What's Your Problem?

So, you're writing a story or a novel, and you can't figure out why it's not working.

The first question I'm going to ask you is this: Does your character have a problem?

If not, then you have a problem.

And you need to figure out the problem your character needs to solve.

Each character has one.

You can call the problem whatever you want to call it—a challenge, a struggle, a question—but no matter what you call the problem, it’s what your story is built around.

Some might suggest asking: what does your character want?

Others might suggest this: place your character between a rock and a hard place.

Which is just another way of saying that your story is a map, of sorts, of the choices that your character needs to make in order to solve the problem.

He or she doesn’t just act randomly for the sake of acting.

Each action is based on choices that come from the quality of the character.

Is he a good guy? Is she a bad girl? Selfish or compassionate? Generous or miserly? Full of hope or despair?

You can imagine how someone who is selfish might choose to act in a different way than someone who has a generous heart.

When you place your character in a situation related to the problem, you’ll begin to understand how your character might act to solve the problem.

And over time, as you progress with the story, you’ll see how each choice helps shape your story and bring your character into sharper focus, as well as closer to the resolution of the problem.

For more information on figuring out your character's problem, you might find these links helpful:

http://writerswrite.co.za/the-4-main-characters-as-literary-devices

http://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/character-arcs-2/

https://medium.com/@penguinrandomus/two-little-words-to-elevate-your-writing-make-trouble-a106f83e981e#.wuxsyjx2g

http://www.elizabethmoon.com/writing-motivation.html

Shallow Water

The other day I finished a YA novel by one of my favorite authors and felt as if I’d scraped my knees on the bottom of the pool. Until I turned the last page, I hadn't realized–or maybe hadn't wanted to admit–that I’d been swimming in shallow water.

From the beginning, the story had all the requisite ingredients. Intriguing plot-line. Quirky characters. Lots of snappy dialogue. And it gave the pleasure of swimming until I reached the ending which lacked the kind of emotional impact that I always hope to find on the final page.

So now I’m wondering: did I miss something along the way? Or did the author simply create a shallow pool for his reader to swim in? Or was he unaware, like me, of the story’s lack of depth?

What made the water feel so shallow when, from the surface, everything looked fine? What was missing?

The depth of the story, or its lack of depth, was related, I think, to the way the author presented the main character’s dilemma and its significance to the reader. There were multiple problems–a parent’s abandonment of a family; a dislocation to a new home; the challenge of making new friends–and each problem served as an external obstacle for the main character to overcome, without any one problem becoming a priority.

But as the story moved forward through these various dilemmas, I kept wanting to know the main character’s internal struggle, the desire above all that the main character needed to satisfy, and either I overlooked it or the author didn't share it with the reader.

In her book, Pay Attention, for Goodness’ Sake, Sylvia Boorstein talks about unappeasable desire as the source of human suffering:

“Tanha, the word the Buddha used in the Second Noble Truth to define the cause of suffering, is usually translated as “craving.” I feel it in myself as unappeasable wanting–wanting so much to have something I don’t have, or wanting so much to have something I do have but I don’t want to go away–that my mind cannot rest.”

This is the perfect way to describe what our characters need for a story to gain depth: a craving for something or someone that can only be fulfilled through some significant act on the part of the character. Without this deep need, this unappeasable desire, driving the character’s actions, the story and the character will remain in shallow water.

In this case, the character may have had to start a new life. He may have had to make new friends. One of his parents may have left the family. But I kept wondering what was it, in the midst of such circumstances, that the character desperately wanted? What did the character need so badly that he couldn’t stop until he got it? What was this character’s unappeasable desire?

Sometimes, swimming in shallow water is what we need to do so we can fully understand the depth of the water in which our own characters are swimming.

For more information about creating emotional depth in your characters, visit:
http://blog.liviablackburne.com/2011/09/revision-adventures-building-strong.html
http://writerwords.blogspot.com/2006/01/emotional-depth.html
http://rose-green.blogspot.com/2008/10/creating-emotional-depth.html
http://www.etbscreenwriting.com/nine-character-types/introduction/
http://www.autocrit.com/websitepublisher/articles/10/1/Emotional-Depth-2-Bring-Your-Characters-To-Life/Page1.html
http://www.writersstore.com/the-emotional-and-psychological-world-of-you-and-your-characters
http://barbarahannay.com/emotion.asp

Catching Your Breath Underwater

You can barely stop to catch your breath when reading Alex Flinn's Breathing Underwater

It's not just her pacing that keeps you turning the pages. It's the deft way that she interweaves scenes from the main character's past and present, as well as offers multiple perspectives into his character, that draws you underwater, deeper into the story and into the character's dilemma.

