Writers in the Storm

by Kris Maze

How does one become a superstar editor? Or even just a better self-editor? Take a class?  Get a coach? Getting an editor job takes years of study and experience, but if your goal is to strengthen your manuscript and to gain satisfaction from growing in your craft, there's a resource that may be a good starting point.

When I researched “empowering your inner editor”, the internet protested that this secret superpower (editing) was taboo. Pages of Google Search Titles portrayed the Inner Editor as badly as an addiction to a smarmy ex-boyfriend:

• How to Silence…
• Why You Need to Restrain…
• 9 Tips to Defeat...
• How to Shut Up Your…
• How to Turn Off...
• Four Ways to Control your…

INNER EDITOR.

Whoa, now. I have to disagree. The inner editor serves a vital purpose after the first draft, taking one’s writing from fluffy to fog-free. But it doesn't happen without practice and guidance.

When I finished my first novel THE TALENT, I was overwhelmed by the steep journey of editing.  I hired a professional editor but didn’t want them to waste their time working on errors I should be able to fix myself.

As I navigated the how-to of trimming the wordiness from my writing, a friend suggested Don McNair’s 21 Steps to Editor-Proof Your Writing.  Packed with examples and exercises, this book takes a writer from understanding to implementing with precise editing strategies in three parts:  

• Part 1: Putting Words In examines the developmental part of editing.  
• Part 2: Taking Words Out moves into specifics of what makes an editor cringe.
• Part 3: Sharing Your Words advises how to utilize critique partners, work with professional editors and find publishers and/or agents through querying.

Here is a raw scene from a short story in progress, which I'll use to show the before and after of McNair's lessons.

Draft #1

She played the bow across the string with a final dissolving note, while the dinner chatter rose. A man rattled ice in his cocktail glass, at a nearby pub table. “It was a fine performance, but not exquisite.” he commented to a woman checking her phone.

“Let’s call that a set.” her pianist declared, raising from the piano bench and disappearing to the bar as she slowly bobbed her head.

She wandered from the room to the adjoining study with towering windows flanked by thick curtains to keep out the winter chill.  The glass was visible and framed the star-dotted sky.

One paned glass door was open a crack, a bucket with half extinguished cigarette butts on the concrete enclosed patio. The chilled air bit into her bare arms and she pulled the sparkling gown training behind her up and around her feet. She welcomed the cold and invited them to snap her to her senses. Her performance was weak and she knew it.

McNair offers lengthy lists of sample words and phrases to search out to cut the fluffy parts from your writing. He provides brief exercises with answer keys to ensure you understand how to make your writing clearer.  The process of going through his book trains your writing brain to find the sticky parts common in first drafts (along with tools to fix them).

5 Steps to Self-Editing Stardom

1. Fix your verbs! Seriously, almost half of his list is dedicated to this powerful grammar motor.  Make the verb tense concise and select the most accurate words to carry your story.
2. Eliminate and Avoid Dead and Redundant Phrases.  See what I did there?  Don’t do that.  Get rid of the fog by picking just the important details. Only add visual elements that further your story.  Get rid of the fluffy words.
3. Deconstruct and Realign. Could you regroup your description to streamline the reader’s experience?  Could the order of the actions change to make the words flow better?  Pulling apart the scene can help a writer reorder the details in powerful ways.
4. Prepositional Phrases – Keep an eye out for these sneaky extras – phrases like “on top of” or “down below” are easy to cut out and replace with stronger expressions.
5. Dialogue – Do you need it?  How much?  Simplify to only what pushes the story onward.  Let actions evoke the mood and set the scene.  Less is more.

Draft #2 - in progress

Those edits paved the way for scene setting, improved sensory details and smoother dialogue.

Draft #3

She tugged the violin bow through a dissolving finale while dinner chatter rose.  A man rattled ice in his cocktail glass, “A fine performance, but not exquisite,” he said to a woman checking her phone. Evalyn set the bow in its case, feeling a flush form on her cheeks.

She couldn’t afford another mediocre review.

“Let’s call that a set, “her pianist said. He bolted from the bench to the bar before she could bob her head in agreement.

Evalyn wandered to the balcony entrance where brocade curtains insulated tall windows and framed the star-dotted sky.  A planter full of half-extinguished cigarette butts smoldered as she exited through the glass-paned door.

Her steps echoed across the concrete as her sequined gown flowed behind, cascading like a crystalline waterfall and exposing her well-scuffed heels. Goosebumps formed on her legs as she invited the cold to bite at her bare arms. Her breath formed clouds in the crisp air.

