Courtesy of svilen001

One of the most interesting things about being human, is that we see the world, not necessarily as it is, but through the lenses of our own perceptions.

When we write a story, our characters do the same.

The most compelling characters are those that act as a conduit to pull the reader out of their world and into the world we've created in our story.

So how do you decide whose story you're going to tell? Imagine how different A Christmas Carol would be if it had been framed around Marley or the ghosts of Christmas instead of Scrooge.

One of the best pieces of writing advice I learned early on was to chose the POV of the character who had the most to lose when writing a scene. I agree with this 100%, since a well-rounded character will have their own perceptions and act as the focal point of understanding to their own world.

But doing this only tells us how to write it, not who to write about.

So how do you decide who the main character will be and whose point of view you'll frame the story around?

Figure Out What You Want to Say

Stories, in general, have a kernel of truth at their core. A perception, a thought, a question, a statement. Some are written purely for entertainment, but others--my very favorite--are saying something through Story.

Whether or not you intend to speak through Story, Story will speak for itself, so it's a good idea to decide what it's going to say. Will it be the journey of a man to a miser back to a man again? The regrets of a selfish man who had precious little humanity inside him when he was alive? The story of three Christmas spirits as they work to transform people and remind them what it means to be human?

Those choices are all really different facets of one story, but which facet will you choose to focus on?

Decide Whose Story You Want to Tell

Once you've figured out what you want to say, you're going to need a voice to speak throughout the story. The character who connects the reader to the book in their hand.

For me, even though this is the second logical step, this is the first step for anything I write. The character is sometimes a whisper at the back of my head, but most of the time he or she says something that stops me in my tracks. It's usually just a single sentence, but a provocative one that instantly grabs my attention.

For my upcoming release, my main character looked at me matter-of-factly and said, "Death has bright green eyes and a wide smile."

There was so much Story in that single line (that also went on to become my opening line) that I had to chase down the words and take them apart to see exactly what that phrase meant.

So guess whose story got told?

If you know what you want to say, then make sure you pick the voice best equipped to say it. If not, my preference is to always go with the most vibrant, dynamic, and lively character that pops out of the ether and demands their story be told. O:) If one of those types of characters isn't coming after you, don't be afraid to just sit back and listen. The right voice to tell the story isn't always the loudest.

Get Into That Character's Head, Heart, and Shoes

In order to effectively tell the story, you're going to have to slip out of your perceptions and sometimes go outside of your own experiences. Because you aren't telling the story as yourself--unless you're writing NF or a memoir, in which case, disregard this--you're telling it as someone who lives outside of the world you've carefully crafted out of your own perceptions, beliefs, and experience.

You have to learn to be able to see the world as your character does. Live it. Breathe it. Experience it--as he/she does. Otherwise, it will just be you behind the curtain.

Sometimes this can be achieved through research, but most of the time, it's just as simple as sitting back and allowing your character to speak. Learning how to listen so you can hear their voice and weave it through the story. Finding ways to see the world through a different set of eyes. Letting go of yourself so your character can get on with the telling of the Story.

Because that's what Story is all about. Story allows us to shed our own skins and try on someone else's for a time.

How do you decide whose story to tell when you sit down at write?


Danyelle Leafty| @danyelleleafty writes YA and MG fantasy. She is the author of The Fairy Godmother Dilemma series (Catspell, Firespell, Applespell, and Frogspell), and Slippers of Pearl, and can be found on her blog. She can also be found on Wattpad.

Success Stories

Congratulations to two writers who shared their success stories with us: best wishes go out to Marcy Kate Connolly and Tracy Bilen.

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Publisher News

Random House Canada launches a new emag: Hazlitt, named after 19th century critic and journalist William Hazlitt. Hazlitt isn't a newspaper insert full of promotional ads; it's a "digital habitat" that is "absurdly eclectic" and "writer-centric." What does that actually mean? Two words: interesting content. Hazlitt is accompanied by an ebook line, Hazlitt Originals.

The Great Debate

People often compare traditionally-published bestsellers to unsuccessful self-published books when expressing anti-indie views…but what about the flip side: wildly successful indie books or manuscripts that never make it out of a big house's slush pile? This article takes an interesting look at the growing trend of indie books. 

Austen? Whitman? Hathorne? Dickinson? Yep. They all did it. A new exhibit in London highlights several iconic writers who published, or paid to publish, their own work.

Self-publishing or traditional publishing? How about…both? An author explains why doing both may be a better way to launch a successful career.

Thinking about skipping the whole traditional publishing gamut and getting your book out on your own? Self-publishing a book takes a lot more work than simply converting a document to an epub file: it takes expertise.

Blogospherically Speaking…

In a post about non-fiction platforms and comp titles, agent Janet Reid discusses Amazon rankings and how they can help you and your book.

One of the reasons for the growing self-published trend is time--publishing is a slow process. (It's probably why we QueryTracker users are addicted to response time stats!) Agent Rachelle Gardner has excellent advice for dealing with impatience.

Impatience isn't the only demon that torments writers--our self-confidence is always under attack. Here's a nice piece about regaining confidence in our writing.

Have a great weekend, everyone.





Ash Krafton is a speculative fiction writer who resides in the heart of the Pennsylvania coal region, where she keeps the book jacket for "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" in a frame over her desk. Visit Ash's blog at www.ash-krafton.blogspot.com for news on her newly released urban fantasy "Bleeding Hearts: Book One of the Demimonde" (Pink Narcissus Press 2012).