Flinn grabs her readers from the start with present-tense scenes of sixteen-year-old Nick Andreas as he enters the juvenile justice system, faces the judge, and finds himself sentenced to community service. He's also required to attend anger-management classes with Mario and keep a journal to better understand himself and the violent way that he mistreated Caitlin, his former girlfriend.

Right from the opening scene Flinn provides strong clues that Nick poses a danger:

I've never been in a courthouse before. But then, I've never been in such deep shit before, either. The metal detector screams when I walk through, and a security woman tries to check my pockets. I pull away.

"These what you want?" I dangle my keys an inch from her nose, getting in her face. She backs off, scowling. I throw them into her yellow plastic basket and walk through again.

This guy is trouble... and Flinn shows him not only in trouble but causing more trouble before he even makes it to the courtroom at the start of the story.

Second, Flinn includes telling details from Nick's journal entries. It's through his journal that Flinn shares the back-story leading up to the present story, with Nick describing his infatuation with Caitlin, exploring their relationship, trying to understand his anger, his controlling behavior, his jealousy, his self-esteem issues.

The journal entries reveal a more vulnerable side of Nick and allow us as readers to feel sympathy for him as he lets his guard down. With each entry, we begin to move past Nick's anger and discover the emotional wound that serves as the source of his current crisis:

When we were kids, Tom and I used to tell people we were twins. I wished it was true. My father would go on the warpath, and I'd head for Tom's. Did his family wonder why I came over so often? I tried not to care.

Third, Flinn shifts the focus (just slightly) to Nick's relationship with his father, a man who abuses him emotionally and physically. In this journal entry you can feel the tension between father and son:

The sound of ice cubes greeted me. In my father's house, ice cubes are air-raid sirens that send me diving for cover. I searched for an exit. There was none. Usually, I missed happy hour, my father's version of dinner at home, but he was early, I was late, and worlds collided. My father swirled his glass. I tried to look casual--impossible--and walked past him.

Fourth, Flinn develops Nick's new relationship with Mario, the leader of the anger-management class, as a way of revealing the first hints of his tentative growth toward a new understanding of himself:

After class, I gather my stuff, hanging back so I'm the last to go. When everyone's gone, I approach Mario. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead.
"That day on the bridge, when I slapped Caitlin..."
"Yeah?" He turns to give me his full attention.
"I was afraid, okay? I was afraid she'd leave me."
Mario nods. "I know you were." He starts to reach his hand out, then takes it back when he sees my face. "It's okay to be afraid, Nick."

And Flinn develops, as well, his new relationships with others in the class, especially Leo, who serves as a foil to show how much Nick has changed since he was with Caitlin... and who lets him finally see and understand how badly he had mistreated her:

At five after, I'm still waiting. I remember when we discussed lateness in class. I'm annoyed with Leo but not furious. Would I be madder at Cat? Losing it, maybe? No. Not really.
Maybe.
Probably.
No time to consider. Leo's black Trans Am cruises to a stop. When I get in, he says, "Sorry we're late. Someone got held up at the drugstore." He turns to the guilty party, Neysa, sitting beside him. "That's your story, right?"
"Leo..." she says.
"Leo..." he imitates, gunning the motor.
"Why are you acting this way in front of--"
"What way?" Leo demands over the tires' squeal. "You're the problem, not me."
"I'm sorry," Neysa examines the floor mat.
"I'm sorry," Leo mocks. "I'm sorry I'm always late. I'm sorry I'm a lying slut. I'm sorry I--"
"It's okay," I tell Neysa. "I don't think it matters if we're late." Leo, I ignore. Why is he acting like this? Why is it so familiar?

And, last, Flinn shows Nick finally coming to terms with his feelings for Caitlin, feelings so strong that by the end of the book they prompt him to violate the court's restraining order to speak to her so that he can finally apologize for his earlier behavior:

"Caitlin?"
"Who's this?"
"It's me." Then, quickly at her intake of breath, "Don't worry. I'm not trying to get you to take me back."
"Will you stop calling me?" she says, over my words. "Please. I could tell--"
"Go ahead. Call the police. Have your boyfriend amputate my face. I deserve it. I deserve it. Just listen a sec, okay?"
I take her silence as agreement. Out front, someone's mowing the lawn, and I say, "Look, I know you couldn't like me anymore, not after what I did. I know that now. I just..." Why is this so hard? "I'm just sorry. I thought I meant it before, but I didn't know. I mean, it's like apologizing for stepping on someone's foot. You say you're sorry, but you don't really understand how bad you hurt them."

