A Dollar of Trust

Imagine that a reader gives you a dollar’s worth of trust by reading your book. That trust means she expects you to give her certain things like a good story, interesting characters, and competent craft, among other things.

Every time your story fails in one of these elements, the reader takes away a bit of that money, and, when there is no money left, the reader tosses the book without finishing it and will no longer trust you enough to buy the next book.

The really tricky problem is you don't know what will irk each reader. Maybe it's grammatical mistakes. She may take a nickel out of that dollar, or, if she really hates grammatical errors, that error may cost you a quarter or the whole dollar. Or it could be plot problems, bad science, or faltering viewpoint to lower that dollar to nothing.  

Do you really want to risk losing that reader by being sloppy about any part of your writing? It's just pretend is not an excuse many readers will accept.  

The Minor Character

 A minor character is one who makes one or two appearances in a story, or if he has more appearances, he has no real character growth. He can be anything from the stable boy who tends the horses to the best friend’s brother who has a few comic moments.

Here are things to consider when you have minor characters in a scene. 

If all the characters in a scene are minor to the plot, you need to ask yourself whether you need the scene. 

If the scene is only there to tell readers something about the main character, then you should move it to a scene that is necessary with characters who are more important. 

If the person is familiar to the point-of-view character, very little physical description is needed unless the physical description has importance in the scene. 

For example, Jim studies his friends and decides to take Fred with him to meet the bad guy because Fred is built like a linebacker and is good in a physical fight.

However, if it's in the heroine's viewpoint, and she's introduced to the hero's friends, she will pay attention to what they look like and their names so more physical detail is needed.

If the scene needs a waitress who adds nothing to the scene beyond taking the food order, you can use some line like "the waitress took their order and left." 

If the hero is flirting with the waitress to make the heroine jealous, then a bit more of a physical description may be needed and a bit more personality if the character flirts back. 

Avoid the Bubble Scene

 Fiction narrative is a river of cause and effect which sweeps the reader and the characters through the novel.  What happens in each scene affects what happens through the rest of the novel, and main characters should change as these events affect them.  

If the sweet heroine has to kill someone to save her lover’s life, that death should change her, and that person’s death should affect the events of the novel.  

If that death scene has no effect on either the heroine or the plot, it is a bubble scene.  The reader may also decide that she’s not so sweet and may be a psychopath.

If she nearly makes love to another man and doesn’t think about her true love and that event does nothing to change her or the plot, that’s a bubble scene.  You’ve also changed the reader’s view on your heroine’s worthiness for a happily ever after.

Bubble scenes are emotional failures because the reader loses their connection to the story you want to tell. These scenes also change the reader’s perception of your character.

If a scene has nothing to do with the rest of the novel, you should ask yourself if it should be included.  When the answer is no, that bubble scene should be popped. 

Killing Secondary Characters

 QUESTION: Should I kill an important good-guy secondary character? 

It depends on what genre you are writing.

In romance a writer shouldn't kill off a favorite secondary character unless it's absolutely necessary. Romance is essentially the fantasy of happily ever after, and the death of a beloved character jars the reader's expectations. 

If a nice character dies, it should be a noble death to save someone else's life, not a senseless death. The finest example of this is Sidney Carton in Dickens' TALE OF TWO CITIES who died so the love of his life and the love of her life could find happiness. 

Science fiction, fantasy, and mystery have a harder edge, and readers are more willing to accept a character's death. In fact, if no one dies, many sf and fantasy readers consider that a flaw in believability.

I must admit to an intense dislike of having the major character's longtime love interest in a series killed, not only because I become attached to the character, but also because this is often writer laziness at its worst. 

Usually, the love interest softens the major character, and the writer doesn't want any softness or mushy stuff. (Oh dear, someone might think I write those stupid romances so I'd better kill the love interest!) To bring the main character back to the way he or she was at the beginning of the series, the writer kills the love interest. 

Of course, the most suicidal thing a writer can do in any genre novel is kill a beloved fictional pet or child. That will definitely drive readers away in droves.

As a good rule of thumb, I always try to remember an unspoken law in romance writing— “Never waste a perfectly good hunk.”  In whatever genre you write, readers love sequels or new adventures with the secondary character as the hero.  

Making the Victim Matter

Mystery, romantic suspense, and urban fantasy novels often start with a dead body, and the main character’s goal is to find out the who, what, when, where, and why of his death so she can solve the crime.  

The first hook for the reader is curiosity about the victim and the crime as well as the main detective/character’s personality, etc.  

Most readers will allow the writer time to set up the situation and to gather the first clues, but at a certain point, the reader’s patience and interest will wear thin unless the writer gives the reader a reason to care about the victim.  Simply getting justice for the victim isn’t enough to keep most readers reading the whole novel.  

