By John Gilstrap

By the time I got to college, writing and public speaking were my things–the niches I’d cut out for myself. I wasn’t nearly as good at either as I thought I was, but that’s what being a freshman is all about, right? I wanted to be a good student and I wanted to get good grades, both of which came so easily in high school but then proved to be elusive at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where I was surrounded by students for whom such things likewise came easily in high school.

Western Civ kicked my ass. Honestly, who can possibly read all that stuff? As a science, Geology looked a lot better in the catalogue than it turned out to be in the classroom. Anthropology was cool, but again, what’s with all that reading? Holy crap! The Yanomamo are interesting, I suppose, but not for five hundred pages!

English 101 was supposed to be my happy place, the slam-dunk. I’d been editor of my high school paper, for crying out loud. I’d never gotten less than an A in any English class in my life. Welcome to college, kid.

This was 1975 and Mr. Greene (not Professor, mind you, making him only an instructor of English, apparently an important distinction) was a groovy, happening guy. With shoulder-length hair and a porn star mustache, he wore bellbottoms and sandals–the kind with the leather loop around the big toe. While he never did it around us, I’m confident he toked maryjane in his off hours. I would not have been surprised to learn that he owned a set of finger cymbals.

Our very first assignment from Mr. Greene was to write a one-page descriptive essay. Easy-peasy.

My Pop-Pop Bonner had passed away shortly before, so I wrote of seeing him laid out in the funeral home for the first time. I’d never seen a corpse before, and I’d never encountered the overwhelming smell (stench, actually) of all those flowers. I wrote of my hesitation to approach the casket and of my refusal to touch his hand as my mom wanted me to do. The payoff of the piece was that Pop-Pop had always been a working man, and there in the casket was first time I’d ever seen the lenses of his glasses be clean. I cried when I wrote it. I thought it was great. I turned it in with the naive confidence of an easy A.

Next class, Mr. Greene handed it back to me ungraded, with the note, “See me.”

I saw him. He told me that my piece was non-responsive to the assignment. He wanted a descriptive essay. I gave him a story. He gave me till the next class meeting to try it again.

I did try it again. I described the bejesus out of that scene. I talked about my uncomfortable shoes, about the crucifix on the wall, the light through the windows, the color of the carpet–everything. If nothing else, I demonstrated my knowledge of adjectives. I turned it in.

“SEE ME.” Note the caps.

I saw him. “What is this? Are you mocking me?”

I honestly don’t remember my reply. I might not have replied at all. Being a keen reader of body language and listener to words, I knew that I’d done something wrong, but I for the life of me didn’t know what it was. I certainly was not mocking him. Then. I most definitely am now.

I got a third swing at the ball. Lucky me.

Back at my dorm, I vented to my buddy Paul who lived next door (and is now a professor of accounting), who, as luck would have it, also had Mr. Greene but at a different time, and declared the descriptive essay to be the simplest assignment in history. He let me read what he’d written.

Oh.

My final rewrite was about a vase with flowers in it. No action, no emotion. Just flowers and a vessel to hold them. I got my A.

To this day, I do not understand the point of that exercise. For a reader to bond with a scene–with the description–movement and emotion are essential. Looking back, I must have instinctively realized the importance of point of view in creating a scene. In reality, plot, setting character can never exist effectively without interacting, all of it filtering through point of view narration.

My version was better.

And I still miss Pop-Pop.

Val d’Orcia in Tuscany, where the homecoming scene in “Gladiator” was filmed

By PJ Parrish

Buongiorno, cani del crimine!

Okay, fair warning. This post is going to be full of digressions. Because I am of a wandering mood today.

As you read this, I am probably having dinner somewhere in Tuscany. Am writing this ahead of departure, however, so I don’t have a clue where I will actually be. I travel with my husband Daniel, my best friend Linda and another old-friend-couple Roon and Athena. We’ve had great luck traveling together so we’re off again – The Traveling Wilburys.

First digression: Most of you have probably heard of the real Traveling Wilburys. They were a super-group composed of George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison. You had to be special to be a Wilbury. Not everyone had the creds and soul to be a Wilbury.

On a Sirius XM Tom Petty channel, Petty talked about how they used to sit around and muse about who could be a Wilbury and who could not. Jack Nicholson = Wilbury. Richard Dreyfuss = great actor but never a Wilbury.

This is how we feel about our little travel group. You have to have the right stuff. Our Wilburys like the countryside, not big cities. We seek out eateries discovered on the wing, not Michelin-mandated must-tries. We love to sit in cafes and watch the world go by, not face the selfie-hoards around the Mona Lisa. I am convinced conflicting travel vibes is behind the failure of many marriages.

