Storytelling for Pantsers

by Annalisa Parent

  I get it. It’s scary. Maybe you don’t want to feel like you’re wasting time digging for gold and never finding it. One way to mitigate wasted time is through character sketches—with one caveat. Remember that I said it’s better to see how your character acts or acted than to make lists of traits.

  Here are some questions to help set your characters in motion.

  Let’s take a short jaunt down Dialogue Alley.

  If you think about your friends, you might all have a similar way of speaking, in that you might all have phrases and inside jokes that you use. However, no matter how close you are, you and your best friends have different ways of speaking.

  Therefore: You don’t want your dialogue to be homogeneous for all of your characters. How do your characters sound different from one another?

  Another activity that many writers like to use is fill out a dating profile for their characters. Now, this might be more useful for some types of characters than other types, but if you go onto any online dating site you’ll see some basic questions: occupation, age, height, ethnicity perhaps, religion might be important, and just a general physical description. What does this person look like? Physicality might play into who they are.

  This is just a sampling of some of the character profiling we do in the Writing Gym, but it gives you some direction on how to think about how your characters act.

  The ultimate goal here is to get to know your characters on a deeper level, which may eventually lead you to their deepest desires, needs, and motivations.

  Your characters must be relatable

  Note that I said relatable and not likable.

  Your readers don’t have to like your characters, but they must believe them. You don’t want your readers to toss the book aside with a “nobody behaves like that.” (Well, unless it’s a romance, but that’s a slightly different scenario, right?)

  Your readers have to be able to see your characters as plausible—even if the world in which they live is imaginary. If you’re writing an other-worldly piece (fantasy or scifi, for example), you can have people who walk on ceilings, stand on their heads and eat through straws that pop out of their belly buttons.

  None of that matters if the emotional reality of the characters rings true. When the characters’ emotional reality rings true, we gullible humans will believe just about anything else you throw our way.

  Let’s talk about the Big HP.

  We just buy the fact that Harry Potter flies around on a broom, has trees that want to wump his, well, car, and cavorts with spiders big enough to give me nightmares into next week. We accept all of it. Why? He’s grounded in his humanity.

  We feel for his mistreatment. We root for him to escape his abusive family. We dislike when others spurn him. Our empathy is engaged by Harry’s situation and actions. He could jump from Earth to Saturn and back again, and we’d believe it—because we trust his emotional reality.

  No matter where your story is set—in time or space—the reader must relate to how your characters behave and feel.

  Quirks

  Quirks are an element which lend relatability to your characters, quickly and efficiently.

  Why?

  We humans are just quirky lil buggers. Think of the people you work with. The guy who drinks coffee from that same Superman mug every day. (Does he even wash that thing?) Miss I-only-eat-organic in the lunchroom. The guy having an affair who’s got to be dumb if he thinks no one hears him on the phone through the cubicle walls.

  Our quirks make us annoying and endearing (depending on one’s perspective), and character quirks can have the same effect.

  You don’t want to have too many quirks per character, but one or two really make a person relatable in his or her imperfections—the more specific, the better.

  What should be specific? Why, motivation of course. (You knew I was going to say that didn’t you? Have I told you how smart you are in the last few pages?)

  What’s the intersection of motivation and quirks?

  I’m so glad you asked.

  Imagine two nail-biters. What does nail biting signify?

  You probably said nervousness, because that’s the most prevalent connotation we have for that body language.

  But consider this: If I am pensive, might I also place a nail to my lips? If I am deep in reflection, might I tap my teeth with that nail?

  Sure.

  Same mannerism. Two totally different interpretations.

  And there’s a huge difference between a nervous ninny and Rodin’s muse. (Rodin sculpted The Thinker, in case I went too far into the depths of obscure cultural references there.)

  You’re going to choose a mannerism that has an impact on the plot.

  A note about psychology

  Before I move on, just a note about psychology. Certainly the more we can understand psychology, the more depth and the more dynamism we can give to our characters. Especially if you’re writing certain types of traditional literature, getting into the psychology and the motivation of a character might, in fact, be integral to your novel.

  Consider, for example, Dostoyevsky. This nineteenth century Russian novelist is a master psychologist and one of the things that he’s known for is digging into the deeper motivations of his characters and being able to articulate them masterfully.

  Digging deep into motivation and using person vs. self as the central conflict that carries the novel is no easy task. Yet, in Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky digs so deep into the protagonist Raskolnikov’s motivation that the character’s struggle with himself becomes the story. In fact, the reader knows little else of Raskolnikov other than how he grapples with his own internal conflict—which causes and results from the central action of the novel.

  Integrating psychological elements can be an A-level endeavor, but if you want to see how a master battles person vs. self and wins, I highly recommend revisiting Crime and Punishment.

  (Remember what I said about reading?)

  How much detail should I include?

