By John Gilstrap

As I read Reavis Wortham’s post last Saturday on how his characters evolve in his head, I marveled at how vastly different our writing processes are. I often tell people that my characters are all day workers: they hang out at the social hall drinking beer and having fun until I call on them to do something. Then, they’re like, “Don’t ask me what I should do, Mr. Writer Man. This is your gig, dude. I just do what I’m told.”

My stories are told from a very close third-person point of view. I don the character like a costume and and live the story from the inside. I know what the character wants to do (or wants to stop, depending), and then I go on the great pretend. I document what that scene’s POV character sees, feels, and smells. Somehow, through that process, I become close to those characters, and they come alive for me.

In any given scene, then, the most important choice is assigning POV ownership. It becomes especially critical when two or more POV characters are interacting. While they all can speak and emote, only one of them can feel. The POV character knows that his heart is racing and that his face feels flushed, but he can only observe or surmise that the other characters in the scene appear to feel emotion.

I’ve written in this space before that I have never described my character Jonathan Grave in any detail. In part, this is because if he is in the scene, he is 99% likely to be the owner of the action. As I write this, I have no idea what my facial expression is as I type, but I do know that my back is sore from where I tweaked it the other day. If we were having this discussion live and in person, you wouldn’t know about the twinges of pain unless I mentioned them.

As for plot, I have to know where I am going before I start–or at least before I get too deeply into the story. What I discover along the way is the most fun route to take me there. It’s like knowing you want to drive from DC to Los Angeles, but not knowing till somewhere in Indiana whether you want to take the southern route or the northern route. Or, maybe you want to park at a train station and finish the trip by rail.

Because I write on tight deadlines, there’s no such thing as a mistake. If I push Jonathan and his crew into a corner that I shouldn’t have, I don’t have the luxury of going back and rewriting a week’s worth of work. Instead, I climb into the POV character’s skin, and I figure out the solution from behind his or her eyes. And you know what? Some of the most poignant, memorable scenes in my books grow out of those “mistakes.” It happens frequently enough, in fact, that I’ve come to trust that the subconscious somehow knows what has to happen, and if I relax, I’ll get there.

Which is good, because those lazy-ass characters love to chuckle at me and guzzle suds and eat wings while they watch me try to figure things out.

All of this harkens back to my oft-stated and heartfelt belief that there are no rules to this writing thing. What works, works. Hard stop. I don’t understand the need to outline and do character sketches before I start, but if they work for another writer–and I know such things work for many other writers–God bless them.

But here’s some food for thought: If you are an outliner or character sketcher, and you find yourself plagued by writer’s block, consider the possibility that your outline is the problem. Perhaps your preproduction vision of the story is not the best one, and that your real problem is trying to join parts that aren’t sized properly, or have simply fallen out of fashion. Try putting the outline away and going on a great pretend.

By PJ Parrish

If you write long enough, you will eventually get this question: Where do you get your ideas?

Readers seem to be fascinated by the novel writing process, thinking it some mysterious alchemy, stories arising from the ether of the writer’s soul. (Which, of course, it is). But where the ideas come from is often quite prosaic and, well, practical.

I’ve never really given much thought to where my story ideas come from. They just do. Thank God. But I ran across a good blog at Jane Friedman’s site the other day that got me to thinking that maybe the kernels of our stories are an either-or thing.

Guest blogger Susan DeFreitas posits that, in her experience as a book coach, novelists fall into two camps: those who start with character and those who start with plot or story concept. To quote DeFreitas:

CHARACTER: Writers who start with character tend to be empathetic people—“people people,” you might say. A new story for these folks may arrive in the form of a certain voice in their head, or a line or two that seems promising. Or they might be struck at first by a type of character—for instance, a character who’s a bit like an intriguing person they happen to know, or a bit like a character in a book or movie they loved.

