Guest Post: PJ Manney on GameStop and the Power of Populism

A pop quiz for speculative fiction writers. Think about your current work-in-progress. Maybe it’s a short story, a novel, or a play. Now, thinking about your protagonist or main character, answer the following questions:

• What are your character’s greatest fears from one day to the next?
• What does he or she want in life, most of all?
• What does your character want for those around her, the important people in her life?

If you can answer these questions without hesitation, you’re ahead of the class. You’ve done your homework. Kudos for that!

But if you’re like many writers, and you’re struggling to find the full depth and complexity of your characters, it might be time for a little journaling.

You’ve probably heard of this concept before. It’s simple enough. All you do is write some diary entries in the POV and voice of your main character. You slide into your character’s skin, into their world, and let the thoughts and ideas flow.

This technique has several names. Character journaling. Fictional diary. Et cetera. Call it what you will, just know that it’s a powerful method for breathing life into your characters. It can also be a lot of fun, yielding surprises and insights you never saw coming.

 

A New Twist on an Old Classic

The general concept is straightforward. You journal in your character’s POV, getting inside their head to reveal their innermost fears, hopes and desires. That’s the gist of it.

But let’s go beyond the basics. After all, stories have a beginning, middle and end. And your character’s headspace can, and probably should, be different at each of those points. So what I’m suggesting is that you write three diary entries for your main character (and maybe for your important secondary characters as well).

Write a diary / journal entry for each of the following:

1. The beginning of the story, before the conflict has come to a head.
2. The climax of the story, when the conflict and drama have reached a peak.
3. The end of the story, post climax, when everything has changed.

For a short story, you might only need to write one or two diary entries. Short stories often “start in the middle,” from a dramatic standpoint. But for a novel, you’ll definitely benefit from doing all three. It forces you to think about how the events in the story affect your character, and how your character shapes those events through his or her actions.

This isn’t a writing class and there aren’t any hard-and-fast rules. You could approach this project however you want. But, having done it many times myself, I would offer the following tips:

• Don’t show the diary to anyone. Keep it private, just like a regular diary. Give your character the confidence to “open up” without fear of judgment.
• Turn off your internal editor and let the words flow, grammar be damned. It’s a diary after all.
• Embrace the turbulent stream of consciousness. Let your character’s thoughts, fears and hopes stream forth, unrestrained. Bust the dam wide open.

What it comes down to is this: If you give your characters the space and opportunity to surprise you, they probably will. And your story will be richer for it.

 

Notes from the Field: A Real-World Example

I’ve used this exercise many times, but it never ceases to surprise me. Just when I think I’ve got my characters figured out, I write a few journal entries and BAM… revelations.

Here’s one example. My current WIP is a sci-fi horror novel set in the future, in which a woman travels to a huge shopping mall to retrieve her errant teenage daughter (who is supposed to be at the library studying). Long story short, the mall’s service androids go bananas and turn murderous, and what began as an ordinary trip to the mall turns into a survival scenario.

I did some journaling on behalf of the mother, the main character in the story, and discovered she harbors a lot of guilt. She got into some trouble in the past, got kicked off the police force, and ended up with her face all over the news. I knew those things, because I wrote them. What I didn’t know””even halfway through the novel””was how much guilt she carried for putting her daughter through all of that turmoil. She had failed her daughter, at least in her mind. That particular insight emerged as the mother was “speaking” through me in the relative safety of her private journal.

(Thankfully, she gave me permission to carry some of this over into the novel.)

Think of it as an exercise in trust. Your character uses you as a kind of medium. They share, and you write. That’s the arrangement. And while much of the journaling won’t ever see the light of day, it will breathe new life into your characters. It will make them more real in your mind, and in the reader’s mind.

And who knows, you might even produce some usable material you can add into the story. With your character’s permission, of course.

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BIO: Brandon Cornett is a longtime writer whose stories have appeared in the Mississippi Review and other journals. His first novel, Purgatory, is a horror-based thriller with a reality TV tie-in, available now on Amazon. His next novel will be out in 2020. Brandon also blogs about speculative fiction with a nerdy level of enthusiasm over at https://www.cornettfiction.com/blog/.

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At some convention or other, Dave Creek turned to me and said, “Say, I have some thoughts for a story that we could write together. I’ve got a survey team that enters an abandoned orbital habitat and stumbles across some super-intelligent dinosaurs. You’re the one who knows about dinosaurs.” This sounded intriguing, especially when we conceived of it as a short story that we could send off to a magazine that had published bunches of our stories written separately. Ah, but like that recon team, we had very little idea what we were getting ourselves into. Little did we suspect that SAUROTOPIA would expand to become a whole novel. Or that we’d find a publisher who wanted six books.

Science fiction fans have long enjoyed collaborations. James S.A. Corey’s series, THE EXPANSE, is actually a collaboration between Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. For fantasy readers, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Ignyte awards. Other writers who’ve jointly produced well-received novels include Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, as well as Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

How exactly do writers work together to make this magic? I’m sometimes asked if I wrote the dinosaurs and Dave wrote the humans. That’s a reasonable assumption, especially given that the chapters alternate between human and dinosaur viewpoints. However, for us, this isn’t how it works. Dave created my favorite character, who is an ostrich-like dinosaur best described as a fierce version of Big Bird. The first scene in which this dinosaur appears was Dave’s creation. No, this is not the only dinosaur he created. There’s also the leader of a predatory band of different dinosaurs. Basically, they are feathered velociraptors. I added the parts where they hunt in packs and stalk their prey from branches of trees. Don’t get me wrong, I did create several other characters for both these species of dinosaur as well as some peaceful herbivores.

Here’s another surprise that I learned as we worked together. It seemed natural to suppose that a book can be written by two authors in half the time it will otherwise take them to write it alone. If only this were true! Both Dave and I have a batch of other projects we were working on. I write a regular book review column and am about half way through a different series. Dave has his own series of novels and short stories clamoring to be written. This meant we both needed to find time in between our other work to write chapters of SAUROTOPIA and edit each other’s work.

Then there is the prospect of encountering “creative differences.” Part way through this project I worried about Dave hating my ideas and me hating his ideas. There were certainly times when one or the other of us would come up with something…let’s call it surprising. Looking back, what worked best was for me to sit with his unexpected plot developments. Over time, his new idea would not only grow on me, but I would become really intrigued by where it might take our characters, both the humans and the dinosaurs. Now I am looking forward to the times when he will spring something completely unexpected on me.

If you’ve read this far and are a writer who is wondering whether you might want to collaborate with another writer, I have to say, it can be tricky to figure that out in advance. Even if you have similar approaches, such as you both outline before you start, that’s no guarantee. Nor for that matter is there any assurance that a solo work will come to fruition. So, take another look at those collaborators I mentioned at the start. What the heck, give it a shot.

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Rosemary Claire Smith writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories showcasing her interests in dinosaurs, alternate history, space exploration, mythology, genetic engineering, time travel, and aliens. She draws on her background as a trowel-wielding archaeologist, reformed lawyer, and keen observer of society. Her other interests include flower arranging, abstract photography, foil fencing, and astronomy.