The simplest way to make the reader care is to make the victim someone the reader would care about instantly -- a child, an innocent, a good person, or a person with a job that matters like being a school teacher, doctor, social worker, or an honest cop.  

Even someone who was a jerk or bad person will matter if he died doing something decent, or he had survivors who care.  A weeping mother or wife who begs for justice is a strong motivator for the detective and the reader because they create an emotional stake in the person’s death.  If the detective must prove it was murder, not suicide, so the young widow with little kids will get death benefits, the solution will matter.

If nothing about the victim will give the detective or the reader any reason to care that he was murdered, then the detective must have another reason to solve the crime.  Perhaps he will lose his job because his failure rate at solving crimes is so high, or he’s caught in a political situation where only solving this crime will save his career.  The victim could be one of a string of serial killings, but the killer has made several sloppy mistakes in this killing which could be his downfall so the detective is trying to stop other murders as well as solving this one.  

A method used in TV shows like NCIS or BONES is to make the good guys and their scientific methods as important as the crime’s solution.  We care about them more than the rotting corpse of the abusive pimp at the crime scene, and their lives are the soap opera that drives the emotional plot while the science drives the mystery plot.  

Having the killer go after the detective or people he cares about is also a tried and true method to make the solution matter.

Whatever method you use, just remember that the main character’s goal in solving the crime must be a strong and worthy one, and the emotional reasons for the solution must matter to both the reader and the detective.  

Make It Matter

I’ve talked a lot about various craft issues that make your book readable and approachable for readers, but one thing will mean the difference between a reader rushing through your book or putting it down and not going back. 

I call this idea Make It Matter.  

What is “it?” Each scene you write, every important character, and the book itself.

How do you make each scene, character, and the book itself matter to the reader?

The reader must care.  I’m talking not just interest in what is happening but an emotional investment.  

That murder being solved might be an interesting puzzle, but if it doesn’t have an emotional component for the reader and the main character, most readers won’t care.  

I’ve put down three different mysteries in the last month because the victim was such a pile of scum that I wanted to give the murderer a medal, and the sleuth had no emotional investment in solving the crime.  I didn’t care about any of it so I stopped reading.

In a romance, the love story should be life changing for the two characters and emotionally fulfilling for the reader.  Two people shacking up forever for great sex isn’t emotionally fulfilling.  Two people having a true meeting of the minds and hearts is.  

No quest in the world of fantasy will matter much if the reader doesn’t care about the characters, and the goal of the quest is selfish.

So, check every scene, the important characters, and finally, the book itself to make sure that you made it matter.

 

A Brief History of Narrative

Narrative has dwindled in importance since the first novels. Compare a novel of a hundred years ago to one today, and you'll see what I mean. 

What you'll find is that descriptions, dialogue, and narrative have all simplified. 

Descriptions aren't as detailed, and you certainly won't find long pages of descriptions of the countryside, the houses, or the clothes. 

The narrative has become more intimate with the author less intrusive. The reader is put dead center into the character's head and thoughts, and the intimacy tends to only be for one or two characters, not every character in the novel. 

Instead of omniscient, the current standard in fiction is third and first person. Most fiction is written in warm third person with occasional forays into cold third person. Hot third person tends to be only used in romance which is about emotions.

The paragraphs are also shorter.

The dialogue carries more story weight because it must give the reader more information about what the characters are thinking and seeing as well as advancing the plot. 

In other words, much of the fat of the novel has been trimmed because modern readers want only the meat and bone of the story.  This trend continues today with the narrative even more spare than it was a few years ago.

The fourth wall is never acknowledged anymore in genre narrative because of the more intimate viewpoint. You will never see this in a contemporary novel-- "Do not despair, gentle reader, for Becky will soon get her comeuppance." 

Constantly shifting viewpoints in third person has never been used in fiction except in the romance of the last twenty-five years where a bastardization of omniscient and third person developed more from ignorance of narrative techniques than deliberate choice. 

At its best, it is close to the norm of omniscient; at its worst, it is annoying and rather nauseating in a motion-sickness sort of way as the reader is jerked back and forth between two heads and offered considerably more information than is necessary. 

Few writers (Nora Roberts, for example) can write well using shifting viewpoints, and it is the kiss of death for most editors when they are looking at submissions because it shows the writer doesn't know what the spit they are doing. 

As an interesting side note, video techniques are changing viewpoint. Editors frown at sentences like, "His hand ran up and down her back." They prefer, "He ran his hand up and down her back." Body parts should not act independently according to editor thought. 

However, many writers now prefer, "His hand ran up and down her back," because they see this as a close-up in their mental video of the action, and it is beginning to creep into published writing.

In a few years, this type of video technique may be as common in genre narrative as the other changes we have seen.