Critiques or Consequences, Part II ~ When Is a Novel Like a Layer Cake?

by +AneMulligan @AneMulligan

When you add layers, of course!

To draw your readers into your story, you want to create an experience for them. But that experience is filtered through your POV character. You know that already? Good.

But are you layering the senses into your fiction so the reader hears, sees, smells, tastes, and feels it? It's actually a matter of "showing vs. telling" gone wild.

If you're telling them what the character is experiencing, it's like this:

I can say: "Joan heard a siren in the distance."

Showing them is like this: A siren wailed in the distance.

Then you take it one step more: A silence wailed in the distance. Joan glanced in her rearview mirror. The blue flashing lights of an emergency vehicle drew closer. Her heartbeat accelerated as slowed her car and pulled over.

In the second one, you experience it with her. We've all heard a siren. I don't know about you, but the first thing I do is check my rearview mirror. I don't want to get in their way.

So avoid the word "heard" which immediately makes it telling. The same with "saw". I could have said: Joan glanced in her rearview morrow and saw a flashing blue light.

But by showing you what she saw through her eyes makes for a better read. And readers can relate to it better than saying she saw.

Another one that is often forgotten is the sense of smell. I love to incorporate that one into my writing. If your character is taking a walk through the woods, you want your reader to smell the pines. If it's after a rain shower, the forest floor is damp and the scent of leaf mold rises as the character walks the path.

When Claire enters Dee's 'n' Doughs in any of my Chapel Springs series books, you join her as the aroma of vanilla, yeast, and sugar waft around her. From Chapel Springs Revival, the introduction to the bakery went like this:

Claire paused on the threshold for a moment, closed her eyes, and let the heavenly aroma of yeast, vanilla and almonds entice her. That indulgence alone would probably add another inch to her waistline.

Most everyone has stepped inside a bakery and smelled what I just described. Aromas trigger memories and that makes your fiction relatable.

TWEETABLE

Critique or Consequences, part 2~When is a layer cake like novel #writing? (Click to tweet)

Ane Mulligan writes Southern-fried fiction served with a tall, sweet iced tea. She's a novelist, a humor columnist, and playwright. She believes chocolate and coffee are two of the four major food groups and resides in Sugar Hill, GA, with her artist husband and a dog of Biblical proportion. You can find Ane at anemulligan.com or her 

Amazon author page.

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The Best POV ~ First Person or Third?

There's an ongoing debate over using first or third person when writing a novel. I started out writing in third person. When I had trouble starting a new project, I switched to first person and the story took off.

That's when I realized POV isn't a matter of style or voice. The story dictates how it wants to be told.

I love how the "rules" on first/third person are changing. I've seen novels with the protagonist in first person and the other POV characters in third person. What truly matters is a well-written story that's mesmerizing.

The best story is intimate

Deep POV can be as nearly intimate as first person. That's because deep POV means more than simply showing the scene from that character's perspective. It means staying completely true to his/her view of everything. You can't slip and tell something the character can't possibly know.

Nor can you write a scene in a manner untrue to the POV character's personality or backstory.

What does that mean? It means not showing other characters as they truly are, but only as the POV character thinks they are. If your protagonist, we'll call her Nancy, had a run-in with a bully in the 1^st grade, and this bully was a brown-eyed blonde named Julie, then Nancy is going to have a natural aversion to any brown-eyed blonde named Julie. Instant conflict, especially if your character Julie is a sweet woman who only wants to be friends.

It also means staying true to only what the POV character's knowledge. Whether you're writing historical or contemporary, resist imparting any information the character wouldn't or couldn't possibly know. In historical writing, that would also mean the words they used.

One of my critique partners used a word I thought was too modern for her character. I looked it up in the etymology dictionary and discovered the word had its origin about 10 years prior to the story. BUT ... did that mean the character would know it? This was 1838. No Internet or Google. However, the character's father was an educator, so I realized she could very well have known the word. I didn't suggest a change.

 

One of the best books I've ever read for staying true to the character's knowledge is Jessica Dotta's Born of Persuasion.  Written in first person, Dotta stays true to her protagonist's worldview. She never tells the reader anything the protagonist doesn't know, so through much of the novel, the reader isn't always sure who some of the characters really are.

There's mystery attached, simply by resisting the urge to let the reader know what's really happening. It brings your reader totally inside the POV character's head, allowing the reader to experience the novel, not merely read it.

And isn't that the goal? Hey, nobody ever said writing a novel is easy. Being an author ain't for wimps.

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Classic Tess....You Stole My Story...

Tess Gerritsen left a successful practice as an internist to raise her children and concentrate on her writing. She gained nationwide acclaim for her first novel of medical suspense, the New York Times bestseller Harvest. She is also the author of the bestsellers Life Support, Bloodstream, Gravity, and The Surgeon. Tess lives with her family in Maine. (PHOTO CREDIT: Paul D'Innocenzo) --as appeared her blog.