What if the most poignant parts of your story are the parts you don't say?

Beginning writers hear it dozens of times: show, don't tell. We cross out "Ted was mad" and say, "Show us how angry Ted is so we can feel it," and the intermediate writers dutifully show Ted punching walls, clenching his teeth, and stomping up the steps.

The next step is to show all your characters' feelings, not just your POV character's, so that when Jill watches Ted stomp up the steps, she knows he's feeling mad without having to tell the reader, "Wow, Ted was furious."

I've worked recently with a few newish writers on their first novels, and I'm picking up a trend from them: the need to reinforce their stories. It's not technically wrong, but it's giving their stories a feel I have to call amateurish, and I want to call attention to it, because it's standing in the way of otherwise good fiction. I'm going to call this overshowing and overtelling.

When we first start telling stories, it's difficult to prioritize what needs to be in and what needs to be left out. Back when I was in college, one of my best mentors read one of my early novels (I owe the poor woman a case of hard liquor for that service) and she told me to back off the reader. "Don't keep reminding us of things," she said. "Every time this character showed up, he had green eyes. Every time. I thought, maybe they change? No, they're always green, and eventually, whenever he showed up, I'd find myself waiting for the green eyes."

We do this because as writers we're afraid the readers are going to forget, or are going to miss something. Or, it's a more insidious problem: it's not the readers we doubt.

She continued, "You can trust us. I see you showing us something, like that he's angry, and then you tell us he's angry. But you can trust us: trust your reader that we'll get what you're doing. And more than that, trust yourself that you did it right the first time."

(When you get a chance, check out the TED talk on designing a book cover. At 3:03, take special note of what Kidd says about the word 'apple' and the picture of an apple, how you may have one but not both.)

If Jill insults Ted, we know it's an insult because we're paying attention, and we're smart. When a writer follows it up by saying, "Jill smiled at the cleverness of her insult," we as readers feel talked-down to. No doubt what the writer wanted was to make us think Jill's insult was pretty funny, but telling us twice has the opposite effect: we back away because it reminds us we're reading a book and for that second, we're no longer experiencing it.

To be really extreme, take something like this:
Ted picked up the pottery jug, glared at Jill, and smashed it against the wall. Ceramic shattered against the concrete. "That's what I'd like to do to your head!"

Quick: what's he feeling? What's the tone of his voice?

Now imagine it if I do it this way:
Ted angrily picked up the pottery jug, glared at Jill with fury, and in a fit of wrath smashed it against the wall. Ceramic shattered against the concrete while Jill stared, wide-eyed in terror. "That's what I'd like to do to your head!" he thundered.

By the time you get to the end of that, you're pretty much snorting with laughter, like okay, I get it, he's pissed. But when a writer does that over and over, it's as if the writer is holding the reader's hand and trying to guide her toward the emotions she should be feeling in the scene, rather than relating the scene and allowing the reader to do her job and really feel it.

Okay, so now you know not to overtell and overshow. But what if you take it one step further and deliberately undershow and undertell? How would it work? I'll tell you, done right, it works beautifully.

Try framing it the way Ivy Reisner did to me: partner with your reader. Give two parts and let the reader fill in the third. Ted picks up that pottery jug and cocks his arm, and in the next moment, ceramic shatters against the concrete. Your reader will know he threw it at the wall without your saying so. If Jill takes a pregnancy test and shrieks when reading the result, the reader will probably know what it was.

I call this 'elision.' And it's a lot of fun: how much can you remove without losing the reader?

I didn't invent this literary technique, although as far as I know I'm the only one who applies a linguistic term to it. If you've read Pride and Prejudice (if you haven't, go do it now) the moment of the proposal is rendered obliquely: Mr. Darcy makes it known to Elizabeth, and she gives him to understand her acceptance. We don't truly witness it, and yet we know it happened. In Sula, Toni Morrison shows Sula swinging Chicken Little by the arms, and even though it's a pivotal moment in the novel, his slipping from her hands is rendered in a dependent clause such that we never see it happen; we never know whether it was accidental or intentional.

It's a game of Jenga with your story, only the structure gets stronger when you remove the unnecessary bracing. Readers instinctively engage when they're hungry to know and you're giving them just enough at just the right times...but not too much.

Does this require your reader to pay attention? Yes. Does it require you to place a great deal of faith in both your skills and your reader? Yes. Will some people miss a point until they've read the story twice, and therefore many will never get some of your finer details? Yes.

Is it worth it anyhow? Absolutely yes.

Sometimes the writer's most important job is to get out of the way of the story.

---
Jane Lebak is the author of The Wrong Enemy, to be released by MuseItUp this coming September. She is also author of The Guardian (Thomas Nelson, 1994), Seven Archangels: Annihilation (Double-Edged Publishing, 2008) and The Boys Upstairs (MuseItUp, 2010). At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four children. She is represented by the riveting Roseanne Wells of the Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency. 

Courtesy of gun4hire

Danyelle Leafty| @danyelleleafty writes YA and MG fantasy. She is the author of The Fairy Godmother Dilemma series (Catspell, Firespell, Applespell, and Frogspell), and Slippers of Pearl, and can be found on her blog. She can also be found on Wattpad.