This is the fourth in a series of six observations on writing craft

Another note I find myself writing on almost every contest entry I judge is some variation on: Take the time to think more deeply about your characters.

More time. Always more time. Ugh.

Everyone drafts books differently, but for most people I would imagine that characters are less distinct in the first few drafts than they will eventually be. I find out a lot about my characters by writing them, and then looking at what I have and drawing them out of the clues I find there. It’s one of the great joys of working on a book – feeling these characters become deeper, more complex people.

But I’m always aware, when I write that feedback, that it’s a simple note for a difficult process. Easy to say ‘think deeply about your characters’, but what on earth does that look like? And once you’ve figured out how to do it, how do you bring what you’ve found back to the page?

The answers to those questions will be different for everyone, and I think it’s worth thinking about it – maybe even trying to make a process for it.

Something that occurs to me when I’m reading contest entries is that the writer might feel more free to explore the character if they took them out of the plot. The plot – especially if it’s a tight, romance-trope plot – often feels like it’s dictating the character, rather than the other way around.

So one way to approach it could be to have your character perform a simple task and write their stream of consciousness as they do it. Follow every little thought, no matter how trivial. Let them bitch and concentrate and worry. Toni Jordan used to ask us to write our characters peeling an orange. Then you have to figure out how your character peels an orange. With a knife, or fingers? Messy, fussy, annoyed? How do they experience the sensations? Are they even aware of them, or are they thinking about something else? How do their body and their mind relate to each other?

My feeling is that once you’ve done this work, you’re writing from a place of greater understanding and it will be quite natural to bring the more complex elements of your character into the scene.

However, I have one excellent shortcut to suggest: The simplest way to make a character feel complex is to have them feel multiple, even contradictory things at once.

I notice this when it’s done well, and I notice when it’s absent. If a character feels only one thing, they feel simple – especially if that one feeling is the obvious response to what’s happening in the scene. If they feel multiple things they begin to feel realistic. Intimacy is wonderful and scary. When new opportunities enter your life they often take you outside your comfort zone. Or going back to the last post about family: You can love someone and be frustrated by them at the same time, or want them to succeed and feel jealous. It doesn’t make you a bad person, it just makes you human.

Another effect it has is that it forces the character to have an inner dialogue about themselves. To feel multiple things at once you need a level of self-awareness that allows you to feel something and understand why you feel it, but not give weight to it or act on it. Or to watch yourself having the worst possible reaction to something even while you understand that you’re behaving badly and making things worse. We don’t always act in our best interests, and we don’t always enact our worst impulses.

I’m not saying every character should perfectly understand themselves, because so few of us do. But even when we wilfully misunderstand ourselves, it’s in the context of an inner dialogue that has developed over a lifetime of being in our own head.

Seeing this inner life makes characters feel multi-dimensional, and it makes them feel like grown-ups.

This is the third of six observations on writing craft

One of my reader catnips is family. Found family, real family, doesn’t matter. Give me those deep relationships that matter more and can cut deeper than any other relationship. Give me unconditional loyalty and conflicted love.

Something I notice in most of the contest entries I read is that the dialogue between family members or old friends doesn’t have a depth of shared history to it. They don’t sound like people who have known each other forever – they sound like they’ve just met.

Honestly, I understand how this happens, and I feel like it’s even appropriate for a first draft. In a first draft they literally have just met. There were points in late drafts of Untamed when I would suddenly realise whole sections of the siblings’ history with each other was a giant blank to me. They existed only in the bits of their shared past that were recounted or referenced in the story.

It strikes me as a really good place to focus attention, thought and work as a story is developed beyond the first draft.

I think we all know that feeling of being an adult until you go home, and then you’re straight back into a family dynamic that was cemented when you were eight years old and you honestly can’t believe some of the ways you’re behaving. You have a professional job! Where people look up to you! And you’re smart! And mature! Until you’re with your family.

Showing this dynamic is a powerful way to give a sense of history (these people shaped each other) – but it’s also a powerful way to draw your character and make them feel complex. We see them behave differently in different contexts.

When our heroine’s talking to her little brother does she immediately start mothering him and organising things he’s probably entirely capable of doing by himself? Does he enrage her more quickly and effectively than anyone else? Does she not expect him to have a complex inner life? How does she deal with it when she sees signs that he, in fact, does? Do they always joke with each other – a habit that becomes painful when they have something devastating to deal with together?

Dialogue is, I think, the primary place to do this work. The ways family talk to each other – the things they say and don’t say – are going to tell us almost everything we want to know. This goes back to my previous posts on writing for an investigative reader: The inconsistencies between what they say, feel, and don’t say will give the reader room to begin drawing the shape of these relationships.

It’s also a good chance to make the dialogue work harder. It’s a framework for asking: How would this specific character say this thing? What would they say in this circumstance, to this person? If the characters are all in relationship with each other, then they need to speak as their particular self for the dynamics to work.

Another simple but effective tool is thinking about the shorthand they would have developed over years and years. If someone brings up something that happened years ago is it a story they bring up all the time, God, Jenny, we know! Do they all have different positions on what really happened that need to be relitigated every time it comes up? Is it a shared story they can reference with one word in order to illustrate a point? Do they use the name of one particular sister to reference certain behaviour (Don’t Donna me over this!)?

