BYOCD: Creating a Casting Book
Before we get into using these images to help you in developing your characters, you need to know where to find them! As of today, I have almost 950 Real World Templates in my casting book. This has been a 20 year project, so I do have a little bit of a head start
Always be on the lookout for images of people who strike a creative nerve inside you
- Go online to clothing sellers such as Land’s End, LL Bean, J Crew, Eddie Bauer, etc., and request to receive their mailed-out catalogs.
- Buy magazines such as People or other publications that focus more on photos of people and less on articles. (Entertainment- and fashion-focused mags work best.)
- Watch for actors in movies – especially those in secondary roles – and find out their names by watching the credits or looking the movie up on IMDb.com (Internet Movie Database). Then do a Google Image Search for the actor/actress.
- You can also use real people, and in this day and age of camera phones it’s easier to capture an image of someone you happen to see who strikes that creative nerve, but just make sure that you aren’t describing someone whose features are so unique they’ll be able to pick themselves out.
There are two decisions you now need to make: how you want to store and organize your Casting Book.
For storage, you can
- paste/tape photos, pictures, images you print from the computer onto notebook paper and keep them in a 3-ring binder.
- cut/print them out and store them in file folders.
- store digital images (scanned or downloaded) electronically on your computer.
- or choose the storage system that works best for you and is easily accessible and updatable.
For organization, you can:
- sort images by feature: ethnicity, age, hair color, eye color, or whatever feature you tend to look for when you’re casting your character.
- store images alphabetically by the real world name of your Real World Template. This is the system I use. If it’s a model I cannot find a name of, I use the name of the catalog or magazine where I found them as their last name.
- or, again, choose a system that works for you.
I believe I’ve mentioned on this blog before that I am 50/50 right-left brained, so this is where my left-brain organization comes in handy. Because I’m extremely weird, I like to know a lot of information about the real world templates I use, including their ethnicity, real age, and height, all of which can usually be found on IMDb. I include hair/eye color for when I’m looking for something specific, and where I first noticed the person so I can call to mind a mental image of the person without having to look him/her up. I keep all of this information in an Excel spreadsheet for two main reasons: I happen to like Excel, and Excel gives me the ability to sort by the criteria in each column, allowing me to narrow down my casting process without having to search through all 950 names
Because I love my blog readers so much, I’m going to put you 20 years ahead of the game by sharing my casting book. In this version, they’re sorted in alphabetical order. But if you’re familiar with Excel, you can see I have it set up with auto filters—which means I can easily narrow it down to a certain year born, certain height, certain ethnicity, or even certain eye color. Granted, Real World Templates are for REFERENCE ONLY, but because I am so visually oriented, it’s hard for me to use a template who doesn’t share most of his major physical traits with my character
Now, I also keep electronic files of images of my RWTs—in PowerPoint. Again, for two main reasons: PowerPoint is my favorite program, and PowerPoint gives me an easy way to store, move, organize, and view my images. Here is a screen capture of the Mac-Mc.ppt file from my casting “book.” Here is a close-up of the first page (of several) of the RWT for my character William Ransome, Paul McGann. Because this is just a working file, I don’t worry if the pictures overlap one another. When I’m ready to use them, I can move them around and pick out the ones I really want to use. The DVD player on my computer came with a software program (Power DVD) that allows me to do screen captures, which is where several of these images came from. This is great especially if you’re like me and you’re drawn to secondary characters who might not be well known
Okay, great. Paul McGann is in my casting book. But let’s take it a step further. Do you use a physical storyboard when you write? Pictures of houses, floor plans, etc? Next time, I’ll show how I use my casting book to create files and storyboards for my novels
We interrupt this series . . .
. . . to do a little happy dance. A noted and highly respected agent has requested a full of my contemporary romance Happy Endings, Inc.! Just having him say that he thinks it’s well written and “quite publishable” is exciting, but added to that the possibility of being represented by one of the top agents in the CBA publishing industry is an unexpected and greatly appreciated blessing.
