characterization

Odds In Our Favour: Race in The Hunger Games

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This post by Alice Nuttall originally appeared on For Books’ Sake on 6/25/14.

With popularity comes controversy, and The Hunger Games is no exception…

There have been questions around the franchise’s use in advertising, and  positive and negative reactions to the casting of the curvy Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss. However, the biggest controversy has been around race in The Hunger Games, and its portrayal of racial diversity.

The Hunger Games isn’t the only series to have sparked this debate. Walter Dean Myers and Soraya Chemaly have questioned the lack of racial diversity in YA literature, and Victoria Law wrote a two-month blog series inspired by her struggle to find YA dystopian novels with POC protagonists.

None of the characters in The Hunger Games novels are explicitly described as black, white, or of any other racial background. Although her race is ambiguous, readers like blogger Alexiel have read the black-haired, olive-skinned Katniss as a woman of colour.

Like Harry Potter’s Dean Thomas and Angelina Johnson, Rue’s blackness is only implied, but her ‘dark brown skin’ means that it is a rather strong implication. The fact that Rue is African American is obvious – or so one would assume.

 

Read the full post on For Books’ Sake.

 

Blindness Basics For Authors

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This post by Melinda Primrose originally appeared on her Primrose Path site.

Writing a blind character seems to be much harder than everyone thinks. There are many mistakes being made that I think a little research would go a long way to fixing. Most of the blind characters I’ve seen, either in books or in film media, fit one of two stereotypes. Either the blind character has superhuman abilities because of their blindness or they are completely helpless. Most blind people, in fact, fall somewhere between the two. How do I know this? you ask. I am blind myself.

I was given the label “legally blind” when I was 25. In my younger days, I had 20/20 vision with my glasses. The short version of the long story, which I may go into some day, is that many different diseases attacked my eyes and caused vision loss. Since my initial diagnosis, I’ve had over a dozen surgeries to try and keep what vision I have.

WAIT!

You said you were blind, you say.

I think that is the first thing most people get wrong about blindness. It’s not an either you have vision or you don’t Kind of thing. In the United States, legally blind is defined as:

 

Read the full post on Primrose Path.

 

Likeable, Relatable, and Real

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This post by Annie Cardi originally appeared on Ploughshares on 9/17/14.

When I was a junior in high school, we read The Great Gatsby in English class. I hadn’t read the book yet, but I knew the rest of my family hated it. (They’re Hemingway fans.) “Ugh, that Daisy,” my mom said. “Who cares?” Obviously a lot of readers care about Daisy and Gatsby, but many readers also place a priority on likeability.

On popular review sites, reviewers refer to everyone from Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley to Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester to the cast of A Visit from the Goon Squad as unlikeable. Part of this is a personal taste issue, but it also deals with what kind of people we want to surround ourselves with. A novel that’s over three-hundred pages long is a fair time commitment—it can be grating to spend that much time with a character you wouldn’t want to interact with on a daily basis. Likeability is about ease and comfort and a kind of emotional bond. Connected to that is the issue of relatability, which NPR host and producer Ira Glass brought up when he tweeted that Shakespeare’s plays and characters aren’t relatable.

 

Click here to read the full post on Ploughshares.

 

How to Appropriate by Not Really Trying: An Author’s Guide to Writing Socially Marginalized Communities in Romance

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This post by Heidi Cullinan originally appeared on her blog on 9/23/14.

I hate to start a post with a dictionary definition, but this topic needs every card laid out on the table. Let’s begin with the beginning. Appropriation is the act of using something that doesn’t belong to you as if it does.

Authors do this hourly. It’s practically our job: we’re professional pretenders. In my published career alone, I’ve appropriated more than I have time to list, but let’s tick off a few. Long-distance truck drivers. Pawn shop owners. Ballet dancers. Football players. Poker players. Italians.

Drag queens. Practitioners of BDSM. Persons with OCD and autism. Transgender women. Gay men.

Some of these things are not like the other. If a poker player reads Double Blind and feels I got something wrong, their personal injury goes no deeper than annoyance, possibly with a side order of irritation. The same goes for the truck drivers and football players and Italian families. None of these groups currently experience deep prejudice. If I screw up when I borrow them for my work, the egg is on my face alone, and they have every right to call me on it. They will do this from a position of if not privilege, at least a confidence in their semi-comfortable place in our common culture.

If I misrepresent the groups italicized above, matters change quickly. Every group listed have been significantly marginalized by the societies in which they exist, and by simply declaring themselves part of that community, the members experience prejudice, social stigma, and often outright abuse. If I screw up when writing about these groups, not only do I have egg on my face, I contribute further harm and insult to persons already bearing a full plate of social struggle. If they simply hear about it happening, that’s bad enough. But if they purchase my book to see themselves represented in a positive way, and I slap them in the face? That’s bad. That’s very, very bad.

