New England town, hoping to face down his childhood fears?
• What if there was a boy who learned a lot about God and loss when his family got trapped in a remote Nevada town?

That's far less interesting, isn't it?

So. How do you find this conflict if, starting out, you only have your character? Read that short definition of plot again: Plot is the mechanism by which your protagonist is forced up against her deepest fears and/or desires. In order to really know your character's fears or desires, you have to know your character. More than that. You have to love your character.

From Sue's class handout:

You must love your characters, even if they are hell beasts. See things from their point of view, even if it's broken and dark. This way you will learn what they truly care about.

Tomorrow we'll talk more about loving your characters... especially the bad ones.

REACTIONS? Tell me your theories about plot, character, and conflict.

Monsters and Mayhem, Part 3 of 6

Godjira

And now we return you to your regularly scheduled programming, already in progress:

As my regular readers know, I'm taking a 6-week course called Monsters and Mayhem at Grub Street, taught most evenings by Sue Williams and KL Pereira. (New link for KL! Blog this time! Check it out!)

Sophie Powell was last night's guest instructor, and week three was all about world building and backstory.

You classics and history buffs will appreciate the fact that Sophie started by having us read excerpts from The Odyssey, specifically those passages describing the physical environments inhabited by the Cyclopes and Circe. The arrogant and giant one-eyed monsters lived on untended land where they needed to do no work because the Gods provided everything for them. The more seductive goddess-witch Circe, by contrast, lived in an enticing house with high-backed chairs, polished tables, and girls to help bathe and feed Odysseus. As Homer did, so you too should consider physical setting: how does your monster/character's home and local environment reflect or contribute to its personality? If you are writing anything other than contemporary realism (speculative fiction, magical realism, even historical fiction), how does the setting of your story contrast with the world as we now know it? How does that affect the players in that world?

We also pondered several questions relating to our characters' backstories:

• Have they always been monsters/villians?
• Have they always been unloved/loved?
• What do they really want from life? How would they choose to die?
• Who or what do they care for? What is their most treasured possession?
• Do they like their appearance? What are their favorite/least favorite body parts?
• Are they creatures of habit?
• Do they sleep lying down? What do they dream about?
• What do they worry about? Get excited about?
• What do they fear? What do they love?
• What do they have faith in? Do they believe in a higher power?

It is truly amazing how many answers there are to these questions. One character might want to die in battle... another surrounded by loved ones... and yet another might want to die alone, away from prying eyes. And I found many of the questions especially interesting because in the story I'm working on, the main character is dead. So, in order to write this well, I should know exactly how she died, and whether it was what she wanted. I should know if the afterlife is what she expected. I should know if there's any possession she misses from her time on Earth.

Good stuff.

If you like where these questions are taking you, you should check out the Close Your Eyes post on KL's new blog, where she will lead you on a character-discovery visualization similar to the one Sue did for us during the first class. While the exercise is geared towards the fantastical, it might very well work for any character you're writing about.

PLEASE TELL US A TIDBIT FROM YOUR CHARACTER'S UNIQUE WORLD OR BACKSTORY. I think this stuff is just fascinating...

Monsters and Mayhem, Part 2 of 6

Nessie

Recap: for those who are new to the blog (welcome!), I am in the middle of a 6-week course at Grub Street ("a non-profit creative writing center dedicated to nurturing writers and connecting readers with the wealth of writing talent in the Boston area") called Monsters and Mayhem, taught by Sue Williams and KL Pereira. As a commenter once said, I basically do a Cliff's Notes version of all my Grub Street classes, and they've been a reasonably popular series of posts.

I hope the posts from this class will be applicable across multiple genres, but if you're really not into the speculative fiction genre, you can read the older posts in this series, or you can wait until the end of March, when I'll once again be taking some one-night-only seminars; specifically, I'll be taking "All The Right (Opening) Moves" and "Crank the Tunes, Crank the Prose: Music as the Path to Literary Improvement."

But back to the mayhem! Yesterday's class was all about monster psychology.

