Hello there lovelies, this is Roxo
from TheBeautifulOnes.
I am very glad to be doing this post here with the Tangled girls.
So I
am going to show you how to make characters believable, from Mindi
Scott's beautiful debut, Freefall. She
actually is going to have her second book, Live Through
This published in the fall, so,
check it out, she has beautiful prose.
In
case you didn't read Freefall,(you
totally should), here's a quick synopsis:
Seth
has been the first to see his best friend dead. And the way he had
died wasn't exactly dignifying. Neither was Seth's life. It's a slap
in the face for him, facing death like that. He realizes that he
should better wake up and start over. It's easy to say, but much
harder to do; until he meets Rosetta and he finds out that other
people have issues as well. Together, they learn to overcome them.
This is, in short,
the plot of Freefall. The book has a very strong and credible male
POV, a thing you rarely find in Young Adult fiction these days,
especially now that most of it has female main characters.
As a writer of
non-paranormal I was delightful to find out there's no magic around,
and as I breathed the book in, I tried to learn as much as I could
from the craft.
*
I will
be starting at the beginning of the novel and provide examples. I'm
going to try my best not to give away any spoilers.
The
books starts with a party, and even though we are not explicitly
told, the reader can infer that Seth has a troubled mind. There are
hints to disclose his torment and his right from the very beginning:
The room I was trying not to go into was exactly where I kept ending up; the stuff I was trying not to drink was exactly what I'd been chugging all night.
The
suggestion is simple and to the point, so the reader can easily
understand the character. The male voice is clearly distinguishable
from the somewhat more poetic and connotative discourse of the female
characters.
As the
story continues, the male voice becomes more and more distinct, as we
learn how he puts up with the real problems in life of a messed-up
teenager.
**
The back door slid
across its track.
Open: loud music/
laughing/ talking.
Closed: muffled music/
laughing/ talking
As
writers, we should know everything in a scene.
We have
it in our minds, we press pause and everything freezes. That is when
we detach from the window we're watching, and go investigate the
surroundings of the scene in our head. We should see all the details:
the lines across one's t-shirt, the way a hair stands out, unyielding
to stay in place, one character's frown and another fidgeting with
his keys. We should know what color the sky is at every moment and
whether the cars are loud or if there's shouting in the streets. We
must feel the smell of exhaust and taste the food we're feeding our
characters.
But
they wouldn't perceive it all. They would only see things according
to their personality. A sensible girl would notice the fresh air and
the soft grass under her toes, Seth McCoy notices the factors that
disturb his silence.
*
To make her laugh
again, I said, “All right. Fine. Be that way.”
It didn't work at all;
I sounded like a dickhead.
What
makes Mindi Scott's male voice believable is exactly situations like
this one. As much as we love sarcastic comments and awesome dialogue,
it doesn't happen in real life. This does: awkward, out of line
responses, bad jokes and even worse attempts to fix the situation.
The
approach here depends very much on the type of novel you want to
write, and I have to admit it is risky to take this path, as people
read to distance themselves from real, crappy life. Even with this
risk, though, you have to make sure the dialogue sounds real. It
helps if you read it aloud.
*
Another
thing that makes us (well, me, at least) wonder in books is the
sudden change a character makes. While that might work well in the
whole plot and offer us an example worth reading, Seth's change is
slow. Actually, the whole book is about this one change.
Imagine
him saying: “I am going to stop drinking right now!”. For the
rest of the novel we would have seen him fighting with the decision.
But Mindi Scott has another technique. Check it out:
I wanted to try not
drinking for a while and see where it went.
It's
just like real life. You're never going to start running every day if
you make a New Year's Resolution. But it might become a habit if one
day in April, you might go for a run in the park, just to clear our
mind. And then you realize you like it and then you go the next day,
and the one after it, and you turn it into a habit.
My
point is that you should imagine if what your character does is
something you, or any person would do in real life. A strong
character might do sudden changes, of course, but the motivation
should be very well pointed out, and just as strong.
*
We weren't much closer than we'd been before,[...]. I breathed in her flowery shampoo until we'd dropped all the golf balls in. Then I reluctantly stood and helped her up.
This
description sounds really natural, right?
My
basic point is, to make something believable you have to examine it
very well in real life, note all the details, extract the meaningful
ones for your character and put it in words so that rendering it, the
feeling remains the same.
I don't
think there is a book to tell you exactly how to write, how to put
down word by word. Good writing is maintaining the emotion, no matter
of how it is written.
So that
was it. Leave your suggestions in the comments. Tell me, what do you
do to make characters feel true?
Lovsies,
Roxo!
