character development

Mining Reader Reviews for Story Gold

February 5, 2019 By Nancy Johnson 25 Comments

If you’re already a published author, you may not want to do this. It can be painful. Since my novel isn’t published yet, I can do it for you. When my author friends read their Goodreads and Amazon reviews, they often do it with one eye open. Some give up after their first one-star reviews.

Some of the bad reviews from readers will say DNF as in “did not finish.” This is about as crushing as seeing NSF on your bank statement after you’ve bounced a check. Yet there are people who force a bad book down like cold medicine. As if it’s a test of character to endure every book they begin.

Still, we know that every bad review doesn’t equate to a bad book. Maybe the reader was ticked off standing in the 15 items or less line at the grocery store behind someone with 16 items in the cart. When I peruse reviews, I find a more likely answer as to why people dismiss certain books. Bias that has nothing to do with storytelling or literary merit can sink a reader’s assessment of a book fast. For example, they’re pro-life and one of the characters had an abortion, so they abhor the book. That’s an actual critique I saw once on Goodreads. Not a helpful review.

I’ll put my critique partner and beta readers up against yours any day. They are literary luminaries in my admittedly biased estimation. Still, when I’m in revision mode, I turn to book reviews to understand what keeps readers turning pages and reading a novel when they could be doing a million other things. I pore over the reviews for books I’ve read so I can go back to the text and understand why the reader stayed engaged or slogged through or just stopped reading. I wade through poor reviews look for recurring themes and issues raised by multiple people. A silly, errant thought occurred to me: If I can avoid all the things readers hate, they’ll love my book. Okay, maybe not, but I’ve found some valuable nuggets and some doozies, too, in the cavern of comments.

Lack of emotion and poor character development can flatten a book.

Reviewers often say, “I didn’t understand the character’s motivation.” We’ve all heard that the stakes in the story must be clear, urgent, and high. This matters to readers. Even more importantly, they want to connect with the characters and feel something. Often, they point out that highly stylized, experimental writing and story structure can work well, but not if it keeps the reader at a distance, sacrificing emotional intimacy with the characters. Another problem stemmed from characters not growing or transforming over the course of the book. [Read more…]

Ties that Bind and Define – The Family of Your Protagonist

November 5, 2017 By John J Kelley

Two weeks ago, my siblings and I helped my mother move to an excellent assisted living facility within a mile of my childhood home. That’s the easy explanation, a breezy summation which masks the heart-wrenching path of the past year, from growing concerns over physical and cognitive health, to a rushed winnowing of household possessions to furnish a single room, to standing near as Mom said goodbye to her home of nearly six decades. The simple statement avoids another aspect which caught us all by surprise, the emotional toll of chafing against traditional family roles, both mother to child and sibling to sibling. Suffice to say the process was punctuated by eruptions of frustration as we lurched toward a destination we could no longer avoid.

In retrospect, it is no surprise that during my return flight I struggled to enter the world of Tell the Wolves I’m Home, Carol Rifka Blunt’s debut set within a stilted, dysfunctional family household. Perhaps, in some ways, the read should have offered solace. After all, my family had successfully navigated a painful task, joining together as families must. But I suppose the bruises were too fresh, the lessons still unclear, to fully counter a natural resistance. Yet as I forged my way through the pages, I found myself pondering the family at the heart of my first novel, as well as the one in my current manuscript. And, in a most writerly fashion, questions began to churn.

Specifically, I pondered how depictions of family can offer a window into a protagonist’s core character. Similarly, I considered how fictional families, not unlike real ones, can challenge a protagonist unlike any other external or internal force. Here are a few ideas drawn from the exercise:
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The Care and Feeding of Relationships

March 5, 2017 By John J Kelley

A Revealing Scene (in more ways than one)

I stumbled upon something unexpected recently while working on the opening for a potential work in progress. It turns out my protagonist has a son. Well, I suppose that in itself wasn’t a shock. After all, I was the one who placed the youth amidst the brief bridging conflict, having him tag along as an inquisitive preteen might do while his father checks a glitch in the security perimeter for the isolated town in which they live after the collapse of a once great land. The surprise was the realization that this awkward, questioning boy was the center of my protagonist’s world, meaning more to him than his wife, more than his standing in the community, more in fact than he himself will see until much later in the story. And it was in that moment of discovery that all the machinations for the tale I had plotted out in my head instantly fell into place. For I had identified the primary motivator of my lead, and pinpointed a relationship I would need to tease out and understand, just as surely as any individual character arc.

