Being Evil: Plotting From the Antagonist's Perspective

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

When working on a scene, we're almost always thinking what the protagonist will do and how they'll get out of it. This is just good plotting, but sometimes it can lead directly to the outcome you have planned and miss opportunities for wonderful situations.

I was working on a scene for Blue Fire and found myself in this exact situation. The general gist of the scene was, Nya has to get out of something and fights a bunch of bad guys to do it. She'll get away, but it'll be a tough fight. Since I know she'll get away, I had her acting to achieve that goal. Oddly though, it felt wrong, too easy, rather flat, and something was off. Then it hit me...

This wasn't about her trying to get out, it was about the bad guys trying to stop her from getting out.

Rhythm of the Words: Voice in Dialogue

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Aaron Sorkin is a god when it comes to dialogue. Seriously.

For those unfamiliar with the name, Sorkin is the writer and creator of such delights as "The West Wing," "Sports Night," "Studio 64," "The American President," and "A Few Good Men." Watch any of these, and you'll hear the style of his writing and how he puts words together so they hit the ear just right.

What does this have to do with writing, you ask? Everything.

Why Refreshing What Your Know About Writing is a Good Thing

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

I love reading about writing. There's something about an article that looks at -- say dialogue -- in a new way and makes me realize I could improve it if I did X, that gets me all aflutter. It's one of the reasons I love reading writing blogs so much. They're a wonderful way to grow as a writer.

I often point these out to writer pals, and I've had some mention (and I'm paraphrasing here), "Yeah, that's a great blog, but it's all basic stuff. We're way past that." In a way it's true, but in a way, it's not.

It's easy to forget about the fundamentals when they're old hat to you. When you don't sweat over structure, worry over dialogue, fret over setting, you don't always look at them as closely as you once did. Sometimes, they suffer because of it. Or if not, they might not be as stunning as they could be, because they're good enough. It's all stuff you know. You're past all that.

Wait for it, Wait for it—Never mind: Building up and not Following Through

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Good stories have a lot of balance to them. The right combination of information and action, narrative and dialog, description and internalization. When that balance is out of whack, readers notice.

One thing that can tip the scales is a disproportionate focus spent on an event vs its importance.

Let’s say Bob and the gals are running from zombies, trapped inside an abandoned car manufacturing plant in Detroit. For ten pages, Bob is obsessing over what’s going to happen when they reach the other side of the assembly line and go through the exterior doors. Sally disagrees with going there, Jane wants to go somewhere else but Bob insists it’s the only option. Despite the dangers, it’s a lot worse to not go through the assembly line doors. They finally get there and…

All By Myself: Why Protagonists Need Friends

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

It can be lonely being a protagonist. You go about your day with all kinds of terrible things happening to you, and there's not always someone to talk to about it. But protags need friends and confidants. And not just because it's lonely.

It's difficult to write a character who has no one to talk to.

Solitary protag stories are hard to write. The protag is in their head all the time, internalizing, talking to themselves. Some of this is great (you really get to know a protag that way), but too much and your reader can wind up telling your protag to zip it and get on with things.

When Being Bad is Good: Creating a Great Antagonist

By Janice Hardy, @Janie_Hardy

A reader asked...

How did you get in the "mindset" of writing from the antagonist perspectives (assuming you wrote in third-person)? If not, what are your thoughts on how to decide between telling a story in first- or third- person?

For this example, I'm going to say antagonist and bad guy mean the same thing, even though your antagonist doesn't have to be a villain. It's just who or what is between your protagonist and what they want. Often that's a bad guy of some type, but not always. There are multiple kinds of conflict.

Cats and Character: Telling Your Characters Apart

Darwin

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Two of my cats are red tabbies who look identical if you don't know them. It often takes a guest three or four visits before they realize we have two of them and they aren't the same cat, even though they're as different as night and day personality wise. What does this have to do with characters? You can learn a lot about creating characters from my cats.

Throwaway Characters

At first glance the cats look the same. Red fur, long and skinny, short hair, similar weight. This is what first-time guests remember after they leave my house. "They have cats." They might remember how many (minus one) and they might remember the colors.

Words That Sound Like What They Mean

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

I love onomatopoeia. Not everyone does, so it's something I have to use with care. But just because I can't use "thwack" as often as I'd like, there are plenty of words that sound like what they mean that aren't onomatopoeia. The sound of the word evokes its meaning.

There's a great exchange in The West Wing that illustrates this. (I tried to find a video clip, but alas, no luck).

Ivanovich : Sam, it is freezing too cold in Rheykjavik, it is freezing too cold in Helsinki, it is freezing too cold in Staad, why must every American president bound out of an automobile like he's at a yacht club, while in... comparison,  while in comparison, our leader looks like... I don't even know what word is.

Sam : Frumpy?
 

Ivanovich : I don't know what 'frumpy' is, but onomatopoeticly, sounds right. 

Frumpy sounds like what it is. You don't have to know its definition to get a good idea of its meaning. A quick trip to the thesaurus got me these other words that could have been used instead:  

Shake and Bake: Re-Structuring Your Novel

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

When I got my critiques back for Darkfall I knew there were going to be a lot of comments. I knew when I wrote this draft that it was a bit "all over the place" because it was wrapping up the trilogy and I wasn't sure how some things were going to pan out. I needed to write it and see what happened, and then needed to hear what folks said about it before I went back and revised.

I knew I was setting myself up for some serious realigning. And I was right.

The biggest change I had to make was to align the goal structure so all my plot arrows pointed in the same direction. Nya was often being pulled in several directions, and not in a good way. It was like she didn't know what to care about from chapter to chapter, so her goals bounced like ping pong balls. This happened because her goals were plot goals, not personal goals.