Today, I’m going to share an article they had up 28 April, 2009, entitled Michael Crichton’s Top 5 Writing Lessons. Here is the article as it appears.

Think velociraptors on distant islands. Murderous gorillas guarding fields of diamonds. Dramatic doctors tending to trauma patients galore. Even if you never read him, you probably recognize the intense imagery he created over the last few decades—be it Jurassic Park, Congo or his television epic “ER”—and that’s a testament to Michael Crichton’s role as a master of intelligent, modern storytelling.

In memory of the author, who died in late 2008 at the age of 66, we asked Karen Dionne—a writer David Morrell deemed “the new Michael Crichton” for her thriller debut Freezing Point—to share what she learned from her idol’s books. Here’s what she said:
1. CHALLENGE YOUR READER. Don’t be afraid to tackle complex topics such as quantum physics or manipulating the genetic code. Readers love learning something new. Stirring their curiosity is just as important as grabbing them from the first page.

2. SURPRISE YOUR READER. No one reading The Andromeda Strain could have guessed the ending. Novels should be novel. Unpredictability is key.

3. KEEP THE CLOCK TICKING. Timing, tension, momentum, pace—Crichton set the bar. A pounding heart keeps the reader reading.

4. GET YOUR FACTS STRAIGHT. Whether the details pertain to science, history or setting, readers expect your research to be accurate.

5. PLAY FAST AND LOOSE WITH THE FACTS. Story trumps all. Crichton’s gift was making the impossible believable. Everyone knows that dinosaurs can’t be cloned from fossilized DNA, but if they could …

Well, what more can I say? Mr. Crichton hit the nail on the head.

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Sarah is writer looking for an agent. She is currently working on novel # 4, editing novels 2 and 3, and querying novel # 1. For more insight to her work, visit: http://legendoftheprotectors.wordpress.com/ or http://legendoftheprotectors.blogspot.com/

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He is driven by a father who constantly belittled him. Nothing this character did was right. He was a sinner in his father’s eyes. This character has been talking to me all weekend and I now feel like I can write his story so much better. It will change many components of my novel drastically, but that’s what happens when you go from first draft not knowing motivation for things, to having the knowledge of how someone who’s not the main character, but the main love interest would truly behave. It changes what happens between them.

So I look forward to rewriting much of this novel. I look forward to learning more about my characters.

I found an article on characters that I found interesting, so I decided to share it. It’s written by one of the greats. Someone who knows what he’s looking for when it comes to characters.

Enjoy.

Agent Don Maass Explains Your Tools for Character Building

Posted by Chuck from Guide to Literary Agents Editor’s Blog

Finding a Protagonist’s Strength

Step 1: Is your protagonist an ordinary person?  Find in him any kind of strength.

Step 2: Work out a way for that strength to be demonstrated within your protagonist’s first five pages.

Step 3: Revise your character’s introduction to your readers.

Without a quality of strength on display, your readers will not bond with
your protagonist.  Why should they?  No one wants to spend four minutes, let alone four hundred pages, with a miserable excuse for a human being or even a plain old average Joe.  So, what is strength?  It can be as simple as caring about someone, self-awareness, a longing for change, or hope.  Any small positive quality will signal to your readers that your ordinary protagonist is worth their time.

Finding a Hero’s Flaws

Step 1: Is your protagonist a hero – that is, someone who is already strong? Finding in him something conflicted, fallible, humbling or human.

Step 2: Work out a way for that flaw to be demonstrated within your protagonist’s first five pages.

Step 3: Revise your character’s introduction to your readers.  Be sure to soften the flaw with self-awareness or self-depreicating humor.

Heroes who are nothing but good, noble, unswerving, honest, courageous, and kind to their mothers will make your readers want to gag.  To make heroes real enough to be likable, it’s necessary to make them a little bit flawed. What is a flaw that will not also prove fatal?  A personal problem, a bad habit, a hot button, a blind spot, or anything that makes your hero a real human being will work.  However, this flaw cannot be overwhelming.  That is the reason for adding wise self-awareness or a rueful sense of humor.

The Impact of Greatness

Step 1: Does your story have a character who is supposed to be great? Choose a character (your protagonist or another) who is, has been, or will be affected by that great character.

Step 2: Note the impact on your point-of-view character.  In what ways is she changed by the great character?  How specifically is her self-regard for actual life different?  Is destiny involved?  Detail the effect.

Step 3: Write out that impact in a paragraph.  It can be backward looking (a flashback frame) or a present moment of exposition.

Step 4: Add that paragraph to your manuscript.

Greatness is not always about esteem.  Those affected by great people may be ambivalent.  Whatever the case in your story, see if you can shade the effect of your great character to make it specific and captured nuances. The effect of one character upon another is as particular as the characters themselves.

Excerpted from The Fire in Fiction
(2009, Writer’s Digest Books).  You can
find the book in the F+W Bookstore here.
Donald Maass runs his own agency
in New York City.

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Sarah is writer looking for an agent. She is currently working on novel # 4, editing novels 2 and 3, and querying novel # 1. For more insight to her work, visit: http://legendoftheprotectors.wordpress.com/ or http://legendoftheprotectors.blogspot.com/

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How to Write Good
The first set of rules was written by Frank L. Visco and originally published in the June 1986 issue of Writers’ digest.
The second set of rules is derived from William Safire’s Rules for Writers.

My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:

1. Avoid Alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren’t necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
13. Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
14. Profanity sucks.
15. Be more or less specific.
16. Understatement is always best.
17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
18. One word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be avoided.
21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
22. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
23. Who needs rhetorical questions?

