With something as important as this, it’s often best to reveal it as part of a scene rather than just mention it in passing so that readers will be more likely to remember it. Maybe Katy has to stand on tiptoe to reach a shelf, she’s teased about her size or she has to look up to see another character’s face.
Backstory
We are all shaped by the events that happen to us, and these events make up what are called our backstories. Each of your characters will have their own backstory, but neither you nor your readers need to know everything that’s happened in them. The events that matter are the ones that shaped your character in ways that are significant to your story. So the fact that a character nearly drowned when he was twelve is important if it left him terrified of travelling by ship and the plot includes a sea crossing. But the same fact doesn’t matter if it’s only effect was to make him learn to swim, and he won’t be required to do that in the story.
Although it’s important to tell your readers important facts about your character’s appearance early in the story, the same is not true of their backstory. In fact, one of the major reasons for a book taking too long to get going is including too much backstory long before your reader needs to know it. On the other hand, you don’t want to hold back some information too long either. If you wait until your hero has been shipwrecked before you reveal that she was the high school swimming champion, that skill will look too conveniently contrived to be believable.
The right solution is to drip-feed the vital backstory information into your story a bit at a time. Less important information can be left out completely or included just to make it harder for readers to realize what really matters. You can also put questions in your readers’ heads by hinting that important information exists without revealing it completely. If this awakens their curiosity enough, their desire to learn the truth will help to keep them reading.
Family issues
Family ties make a big difference to how characters react to situations. James Bond’s approach to danger and casual sex would probably be quite different if he had a loving wife and three children waiting for him at home. That’s why so many detectives, spies and adventurers in stories are single, divorced or otherwise free of relatives and family ties. It gives them the freedom to behave any way they like without fear of repercussions on the people they love.
However, family ties don’t always have bad effects on stories. The complex relationships in families form the basis of many successful plots, and they add an emotional depth to countless others. You can use them to give your characters the motivation they need to escape from danger, the determination to dive back into the burning building to rescue the people they love or, when disaster strikes, a reason to seek revenge.
You don’t need to work out your character’s complete family tree. Concentrate on the relationships that matter to your story: the older sister who keeps trying to marry off your bachelor detective, the ageing mother whose needs conflict with your character’s career plans or the talented brother who overshadows your character’s own achievements. As always, you don’t need to decide all of this at the beginning. You can decide on relatives as and when you need them and, where necessary, adjust the plot to introduce them earlier.
The problem with parents
Good parents love their children and try to keep them safe. As a result, they stop them doing anything that might turn into an adventure and, when the children do get into trouble, they rush in and solve their problems for them – a situation guaranteed to produce an unsatisfactory ending. So, if an important character in your story is a child or teenager, you may find it helpful to get rid of their parents.
That’s why so many main characters in children’s books are orphans. However, killing off parents is a drastic step and best done well before the start of your story unless you want to focus on grief. Making parents workaholics is less gruesome and more realistic in the present day when people often work long hours but rarely die young. Boarding schools are handy too, and so is setting your story back in time to a period when 12 year olds were considered adults. I don’t recommend making the parents go on holiday and forget to take their child with them – it’s been done so thoroughly in the Home Alone movies that it doesn’t look original any more. But the family might get separated in some other way, especially if there's a war, a tsunami or some other disaster.
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Making characters believable
Have you ever read a book or watched a movie where a character acts in a way you can’t believe? If so, you’ll remember how annoying it was and how much it affected your opinion of the story. To make sure that you never annoy your readers in that way, you need to create your characters skilfully so the way you need them to behave seems natural. That’s why it’s best not to decide too much about them until you know the part they will play in your story. Delaying decisions until you can see the effect they will have leaves you free to develop both the character and the plot in the best way possible. If necessary, you can then go back through your plot and adjust earlier steps to incorporate that decision.
Providing information in good time
As I mentioned in the section on backstory, if we don’t let the readers know that a character has a vital skill until he uses it, they are likely to decide that’s unbelievable and only put in to get the author out of a plot hole. So it’s important that we give our readers this information earlier in the story and, because it’s so crucial, it’s best to mention it more than once just in case they miss it the first time. But we don’t want to make the mentions too obvious in case they telegraph the ending by giving too big a hint of what’s to come.
Let’s go back to the example I used earlier of someone who used to be the high school swimming champion. An obvious way to bring that into the story is to show her swimming, but here are some ways you could let readers know about her achievement without her getting wet.
