The Big Seckrit

You know the big secret? The one that our hero hides because he doesn't want anyone else to know? Or the one that the heroine never talks about and is afraid someone will find out? Like, the hero used to steal cars and one time, when he was chased by the cops, he hit someone and then ran away because he was afraid of getting caught. Or the time the heroine stole something from a shop because she was poor and needed to eat, and then kept doing it because of the rush?

They're usually BIG SECRETS. And the characters think they can NEVER TELL anyone about them because then...I don't know, the world would explode or something. You get the idea.

Secrets are cool and neat and can drive conflict really well. And it's tempting to keep them until the very end of the book so you can have the BIG REVEAL, where the character will finally TELL ALL and the reader will go 'ah ha! So that was the problem all along!'.

The problem with secrets is that although they are cool and neat and drive the conflict, they can also hide the conflict as well. The true conflict. Because it's not so much the hero's hit and run that's the issue as why he ran away after he hit someone. Same with the heroine and her shoplifting. Why did she need the rush? It's what they DO in response that's the important bit, not the secret itself.

But so often the secret becomes the whole of the story and the more interesting questions like why did the hero run or why did the heroine keept stealing, get lost under the big reveal. Sometimes it's the secret driving the story, not the characters themselves. Which is easy to do because it's fun to keep it from the reader. And it's fun to keep it from the other characters. Makes creating tension really a piece of cake too because all you have to do is threaten the BIG SECRET and hey presto, instant tension.

It's really easy for the big secret to become a crutch for conflict. If you have your characters going to extraordinary lengths to hide their secrets, if you have to manipulate the plot in order to do the same then you really have to ask yourself why. What would happen if the big secret was discovered halfway in? Would the book end? If so, then either you're not going deep enough into the conflict, or the book itself relies totally on the big secret which can also be not so good.

I guess it depends on what type of book you're writing, but for character driven stories I'm a big fan of getting that big secret out in the open when it's appropriate (not manipulating plot and characters to hide it). Because when the big secret is finally out, then you can start dealing with the real meat of the conflict - why did you run away after you hit that person? What were you scared of? Why did you like the rush of shoplifting? What did it give you that the rest of your life didn't?

My chess ms was a book with a character with a big secret. The hero did something bad in his past and he didn't even tell me what it was until the end. So I had to go back and rewrite it so he told it earlier, beacause the bad thing he did was the symptom of a deeper issue he had. A deeper fear. Even now I'm not sure I got it out early enough - but then again, he was a reticent kind of guy and it wouldn't have been something he would have told just anyone. I guess only time will tell with that one.

Anyway, I suppose the real thing to watch for is to make sure that when one of your characters is nursing a secret, you don't have that as the entire conflict (unless you're writing a murder mystery and they're the murderer). Ask yourself why the character is keeping it a secret in the first place? Do they even care what people think of them? What would happen if everyone knew? And if the answer is 'my book would end' then you know you're in trouble. :-)

Do you have a favourite big secret book? When was it revealed? And if you say right at the end and it was still cool then I'm sorry but I'm going to have to kill you. :-)

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?

Headache or Plot Device?

Finished my Frenchman. Yes, it was fast but I'm realising that writing the first draft really quickly is kind of my process. I have to get it down ASAP because if I don't, I lose interest and never finish it. And since finishing is a weak point of mine, it's something I really have to work at and be disciplined about. Anyway, I'm already thinking that I'm going to have to change the middle of it. Why? Well, some explanation is required.

My hero, in the beginning, has a migraine that affects his vision (yes, apparently this is rather girly but hey, I can change it if I need to). Cue practical, efficient heroine who takes charge of him while he's extremely helpless. This ties nicely into his conflict of hating to be helpless, while at the same time, showcasing the heroine's trustworthy nature. Okay, this may have a whiff of the plot device about it but I'm keeping it for the beginning for the meantime (external conflict brings them together right?). However the whiff does get a tad stronger later on because he has another one - this one is different because he willingly places himself in the heroine's care for the first time, thereby demonstrating his growing trust in her and also having this trust repaid. But, I've already used this situation in the beginning so is using it again overkill? I didn't want him to have one migraine and then it never be an issue again (definitely a plot device!) and yet I didn't want to keep going back over the same ground. My gut feeling, though, is that yes, it's overkill. Not to mention the fact that it makes the whiff of plot device rather more stench-like.

The problem is that MH (and a lot of the other M&B lines) are character driven. I never really got a good idea about what this means until recently but now I do, I can see why my migraine thing may be just a plot device. Character driven means the character drives the story through the decisions and actions that they take. They don't stand there and have things happen to them. Hence my problem with a migraine. A migraine happens to someone, someone doesn't happen to a migraine. So really, if I want to showcase my hero's developing trust in the heroine, what should be happening is that a decision he makes places him in a situation where he has to trust the heroine rather than have the situation happen to him. But this is the difficult part for me - thinking of the situation! Because as a billionaire who hates losing control, why would he make a decision that places him in a situation where he has none? The answer probably will lie with the heroine and the chain of action and reaction that happens in the book. Somewhere along the line, she'll do something and his reaction will be to place his trust in her. In fact, I have an idea right now as I'm typing this....

What do you guys reckon? Is a headache just a headache or is it plot device? ;-)