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#2MinWritingTip – Fix A Flat Character

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This tip may sound like a cheat for character development, but it’s really not. When you have a character who feels flat or one-dimensional, it’s usually because you’re playing him or her too close to an archetype. The gruff, hard-boiled detective, the dumb blonde supermodel. You’re relying on your readers’ understanding of what these types are like to fill in the blanks rather than giving them a full and vibrant interior landscape. By inserting a contradictory interest or hobby, you’ve suddenly created tension. Maybe the detective secretly paints landscapes, because his therapist has recommended it to calm anxiety stemming from his PTSD. Maybe the dumb blonde isn’t so dumb after all and she’s secretly a chess master.

[bctt tweet=”When you have a character who feels flat or one-dimensional, it’s usually because you’re playing him or her too close to an archetype.”]

Once you have that tension, you need to decide how to reconcile it with your character’s surface demeanor. Why does the detective have PTSD and why painting? How did the supermodel become an expert at chess… or even better, how did a bookish childhood chess prodigy become a supermodel? When you’re forced to integrate contradictions in your character, they instantly become more complex and interesting, and it gives you an opportunity to create backstory that your readers can discover throughout the course of the book.

 

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#2MinBookReview – The Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes

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This is my first ever non-fiction #2MinBookReview, and I got a little carried away…over three minutes worth. So here’s your two-minute book review, NOW with 50% more review! I would really love it if Shonda would be my best friend, because while we don’t see eye-to-eye on everything, she gets what it means to be a creative working mom better than almost anyone.

 

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#2MinWritingTip – Character-Driven or Plot Driven?

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We hear the question a lot: is your writing character-driven or plot-driven? I’m going to make a bold statement and say that’s a false dichotomy. All stories are character-driven or they aren’t very good stories. What we’re actually trying to categorize is the stakes: are they personal or are they more universal?

Let’s take a look at the well-known movie, The Book of Eli. IMDB’s logline describes it as “A post-apocalyptic tale, in which a lone man fights his way across America in order to protect a sacred book that holds the secrets to saving humankind.” Sounds pretty plot-driven, right? We’ve got a bad guy (Gary Oldman) who will stop at nothing to get the book, and a man (Denzel Washington) with a preternatural ability to fight his way out of any situation. It’s gritty and violent and until the end, somewhat hopeless.

It would be easy to characterize this as plot-driven because the stakes are life and death, and it has a strongly action-driven narrative. Yet the entire movie hinges on Denzel Washington’s character, Eli: not just his ability to fight, but his intelligence, his incorruptibility, and *spoiler alert* his faithfulness to a twenty-year divine mandate. Substitute any character for Eli and the entire movie becomes a forgettable post-apocalyptic action movie and not an interesting film about religion as political control through a visceral example of faith.

Let’s look at another well known movie: Sharknado. (Stop laughing.) IMDB’s logline for this movie is: “When a freak hurricane swamps Los Angeles, nature’s deadliest killer rules sea, land, and air as thousands of sharks terrorize the waterlogged populace.” Do you remember who starred in it? I had to look it up. And that’s because it’s a wholly plot-driven movie. Just like the Book of Eli, the stakes are life and death, but you could substitute any character or any actor in it and it wouldn’t make a difference: the purposely-ridiculous premise drives the movie. I’ll give you that it’s enjoyably camp, but I don’t think anyone is going to argue that it’s good storytelling.

Therefore the key to any good story is a character who’s worth following and caring about. They don’t have to necessarily be likable or even understandable…they just need to be interesting enough to carry a story, to make us care about the stakes. Give me someone who intrigues me and wants something desperately and I’ll follow them through a story, big or small.

[bctt tweet=”There’s no such thing as character-driven stories vs. plot-driven stories. There are only character-driven stories and bad stories.”]

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