  Mannerisms. Quirks. Psychology. Speech patterns...I thought you said we shouldn’t include too much detail.

  Remember this: Every detail we include has the sole purpose of moving the plot forward. I don’t really care that your character has short hair or long hair, unless it’s helping to move the plot forward, right? If she’s a fighter and she ends up getting grabbed by the hair because her hair is really long, that’s important. If she always tucks it up under her helmet, we don’t care about her hair.

  Let’s compare two scenarios and see what this looks like.

  Some of you who might have met me at writers’ conferences might understand that I’m, er, vertically challenged at a whopping five feet tall.

  If I were a character in a chick lit, there might some opportunities for that to be my quirk, right? It might be comic relief that comes around about how I can never reach the cupboard. My friends, my roommates, my boyfriend, whoever in this novel is always having to get things down for me because I can never reach anything that’s not on the bottom shelf.

  Not only is this an entertaining attribute, but maybe as the protagonist of this novel, I am on a quest to self-acceptance, and so getting over myself and my insecurities about my height serve not only as entertainment, but as the external manifestation of my internal conflict.

  Let’s genre hop, shall we? If I am the heroine of a fantasy novel, there might a different opportunity here for this quirk.

  I’m short and I can never get up on my dang horse; somebody’s always going to help me get up into the saddle. That’s funny— but it might also be something that helps the plot to move forward. Here’s one scenario: There might be this moment when it’s dawn at camp and everyone’s getting ready to set out on the trail. Out of nowhere, the bad guy and his crew come charging down the path toward camp.

  Well, the fact that it takes me longer to get onto my horse is now a liability. Maybe I end up injured because I’m not battleready or perhaps I am kidnapped. M
aybe my kidnapping is the inciting incident that leads my compatriots on a quest that ultimately saves the kingdom. It couldn’t have happened without my quirk.

  What I’m saying is consider how the attributes of your character are going to help to move the plot forward. If you’re going to include a detail, such as the person being short, is that going to be comic relief only, or is that going to be something that is directly tied into conflict?

  Conflict

  Just so we’re all on the same page, let’s review the different types of conflict.

  NB: Some people separate out “person vs. supernatural (God)” as its own category. We’re not here for theological debate; this is a book about storytelling, so do what you want. They’re just labels. It’s more important to know how to use the concepts than for us to argue about what things are called.

  Of course, your novel is going to have conflict. Remember at the beginning of this chapter I said that there were all these working parts of your novel? Well, we can’t think about character without thinking about conflict, and we can’t think about conflict without thinking about plot, and we can’t think about plot without thinking about character. It’s all these cogs that come together, these gears moving together that create one operating piece.

  Not only will your novel have one main conflict, but—and this is what’s most important character-wise about conflict—your main character is going to balance out the types of conflict throughout the story.

  What?

  Let’s revisit our pal Odysseus. I reminded you that he dealt with a whirlpool and the lack of wind in his sails. Poor Ole Odysseus though, life was so much more complicated for him than that. He battled Poseidon, was held captive multiple times and was tempted by the sirens’ song.

  As you can see, Homer varied Odysseus’ problems: Odysseus vs. a god; Odysseus vs. person; Odysseus vs. well, whatever the heck sirens are.

  Side trip: The Odyssey was composed in the eighth century BC (BCE, if you prefer). We humans have been at this quality storytelling thing for a while. Think of the power of a quality story: It lasts for thousands of years.

  The Odyssey is a long series of multiple conflicts (but very interesting, and you should definitely reread it, especially if the last time you read it was in a high school anthology). The important fictive element Homer was onto here was varying the types of conflict; that variation is what we want to aspire to in our writing as well.

  Let’s simplify for the sake of illustration.

  Suppose we’ve got a knight.

  If this knight gallops across the countryside, and first he fights the yellow knight, and then he fights the green knight, and then he fights the white knight, and then he fights the black knight, that’s not a really interesting story. Why? Because the conflict was consistently person vs. person.

  However, if we mix it up, and first our knight has to fight the green knight and then he gets caught in a storm—person vs. nature. And then God comes down from on high (person vs. supernatural—if you like) and gives him dreams through the night that cause him to suffer so much he’s unsure of himself when he wakes in the morning. That’s a much more interesting story.

  Why?

  Because we’ve varied the conflict types.

  Vortex! Here’s where the characterization comes in: Remember the quirks?

  If this knight doesn’t believe in God, he is going to have a very different struggle with God coming down from on high than someone who’s deeply pious, right? Knowing who my character is will influence the types of conflict that he or she can face.

  Then I’m going to work in all these different aspects of who this character is so that I’ve got different types of conflict happening throughout.

  I can’t vary the types of conflict until I have a deep understanding of who my character is, and who my character is is going to determine how the conflict is dealt with. (Remember the vortex? We’re evolving here, moving to the next level.)