PLOT: Plot people, generally speaking, are idea people. A new story may arrive in the form of a concept they’re fascinated by—say, the idea that aliens might be symbiotic beings, in much the same way that lichens are—or an intriguing question: What if two twins, dissatisfied with their lives and marriages, decided to pass as each other for a year? Or they might be interested in writing a type of story. Say, a thriller that revolves around the trafficking of endangered species, or a story that combines elements of space opera and noir.

Well, my Louis Kincaid series, of course, started with my protagonist. He’s a biracial man with a rough childhood as a foster kid who gets kicks off the police force and spends most of ten books trying to reclaim his badge — and his tortured past. Which dovetails with what James wrote about Sunday: backstory as conflict catalyst. So I am character driven, right?

I always thought I was. But as I read DeFreitas’s blog, I realized I am more plot-driven when it comes to inspiration. Which was something of a revelation to me. I seem to fall head-over-heels for the big “what if…?”

Example: My sister and I were doing a book signing in Ft. Myers years back. Kelly and I had just returned from lunch at a rustic inn way out on a tiny island in Pine Island Sound. The waters around Ft. Myers are dotted with hundreds of islands, most just green tufts, but a couple privately owned and quite secretive. We were jawing about setting a book on such a remote place but getting nowhere with an actual plot. A woman came up to our table to get a book and we chatted. She said she was a psychologist who specialized in the sociopathology of extended families forced to live in close quarters.

What if…

There was a big family living out on one of the sound’s remote islands. What if they ran a run-down restaurant to make ends meet but no one knew anything about them? What if one of the women tired of the forced isolation and tried to run away by stealing a boat? What if a hurricane was coming? What if her body was found washed up in the mangroves near Ft. Myers? What if no one could identify her but she was wearing a strange ring carved from coral? What if there were, Louis discovered, a list of unsolved cases of missing teenage girls from the area that extended over thirty years?

So was born Island of Bones. It turned out to be one of our best sellers and won the International Thriller Award.

As I think back now, I realize almost all our stories were plot-hatched. Quite a revelation to this writer who prides herself on character development.

To get back to Susan DeFreitas’s blog: She makes some interesting points about the strengths and challenges for writers of plot versus character inspiration. See if any of this resonates with you:

PLOT INSPIRED

Strength: It’s inherently high-concept

Writers can describe their book in a sentence or two that will get the attention of both readers and publishing professionals, because the story concept speaks for itself.

Strength: Readers love plot

Yes, there’s a solid market for character-driven fiction—but the market for plot-driven fiction is substantially larger, encompassing genres like speculative fiction and mysteries/thrillers. Writers with an intuitive sense of plot don’t struggle to keep their readers turning the pages. In their stories, A leads to B leads to C, and D is that mind-blowing twist that keeps the reader up way past her bedtime. Such writers tend to have a lot of rabbits hidden up their sleeve, so to speak, and for the reader, there’s a real sense of delight when one after the next is revealed.

Strength: There’s no question of what happens

Writers who excel with plot are really people who excel at ideas: they know the field they want to traverse, so they pick the path that hits all the vistas they want to reveal. That’s a very different—and easier—proposition than trying to figure out what a given character or characters should do, or what should happen to them.

Challenge: Lack of character arc

The characters often start as a means to an end, the who that will discover the what. In order for the story to develop a sense of meaning and depth, these writers have to dig deeper with their characters in revision, exploring who these characters really are, what makes them tick, and the emotional journey they’ll make over the course of the story. Plot keeps the reader turning the pages…[but] it’s the characters, and the way they’ve either learned and grown over the story or, tragically, failed to. This is the part that writers who start with plot often have to figure out, and layer in, in revision.

Challenge: The incredible expanding plot problem

The thing about being good at plot is…it’s hard to know when to stop. One thing leads to the next, leads to another, leads to a fascinating subplot, and then another, and then, before you know it, you’ve got 160,000 words of something that may not in fact be publishable. Writers with this problem either have to train themselves how to outline in a way that addresses character arc or develop an eagle eye in revision for what’s really important in the story and what’s not.