 

Click here to read the full post on Heidi Cullinan’s blog.

 

Writing A Relationship

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This post by Adam Ganz originally appeared on The Last Word on Nothing on 8/20/14.

About a year ago I sat in the Members’ Room at the Royal Society as Professor Judith Howard FRS, once a doctoral student of Dorothy Hodgkin’s, explained how crystallographers worked in the early days. She showed me how Dorothy would begin by calibrating the black circles in an X-ray diffraction pattern by eye, to begin the long process of assembling from the shadows cast by an X-ray beam the complex three-dimensional arrangement of atoms in the molecule. Hanging on the wall outside was a Henry Moore drawing of Dorothy’s arthritic hands, the hands she said she thought with.

What intrigued me [was] seeing the combination of skills she needed, not only mathematics but hand and eye co-ordination and vision to work out how the thousand atoms in say the Vitamin B12 molecule fitted together. It was somewhere between chess and Rubik cube- a giant jigsaw puzzle where she couldn’t see the picture, or even all the pieces.

I met Judith as part of my research for a radio play about Dorothy Hodgkin and Margaret Thatcher, two extraordinary women who reached the pinnacle in their chosen spheres –and were about as different as any two women could be.  From 1943 to 1947 Hodgkin was the then Margaret Roberts’ s chemistry tutor at Somerville College, Oxford from 1943 -1947 when Hodgkin was working at the cutting edge of X ray crystallography. In her fourth year Thatcher worked in Hodgkin’s lab on a molecule called Gramicidin S, which originated in the Soviet Union and had some antibiotic properties.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Last Word on Nothing.

 

How to Write a Novel: 7 Tips Everyone Can Use

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This post by Jennifer McMahon originally appeared as a guest post on Writer’s Digest on 5/22/13.

1. Write the story you’d most want to read.

Don’t write a story just because you think it might be a bestseller or that it would make Great Aunt Edna proud. Think about the books you love, the ones you really lose yourself in. If those are mysteries, then don’t try to write an historical romance or a quiet literary novel. It might not be anything genre-specific that you love, but a certain voice, or type of story, or kinds of characters. Write what you love. Do me a favor — right now, today, start a list of all your crazy obsessions, the things that get your heart pumping, that wake you up in the middle of the night. Put it above your desk and use it to guide you, to jumpstart your writing each and every day.

 

2. Begin with character.

Make her flawed and believable. Let her live and breathe and give her the freedom to surprise you and take the story in unexpected directions. If she’s not surprising you, you can bet she’ll seem flat to your readers. One exercise I always do when I’m getting to know a character is ask her to tell me her secrets. Sit down with a pen and paper and start with, “I never told anybody…” and go from there, writing in the voice of your character.

 

Click here to read the full post on Writer’s Digest.

 

Vulnerable Characters: How to Write Compelling Characters

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This post by Jean Oram originally appeared on her The Helpful Writer blog on 12/13/13.

What makes a character so compelling you have to laugh and cry with them through the book’s adventures? That you get so involved in it all that the author creates a fan instantaneously?

One of the things that really works–particularly in romance–is a vulnerable main character. If you don’t believe me…think of Wolverine from X-Men. In the movies he has a vulnerable side that makes women swoon.

To quote author Julie Farrell “Both Beth and Mandy [from Jean Oram’s Blueberry Springs series] have a great balance of being ‘feminine’ and powerful. And sometimes being strong means making yourself vulnerable. It’s not just about arm wrestling! … Those are the times where the rewards are greater. When you go to the place where you confront what you fear the most, you’ll come out the other side totally transformed.”

Didn’t she put that so well? It struck such a cord with me and really put words to what was swirling around in my head. In fact, our conversation lead me to look at the books I was currently reading and which heroines had really dragged me into their journies lately.

And yep. Vulnerability was top of the list.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Helpful Writer.

 

Write Relatable Characters

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This post by Ksenia Anske originally appeared on her site on 6/25/14.