Will post an update when I learn more!
Be Your Own Casting Director: Real World Template Exercise
Last time, I gave a list of descriptors to use to write a few sentences about a character. The general terms I gave (brown hair, brown eyes, medium build) is the kind of generic description that most people can give when they’ve witnessed a crime. This is why police have witnesses work with sketch artists so they can have a concrete image to go from.
Back in the “olden days” when posting images or photos on the internet or through e-mail wasn’t very easy, if you were going to meet up with someone you’d only chatted with online, you might have to rely on the same type of generic description—and maybe a specific piece of clothing or something to look for. I remember at the first ACRW conference in 2002 that there were so many people I thought I knew well because I’d gotten to know them through the e-mail list, but when I met them face to face I felt like I didn’t know them because they didn’t look anything like the mental image I’d formed of them.
Although I haven’t come across it recently, there have been times when I’ve read a book where the character is described one way in the beginning (with green eyes) and then later in the book has a different appearance (with brown eyes). Most of the times, this is a continuity problem an editor will catch, but also something that can mean the difference between a contract and a rejection.
I have used Real World Templates for my characters for as long as I’ve been writing. The romance genre, probably more so than any other, requires specific and detailed physical descriptions of the characters. Because I’m visually oriented, I find it much easier to remember what my characters look like if I have a picture—or series of pictures—to go from. That way, I can be sure that my character descriptions remain consistent.
In a later session, I will get into how having multiple images of the character can help with developing the character, but in this lesson, let’s look just at how having an image can inspire ideas for a character.
Look at the sentences you wrote last time. Now, click on this link. Now write a new paragraph and focus on the physical characteristics while also including emotion and personality.
What is the difference between your two paragraphs? Was it easier to describe him physically from the list of characteristics or from the photo? Did the photo give you ideas for what he might be thinking or what his personality might be like that is different from what you wrote in the first exercise?
Now you may be thinking, Yeah? So what? It’s easy to come up with a physical description from a photo.
Once you start to build your casting book, if you’re as obsessive as I am, you’ll be able to find images of your RWTs that can help define your characters’ . . . well character.
Stick around, because next time I’ll discuss creating a casting book of your RWTs and how and where to find and store images!
Be Your Own Casting Director: Introduction
I’m hoping that I can in written form relay the information from a workshop I’ve taught a few times.
Do you have pictures hanging off the sides of your computer monitor? Maybe tacked to a bulletin board? In a notebook or folder? Or (like me) electronically stored on your computer? Let’s talk about how to use those images for deeper character development and inspiration for our writing.
First, what are characters? I came up with three definitions:
- People: real, whole, and alive
- The tool a writer uses within his or her story to connect with the reader
- The “active” part of the story
Now, there are a few terms you’ll need to be familiar with:
- Visually Oriented Writer—someone who is visually oriented learns best and is inspired by visual stimulation (that’s me!)
- Visually Oriented Character Casting (what this discussion is all about)
- Real World Template – the picture of that actress, actor, model, singer, athlete, or whoever, you have taped to the side of your monitor because that’s “your character”
- Casting Book – your collection of images of RWTs for your current work and for anything you might possibly write in the future
Why worry about the physical attributes?
We’re writing, not casting a movie or a play—so why worry about what the characters look like?
- Have you ever been frustrated when reading a published book because you want to know what the characters look like?
- In the semesters of critical research I did on Jane Austen’s work as an undergraduate student, I realized that unless a character was greatly self-involved (e.g., Frank Churchill in Emma), she never describes what her characters look like in detail except for generalities (tall, short, slender, plain). Picture Mr. Darcy in your head. What does he look like? Tall, slightly frumpy, curly brown hair, brown eyes, a little jowly? Or is that just because we’ve so identified Collin Firth with a character that isn’t even given that much description in the book?