  Wait, weren’t we going to talk about setting?

  I’m going to say something a little bit controversial about setting, something most people don’t say: Treat setting in your novel as a character.

  What do I mean by that?

  Like details of character, details of setting can help to ground the reader in what’s happening. Similar to character, you’re only going to include the details that move your plot forward. Again, no matter how interesting you think that Victorian mansion is and all its ornate furniture and rooms and textures of materials over the window, we wouldn’t need to know that about a character, and we don’t need to know that about setting. You can also think about the ways that your setting can help to move the plot forward.

  So, no gratuitous expressions of where these people are.

  If you’re looking for an example of setting as character that is masterfully done and moves the plot forward in a way that almost anthropomorphizes the setting itself, I strongly suggest looking at Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, where he uses the setting as an active character, not just a passive backdrop. Again, A-level stuff.

  Confused yet?

  I know I’ve given you a lot of information, and it’s hard to see, in abstract, how all these pieces fit together. (Pantser Peril strikes again.)

  I understand how confusing this writing journey can be, how looking at all the moving parts individually and trying to figure out how they work together can be overwhelming. I know because I am a pantser myself—who had to discover this system to make the process work—and writers ask me these questions every day:

  What goes where?

  What should I do next?

  Do I have enough this?

  Do I need more that?

  These question are frustrating because applying writing theory to the act of writing is not easy stuff. Many writers find that the right guide to help you with the integration can be the key to moving through that frustration, especially a guide who not only understands your process, but can give you targeted activities to help you muddle through the murky murky mess and get those gears running smoothly again.

  WHAT IS PLOT?

  IF “[S]TORY IS THE essential progression of incidents that occur to the hero in pursuit of his one goal,” as David Mamet wrote, then plot is the best way to arrange the parts.

  When we think about the plot, we often use the plot diagram devised by the nineteenth century novelist Gustav Freytag. The plot arc covers the action of the entire novel; think of it as the rainbow over your piece, with the moving, churning water below as the tension of the individual story arcs.

  We’re going to use the plot diagram to discuss the elements of plot and the structure of your story—but first, let’s talk about the different types of plots.

  Plot-Driven vs. Character-Driven

  There are two main types of plots: plot driven and character-driven.

  Novels that are plot-driven focus on plot twists, action, and external conflict. Think James Bond. The goals of the story, here, are focused on external outcomes. (Will Bond catch the bad guy?) The characters make fast decisions, and therefore character development, or evolution, takes a back seat to the unfolding of events.

  In character-driven novels, the main focus is the evolution, or change, of a character over time. All coming-of-age novels fall under this category, and all novels in this category follow the same guidelines as a coming-of-age piece, even if they are not technically about a child coming of age. In The Secret Life of Bees, for example, we see a girl grow, change, and literally come of age. However, the same happens for Bridget in Bridget Jones’ Diary, and she is certainly well above majority.

  Here’s another way to think about it: In a character-driven plot, the characters seek something within themselves; the struggle may manifest itself externally, but the real journey is an internal one. In plot-driven plot, the character seeks something outside of himself: to vanquish the bad guy or to find the Holy Grail.

  Re-read that paragraph again, because that’s a huge tip.


  Ok, moving on.

  Whether you choose to write a plot-driven or character-driven novel is up to you. Certain genres lend themselves more easily to one or the other, but these are not hard and fast rules.

  You can’t know which plot form to choose until you know your characters’ motivations better, and you can’t know your characters until you know what they do, and you can’t know what they do until you know who they are, and you can’t know who they are until…

  Remember the vortex? Take a deep breath. The carousel’s coming around again, and there’s always a chance to grab the golden ring.

  Before we move on, I want to mention that you can write a hybrid of the two forms. (I would argue that The Hunger Games is one such hybrid.) That said, as with anytime you create a mishmosh, you sacrifice some of the integrity of each art form. Spaghetti pizza might be yummy, but is neither spaghetti nor pizza. A hybrid novel loses some of the fast pace of the typical plot-driven novel, and lacks some of the depth and exploration of character contained in a character-driven novel. This difference is not a bad thing per se; it’s simply something to be aware of as you choose the plot style that is going to help you to reach your end goals the best.

  Going back to the idea of A-level stuff, a hybrid novel is probably a challenge that inexperienced writers shouldn’t attempt yet. It is one of the “soufflés” of the writing world. That doesn’t mean, like all high-level material, you can’t play with it, investigate it, and explore it.

  No matter which format you choose, the plot not only includes the main goals of the story (whether they are event or character specific), but also interweaves your overarching themes, and possibly symbolism. (This is a very literary technique, and may or may not apply to your novel. In A Tale of Two Cities, for example, the symbols of the Golden Thread and knitting are woven throughout. Ha! Get it: woven. Are all of my jokes going to be that bad? Probably.)