Ask Dr Jax - Questions Please

All right, the people have spoken!

Bring your tricky conflict questions to Dr Jax! He's a qualified psychiatrist and can give real life advice on any thorny behavioural issues. Would your characters really act the way they do? Or would they do things differently? How do people generally respond to tragedies in their lives? Etc etc.

You can either ask your question as a comment or, if you don't want to post it, feel free to use the contact page (there's a form) just below my blog header and email me. If you're not comfortable with specifics, then just be as general as you like. But don't do the 'my friend is writing this story...' cos that's a dead giveaway. ;-)

Disclaimer: Dr Jax is a psychiatrist, not a writer or an editor. He gives real life advice on how real people behave, not fictional characters. However should your book go on to be published subsequent to his advice, feel free to pass on any royalties (or chocolate). ;-)

Dr Jax Helps Out

Was going to do a long and involved post today but since my youngest daughter broke her leg yesterday (jumping off a bunkbed trying to touch a light!), I am at her beck and call instead!

Still, thought I'd mention that I was talking to Dr Jax over the weekend and asked him if he might like to do a Q&A on conflict. We're told we have to be psychologists with our characters and their conflict so I thought conflict issues from the point of view of a bonafide psychiatrist might be kind of helpful. He was amenable so what do the rest of you think? Got any conflict questions you want to ask? A particular issue or how people behave in general? Let me know what you think would be most helpful!

Jackie Has Some Good News For a Change

Yes, my successes have been few and far between of late but I found out this morning that I have finalled in the RWNZ Great Beginnings Contest! Big woots for me!! I've entered this competition for the past three years with no luck but this time round hit the mark and I'm extremely pleased!

I'm even more pleased because the kind of writing I fluked for the High Five, I put consciously, using all I've learned about conflict and character, into this story. That didn't mean I expected it to come anywhere. The judges could easily have hated my story and my characters no matter how well they were written. But they certainly liked it enough to give it some good scores and I'm pretty damn thrilled about it.

The story isn't a Riva story, it's a Presents/Modern, which made it a nice change for me. Anyway, have no idea how the final judging will go, suffice to say that I'm pretty happy with what I've got already. :-)

Some wise people have told me to celebrate any success in this tough industry, so here's what I'm doing - Hoo is passing round some vintage Krug on a silver tray...please, help yourself. And while you're doing it, share some successes you've had lately. It doesn't matter what it is, big or small, let me know so I can raise a glass!

Carving Michelangelo's David

I feel a bit like Michelangelo trying to carve out David from a block of stone at the moment. I keep chipping away thinking I see the figure inside, but then realise that my David looks more of an ogre than a svelte young man. All the proportions are wrong and he's wearing clothes instead of a fig leaf. So I have to do some more hacking, some more cutting down and polishing. I'm hoping it'll be worth it.

Currently my Chess masterpiece is becoming the new never-ending story. A month and a half on the first three chapters. Longest. Time. Ever. And you know what? I think I may have to can those chapters. Why? Because they are based on an earlier incarnation of the conflict and now do not have any relevance to the rest of the story. They involve the heroine and hero working together. But they never work together again and their conflict is not based on a work situation. So why have I still got them working together?? How does it forward the conflict? It used to, but since I've fiddled with the heroine's conflict, it doesn't anymore. Argh!!

Sigh. This is becoming a watershed ms. I think I've learned more writing this than I have any other story. More about my process, more about what I've been doing wrong in previous stories, and more about how to fix the things I've been doing wrong. At least, I think I'm fixing things. I could be making it worse of course but the only way of knowing that is by sending it away. But I can't do that until I finish the damn thing.

This is why fixing an old ms can be harder than just writing something new, especially if the problem was character and conflict. I mean really, given the amount of rewriting I've been doing, I'll just say that in fact, this IS a new ms. Because changing a conflict or changing a character can have wide-ranging effects. A character that acted one way in the beginning, may not act that way after the change. And if the plot is based on what the character does - which is most category - then what the character does will in turn change the plot. Can anyone say nightmare?

Anyway, what else can I do but keep chipping away? And hope that soon my ogre will start looking less like this:


more and more like this:

Jackie's Year of Surviving Rejection

I've done a post on the Sisters' Blog in celebration of our blog's first birthday. It's on...drum roll.... surviving rejection! If you're keen for a bit of Chumbawamba, then head over. If you're still in denial about the possibility of being rejected then keep away... :-)

Character Lightbulbs!