But I digress.

I have been trying to learn some Italian before this trip. I do it because I think it’s necessary to have good manners as a visitor and because I found it so darn frustrating on my first trip to France in 1985 that I couldn’t talk to folks.

After much agony and decades, I can speak enough French to get by. As David Sedaris wrote of his own sad attempts to learn French: Me talk pretty one day. From his essay of the same name:

Learning French is a lot like joining a gang in that it involves a long and intensive period of hazing. And it wasn’t just my teacher; the entire population seemed to be in on it. Following brutal encounters with my local butcher and the concierge of my building, I’d head off to class, where the teacher would hold my corrected paperwork high above her head, shouting, “Here’s proof that David is an ignorant and uninspired ensigiejsokhjx.”

My only comfort was the knowledge that I was not alone. Huddled in the smoky hallways and making the most of our pathetic French, my fellow students and I engaged in the sort of conversation commonly overheard in refugee camps.

“Sometimes me cry alone at night.” “That is common for me also, but be more strong, you. Much work, and someday you talk pretty. People stop hate you soon. Maybe tomorrow, okay?”

But I digress.

Learning a new language isn’t just for the benefit of the foreigners you might meet. It’s good for you. Like at a cellular level.

Everyone’s brain is made up of neurons, and things called dendrites, which are the connections between neurons. This is what we call “grey matter.” Bilingual folks have more of these neurons and dendrites compared to the rest of us. This means that their grey matter is even greyer.

Bilingualism also has an impact your brain’s white matter. This is the system of nerve fibres which connect all four lobes of the brain. This system coordinates communication between the different brain regions. This helps you learn new stuff. Bilinguals have a lot of white stuff.

Yeah, but it’s hard, darn it. Kids, well, they tend to pick up languages pretty easily. We old farts really struggle. But it’s worth it. Just the process of trying to learn Italian gives my brain a workout and protects me from dementia. So I can say with great confidence that after six months suffering through Babbel Italian, I can now say “Where are the car keys?” (Dove sono le chiavi della macchina?). But I still have trouble finding my car in the lot at Home Depot.

Scientific studies have shown that learning a language also helps you stay awake. Just one week studying a new language helps students’ levels of alertness and focus. This improvement was maintained with continuous language study of at least five hours a week.  And get this: Improvement in attention span was noted across all age groups up to 80. This gives me great hope because napping is my new hobby.

But I digress.

Okay, so learning Italian is good for:

1. Polite manners
2. Finding a bathroom in Cortona
3. Helping your memory
4. Keeping you awake

But what does all this have to do with writing novels? (And you thought I didn’t have a point today). Well, turns out that according to studies, learning a foreign language helps you communicate better in your native language. It also boosts your powers of empathy. And maybe the best benefit: It increases your ability to see things from a different perspective. To put it another way, foreign language study:

1. Enhances your command of English
2. Makes you understand human nature
3. Allows you to walk in another person’s shoes. Madame Bovary, c’est moi.

Don’t we novelists need all three of those in spades?

In trying to learn French, I had to respect the structure of the language (if you put an adjective in the wrong place, it can change its meaning completely). I had to learn the nuances of the accent and subjunctive tense (One neglected subjunctive and a kiss is not a kiss, it’s a shag). In trying to learn Italian, the biggest lesson I learned was that sometimes you just have to go with the flow.

Italian is a very quirky language. I’m a tad anal and I drove myself crazy trying to analyze the whys behind it. I was always looking for the theory and sense behind its structure. I finally gave up and just tried to speak. I hear that the Italians are a very forgiving people.

I love idioms and my favorite in Italian so far is this one:

Non tutte le ciambelle riescono col buco.

This translates literally as “not all donuts come out with holes.” It means, roughly, that things aren’t going according to plan but, hey, don’t sweat it. Que sera. It’s a verbal shrug. Which is pretty good advice in any language for any situation, right?

But I digress.

A presto, amici!

I’ve got a special treat for you today. Becca Puglisi joins us with tips on how to flesh out antagonists. Please help me welcome her back to TKZ.

Cover linked to Amazon

We all know the importance of tapping into our character’s feelings and conveying those clearly to readers. When we do this, readers connect with our characters and become invested in the story. This is how we keep them engaged beyond the first few pages or chapters.