She wished for the cold to wake her muse and make it heed her summons. 

Final thought

Self-editing can be a satisfying part of the writing process but I hear mixed reviews from writers. It's a joy to some and a tedious chore to others. I recommend Don McNair’s book for anyone who needs clear direction to navigate the foggy parts of writing.  His thorough process was the perfect guide to a stronger manuscript worth submitting.

What favorite resource made a difference to your newbie writer self? Please share the editing resource that helped you refine your writing in the comments below.

About Kris:

A recovering grammarian and hopeless wanderer, Kris enjoys reading, playing violin and piano, and spending time outdoors with her fur babies and family. She also ponders the wisdom of Bob Ross.

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To find out more about IMPACT, click here.

by Tiffany Yates Martin

Imagine you’ve been given a fabulous vacation—a trip to Bali, a luxury cruise of the Nordic countries, an adventure vacation across Asia, an African safari. The only catch is that you have to go with a pre-selected travel companion, and you have to stay with that person the whole time. Oh—and she’s whiny. Or he’s completely passive and just wants to hang around in the hotel room and write in his journal. Or smug, or abrasive, or grandiosely self-absorbed, or always feeling victimized, or just plain dull. How much fun does that trip sound like now?

Authors sometimes assume that if they have an interesting enough setup and plot, readers will automatically be invested in their story. But no matter how spectacular the journey you promise them, readers don’t deeply care what’s happening unless they care who it’s happening to.

Barbara Linn Probst's Friday post about likeability and relatability showed why these traits matter in hooking your reader, and how incorporating the gray areas in both can create faceted, layered characters. Let's build on her insightful thoughts and talk about some specifics for creating characters that hook readers from the very beginning of your story.

That doesn’t mean your heroes have to be likable—although that’s one excellent way to make us want to take that journey. But they do need to be engaging and relatable enough from the very beginning of your story that we want to spend hours of our busy lives traveling with them, and there are a variety of ways to accomplish that.

#1 - Likability

This is definitely one of the most common ways to draw a reader into your protagonist, but making protagonists likable doesn’t mean making them uniformly good—that’s dull and results in flat characters who don’t feel real. It means there’s something inherently appealing to us about who they are—for instance:

• Humor
• Kindness, goodness
• Genuineness, sincerity
• Great passion for something, loyalty, love
• Great talent or skill at something
• Great effort or dedication to something
• Someone who is a plucky underdog

Story consultant Michael Hauge offers a perfect example from the movie Wedding Crashers—a story about two potentially repugnant characters: womanizers who invade strangers’ weddings. This film brilliantly uses almost all of the above techniques in its opening ten or fifteen minutes to make sure we like these two enough to invest in them.

Within the first few scenes we see them ingeniously brokering a peaceful divorce settlement between an exceptionally antagonistic couple (competence/skill) by reminding them what they once loved about each other (goodness/sweetness), and being completely hilarious while they do it (humor).

Then we see them excitedly preparing for wedding season (passion/effort), along with demonstrating their strong friendship (loyalty/love) with a sweet (and probably true) story of Vince Vaughn’s character's caretaking of Owen Wilson's as kids (kindness). After that we’d forgive these guys almost any outrageous behavior (and we do!) because it’s impossible not to like them.

And a great example of a plucky underdog? Frodo.

Traits that alienate readers

Conversely some traits may distance a reader too much to invest in a character, even if you have created other sympathetic or likable qualities in him—and even if overcoming these flaws is part of the protag’s journey:

• Casual thoughtlessness or cruelty (especially to those weaker or in a “punch down” position: animals, children, servers, clerks); abuse
• Extreme narcissism, self-focus, obliviousness of others’ feelings and desires
• Self-indulgence and self-pity—for instance, a character who milks a tragedy or sorrow or simply collapses or wallows. A protag who’s at least trying to be strong and persevere or fighting tears is infinitely more affecting and invests the reader more deeply than a character who sobs and wails his pain.
• Weakness or victimization without any effort or at least desire to be strong. Weakness in and of itself isn’t a negative—in fact it can make a character greatly sympathetic. But we have to see her fighting, trying—or at least aware of her inability to be strong at that moment for some reason, like depression or oppression (or handcuffs).

Making non-likeable characters engaging.

But, as the enduring popularity of stories like Lolita, American Psycho, or Catcher in the Rye shows (or shows like Breaking Bad and The Americans), protagonists don’t have to be likable to engage us as readers. You can create antiheroes or just reprehensible protagonists and still invest the reader in them using other techniques as well.