Make her grumble that getting up early in the morning reminds her of all the early starts to swimming practise when she was at school.
Make her angry with her dad for pushing her so hard to be a champion swimmer when it wasn’t what she wanted.
Make her sister tired of always playing second best because she wasn't a championship swimmer.
Show her struggling with something else (maths, reading, woodwork) and boasting of her swimming achievement as a way to show she’s not a total failure.
In each case, the reader is likely to focus on the emotion of the situation and not realize your ulterior motive in making her a good swimmer until it becomes crucial to the plot.
Of course, there are some stories where we deliberately keep a fact secret from the reader for most of the story. This applies to many murder mysteries and to any plot with a twist at the end. But even then, the reader should be able to go back through the story and find hints that point towards the twist that are so subtle that they either missed them completely or misunderstood them the first time around. The movie The Sixth Sense does this brilliantly. When you finally meet the final twist at the end (which I’m not going to give away here), everything suddenly clicks into place and tiny things you didn’t quite understand become totally clear. It’s worth watching twice just to see how it’s done.
Motivation matters
Sometimes it’s not a skill or the lack of it that’s the problem. It’s the way a character reacts to a situation that doesn’t feel right. Motivation matters, so readers will only believe that a person acts in a particular way if they understand the reasons for that behaviour. For instance, if you want a normally polite character to be rude to someone, you need to show that she’s had a really bad morning that’s driven her to breaking point or that she’s finally snapped because the recipient of the rudeness has been picking on her for weeks.
Solving motivation problems often involves doing more character development. When I was creating There Must Be Horses, I knew Sasha wanted to stay at her new foster home, but I also knew that the stor
y needed her foster parents to refuse to keep her permanently. However, they were such a naturally kind couple that the story would only be believable if there was a reason for them to turn Sasha away. It took me a long time and many false starts to find one that was strong enough to make the book work, and I only managed it when I worked out a backstory for the foster parents that explained how they felt. That reason then became pivotal to the whole story, and I made Sasha go through the same search I had to discover why she couldn’t stay.
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Character arcs
A feature of many successful stories is known in story jargon as a positive character arc: a change for the good in a character during a story. That change can take many forms but, in order for it to be successful, it has to be one that the readers find satisfying and believable. Common character arcs include:
a timid man overcomes his fear enough to do something brave.
an ambitious woman gives up her chance of success in order to help someone else.
a selfish man ends up caring enough about someone else to risk his life for them.
a shy girl overcomes her fear of speaking in public in order to lead a campaign against injustice.
a villain sees the error of his ways and lets his captives go.
Some stories contain negative story arcs where a character gradually becomes worse and worse. That’s okay if it’s the villain who is deteriorating, but books where the hero changes from good to bad tend to be downbeat and depressing unless he eventually learns the error of his ways and improves. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write that sort of story, but it’s not an easy task. You’ll have to work hard to keep your readers caring about someone who is becoming increasingly unpleasant.
Character arcs are not essential
Although an interesting character arc can improve your plot, you don’t have to have one. In most detective series, police procedurals and superhero adventures, the main character stays much the same throughout each book. And readers like it that way. They read book after book because they like that character so they don’t want them to change.
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Character development in action
Let’s go back to the story we started earlier about Seb and Jane. I’ve decided that the idea of any piece of electronics still working two hundred years later is too hard to believe. So the message Seb finds is now a diary written in a language he doesn’t know (probably French), and Jane has gone back to being a language expert. That means the current step outline is:
Seb is demolishing an empty house when he finds an old diary hidden under the floorboards, but he can’t understand what it says.
Seb starts to take it to his boss but hesitates. Taking it wouldn’t really be stealing because no one else knows it exists. Money is tight, and this might be valuable to a collector. But it’s hard to know how much it’s worth without knowing what it says.
He takes the diary to Jane and asks her to translate it.
Jane won’t do it. The study of history is strictly controlled, and she’ll get into trouble if she works on an unauthorized artefact.
Seb persuades her to change her mind by tempting her to tackle something new instead of the dry, approved texts she usually has to translate. Jane agrees reluctantly, worried she’ll be caught and get into trouble.