As you can see, Flinn juggles these multiple scenes and shifting perspectives in dramatic ways, offering different angles into the story and generating mounting suspense in the reader's mind in the form of the all-important question: how will all of these different perspectives connect and resolve themselves?

If you haven't taken a look at Breathing Underwater, try to find a copy... and study Flinn's work closely for how to craft a multi-layered character as well as a fast-paced, satisfying story.

For more information about Alex Flinn, visit her website: http://www.alexflinn.com/

P.S. - Wordswimmer will be taking a break until June 10th in search of new sources of inspiration. You're invited to leave comments to this and other posts, and I'll post them on my return. Thanks for stopping by... and keep swimming!

Listen Deeply

In Stephanie S. Tolan's new novel, Listen!, a wild dog--like a mysterious healing spirit--helps Charley, a 12-year-old girl mourning for her mother, recover from grief and a leg injury that she suffered in a car accident.

It's a slow, frustrating process for Charley, a process that demands that she listen to the world again, a world that she shut out after her mother's death in a plane crash while on assignment for a magazine as a nature photographer.

Tolan develops a reader's sympathy for Charley almost immediately by showing the reader exactly what Charley has lost.

The biggest loss, of course, is the death of her mother, which strikes the core of Charley's being, the root of her spirit.

Then Tolan introduces another loss... a physical injury almost as challenging to Charley as the loss of her mother because this loss steals away her physical foundation. Her injured leg makes life even more wobbly, forcing Charley to rely on others.

But who can Charley rely on? Her friend, Amy, walked away from the accident without a scratch...and then went to tennis camp over the summer, leaving Charley alone with her father and their housekeeper.

Ever since her mother's death, however, her father's been aloof, distant. He works all the time, no longer smiles, no longer has time to play with Charley.

And the housekeeper, Sarita, is somewhat aloof, too, harboring her own grief and memories of a son killed in a motorcycle accident.

So, Tolan opens the story with Charley struggling to return to "normal," even though normal can no longer be, well, normal for her.

And into this world of loss and struggle comes a wild, beautiful dog.

When Charley first sees the dog, she feels "a kind of tremor, as if an electric shock has passed from the dog to her and back again."

Something about this dog--perhaps the dog's independence or the simple fact that he is a survivor--awakens Charley and helps her begin the process of accepting that, despite tragedy, beauty can exist in the world.

As the story progresses, Charley's longing to befriend this dog intensifies, but the dog only becomes harder and harder to tame, resisting all her treats and gifts of food.

Her deep longing for a companion, though, draws Charley into the woods to pursue the dog. And her immersion in the silent woods, a kind of sanctuary where she used to go with her mother, revives memories of their time together and enables Charley to face her loss, as well as the new, painful solitude surrounding her, so she can move beyond the pain.

Tolan is masterful at tracing the subtle changes of grief in this young girl. Not only does Tolan show us Charley healing over time, she lets us see Charley gradually recognize traces of her mother's artistic abilities and vision in herself, as in this passage, when Coyote disappears and Charley worries that she might not find him again:

Charley stops as if she has run into a wall. What if Coyote doesn't come back? What if the image of the road, the cars, was real, and there is nothing left of him now but a body among the weeds, a reason for the vultures that circle overhead to tilt their wings and drop down to the pavement? She never thought, in all these sixty-seven days, to take a picture of him. How could she--Charley Morgan, daughter of Colleen Morgan, nature photographer--not once think to go to her mother's studio, dig through the boxes, find a camera, and take a picture? If he is gone, there will be nothing to show that Coyote ever lived. Nothing--nothing at all--to show for day after day of the effort to tame him, day after day of their growing connection.

This is a story about making connections with the mysterious source of life that runs through every living creature and remains part of the world even after we're gone.

It's about becoming aware of gifts around us, gifts that may be hidden from view, if only because we haven't listened deeply or searched hard enough for them.

In the end, Listen! is about a girl and her dog, each finding a way to overcome solitude and loneliness and share in life's joys together.

As writers, we need to listen like Charley to voices spoken so softly that sometimes we wonder if we're imagining them.

Listen! reminds us to do this: listen more closely to the sound of leaves rustling, waves slapping the shore, our breath moving in and out, a dog's barking.

If we listen closely enough, perhaps we'll hear the sound of a spirit rushing through us, drawing each of us together, carrying us deeper into the mystery of life.

For more information about Stephanie S. Tolan and her work, visit her website at
http://www.stephanietolan.com.

Defining Character

In the accidental, round-about way that I seem to find books these days--a little like following unexplored tributaries, not quite knowing where they'll lead--I found Paul Acampora's new novel, Defining Dulcie.