2. The hope of redemption

This plays on the common human urge to rescue and rehabilitate. The movie Leaving Las Vegas was built around this idea.

3. Righteousness

If a character’s motivation appeals to the almost universal human sense of justice or fairness, readers will be drawn into his cause even if he’s not a likable character, as with Tom Hanks’s ruthless mob enforcer who is seeking to avenge the vicious murders of his family in Road to Perdition.

4. The hope for comeuppance

This also plays on our craving for justice. Lady Macbeth taps into this desire in us, and Gillian Flynn created a riveting cat-and-mouse of it with both her unlikable protagonists in Gone Girl.

5. Lesser of evils

The book series (and TV show) Dexter is built on this premise: that the protagonist is bad, but those he’s working against (or who are working against him) are worse. (Dexter is also redeemed partly by his loyalty to his sister.)

6. Outcome trumps means

If the “bad guys” are fighting for good, for whatever reason, we root for them—as in the movie Suicide Squad (though notice that in this DC Comics movie each character is also given a sympathetic backstory to explain their “badness”).

7. Vicarious thrill/power

Humans are complicated, and even when we strive to be good there is a fascination with the dark side. Art allows us to indulge that. It can be exhilarating to see characters exercising freedom of bad behavior we feel strictures against. The TV show House of Cards traded on this guilty pleasure, as do The Godfather and The Sopranos.

8. Sheer charisma

If an antihero has enough élan, readers/audiences can’t help but be drawn in (this can actually play powerfully into the theme of the seductive, destructive lure of evil). Hannibal Lecter is a delicious example of a fascinating bad guy we may find ourselves drawn to. Sherlock Holmes is a moody, drug-addicted narcissist—but his uncanny genius for solving crimes makes him larger than life.

9. Sympathy/empathy/relatability/universal truth

These are powerful ways to invest readers in a protagonist, whether or not we like her. If we can relate to a character’s situation, struggle, challenges, pain, we will follow her journey.

Paula Hawkins took advantage of this in The Girl on the Train with her unpleasant alcoholic heroine in whom we nonetheless invest as she tries to seek justice, solve a mystery, right a wrong, all common human urges we can relate to.

In Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, protagonist Amir can be entitled, cruel, dismissive, and resentful of Hassan, the disadvantaged son of his family’s caretaker who is raised almost as a brother with the privileged Amir and offers Amir nothing but unconditional love and support—and Amir commits an appalling betrayal of Hassan. Yet we can sympathize (perhaps empathize) with the lack of love Amir feels from the father he idolizes, his feeling that his father loves Hassan more, his inadequacy and pain, and we stay invested in his journey.

Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces is irascible, lazy, judgmental, and full of resentment for the world and its treatment of him—and yet many readers can sympathize or empathize with his grudges, even if we don’t let that worldview take us over, as Ignatius has. (We may also sympathize with author John Kennedy Toole’s story—falling into depression and alcoholism, he committed suicide at 31 and never saw his novels succeed, yet they were published after his death and Dunces won a Pulitzer. Though I don’t recommend this as a writing strategy.…)

10. Effort/striving/sacrifice

Even a “bad” character may invest us if we see him fighting his dark side or demons. For instance, spoiled, self-centered Darcy spends a lot of time in Emily Giffin’s Something Blue ranting about her former best friend who stole her fiancé, but also realizes her own part in her broken relationships and tries to do better. Kristin Bell’s character in the TV show The Good Place begins as a morally reprehensible soul mistakenly sent to heaven, but comes to genuinely want to learn to be a good person.

You can also show your character craving or fighting for something better for herself or others, like Katniss working for a better life for her family and to save her sister Prim in Hunger Games, or the father in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road who will do any terrible thing and make any sacrifice—including his soul—for his son.

Finally, you can hook readers by showing a character willing to give up or actually sacrificing a selfish goal for someone or something else, or for the greater good: like Gandalf falling to the Balrog in The Fellowship of the Ring to allow Frodo to escape with the One True Ring, or Cyrano de Bergerac sacrificing his own happiness for his love Roxanne’s, or Oskar Schindler risking his freedom and his life to save persecuted Jewish people.

Reader engagement hinges on character investment. The author’s job is to find reasons for us to buy in.

What techniques do you use to invest readers in your protagonists? What unlikeable protagonists do you love?

I’m excited to share that my book for authors to learn to self-edit their writing, Intuitive Editing: A Creative and Practical Guide to Revising Your Writing, releases May 5! You can learn more and preorder here.