- Visually oriented people want to know what a character looks like, and it helps to distinguish them in your reader’s mind. If the character is well-described, the reader can immediately call to mind a visual image of the character and be grounded in your story.
But keep in mind—describing what your characters look like is not the same thing as character development. It’s just the gift wrap. You want your readers to be pleased at the external wrapping but eager to rip through it to see what’s on the inside.
Two types of Visually Oriented Character Casting
Pre-casting visualization (Inside-Out)
- You’ve pictured the character in your mind so that you have already developed a clear, detailed mental image of the person and are looking for a RWT that comes close so that you have a visual reference as you write and don’t lose that image.
Casting from RWTs (Outside-In)
- As soon as the idea for a character comes to mind, you go straight to your casting book to find a RWT to develop the character from.
- Or you see an actor/actress/model, etc., who instantly becomes a character in your mind and a story begins to form around that template as that character.
I have used both techniques in the same story—including Ransome’s Honor which is what I’ll be using as my examples for this series.
Now, a writing exercise. Write a 2-3 sentence character description (within narrative) utilizing the following information—and try not to use any of these words directly:
- Male, mid-30s
- Brown Hair
- Brown Eyes
- Average height, build
If you don’t post your sentences in the comments, hang on to them, because you’ll need to refer to them in the assignment I’ll give next time . . .
Conflict: Move That Bus!
I am one of the seemingly few people who actually enjoyed the movie Castaway. I thought it was a wonderful character study, but there is one thing that really bothered me about it—the fact that we never find out what was in the box with the angel logo on the outside—and that the film ends with him standing in the crossroads—there is no actual ending to the movie. I’m left with that “hanging” feeling.
Have you ever felt that when watching a movie or reading a book? Like the writer did not bring the storyline to a close? This is called resolution and it’s what you must have for the conflict in your novel.
In browsing some websites that deal with this, I came across a really good example. A man living in a second floor apartment always takes his shoes off and drops them on the floor before going to bed. His below-stairs neighbor has complained about this over and over and over, but he keeps doing it. One night, he drops the first shoe, then remembers his neighbor’s complaints. So he sets the other shoe down quietly. Then, after a few minutes, he hears his neighbor yell, “Drop the other shoe already!”
Conflict keeps our readers reading out of anticipation. If their anticipation is not rewarded with the relief of a resolution, that anticipation will turn into annoyance and disappointment. It’s why TV shows end their season with a cliffhanger—the anticipation from the conflict the characters are in the middle of when the show ends in May is what gets the viewers back in September—for the payoff. When you give your characters an easy out, when you resolve a major conflict off stage, or when you do not resolve a conflict, your readers lose trust in you as a writer.
Has anyone ever related a story to you and when they finish, all you can think (or say) is, “And the point of this story is . . .?” Don’t waste your readers’ time. You’ve set up great conflict. You’ve explored your character’s desires and how to thwart those desires. Now you have to give your character the victory.
Think of it this way. On Extreme Home Makeover, the team comes in and tells a family who have gone through some kind of conflict/turmoil (a handicapped child, loss of a spouse, house fire, etc.) that they are going to go away for a week and come back to a brand new house. We watch the show because of the anticipation of seeing the family’s reaction to seeing the new house. But what if, when the family came home, they came home to the same house—or, even worse, no house at all! How would the family feel? Cheated, lied to, betrayed? On a smaller scale, when we do not resolve the conflicts in our stories, this is how our readers feel. If the family came home to some little prefabricated, bare-bones house, yes they would have a roof over their heads, but they sure wouldn’t have gotten what they expected and would be disappointed. This is what you’re doing when you give your characters easy outs, or when you avoid the resolution of the conflict by having it occur off stage. What if the family came home to a house only half-built? What if you only resolve a few of the conflicts but not all of them? But regardless of the problems they face on the jobsite, the Extreme Team always completes the house before the family comes home. As writers, we must complete our “house” by resolving the conflicts we create for our characters.
