Podcast Notes:
So often, there are stories with a wonderfully diverse cast, super interesting ensemble…and at the center of that is a super boring main character.
If you think about making a *different* character the main character and would find your original protagonist to be woefully unengaged or hard to write…your main character is boring
It’s not just a matter of making your main character quirky…they must have ACCOUNTABILITY and RESPONSIBILITY for the story
So how to fix it: give your character more *stake* in what’s happening. When they take an action, there is a COST or a CONSEQUENCE. What is the price my character has to pay in order to get what they want.
STAKES are the things you will lose
ACCOUNTABILITY is being held responsible for your actions
There are so many things that are worse than death that can happen to your main character…it’s all those non-death things that make a character interesting and a participant in the story.
Book of the week: “Wolf Hall” by Hillary Mantell (sp?) – about Thomas Cromwell, get to see the other side of that famous story about Henry VIII (?)
Make it more than just a “dark and tortured past”…it needs to be urgent in the present
Make the character not fit their role quite so perfectly
GIVE THEM AN ARC…have them start at point A and end up at point Z
Proactive, likable, competence…adjust those three levels to find a nice balance (ie- not all should be high all the time)
Stretch beyond yourself to write characters who are not like you. The differences in how they interact with their world are inherently interesting.
Highlight differences between your characters – tastes, likes/dislikes, etc. – gives them a lot of conflict that we can relate to in our everyday lives
Make your characters SPECIFIC
Exercise:
Take three different characters and walk them through a scene. Convey their emotional states, their jobs, and their hobbies without directly stating any of those. The scene in question: walking through a marketplace, and they need to do a dead-drop.
CHARACTER 1:
The marketplace was loud. Really loud. I stood in the entrance gazing up at the long roof that covered market, cursing whoever designed it with such perfectly arched dimensions as to gather all the noise rising from the bustling sea of hucksters and purveyors, and reflect it back down upon them. It was a never ending feedback loop of shouted sales pitches, price bargaining, heated arguments…and was that a wail in the background? That definitely sounded like a wail. Stars above, what was I doing here?
I realized, perhaps too self-consciously, that I was holding the brown-paper-wrapped package up to one of my ears to block out the cacophony. I jerked it back down at my side, then reconsidered and moved it behind my back, then reconsidered again that maybe it should be where I could see it and moved it in front of my belly. All that additional movement, of course, made me glance around to see if anyone had seen that incredible display of awkwardness…and then of course it occurred to me that my looking around was making me appear suspicious.
How did people do this?
I uprooted myself from the entrance, and plunged into the people-ocean. Everything in the press of bodies seemed to tilt in my direction as I waded my way through. Corners seemed to lance in my direction front the corner of my eye, the bill of a cap, the corner of a winter coat, a booth-owners point finger; they were all spikes driving at me, making it so I couldn’t breathe. I longed for my desk, for my chalkboard, for my pile of essays ready to be read. Essays didn’t yell at you. Chalkboards didn’t squeeze you like a vice. Desks didn’t hand you packages wrapped in brown paper on the outside.
Breathe, I told myself. Just breathe in and out. This was better. If it was a sea of people I was swimming through, perhaps I simply needed to re-orient my thinking. Above, not through. Skim the water one stroke at a time. Breathe every third. Look at the markers after every second, stay in the middle of the lane, and keep the goal straight ahead.
Aisle 7, row 13.
I saw the booth. It was empty, as they’d told me it would be. It had one of those blue pop-up canopies I’d see around campus when the job fairs would come around, but it was lowered to half-height, too short for anyone to stand under; a sign that they were ‘closed.’ I knew they’d never intended to be ‘open.’
That’s where I was supposed to leave the package.
(That’s all I had time for, sorry, guys!)