But sometimes our characters don’t want to “go there” emotionally. Maybe they’re resistant to change and have a death grip on the status quo. They might be uncomfortable with certain emotions and will try to hide or repress them. Un-dealt-with trauma may cause them to avoid their feelings. There are a lot of reasons a character might need an extra push to get them out of their emotional comfort zone. And the best way to do this is with an amplifier. Emotion amplifiers are specific states or conditions that influence what the character feels by disrupting their equilibrium and reducing their ability to think critically.

Distraction, bereavement, and exhaustion are examples. Emotionally speaking, these states destabilize the character and nudge them toward poor judgments, bad decisions, and mistakes—all of which result in more friction and increased tension in the story. And that’s often what we want.

But we’re not the only ones invested in making life difficult for our characters. Villains, rivals, frenemies, antiheroes, and other morally flexible characters will often seek to undermine other characters as a means of controlling them or manipulating their circumstances. A strategically used amplifier is a great tool for bringing those devious pursuits to fruition. Here are a few examples of short-term goals your bad guy or girl may pursue and how an amplifier can help bring them about.

MANIPULATING MOOD

Mood is a temporary state of mind—tending toward negative or positive—that is often influenced by external stimuli. It affects a character’s perception of themselves, other people, and their situation and influences their decision-making.

Someone with a vested interest in changing the character’s mood can easily do so with an amplifier. Maybe they purposefully put the protagonist into a state of exhaustion by disrupting their sleep, or they force them to endure the hardship of cold temperatures by killing their heater in winter. As the character’s mood swings, they go right where the adversary wants them: emotionally elevated, irritable, and distracted from what really matters.

ENSURING COMPLIANCE

Antagonists tend to crave compliance; after all, it’s a lot easier to dominate others when they’re not actively fighting against you. If the protagonist hasn’t yet recognized their enemy, all the adversary has to do is quietly manipulate the situation to weaken them. Then they can step in and lead the character in the wrong direction, offer self-serving advice, or magnify any cognitive or emotional dissonances already in play.

In the movie Ghost, Molly’s husband Sam is dead, and she’s in the throes of bereavement. Her good friend Carl (who, unbeknownst to Molly, was responsible for Sam’s death) is now subtly putting the romantic moves on her. His attempts are unsuccessful, so he takes a different tack by pushing her deeper into grief, deliberately using her situation to make her more vulnerable and open to suggestion—a despicable but frequently successful way to gain control and influence over someone’s decisions.

Another way a character can ensure compliance is by introducing an amplifier to create an undesirable situation, then using that situation to “rescue” the victim. Consider a greedy land baron who wants to take over a town, if he can just depose the matriarch. So he uses his considerable resources to create a local famine. Crops fail, people and animals go hungry, and the coming winter promises even greater suffering and death. Fear becomes as abundant as food once was. The matriarch, unable to identify the cause of the famine, is powerless to resolve the problem.

Then a stranger comes to town. He expresses sympathy for the villagers and reverses the famine to provide food until the next harvest. The indebted villagers begin to view him as more capable and resourceful than their own matriarch, and voilà! Through a fabricated disaster fueled by hunger and fear, the antagonist has earned the trust of the people and is on his way to claiming the village for himself.

CAUSING A PSYCHOLOGICAL DERAILMENT

But what if it’s not enough to simply win people over? In extreme cases, an antagonist may need to break down their opponent mentally and emotionally before building them back up in their own image. Leveraging the following amplifiers can help accomplish this.

Isolation: Separating a character from other people and even the wider world creates an unmet need in the area of social connection (love and belonging on Maslow’s hierarchy). Isolated characters make easier targets because of their emotional vulnerability and their longing to be accepted by others.

Confinement: Trapping or restricting a character in some way makes them emotionally volatile and reliant, forcing them to depend upon their captor for release, information, or whatever they need to survive.

Forced addiction: Creating a dependency on drugs, medicine, or other substances alters the character’s mental state, tempting them to sacrifice their moral code and reconstruct their priorities as the substance becomes the most important thing.

Torture and trauma: These potent tools, applied directly to the character or indirectly to loved ones, make the protagonist more fragile and easier to break.

Brainwashing. Thought reform through altering the character’s beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors is the tool of a morally destitute antagonist. This subtle process twists fear and hope in a perverse way to rewire the subject’s brain to align with the adversary’s own ideas.

These are difficult notions to consider, particularly as we know these amplifiers are used in the real world for heinous purposes. As such, writers shouldn’t deploy them casually. But they are legitimate options for a corrupt character who’s motivated enough to use them.

There are so many ways a character may seek to achieve their nefarious goals, and an amplifier can be the most effective. Make your antagonist a force to be reckoned with. Arm them with amplifiers that will make them more powerful, create challenges for the protagonist to navigate, and encourage readers to keep turning pages to see who wins.