In this case, the tributary led to a new collection of stories, Every Man For Himself, edited by Nancy Mercado (an excellent collection of stories about being a guy), and one of the stories was Acampora's remarkable "No More Birds Will Die Today."

The emotions stirred by his story were still rippling days later. That's when I knew I had to go back to the library to check out his new novel.

Defining Dulcie is all about, well, defining 16 year-old Dulcie, only Dulcie's search for identity isn't apparent at first glance. That's because the story opens with a scene that describes a death in the family--in this case Dulcie's father, a janitor at the local high school, who mistakenly mixes together toxic chemicals and kills himself.

Ordinarily, when I find such a scene at the start of a story, I tend to expect the story that follows to explore grief... and the character's recovery. But Dulcie's story is full of surprises, and one of the surprises is that it isn't so much an exploration of grief as it is a search for her true home and place in the world.

Her father's death may have set the plot in motion, but it's a plot that concerns itself with Dulcie defining herself in his absence, not about her grief per se. So, it's not the mourning process that Acampora explores but how Dulcie comes to a new understanding of where she belongs.

What's interesting about how Acampora sets up the plot is the way Dulcie, who is literally yanked out of the world that she's known all her life, has to find a way back to what she knows in order to come to a new understanding of herself.

It's her mother who decides that they should start a new life (literally "re-defining" themselves) in California, and who insists that Dulcie leave Connecticut, where she feels most herself (and closest to Dad), and accompany her on the long drive across the country.

To get back home, Dulcie steals Dad's truck from Mom and begins the cross-country journey in reverse on her own. This adventure, along with the life that Dulcie begins to make for herself in Connecticut with her grandfather and an unexpected new friend, is what shapes Dulcie's search for identity.

Throughout this unusual coming-of-age tale Acampora deftly weaves Dulcie's memories of Dad with her insights into her current dilemma with Mom and her concerns about her future, deepening our understanding of her character as the journey unfolds, defining her with each new revelation about what she needs to become herself.

At the start of the story, Dulcie's confused, at sea, unconnected without Dad... and must find a way to connect herself to his memory, as well as to others. The move (and Dad's death) displaces Dulcie's sense of self, stretching her sense of connection with herself and her past, forcing her to ask such soul-searching questions as:

* How does the loss of Dad change who I am?
* And who, exactly, am I?
* And where do I belong now that Dad's gone?

These are questions that any writer might ask his or her characters while exploring their inner lives: Who am I? And how does the loss of someone (or something) that I love change me? And where, ultimately, do I belong?

But by the end of the story all of the invisible lines in Dulcie's life that connect her in mysterious ways come together:

I tilted my head and imagined my nose about even with the Triple J. I stretched out my left hand and pointed toward Mom and Roxanne in California. My right hand held an invisible line that went straight to Frank's house. If my feet were connected to wires, long rays could stretch from me all the way to Sister Clare or to the Kansas Fainting Goat Farm. Somewhere, there was a line to the pink cemetery stones too. All these things were connected to me, and for one brief moment I was at the center of things--my town, my story, my self.

Dulcie's found her place, her self. She may still feel unsure of where all the lines lead, but she can feel them nonetheless:

I thought again about all the lines, real and imaginary, that surrounded me. I was not sure whether they were strands in a giant web or huge broad strokes in a picture so close to my face that I could not see it clearly.

And it's sensing the map of her life as it might unfold along these invisible lines that's enough for her (and the reader) at this moment in her life.

Defining Dulcie is an impressive debut, as well as an excellent novel to study for learning how to develop a character with depth. Take a look. You'll have lots to thank Acampora for.

For information about Paul Acampora, check out his website http://www.paulacampora.com/ and his blog http://acampora.livejournal.com/

Swimming Underwater

Exploring the emotions of your characters is a lot like swimming underwater.

You dive beneath the surface of a character's skin, trying to follow the reef of an emotional spine, the backbone of his or her personality, searching for what propels each character through the water of his or her life.

Jacqueline Woodson is a master of swimming underwater, fleshing out the emotional worlds of her characters in such books as If You Come Softly, her heart-breaking tale of first love and loss in Brooklyn.

How does she do this?

Look at this passage from If You Come Softly and see if you can name the emotion that Woodson's writing about:

It rained again on Friday, a warm, steady rain that turned the whole city gray. I sat in Mr. Hazelton's history class watching it. There was something sad about the rain. Marion had left on a rainy day. And Anne. The day she moved out it rained and rained. I turned back to my textbook. Jeremiah must have left Percy. It was already October and still I had only seen him once since that first day. That's what the rain made me feel now as it slammed against the windowpane--that I should stop hoping. People would always be leaving.

