Men characters…can’t control ’em and can’t shoot ’em.
Actually, I guess I could do the latter. And that is just about where I am right now with one of the guys in my work in progress. His name is Josh. Or sometimes Matt. Before that his name was Alex. The fact that I can’t even settle on a name for this guy shows you where I am with him right now. He’s the husband of my heroine and while SHE doesn’t really need him — in fact, that’s part of her character arc — I do need him. He’s important to the plot.
It’s my fault. I gave birth to this creep. I can’t even blame my co-author sister Kelly because when we plotted this book out, I was the one who drew duty on Josh. I put him on paper, I got him up and walking around. So now I have to find a way to deal with him. I thought I was doing okay with him until I ran his introductory chapter past my critique group. They tore Josh to shreds.
Josh, it seems, is a cipher. In creating him, I committed one of the biggest sins of writing, something I preach about to every new writer I encounter. Namely:
Your villain must not stupid, dull, or incompetent. He must be a worthy opponent for your hero.
Wait, you say, Josh is the villain? I thought he was the husband. (Actually, he might be the villain; I haven’t really decided). Regardless, the same commandment applies to love interests as well as villains. If you expect readers to buy into a romantic relationship, the man you pick for your woman must be worthy of her affection.
Josh, alas, is made of cardboard. He’s not the sexy UPS man. He’s the UPS box.
I haven’t taken the time or energy to flesh him out. I neglected to give their relationship enough back story to make it believable. I didn’t give enough thought to his motivations. I have been so busy lavishing love and words on my heroine, the cast of fabulous secondary characters — shoot, even the frickin’ scenery — that I just plain forgot about flaccid Josh.
I know why this happened, though I hate to admit it.
This book is not a Louis Kincaid book, so I can’t depend on my deep “friendships” with old characters. I don’t know these new characters yet so it’s harder to plumb their depths. This book is also not a strict thriller like we have written before. It’s closer to psychological suspense, which for me at least requires some stretching. It is still dark in tone as our other books but it is more dependent on relationships and all the shadows, ambiguities and difficulties that presents.
I think when writing Josh I had flashbacks to my romance writing days, when relationships were the backbone of my stories. There wasn’t the convenient conveyance of violence or an unsolved case to propel the plot forward; you had to build suspense solely through how the characters related to each other. Plus there’s the sex thing. In romance, if you didn’t have sex every four chapters or so there was something wrong with you. But that was a long time ago. I haven’t had to have sex since…well, never mind.
Friends, I am here to tell you. It is not just like riding a bicycle.
The lesson here is: Pay attention to every character and don’t take shortcuts. Go deep and then even deeper when you think about their motivations. I didn’t do my job as a writer with Josh the first time around. I thought I could get away with giving him less than my best. So now, here I am, struggling with rewrites way too early in the first draft.
This is not a good place to be because first drafts, as I have said often, should be just that — drafts. If you stop and go back for intensive surgery too early in your book’s life you lose your forward momentum. But I have no choice because I know the rest of the book will not fall into place the way it needs to until I go back and fix Josh. So today I will transfuse Josh with some blood, jolt him with the heart paddles, and try to make him come alive on the page.
I should have killed him off in chapter 4. It would have been easier.
Punish him by giving him a horrid back story that his current bad bahavior justifies. Mental or physical abuse in his past that she doesn’t have all the truth on. The mystery of his past and her unraveling it could be interesting. He could turn out to be borderline sympathetic.
Make him charming in public (with humor or romantic gestures) or when he needs to be (to justify her falling in love with him) but be dark and brooding and dangerous when he flips on her. Draw on your romance roots to make him a sexy bad boy whose psychotic with her.
Or give him a memorable hobby. Make him be an obsessive collector of something like venemous snakes, poisonous plants or a new strain of killer orchids. Ha!
But you are right. He should never be cardboard.
LOLOL! Love your suggestions, Jordan! Seriously…they are good. He, does in fact, have secrets in his past and his present. But so does my heroine.
Snakes? 🙂
I liked the killer orchid. ha!
In my first novel, I wrote one (luckily) minor character who was solid wood – nothing I did made him come to life. I couldn’t remove him as he was needed. In the end, I just cut his scenes and dialogue to the bone.
