I followed the advice from teachers and craft books that said I must create a separate biography for each of my characters. My biography included the character’s astrological sign, where she went to junior high and what sports she played. I spent literally months spinning details for each of my characters.

When it came time to introduce them in scene, my characters rebelled. One morphed from ditsy to sharp-witted; from plump to anorexic. Even her name changed. Why? I put her in the scene and challenged her and she rose up off the page to become something different. Something better.

For me, constructing character biographies is as two-dimensional as constructing detailed plot outlines before I’ve written a scene. Does that mean I believe in letting my story evolve day by day, not knowing where it will lead me? Absolutely not. I have my murder and my murderer, I know what kind of person my murderer is and most of the challenges my protagonist will face. I have the skeleton in place, I have my cast of characters. That’s when I start writing scenes and discover who I’m dealing with.

The characters reveal themselves as they bump against one another and a shape emerges. Once I have a shape, there’s many ways to get to know my character better. Writing exercises help this process along.

Exercise: Take one of these scenarios and write for 10 minutes using a character
you make up on the spot or an existing character.
1. Character caught shoplifting.
2. Seen with an ex by jealous current.
3. Dragged to a party character knows she’ll hate.
4. Late for an important appointment and stuck in traffic.
5. Mate/friend breaks a promise to do something important for the character.

Are you one of those writers who can’t resist the latest book on the writing craft? I am. All someone has to do is mention a craft book and I’m headed to the bookstore.

My current favorites are:

Writing the Breakout Novel, by Donald Maas.

This book addresses the story stakes, meaningful characters and much, much more. All of Maass’ craft books are worthwhile.

Story, by Robert McKee.  Analysis of story structure, character and emotional arcs.

How to Write a Damn Good Novel, by James Frey. The king of conflict takes us back to the basics of dramatic storytelling. You literary novelists out there would find this useful as well.

Story Engineering and Story Physics, by Larry Brooks. Brooks uses the rules of screenwriting to help novelists shape their stories, that and much more. As with Donald Maas, all of Larry’s books are worth reading.

Scene and Structure, by Jack Bickham. How to orchestrate story between scene and sequel. Alas, I keep hearing about this one from my fellow critiquers.

Honorable mention goes to:

If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland, for inspiration.

Writing Down the Bones, By Natalie Goldberg, for free writes.

Bird by Bird, by Annie Lamott, for shitty first drafts.

What are your favorite writing books?

The antagonist is the character that opposes your protagonist because his agenda opposes your protagonist’s agenda. He doesn’t even need to be all that bad, but to make an interesting story he must be as strongly motivated as your hero. He must be an equal match in terms of strength and resources as your protagonist. It’s even more interesting if your antagonist has a bit of an edge.

Think of your antagonist and protagonist as mirror images of one another: each blocking the other’s desire.

Consider Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche DuBois is our fragile protagonist and Stanley the brawling antagonist. They compete for Stella’s affections, loyalty, home and respect. It becomes a battle where only one can possibly succeed. Even though Stanley is rough and crude, we can’t help but see his view of Blanche and his right to be the head of his family.

Even if your antagonist is unsympathetic, so long as he has a powerful desire, the reader can’t help but sympathize. This desire becomes the reason behind why the antagonist commits his deeds. Understanding him gives him a spark of humanity.

And what if your antagonist truly is a villain? Well, that’s okay, too. Did you know that a recent study by Dr. David Buss revealed that 91% of men and 84% of women have fantasized about committing murder? How that informs fiction is that many of us readers are lured by the forbidden. Some of us daydream as we read books about “bad guys” and what it would be like not to be burdened by a moral code.

Go ahead, create a villain, just don’t make him a mustache-twirling-shifty-eyed sonofabitch. Your readers have seen that character ad nauseam. The villain must be psychologically complex. By having both a good and bad side, this antagonist can more fully test our hero.

What makes a good villain? The same qualities that make a good hero: larger-than-life strengths, highly motivated and operating at maximum capacity.

My favorite villains are Mr. Blond, Mr. Dark, Nurse Ratched, Evil Stepmother (Snow White), Hannibal Lecter and the Snow Queen. What do they have in common? Every one of them was stronger than the protagonist which upped the tension for me as I worried for the protagonist.

Who are your favorite villains?

