This is number 130 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
THE CAMERAS ARE ROLLING. The characters are in position. And what is the next thing the director says?
“Action!”
Then a car explodes or something. An actor jumps from one building to another. Shots are fired. Punches are thrown in a Kung Fu fight. Or maybe the opening credits roll over a star scape that morphs into the pattern on a coffee cup.
That last one is less and less likely. I watched a movie online a few nights ago and the opening credits didn’t begin until almost twenty minutes into the movie. Prior to that was a twenty-minute action scene setting up the lead character. What it really did was expose what kind of person the main character was.
And that is the kind of action we are looking for. Character drives the action. So, action needs to expose and be consistent with the characteristics of the person you are writing about. If you have imagined a character who is nearsighted, you can’t suddenly have him spotting a threat coming toward him from a number of yards away. That isn’t consistent with his capability.
Even if a normal person who is in leg braces suddenly starts outrunning all the bullies chasing him, he has to have something in his character that enables the transformation. Run, Forrest, run!
If you have done a good job of creating your character—even if only in your mind, but I advise writing it down—you need to put challenges in front of her that will show her strengths and weaknesses. Action is at the intersection of conflict and character. Hence, you need to discover what the conflict is. Or, since you are the author, create the conflict that forces the character into action.
In Devon Layne’s The Rock, Book #5 of the Living Next Door to Heaven series, Brian is called upon to defend Hannah against a meth-enhanced former boyfriend. Brian was originally presented in Book #1 as a weak shrimp, always being defended and protected by his bigger and stronger friends. But over the course of the next three books, he is in constant training from Whitney and has shown himself as able to ‘take a hit.’
Still, his instinct is not to fight if he can help it. He takes two hits and narrowly escapes a knife gash to his head. In the next instant, his training kicks in and he breaks the attacker’s arm, neuters him with a kick, and bursts his appendix with a hit to the stomach. Within his capability and consistent with his character? Absolutely.
However, when Whitney gets him to relate the event, replaying each step, she demands, “Why didn’t you kill him?”
Killing the attacker would not have been consistent with Brian’s character. In the long run, he is not the killer that future Marine Whitney is. But his actions in subduing the attacker are completely consistent with his character. He will protect those he loves at all costs.
The Rock, and the entire Living Next Door to Heaven series are available as eBooks from ZBookStore.
In my opinion, a typical flaw in novels is spending too much effort to explain why a character is the way he is. That’s often very informative. Brian is picked on and bullied in school because he is small. But he is intensely loyal to his friends—especially Heaven—and he can’t help but attempt to rescue her when she is attacked. But we really didn’t need to know what made him so loyal to his friends.
I’ve watched a lot of movies lately that would normally never cross my mind. In one, a sixteen-year-old girl takes down a radical rightwing cell intent on killing a liberal senator. A lot of time is wasted telling about how her parents died after an attack by neo nazis. Everything I needed to know as a viewer, I saw in the scene where she runs away from her foster parents.
Now, the author needed all the backstory. The author needed to know what happened in that girl’s life that made her into a kind of survivalist with an amount of rage that bursts into action when her friend is murdered in front of her. But the viewer or reader didn’t need that information to tell what kind of person she was.
I was asked recently how much research I do on topics I write about. The answer is dissertation-worthy. That doesn’t mean I get all the details correct. Anyone with a real knowledge of a subject will readily point out flaws in what I write. But I have a lot of research.
Before I drafted Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) The Gutenberg Rubric, I spent nearly a year doing research, after having taught print history for ages. But there were a lot of subjects I wasn’t up on. One of the books I read was 40 Centuries of Ink by David Nunes Carvalho, published near the end of the 19th century. It traced out all the developments in creating ink over those years. Then there was Printer’s Marks by W. Roberts, 1893. Or Wilson and Wilson’s Comprehensive Analytical Chemistry, Volume XLII: Non-destructive Microanalysis of Cultural Heritage Materials.
There were tons of other books I read and annotated in about 150 pages of pencil, shown above. But when I shared my first incomplete draft with Sonja Black, the Book Doctor, she said that even though I needed all that information to write the book, the reader didn’t need it all to enjoy reading the book. It wasn’t part of the story.
The same is true of character development. You might need to research an entire biography of your main character, but what the reader needs to know is that his actions are consistent with his personality, ability, and resources.
So when you place a conflict before your character, you need to be sure the action of the character is consistent. Once you have the intersection of conflict and character, action has to follow. When there are actions, you can build the plot.
Of course, there are dozens of other ingredients to toss into your mix. But next week, we’ll take a look at the Plot. Which comes first? The character or the plot?