How Could You Do This to Me? When Characters Betray Other Characters

By Janice Hardy

Betrayal can come in many forms, and most of them make for great stories.

The "unexpected betrayal" has always been a popular trope, but there was a time when it was everywhere, especially in young adult novels. 

The "trusted mentor suddenly turning on you" was the most common, but betrayals were coming from all quarters. Close friends, random people, family. They started to feel a bit deus ex machina to me. It was like yanking off the mask at the end of Scooby-Doo and seeing Old Man Withers.

So instead of a betrayal surprising me, I was playing the “I wonder which one of these allies will turn on the hero in the third act?” game. I knew it was coming, and more times than not, the same old "Aha! I was secretly working for the villain" was the big twist. 

The problem here...

Where Was I Going Again? The Benefits of Re-Reading During a Revision

By Janice Hardy

A re-read might be the right path to find your story and fall in love with it all over again.

Many writers shudder at the very thought of revising their novel. Others curse. But I’ve always enjoyed the revision process (don’t hate me). I’ve found it’s where my best writing happens, because I know how my story turned out and I have a much better understanding of who the characters are and what they want and need to do.

Even if you’re a meticulous outliner, your final draft rarely matches your original plan exactly. And if you’re a pantser or discovery writer? Well, your manuscript may resemble your initial vision about as much as a squirrel resembles a spaceship. Though honestly, that can happen to plotters, too.

Because things change as we write. Motivations shift. New ideas pop up halfway through and suddenly alter our understanding of the plot. Characters do things we didn’t plan, and sometimes what sounded brilliant in Chapter Eight feels like a complete mistake by Chapter Twenty.

How Do You Know if Your Writing is Getting Better?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy 

Without objective feedback, it's hard to know if you're improving or just making the same mistakes. 

Almost every writer at some point has wondered, "Is my writing getting any better?" I've wondered about it, many writers I know have wondered about it, and odds are good you have, too. It's a normal question when what you're doing is so subjective. 

Sadly, there's no easy checklist to verify if you're improving or not. It's also really tough to judge our writing, because it's hard to be subjective about our own work. We can love our bad writing and hate our good writing—and we often have trouble telling the difference. 

Of course, you can always get a paid critique or manuscript review from a trusted professional source, but not everyone has or can afford that option. For this post, I'm focusing on what we can do on our own.  

You Can Fight Mama Nature: What to do When Your Antagonist is Nature Herself

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Some antagonists can't be fought—they can only be survived.

It's common to hear "antagonist" and think "villain," but the two are not synonymous. An antagonist is just who or what is preventing your protagonist from achieving their goal. Often, that is a person and a bad one at that, but it can also be from a conflict type that has no personal stake in the game. 

Like Mother Nature. 

Your antagonist can come from any of the four basic conflict types, and they each focus on a different type of conflict opposition. We've discussed the person vs. society conflicts, and person vs. self antagonists, so let's look at the person vs. nature conflicts.  

Person vs. Nature conflicts have often undefeatable foes to deal with, because they focus on taming the untamable or surviving the overwhelming threat.  

A great example of a nature antagonist is a traditional disaster movie like Volcano. 

Getting the Best Response From Your Characters

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Don't confuse your readers by mixing up what happens when and why.

When one of my nieces was little, she'd tell me stories about her day. They usually made no sense, and not just because she was seven. She'd always tell me what she did before she told me why she did it.

"I cried on the swings, because it wasn't fair and they yelled at me."

It often took multiple follow-up questions to get the real story that she got scolded for playing in a sandbox she'd been told three times not to play in (the reason why involved a cat mistaking it for a litter box).  

Granted, few writers write a novel like a seven year old telling a story, but mixing up the stimulus/response structure happens all the time. Usually it's a small mistake that readers can figure out and move on from, but sometimes it's a big error and leaves them confused.

Are Your Characters Living in the Moment or Watching it Pass By?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy 

Put yourself in a scene before you put your characters there.

Years ago, there was a bit of a scare in the Hardy household. Our oldest cat took a tumble and hurt his hind leg. He was fine (he just limped for a few days), but until I knew he was okay, I was a basket case. For the rest of the day, I was a nervous Momma, and that continued until my little guy was back to his old self.

In the grand scene of things, it was no big deal.

To me, it was a huge crisis. Someone I loved was hurt.

Even worse, someone vulnerable I loved was hurt and needed my help.

Description Tip: Make “Sense” of Your Characters

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

You have five great tools for writing better descriptions, so why not use them all?

I’ll be honest—description is my least favorite thing to write. I always have to do a revision pass specifically to add more description, and I have critique partners who regularly whack me with the description stick when I slack off. 