1. Parenthetical words however must be enclosed in commas.
2. It behooves you to avoid archaic expressions.
3. Avoid archaeic spellings too.
4. Don’t repeat yourself, or say again what you have said before.
5. Don’t use commas, that, are not, necessary.
6. Do not use hyperbole; not one in a million can do it effectively.
7. Never use a big word when a diminutive alternative would suffice.
8. Subject and verb always has to agree.
9. Placing a comma between subject and predicate, is not correct.
10. Use youre spell chekker to avoid mispeling and to catch typograhpical errers.
11. Don’t repeat yourself, or say again what you have said before.
12. Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit it when its not needed.
13. Don’t never use no double negatives.
14. Poofread carefully to see if you any words out.
15. Hopefully, you will use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
16. Eschew obfuscation.
17. No sentence fragments.
18. Don’t indulge in sesquipedalian lexicological constructions.
19. A writer must not shift your point of view.
20. Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!
21. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
22. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
23. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
24. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
25. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
26. Always pick on the correct idiom.
27. The adverb always follows the verb.
28. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
29. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.
30. And always be sure to finish what

Sohereyougo. Whattodoandwhatnottodo.

Did you follow that?

Good.

Now go write good!

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Sarah is writer looking for an agent. She is currently working on novel # 4, editing novels 2 and 3, and querying novel # 1. For more insight to her work, visit: http://legendoftheprotectors.wordpress.com/ or http://legendoftheprotectors.blogspot.com/

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How many characters are too many?

Well, I guess that depends. How many can you keep up with and how many can your readers?

70 Solutions to Common Writing Mistakes by Bob Mayer, from The Writers’ Digest Writing Kit, states “If the curtain on a play opened and there were thirty people on stage and all of them had speaking roles, would you be able to identify and keep track of everyone? Or if you went to a party and opened the door and the room was filled with people you’d never met before, would you have a good time? Throwing too many characters at the reader creates the same sense of bewilderment and diminishes the reader’s ability to empathize with any of them.”

I can usually remember two to four people when first introduced. Usually faces, and names if they interest me. The rest go into the blur of new people to be sorted out later. Even if they interest me, it takes me at least one more visit and good conversation to remember their name.

So why is it in writing we think we have to introduce all our characters up front? And why do we feel that if we don’t have ten plus people in our books, that no one will want to read them?

I’m not saying to limit your novel to 4 people, I have many more than that in mine, but everyone does not need to appear on stage at the same time, and they don’t all need speaking parts. I have been an extra on Touched by an Angel (yes, a long time ago) and was just that, an extra. Background. I have had speaking roles on stage that added to the scene, and been on stage again as background.

There will be background characters. Give them life, make them move, shift, walk stage left to stage right, but they don’t all have to speak, they don’t all have to show up at important scenes.

Writer’s Digests tip for the day goes on to say, “Larry McMurtry can do it in Lonesome Dove and win the Pulitzer Prize, but we’re not Larry McMurtry. He’s able to do it because he makes each character distinctive. It’s a question of how much you’re able to change personalities with your characters. Most of us can only take on a handful.”

So in order to have more than one character, they need to have personalities different from each other. Know your characters, even the background ones.

In theater, we were required to do character analysis of who we played. Not only did we know their first name, given to us by the playwright, usually, we had to know their last name. What their favorite ice cream was. Who was their best friend? We were asked to read the play with that one character in mind and learn as much as we could about them. Even if we were background and off stage most the time.

What did that create? A play people wanted to watch. Actors that knew and understood why they moved where they did.

The importance of knowing our characters is so important, if we don’t care enough about a character to get to know them, our readers won’t either.

Bob Mayer’s solution: “Before you start writing, decide how many characters you feel you can handle in the story. You will have your protagonist and your antagonist. Then you will have your named supporting characters. Named characters will be those who appear throughout the story.”

This is helpful if you know your story before you put Uniball pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, but as you’ve read, I don’t do that. I don’t know my story before I start writing. So I have to figure it out as I go. Often, I get to parts of my story that require me to go back to an earlier part and share more about characters, put in what I’ve learned about them, change their profile. (If you want a good Character Profile sheet, email me and I’ll send it.)

Often, I get to know my characters as I write. I get rid of characters that aren’t important, giving their lines to someone else, if they’re worth keeping. I’ve even added new characters, or made background characters more important, replacing someone who I thought might have played a larger role. So for me, I role with the punches. But if you outline and plan, this is something to plan for.

Mayer continues, “It’s probably not a good idea to give names to characters who appear only once. Those characters might be described as spear carriers, analogous to those people on stage in the opera who stand in the background, carrying—you got it—spears. They’re window dressing, and you can describe them by their roles, such as “the taxi driver” or “the desk clerk” so as not to confuse the reader.

“Make sure the reader can keep track of your named characters, and keep focus on the protagonist and antagonist.”

I agree wholeheartedly. Even though I knew my name when I played background, the audience did not. You can know them, or not, but know why they are there, if you don’t, the reader won’t either. It’s been said many times that we should know 95% more about our novel than the reader; this is one of those things to know more of.

So know your characters. Introduce them with the reader’s memory in mind. And if you’re going to start all your characters with the same letter, know that the reader, at least this one, will be confused as to who’s doing what and saying what. Made up names are fine, but remember your reader when making them up. Just saying.

*Writer’s Digest offers great advice to its subscribers. Worth checking out.

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Sarah is writer looking for an agent. She is currently working on novel # 4, editing novels 2 and 3, and querying novel # 1. For more insight to her work, visit: http://legendoftheprotectors.wordpress.com/ or http://legendoftheprotectors.blogspot.com/

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