You Stole My Story...Tess Ger
ritsen

Some time ago, I wrote a blog post about how another author and I had our books published the same year, and both stories were eerily similar, with identical details right down to the crucifixion of the victims. Some readers told me I should sue because obviously she stole my idea. Or was I the one who stole hers? I pointed out that it would be physically impossible for either one of us to have stolen the others’ story, because we were writing simultaneously, and these things happen. Stories bear striking similarities that can only be explained as coincidence.

So now there’s a reader review of SILENT GIRL on Amazon accusing me of ripping off GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, and he says that Stieg Larsson’s estate should sue me. He says it’s exactly the same story. I’ve just seen the movie, so I’ll start off exploring this issue with plot summaries.

GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is about a sexually traumatized computer hacker who teams up with a disgraced journalist to solve the mystery of a missing girl. There’s also a lot about Swedish business corruption, Nazis, and men’s abuse of women in Swedish society.

THE SILENT GIRL is about a series of murders in Boston’s Chinatown that may be linked to a decades-old massacre in a Chinese restaurant. Rizzoli and Isles investigate. There’s stuff about a female Chinese martial arts master, the ancient legend of the Monkey King, and the Asian immigrant experience.

So far, these stories are really close, right? Except for their plots and characters.

Where, then, are the similarities between these books? They’re definitely there — in the form of mystery tropes that have been used by just about every mystery writer who’s ever lived. They’re part of every writer’s plot toolbox, and I’ve been using them for years. (Maybe I should be sued for copying from my own books). There are spoilers below, so I apologize in advance if I give away clues to books of mine that you haven’t yet read.

Literary tropes in mysteries:

Dead or missing female victim(s)
 
Yep, both DRAGON TATTOO and SILENT GIRL have them. Dead girls. The mystery genre loves dead girls. TV loves them too, especially if they’ve been sexually abused (anyone watch Law & Order SVU?) I’ve used this trope repeatedly in THE SURGEON (2001), THE APPRENTICE (2002), VANISH (2005), and THE KEEPSAKE (2008). I was writing about dead girls long before DRAGON TATTOO. And like DRAGON TATTOO, my victims were sometimes confined in basements (THE SURGEON.)

Killers who work as a team or as a family
 
I’ve used it already in THE APPRENTICE (2001) and THE KEEPSAKE (2008). And yep, I even had a book where the killers are part of the same family, in BODY DOUBLE (2004.) I also dealt with the theme of multi-generational evil in THE MEPHISTO CLUB (2006).

The “dead” character who turns out to be alive.
 
I love this trope. In fact, I used it in my very first romantic suspense novel, CALL AFTER MIDNIGHT (1987). I used it again in HARVEST (1996), THE MEPHISTO CLUB (2006), and THE KEEPSAKE (2008).

These are literary tropes because they are endlessly useful plot devices that writers have used since the beginning of storytelling. Throughout my writing career, I’ve fallen back on them to inject surprise, suspense, or that one last plot twist. Tropes are not copyrighted. They do not belong to Stieg Larsson. In fact, I’m willing to bet that Stieg Larsson borrowed them from someone else. (Hey Jo Nesbo, did Stieg take something of yours?)

DRAGON TATTOO has become stratospherically popular. Even readers who hardly ever read novels have picked this one up, or watched the movie, and they think this must be the first serial killer story ever written that has a duo of killers. They think that no one else has ever before written about survivors of sexual trauma (I did in THE SURGEON) or abusive fathers (I did in THE SINNER) or kick-ass heroines (um… Jane Rizzoli?) They think this because they haven’t been reading deeply in the genre. They think that anyone else who uses these tropes must be a plagiarist, because of course, Stieg Larsson invented them.

No, he didn’t. Neither did I.

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Adjusting the Picture for Clarity

I used to live on a lake in Alaska. I had a gorgeous view from my deck--the little lake, full of wildlife and surrounded by rugged Alaskan mountains.

But the pictures I snapped, once developed,  looked nothing like reality. 

The snow-capped peaks in my photos were flat, small, pedestrian things. They elicited no feelings of wild, brutal power. They never stirred the passion in me that the real mountains provoked. The swans on the lake were little lumps of white in a sea of gray water. The otters and the moose were smudges of brown. 

A better photographer would have taken better pictures. He would have focused his shot to make the mountains pop out and grab me. He would have brought the wildlife forward--blurred the background instead of the subject of the shot. That's what good photographers do. They focus their shots. They freeze a moment and they make us stop and look and really see.

I suspect that even as my camera strips truth from nature, so does the bustle of our world strip meaning from life. Good novelists, like good photographers, have the power to make people stop and listen and learn. We have the opportunity to paint scenes and bring into focus things they often rush past without seeing. 

What we bring into focus, and what we blur in the background matters. 

