Writers in the Storm

Eldred Bird

Good stories are built around great characters. If readers don’t identify or sympathize with your protagonist, they’re not going to care enough to come on your character’s journey.

We writers generally have a picture in mind when it comes to the characters in our books. We know what our heroes and villains look and sound like. Height, build, hair, eyes, accents—it’s all etched inside our brains. As we write, we want the readers to see exactly what we see . . . or do we?

Les Edgerton stated, in an earlier post here at WITS, that giving too much description can actually keep the reader from investing in a character. His theory is that by giving only information essential to the story and letting the readers fill in the blanks with familiar images, the characters become more personal and recognizable.

What happens if we remove all character description?

We bring our own biases and perceptions into the characters we create, often pulling in elements of ourselves and people we know. I was curious to see what readers would do when my own vision was removed from the equation (to the extent that it’s possible), so I did an experiment.

My hypothesis:

In the absence of physical description, the readers would paint their own picture and reveal their own biases.

To test my theory I wrote a short story, Treble in Paradise: A Tale of Sax and Violins. I left out any physical descriptions or details that might influence how readers would picture the protagonist: gender, religion, physical attributes, ethnicity. I included only a vague idea of age. I kept the language gender-neutral as well.

The story was written in first person POV in a journal entry style, as we have a tendency not to describe ourselves physically in that format. That choice made leaving out those details feel more natural.

At the end of the story, I asked readers to close their eyes and without referring back to the text, picture the protagonist and describe that person to me. I wanted to know who they would see without my words guiding them to build the image.

Results:

Though a couple of readers came close to my own vision of the protagonist, no one described the character I’d seen when I wrote the story. Only one person mentioned noticing the lack of description, but indicated that it was not an issue for them.

An equal number of men and women took the time to respond to the question. All but one respondent pictured a male protagonist. To my surprise, the lone respondent who saw a female was a man. This might say more about societal expectations and bias rather than that of the individual readers.

What did the readers tell me?

Beyond the near unanimous agreement on gender, the descriptions covered a wide spectrum.

• People guessed the age of the musician as anywhere from mid 30s to late 50s.
• Body types varied from thin to chunky, but most everyone saw pale skin and dark hair with at least a tinge of gray.
• A couple of people admitted to seeing themselves, and a few even scoured the internet and provided images matching their vision.

Though I had only asked for a physical description, many people responded with emotional descriptions as well. Two readers even built a back-story for the protagonist. I don’t think I could ask for a closer reader connection than that.

What have I learned from this experience?

1. My first take away is that sometimes less really is more. Trying to force my image of the character into the mind of the reader may push them away rather than bring them closer.
2. Removing all description is extremely difficult, and not always practical. There may be certain physical details that are required for the story to work.
3. The big lesson is to TRUST THE READER.I have a tendency to over-describe or over-explain because I fear people won’t get the idea. Believe me, they get it.

While the physical descriptions from the readers often differed from my own vision, the emotions described didn’t, and emotions are what our stories are all about.

This experiment had a profound effect on me as a writer.

Telling a story is about taking the reader on a journey, not just getting them to a destination. Never again will I attempt to spoon-feed the readers information. Instead, I’ll leave more to their imagination so they can fill in the blanks with familiar images. I want them to have a personal experience with the characters I’ve created. Building in too much detail can create a brick wall that blocks their view of the story.

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About Eldred

Eldred Bird writes contemporary fiction, short stories, and personal essays. He has spent a great deal of time exploring the deserts, forests, and deep canyons inside his home state of Arizona. His James McCarthy adventures, Killing Karma and Catching Karma, reflect this love of the Grand Canyon State even as his character solves mysteries amidst danger. Eldred explores the boundaries of short fiction in his stories, The Waking Room and Treble in Paradise: A tale of Sax and Violins (Treble is free on Amazon for the next few days).

When he’s not writing, Eldred spends time cycling, hiking and juggling (yes, juggling…bowling balls and 21 inch knives). His passion for photography allows him to record his travels. He can be found on Twitter or Facebook, or at his website: http://www.eldredbird.com/.

Lisa Wells

Every book needs a dose of laughter. Even hard-core, freak-out scary stuff needs a scene or a sentence or a word intended to allow the reader a moment to breathe out some of the tension you’ve mummified them in for pages and pages and breathe in ease.

This post will acquaint you with five make-them-laugh techniques you can choose from when you want to give your readers a giggle, chuckle, snigger or even a good old-fashioned, snorting,  belly laugh.

5. K -- the sound it makes is the funniest letter

This rule appears to be universally agreed upon by comedians. So much so, that in Neil Simon’s 1972 play The Sunshine Boys, there’s a scene in which an aging comedian schools his nephew on comedy and the letter k:

"Fifty-seven years in this business, you learn a few things. You know what words are funny and which words are not funny. Alka Seltzer is funny. You say 'Alka Seltzer' you get a laugh ... Words with k in them are funny. Casey Stengel, that's a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny. Cupcake is funny. Tomato is not funny. Cookie is funny. Cucumber is funny. Car keys. Cleveland ... Cleveland is funny. Maryland is not funny. Then, there's chicken. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny. Cab is funny. Cockroach is funny -- not if you get 'em, only if you say 'em."