There’s almost no new information you can tell your family – only continuing, evolving conversations, decades long.

This is the second of six observations on writing craft

In the previous post I focused on dialogue, because that’s where the power of leaving space for the reader is most immediately apparent to me as a reader. However, another place I’ll notice whether I’m invited to participate in the story or not is in the opening scene – the opening lines, even.

We all want to nail the beginning of our story, because we want the reader to stick with us. I think writing for an investigative reader is a useful tool for doing this.

The beginning of a story is when we have to introduce a lot of brand new information to the reader. With every solid piece of information we tell the reader – the markers that give them a sense of where they are – we have a choice about whether we give them room to start putting the shape of the world together themselves, or whether we draw it for them.

There’s a fine balance between statement and question in writing, which I don’t fully understand, but which I’m aware of navigating while I write. When is it more powerful to make a statement – to ‘just say the thing’ – and when is it more powerful to ask the reader to figure it out? But for this post I’ll say, simplistically: Each question arises from and is anchored to a solid fact.

An example:

Stating the fact and the answer together (and thus leaving nothing for the reader to do) might look like: She needed to feel bold today, so she wore her brightest lipstick.

Stating the fact that gives rise to a question might look like: She’d chosen her boldest lipstick.

Readers will immediately start to think about why she’s wearing her boldest lipstick. The most obvious reason – that she wants to feel confident – will occur to the reader, almost unconsciously. Even just working on that level, it’s a detail that will invite readers in, rather than shut them out.

But what if she’s meeting her mum and as soon as her mum sees the lipstick she becomes disapproving? The reader connects those two pieces of information and comes up with a world of detail.

Yes, she needed to feel confident, but she was also intentionally rubbing her mum up the wrong way. It shows us how she feels about that relationship (like she’ll never get her mum’s approval, like she desperately wants her mum to see her). It raises questions about their relationship (what went wrong between them?). It shows that what she tells us and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same thing. It leaves room for some really tender emotion to enter the narrative.

This thought process can be applied to every new detail that is given or purposely omitted at the beginning of the story. Some of those details are character details, like the example above. Some will be plot details, where we have to think about how much solid information the reader needs to feel situated in the story and how much we want to leave for them to guess at – which questions we want them to be asking.

This is the first of six observations on writing craft

Here’s a sentence I find myself writing over and over when I’m marking up contest manuscripts: Writers love to investigate – it’s what makes them engaged readers!

(And now you know if your work was judged by me, because I am in love with this concept.)

I started thinking about readers as investigators during the past year or so, and I love how clearly it draws the relationship between writing and the act of reading. It gives me a way to look at my writing on a sentence level and consciously make it more dynamic.

I began noticing it when my attention would wander during dialogue that didn’t ask me to participate in any way.

This is dialogue where two people are responding exactly to what each other is saying. One asks for information, the other gives it. One makes a remark that merits a certain emotional response, that emotional response is given. All the relevant information for the interaction, scene and narrative are given in the text of the dialogue without activating the subtext.

This leaves me, the reader, with nothing to do but passively receive what I’m given.

What I really want as a reader is to be an active participant. I want to be given crumbs to collect, and follow. I want to be required to carry one piece of information with me, and arrive at some new understanding by connecting it to another piece of information. I want, basically, to play connect the dots. The story gives me enough solid points to travel through, but I draw the line.

We’re puzzle machines. If we see two disparate pieces of information we will immediately begin to find the connection between them. This is where we engage readers – by leaving the answer blank and asking them to find it.

(That’s a bit reductive. A satisfying narrative will likely eventually state the answer – it’s just way more satisfying if I, the reader, have already solved for the same.)

There’s an example I always think of that does this so beautifully, from Peter Temple’s Truth. (I’ve written about it before).

The detective, Villani, is out with his dad preparing his property for approaching bushfires. His dad mentions that one of Villani’s brothers is scared of him, to which Villani replies, ‘Bullshit.’ That appears to be the end of it. For half a day they clear the property, and Villani’s internal thoughts are on his dad and their history. That evening they’re sharing a beer and talking about other things when Villani says, ‘Why’s Gordon scared of me?’

There’s so much meaning we can read into the space between these two things. Villani’s initial response, ‘Bullshit’, seemed to be a full-stop. He disagrees, end of story. When he brings it up again out of nowhere, we realise that he’s been thinking about it this whole time. That gives us a new sense of him as a character: That he’s sensitive and defensive. That he acts first and thinks later. That he cares about what his family thinks of him. That it bothers him to think his brother’s scared of him.

Even more, the phrasing of his question, ‘Why’s Gordon scared of me?’ tells us something. If he’d said, ‘Is Gordon really scared of me?’ it would still have the flavour of dialogue that responds directly to what’s been said. However, his phrasing shows us that he’s not only been thinking about it but he’s drawn a conclusion from it: He agrees with his father.

This sense of internal thought and self-knowledge makes him feel complex and real. Like an adult. And none of that happens on the page, it all happens in my puzzle-solving brain, in the conclusions I’m drawing from the evidence presented to me.

The more I’m asked to participate in the story, the more thrilling it is.