A Story is a Promise Blog

A good writer knows more about her characters--and the world they inhabit--than she ever tells her readers. The more you know about your character--likes, dislikes, habits and history--the better. Character building rounds out your story's main players. What's the Point? The reader may never learn the taxi driver who dies in Chapter 2 has three children, or the talking dormouse who helped your hero traverse the Desert of Failings has an addiction to cauliflower. As such, you may wonder if character building isn't a waste of time. A well-developed character comes across stronger in a story. You understand her motivation, her reasoning, and that understanding seeps into how you describe her. Besides, as you explore your characters they can surprise you, adding elements to your plot and atmosphere you hadn't realized were missing. Getting the Whole Picture Take our dormouse as an example. He's a minor character who only shows up for one chapter, but he plays...

For people, self-awareness has many facets. People in general need brain power to filter out much of the information their senses collect. I think self-awareness for particular people can end up running in channels, so that we can quickly assign meaning and values to people and relationships in our lives and not get bogged down/drown in processing details. Relationships can also be symbolic, in the sense that a symbol can stand in for a relationship, a kind of short hand code. The problem arises when a new writer doesn't realize their particular short hand code (a dark-haired woman with thick glasses could be a symbol for an abusive parent) doesn't evoke anything for a reader. The job of our brains to filter out details or shape our reality to a particular design can lead to a kind of neutered, thin writing that fails to ring true. Except for the person writing in their particular symbolic code. Directed awareness, however, is a choice about where to focus awareness. Cynthi...

As the (now former) office manager for a writers group with over 1,750 members, I was often asked by newly published or self-published authors, what do I do to promote my book in my local area? First, it's easier to get an announcement about a talk into a local newspaper than a lone author doing a book signing. Many authors have some lifetime experience they can speak about at a local library. And some libraries also allow book sales for a nominal commission. If you can't arrange a talk through a library, local community colleges often rent rooms on weekends for a small fee, and such locations generally offer easy parking and access. Using a space at either a library or school also lends some status to your talk. If these spaces aren't available to you, many communities have arts organizations, some that meet in publicly subsidized spaces. They can also be a resource for renting a room to hold a talk. Retirement communities also will host speakers (or performers ...

One of the pleasures of great fiction comes when a character you love takes an action that you didn't foresee and yet is so right for the character that it feels inevitable. You find yourself saying, "Of course! That's so like her!" The flip side of the experience is the character whose action so surprises you that you scratch your head and flip to the cover just to make sure you're still reading the same book. That's emotional resonance at work (or not at work in the second example.) Character interviews and charts listing personal appearance and habits are an excellent beginning, but how do you move into the realm of what makes a character internally consistent and emotionally true? To get at the deeper character, a writer has to ask herself deeper questions. Here are two to get you started. What is the virtue that my character's family or friends or community values most highly? What is the worst sin this character could commit in his social circle...

Too often science and art are classed as two different worlds, distinct from one another. We are pleased to introduce you to someone who doesn't recognize this distinction, but rather sees these endeavors as two sides of the same coin. And she has the credentials to assert this since she's both an accomplished scientist and a successful novelist of the bestselling Outlander series and the Lord John series. In this intriguing and lively interview, Diana Gabaldon shares her understanding of how the artistic process and the scientific process are similar, and how crafting a novel is like solving a scientific riddle. But that's not all that Diana offers in this amazing interview. She also does something that no other writer we've spoken with has attempted: she demonstrates how a written scene is crafted, reshaped and refined into a fine literary image. It's a magical scene that writers and artists, and no doubt scientists, will find illuminating. Each of Diana...

This movie about Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Sabina, a patient of Jung's, illustrates that conflict in a film does not have to revolve around action. Here the most heated conflict revolves around ideas. Jung is a disciple of Freud , who has invented psychoanalysis. Freud's goal is to ensure that psychoanalysis be taken seriously as a scientific method of understanding people through an understanding of the subconscious and the unconscious. When Jung begins to express an interest in a collective unconscious and mysticism, Freud sees this as something that will undermine his life's work. Each man is committed to his ideas and their primacy. Neither can walk away from the conflict between their ideas. When Jung begins to treat a young Russian Jew named Sabina with the new talking cure, he finds himself attracted to her (as he is not to his wealthy, genteel wife). When Jung and Sabina become lovers and rumors about that begin to surface, Freud now has a weapon he can u...

Story ideas come from real life. Even when we are inventing new worlds and new dimensions, the events we set forth in words follow recognizable logic and have their origin in lived experiences. Many writers feel drawn to subjects that are obviously autobiographical. As a memoirist, I think that's fine. But over time that kind of writing can create a very deep groove. Here's a suggestion for venturing out of it. If you feel that the character you are writing about is too familiar, stop and make a list of descriptive phrases about yourself. Then pick a feature and change it. Make that new trait central to your character. For example, I love music, but due to a few poor decisions along the way I cannot with any honesty call myself a musician. The phrase not musical showed up in my list. So I tried my hand at writing about a violinist. As sometimes happens, this character began to take charge of his story. I was pleased to see that he had the wisdom to decide differently when...

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins offers an example of how to tell a story about a familiar if alien world, here a future United States divided into mini-states and ruled with an iron fist by the Capitol. This kind of story requires raising questions and introducing information about this new world that draws an audience forward to want to know more. This is easy to do, hard to do well. The following is a review of the opening pages of the novel. In the beginning... When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim's warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother. Of course, she did. This is the day of the reaping. The novel starts rooted in the POV of Katniss, a young girl. The opening conveys subtle information about the world, waking up cold, a mattress with a canvas cover, the question, what is the reaping? It also raises character questions, who is Prim?...