Summary: Whether you’re writing fiction, narrative nonfiction, or memoir; whether this your first story or your fiftieth, Intuitive Editing will give you the tools you need to edit and revise your own writing with inspiration, motivation, and confidence.

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About Tiffany

Tiffany Yates Martin has spent nearly thirty years as an editor in the publishing industry, working with major publishers and bestselling authors as well as newer writers. She's led workshops and seminars for conferences and writers' groups across the country and is a frequent contributor to writers' sites and publications.

Top photo: Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

by Barbara Linn Probst

The question of likability, especially for female protagonists, is a topic that’s sparked heated debate. Male protagonists have, traditionally, had an easier time of it. There have been rascals and rogues as well as knights. For every Atticus Finch, there’s a Rhett Butler. Female protagonists have had a more difficult history. Eccentricity is permitted (think of Elinor Oliphant). So too, anti-heroines are allowed in psychological thrillers like Flynn’s Gone Girl or Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train. Yet a truly unlikeable female protagonist is relatively rare.

Sometimes relatability is suggested as an alternative. “Your heroine doesn’t have to be perfect,” we’re told. “She can have weaknesses, make mistakes. That makes her someone we can connect with. It makes her relatable.”

Some have rejected both concepts. They point out that great characters in literature have been self-centered, self-deluding, ambitious, jealous, craven, angry, broken. As Mohsin Hamid notes in the New York Times (September 24, 2013), we can love a book without liking its protagonist. In fact, it’s often the “fatal flaw” and ensuing struggle that make us turn the pages.

So what is likability?

In simplest terms, likability is "the quality of being readily or easily liked." In his 2005 book, The Likability Factor, Tim Sanders parses the concept into four aspects: friendless, relevance (connecting with others’ wants and needs), empathy, and realness (integrity, authenticity).

That same year, psychologist Stephen Reysen developed an eleven-item likability scale, covering perceptions of warmth, friendliness, attractiveness, approachability, and similarity to oneself.

The assumption is that likability is intrinsic to the person—that is, it’s something that a reasonable person would feel about Mr. X or Ms. Y. The impact of factors like culture, gender, and temperament aren’t taken into account. Likability is assumed to be inherent, objective, and good.

It’s not surprising, then, that there are countless articles offering advice to writers about how to make our characters “likable” in five or six or twelve sure-fire ways. If we don’t like the protagonist, why would we care whether or not she achieves her goal?

On the other hand, there’s been a backlash against likability. In the January/February 2018 issue of The Literary Life, a publication of Poets & Writers, Stephen Almond writes “in praise of the unlikable.” Novelist Tara Burton also cautions against too much concern for likability. In her 2018 article for Vox, she minces no words in asserting that “talking about ‘likability’ in fiction ignores what the greatest literature does.”

It’s worth quoting her at length:

“A character who is portrayed as fully human— a frayed and interwoven tapestry of flaws, neuroses, aspirations, longings, yearnings, hatreds, envies — cannot be easily likable. To truly understand a person, we cannot simply engage with their surface good qualities. We must know their brokenness, too, the terrible things they think, say, and do. And, ideally — when the work is good and well told — we must care about them anyway. We must learn to become invested in the journeys of whole, complete people, who are, like all human beings, both likable and unlikable.”

What is relatability, and what is its role in literature?

When we say that someone is relatable, we mean that it’s easy to understand and feel connected to them. S/he’s like me, in some fundamental way. I can bond, empathize, identify. Relatability answers the question: likable to whom?

At first glance, this seems like an obvious “must have” for a protagonist. Yet here too, it’s more complicated.

What about those extraordinary, larger-than-life heroes or characters who live in circumstances that are nothing like ours?  At times, certainly, we read fiction to enlarge our world, not to confirm what we already know. Historical fiction, folklore, mythology, fairy tales, science fiction, fantasy, horror, thrillers, magical realism—huge chunks of literature lie precisely outside the realm of the familiar and “relatable.” That’s why we like them!

Even for so-called “realistic” fiction, relatability has its limits. As Rebecca Mead asks, in her article on the “scourge” of relatability: Should characters in literature be people we can easily understand and assume we can relate to? 

In other words, should reading fiction be an easy, unambiguous experience?

Mead objects to the expectation that a book should reflect, conform to, and confirm what we already know, or think we know—that it ought to serve as a mirror in which the reader recognizes himself. “The notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism.”