Challenge: Lack of a real ending

Writers who tend to start with plot often find themselves writing a series. One pitfall of this tendency is that such writers often don’t know how to actually end their first book in a way that will be satisfying for the reader. Such writers often want to hold onto some big development until Book Two, or even Book Three. My response to that is this: Don’t hold your best cards for some imagined future story, because if you don’t end Book One in way that’s satisfying for the reader, and brings all the major threads of the story through to compelling climax and resolution—even if that resolution is just the troubled situation that will begin the next book in the series—there won’t be another book in the series, because the first one won’t get published.

CHARACTER INSPIRED

Strength: Characters make us care.

Writers who start with character don’t struggle to create characters who seem alive on the page, whose struggles touch upon universal themes, and who exhibit the sort of complexity that makes us as readers really feel what it is to be human.

Strength: There’s a solid market for character-driven fiction.

The vast majority of novels that fall into the genres known as contemporary fiction, women’s fiction, and literary fiction are character-driven. Which is to say, there’s a solid contingency of readers who read fiction for exactly what writers who start with character are generally able to deliver, on every single page: The sense of being someone else, seeing the world through their eyes, and going through a meaningful transformation or change over the course of the story. Writers who start with character generally don’t struggle to determine if there’s a market for the sort of thing they do, because that market is broad and well defined.

Strength: There’s no question whose story it is.

Other types of writers may spend some time in the planning stages of a novel wrestling with the question of who their protagonist should be. But for writers who start with character, this generally isn’t an issue (unless there are so many compelling characters in their head that it’s just hard to choose among them). These type of writers are not like directors looking for actors to play a part in their story—they’re more like directors making a biopic, with the story as a whole built around a certain character.

Challenge: Too many POVs

If you do something well as a writer, why not do more of it? That’s often the position taken by writers who start with character, whether they realize it or not, by adding many different POVs in their novels. POV comes easily to such writers, and they generally find it fun, because they don’t struggle to get inside the heads of the protagonist’s husband, for example, or her kids, or even the checkout clerk at the grocery store where she shops. These other POVs [can be] compelling and well written. But that doesn’t mean they serve the story. sometimes these other POVs are no more than game trails that lead the story off on tangents without contributing to the main story line.

Challenge: Lack of arc

Sometimes writers have so much love and sympathy for their protagonists that they have a hard time imagining a real flaw for that character, or some real issue in the way that person sees the world. But without an issue or flaw there’s no real character arc, no clear way that the story will push the protagonist to grow and change.

Challenge: Episodic or slow plot

Readers in general find deep character work compelling. But that doesn’t mean a novel can just rely on character to keep the reader turning the pages. For that to happen, there needs to be a causally linked series of events, with emotional stakes, that escalates over the course of a story to a distinct breaking point—in other words, a real plot.

So…which compels you — plot or character? And do you find yourself sometimes struggling with some of the challenges of either as outlined by Susan DeFreitas? Maybe you’re a hybrid like me. Yeah, I seem to start with plot, with some big idea. But for me, character must win out in the end.

A really great story is like juggling. You have to be able to keep all the balls in the air. And make it look like the easiest magic trick in the world.

Writing is easy for me. I don’t mope around the house, struggling with a story, and have never accepted the concept of writer’s block. The question of what to write about has never entered my mind. There are a million things to include in a manuscript, and I spend more thinking time on what not to add.

For me, writing is fun, and the creative process is always fresh and exciting. In my experience, it’s as simple as putting the characters on a mental stage, then sit back to watch a river of words flow onto the page…er…screen. I don’t outline or pre-plan what will happen. My characters take care of that, and far be it for me to interfere in their (usually) chaos-filled lives.

