The big challenge for me in my final weeks at Clarion was characterization. Frankly, I’m not much good at it. The main complaint I got was that people kept referring to the folks in my stories as “Ferrett in a mask,” and that’s true – I have a strong voice in this blog, but when every person we meet in my fiction speaks like I do, that’s a weakness.

So how do I fix that? Here are the final lessons.

Write From A Different Space.
“Ferrett,” my instructor asked, “Where do you write from?”

“Uh… My hands?”

“No, no - do you write from your head or the body?”

I’d never thought of it that way before. “I write from the head,” I said, tapping my temple. “I’m very in their minds, about what’s going through their thoughts at a given moment. In fact,” I mused as the thought sunk deeper and deeper into me, “I barely see what they see at all.”

“Write from the body,” my instructor suggested. “You wrote about a fifteen-year-old girl in this manuscript, but we didn’t feel that. It felt like you. But if you’d written it from the body of a teenaged girl, starving, high up on a girder as she’s waiting for a charity boat to come down the river with her food, you’re going to notice different things.”

Suddenly, it snapped into focus. Before, I’d had a teenaged girl and I wrote her from the mind – which was my viewpoint of me, thinking what I’d think if I was there.

But the question had put me into a different space – I wrote from the perspective of, “What’s it like to be up there?” then suddenly the sensory details sorted themselves out. My plot had placed my character on that girder…. But once I body-thought, I felt what it was like to be that hungry. I put myself in the cold of being so high up, the wind whipping across my arms, seeing things from a different point of view.

My concerns changed. Because as opposed to being all intellectual, I was worried about very minor, telling details that fleshed the story out a lot more. I’d known that yes, my character could fall off the bridge that high up, but it’s funny how much more vital that seemed when it was my feet on that rusty rail, the river a hundred feet below.

And best of all, my emotions became more vivid when I wrote from the body. When I was concentrating more on what it felt, physically felt, to have that heart-thrummy nervousness of a first love or the deadened-nerve muscle apathy of a serious depression, then it rang truer when I wrote about it.

Everything changed from there. I’d put myself behind the eyes when I wrote, which could get me so far… But what I needed was to inhabit that other fully. And it’s a subtle difference I don’t think I ever would have gotten on my own.

Every Character Paragraph Must Make A Decision.
I’d read my instructor’s books, and they had whole friggin’ paragraphs talking about their characters' states of minds. Just like I did!

But when they did it, it was showing. When I did it, it was telling. And I didn’t know the difference, so I asked why.

My instructor said, “The trick is, every paragraph has to be a decision that the character makes. And the character has to make that decision using what they see. That’s how you show.”

I squinted, not quite getting it. “Can you give me an example?”

“Sure. Let’s take a Western.” And my instructor hunched down, adopting an uncannily accurate Midwestern female accent as their demeanor transformed into something else entirely.

“I don’t like him,” they mimicked, peering off at an imaginary person at the bar. “His hair’s too slick. His shirt’s been washed too much – there’s no dirt on it. He’s been sipping his beer for an hour, and he thinks I haven’t noticed but I have because everyone else is getting drunk and he’s hiding that he’s not. No, he’s a city slicker, and I’m not trusting him one bit.”*

My instructor straightened up.

“That’s her coming to a conclusion,” they said. “You can see what she thinks is important, and that forces you not only to be more specific with your level of detail, but it also tells the reader exactly how that character thinks. Which means that by the time we get to the end, we have followed the character through a small narrative arc that concludes with what they have decided to do.

“Every paragraph should be a decision.”

I vowed immediately to steal this technique. It seems to be working quite well.

Blogging Teaches You Bad Habits
The worst habit I have picked up is you.

See, when you write for a blog, you write to an audience. So you speak in general terms, because that’s the best way to connect. When you talk about how people experience universal emotions or best practices, you default to “you.”

You know why? Because you sound like an egotistic dick if you use the word “I” all the time. Even if it’s absolutely true, rewriting the previous paragraph as, “When I write for a blog, I write to an audience. So I speak in general terms, because that’s the best way to connect….”

…well, that distances your audience from you. It reminds them that this is your opinion at a time when you’re trying to sway them with the siren song that hey, everyone feels this. So you use “you,” and if you’re clever, it works.

Or I should say, it works in a blog essay, which is essentially a personal letter to each person who reads it. I’ve written a lot of solid pieces where I invited the audience to think of themselves in love, or in hatred, and they’ve generally gone along with it positively.

My first few stories had the characters slipping into discussing their universal desires for love and affection by talking about you, the reader. That’s great in a blog, when you know you’re a reader. But in a work of fiction where I’m trying to make you forget that OH HAI, BIG ARTIFICIAL CONSTRUCT HERE and have you fall into the story, I need to have the character and only the character feel that emotion. Which, strangely enough, works better in fiction.

Your evocation is completely reversed.

Every Character Should Get What They Need.
Endings are tricky. Out of like sixteen stories a week for six weeks, I think we’ve had maybe seven stories total that had endings that worked out of the box. Most of them needed tweaking to sing, and many of the endings (including, yes, many of mine) just didn’t fit with what we knew.

But my instructor had a very good point.

“At the end of the story,” they said, “The lead character should get what they need. That’s not necessarily what they want – in fact, it usually isn’t – but they should get what they need. Even if, in some cases – especially horror stories with awful or clueless protagonists – what they need is a terrible death.”

That’s been a useful way of looking at endings, because the ones that worked generally gave the characters what we felt they needed to have. The ones that didn’t work generally didn’t stem organically from the characters – they came from plot elements that we didn’t care about.

“Giving them what they need?” That’s hard. Because that means you have to have an ending that fits those characters precisely, and no other. Sure, it’s nice to end every romance with the heroine and the hunky male kissing by the seaside, but isn’t there something more unique to tease out here? Some resolution that makes this story something that you can’t get anywhere else, because the conclusion depends on a handful of unique people?

Oh, that’s scary. But when it works, that’s when you do the real magic.

* - NOTE: The instructor obviously did it a lot better than my memory of it. Danke.

(Tell me I'm full of it)