Why? Is the first question you ask. Why should I write characters that are relatable? What about villains? The bad guys? The killers? The perverts? The awful awful people that do bad bad things? Well, here is the deal. Even the awfulest people are human. And by human I mean, we all simply want to be loved and to love. We may have a ton of shit piled up from the past, a ton of fear and anger, to the point when we want to kill somebody. Still. Killers feel too. They kill because they feel. Pain. A tremendous amount of pain. So much pain that they don’t know it’s pain anymore. They’re human, not robots. They have feelings. Think about the last book you read with a really evil character. Somebody so horrible, you couldn’t possibly root, but you did. I can tell you one. I read AMERICAN PSYCHO and even though I should’ve felt hate and disgust, I rooted for Patrick Bateman. Why? Because he was human. He doubted himself, he tried to find love and beauty in things, albeit, the wrong way, but you could feel it, see it, identify with it, perhaps think about that time you squished a bug to see what’s inside and realizing you killed it and feeling bad and sorry and…you know. All of us had these moments.

Because the characters are relatable.

 

Click here to read the full post on Ksenia Anske’s site.

 

How Emotional Peril Keeps Readers Reading

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This post by Janice Hardy originally appeared on the Writers in the Storm blog on 6/20/14.

Before I dive in, I’d like to say congrats and cheers to everyone at WITS on their new home! It’s hard to improve something so good, but they managed to do it. Kudos, Stormies! And thanks for letting me stop by to help you celebrate.

Okay, on to the writing tips…

When you pick up a novel, what keeps you reading?

The desire to see what happens next? The fear that something horrible will happen to your favorite character? The need to see it all turn out for the best? The need to know what happens next or what it all means? Maybe all of these at different times in the book.

No matter what hooks a reader about a book, she’s made an emotional connection. She cares, and doesn’t want to see the characters get hurt. But the wonderful things is, once you’ve made that emotional connection, “hurt” takes on a much broader definition. The emotional peril the character faces becomes just as important as physical peril. Probably more so, because readers know a major character isn’t likely to die, so they don’t worry as much about the outcome (unless it’s Game of Thrones, then all bets are off).

But you can destroy a character emotionally without physically hurting her. She can survive, yet never be the same. (and if you’re giggling in glee over the very thought, you’re my kind of writer)

 

Click here to read the full post on the Writers in the Storm blog.

 

10 Things Writers Can Learn From Jane Eyre

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This post by K.M. Weiland originally appeared on her Helping Writers Become Authors site on 6/25/14.

lucky ducky. Know why? Because writers can learn about storytelling just about anywhere. Life itself is a story. All we have to do is sit back and watch!

But one of the best specific places where writers can learn how to better their craft is by reading masterful books. As we approach the August 1st release date for my writing how-to book Jane Eyre: The Writer’s Digest Annotated Classic, I’d like to share ten quick lessons you can take away from this book right now. In lieu of the standard book trailer, graphic wizard Sean Brunke put together this fun little video for us.

 

Click here to watch the video on Helping Writers Become Authors. Note that a full transcript of the video is also available there.

 

Because Size Matters: McKee’s Four Tips on Writing a Big Story

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This post by Jan O’Hara originally appeared on Writer Unboxed on 6/16/14.

You know how certain types of feedback get under your skin like road rash, so that months or years later the grit is still working its way to the surface? Well, eons ago, as she contemplated a novel I’d set in my province, a critique partner sent me metaphorically skidding on the asphalt in a pair of Daisy Dukes.

The comment she dropped  which I found so distressing? “I think this would appeal to readers outside of Canada.” (Meaning, as I took it, that my beloved story wasn’t sufficiently big or universal to warrant a larger audience.)*

If you’ve had similar concerns about your fiction, today’s post might help. It’s a summary of four techniques advocated by Robert McKee in his seminar on Story which, when employed individually or collectively, promise to give your fiction a sense of expansiveness. While you’ve likely encountered the first three in one venue or another, it’s the fourth which lit up my neurons and where I’ll focus the bulk of this article. (If you’ve missed my former McKee Morsels, you can read them here and here.)

 

1. Take the Story Conflict Wide

In this circumstance, what is the worst thing that could happen to my character?

Writers are encouraged to use the above question when brainstorming progressive complications for their story. If attempting to go wide, then, while the story might begin at the level of personal or interpersonal  conflict, the “worst” ripples outward to affect the larger world, including societies and institutions, possibly even nations or worlds.

 

Click here to read the full post on Writer Unboxed.

 

Everybody Arcs! How to Use Emotional Growth to Propel the Story and Capture the Reader

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This post by Kristen Lamb originally appeared on her blog on 4/24/14.

I’ve heard people say some books (or genres) are plot-driven and others are character-driven. My POV? This is a fallacy. All good books are character-driven and plot is what makes that possible. Characters have to make us give a hoot about the plot. If we don’t like or empathize with the characters, we don’t care about their problems.

Conversely, plot is the delivery mechanism and crucible for character (even in literary fiction). Characters can only be as strong as the opposition they face. Weak problems=weak characters. In a nutshell, character and plot can’t be easily separated.

