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I used to be too nice to my main characters.

I’d put them in danger, I’d subject them to fights they couldn’t win, I’d imprison them, and once I had aliens install a brain implant through my character’s nose.

But these sorts of discomforts and pains are first level pains. Readers can be intrigued by these problems, but they’re so used to reading them, they don’t feel especially moved by them.

You could write more graphic detail, the kind of thing people need to read with thier hands over their eyes. And I suppose there are genres where that’s what readers are looking for.

But what we want readers to feel mostly is a desperate yearning for the main character to overcome, escape, and perhaps get revenge. In romance we want the couple to come together forever.

And it’s the doubt, discomfort, pain that makes that payoff . . .  well, pay off.

Enter the Dark Night of the Soul, the nadir of the character’s arc, the low point of all low points, rock bottom, the last hope of victory is extinguished.

I’ve noticed three reasons why writer wimp out:

• Writers are fond of their characters and are too soft on them
• Writers fear putting characters into a hopeless situation because they don’t know how to get the characters out of it
• Writers fear that taking away hope will force a fundamental change on the world they don’t want to write

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The psychology of the story is the psychology of the author, and there are caves we don’t want to enter.

But that’s where the path leads, invariably. The reader needs you to go in there and take them with.

If your main character dies, you’ve written a tragedy. That’s fine, and if you’ve signaled to the reader that this is what’s happening, they will accept it. If you’re writting a romance, you will alienate readers, who want a Happily Ever After.

Or maybe your main character dies and is ressurected, literally or figuratively. It’s hard to literally kill your main character without a deus ex machina resurrection. So we kill them metaphorically by taking their power, killing (or appearing to kill) their loved ones, and showing the villain’s victory.

In Writing the Blockbuster Novel Albert Zuckerman notes that the hero must fall into the power of the villain. He’s been captured, gun taken, hands bound, surrounded by guards.

All these tropes are designed to create the enormous emotional contrast when the hero gets free and vanquishes the villain.

Indiana Jones fails to keep the Ark of the Covenant out of the Nazi’s hands. He and his girlfriend Marion are captured, tied up, and forced to witness the relic being opened.

Whip snapping, gun shooting, and fist fighting got him this far, but it’s his knowledge as an archeologist and his respect for historical relics (“It belongs in a museum!” he tells Belloq about the Aztec idol at the beginning) and his experience that all treasures have traps, that saves him. “Don’t look at it!” he tells Marion.

It requires sacrifice. For Indy to survive he has to turn away from the mystery.

And there’s a bit of a hint for how to get your character out of that dark moment. Look to the qualities of their character, not their physical skills, to get help them out of the darkest moment.

For Luke Skywalker to survive against Darth Vader in Empire Strikes Back, he can’t fight, his hand has been chopped off and his lightsaber lost. He doesn’t have enough command of the Force to beat Vader. But he has now way out except to join the Dark Side.

But he does have a choice, one that only a noble-hearted hero could make: to sacrifice himself by jumping to a probable death. (BTW, Han Solo is frozen in carbonite, giving the audience a worse-than-death horror to endure for THREE YEARS until the sequel came out. I remember, I was there!)

John McClane in Die Hard has to surrender to save his wife. Yes, he has taped a gun to his back, and he does use it once he’s Surrendered to Infiltrate the Fortress of the Villain, but this is total keeping with his New York cop street smarts.

In The Dark Knight, Batman chooses to take the fall for Harvey Dent’s “murder.” All his gadgets and fighting skills can’t fix the real problem: that the “White Knight” that was to clean Gotham up had gone bad and had to be killed. To preserve Dent’s reputation, Batman chooses to be seen as the villain.“Because he’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we’ll hunt him. Because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero. He’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A dark knight.”

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Remember, you can scroll back in your manuscript and plant a few seeds that will blossom at just the right moment.

I got off to a rocky start yesterday, but I did hit my daily wordcount goal of 1800 words.