Yeah, I'm finding I'm having lots of lightbulb moments with my chess ms. In fact, I'm beginning to think that my chess story is becoming a bit of a watershed ms. I am learning so much with this one. I knew at the beginning of the year that it was proving to be quite a learning experience but it's becoming even more of one now. Maybe it's because I'm taking my time with it and really thinking about it. Or maybe it's because my weaknesses are so much clearer now and I am working to fix them. I'm not sure. What I do know is that this story WILL be much stronger than anything I have written to date and that can be put down to the fact that I know my characters. This time round I have thought about their pasts in great detail and if there's something I don't know about them that I need to know, I can actually tell when that moment is and can stop and think about it.

What do I mean? Well, for example, whenever I am introducing a bit of conflict and find myself writing the same thing over and over again without really capturing what it is I want to get across, it's usually because I don't know what it is I'm trying to say! A specific example may be: 'He reminded her of her parents. Their lies, their judgements, the way they made her feel small'.
This does tell you something about her conflict. She had issues with her parents, they lied and judged her and made her feel small. But there are some questions unanswered: what did he do to make her think of her parents? What lies did her parents tell and did they tell them to her or to each other? What about their judgements? Did they judge her or each other? And what made her feel small? The lies or the judgements or both? And why did that make her feel small?
Obviously you don't answer all those questions immediately, they are revealed as the book goes along, but what you have to do as a writer is know the answers to the questions. And what I think really builds the characters, and what I have NOT been doing, is having an example to illustrate the answer.

So if her parents had lied to her, thinking about a specific lie at a specific time by a specific person, can tell you so much more about a character and their conflict that some vague generalisations. Example: When she was ten, her beloved cat went missing and her mother told her that the animal ran away from home. However that night, when she was supposed to be a asleep, she got up to get a glass of water and spotted her father in the backgarden digging a hole, her cat lying dead on the grass next to it.
Doesn't that tell us so much more about her and her parents and their relationship? And also gives us insight into the motivations of her parents too. It tells us she had a pet she loved. That her mother lied (to protect her maybe?) to her about what happened to it. That her father was in on it. And that by burying it at night when they knew she was alseep, they were trying to hide the cat's death from her. Perhaps this is a terrible moment for the heroine. Perhaps finding out that her parents are not always truthful causes her to subconsciously be suspicious of anything they might say. What is certain is that it gives us more information than 'her reminded her of her parents. Their lies, their judgements....etc'.

It's those little snapshots of pivotal moments in the characters lives that really - for me at least - build up a great picture of who that person is and what in their past might had led them to think the way they do. Of course, what I'm missing from that example and what it is just as important as the situation itself, is how the heroine acts in response to it. Did she not say anything to her parents about her cat or did she confront them?

So what helps you build character? Anyone got any useful examples?

Character Traits vs Conflict

Janet asked me an interesting question about my last blog post and since I'm scraping around trying to find things to blog about, I thought I'd actually give my answer as a post. This comes with the usual caveat that my answer is my thoughts about the subject, thoughts that could be totally erroneous, sadly misguideded or plain old wrong. On the other hand they could be so totally brilliant that you will want to bow before the power of my awesomeness (presents and small tokens of thanks are always appreciated). :-)

Okay, so Janet ask me to give an example of the difference between a character trait and conflict. This was in response to me saying that what I thought was conflict in my heroine, turned about to be a character trait. So what do I mean?

Well, we're told that asking the 'why' questions are really important to figuring out conflict. And it's true, you do need to ask those questions. But my problem is that I didn't know when to stop! My heroine - I thought - is an emotional girl so I kept asking myself, "This is her conflict so why is she emotional? Why? Why? Why?". I kept looking for a reason for my heroine to not hide how she felt but there wasn't one that fitted with the idea of her I had in my mind. So there comes a stage where the 'why' comes down to 'well, they were born that way'. And if they were born that way, it becomes a character trait, not the conflict. So one of my heroine's character traits is that she has no problem with telling everyone exactly how she feels.

Where the conflict comes into it is how this character trait makes the character behave in response to certain situtions in their lives. Not hiding how she feels is NOT the conflict, but it does affect how she responds to the conflict. Does that make any sense?

My hero, on the other hand, is emotionless - which of course is a big lie because he's not really. But being emotionless is his response to his conflict. He's actually just like her, feels things very deeply, but unlike her, his experience has taught him that such emotions are dangerous and he won't have a bar of them. So he's shut himself down.