This has never happened to me since, thank goodness…
Isn’t it strange that some characters just don’t want to come alive? Maybe it is because we are actually writing them true to their nature? Haven’t we all met a wood-person? Problem is, they feel false on the page even when they are true.
I hate it when I re-read what I’ve written and realize a character is a generic cutout straight from central casting. You said it yourself – motivation. What does he want? What does he want so much that he’ll do anything to get it? I’m always less interested in why the character wants it than in making sure he wants it so badly he’ll do anything.
John: Yup, it comes down to the writer really sweating out the hard work of figuring out motivation. I started to write this post on exactly that but decided I needed more time to say what I wanted. Will follow up on it next time.
He sounds like a real pain. Send him away on a busness trip. Even better, have his reserve unit get called up for deployment. What? You didn’t know he was in the reserves?
Can’t I just shove him out onto an ice floe?
There you go. Think outside the box. Watch more soap operas. Let him die in a fiery crash. You can always bring him back later if you need him. 🙂
“He’s the UPS box.” LOL
Now I’ll have to buy the book just to see how Josh/Matt/Alex developed. How very devious of you.
Characterization, I believe, is my strong suit and my weakness. I tend to overdevelop and end up with pages of yawn-inducing back story. But to have this problem with Josh before the first draft is even finished…you have my sympathy. No words of advice, though. Just a bunch of sympathy. Sorry.
Well, I can give you a compliment (re too much backstory) and say you’re in good company. I think P.D. James sometimes does the same thing. I love the books but sometimes she gives me way too much about the downstairs maid etc. As my old newspaper editor once called it, “enough about the hummingbirds.”
Great blog. Been there. If I can’t remember the darn character’s name, I know I’m in trouble. 🙂 BJ
It’s like Eliot said about the naming of cats — it’s a difficult thing. If I can’t get down with the name I can’t nail the character.
Even though I can fall victim to cardboard characters of either gender, I find that as a female writer, I’m most susceptible to writing female cardboard characters. Most of the time, the men, while they may need tweaking, are born alive on the page.
Weird.
Yup, weird. I don’t notice a bias in my writing one gender or another. Some men are easy, some aren’t. 🙂 Ditto for women.
Happy belated b-day!
I love your posts — they’re so entertaining. 🙂
As you described Josh (and your feelings toward him), I found myself coming back to the husband in GONE GIRL. I kept wanting to care for the man, but never could. And by the time the book ended, I wanted to hit him upside the head with a 2 x 4 and tell him to grow a pair.
It would appear Gillian Flynn achieved success (if you go by book sales and reviews) with a UPS box for a character.
Good luck! Like Amanda, now I’ll look forward to reading the book.
Yes! I felt the same way about the Gone Girl guy. Wanted to slap the idiot. Re Gone Girl: I am being VERY careful not to mimic the marital dynamic in it. In case no one has noticed, “upscale women’s fiction with mystery cross-over appeal” is now hot. (I did NOT make up that label…saw it on an agent’s submission requirements. Evidently, everyone’s trying to dupe GG’s success. Maybe we’re ripe for “Gone Ghoul” — bad marriage among zombies?
Kris, one thing I find even worse is a square character I’m trying to jam into a round hole. This happened in the second Cotten Stone thriller (THE LAST SECRET) where Lynn Sholes and I introduced a new love interest for our protag. Problem is, they just didn’t hit it off. We kept giving them the chance to strike up a relationship but nothing clicked. Still he was a critical character and we had to keep him around, at lease for the first third of the book. So we had a realistic chat about him, and he wound up slipping in the shower (caused by the bad guys). Cotten went back to her original love interest which lasted through the whole 4-book series. Interestingly, our most frequent question from fans was when Cotten and John Tyler would finally get together. It make writing the ending to the last book (THE 731 LEGACY) easy–they did.
Joe: We had the exact same thing happen with Louis! Some of our readers were saying he needed a love interest (one old lady in Maine actually wrote that “Louis needs to get laid.”) So in “A Killing Rain” we created a defense attorney named Susan. She was going to be The One. But man, there was no chemistry! Then…and this is weird…we had to honor a charity character-naming thing and we had no other women in the book. So we switched the gender of a homicide detective to female (thus was born Joette Frye). She was supposed to be a cameo, one small scene, but she was rich and exciting from the moment she appeared on the page. They fell in bed in that book and in love in the newest one.
The lesson: Writers make lousy matchmakers.