This is an easy way to add a touch of subtle humor to your writing. Any author can give the diner their character is hiding out in a funny k-name. (Crunchy Cracker Café). By the way, according to my research, these sounds are funniest when you put them in the middle of sentences. (I don’t write the rules -- I’m just reporting them.)

4. Shock

If you want to make your readers laugh, shock them. According to Author Scott Dikkers in his book How To Write Funny, this funny filter includes anything you shouldn’t say in mixed company.  He also says it’s a method best used like a garnish. Never the main course.

Example: The television series The Black List deals with grim storylines. The kind that make you me want to close your eyes and turn down the sound. Here is one example of how they used shock to elicit laughter in the midst of a tense scene in which Reddington is trying to extract information from a guy who is part of an illegal organ transplant ring. The bad guy has a heart condition, and Reddington (the bad guy you can’t help but love) has spiked his drink with Viagra.

"Those drinks you’ve been enjoying on the house? They weren’t from the house. They were from me. I hope you don’t mind. I took the liberty of adding a special surprise ingredient. Something to treat any localized dysfunction you may be suffering. Has the little man been falling down on the job? It’s a miracle drug, not so much for a glutton with a bum heart, however. But look on the bright side, you’ll die with a marvelous erection."

3. Misdirection

As an author, you can easily set your readers up to they think they know what’s going to come next -- and then throw them a curveball.  An example of this can be found in another scene from the show The Black List.  The character, Reddington, is standing in front of this huge portrait of a woman hanging on the wall in someone’s house, and he says:

"Last night I got up for a scoop of orange sherbet and she caught my eye. I just stood here in the dark, squinting at her. She’s breathtakingly unattractive."

The curveball is the word unattractive. Up until this point, the audience thinks he’s going to wax poetic about her beauty, and he doesn’t. Not only is she unattractive, she’s breathtakingly unattractive. Breathtakingly misdirects us to think beautiful. Had he said very unattractive, the laugh wouldn’t have come. But he used a word that our brains are trained to pair with the word beautiful. We were misdirected, and as a result, we laughed.

2. Exaggeration

Columnist Dave Barry is known for his humor. Humor that is often a result of exaggeration. Below is an example of how he uses exaggeration to paint a picture of a delusional man in Revenge of the Pork Person:

"A man can have a belly you could house commercial aircraft in and a grand total of eight greasy strands of hair, which he grows real long and combs across the top of his head so that he looks, when viewed from above, like an egg in the grasp of a giant spider, plus this man can have B.O. to the point where he interferes with radio transmissions, and he will still be convinced that, in terms of attractiveness, he is borderline Don Johnson."

In this example, Dave doesn’t just stop with one exaggeration, he really piles them on.  The key to exaggeration is to not be afraid to go over the top. Exaggeration is no time for subtlety.

1. Innuendo

A veiled remark about someone or something that indirectly insinuates something. Often, the something has a shock value to it. Example:

"He had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humor." -- Bill Bryson.

With innuendo, you don’t want to spell out for the reader why it’s funny. They either pick up on the play on words or they don’t.

There you have it -- five techniques you can use when you want to add a bit of humor to your writing. If you study the examples, you’ll see that humor is often created by combining several methods. How many methods are there? Over thirty. I learned these methods while spending over a year researching, researching, researching how to make people cry.

The easy answer -- surprise them.

And because I’m an educator by trade, I took what I learned and turned my effort into a class on how to add humor to anything.

If you’d like to learn more about this class, check it out. I’ll be teaching it at Lawson’s Writer Academy in October. http://bit.ly/2N5Xc5R

Tell me your go-to-author when you want to laugh, and I'll include your name in a drawing for a $10 gift card to Amazon. The drawing will be on the 25th.

About Lisa

Lisa Wells writes romantic comedy with enough steam to fog your eyeglasses, your brain, and sometimes your Kindle screen. On the other hands, her eighty-year-old mother-in-law has read Lisa’s steamiest book and lived to offer her commentary. Which went something like this:  You used words I’ve never heard of…

Lisa’s the author of the Off the Wall Proposals series from Entangled.

She lives in Missouri with her husband and slightly-chunky rescue dog. Lisa loves dark chocolate, red wine, and those rare mornings when her skinny jeans fit. Which isn’t often, considering the first two entries on her love-it list.