She goes even further, decrying the laziness and passivity this implies. “To reject any work because we feel that it does not reflect us in a shape that we can easily recognize—because it does not exempt us from the active exercise of imagination or the effortful summoning of empathy—is our own failure.”

The unrelatability of a character, setting, or situation can stretch us to think in a new way—and make a story more interesting. Remember that unrelatable features are unusual, not intrinsically good or bad.

How can I assess the likability and relatability of my novel’s protagonist?

By way of example, I’ll use the protagonist of my own novel, QUEEN OF THE OWLS.

Elizabeth is likable because she’s smart, hard-working, and a loving mother. She tries to do the right thing and to meet needs of those she cares about. We can relate to her feeling for her children, her passion for her work, her longing for something more in a relationship, and her willingness to (finally) step outside her comfort zone.

On the other hand, there are aspects of Elizabeth’s life and character that many readers will not be able to “relate” to. Few readers are on track to get a PhD in Art History, and most would have difficulty imagining themselves posing nude in imitation of the iconic painter Georgia O’Keeffe.

Still, the feelings behind her actions—the deep yearning that draws her to Richard, a charismatic photographer—are psychological truths that we can relate to, even if we’ve never experienced exactly what Elizabeth has experienced. Externally, she may seem unrelatable; but internally, in her desires and emotional responses, she’s quite relatable.

In fact, it’s the combination of the relatable and unrelatable elements that makes Elizabeth an intriguing character. After all, we don’t want to read about someone who seems entirely known and familiar! We like motivations we can connect with, dressed in unfamiliar garb.

When a character is truly unlikeable

It’s a little trickier when a character is truly unlikable. We can accept an unlikable trait or two if it’s a weakness the protagonist must struggle with, and transform by the end of the book, perhaps after she realizes its cost and experiences true remorse. 

A character who starts out vain or proud becomes lovable when we can witness their growing awareness and wish to do better. The unlikable trait can also be a mask for insecurity or the result of an earlier wound. We can accept the unlikability because it has a reason and isn’t the whole of the person.

Many readers are suspicious of a protagonist who has no real flaws. Too much likability makes a character unrelatable. At the same time, it’s hard to craft a compelling story around someone who is fundamentally unlikable.

We’re drawn to complexity—to characters who seem real because they combine traits we like and traits that make us uncomfortable. The features we understand draw us in; the features we don’t understand keep us curious—and keep us reading. Without the latter, we’d be bored.

Questions to ask about your own protagonist:

• What are the aspects of my protagonist that I most admire and would like to embody or find in a friend? When I see her acting this way, I’m on her side. These are her likable features.

• What are the aspects that I feel comfortable with and feel I understand, as if I’ve been there myself (even if I haven’t been in that specific situation)? These are her relatable features.

• What are the traits that cause my character to make wrong decisions, compromise her sense of self, or alienate those who want to help her? When I see her acting this way, I want to wince or recoil—or run. These are her unlikable features.

• What are the traits that I’ve included, even though they’re probably outside the direct experience of most readers, because I feel they’re integral to my character or her story? These are her unrelatable features. 

Then consider the cast of other characters. Is there someone for each of the four categories above?

I don’t mean to suggest adding cliché villains, goodie-goodies, or eccentrics—only that each category should be represented in the story, in specific features if not in whole characters.

I’ll take another step and suggest that likability and relatability aren’t what make us keep reading. We keep reading for one reason only: we have to know what’s going to happen!

That engagement can happen for all sorts of reasons—a high-stakes plot, gorgeous writing, identification with the protagonist.  Likability alone won’t do it. But we do have to care.

As Tara Burton reminds us, our characters—like our friends, our family, and ourselves—don’t have to be likable to be lovable.

Do you have a main character who is unlikeable? Will you read a book with one? Name one unlikeable character that you love!

About Barbara

Barbara Linn Probst is the author of Queen of the Owls, coming in April 2020 from the visionary, award-winning She Writes Press. Queen of the Owls has been chosen by Working Mother as one of the twenty most anticipated books for 2020 and will be the May 2020 selection of the Pulpwood Queens, a network of more than 780 book clubs throughout the U.S. To pre-order or learn more, please visithttp://www.barbaralinnprobst.com/

A chance meeting with a charismatic photographer will forever change Elizabeth’s life.

This novel asks the question: How much is Elizabeth willing to risk to be truly seen and known?

Click here to read more, or to pre-order the book.

Top photo credit: Deposit Photos

An earlier version of this article appeared on Women Writers, Women’s Books in December 2018.