When it comes to villains, one exercise I teach is “The Closing Argument.” Imagine your villain arguing his own case before a jury. He has to convince them that he was justified in what he did, or should somehow be excused. Do it in first person voice….it brings out nice colors.
Interesting exercise, James. I’ve seen some books where the writer takes this literally and we get at book’s end the dreaded “Now let me tell you why I have to kill you” monologue!
But I can see the usefulness of having to give actual voice to the villain’s reasoning. If it is clear in the writer’s mind it will be clear on the page.
I just had to redo a character – instead of being enigmatic he just was muddled and dense. What I did was go back to a basic character profile with wants, needs etc., identified these, and started to flesh him out from scratch again. Here’s hoping it worked!!!
Where were you in the process, Clare? Rewrites or midstream? That is my problem…I need to do it now. Sigh.
Hysterical! Josh is such a contemporary name. I can actually see him over at a corner table in Starbucks just texting away like a squirrel attacking a peanut. He sounds worse than the dweeb husband in Gone Girl. I’m hating him already. Keep him around for awhile and then slip it to him. 🙂
My bike’s hanging up in the garage, but that don’t mean I don’t take ‘er down for a spin ’round the block every now and again;)
Cheers! And so long, to Dutch:(
Jim: You nailed Josh pretty good. Actually, the more I write about the guy the sorrier I feel for him. He thinks he’s a master and commander (in fact,that’s his ring tone). He doesn’t know he’s a dweeb.
You could make his boringness be why she loves him.You could also bring in a love interest right before killing off the husband and said love interest could comfort her. Then you can fill in the gap however you want but in the end the man she thought she was falling in love with turns out to be a criminal psychopath that killed her beloved husband.Just a suggestion
Hmmm. You should write that book. You seem to have a feel for it. 🙂
The problem with cardboard cutout characters is moisture. When the rest of the story gets soaked in the rain storms of fate and destiny, or drenched by the ship tossing waves of high adventure or swept away by the sweaty, sloppy french kisses of romance, cardboard cutout characters suck up all that moisture and, unlike their more 3-dimensional co-characters, with no life-like outlets against which to pour their rage, violence or tongue wagging horniness they end up absorbing all the rain, salt waves, saliva and any other violence based or sexually induced ‘wetness’. The cardboard cutouts just suck up the moisture, absorbing it with the sucky power of those top secret NSA super-sucky paper towels(aka ‘Super-Secret-Sopping-Slurper-Sucker-Upper’ brand towels) Snowden tried to warn us about.
Cardboard being as cardboard is, our cardboard cutout 2-D stud and/or femme fatale absorbs the wetness, but can’t be wrung out and ends up a pile gloopy, glumpy, slushy-mush that looks like oatmeal blended with mouse turds and topped with week old guacamole with a side of mold.
Therefore, having said and done and imagined all of the above we are left with only two closing conclusions:
1. Don’t write cardboard cutout characters
and
2. Don’t French Kiss cardboard people…you don’t know where that wetness actually came from…
… So there… mission accomplished … I think we’ve saved a life today.
I don’t have anything to add to this. It was magic.
Truly instructional thread founded in honesty and evident artisan skills. The word ‘genuine’ applies.
You are a TKZ writing ninja!
:))
This was one of the best posts ever. We should hold a contest!
PJ–
Everyone commenting seems to focus on the husband. Maybe you can solve your problem by asking this question: why did my heroine marry such a man? What is it about her, not him that needs clarification?
Or: are there aspects to her character that explain why my heroine perceives her husband as a loser or a bad guy, when he’s actually much different?
I like James Scott Bell’s exercise involving a negative character defending himself in court. This is a good idea, because few if any “bad” people think of themselves this way. They feel justified and often superior to those who judge them.
I feel your pain. My main protagonist for my WIP has been cardboard for a long time. I still haven’t figured out his motivation but I have a huge backstory for him already.
Maybe it’s because I care *too* much about him. He’s *too* important to the story (obviously).
My suggestions: Your Josh is male so he needs something to be loyal to, to fight for. What is it? What drives him? I also like each of my characters to have one trait that makes them standout. Or conversely, if you know your female protagonist really well, what kind of man would she fall for? What kind of bad boy would she fall for that she shouldn’t? What need of hers does he fulfill and for this I recommend you look over Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.