The New York Times film reviewer A.O. Scott once said, “Bad literary adaptations are all alike, but every successful literary adaptation succeeds in its own way. The bad ones are undone by humility, by anxious obeisance to the cultural prestige of literature. The good ones succeed through hubris, through the arrogant assumption that a great novel is not a sacred artifact but rather a lump of interesting material to be shaped according to the filmmaker’s will.”

You want hubris? Who better than Baz Luhrman to retell The Great Gatsby? Since Romeo + Juliet, I’ve been waiting for Baz to hit another homerun. And he absolutely does with The Great Gatsby for the same reason that Romeo +Juliet was so successful. He has a fabulous story as his launch.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age has many parallels to our current time: unmitigated greed, income inequity, the sense of entitlement the wealthy assume, the hysteria of excess. These are the mileposts of the American Dream, and everyone feels that the dream is within reach. But at the heart of The Great Gatsby is the tragic love affair of Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. Daisy is almost in reach, just as the green light at the end of her dock beckons to Gatsby from across the bay. And I feel Gatsby’s heartbreak more deeply than I ever did reading the novel, marvelous as it is.

The movie was brilliantly acted with Leo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire. The score by Jay-Z adds to the excitement, and then there’s Luhrman’s fabulous spectacle. Just be prepared to have your heart broken.

One more thing: The Wall Street Journal HATES this picture. Now, don’t you want to go see it?

You sit down for a day of novel writing. A paragraph later your character rolls up his sleeve and his forearm is tattooed in Chinese script.  You halt your writing and look up Chinese writing on Wikipedia, and following the source material at the end of the article, you order two books on Chinese calligraphy. The next thing you know it’s time for lunch. Is this a good use of your time? Only you know the answer.

The question is: do you need to research before you write the scene in order to inform the writing, or can you write the scene and add the researched layer in the same way a painter would add another dimension to her painting. It’s a question I still struggle with after writing for more than ten years.

When I decided that I wanted to write a mystery, the only thing I knew about criminal investigation was from novels or television, so I took a series of criminal justice classes at my community college. I learned the difference between interrogation and interview, grid searches, accelerants and blood spatter. To add a sense of place I’ve scoped out dive bars and cart culture, and used my friends’ and families’ houses to shelter my characters. I’ve interviewed two detectives and asked a ton of questions of a friend who worked for years as a prosecuting attorney.

That said, I try to keep writing before I stop and research. My story and many of my characters remain fluid through much of a draft. In  A Bitch Called Hope, I had a completely different murderer until six months before my agent sold the story. Which is why a lot of my research ends up in a file cabinet for some future novel. One of my writer friends researches everything before she puts fingertips to keyboard. Her characters spring from her head fully formed. Another writer friend has her character loading a dishwasher in her 19th century novel. “I’ll do the research later,” she says. It makes for a painful critique session.

What is your take on research?

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.

The best characters want something badly. When people or circumstances block the protagonist from getting what he wants we have conflict. Consider what would thwart our protagonist from reaching his goal, then give the power to block the goal to your antagonist. Why does she block our hero? Because her desire is both opposite and as intense as your protagonist’s desire. Give this opposition a two-way urgency: a deadline, a ticking clock. Whether you’re writing literary fiction or genre, your protagonist must have a fierce desire and someone or something must block him from what he wants.

Many of us fall in love with our characters. Like a parent, we want to shield them from arguments, injury, embarrassment, all the things that sensible people shy away from. If we devise a situation that gives our character pain, we take the action “off-camera.” Fight this impulse, writers! Fight it with everything you’ve got.

Look at a scene and ask yourself, what is the worst possible thing that could happen to my character at this moment? Enact it and see how your character deals with adversity. Make sure he’s operating with maximum capacity.

That said, it’s a wise writer that doesn’t swing so far that her characters resemble Job.  Your readers grow fatigued with all that trouble. Astrid Magnussen in White Oleander is an example of the writer giving her poor protagonist too many hardships to overcome. Obviously that’s a matter of taste, and a lot of people disagree with me.

Vary the trouble. The reader’s interest is piqued when your character is embarrassed, fearful or falls in or out of love. Readers love to be surprised.
To create surprise,  look at your pivotal scenes and asks yourself what’s likely to happen next. Then write the exact opposite of that.

When you finish your novel, chart the intensity of trouble and see what kind of pattern it forms. Do you have a rising sense of trouble as your novel reaches its climax?