Now that’s been resolved, stick around because over the next several days, I’m going to try to figure out how to convert the class I teach on characterization for visually oriented writers—Using Real World Templates for Characterization and Inspiration—to the blog to explain how I go about creating the storyboards that I posted the other day and how I use them in my writing.
Conflict: Desires and Goals
In Stein on Writing (the best overall book on craft I’ve ever run across), Sol Stein describes plotting at its most basic as “putting the protagonist’s desire and the antagonist’s desire into sharp conflict. . . . think of what would most thwart your protagonist’s want, then give the power to thwart that want to the antagonist” (83).
In genres where there is a definite antagonist/villain, this is easier to do than in genres or stories where there is no “bad guy” to give the role of thwarting our hero/heroine. This is one of the reasons why it is important to figure out what your thematic conflict is—if it is Man vs. Man, then you most likely have an antagonist. However, the person who thwarts your main character’s goals may not necessarily be a villain. In a romance, it may be that the hero and heroine are at cross-purposes with each other. In historical fiction, it may be that our solider, whose desire is to get home, keeps being sent to far off places by his commanding officers. What thwarts your character’s desires doesn’t have to be of ill intent—just something that happens that keeps your character from reaching those goals easily.
Stein quotes Kurt Vonnegut as saying that he teaches his students to have their character want something on the first page—-even if it’s just a glass of water. It’s not interesting to read about someone who doesn’t want anything—who has no goals. The greater the desire, the more interesting the story. Think about The Wizard of Oz. The whole story, once she arrives in Oz, is Dorothy’s desire to go home to Kansas. If she followed the yellow brick road all the way to the Emerald City with no one to stop her—even if she did meet interesting folks along the way—it would not be a very interesting story (nor take very long to tell!). But along her journey she meets with one conflict after another brought upon her by her nemesis, the Wicked Witch of the West. But the witch wasn’t thwarting her just to thwart her. She had a desire as well: to retrieve the magical ruby slippers which were on Dorothy’s feet and held the key for Dorothy’s return home.
Dorothy’s desire (home) is one that everyone can understand; it’s what Stein calls universal: “The wants that interest a majority of readers include gaining or losing a love, achieving a lifetime ambition, seeing that justice is done, saving a life, seeking revenge, and accomplishing a task that at first seemed impossible” (84).
In my genre, this universal desire is built in: gaining a love. Love, money, and power, according to Stein, are the three themes which create the greatest conflict, which is perhaps why the romance genre makes up more than half of all popular fiction sold.
While Dorothy’s desire to go home is her driving motivation, her goal for the purpose of the active plot is to make it from Munchkinland to Emerald City to seek help from the Wizard of Oz. Once she achieves that goal, after several major conflicts that seem like they might keep her from achieving that goal (“Poppies! Poppies! Poppies!”), she is given a new goal: to get the Wicked Witch’s broom stick and return it to the Wizard. She accomplishes this goal (“I’m melting. . . .”) and just when it seems like she’ll get to go home, after teary goodbyes, her desire is once again thwarted by the balloon taking off without her in it—she has achieved her goals, but not her desire. Enter Glenda the Good Witch who explains that the means to gain her desire was always within Dorothy’s reach—the ruby slippers.
Your character’s main desire shapes his or her goals for your story.
In my contemporary romance, Stand-In Groom, Anne’s desire is to run a successful business, remain independent, and perhaps, after ten years of living with the regrets and bitterness of a broken engagement, “create her own happy ending.” Her goal for the first part of the novel is to plan a wedding with a limitless budget, thus ensuring the future of her business, while fighting her attraction to the man she thinks is the groom. When she discovers he isn’t the groom, her secondary goal changes to trying to trust him again; after all, he’s been dishonest with her about his identity for several weeks. Then, when she discovers the true identity of the groom, her goal changes again. And, along the way, her desire changes to focus on putting happiness in her personal life first and her business second. While the hero and the man he works for (the groom) aren’t necessarily antagonists, it is through their actions—the hidden identities and goals of their own—that Anne’s desires and goals seem to be thwarted.
