my writing process and such
Okay, so, Val asked me to talk about how to stretch something from two characters into a novel idea, and I'm going to use my past NaNo's as examples for this.
First, I think it really helps to have some kind of idea what sort of themes you're going for. I keep a notebook full of my ideas (good and bad) that includes main characters, formats, vague summaries, themes/motifs, etc. This could be anything from "grief" to "I want to explore a revolution through the eyes of two moles on opposite sides". If something interests you as a theme, write it down. It doesn't have to be coherent. Things like "What if?" questions, quotes that get your gears turning, vague ideas for characters...anything. Just write it down. In mine, I've got a lot of stuff from the Adopt an Opening Line thread at the NaNoWriMo forums, some stuff that I liked from generators (which usually churn out bullshit but occasionally spew out things that are great), some WHAT Ifs (What if you told a story from the sidekick's perspective? What if someone pulled off a school shooting and blended back into the crowd without being caught?), a lot of quotes, etc.
For my most recent NaNo, I started out with just wanting two characters—a guy and a girl—and very little other activity surrounding them. I just wanted to take two characters and sit them down and have them talk about their lives and get to know each other. So from that, I plucked up names (David and Alex), and I started asking myself questions that kept building off of each other. Like.
What kind of situation would call for two strangers being completely cut off from any other types of humanity for a long period of time?Â
Would these characters open up like this under any other kind of circumstances? (You can tell a lot about characters from this, I think? I know that by saying a solid "No", I managed to figure out that they were both very closed-off people. And from there you can go, "What are the different reasons for them being so closed off?")
What's a larger theme that I could use here? (I ended up going with something about being able to go after what you want and being too scared to VS being brave enough to go after what you want but being incapable of doing so. I don't know how well that actually comes across, but eh. That's what re-writes are for.)
What kind of secrets do they have to hide?
What's the shittiest, scariest thing that's ever happened to this person that they've never told anyone else?
I ended up stringing a lot of the themes in my notebook together for this one. A lot of David's character comes from the fact that every time you ask an English major what they want to do with their life, they will say, "I was going to be a writer, but that's obviously not going to happen, so I'm getting a teaching degree instead." That stuck out to me last year because it happened in every class that I took and it always just blew my mind that there were so many people who weren't willing to take the risk of failing and go for what they knew that they wanted to do. So I had this guy who was in general scared. He didn't take risks, he didn't talk to people, he didn't start confrontations. And then Alex came out of the opposite side of that theme--a girl who had everything within her grasp until it was physically torn from her, and yet she kept fighting tooth and nail to get her life back.Â
Then I started piecing together songs for a mini playlist, and that's when I started getting the idea to do this in two parts--a before and after. And I wanted to take the normal trope of "Two people go through a trauma and end up falling in love and being happy!" and turn it on its head by using two people who had become so utterly damaged by what they went through together that all of the love that they have for each other is always going to be warped by the memories that are brought up when they're together. I think when I stuck "Gravity" on my playlist was when I realized that this wasn't going to end happily for them, and that Alex would be the one to say, "Look, we can't do this; this is killing both of us."
Um. At that point, I had a half-baked idea. I didn't have most of the logistics worked out, and mostly just knew a lot about these two characters and a vague bit about what was going to happen to them. So I had to start asking the more critical questions. Why would Alex not report her injury? Why was David taken and kept alive when he so obviously didn't fit the victimology? How exactly do you keep someone interested in a story that is literally just two people sitting in a dank room talking about themselves? Out of this, I got Alex's sister, and I got Noah (David's FBI agent father), who served the duel purpose of (1) moving the plot forward and (2) being kind of a sane point in the darkness for David. (I came up with Palmer much later and she ended up being like this for Alex.)
Then I read Dan Harmon's Circular Theory, which essentially boils down to this: A character starts in a zone of comfort, but they want something, so they enter an unfamiliar situation, adapt to it, get what they wanted, pay a heavy price for it, and then return to their familiar situation, having changed.Â
So I started thinking about the different lives that David and Alex had before they were forced together, and how those lives and the people in them would be impacted by this situation, and how people on the outside would view them, and what kind of prices they were going to have to pay in order to get better, which is the general goal for both of them in the second half of the novel.Â
Out of this, I got the idea that Alex has a bit of a martyr complex, and that shaped a lot of the first half of the novel. She doesn't do a lot of things where she puts herself above other people. It's the reason she didn't turn her father in--because it would be easier to use that as leverage to get Rose out of that house, instead of letting it backfire and hurt them more; it's the reason that she sacrifices herself to try to help David; it's why she puts David's well-being above her own. And in order to get better, she has to cut David out of her life, because every moment she's with him is another moment she's stuck in the Basement wasting away, and she knows that she'll never get better that way. So, I had my main conflict for her.Â
Ah. This is getting kind of ridiculous and I'm not sure if this is helpful at all, so, bullet points!
Keep a journal of anything that sticks out to you. Anything. Tropes especially. Like, "Oh, I like that 'Revelations' went the realistic route with showing that everyone breaks under torture" or "It's kind of cool when people focus on the background characters for a change". Go find story generators or hit the random button on TV Tropes.org until you find something that sticks out.Â
Ask questions. Turn your "What are you doing, Criminal Minds?" eye in on yourself. Be objective, be critical. Why does this work? What do these characters talk about? Why is this happening to this specific character? Are they reacting realistically? What kinds of things do these characters have in common on the surface that end up coming from drastically different places in their histories?Â
Music! Make playlists, look for things that remind you of your characters, even if it's just one lyric. From there, things can really click together in interesting ways.
Read about how actual successful writers get their ideas. Dan Harmon's Circular Theory is a really, really interesting concept. Stephen King's novel On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is also worth every penny that you'll pay for it.Â
Don't try to force it. Things will click together when they click together. If you try to force a story, it'll definitely show. If you love your characters, work on their backstories and writing what happens to them in every day life--there's always something in a character's past that can spawn some kind of idea.
Um. Yes! This is basically what I have to say. I considered adding in another example with some of my other books but this is already obscenely long and probably ridiculously pretentious and unhelpful. So I apologize for that.
