Who is Your Narrator?

You've carefully thought out your characters and planned the plot and structure of a novel. Then, once your characters get moving and start revealing new aspects of themselves that you never expected, everything changes. They'll start doing things in your story that you hadn't planned and you'll find yourself going back to rework your plan. Again.

That's okay.

You are not the puppet master. You are a novelist. (Image courtesy of Matthijs and altered.)

As a writer of novels, you have to give up control. Planning gives you direction and helps you move through the story so you don't get stuck, but no matter how much you prepare, your characters will eventually take over.

There is one place you probably can retain a shred of your

27 Things You Know as a Writer in Middle Age

1. You know that writing is not a romantic endeavor. It's a struggle. It's sacrifice. It's not a party and drinking doesn't help. It's real love.

Michael Douglas as Grady Tripp in the 2000 film adaptation of the novel The Wonder Boys.
Grady is on page 2,611 of his second novel. 

2. You know that it takes a lot of sitting and that leads to

Issue 02 of Four Chambers has been realeased.

Jake from Four Chambers asked me to pass this along...

Four Chambers—what certain members of the community are calling Phoenix's pre-eminent literary magazine (but only in

How Procrastinating Helps You Write More

Procrastination is critical for a writer. Sometimes we get trapped in our writing schedule and our deadlines and our goals and our word counts. That can mean death to a novel. 

We get hung up on “Writers write”. Gawd, how many times has someone said (or written) that snarkily in response to someone discussing writing?

Really, it pisses me off.

You want to know when I've done the most and best writing? Those periods in life when I walk a lot, when I read a lot, when I get the chance to talk about writing.

Want to know when I don't write pages and pages or particularly well? When I'm working all the time, have my writing scheduled, and I'm insisting to the people around me, and to myself, that I need to sit down and write because I need to get it done.

Image: Nick Kenrick on Flickr (text added)

12 Steps to Really Knowing Your Characters

In my previous post, I presented a series of questions to help think about your character-driven novel as a whole. The intent of this was to make you consider what you want your readers to feel and what you expect a novel to do. It also got you to think of your main character in terms that would help her to push the plot along, rather than depending on outside forces to move through the story.

Now I'm going to ask you to contemplate who your all characters are in greater depth. Even though we often spend a lot of time inside our protagonists and imagining them in great detail, sometimes we think about other characters within a limited context of the story. If you go to a critique group, you might be asked why character X lies to the protagonist. Your answer is probably about his motivation.

Well, if you're really writing a character based novel, simple motivations aren't enough.

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Add depth to your novel by shedding light on the complexities of your secondary characters.
(Images: http://kalaalog.com/)

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3 Steps Before Starting the Novel

Back in June, I began to talk about where the idea for a novel comes from and how understanding your main character helps develop plot. 

I stand by this. 

Your novel starts with a compelling protagonist. The character doesn't need to be entirely sympathetic, but somebody who we can see humanity in, someone we can feel. And they must have a goal and a desire. (Note that I used and there—not or—I'll get there, eventually.)

I am also a proponent for writing several scenes until you develop an understanding for your character. This makes writing sound magical, though.

Writing is not magic.