Part 3 - Your scene needs characters
Welcome back. Did you bring your notes with you?
During today’s workout, the plan is to expand your work to approximately double the word count. Right now, you have a word-sketch of a scene, waiting to be filled with characters.
In our last chat, there were two main points.
Firstly, develop the scene that came to mind when you started thinking about your storyline.
Then, sit with two of the key characters who will inhabit the place you are building.
Guiding this design was the proviso that you should not put in sprawling paragraphs of fine-tuned detail just yet. The reason for this? At this point, we do not want to lock places, events, characters in. In these early stages you want to have the flexibility to easily manipulate all three as the embryo of your plot germinates and begins to grow. What if you had to shift the location of a whole town because of the way the story developed? If you did, you need to make sure any directions given, or travel times, or the toing and froing of people, matched that.
Imagine writing a whole scene and then discovering a building should be on the other side of the street because your characters could not move around it to create the suspense you were looking for. It changes so many relationships. At this stage, that would be easy. As a writer you can move mountains, rivers, time, but it must all end up as a smooth-flowing storyscape. What if a character had walked across our pages several times and then you discovered they needed a particular trait to be added in an earlier scene to be more convincing in their role later in the action? Still doable, but less desirable. Keep the layout of large structural parts loose to begin with. The detail can be in the look, feel, smell and so on of those large parts. You will then easily move large chunks of story, if you have to. I will discuss these chunks in a future post.
In your mind, play with the threads of your story and discover who roams where and begin to understand how all the pieces fit together. You can really get stuck into writing without needing to know everything that happens. Not knowing and then fretting can sometimes hold up the real creative process — writing. Writing drives creativity, not the other way around. Allow the act of writing to free your thoughts and feed into the creative process.
Have fun constructing the backdrop and central pieces with your primary characters moving through them. This will help clear the vision of how that integration can occur. As the landscape and movements across it are set up, you will discover more points in time or place where enhancements can be woven in and detail confidently told.
Think of the pencil/charcoal outline in preparation for a masterly oil painting. Even with these skillfully applied marks, x-rays of famous works reveal evidence of many changes made as great masters brought their stories, written in oil, to life.
Sorry for the waffle. I bet you are itching to get your characters moving. Me too, so let’s get on with it.
Now you should plan how you will place your two characters into their world.
Before they are put there, move away and prepare. These are possibly two central characters. Much of the narrative will hang off them. Walk through the environment with one. How does this character interact with the landscape (all five or six senses plus other relevant detail such as clothing, speech, mannerisms, attitude and whatever else comes to mind)? What are they thinking about, if anything? What triggers do you experience with them as you register everything around you? Why is this character even here? How are they feeling? Jot down notes as you go.
Repeat this for the second character. They will act differently, even though they are in the same place at the same time.
What is happening to them? What are they doing? Make it important because the section(s) you are planning now will affect the immediate future and past direction of the tale you have to tell us.
What about your reader? How do you want your reader to experience this chapter/scene? What is it like being here? Your readers are is the most important person in all this. They will expect certain standards.
How are the physical and psychological make ups of the two coming into play now? What can we do with them? Why not leave the reader with clues hinting they were both here, but did not come face-to-face? Do their paths cross, but they are unknown to each other at this stage? A lingering scent, something dropped, a fleeting glimpse, a signature overheard conversation, a body at the morgue, the way something is done, association, scar, food allergy, preferred instrument, clothing, disability … The list of possible interactions relies only on the inventive capacity of the writer — you. This is the clever, and fun, part of writing.
Do the people here remind you of any of your characters? How would you describe each of these? For practice, take a break and write fifty words on each. Go on. Try it. Just for the heck of it.
How was that? The more you do of this, the better your descriptions of people will become.
OK. You’re warmed up, ready. Time to write. Intrigue the reader with what they learn, but don’t let them feel satisfied that everything is solved or known. Leave them wanting more, much more.
Grab your characters and start writing them into the world you have created for them. As they are added, you may find elements of that world shifting slightly to accommodate this intrusion.
When you finish up today, aim for five hundred words or more, which includes all your work to date on the characters and the locations you have them in. We want to meet the characters and hear a little about their lives. The interactions between the characters and the reason for them may be clear, unseen or not seen as being significant. Up to you how you do this.
Try to make your paragraphs lean. By that, I mean do not throw every descriptor you ever heard of onto the page, mixed in with a stash you retrieved from a thesaurus. As you did at our last meeting, give yourself a clear timeframe. Write for two hours, more if you feel the story is gushing out. Build in regular breaks. Make it a comfortable exercise, one to enjoy. Imagine how it will feel in a few weeks when you can tell friends and family how far you have gone into writing your novel. Guarantee it will feel good.
After you complete this exercise, you will find some marvelous things have started to happen.
Let us know about them, if you are willing to share, in the next meeting.
By the end of our next writing session, you will have written a very large chunk of your first eleventh chapter. I look forward to seeing you there. Have fun.