Using words like "rain" and "gray" and "sad"... Woodson creates an internal mood in the reader, a sense of gloom as it "rained and rained," layering the emotion by filtering it through the narrator's memory of other sad days when it rained.

But she goes deeper than sadness... into another emotion... that gains in intensity with the description of rain "as it slammed against the windowpane"... so that the reader feels as if the rain is slamming into her, hurting her... to the point that she "should stop hoping." Hoping what? That the rain will stop? That life will one day be different? That people wouldn't always be leaving?

How would you write about sadness? Would you use rain as an image, as Woodson does here? Or would you draw your reader into a character's sadness in a different way?

Here's another passage that uses rain... to get at a completely different emotion... from Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street:

But my mother's hair, my mother's hair, like little rosettes, like little candy circles all curly and pretty because she pinned it in pincurls all day, sweet to put your nose into when she is holding you, holding you and you feel safe, is the warm smell of bread before you bake it, is the smell when she makes room for you on her side of the bed still warm with her skin, and you sleep near her, the rain outside falling and Papa snoring. The snoring, the rain, and Mama's hair that smells like bread.

Rain draws us inside a character's emotional world again, but Cisneros, unlike Woodson, uses it to create a sense of security and safety. How does she do that?

The images rush toward us almost like a waterfall: hair, rosettes, little candy circles, curly and pretty, sweet, safe, warm smell of bread. And the smell of bread becomes the smell of her mother's bed, still warm with her skin... and then the rain... a gentle sound (not "slamming against the window" as in Woodson's story) that beats in rhythm to Papa's snoring.

Again, how would you write about the love between a child and mother? Would you use rain to help a reader understand the intimacy involved in that relationship? Or as a way to show the distance separating them?

Here's another passage of a mother-daughter relationship... from Norma Fox Mazer's Goodnight, Maman, a story about 12 year old Karin Levi, whose family is torn apart in June 1940, as the German army advances on Paris:

Her eyes, her beautiful, beautiful eyes. Her beautiful, sad eyes.
Here's what I learned about sadness--it was catching. Get in the way of someone else's sadness, and before you knew it, you had it, too. And then time collapsed, and turned the day so shapeless you couldn't see to the end of it.
That's when I learned something else--to turn away from Maman's eyes. And from the sadness. Away from thoughts of Papa and Grand-mere, of home and our little cat, Minot, and of friends and school. Yes, just turn away.
But then there was the other thing I learned--that sometimes I couldn't do it. I had to look at Maman. I couldn't live without looking at her.
So I did. I looked at her. And I never stopped looking. And loving her. Loving her so much.

Can you name the emotion that Mazer's writing about in this passage? Is it sadness? Or fear? Or love? Or a combination of emotions, each swirling into one another?

How does she use Maman's eyes as a way to get at Karin's emotional world? Notice that Mazer gives us not merely a description of Maman's eyes, but a description that shows us how Karin feels about her mother's eyes... and their life that's been torn apart by the German invasion.

In those eyes she sees her past... and the sadness of having to leave that world... and yet she can't not look at the eyes because of her love for Maman, an internal conflict that makes this scene all the more poignant, I think.

Or here... what about this excerpt from Carolyn Coman's Many Stones:

I wish I could tell Josh. I wish I could open my mouth and talk--say how I put the stones on me, one by one, like I am the paper and they are the paperweight and they keep me from flying off, right out the window. Tell him how I have to do it--move them, one by one, from the nightstand onto my body, how they start out light but add up to heavy and how they keep me weighted so I know there' s something there to be weighted.
But I'm like the stones: dumb. As in, can't speak. I turn back to Josh. He has cupped his hands under his head, his elbows are splayed out across the pillow. The look on his face registers next to nothing.

What is Coman trying to get us to feel here? "I wish I could open my mouth and talk..." How does that make you feel? Or: "...like I am the paper and they are the paperweight and they keep me from flying off, right out the window." Or: "how they keep me weighted so I know there's something there to be weighted." Or: "The look on his face registers next to nothing."

This is another example of a character working her way through grief, but contrast it with the samples from Mazer's and Woodson's work. What does Coman do differently? How does grief feel for this character... and how does Coman enable us to feel it, too?

Each of these writers takes us deeply inside the emotional worlds of their characters.

We swim with them... underwater... beneath another person's skin, into another person's view of the world. Through the magic of fiction, we feel the pulse of another human being... as if it's our own.

You can do this with your stories, too.

Study how your favorite authors swim underwater, diving beneath the surface of each character's skin to reveal a hidden world of emotions.

In time you'll swim underwater with your own characters and bring back jewels from the deep--the rich variety of emotions--that all of us share.