In Ransome’s Honor, my heroine Julia begins it with her main desire being to gain her father’s respect: to be recognized as his favorite over a sea captain who, she believes, replaced her lost-at-sea twin brother in her father’s affections (and who also ignominiously walked away from her with no proposal after courting her twelve years earlier), and to return home to their sugar plantation on Jamaica. Her goal is figuring out how to get back to Jamaica. She has two people who will try to thwart her desire: her aunt who is intent on Julia marrying her son, Sir Drake, so they can get their hands on her large inheritance. Both of these characters have desires of their own as to why they want Julia to conform to their goals.
You may have a very clear idea of what your characters’ goals are for your story. But what is the underlying desire driving those goals? And what can other characters, the environment, or other forces do to thwart those desires and make the goals seem impossible to achieve?
Storyboard Examples
A couple of days ago, I wrote about using visuals for creating my characters and getting inspiration for scenes. I wanted to share the storyboards I’ve been working on for Ransome’s Honor to give an example of what I’m talking about. Each image includes a background of the setting as well as major characters who have named/active appearances in the scene.
Chapter One—In the first half of the chapter, which takes place on HMS Alexandra, we meet captain William Ransome, several of his crew, and the Northrops, whom he must transport from Yarmouth to Portsmouth. In the second half, at her family’s townhouse in Portsmouth, we meet Julia Witherington and her father, Admiral Sir Edward Witherington
Chapter Two—William stops in to see his best friend and learns that he is still at sea. He does visit with his friend’s wife, Mrs. Susan Yates. That same evening, Julia, her father, and mother attend a card party where she meets Admiral and Mrs. Hinds. Later that evening at home, she gets nostalgic over letters from her twin brother lost at sea almost fifteen years before.
Chapter Three—William returns to the Alexandra and informs his officers they will be on leave for a month while the ship is refit so they can then go to Jamaica. The next morning, after taking care of some household business, Julia pays a visit to her dear friend, Susan Yates. While there, the man Julia despises most in the world, William Ransome, arrives.
I have storyboarded through the chapters I’ve written, and in the process cast several minor characters (such as Fawkes, and all three Northrops), and because of that was able to go back and tweak the narrative descriptions of them to make them more specific. Here’s a link to a (huge) file that comprises the detailed storyboards for chapters 1-20. (Sorry if it takes a while to load–the server where it’s saved is unusually slow!)
Enjoy!
Conflict: Thematic vs. Actual
Think about the most boring movie you’ve ever seen.
After writing that line, I had to sit here a while and think really hard to remember a specific boring movie. Not because I’ve never been bored by a movie, but because they’re just not very memorable. I did finally remember, though, when my parents took my sister and me with them to see Chariots of Fire. At ten years old, I was bored out of my skull by what to me seemed nothing more than a bunch of pasty, skinny British guys running around in their underwear to melodramatic piano music. A lot of talking, not much action. Don’t get me wrong—as an adult, I’ve heard wonderful things about this movie and its themes of conflict and victory. But at ten years old, I had no understanding of the very nuanced conflict present in the movie. It was nothing like another movie we went to see that summer, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
These two movies represent two opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to conflict. One (CF) is dependent on the audience possessing a certain knowledge of history that includes understanding the social context for Jews in the 1920s. I have to admit, I had to go to IMDb.com and look up the plot summary, because I thought it was set in the 1930s against the backdrop of Hitler’s rise to power. The other (Raiders), which is set during the Hitler era, does hope that the audience has an understanding of Nazis but isn’t dependent on our knowledge of the nuances of history. What Raiders gives us is a hero with a goal (finding the Ark of the Covenant) and bad guys (Nazis) who keep getting in his way in real, physical ways. Both stories are built around conflict, but because of differing goals, the scope of the story, and the forces on the other side of the conflict, we get two very different stories: one that appeals to a ten year old and one that does not!
