Dear O'Abby: How do i make my ending more satisfying?

 Dear O'Abby,

I've recently finished my first novel and I took it to a local writing group to get some feedback on it.  I had six different people read it, and they all said they enjoyed it, but found the ending unsatisfying. None of them could put their finger on exactly why it wasn't satisfying, so I'm curious how one makes and ending feel right.

Do you have any kind of basic information that could help me re-shape the ending of my book?

Best wishes,

 Unfinished

Dear Unfinished,

That's the worst kind of feedback, isn't it?  That everyone feels the same thing about the ending, but no one can quite give you a specific reason why it's not working for them.

My suggestion would be to look closely at your characters.  Often when something feels unsatisfying it's because a character acts in a way that isn't typical of the way they've acted through the rest of the book.  That can be jarring, especially if they change out of the blue to facilitate the ending you want without there being much growth beforehand.  If you think this might be the case, go back through and see if there are places you can show your character growing or changing to become the person they need to be to make the ending satisfying.

Alternatively, it could be that the characters haven't earned the ending you've given them.  To be a satisfying ending, your characters need to have been through hell to get there.  If everything has just fallen into their laps and they've tiptoed through the tulips to get to the end, you may need to go back and throw some obstacles in their way.  It should feel impossible that these people can ever get whatever it is that they want or need, that there is no way they can possibly overcome everything thrown in their way.  Then, when they do attain that ending, it feels like they deserve whatever it is they earn from getting through.

Or it could very well be a combination of both these things.  I suggest you go through your MS with a finetoothed comb, focusing on both these things separately.  I can almost guarantee you will find ways in which to challenge your characters more, and in turn, show their growth as people who deserve the ending you've given them.

Hope that helps!

X O'Abby

NaNo Tips from O'Abby's Archive

 At this point in November I imagine that some of you are struggling with NaNo.  I know that the first half is always easier for me than the second and we're a few days into the second half now.  You can do it!  And if you find you're feeling stuck, here's some advice from O'Abby's archives to help get you past that sticking place. 

I remember this book and the problem I was having with it when I wrote this, and I can assure you that I managed to move past the point I got stuck and hit my 50K goal.  I also have to admit this book is still sitting in my hard-drive, unfinished at around 70K...  Maybe I need to take some of my own advice, huh?

Dear O’Abby,

I’m doing NaNo and I’m stuck.  I’m at a point where there are multiple choices for my MC and I can’t for the life of me figure out which way to make her go.  I’ve tried skipping beyond this point, but because it’s a crucial decision, what happens next depends on this choice and I can’t write what happens next without her making this decision.  I’ve been going back and forth with different ideas for days, but I’m not happy with any of my choices.

Any ideas how to get past this?

Yours,

Stuck.

Dear Stuck,

I know this feeling all too well.  When there are 155,000 options for your character and you’re not sure which one is the right one. 

Well, my advice is to choose the wrong one.

Fiction is better when characters make mistakes.  So whenever your character is faced with a decision, make her pick the one that is going to create the most trouble for her.  Pick the thing you would never select personally if you were faced with the same dilemma. 

I’ve had the same problem with the book I’m writing this month.  As a grown woman, I know the right thing for my protagonist to do in his particular situation is to call the police or some other authority figure and tell them what’s going on.  There will be a whole string of consequences from this choice of course, but all of them lead to the main problem he is facing being dealt with.  So as a writer, I’ve made him stubbornly refuse to go to the authorities, preferring to deal with the tricky, illegal situation on his own.  And of course making that foolish decision will lead to a whole lot of other, trickier situations for him to deal with. On his own.

That's important too.  To be interesting, your character needs to be active and really driving the outcomes from any decisions she makes.  If doing something one way puts the outcome into someone else's hands, choose another direction, one that forces your MC to solve her own problem, or places another one directly in her path.

So be decisive.  Never let your character dabble in her options.  She needs to pick the wrong path and navigate it, however feels natural for her.  And each time she reaches another branch in the road, she needs to choose the direction that leads to the most trouble, the most conflict.  It’s hard, I know.  We grow to love these characters like our own children and it’s hard to send them off in the wrong direction, especially when we know their choices are going to lead to them or someone else getting hurt.

I hope that helps!  Now, I’m off to give my MC some unexpected consequences for his poor decision making. Poor guy!  He doesn't know what's coming at him...

XX 

O’Abby

Blast From the Past #2

It's November. It's NaNoWriMo. I'm an ML this year. I got revision notes back from my agent last month that I'm still working on. My husband is completely renovating our living room, right before we have a bunch of family in town for Thanksgiving. Something's gotta give, and this month it's new content for Operation Awesome. So I've picked through some of my old posts and picked out a few to feature this month.

If you are stuck while doing NaNo (or just stuck at all, whatever), get the brain juices flowing by doing personality tests for your characters.

Serenading the Wicked Heart: An Ode to Villains

Good villains require a lot of development so they don't become flat, cliche stereotypes. Villains, like ogres, should have layers. There are different types of villains, but my favorite are sympathetic villains. These characters might be just a decision or two away from being a hero, and we might be a decision or two away from being them. To me, that's fascinating.

