I've figured out what keeps going wrong with my book.

[betweensunandmoon]

Now that I've gotten my plot to do precisely what I want it to do, I no longer have an excuse to ignore the underlying issues I knew were there all along but wasn't addressing: there are no stakes, and there is precious little character development.

Why haven't I tried to fix these problems? Simply put, I'm afraid. I'm afraid to delve into the minds of my characters and figure out what matters to them. Am I afraid of what I might find? Afraid I'll end up having to throw my entire plot out and start again from scratch? Afraid I've only been deluding myself that I could write a novel? I don't know. These characters all seem so real and vibrant in my head, but come across as painfully flat on the page.

I love this book. I'm also afraid of it. I don't know if it's possible to truly love and fear something at the same time. I know the only way to deal with a fear like this is to confront it. I'm committed to finishing this book no matter what, but it's becoming clear that I'll have to step back and do some serious thinking if I want to have a solid foundation on which to build.

Why do I always have these revelations right when I'm trying to reach word-count goals? It's annoying.

Comments

[igenlode]

I'm not certain the problem you've diagnosed ("These characters all seem so real and vibrant in my head, but come across as painfully flat on the page") is necessarily caused by the issues you see as being present ("there are no stakes, and there is precious little character development"). If you think about the average classic children's novel (say "Swallows and Amazons"), the characters don't really 'develop' from start to finish; they have adventures, generally not life-threatening ones, and emerge from them successfully. In fact you often have a whole series of books where the protagonists don't change much (Biggles manages to survive from the early days of WWI up into the 1960s without aging noticeably; the only books where he really undergoes much character development are the rather more autobiographical early stories).

James Bond is another example of a character who is effectively reset to zero at the start of each novel; whatever happens to him, he shakes it off and goes on to the next adventure. The plots are action-driven rather than concerned with the protagonist's personal journey, and there's nothing whatsoever wrong with that ;-p
Horatio Hornblower, on the other hand, is an example of an action hero whose inner life is equally as important as his ingenious schemes; if you read Hornblower out of order (or at least out of publication order, since the protagonist's backstory was developed from book to book as the author went along), then the series won't make so much sense. Hornblower as a relatively mellow old man wouldn't be who he is (or act as he does) if he hadn't been an impoverished and morbidly self-conscious officer earlier, and an unsuccessful lover. Bond, on the other hand, can be read in pretty much any order, provided you don't mind Felix Leiter's being short a hand or two ;-p


So I'm finding it hard to envision a plot in which "there are no stakes". Do you mean that the characters have nothing to fear if things go wrong for them? Potential consequences don't have to be major life-changing events; they can be as simple as being made to look silly in front of 'the grown-ups', a.k.a. someone whose opinion matters to the protagonist, or being embarrassed. The heroine of a historical romance doesn't need to be placed in mortal terror of being forced down a coal-mine to earn a crust of bread; she can just be trying to avoid a scolding from her mother for acting improperly in public.

If you feel that your characters are coming across as flat, the advice that watervole gave me back when I was getting started with fan-fiction was to write more about what the characters are thinking on the inside during a given scene than just about what they are visibly doing on the outside. Obviously you don't want to go too far overboard with this, or the pacing of your work will descend to a crawl (and it will potentially descend into one of those Erik-angst-fest-type stories, in which nothing happens for chapter after chapter save for the protagonist agonising about his emotions), but I find it a good way to flesh out characters as well as to create background. It's what they call 'deep third-person viewpoint' nowadays; writing from the inside of the character via a little window looking out through his head, rather than writing a TV-style view of a scene via a window looking in at people moving round a room.

So instead of writing, say, "Theo grabbed the helm of the spaceship and began to navigate skilfully through the asteroid field", you might write "He'd never been able to bear to see a job done badly. Jessamy was willing, but he wasn't half the pilot Theo was -- never had been, even back when the two of them had been moonlighting from college to run contraband cargoes in from the inner rings -- and there was too much riding on this for them to be able to afford mistakes. He reached out for the helm, shouldering Jessamy out of the way, and reprogrammed their heading direct for the asteroid belt, sparing a moment for a nod of reassurance. Gently now, he told himself, gently. These rocks might be small compared to the moons of Euterpe, but they still out-massed the ship by a considerable margin[...]" (thus incidentally introducing a bit of backstory for your characters on the fly -- not to mention some scope for world-building, which to be honest is how most of mine get built!)

This sort of thing is harder to do if you're writing a historical novel set in the distant past, because it requires the author to have an idea of what childhood and everyday life were likely to have been like for the characters, i.e. the sort of little incidents you can pull in. For nineteenth and early twentieth-century settings I can just pull incidents from contemporary novels (stealing a minor reference from "Black Beauty" to show teenage Raoul defending dumb animals, for instance, or drawing from stories of children in convalescence at the seaside in the pre-antibiotic era for a backstory of Christine meeting Raoul while recovering from whooping-cough).