I urge you to take a few minutes to read Ramsey Shehadeh's short story Creature. After you've read it through once, take a look again at the second section (sections are separated by "* * *"), and look at how the author portrayed Creature's desires, insecurities, and motivations. Consider its wants and needs, its internal and external influences. Look at how much character development the author gives you in just that one paragraph following the section break.

Even if you're not a genre writer, let's think about this for a moment. How much do you know about your villain/monster/antagonist's backstory? How was s/he born or created? How was s/he raised, or not raised? (Tell me about your mother, we hear in a deep Freudian accent.)

Maybe try your hand at the following writing exercises:

• Describe your monster's birth or creation (in the case of my creature, hatching);
• Write a scene in which your monster/antagonist becomes frightening or repulsive even to him/herself;
• Write a scene in which your monster/antagonist fails to overcome his or her evil (or merely naughty) impulses... and does not regret it.

That short story I linked to? Includes all three such scenes. Yowza.

They say that the way to make vivid, well-rounded characters is to remember that every character is the hero of his or her own story. That includes monsters and villians. That includes characters who are self-loathing, or who wish they were more than they are... or less.

I hate to quote Ally McBeal (note to my foreign readers, I swear that show had nothing remotely to do with law as it is practiced in the United States), but there was one episode where a much-abused friend asks Ally, "Why are your problems so much bigger than anyone else's?" And in a rare moment of honesty, Ally replies, "Because they're mine."

No matter what genre you're writing, no matter what species your characters are, no matter how big or small their roles in your stories are... their problems are THEIRS. And that's what going to be important to them. They're probably not out to just be evil or get in your hero's way. They may want power, or love, or just to be left alone.

If those characters of yours get a lot of time on the page, you could do worse than to get inside their heads with them for a while, and see what got them started down those paths.

Monsters and Mayhem, Part 1 of 6

Neaopoleviathan

from Joe Alterio's Robots and Monsters gallery

So, I'm taking a 6-week course called Monsters and Mayhem at Grub Street, taught by Sue Williams and KL Pereira. (Sophie Powell will also teach in future weeks.) I'm taking the class because:

1. I love to read sci fi, fantasy, and horror, but I've never tried to write it. Why not?
2. I want to start writing more magical realism.
3. I think challenging myself to explore a new genre is a good thing.

So, what have I learned so far? Genre-jumping is hard. The first class assignment was to answer some in-depth questions about "your monster"... but I don't have a work-in-progress with a monster yet. The students around me immediately started writing about dragons and vampires and necromancers who trail ghosts behind them and a leviathan with a 6-chambered heart... and I was just sitting there thinking, dang I am out of my league.

But that's the point of pushing yourself, right? Finally an idea hit me from something my husband and I said years ago about the devil, and I came up with a "monster." I'm still more in the magical realism arena than in true speculative fiction territory, so I'm working with a real animal rather than a fantastical one, but this is still the first time that I've ever tried to get into the head of any character other than a contemporary human. And it's extremely cool. I might even have a short story idea building out of this.

Yesterday was all about character-building. Often writers get caught up in a good character idea and start writing before they've fleshed everything out, and then end up stuck, or worse, end up finishing a book without realizing that they've left out important things like where these characters get their money, how do they eat, and what happened to their families. Here are some questions to consider when creating your characters:

• Is your monster male/female/both/neither?
• What are its fears and desires? Is it good, or evil, or in-between?
• Was it born a monster or become one? If it became one, when? How old is it? Is it mortal or immortal? If immortal, does it age at all?
• What does it look like? How is it like/unlike a human? What powers does it have? How does its appearance change when it uses those powers or experiences emotion?
• Housing: it is a posh monster who decorates elaborately, or is it a hole-in-the-ground kind of guy?
• Does it have any particularly fond or terrible memories about its life before it was a monster, or about being a monster? Does it have parents, a spouse, children, or an unrequited love?
• When and where does it live now? Our world and time or another?
• Is it a solitary creature or does it crave company? Who does it like and/or trust? If if prefers groups, what is the hierarchy of that group, what are the rules, what are the consequences of disobeying?

Next week we'll be getting more into monster psychology. Can't wait.

DO YOU WRITE ABOUT MONSTERS? Tell us a little about them.