I hear a lot about building characters. Some folks spend days or even weeks developing a written backstory for each fictional person they create. It’s how they write, and there’s no way I’m gonna say this method is right or wrong. If that’s the way it works for you, more power to you. Writers write, and they create in their own way.

However, my characters appear as the story progresses. Some might begin as secondary characters who help move the story along. Others are around for a single chapter, to help establish a scene, or to prod a reaction from the protagonist or antagonist, and they often are there to simply add spice and provide comic relief.

They are young, old, strong, weak, craggy, funny, lanky, portly, and always with distinctive voices. Many are part of an ensemble cast that grew over the years as the Red River and Sonny Hawke books matured.

But who are they, these fictions that I construct without conscious thought or planning?

One is Retired Texas Ranger Tom Bell, old, grizzled, tough as a bootheel.

He developed over the course of a few days. Building Tom Bell (I always refer to him by both  names) was like snapping mental Lego blocks together one piece at a time until he matured on the page. He’s partly a real deputy I once knew, partly drawn from life, and wholly cobbled together from actors I’ve seen in a hundred movies.

My daughters insist Tom Bell is my alter ego. Honestly, I hope I’m as spry as he when I reach his advanced age.

Early on, many of my characters were loosely based on people I’ve known, such as The Hunting Club membership. I used several old hunting and fishing buddies as the basis of my 33-near-old newspaper column giving them nicknames at the outset, and stretching the truth about our adventures. But as the months, then years (good lord, then decades) went by, those characters took on a life of their own, and are now so far removed from the boys that only friends and family can tell the differences in the two entities.

By the way. A word of caution belongs here. I once wrote a column about the time when Hunting Club members and I went to the Texas panhandle for pheasant season. On the way, we discussed a thousand things, including an acquaintance who often told his wife he was hunting with his friends, only to spend time with a girlfriend.. We made a lot of cracks about it, and the next weekend I wove those stories and observations into a completely fictional character. The Membership’s wives read the column and immediately cornered the boys in order to find out exactly who I was talking about. They soon cornered me and explained that if I ever wrote anything so close to home again, I’d walk like John Wayne for the rest of my life.

In the Red River series, Neal Box, Floyd Cass, Oak Peterson, and Deputy John Washington were all based on real people who have since passed away, but I changed their names. It was enough in those situations, because I molded the resulting characters to fit the storyline.

But human nature requires readers to look for familiarity in an author’s characters, and though most of the time they’re completely made up, folks often think they recognize themselves or someone else.

Our house phone rang one night about eight or nine years ago and my elderly Aunt Millie (not her real name) was on the other end of the line. She’d been in an assisted living facility for years, and I was remiss in visiting her. I thought that’s what the call was about when I saw her name on the caller ID, but cousin, was I wrong.

“Hello Aunt Millie!”

“Reavis Zane, I got a bone to pick with you.”

Sigh. When the old folks who once changed your diapers use both names, you done messed up in some way.

“I know. I’m sorry I haven’t been by. How’re you doing?”

“I’m fine.” Those two words were short, clipped. “That’s not why I’m calling.”

I flipped through a rack of mental files, trying to identify some other transgression, but came up blank. Another sigh. It’s what you do when there’s a whoopin’ coming and all you can do is take it. “Well, go to pickin’. What’d I do?”

She straightened me out right quick. “You’re telling family secrets in them books you’re a-writin’.”

Maybe. In those early years, lot of what I used as the framework in the books happened in some way to myself or others, and were based loosely on tales spun by the old folks. I draped those recollections as best I could to conceal what was real, but a lot was made up from whole cloth.

In this instance, I had no idea what she was talking about. “Which secrets are those?”

“Why, you know what I’m talkin’ about.”

It was the classic Older Adult Strategy used on me by parents, teachers, and at least one high school principal. Pile on the guilt and wait for a confession. I knew better. I’d survived my larval years by either begging forgiveness, or feigning complete innocence.

Volley back into her court. “No ma’am. I don’t know what you mean. Tell me so I can remember.”