For instance, in the Pulitzer-Winning The Road, the plot is simple. Man and Boy must make it to the ocean. Yet, since this piece is literary, the plot goal is subordinate to character goal.

It is less important that Man and Boy make it to the ocean than how they make it to the ocean. The world has been obliterated, killing every living thing other than humans. Many have returned to the animal state, resorting to cannibalism to survive. The question in The Road is less “Will they make it to the ocean?” and more “How will they make it to the ocean?” If they resort to snacking on people, they fail.

But I will say that while plot is great, characters are what (who) we remember. We have to be able to empathize. We want to love them, hate them, root for them and watch them fail, then overcome that failure. As the late Blake Snyder said, “Everybody arcs!”

Often, this is the trick with series and why early books generally are more popular. Once our main character evolves, we are left with three choices:

 

Click here to read the full post on Kristen Lamb’s blog.

 

Is It O.K. to Mine Real Relationships for Literary Material?

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This article by Francine Prose and Leslie Jamison originally appeared on The New York Times Sunday Book Review on 4/22/14.

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. When Robert Lowell used his ex-wife’s letters for his poetry, Elizabeth Bishop told him, “Art just isn’t worth that much.” This week, Francine Prose and Leslie Jamison discuss what they make of mining actual relationships for literary material.

By Francine Prose

Writers need to be careful about putting their children in memoir or in fiction. We’re their custodians.

I’ve been asked this question so often I’ve begun to assume that the world is teeming with aspiring writers wondering what Thanksgiving dinner will be like after they publish that lightly fictionalized exposé of Mom’s actionable parenting skills and Dad’s affair with the babysitter. When asked, I usually reply: “Write what you want. People rarely recognize themselves on the page. And if they do, they’re often flattered that a writer has paid attention.”

Do I believe this? Yes and no. I’m reasonably certain that John Ashcroft didn’t recognize himself disguised as the evil high school guidance counselor in one of my novels. But like so much else, this thorny matter requires consideration on a case-by-case basis. In Mary McCarthy’s story “The Cicerone,” Peggy Guggenheim, the important collector of modern art, appears as Polly Grabbe, an aging, spoiled expatriate slut who collects garden statuary. Guggenheim did recognize herself and was definitely not flattered; it took years before the two women were friends again. Write what you want — but be prepared for the consequences.

 

Click here to read the full article on The New York Times Sunday Book Review.

 

The Benefits of a Style Sheet

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This post by Jen Matera appeared as a reprint on ePublish A Book on 4/8/14.

Some authors write according to an outline, and others have a less-organized series of events they want to describe. There are authors who write their scenes sequentially, no matter how great or small, and those who write major scenes first and minor scenes last. I’ve even known one writer who wrote all her sex scenes first—she said they were the most fun—and then built the rest of the story around them.

But what most writers have in common is that they keep some kind of notes about their story, characters, plot, timeline, and whatnot. These notes, no matter how informal, are what editors use as a foundation for your story’s style sheet.

So… what’s a style sheet? It’s your editor’s notes about your novel—the place where every character’s name, physical description, relation to other characters is noted. But that’s not all. Not by a long shot. There are basically two types of information kept on a style sheet: content and format. Details that refer to your story line, your characters, your setting, your era, etc., are considered content information. Information regarding spelling, punctuation, and grammar is considered format. But the differentiation doesn’t really matter, as long as most of it is recorded somewhere.

Content:

• Character names—for every character named in the novel. Yes, even Sam the driver who was in one scene. We have no idea if he’ll show up again in book three, so he goes on the list.

• Physical description, including any descriptions—eye color, hair color, general build, and anything that’s noted as standing out. No author wants her lead’s eye color changing mid-story.

 

Click here to read the full post on ePublish a Book.

 

How To Tell A Great Story, Visualized

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This post by Kate Torgovnick May originally appeared on the TED blog on 11/8/13.

A good story can make a campfire that much eerier. A good story can flip a conversation at a party from completely awkward to wonderful. A good story can glue your nose to a book. And, on screen, a good story can rivet generation after generation.

So, uh, how do you tell one?

Andrew Stanton, the Pixar writer and director behind both Toy Story and WALL-E, has many ideas, and he shared his expertise in his TED Talk, The clues to a great story. Below, see his golden rules of storytelling visualized by Karin Hueck and Rafael Quick of the Brazilian culture and science magazine Superinteressante. Each month, the magazine’s editors take a TED Talk and give it to their graphic wizards to interpret in any way they see fit. Here, a reimagining of Stanton’s talk on stories. Via the Ugly Duckling. Just click the image to see a larger version.

 

Click here to see the accompanying infographic on the TED blog.