Now, I’m not saying that when we write, we must write our conflicts so that a child would find them interesting. But we do need to know our audience well and write conflicts that they will understand, believe, and relate to.
One of the books on craft that I read in grad school was Noah Lukeman’s The Plot Thickens and I was surprised when reading it to find that more than half of this little book focuses on character development. It was through this study that I finally connected the importance of well-developed, realistic characters with the development of the plot—through their internal and external conflicts. And this is true for plot-driven as well as character-driven stories. Without the characters, even plot-driven stories would have no conflict.
There are two types of conflict in every story: thematic and actual.
Thematic conflict is the overall theme of the story. For example, in Chariots of Fire there are the conflicts of Man vs. Man (the two racers against each other) and Man vs. Society (the Jewish character against the Protestant society). In Raiders, we see Man vs. Man (Indiana Jones vs. the Nazis). In Castaway it is Man vs. Nature, which is also seen in environmental disaster movies such as Earthquake or Firestorm. In 2001 it is Man vs. Machine (remember H.A.L.?). Frankenstein, The Matrix, and Terminator are all prime examples of Man vs. Technology. See this Wikipedia Article for more themes and examples.
Actual conflict is what your characters have to go through to reach their goals, and the number of them depends on the length of your story. Let’s look at a few examples of actual conflicts from Star Wars (I was going to use Raiders but I haven’t seen it in several years):
–After a scroll of text that “tells” us that there is conflict, we are immediately thrust into the middle of a gun fight on board Princess Leia’s ship, which is seen through the perspective of C-3PO. Goal and Conflict: 3PO and R2-D2 must escape the ship before they are blown to bits or “sent to the spice mines of Kessel, smashed into who knows what!” Of course, 3PO doesn’t realize that R2 has its own goal for wanting to leave the ship and get to the surface of the planet below.
–Princess Leia is one of the leaders of the underground rebellion against the “evil Galactic Empire.” Before the film’s opening, she has stolen something that could help her cause defeat their enemy. Goal and Conflict: Leia is trying to get the blueprints for the Death Star to her comrades when her ship is overtaken and boarded and she is taken prisoner by Grand Moff Tarkin and Darth Vader. How will she get the information to the Rebel leaders when she is a prisoner under a sentence of death?
–On Tatooine, we meet Luke Skywalker, a young man who chafes at the restrictive nature of living on his uncle’s moisture farm and dreams of one day going to the Academy (the Imperial Academy, mind you) to become a pilot. When 3PO and R2 come into his life, he meets Obi Wan Kenobi who, after the brutal murder of Luke’s aunt and uncle, convinces Luke to join him on his mission to take R2 to Leia’s home planet of Alderaan. After securing transport, they discover Alderaan has been destroyed by the empire (“That’s no moon. It’s a space station!”) and are also taken captive. Goal and Conflict: Luke, Obi Wan, Han Solo, and Chewbacca must save Princess Leia and the Rebellion by escaping from the Death Star which is swarming with Stormtoopers, weird alien creatures in garbage compactors, and the dark figure of Darth Vader. Not all of our heroes will escape.
–Someone with his own goals and conflicts apart from this is Han Solo. When he takes on passengers, two men and two droids (“and no questions asked”), he is looking at it as an opportunity to make some quick money to pay off the debt he owes Jabba the Hutt. He knows that if he doesn’t pay this off, Jabba, like any good gangster, will have him hunted down and killed. Goal and Conflict: Take the weird guys and their robots to Alderaan, earn quick money, and get out of debt. However, he finds himself drawn into a fight he never expected to care about.
What is the thematic conflict of your book? For some genres this is easier to define than others. In my contemporary romances, it is usually Man/Woman vs. Self (internal conflicts must be overcome to achieve the goal) and Man/Woman vs. Woman/Man (conflicts between the hero and heroine, as well as with others). And yes, you can have more than one thematic conflict (but too many themes can start weighing it down).