“You wrote in this last book about Maxine and T.J. getting together and runnin’ off with one another.”

Growing up, I must have heard a dozen stories about marital infidelity when the old folks forgot us kids were listening to their conversations and drifted off into juicy details. But in this instance, I made up the couple who left their spouses and started a new life.

“Really. Aunt Maxine and Uncle T.J. did that?”

“That’s right.” I heard ice tinkle in a glass and figured she was drinking iced tea, or had gone to hard liquor (where she was driving me). “I just read that part in your book where a couple run off together. You’re talking about kinfolk. You cain’t go opening doors like that. Family skeletons need to stay where they are.”

“Hummm…so Maxine and T.J. ran off together?”

A low gasp. “You didn’t know?”

“No ma’am.”

“Well, I’m not gonna talk about that!”

And she hung up.

After a little digging, I learned what happened way back in the early 1960s, but I swear to you all, they weren’t in mind when I made up those people.

So here’s a little advice. Basing characters on long dead historical figures is a common occurrence for writers. Amy Cook, Writer’s Digest legal analyst, says: “You can write about historical people because the two main legal areas you need to worry about when writing about real people—defamation of character and invasion of privacy—only apply to living people. The deceased’s heirs cannot sue under those causes of action either.”

Using living people can be legally hazardous. Apply a little common sense and don’t be defamatory if someone is still sucking air and kicking. But I dassent go any deeper into this rabbit hole right now. There are dozens of detailed and well-researched articles online about using real people.

Be careful of your own family, too. They might have a crow to pick with you.

We are pleased to have a guest blog today by one of our regular participants, KAY DIBIANCA. Please check the bottom of this post for Kay’s background and links. Thanks, Kay, for agreeing to present this article.

BOBBY FISCHER AND THE HERO’S JOURNEY

KAY DIBIANCA, AUGUST 2021

Recently I re-watched the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. Although the story is based on the early life of a young American chess prodigy named Josh Waitzkin, the undercurrent is all about Bobby Fischer.

Fischer’s life was worthy of a Greek tragedy. Raised by a single mother, he received a chess set as a gift when he was six years old and the journey began. Fischer was amazing. Talented and obsessed with the game, he became the youngest ever U.S. Junior Chess Champion at thirteen and the youngest ever U.S. Chess Champion at fourteen. At age fifteen, he became the world’s youngest person to ever achieve the rank of international grandmaster.

One example of his extraordinary skill was a game he played in 1956, in which he scored a remarkable victory over a leading American chess master, Donald Byrne, in what came to be known as The Game of the Century. Writing in Chess Review magazine, Hans Kmoch called it, “… a stunning masterpiece of combination play … “ Fischer was thirteen years old.

But like many great protagonists, Fischer had a personality of extremes. With an IQ measured at around 180, he had all the mental acuity of a genius – and all the charm of a horned toad. The world simply did not conform to Bobby Fischer’s standards, and he insisted on pointing it out. He railed against the Russians who had dominated the chess world for decades, accusing them of rigging the competitions by playing each other to easy draws so that they could reserve precious energy to play people from other countries. (He was right.) But his fury extended far beyond the chess board. He was rabidly antisemitic even though he was himself Jewish (through his mother), and he left a long trail of broken relationships and burned-out bridges behind him.

However, despite his many flaws, Fischer was so talented and hard-working that most people in the American chess world longed to see him compete for the world championship. As he was reaching his prime in the late 1960’s, it seemed the 1972 world championship would be perfect timing.

But the road to the 1972 World Chess Championship for an American started at the 1969 U.S. Championship. The top three finishers there would move on to the interzonal competitions, and the winner of those contests would compete for the title. However, because of disagreements with the organizing body, Fischer sat out the 1969 U.S. Championship making him ineligible for the later tournaments.

Then a miracle occurred.