That’s because I know a technique that really helps build momentum in any situation. You may have heard of it:

Pomodoro Technique

Invented in the 1980s by a university student called Francesco Cirillo who was overwhelmed with his studies, the Pomodoro Technique is super simple.

1. Set a timer for 25 minutes (I do 20)
2. Write until the timer bell rings
3. Take a five minute break
4. Repeat.

This is how I write my first drafts. Twenty minute writing sprints. And yes I do stop mid-sentence when the timer goes off. In fact, I love to stop mid-sentence. Makes starting the next sprint even easier because there’s a thought already in progress.

I add one more step: After each sprint of writing, I record the wordcount for the session. I’m currently using a spreadsheet for this, but I’ve filled up little notebooks with hand-written tallies as well.

Why does the Pomodoro Technique work?

It gives my brain assurance that it doesn’t have to stay in creative mode indefinitely. Creative work can sometimes be very exhausting. Especially if I’m thinking too much.

When the timer is counting down, there’s a very light pressure to make the sprint count. I just have to write something or my wordcount will be super low. It may sound silly, but it workds. And the less thinking you allow, the better. I’ll talk about that more tomorrow, because for some that statement will be confusing.

Doing Pomodoros tells you what your pace is. This helps budget how much time is needed to hit the daily goal. Over the past few weeks I’m average 640 words per 20 minute session. That means I need to do about three of them to hit my 1800 word goal.

Some days that average is much less, especially at the start of a new project.

So give it a try.

It will teach you to write forward. It will keep you from wasting time trying to perfect each paragraph before you move to the next. You don’t need to perfect each scene before you write the next. You need to write the next scene and the next.

Get momentum going.

Writing is mindset. The timer is a constraint that will focus you on the getting words down. Sometimes you need to blow out some gunk before the good stuff comes. Twenty minutes on, five minutes rest. Twenty minutes on, five minutes rest.

Don’t write nonsense. This isn’t freewriting or free association. If you need to pause for a few seconds that’s fine. But if it’s much longer than that, just write the next sentence. Doesn’t matter if you don’t know where it’s going. Doesn’t matter if you like it. Just stop thinking so much and write what happens next.

Trust your subconcious. It knows story.

Writing tips, tricks, and inspo straight to your inbox. Bi-weekly except for November when I send a daily email to keep you on track for NaNoWriMo.

One of the fake writer landmines is the so-called “he saidism.”

Some editors and style experts will tell you to never use any dialog tag other than “he said” or “she asked.” They might allow an occasional “she whispered” or “he shouted.”

This landmine is easily avoided because 1) it’s not difficult to understand and respect, or 2) you can stomp on it and discover that almost no reader cares. Many huge selling writers put all sorts of dialog tags in their fiction. “He shrieked” “he groaned” “she sighed” “she warbled.”

I tend to stay with “said” and “asked” because I want my readers to skim right past the tag. The purpose of the tag is to make clear who is speaking. If I want to convey a sigh, groan, or shriek, I would be more likely to show it through what actors call a “beat.”

An actor’s beat is a facial expression, a posture change, a turn of the head or eyes, or handling a prop of some sort. These beats reveal to the movie audience what’s going on in a character’s mind.

Novelists can reveal the point of view character’s thoughts by simply having them ruminate on them.

“I don’t think we can stay together,” he said.

So this was it. The moment I had feared. The moment I had connived and lied and schemed to avoid. If he knew how much effort I had put into deceiving him, he wouldn’t just say that so blandly. Did he think I was one of his employees, to be dismissed and replaced without a second thought? Unless . . . “Who is she?”

In that example, we are in first person and the narrator reports her thoughts to us. I don’t need to put on a “I said” tag at the end because we know it’s her talking.

But what about other characters? We can’t write their interior monologue if they aren’t the current POV character.

The answer is to ahve them perform a beat to convey a bit of their emotion AND signal who’s speaking.

I met him exactly on time. I knew something was wrong because he wasn’t at our table in the back corner. Instead he was at a two-top by the window. It wasn’t as private. As soon as he saw me coming he grimaced and put on his sad eyebrows. Totally fake. I sat and looked at him and waited.