Only later did it occur to me I had experienced a similar epiphany on my first novel, when the protagonist’s relationship with his brother, though not central to the story, had proven key to understanding his past, and an essential thread in his evolution.

Both observations got me thinking about character relationships, from those that bloom in plain sight, like Ove’s thawing relationship with his neighbor Parvaneh over the course of Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove, to subtle ones that sneak up on readers and characters alike, such as Ove’s grandfatherly affection for Parvaneh’s daughter in the same tale. Specifically, I wondered this – What are the keys to crafting realistic and moving relationships between characters? And what are the tools one can use to give those relationships their due, supplying them with the power not only to shape the protagonist’s emotional arc but also to elevate the entire work?
[Read more…]

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Writers: Fact to Fiction? Not So Fast

November 22, 2016 By Tom Bentley

Some light years ago, I was living with my best friend in a small apartment in Southern California, on my own for the first time. It was our first New Year’s Eve together as that eager, barely tolerable species: raffish apartment-dweller-type dudes, barely out of high school. We were going to celebrate that self-congratulatory state of being with a New Year’s party.

That evening we had a respectable turnout of our friends, acquaintances, and other welfare cheats of note, and had settled in to the numerous foolishnesses of New Year’s Eve. We had a wee dram, and a wee dram more. As it neared midnight, my housemate and I had an insight: to christen the New Year, we could both doff our clothes and walk around outside in the soft warm rain that was falling. Did I mention we’d had a drink or two?

Equally inspired, my girlfriend decided to join us. We goofed around a bit out front, and then we saw two figures approaching up the block. In the great spirit of improvisation, my housemate and I worked up a plan: we would walk up to the people, acting as though we were in our fully clothed at-ease, and wish them Happy New Year’s. The creative act, in action.

Remember, it was dark and misting outside. Thus you can understand that it wasn’t until we were but five feet away from our prey and about to spring our greeting when we realized it was OUR LANDLORD AND LANDLADY, who lived only a few blocks away, and who had decided to walk over and wish us happy New Year’s. The fact that they were straight-laced, reserved people, and Eastern Europeans yet, made our calculation all the less calculating.

Well. We had perfect presence of mind and body: Run! Without saying a word, we turned and bolted for the house. Somebody at the party caught a classic snapshot of my housemate in manic mother-naked retreat into the house, eyes bulging out of his head like boiled eggs. Perhaps we thought we’d be safe inside. I literally ran into my closet and hid, lacking the benefit of clothing. I did say that I was young, right? [Read more…]

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What I Learned at the Beach this Summer

October 11, 2016 By David Corbett

Every August, my wife and I travel to Turkey and stay at a vacation house her parents own near the bayside city of Çeşme.

In addition to the expected pleasures of visiting family, sunning, swimming, watching the remarkable sunsets, and eating great food—boyos (think of a dense, biscuit-sized croissant), gevreks (the bagel’s leaner cousin), sucuk (spicy sausage, usually eaten in a sandwich with a pigeon-shaped roll called a kumru), kofta (Turkish meatballs), lokma (Turkish donuts), stuffed mussels, fresh sardines, and the most amazing figs, olives, melons, and peaches known to mankind—beyond all of that, the one great joy both Mette and I look forward to in Çeşme is one I think most Unboxers can appreciate.

Reading.

Specifically: beach reading.

The picture below represents the books Mette managed to devour while sunning herself on the warm white sand. (She’s the kind of reader every writer dreams of.)

My haul was significantly less impressive, but what I lacked in numbers I tried to make up for in heft (he says heftily).

Basically, beyond a series of articles on political theory and histories of the Apache and Afghan wars (they’re strangely similar), I principally focused on one book—Jungian psychiatrist James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling—and a lecture series from the Teaching Company titled The Modern Intellectual Tradition: Descartes to Derrida.

Now wait, wait—before you doze off—I will admit my approach to beach reading may seem a bit stodgy, but both the book and the lectures made a significant impact on my understanding of character and characterization.

Allow me to explain.

[Read more…]