In a culture not known for the humility of its participants, one of the U.S. Championship finalists, Pal Benko, stepped aside to give his hard-won spot to Bobby Fischer because he knew Fischer was the American with the best chance to beat the Russian superstar Boris Spassky.

Like Achilles returning to the field of battle, Fischer took Benko’s place and raged through the qualifying rounds, destroying all opponents. The extent of his winning streak was unprecedented, and he earned a higher rating than any player in history up to that time. More importantly, he won the right to meet Spassky in Iceland for the World Championship. The stage was set. It would be a classic cold war battle between the lone American and the Russian machine. Cue the drum roll.

But with the world eagerly awaiting The Match of the Century, Fischer balked. He wasn’t happy with the conditions in Iceland and he threatened to stay away, prompting Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to call and appeal to his sense of patriotism. Finally, after additional histrionics that rattled the chess establishment, Bobby Fischer sat down at the chessboard in Reykjavik and won the tournament by an impressive 12 ½ to 8 ½ score. He returned to the United States a conquering hero and was given a ticker tape parade in Manhattan. He was invited on television nighttime talk shows and feted by celebrities and politicians. Bobby Fischer had arrived.

But a flawed character cannot frolic in the rarified atmosphere of celebrity for long, and Bobby Fischer didn’t disappoint. He disappeared. Having lived so much of his life on sixty-four squares, he seemed unwilling or unable to move to a larger stage. Always reclusive and erratic, his behavior deteriorated and he refused to defend his title in 1975.

He did come out of hiding in 1992 and announced he would play an unofficial rematch against Spassky. But that match was to take place in Yugoslavia, a country on which the United States had imposed sanctions, and Fischer was advised by the U.S. that he would be breaking the law if he proceeded. Unsurprisingly, Fischer ignored the warnings, played the match, and won. Then the U.S. government, which had so lovingly welcomed him home twenty years before, issued a warrant for his arrest.

He never returned to America, but continued living abroad and dispensing his characteristic diatribes. In 2004 he was detained in a Japanese airport for using an illegal passport and jailed for several months. Iceland’s parliament stepped in and offered Fischer citizenship. He moved there in 2005 and died of kidney failure in Reykjavik in 2008.

If Bobby Fischer had been a polite, genteel man, he would still have been remembered as arguably the greatest chess player who ever lived. But would he have captured the imagination of the entire world if he hadn’t carried so much baggage? Would people have invested part of themselves in him if he had just quietly made his mark? I think not.

We are attracted to heroes who are complicated. They may thrill, shock, or disappoint, but they never bore us. They connect with life in a profound and mysterious way, and we’re like voyeurs, watching as they crest the ridge or wrestle the dragon.  We applaud their triumphs, weep at their failures, mourn their loss, and in the end, we acknowledge and value the impact they have had on us.

“What is chess, do you think? Those who play for fun or not at all dismiss it as a game. The ones who devote their lives to it for the most part insist that it’s a science. It’s neither. Bobby Fischer got underneath it like no one before and found at its center, art.” Ben Kingsley in the role of Bruce Pandolfini in “Searching for Bobby Fischer.”

So TKZers. What flaws does your protagonist have? Will he/she conquer them, succumb to them, or just manage to get through and live to fight another day?

***

 I am deeply grateful to Steve Hooley for inviting me to guest post, and to all the TKZ community for the information and inspiration I have found on this site over the years.

Kay DiBianca is a former software developer and IT manager who loves to create literary puzzles in the mystery genre for thoughtful readers to solve. Her debut novel, The Watch on the Fencepost, won a 2019 Illumination Award for General Fiction and a 2019 Eric Hoffer Award for Mystery. Her second novel, Dead Man’s Watch, was released in 2020.

An avid runner, Kay can often be found at a nearby track, on the treadmill, or at a large park near her home. Kay and her husband, Frank, live, run, and write in Memphis, Tennessee.

You can connect with Kay through her website at https://kaydibianca.com.