I once critiqued a novel in which the writer painted a homosexual rape in excruciating detail. It was devastating and ugly, but worse than that, it was so brutal that it lost all power to move me emotionally. I shut down. I couldn’t look, I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t connect.

I told the author that the scene would have been more powerful if she had shown the big boys moving in, and then cut away, perhaps to focus on the flower being crushed under the heel of one of the attackers. The flower would act as a metaphor and it would allow the little boy to have some privacy and dignity. Then the author could move back in to show the little boy lying in a wilted, little heap on the ground after the act was done.

We want to elicit emotion so people will grow, but people rarely grow when we bash them over the head with ugliness. They close their eyes.

I'm not saying we should paint peaches-and-cream pictures of life. Our readers don’t live in heaven and we can’t paint heaven on earth and expect anyone to care about what we say. We live in the land of brutal rapes. We can’t lie and pretend that stuff doesn’t happen. But showing ugly, raw stuff is not the answer. 

We often hear that we should show and not tell, and that's partly because people aren't moved and they don’t grow when novelists preach at them. Telling is preaching. Showing is allowing a reader to draw his own conclusions. But as we show, we need to remember to focus our shots. We don't want to show life exactly as it appears to the busy reader as he rushes through his day. 

We want to show the underlying truth that we see in life. 

Anyone can show the grime that lies on top. Anyone can show the rats in the alleys and the pot-bellied babies with flies buzzing their faces.  

We want to go deeper. Where did the grime come from? Why are the babies dying of starvation. Get to the evil heart of man and to the loving heart of God and you will get to truth. 

The truth in the brutal rape scene I mentioned earlier was not when the big boys pulled down the little boy's pants and the author spelled out what happened in detail. The truth was in the big boys approaching caring only about their selfish desires. No love. No mercy. The truth was in the little boy's humiliation. That scar went way deeper than the physical pain. The truth was in the hearts of the boys, not their body parts. 

You’re the artist. You need to play with the light in order to bring some things forward and push some things backward so that the reader will see life as it really is and not as it is appears on the surface.

How have you used metaphors, or how have you seen others use metaphors, to paint more clearly the truth behind brutal acts or beautiful ones?

photo credit: GlacierTim via photopin cc

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Sally Apokedak is an associate agent with the Leslie H. Stobbe Literary Agency. She's in the process of of building a dynamite list of authors. She is also active in the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators.

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Dialogue ~ The Voices in Your Head

Dialogue is so important, because readers like to get to know characters the same way we like to get to know people in real life. They like to hear people talk and see people act.

So if you want your readers to like your hero, you don’t need to tell the readers how wonderful he is. You don’t have to bog the novel’s opening down with backstory telling how hard life has been for the hero and how he’s done great things despite all that.

What you need to do is give him a voice. Throw him into a situation where his good qualities will show, allow him to speak, and let the readers fall in love.

How do you give your characters strong voices? 

You do it by knowing your characters. Have a picture in mind when you write. Hear the voice. Think of real people or movie characters. I’m not saying to go for a cliché. I’m saying that if you listen to a lot of dialogue in books or movies or in real life, it will be easier for you to write it, and if you have a specific accent in mind when your character speaks, she will feel more real to your readers.

The accent of a character has to be consistent, but you need not be afraid to write a strong accent for fear of forgetting to put it in. The stronger the accent the easier it is to hear and write.

“Oh, Mr. Bennett, you do delight in vexing me!” Can you hear Mrs. Bennett saying that? Every time she speaks you know what her accent is going to be and you know that she will be talking about her lack of money or her poor nerves. That's Mrs. Bennett.

Your characters need to have very strong voices, too. They need to be unique and fun, but also predictable. Meaning they need to be so well done that the reader knows who is speaking just by the line of dialogue, without any tags. 

Maybe I’m odd, but I take on the accents of other people really easily. One of my friends told me years ago that when I spoke to my kids I sounded just like an Alaskan Native. Well, my sisters-in-law were all natives and they spoke to their children a certain way, so I adopted that way of speaking without even knowing I was doing it.

I do the same thing with writing--only I do it on purpose. If I want to write for a certain magazine, I sit down with ten issues and I absorb the voice of the magazine. The next piece I write, then, has that voice.

I think we have to do the same thing with dialogue. If we want our characters to sound real, we have to have real voices playing in our heads as we write. I had a crit partner who pasted pictures of her hero and heroine up on her cork board as she wrote. So one time it was Vin Diesel in Fast and Furious. She heard his voice every time time she wrote one of his lines of dialogue  And her dialogue was some of the best I've read. 

What about you? Are your characters based on people or characters you've seen before? If so, how do you keep them from being clichéd? 

photo credit: ohhector via photopin cc

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Sally Apokedak is an associate agent with the Leslie H. Stobbe Literary Agency. She's in the process of of building a dynamite list of authors. She is also active in the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators.

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