My brother, Bruce, was in Portland over the weekend and told me about a new idea for a book group that sounded so great we decided to try it as a family. We have a big family: six siblings, all of us mated and many of us with grown children. Throw in a cousin or two and we have a small village. 

Everyone who’s interested reads two books about brain science, but not the same books. The point is to share what you’ve learned and make recommendations. The deadline is July 4th when many of us are getting together. None of the attendees has a background in medicine or psychology, but fortunately, there are shelves of books written for lay people. When we meet, we’ll each present out books and recommend them or not. Beats swapping worn-out family stories.

My choices?

Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology, by Paul Broks
In Search of Memory, by Eric Kandel

I’ll let everyone out there in Blogland know what we come up with.

THIS JUST IN: A BITCH CALLED HOPE  WILL BE PUBLISHED IN AUDIO FORMAT AT AUDIBLE.COM MAY 3RD

We’ve probably all heard how we need to log 10,000 hours before we can expect to master anything. The news from UCLA’s Robert Bjork and Florida State’s Anders Ericsson is that if we want to learn faster and retain more we need to vary our practice. These scientists call it interleaving and they claim it triggers the release of hormone CRF in the brain area central to learning and memory.

And I’ve got the very thing to mix things up with my writing practice: free writing. And as of this weekend I got some inspired exercises from writer Lidia Yuknavitch (Dora: A Headcase) at the Oregon Writer’s Colony Spring Conference.

One exercise is to describe a simple object from different characters’ point of view. In the free write exercise we did this weekend the object was an apple. The point of view characters were highly contrasted from one another: a seven-year old country girl; an eighty-year old deaf quadriplegic; a retired marine officer who’d done ten tours of duty in Afghanistan; and a psycho-killer. I’m going to try this with different characters in my new novel, Betting Blind, and see if I can make the descriptions particular enough to tell the difference between the points of view.

Another exercise Lidia suggested was to find a metaphor that continues to surface in our writing. Set the task of writing 100 fragments using that metaphor. Lidia used this very practice to write her memoir, The Chronology of Water.

Your protagonist is a certain kind of a person at the beginning of your story, and by the end of the story she has transformed. This is the character’s arc, and whether you’re writing thrillers or memoir, if there’s no arc, there’s no story. Stories are about conflict. The outcome is always change.

Orson Scott Card puts it this way:

One of the reasons fiction exists at all is to deal with that fear of inexplicable change, that uncertain dread that lurks in the background of all our human relationships. Because fiction lets us see people’s motives, the causes of their behavior, these stories about made-up people help us guess at the motives and causes of real people’s behavior.

Robert McKee takes this principle further. He suggests that if your character doesn’t change emotionally in every scene, you need to ask yourself if the scene belongs in your story. Here are some examples that he uses:

Love/hate
Freedom/slavery
Alive/dead
Peace/war
Truth/lie
Good/evil
Courage/cowardice
Loyalty/betrayal
Wisdom/stupidity
Strength/weakness
Excitement/boredom
Achievement/failure
Justice/injustice.

Obviously, we’re talking about degrees here, otherwise we’d have a farce on our hands. McKee uses the example in Casablanca to show how subtle shifts can create great tension. It’s the scene when Ilsa comes up to Rick’s rooms after having met him in the café earlier in the evening. She begins the scene wanting to explain to Rick why she abandoned him in Paris all those years ago. He begins the scene bitter and sarcastic. He has a low opinion of her. Everyone remembers how the two characters change in that scene, but it’s worth going back and viewing it, or you can read McKee’s analysis of the screenplay in his book, Story.

 How do characters change?  The writer subjects them to the three Ts: Test, Torment, Transform.

What is the character’s greatest fear? Make him face it. What does he dread? Avoid? Ignore? Who does he love? Hate? Make him face the things he avoids. Question everything he loves and  believes in. Review your character’s strengths. What would happen if you took that strength from your character. What would he be left with?

Think of these tests like a refiner’s fire, and your character the silver that’s placed in the fire to burn away all the impurities. What you’ll end up with is a transformed character.

Your protagonist wants (fill in the blank), wants it badly. Great. What will happen if your protagonist doesn’t reach her goal? What stands to be lost is the story’s stakes.

It’s not so easy. We readers have become jaded with the flood of high stakes scenarios. Then how do writers reach their audience? By raising the readers’ sympathy for the protagonist.

A character has two types of strengths, those that drive the story forward, such as perseverance, strength of will, courage; and secondary strengths, those that don’t drive the story, such as compassion. What if your character’s compassion is tested? The reader cares deeply whether the character can hang on to her compassion in the face of whatever horror you’ve inflicted on her. Reach deep into your character’s soul to find what is true in all of us and then test that. That becomes the stakes.

But you could make any strength drive the story. Atticus Finch in  To Kill A Mockingbird demonstrates how compassion can drive the story forward. Although Atticus is a modest, quiet man, we learn early in the story that he’s the best shot in town when he kills a rabid dog. The reader could suppose at this point in the story that Atticus’s strength (good with a gun) will drive the story forward. Instead it’s Atticus’s sense of morality and compassion that drives the story to its brilliant conclusion.

Donald Maas says in Writing the Breakout Novel: “The character’s stakes will seem strong only to the extent that the character is sympathetic…How can you generate in the reader the same warmth, concern and love you feel for your protagonist? By allowing the reader to know the protagonist as intimately as you do…we cannot help but like people that we know very well, whatever their faults. Understanding leads to sympathy.”

Who is your character’s closest ally? Kill her. His greatest asset? Lose it. His most sacred conviction? Erode it. Deadline? Shorten it.

Escalate the misery. Your character is battling for she believes in. You must throw extra losses at her, ones that surprise both your character and your reader. And remember, kind writer, all this trouble will make your character a better, wiser homo fictus.