One of my favorite sympathetic villains is Scorpius from the Sci-Fi channel series Farscape. He seeks the same goal as the hero John Crichton, but his methods for getting it are decidedly more evil and underhanded than John's. Scorpius has physical weaknesses that hinder him, but he uses his intellect to overcome them. This flaw has created a lot of Scorpi's determination and taught him internal strength, building a villain I would side with if it wasn't for the golden-hearted boy-next-door John Crichton.

quick Rumple sketch by Donelle Lacy

On the fringes of villainy, you'll find another character I absolutely love. The Trickster character. He's slippery, seductive, and you never know what side he's on. Rumpelstiltskin from Once Upon A Time is both
a villain and a trickster. His fingers are in everything and he's constantly three steps ahead of the other characters. He has a sympathetic backstory as well as circumstances in which he might be either truly evil or unusually kind.

After reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, I was charmed by the Marquis De Carabas. The long coat, the hat, the flashy smile, seemed more at home in a Louisiana gin joint than the Underground of London, but he fit perfectly. Gaiman played on all the traditional trickster qualities and produced a character who walks that fine line between reader trust and distrust. You're compelled to read on and find out more about him.

What we love most about villains and tricksters is that they do and say the things heroes never could. They cross lines, break hearts, and pull rugs out from under everyone else. They're shifty, sneaky, and clever in ways we wish we could be. They don't have to play fair, but they're seldom very happy for long. So they become tragic figures we secretly wish would come out on top. And in some stories, they do.

Writing villains requires inspiration, motivation, and a deep appreciation for the slipperier critters of the literary world. Without a well-developed villain, a hero would never know how bold, brave, or strong he could be, nor would he be motivated to find out. Villains, more than heroes, are fantastic motivators. If you don't believe me, consider the relationship between Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty, the Doctor and the Master, Batman and the Joker. The more compelling the villain is, the more the hero has to step up his game, and thus the hero becomes legendary.

When you're writing your villains, peel back the layers and get to the heart of why they are who they are. What made them that way? What/who do they love? And what steps would they take against someone who threatened that love?

Using Personality Tests to develop characters

Raise your hand if you've ever taken a personality test.

Oh, good, we found the one thing everyone has in common.

There are many different personality tests out there; explaining our different quirks and tendencies is rather a popular thing. Most tests claim that knowing your individual type is key for anticipating how you will deal with stress, how you might best achieve success, or even what path to take to happiness.

I've certainly taken a few myself; I suppose it's due to my narcissistic streak: I like knowing things about myself.

Narcissism aside, though, a lot of people advocate using personality tests to help writers learn more about their characters. I've never done so myself, because I couldn't really see the point. So what if my character is an INFJ or an ESTJ?

As I was reading Crafting Unforgettable Characters, by K. M. Weiland, I stumbled (with my brain, not my feet) on the word enneagram. Weiland mentions it in passing as she describes techniques for fleshing out characters. But I'd never heard of it before, and she included a handy link, so I checked it out.

The link did not take me to the official enneagram website (you can find it here), but instead to a page on Laurie Campbell's website that covered creating fatal flaws in characters. She explained the enneagram types, and then went on even further to explain how knowing their types could create conflict between characters. It was absolutely fascinating. I always think of using personality tests to learn about positive traits, but this opened my eyes even further--knowing the flaws inherent in personality types helps generate conflict, which is crucial to a story.

Maybe this is all obvious to you guys, but it was revolutionary to me. I will definitely use it in the future when I work out character details.

What are your favorite character personality tools?

NaNoWriMo Prep: Character Interviews

Hello again, and welcome to the next installment of preparing for NaNoWriMo. November is barely a month away, and I hope your fingers are itching to get typing. By now you've been spending time brainstorming all kinds of ideas for things you want to include in your novel, and naturally that's going to include characters.

One of the things that drives me nuts when I'm writing is when I've forgotten a detail I know I've already written about. I can't handle having it wrong, on the off chance that I forget to go back and fix it later. So I have to stop the flow, go back in my document, and figure out what that minor character's brother's name is, or what year the main character's dog died.

Creating a "character bible," or a set of documents with information about your characters, can save you a lot of reference time. When used with character interviews, it can also deepen your understanding of a character's motivations and help you create conflict in your writing.

The writing program Scrivener has some pre-created character sheets where you can fill in what a character looks like, important dates, etc--but it's easy enough to create your own if you don't use or (gasp!) don't like Scrivener.

Take your main character. Make all the notes you need about things like what color their hair is, or when they graduated from high school. But then go deeper. "Ask" your character about their relationship with their parents. Their siblings. Who was their favorite teacher in school? WHY? How did they choose their career?

Go more specific to your book. If you know that you are going to kill one of the main character's friends, ask about them! Why are they friends? What will it mean to have that friend gone?
Figuring out these feelings helps you develop individual character voices as well as their unique feelings towards important events. Then when you sit down to write these events you have a feeling for how your characters would react, and how that might propel the rest of your plot.