 

So I created little games to make it more fun for me. One of them helps me focus and guides my brainstorming toward how my characters might see their world, and what ways they might describe their surroundings and experiences.

If you have a similar distaste of descriptions, or struggle with knowing what details to use, or you’re just looking for fun tips to help with description, try this:

The Faceless Villain: What to do When Your Protagonist Is the "Bad Guy"

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Not every story has a villain at its center—sometimes the problem is the protagonist.

For a lot of writers, the hardest-to-write conflict is the Person vs. Self conflict. Quite often, the antagonist is a physical being the protagonist can physically fight. But in a PvS conflict, there's no one plotting against the protagonist. The antagonist is something to overcome, such as depression, or grief, or a self-destructive streak that’s core to who the protagonist is and a flaw they need to fix by the end of the novel.

These stories are more challenging, but there’s no “Big Bad Guy” causing all the trouble.

An antagonist can come from any of the four basic conflict types, and they each focus on a different type of conflict opposition. We've discussed the person vs. society conflicts, and person vs. nature conflicts, so let's continue with the person vs. self antagonists.  

Like any good conflict, even if your protagonist is dealing with a difficult personal issue, they'll still have an external antagonist to reckon with.

Did You Choose the Best Words to Describe Your Setting?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Your reader doesn’t know what you’re picturing when you write a scene. Make sure they see what you see.

Setting is a vital component of a novel, but it's one of the more awkward things to write naturally. People don't stop and describe the landscape, so having characters who do can feel forced and knock a reader right out of the story.

It gets even more complicated when you think about how pretty much every scene needs its setting described so readers know where they are. But if you over describe, or use the wrong details, readers can get bored and start skimming, or get confused and stop reading.

In a critique, such descriptions often get feedback such as: "The setting didn't feel real to me" or "I never felt grounded in this world" or even "I just never connected to the character."

The Problem With Flash Forwards as an Opening Scene

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

If you have to flash forward to hook a reader, you’re not starting in the right place.

I admit, flash forwards are a big pet peeve of mine. I find them awkward and pointless, because they’re trying to get me interested in “an exciting part” of the story without doing any work to actually create that emotional connection. Obviously, taste vary, but for me, they’re a trick, a bait and switch, and they fail more times than work.

For those unfamiliar with the term, a flash forward is a device that starts with a scene from later in the story, then jumps back in time to show how the characters ended up in that situation. On TV shows, it’s the “twenty-four hours earlier” text that shows up after the opening scene where we see the hero in dire straits.

Decisions, Decisions: Creating Character Choices That Matter

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

A plot is just the series of choices a character makes in a story.

Making a decision is one of the most important things your characters will ever do. Not only does it drive the plot, it creates tension and unpredictability in the story. Readers turn the page to see what happens next, and decisions are all about the "next."

But there's a catch.

Readers have to care about the outcome of that choice.

“Should I have the eggs or the cereal?” is a choice, but no one is going to stay up late to see how that turns out. Because the other half of choosing is the fear that you're making the wrong choice.

(Here’s more with The Impossible Choice: A Surefire Way to Hook Your Readers)

Now, here's where it gets tricky.

Three Questions to Get to the Heart of Your Story

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

The story is why readers picked up your book. 

Writing is such a strange thing. As writers, we get these characters and stories in our heads and put them down on paper. Sometimes we know exactly what happens and write what we imagine, other times we have a character shouting in our heads and we transcribe what they tell us. We all have different processes and write with different voices.

What I find interesting, is that no matter what genre we write in or what age group we write for, one thing stays the same.

The story.

Not the plot, not the series of events that unfold, but the story that causes those events to happen as they do. Because story is bigger than plot or any of the other mechanical and technical aspects of writing. It’s the heart and soul of an idea and what brings the reader along for the ride.

How to Create a Strong Mentor Character

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Mentors are a great tool for telling your protagonist what to do, without telling you protagonist what to do.

The Mentor is one of the more common character archetypes in storytelling, because protagonists need someone to talk to and guide them as they struggle through the plot. The Mentor offers insight, wisdom, and even tools to solve the protagonist’s problems in the novel and helps them grow as the story unfolds.

While often portrayed as the "wise old man" type, the Mentor can be any age, sex, or race (or even species).

• Yoda mentors Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back
• Polgara mentors Garion in The Belgariad series
• Charlotte mentors Wilbur in Charlotte's Web

The Mentor can even be the love interest, such as Like Wilson's character, Emmett, who both helps and eventually falls for Reese Witherspoon's Elle in Legally Blonde.

The Power of Small Problems: Elevate Your Plot with Little Conflicts

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

 
Little problems can be just as devastating to your characters' plans as full-blown issues.