What are your main actual conflicts? These are the events that usually make up the bulk of a 5-7 page story synopsis, and the events that make the plot move and speed up to the climax.
Again, check out the Wikipedia Article for definitions and see which apply to your stories. I’d love to hear what your conflict is!
It’s Good to Be Conflicted
In her writing craft book Beginnings, Middles, and Ends, novelist Nancy Kress explains that middles make up the majority of our novels and are where we dramatize events that increase conflict, reveal character, and put everything in place for the ultimate climax at the end.
If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to go back to the road trip analogy. I have a clear beginning: my house in Nashville. I have a clear ending: my parents’ home just south of Dallas. In writing a romance novel, I have a clear beginning: the H&H meet. And a clear ending: the H&H reconcile and live happily ever after.
But how to get from beginning to ending is as varied in writing as it is on road trips.
Sure, the fastest and easiest way to reach my destination is to take the interstate. But what if I decide I want to stop and see the Shiloh battlefield in west Tennessee on my way? That means getting off the interstate—off the safe, not-very-conflict-filled path—onto back roads. I could get lost. My car could break down in the middle of nowhere. The mountain people could get me. Or I could arrive there safely and have a profound, emotionally and spiritually moving experience. From there, I might decide to go to St. Louis and see the Gateway Arch, then down to Springfield to visit my friends Jill and Tracey. Since I’m so close, I think I’ll stay overnight in Branson and take in a show or two. Then I could drop down south through the Ozarks to Hot Springs and visit the spa at the Buckstaff bathhouse for a hot mineral bath and massage. From there, I’ll hit the interstate for a couple hours’ smooth sailing to Texarkana, where I’ll stop on State Line Avenue—the border between Texas and Arkansas. Ooh, I can take another side-trip down to Shreveport to visit my uncle and his family, as well as try to meet up with several writing friends who live there. Now, unfortunately, once I leave Shreveport, there really aren’t too many places to stop between there and Dallas.
All of this sounds like fun, but think of all of the things that could possibly go wrong with a trip like this! Is my car reliable? Do I have a good road map? Will I be able to find my way along all of these backroads that might not be marked the way they are on the map? Can I trust the locals to be able to give me good directions if I get lost? Sure the trip on the interstate is much easier (and faster)—but a lot more boring!
When we write our middles, we want to take our characters off the safe path. We want to write them into corners we’re not sure they’ll be able to get out of—and then let them figure out how to do it. We cannot let them walk away from conflict.
When I was twelve or thirteen, there were several prehistoric “video games” I loved playing on our TRS-80 computer. (How prehistoric? Try on cassette tape!) All of them dealt with overcoming obstacles, whether it was answering a series of “what do you want to do now?” questions to get out of a haunted house you had to draw on paper if you wanted a visual, or as a little graphic moon rover having to jump craters and shoot aliens. These games were fun because they were about facing obstacles and overcoming them. Once we learned how to write BASIC and manipulate the code in the games so that we could never lose, though, they lost their appeal.
We like to hear and read stories of real people who have overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to survive—the parent company of the publishing house where I work, Guideposts, was built on just such stories. Think about it. Christopher Reeve. Lance Armstrong. Scott Hamilton. Survivors of the Twin Towers or Hurricane Katrina. The man who got trapped in a ravine when hiking and cut off his own arm to survive. The mom right here in Middle Tennessee who sacrificed herself to protect her two little boys during a tornado and now may never walk again—heck, every family they build a new house for on Extreme Home Makeover. We love to see victory over conflict.
But the human spirit cannot experience that elation if there are no obstacles to overcome or if conflict is too easily solved. Nor will these pseudo-conflicts bring about change. It’s been said that an addict will never want to change his destructive behaviors until he hits rock bottom—sometimes several times. Like the addict, we do not know what we are capable of until we are faced with situations we never thought we would have to face: our greatest fears, a deep dark secret being revealed to the person it could hurt the worst, losing a parent or spouse or child to a debilitating disease or death. People face these crises every day. Some cave. Some look for easy outs and end up miserable, in jail, or dead. The ones whose stories we want to hear are the ones who stood up, learned, changed, grew.