Obviously there is room to be surprised, which is one of the most fun things about writing. It's okay if while writing you have an epiphany that completely changes things. But at least you are thinking about your characters and their feelings instead of writing a machine that just goes through plot.

An example from my very first NaNo project:
My main character was a 20-year-old girl who lived at home, and the main focus of the book was on having her open up to experiences that would allow her to leave home and strike out on her own.
She needed a reason to have stayed at home in the first place, so I killed her mother and made her dad a widower. Now she's sympathetic! She stayed home to be with her dad so he wouldn't be lonely!

And not a single time in the whole book did she have any feelings toward her mother whatsoever.

So when I rewrote the book, I talked to her. I learned that not having a mom made her feel isolated, which informed her choice of friends. She felt great pressure to go to the same university as her parents, because of how her dad felt about meeting her mother there. And on, and on. It made the book and character so much richer.

So before November, take some time to get to know your characters. Check back in two weeks to learn more about the benefits of both outlining AND pantsing.

Guest Post: S.L. Saboviec on Growing Your Character Relationships to Grow Your Character!

 

Hello, everyone! This is S. L. Saboviec, and I’m pleased to be a guest today on Operation Awesome. I’m author of the Adult Paranormal novel Guarding Angel, and I’m here to talk a bit about my writing process.

When I first started writing, I knew very little about it. (I know, shocker!) I tried different things to flesh out my characters—character questionnaires, interviews, analyzing their personalities, taking online quizzes—but only when I evolved a character development method did I started to become comfortable. In addition to analyzing their personality traits, I examined their relationships with one another.

Let me explain.

Character Growth: Not Just For Characters

The books we most engage with are ones where characters grow as they overcome challenges. But the characters themselves don’t just grow—their relationships with everyone around them grow. Maybe they meet someone new and fall in love. Maybe they love someone but end up divorced. Maybe they have a strained relationship with their child and mend it, or have a great one and ruin it. These relationship changes are what make up good stories.

(I’m not saying you can’t have a character grow without other characters, but it’s much more interesting to see your character grow against their relationships.)

Not only that, but these growing relationships are the stuff of delicious sub-plots: the man who launches a friend’s rescue saves the world from evil aliens (Chronicles of Riddick) or the mother who struggles with her son’s heinous crime comes to terms with who she is as a person (We Need To Talk About Kevin). Chuck Wendig states it even stronger than I have: Character relationships are what makes your plot, not just your sub-plots.

How to Make Your Character Relationships Grow

When getting ready to write a first draft, I have a spreadsheet I call my “Book Map.” Yeah, I’m a plotter… But don’t run away if you’re not! Besides my plot outline, which is totally optional in this method, I keep detailed character information that I refer back to as I write.

In particular, I have a matrix of relationships. Along the top and the bottom, I have each character’s name. Where each character meets, I write about how their relationship grows:

·         How Character A sees Character B in the beginning of the novel

·         How Character A sees Character B at the end of the novel

·         Notes about their growth arc

An example of this would be one I would have done between Enael and Kaspen for Guarding Angel:

·         At the beginning, Enael sees Kaspen as: mysterious, intriguing, and more committed to his Wards’ development than any other Guardian she’s met.

·         At the end, Enael sees Kaspen as: worth fighting for, her soul mate, and strong for having struggled through so many hardships.

·         Growth arc: When Kaspen makes a poor decision because he wants to protect humans, Enael fights for him. (I’m being vague here so I don’t spoiler anything—in case you decide you’d like to read my novel—but when plotting, I would point to specific actions she takes and how it connects to my overall plot.)

I would do a similar one for how Kaspen sees Enael, which would explain why he falls in love with her. And so on, throughout all the major characters. One of my current works-in-progress has twelve major characters, so that’s 12 x 12 = 144 character opinions of other characters to consider. It was a time-consuming exercise, but I usually don’t do every single one, since not all the characters meet or have strong opinions about one another.

And it’s useful in more than one way:

·         It highlights possible sub-plots.

·         It allows me time inside the head of each character, which allows me to understand each one’s motivations more.

·         It highlights redundant or one-dimensional characters.

Hopefully this insight into a small part of my writing process has been useful. For me, the “hair color / eye color / mannerisms” character sheet lists don’t cut it. I need to get into my characters’ heads and really understand what they think of each other. Hopefully I gave you some things to think about and perhaps even strengthen your next revision.

About Me:

I’m a self-published author whose dark, thought-provoking science fiction & fantasy contains flawed, relatable characters and themes that challenge the status quo. Guarding Angel is on sale for $0.99 right now. You can find it at several major eBook retailers and on Amazon in paperback. The sequel, Reaping Angel, will be released in early 2016.

·         Kindle

·         Kobo

·         Nook

·         Google Play

·         Paperback (Amazon)

·         Goodreads

You can also follow me on social media, check out the other stops on this blog tour, or if you like my work, sign up for my newsletter:

·         My newsletter (No spam!)

·         July 2015 Guarding Angel Blog Tour

·         Twitter

·         Pinterest

·         FaceBook

Thank you, Operation Awesome, for having me here today!