Here's another example. Perhaps you might have a hero who really, really likes cars. He likes the way they look and the mechanics and the speed, he's just right into them. And perhaps there's no reason for it, he's just always been the kid who loves machines. So his liking of cars is NOT his conflict. It's part of his character. But say he had a car as a teenager he lovingly built from the ground up, spent years on it, spent lots of money on it, it was his baby. And say his father decided he spent too much time on his cars when he should be in school and so sold his beloved car without telling him.... This is where his love of cars interacts with what could potentially be some great conflict, because it's not really about how much he loves cars is it? It's about how he views his Dad. How he responds to this would be a character trait. Is he the type of guy to head straight into a confrontation with his father? Or is he more of a restrained, quiet type of guy, who would say nothing but spend every resource he had finding the car and getting it back...(no you can't have this example, I've decided I'm going to use it. Hehe!).

So that's how I view character traits and conflict. Anyone got any more advice cos God knows, I probably need it. :-)

Heroines Do My Head In

Ah crap, nearly another week has gone by. I do have an excuse though. I have been...drum roll....writing!

What you say? Jackie Ashenden actually writing? Unheard of!

Yeah, yeah, I'm being sarcastic. I never really stop writing to it's no surprise. But lately I have been turning off the net to concentrate wholly on what I'm doing. And good thing too because my poor Chessman needs the attention. His issues are turning out to be waaaay bigger than I thought. He's a very closed off guy, very cerebral and, naturally enough, there is a reason he's like this. Yes, that's right, ONE reason. Not fifty million in the way I usually always overcomplicate stuff, just one. And that's where the whole keep it simple, dig deep stuff comes into it. Taking that ONE reason and exploring it, not chucking in a whole lot of other stuff like I did, say, with the heroine...

Women. Honestly, why do I have such problems with women?? Maybe it's because I'm a complicated girl myself, I dunno, but some heroines just give me gip. I think it's due to the fact that I've focussed on one character trait for this particular heroine and turned it into conflict, whereas it just should have stayed as a character trait. Does that make sense. Anyway, thanks to awesome CPs, I think I've ironed out that little kink. Like the hero, I've taken ONE thing she does (not one aspect of who she is) and focussed on that as conflict instead. Which may be a breakthrough for me. Anyway, Comic Book girl now lives! Woohoo!

So, anyone else mistake a character trait for conflict or is it just me??? :-)

Jackie Discovers The Holy Trinity - Character, Conflict and Plot.

Wow, slack blogger Jackie! *slaps hand* It's been a week - nearly. Groan. In my defence, I should say that I'm not online so much for a reason. Being obsessed by writing hasn't been good for me so I'm reconnecting with non-writing things, and that means less time at the computer and more time doing other stuff. So apologies if I've been slack at visiting blogs. On the upside, I am gaining some much needed perspective (slowly) and that's got to be a good thing, right?

Anyway, so my new process is actually going quite well. If you can consider spending three weeks on the first chapter 'well'. My usual modus operandi is to write like the dickens until the whole thing first draft is done, so as you can imagine, 3 weeks on one chapter is torture. On the other hand, it does mean that instead of getting halfway through and figuring out what my characters are like, which means another round of rewriting, I am getting a really good idea of them beforehand. And, what's more, when I run into a problem, instead of pushing through and writing it out, I am stopping and thinking about it. This is working for me, I gotta say. I have about four stories in the planning stages and all this character groundwork is proving invaluable. Normally I begin with the characters as people without pasts, their pasts only becoming clear to me as I go along, but now they have pasts right at the beginning! I can't tell you the difference it makes to the story, and to my writing as well. Doh!

Because it is all about the character. At least, the kind of stories I want to write are about the character. I don't think I truly appreciated before quite how true this is. I saw the conflict, the character and the plot as three separate entities and I treated them as such. But of course they're not. All three are inextricably linked. And, in my opinion, character comes first. You start with your protagonist. You decide who they are. What type of person. Then you give them some conflict - and the type of conflict that will provide the most friction given the person they are. And after that comes the plot - the story is driven by the choices the character makes and the actions that they take. That's a character driven story.

Now the above is just my own musings and how it makes sense to me. I don't know whether it's right or not and since I have been waaaaay wrong in the past, I could be waaaay wrong now. But I'm putting this into practice with the Chessman. Yes, my lovely chess player who fell by the wayside. I learned quite a bit while writing that particular ms, most of all about moving your characters to suit your plot and not the other way around. It was also the ms that gave me the first intimations of what a dog's breakfast I'd made of my Hammerpants ms. As you can imagine, I have a love/hate relationship with it because of that. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I re-read it last week and discovered it's actually not sh*t. The heroine's conflict needs tweaking but the hero's is all there. And I'm also at the best bit - the black moment! So I've stopped labouring over rewriting the old ms for a while and I've gone back to my Chessman to finish it. Not sure what I'll do with it when I finish it but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. The main thing is though, that it's character driven.

I think. :-)

So how about you? Like character driven stories? Or are you a plot person?