This is what the middle of the story is about—the triumph of our characters of any conflict we as the writers can throw in their paths. Be mean to your characters. Take away from them what they treasure most in this world and give it to their arch-nemesis. Strip them of everything. Treat them like Job and see what they do.
Since I’ve learned so much through the past series I’ve done, this is the first of several posts I’ll be doing on Conflicted Middles, in which I’ll include physical, emotional, and spiritual conflict, so check back often or sign up in the box under the links on the right and receive e-mail notification when I’ve put up new posts.
Virtual Barbies and Paper Dolls
In case you’re new to my blog or haven’t heard me teach or talk about it before, I am a visually oriented person. What this means is that in addition to doing my strongest learning by reading or seeing something in action, as a writer, I am constantly on the lookout for images that inspire my writing.
My stories are always character driven, and those characters come to me in a variety of ways, most especially through the “what if” process—what if I ran into a member of one of the popular boy-bands of the eighties. I would never recognize him because I did not listen to that kind of music nor did we have cable/MTV. Thus begins the premise of a novel involving a former boy-band member and an opera diva. Another major source of characters for me is from secondary characters in movies and/or TV shows that intrigue me (which I’ve written about in recent posts).
No matter where my characters come from, they all have something in common—I have to “cast” them before I can start writing about them. In fact, this is what I did my teaching session on for grad school: using Real World Templates to help build characters. I use mostly actors/actresses as they are easiest to find images of (or to harvest screen captures of from DVDs). Because I am drawn to secondary characters, I tend to use templates who are not extremely well known nor would they be easily recognizable through the physical descriptions I give of them in my writing.
In addition to my two main characters in the Ransome trilogy, the templates for several other major secondary characters come from movies set during the time period I’m writing, which has been wonderful when it comes to describing their clothing in addition to their physical appearance. The DVD player on my computer allows me to do screen captures, so I am able to capture a multitude of facial expressions and body language of my templates to use in building how my characters move and emote. I also get ideas for scenes from screen captures that show the template in certain situations. I would never plagiarize a scene from someone else’s work, but I sure do get inspiration from them!
With the proliferation of movie versions of Jane Austen’s novels, the Horatio Hornblower series, and the movie Master and Commander, I have been able to pull a plethora of images that help inspire me in my writing. Because of the research I have done independently from these, I know when something is a little off in the film (such as Darcy not wearing gloves at the Netherfield Ball in the newest version of P&P or the fact that Col. Fitzwilliam is wearing a naval uniform instead of an army uniform in the same movie). But they give me important insights into the backdrops of formal balls, dinners, life aboard ship, interaction between sailors and their superiors, or Georgian wedding ceremonies I would not get from any other research materials I have.
I can then also take the images of my templates—who have only been in one film together but did not play opposite each other—and use a photo publisher program on my computer to Frankenstein-together pictures of my characters in scenes from MY story.
I realized something rather profound (to me anyway) last night, when instead of writing, I started putting together in PowerPoint a chapter-by-chapter “storyboard” of each character who appears—or at least who is named and has a speaking part. Growing up, I played with Barbie dolls until my early teens. Then, when I put those aside and started writing down those made up stories instead, I collected pictures of my characters out of magazines, very much like paper dolls. I did not play with them so much as cut them out and put them on backdrops, but they served the same purpose as the Barbies—the visual expression of what was going on inside my head. Now, thanks to one-touch scanners, Google Image search, and DVD screen capture ability, I have Virtual Barbies and Paper Dolls to use as the visual expression and inspiration of my story.
And you know, they’re more fun now than they were twenty years ago!
KayeDacus.com 