Jane starts to translate the diary and quickly discovers that it contains a different version of history from the one she’s always been told was true. The elite hold power by force, keep the ordinary population in ignorance and kill unwanted members of the population without a qualm if they cause trouble or are no longer useful.
Seb and Jane are determined to overthrow the elite. They set out to find others trying to do the same.
The elite realize they know too much and try to kill them.
Seb and Jane finally join with the others and take part in a rebellion.
The elite are overthrown.
Now we know all that, let’s think about our characters in more depth. Jane’s surname is Knox because it popped into my head by itself and feels right. (It’s often best to go with your gut feelings on issues like names.) She’s in her early twenties, which makes her old enough to have the qualifications and experience she needs for her job. Her whole life has been orthodox – standard education followed by a civil service job at the museum – so she’s always followed the rules. This sets her up to have a character arc by letting her become more willing to challenge authority as the story progresses. However, I’m tempted to show a small sign of rebellion early on by making her ability with French the result of some unapproved study in addition to her official course. (I’ll decide on that later.) My mental image of her is short and dark, but so far her appearance doesn’t matter much.
Seb Stone is also in his early twenties, and he’s a bit of a geek with a flair for electronics and everything mechanical. I imagine him as scruffy with straggly blond hair, although his appearance isn’t relevant to the story yet. He’s self-taught with no formal qualifications, but he has established a reputation for himself as someone who can make things work. He earns a somewhat precarious living doing odd jobs for local people with a bit of buying and selling on the side that sometimes takes him to the edge of legality. This makes him very different from Jane which opens up the possibility of conflict between them. His edgy lifestyle also provides him with experience and contacts that may come in handy later in the story.
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Sorting out the setting
As you work on your plot, you’ll find you need to know more about your setting. As with characters, it’s best to develop this while you are working out the story so you only worry about the details that matter.
Period
The time period in which your story takes place is an important component of the setting. At its most basic, you have to choose whether it’s going to happen in the past, the present or the future. (Although, if you’re writing about time travel, it could be all three.) Then, if you’ve chosen the past, you have to decide on the exact period you want to write about. It’s important to pick a time that interests you because you’re going to have to do lots of research to make sure all the facts are right. Even small inaccuracies can jar with readers, pulling them out of the story, and making them less likely to recommend your book to their friends.
If you can’t cope with that amount of research, consider using a fantasy or alternative reality setting instead. That can be very similar to the historical period that interests you, but you don’t have to worry about getting every detail correct. It will also give you the freedom to change anything about the real history that will make your plot work better.
If you are setting your book in the future, you can give your imagination free-rein, provided you stay within the boundaries of believability. Readers will find it easy to accept that civilization has collapsed after an apocalyptic event or that technology has advanced to amazing new levels, but they will struggle to believe that Earth’s gravity has disappeared or trees have turned blue. If blue trees are vital to your story, move your setting to another planet or a fantasy world where such things are possible.
Place
The second component of setting is the place or places where your story will happen. Using a real place sounds as if it could save you lots of work. You don’t have to make anything up because it’s all decided for you: from street layout to public transport to the position of hotels and schools. And that’s where the problems start. Using a real place gives you no leeway to make things the way you need them to be for the story. However much you want your hero to be mugged in a quiet alleyway next to the library, you can’t do that if there isn’t an alleyway there. Plus the real businesses in the area may not be too happy about being featured in a story that puts them in a bad light, so you may have trouble finding a suitable bar where drug dealers can sell their wares or a warehouse for a mass murderer to use to dispose of the bodies.
Another snag with using real places is that your reader
s may know them better than you do. Unless you live in the place yourself or your research is perfect, you’ll probably get letters from fans pointing out that the number 52 bus doesn’t run on Sundays or the hotel to the right of the police station closed down in 2010, so it wasn’t possible for the murderer to stay there in 2016.
Despite all these problems, there are some stories where it’s essential to use a real place as a setting for at least some of the scenes. If yours is one of them, arm yourself with up-to-date maps and timetables, guidebooks and photos for easy reference. YouTube is definitely your friend for this type of research as personal videos often contain the small details you don’t find in a travel documentary.
Of course, it’s best if you can visit the place yourself and walk around the streets your characters will use. If that’s not possible, try to find someone who lives there who is willing to help with the small but important details you can’t find elsewhere. Other authors can be particularly helpful because they understand the problem – try putting a request on author discussion groups to find someone suitable.
Plots and Plotting Page 5