I'm afraid to delve into the minds of my characters and figure out what matters to them. Am I afraid of what I might find? Afraid I'll end up having to throw my entire plot out and start again from scratch? Afraid I've only been deluding myself that I could write a novel? I don't know.

The way they act in your plot should be a big clue as to what matters to them -- imagine that you are trying to write fan-fiction of your own novel, based only on what you can deduce about the characters' secret motives from what is shown in 'canon'. You might just possibly have to throw your plot out, should you find that your characters start developing minds of their own and refusing to co-operate with it (this does happen sometimes, when what the author needs the characters to do for the sake of the plot turns out to conflict with what the characters themselves would naturally tend to do in that situation). You may find that you can't write a perfect novel at the first try, which when you put it that way might not be entirely surprising. You may even find you have rather more sympathy for Lady Rosesong ;-p

You can write it and then go back and add stuff in once you've worked out your characters' 'development' up to the end of the plot; I've always found it very hard to work that way, but a lot of other people swear by it. In many ways, the first draft is just about establishing a *potential* framework for what happens; it isn't necessarily more than a framework, and you may decide to move elements of the framework around before finalizing them.

Why do I always have these revelations right when I'm trying to reach word-count goals? It's annoying.


Probably something to do with the activity of the subconscious? It sees a goal within reach, relaxes, and starts going back over the wider picture as a whole...

[betweensunandmoon]

You can get away with having characters who don't change in action-driven stories, but not in more "literary" stories where the vast majority of action takes place inside the main character's head. :P

So I'm finding it hard to envision a plot in which "there are no stakes". Do you mean that the characters have nothing to fear if things go wrong for them?

Sort of. I realized that none of my characters had a good reason to care about anything that had happened in the plot so far, which meant they had nothing to lose, which meant that nothing was at stake. I had a decent grasp of their personalities, motivations, and backstories, but couldn't work any of that into the narrative as it stood. I'm already writing in third person, so lack of internal monologue on my hero's part isn't the issue—he just doesn't have enough opportunities to think about anything relevant to his character in ways that feel like natural trains of thought, and the side characters all have pretty much nothing to do.

The middle and end of the plot, as I envisioned them, can still work with these characters, but it's the beginning that's all wrong. The reasons for these particular people to be in this particular place at this particular time doing these particular things don't make sense, and I'll need to fix them if I want my characters to behave how they're supposed to behave.

I'm not trying to make it perfect. I'm just trying to get it done, and it's hard to get something done if you're doing it in a way that you know is going to cause problems for you later.

In many ways, the first draft is just about establishing a *potential* framework for what happens; it isn't necessarily more than a framework, and you may decide to move elements of the framework around before finalizing them.

Indeed. :D

[igenlode]

The way you describe it makes this sound like a problem with railroading the characters into the start of the plot simply in order that later events can happen... but the characters, of course, don't *know* what the plot has in store for them, so they need an immediate reason to get involved.

(This is all a bit tricky for me because historically speaking, my plots have generally arisen *out of* the characters' trains of thought, and their personalities, motivations and backstories likewise -- which is one reason why I can't do the 'skip over this difficult bit and come back to it later', because what happens later will very probably be affected, possibly to a very significant degree, by what the characters specifically said and thought during the bit I'm struggling with; that's how sub-plots arise.)

I realized that none of my characters had a good reason to care about anything that had happened in the plot so far, which meant they had nothing to lose, which meant that nothing was at stake.

But that's only over a relatively short stretch of plot to date, right? So you just need a new way 'in' to the main meat of the story -- a reason to get them where they need to be that makes sense from their perspective rather than just from yours.

the side characters all have pretty much nothing to do

Obvious (silly) question: why are they there? (As in both, why are they on the scene at that particular stage of the plot, and what function do they serve later? Could they just turn up at the point where they are actually needed?)

it's hard to get something done if you're doing it in a way that you know is going to cause problems for you later.

As I said, I personally find it desperately difficult to do major surgery to something that has already been established as part of the timeline, which means I do attempt to get it pretty much finalized before I go on -- changing it later is just so much harder. But that's not the generally-recommended technique!

[betweensunandmoon]

The way you describe it makes this sound like a problem with railroading the characters into the start of the plot simply in order that later events can happen... but the characters, of course, don't *know* what the plot has in store for them, so they need an immediate reason to get involved.

That's exactly it!

But that's only over a relatively short stretch of plot to date, right? So you just need a new way 'in' to the main meat of the story -- a reason to get them where they need to be that makes sense from their perspective rather than just from yours.

*nods* Fortunately, I've already thought of a potential solution—I just need to figure out how to implement it.

The hero's relationships with the side characters, and the side characters' relationships with each other, are the main plot; they all have their own roles to play in the story. I don't know why any of them are there specifically, because I set this whole thing up wrong. Each side character's reason for doing what they do is something I'll have to figure out.

[igenlode]

Sounds at least as if you have it under control ;-)