I'm prone to migraines and when one hits, I'm pretty much down for the day (or longer if it's bad). As you can imagine, that puts a bit of a crimp in my day. It's hard to get much writing done when you can't stare at a screen without pain. Annoying little issues are things we deal with every day, so why not make sure our characters also have to deal with them?

When you're creating your characters and their lives, don't forget to add in the little things that can cause them trouble, even if it's not earth-shattering trouble. 

Think about the bad days you've had, where nothing went right, and how that escalated into you snapping and yelling at someone who didn't deserve it. Or caused you to do something you wouldn't have ordinarily done had you not already been stressed by stupid little things.

 
In other words, pile on the problems.

So What? Making Readers Care About Your Story

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Give readers a reason to care and they'll read on. Problem is, sometimes you can have all the right pieces of good storytelling in place and the reader still doesn't care, but you're not sure why. This often equates to the dreaded "it was well written, but it just didn't grab me" type comments and rejections.

So how do you get those pesky readers to care in the first place?

Four things.

1. Stakes 

"Go to bed" doesn't get much of a response. "Go to bed or else" does, because the "or else" could be something bad. The fear of that something bad forces a reaction. When the reaction you want is fear and worry (which leads to caring), you have to dangle something bad as a threat.

Let's say you have a scene where Joey is sitting at the dinner table, and his babysitter is forcing him to eat his broccoli. He refuses, she insists. This is going to get ugly and one person is going to end the night unhappy. Even though they both have strong goals to drive the scene, do you care if Joey eats his vegetables? Probably not. It doesn't matter if he does. Nothing will happen to him if he doesn't.

How Dialogue Can Help Re-Structure a "Needs Some Work" Draft

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

I’m guest posting over at Writers in the Storm today, chatting about a fun plotting and story developing technique I’m trying with my new novel. Come on over and ask, “What Do You Want Your Readers to Wonder About?” with me.


One of the many daunting revision tasks is facing a finished novel that needs work, but the core story is mostly okay. You know one or two of the subplots will need to go, but you're not totally sure which ones. Certain scenes absolutely need to be moved to different parts of the book, but you're not sure how they’ll fit in. You stare at it, and it feels like you're going to need to rewrite the whole dang thing, yet you know that most of it is actually workable.

Knowing where to start fixing the issues can be hard, but I’ve discovered a little trick:

Look at the dialogue first.

Whose Story is It?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Some story ideas come to us through a character, so we know exactly who the story belongs to. It’s that person with a problem and we start our novels with that in mind. Other ideas are more conceptual or based on a situation, and we have the entire problem figured out before we know the best person to dump that problem on.

In these novels, it’s not uncommon for us to lose sight of whose story is it—or not decide that at all before we start writing it. We’re more interested in the premise than the people that premise affects.

Is Your Description Helping Your Story or Holding it Back?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

When you think about it, everything in a book is description, because the author is describing an entire story to the reader. But when it gets down to the actual details of what’s in that story, it’s not uncommon for things to bog down into the minutia of what something looks like. Looks aren’t nearly as important as the reasons behind why that item is in the story in the first place.

The bulk of a novel's descriptions are likely to be in the setting. Describing the world, the locations the characters visit and move through, the things they touch and use. But if we just throw them in there, they can become as flat and lifeless as backdrops on a stage. Description does nothing to move a story forward on its own. It’s how it interacts with the characters that makes or breaks it. What we want, are details that breathe life into both the characters, and the setting.

Actions vs Choices: Crafting Better Plots

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

I was updating an outline of my WIP one day when something interesting hit me. I had a line of what was going to happen in a chapter, but it was written as if this was an inevitable event.

Protagonist defies her superiors.

I realized this was a common phrasing for my outlines, because I know roughly what’s going to happen. But by stating it so clearly, in a “done deal” kind of way, I was robbing the story of the mystery of wondering what would happen. To remind myself to put the mystery back in, I changed the line to:

Protagonist has to choose between superiors and friend.

A simple fix, but this edit made it a choice my protagonist had to make to achieve that outcome, which made the scene more unpredictable. Sure, the outcome was going to be the same, but when I wrote it, I had that struggle to choose firmly in my mind. I didn't write it as if it was a done deal--and that made a world of difference.

A Trick for Writing Subtext

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

While working on my current novel, I reached a pivotal scene that involved a lot of subtext (where the characters aren’t talking about they’re really talking about, or what's going on has greater meaning under the surface). Two sisters are having a conversation, and one assumes it’s about Problem A, while the other is actually referring to Problem B. It’s one of those lovely conversations where readers won’t realize the double importance of the words until later in the story when they get a missing piece of the puzzle, and suddenly, this conversation will have much greater meaning.