He spun his coffee cup between his palms, little quarter turns. Precise, the way he adjusted the vent fan in the car. “I don’t think we can stay together.”

“Who is she?” I just blurted it out. But how dare he dismiss me like one of his lazy employees? If he knew just how hard I had worked (etc, etc)

Here’s another beat.

He bit his lip and looked out the window. “I don’t think we can stay together.”

Just keep the dialogue in the same paragraph with the beat.

So if you find yourself getting antsy because you’re repeating “she said” tags a lot, replace them with beats. They are marvelous for stretching out tension, indicating pauses, or re-introducing walk-on characters to refresh readers’ memories.

Use this technique today on purpose. That will require a little thinking, but not too much. Then move on and let it settle into that back of your mind.

When you add a tool to your skillset, your inner storyteller will start using it.

Writing tips, tricks, and inspo straight to your inbox. Bi-weekly except for November when I send a daily email to keep you on track for NaNoWriMo.

I hit my wordcount goal yesterday (Nov. 6th, 2020), but it took longer than usual.

Why? Because I did a loopback!

I’m a huge advocate of writing forward, and keeping momentum going. But sometimes you don’t remember what you wrote two days ago. It’s okay to loop back, read through it, fix little errors, and add in details as long as you stay in the mindset of discovery and avoid the overthinking that comes with invention.

This is not the time to be “polishing” or rewriting. Many writers get trapped in a loop of continuous polishing of early chapters and then grind to a halt because momentum is lost. (You know who you are.)

The purpose ofa loopback is to refresh your memory, regain momentum, and pick up where you left off with your creative mind fully enganged in discovery.

When I start writing this morning, I will only loop back a few paragraphs. In a day or two, I’ll probably loop back a few thousand words.

Write forward, loop back a little bit, get a running start, write new scenes, loop back a little bit, get a running start, write new scenes.

“Write. Don’t think. Relax.” —Ray Bradbury

Writing tips, tricks, and inspo straight to your inbox. Bi-weekly except for November when I send a daily email to keep you on track for NaNoWriMo.

Does it feel natural to you to outline your novel?

Go ahead!

I know many authors who do that. And they are very deliberate about the three act structure. They puzzle over what inciting incident will kick off the action. They scribble down their M.I.C.E quotient, or plot out the 40 beats of the Save the Cat formula. They’ll make sure they’ve plotted a false victory, a dark night of the soul, and a Hero Returns Home.

These concepts are learned through study. They help us reverse-engineer successful stories to see why they work. As we move forward in our writing careers, such learning is essential. And it requires thinking, which I’ve discouraged in every email so far.

To deepen your craft, thinking is necessary.

To learn these models, we have to apply them intentionally. We have to push through the frustration and confusion caused by molding our creative output into unfamiliar shapes.

If I gave you the assignment to write a page without ever using the word “was,” you might have to think about it. You’d have to rephrase sentences that otherwise flowed up from your subconcious. That’s a writing exercise that will train your creative mind to reach for more vivid verbs when they are appropriate.

If I asked you to outline a novel that perfectly matched The Hero’s Journey, you’d have to think about it and puzzle over it.

These are valuable exercises.

But if this is your first NaNoWriMo project, focus on training your mind to just write when you sit down to write. Embrace the Bradbury mantra I’ve been repeating in these emails “Write. Don’t think. Relax.” Trust your subconcious; it knows story. This is the fundamental skill.

If you get stuck, loop back, gain momentum, and write forward. Hit your wordcount. You don’t need to know anything more than you already know to write your novel.

When NaNo is over, study plot, character, or prose style. Do writing exercises to teach the creative mind these skills. Then get back to writing without thinking. Your creative mind will use your new abilities automatically.

Writing tips, tricks, and inspo straight to your inbox. Bi-weekly except for November when I send a daily email to keep you on track for NaNoWriMo.