To learn more about all of Lisa’s books, visit:

Website:  www.lisawellsauthor.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lisawellsauthor

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/lisa.wells.737

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lisawellsauthor/

Angela Ackerman

Life can be painful, especially for our characters. In fact, the fallout of an emotionally wounding event such as a car accident, failing to save someone’s life, infertility, or being sent away as a child can derail their life for years (or even decades!) if left unresolved. Not only that, it can change the character’s personality, damage their relationships, and seed their life with dysfunction and unfulfillment.

This is why at the start of a story the protagonist is usually dissatisfied, lost, unhappy, or yearning for something more. They are experiencing something called an unmet need.

Unmet needs are created because emotional wounds generate a FEAR of being hurt again (which can manifest in many ways).

The result? The character holds back in life. They settle. They avoid things that can lead to their happiness because being hurt again is too big of a risk.

A fear of trusting the wrong person after a betrayal keeps Mary from seeking love.

A fear of death after a near-fatal climbing accident keeps Rodney from living life to the fullest.

A fear of losing her only child after the death of her spouse keeps Tonya imprisoned by an inflexible mindset and need to control.

Fear is powerful, but unmet needs can direct behavior above all else, meaning, if the urgency is strong enough, needs will push characters to act even if their deepest, most debilitating fears are telling them not to.

Mary’s need to share her life with someone pushes her to open herself to love again.

Rodney’s need to achieve a lifelong goal of summitting Everest convinces him to take up his passion once more, even knowing the risks.

Tonya’s need to have a healthy relationship with her daughter forces her to let go and support her daughter’s independence.

Your Character’s Arc

Now, this shift won’t happen overnight. We really must ensure that our characters go through a gauntlet of unhappiness and struggle until finally they say Enough! and act. When we do this, readers believe that our characters are pushing forward toward their goal regardless of whatever stands in their way because their inner motivation (an unmet need) is driving them to do so.

A terrific tool to understand the connection between Motivation and Unmet Needs is the Hierarchy of Human Needs, a theory created by psychologist Abraham Maslow. It looks specifically at human behavior and the drivers that compel people to act. Separated into five categories, it begins with needs that are the most pressing to satisfy (physiological) and ends with needs centered on personal fulfillment (self-actualization).

This pyramid representation of Maslow’s original hierarchy makes a great visualization tool for writers as they seek to understand what motivates their characters:

The categories are arranged by importance. So, food, water, and other primal physiological needs are the most critical to fill since they are based on survival. Next is the need to be safe, then to be loved, to be respected, and, finally, to reach one’s potential.

These needs, when met, create balance and lead to satisfaction within. But if one or more needs are absent, a hole is created, a feeling that something is missing. As this “lack” builds in intensity, the psychological pressure will grow until finally it pushes the character to seek a way to fill the void.

When a human need is diminished or missing to the point of disrupting the character’s life, it becomes a motivator. For example, a person can skip lunch and only experience minor discomfort until the next meal. But if it’s been a week since he last ate, his discomfort becomes a gnawing hole that demands to be filled, an obsession he must pursue. He might cross moral lines to steal food, resort to personally humiliating actions such as begging or digging in a dumpster, or even take foolish risks, such as eating spoiled food all because his singular focus is on meeting his need. Everything else—pride, fear, self-esteem, even safety—becomes secondary.

Sacrificing one need to satisfy others happens often, which is why there’s a hierarchy. If a character must choose between a job where he’s universally admired (esteem) or financially stable (safety), he’ll choose the latter. Or his goal to become a doctor (self-actualization) may be set aside if his wife is diagnosed with a terminal disease and he must leave school to care for her (love). Just like that skipped meal, placing one need before others usually isn’t a problem in the short term, but the longer a need goes unmet, the more disruptive it becomes until it eventually hits a breaking point. Unhappy marriages end in divorce when the pain reaches an unbearable level. An employee quits a job when workplace esteem levels bottom out or mistreatment escalates. Everyone has a “final straw” moment, after which they can take no more. How quickly it’s reached will depend on the individual and the reasons he has for being in the situation in the first place.

Change isn’t easy. In fact, it is often painful, and it takes great courage to step into the unknown. The temptation is always there for a character to stay in the safe yet dysfunctional comfort zone: to settle for less while trying to ignore the hole created by an unmet need.

If you need help understanding what unmet needs an emotional wound might create, just check out the entries in The Emotional Wound Thesaurus. In fact, here’s an example of a wounding event right from the book: Accidentally Killing Someone.

If you want to access a tool that helps you plan an unbelievably strong character arc based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Unmet Needs, try One Stop for Writers’ Character Motivation Thesaurus.

Do you know your character’s unmet need? How does it drive them toward their goal? Let me know in the comments!

About Angela

ANGELA ACKERMAN is a writing coach, international speaker, and co-author of six bestselling resources including The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression. A proud indie author, her books are available in six languages, are sourced by universities, and used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. Angela is also the co-founder of the popular site, Writers Helping Writers ®, as well as One Stop For Writers®, an innovative online library filled with unique tools to help writers elevate their storytelling.