For more information on amplifiers and how they can empower antagonists (and steer story structure, encourage character growth…the list goes on!), keep an eye out for the 2nd edition of The Emotion Amplifier Thesaurus, releasing on May 13th. Available now!

Happy Release Day, Becca!

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and bestselling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and other resources for writers. Her books have sold over 1 million copies and are available in multiple languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers—a powerhouse online resource for authors that’s home to the Character Builder and Storyteller’s Roadmap tools.

After struggling for years, maybe decades, you The Writer gets published. Celebrations! Parties! Champagne! Now you can legitimately call yourself an author. The book is a modest success and if you’re lucky, there’s a two or three book contract and eventually a world of your own making grows in print.

Like most of us have experienced, it probably won’t be that hoped-for blockbuster, because as I read last weekend, there are a million traditionally printed books released each year, and if we add in self-publishing, it jumps to four million titles clamoring for attention. That equates to about eleven thousand books hitting the figurative shelves each day. To put it simply, all this makes it hard to get noticed.

But you’re published and the fruits of your imagination are out there for everyone to read and enjoy. If you produce two novels in the same genre, you’ve most likely established a “brand.” You now write thrillers, mysteries, cozies, science fiction, fantasy, and any number of other genres.

Let’s say you write thrillers. The cover bears your name, and you’ve figured out how all this works. Unlike that first one that you toiled and sweated over, the second manuscript comes a little easier, mostly because you have a contract specifying a delivery time and by golly you’re gonna make it.

The next book comes out, and a year later, another. Though you still haven’t made the bestseller list, the checks keep coming in and the reviews are great. You’re on a roll.

The phone rings. “Uh, Author? We’re negotiating the contract for a new book.”

“While you do that, I’m going to write something different. I have an idea for a romantic thriller.”

“That isn’t what you write.”

There. You’re pigeonholed to only do what you’ve done in the past, but is that a bad thing? Most authors have stories that swirl like the little birds around a cartoon character’s head. You’ve been reading thrillers and after finishing the last one you told yourself, “I can do better.”

You’ve always wanted to be published, and so should you just settle in and stay in that lane?

My answer is no, if you want to experiment with ideas outside of what you’re doing. After writing mysteries for several years, you want to do something different and that’s perfectly understandable. You and your readers love those characters and the fictional world you created, but if you read everything from thrillers, to westerns, to nonfiction, you might feel a calling to trying something different.

Is it a career killer to switch genres?

Ask A.A. Milne. He wrote murder mysteries, after he tried his hand in writing humor and plays before Winnie the Pooh was born.

Cormac McCarthy wrote literary fiction for years before releasing his outstanding western titled, Blood Meridian. He also penned a number of contemporary westerns and eventually moved on to the apocalyptic novel, The Road before writing historical fiction.

With more than 225 romance novels in her backlist, Nora Roberts decided she wanted to write futuristic police procedurals. You might know her as J.D. Robb.

And did you know that fun movie that came out in the 1968 with Dick Van Dyke as the lead character was written by the creator of James Bond? Ian Fleming wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in 1962.

Dean Koontz began his writing career by producing lean mystery novels, many under pen names early in his career such as Brian Coffey (Blood Risk in 1973), before moving to horror, (Intensity), and now a flood of suspense thrillers. But within these current pages, he also adds elements of horror, fantasy and science fiction. He’s blending genres.

Larry McMurtry wrote western novels such as the nontraditional western Horseman, Pass By (1961), to Moving On (still another contemporary western about marriage and adult relationships), and literary fiction utilizing dark comedy and romance (The Evening Star). He concentrated on these genres for years before writing the Pulitzer Prize-winning western novel, Lonesome Dove. In his later years, McMurtry switched from one genre to another, even producing nonfiction books on the old west.

You roll your eyes at these examples. “Yeah, but these folks are famous!”

They are now, but they all started out with that first novel, then the second, until they gained enough experience and confidence to branch out, despite possible warnings from friends, publishers, and agents.

In my opinion, and with the examples above as evidence, you don’t have to “stick with what brung you,” to borrow and old southern saying.

It’s your work, your brand, and your name, and you should follow your instincts. For some authors, producing only one novel a year is almost overwhelming but satisfying and that’s enough. For others who like to play with their imaginary friends, two, and maybe three books a year is a real possibility, and that gives you the opportunity to experiment and branch out.

No matter how you do it, under your own name, or with a pseudonym, do your own thing.