Your characters need to be goal driven, they need to take action. What they don’t need is perfection. Why? Perfect is boring. Remember Melanie Hamilton in Gone with the Wind? Boring. Scarlett for all her flaws is the unforgettable character because she seems real to us, because she wants to save Tara and she’s willing to do anything. It’s dangerous creating a character like Scarlett: if she’s too unsympathetic, readers won’t follow her through an entire novel. If you feel compelled to write an unsympathetic character, give her a goal we can get behind and give us hope the character will grow into someone we can admire.

Roger in Jo Nesbo’s novel, Headhunters is an example of an unsympathetic character with a compelling goal: he’s being pursued by a super-human killer and he wants to stay alive. Why do I care? Roger, for all his faults, is a smart man and he tries with every gram of resourcefulness he can conjure to stay alive. I had to admire him.

Back to flaws: alcoholism and substance abuse has been done again and again, so if you’re willing to take my advice, think of something different. Lionel Essrog in Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn is a perfect example of a flawed character. He’s resourceful, smart, goal driven, and totally handicapped by Tourette syndrome. I loved Lionel and stole time to finish reading his story.

What’s your character’s flaw? Make a list of 50 flaws. By the thirteenth, I predict you’ll be getting into some fascinating territory. Remember, you have to live with this condition during the writing of an entire novel so make it something you’re interested in and have sympathy for.

Once you have your flawed character make sure your other characters react to the flaw. Do they poke fun at your character, do they dismiss him? How does your character react to their derision? Does he get angry? Depressed? It’s in these interactions that your characters come to life. It’s magic, it really is.

When I pick up a book I’m agreeing to live with the novel’s characters for many, many hours. More hours than I would spend at dinner with friends, at a party or a family reunion. I have to either love the characters or relate to their struggle on a deep level or I’ll toss the book because there’s a whole shelf of unread books that I’m just dying to pick up. So how does an aspiring writer create a character that a reader will follow for 300 pages?

One common mistake (the one I made through several short stories) was to write about characters that resembled me. I’m loveable, I have struggles, so why not? The problem is that like most writers I’m a bookish, conflict-adverse, passive creature. No one wants to read about me, not even my own husband. That’s because I’m a homo sapiens, and the kind of characters readers turn pages for are what Jim Frey calls homo fictus.

The homo fictus looks, thinks and feels like a homo sapiens. The reader believes the character is like him, but there are some fundamental differences. The homo fictus is active. When she’s faced with a challenge she does her very best to overcome the obstacle. No one wants to read about a character paralyzed by indecision. No one wants to read about a character victimized by their circumstances. It’s boring. It’s depressing. Don’t do it.

Homo fictus is goal-driven. Being goal-driven is the single most important quality a successful character can have, more important than being likeable. The best example I can think of is Jo Nesbo’s  wonderful novel, The Headhunters. The protagonist, Roger Brown, is a real bastard, but very early in the story he has to fight with every resource he can command to stay alive. I couldn’t help it, I wanted desperately for him to succeed. So desperately that I stole time from work to finish the book. FYI: it was worth the stolen time.

All goals are not created equal. My goal is to write ten novels before I die. I don’t believe many readers would find that compelling. Fighting for your life, saving the family farm, never going hungry again: those are goals most readers would commit to.

My new book, Betting Blind, is about a women, a female Don Juan, who preys on the lonely using computer dating sites. I’ve been researching how unsuspecting people can lose their shirts to the unscrupulous. With very little information  my Donna Juan can reach into her victims’ bank accounts, their mail, their entire e-presence.

Over dinner last weekend a friend of ours told us that computer firewalls had become obsolete. Why? It’s far more likely that our computers will be hacked through social engineering. Social engineering, as defined by Wikipedia, is the art of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information… it is typically trickery or deception for the purpose of information gathering, fraud, or computer system access.

What I find fascinating about this whole field of criminal behavior is how it’s accomplished by trickery and not by blunt force. I’m starting to get my own ideas…

I found some great examples of social engineering here: “Social Engineering: The Basics”.

Who knows what another person’s  life is really like? It’s the chief reason I love mystery. Seeing justice served is all very well, but what I’m really interested in is peering under the hood of my fellow human’s life and seeing the inner workings of an outwardly perfect life. And it’s never Norman Rockwell, baby.

Get home from December gridlock traffic, the endless shopping and errand running and curl up to a Christmas murder.

Here’s some of my favorites:
Murder for Christmas,  by Agatha Christie
The Shortest Day, by Jane Langton
Death of a Fool, by Ngaio Marsh
Mistletoe Mayhem, edited by Richard Dalby
Holmes for the Holidays, edited by Martin H Greenberg, J Lellenberg and Carol Waugh
A Rumpole Christmas, by John Mortimer
Murder for Christmas, edited by Thomas Godfrey

Check out these wonderful interviews about creativity—wonderful out-of-the-box thinking.
http://ttbook.org/book/jonah-lehrer-imagine-how-creativity-works
http://ttbook.org/book/austin-kleon-steal-artist
http://ttbook.org/book/kenneth-goldsmith-uncreative-writing

“Mirror, Mirror” is the first of two offerings this spring of the Snow White story. The second film, starring Charlize Theron, is a darker, edgier version of the old tale.

Someone on the radio, I didn’t catch her name, was speculating why Snow White is replacing the Cinderella story told, told and re-told throughout the eighties. She pointed to our youth culture and the Boomers’ obsession with health, fitness, botox, etc-you-get-the-picture. No longer do older women look older the way they did back in the old days.

I think  that the  Snow White story points to the increasing tensions between the Boomers and the Gen-Xers and Millennials. The perception is that the Boomers hold nearly all the money and the power and most of them refuse to retire leaving the youngsters asking if you want whip on your mocha. And when they DO retire they’ll bleed the social security fund dry. It’s enough to make a person give up and take a nap. Well, at  least Snow White has her youth and beauty.

Who knew that George Costanza could be so right?
According to Michael Shermer  citing Robert Trivers’s “The Folly of Fools”, liars need to practice keeping their voices in a lower register, maintaining eye contact, and controlling their gestures so that they don’t appear nervous. And liars need to think harder than truthful people to keep their story both plausible and consistent. But all of that hard work  isn’t necessary if you believe the lie.

As a fiction writer I’ve seen first-hand how my memories can be replaced by fictionalized versions as I write draft after draft of a story.

I’m really excited about this year’s Oscars. Billy Crystal as host—yay! I’ve dusted off the popcorn maker and read all the movie gossip about who’s going to win what.
Word on the street is  “The Artist” will win Best Picture. But if Omer Mozzaffar, “How to Win An Academy Award”,  is correct this most coveted prize goes to the story that follows the hero’s journey. You  know, hero gets the call to action, resists but capitulates, goes on a journey, encounters the evil one, does battle, yada yada.
But wait a minute,  “The Artist” is very French and the French don’t give a rip about the hero’s journey.

My hero the sublime Elmore Leonard inspired this latest writing contest: write one sentence breaking all or as many of Leonard’s ten rules of writing as you can. In case you’re unfamiliar with his rules, here they are:

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the word “said.”
5. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
6. Keep your exclamation points under control.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Send your entry by midnight February 1, 2012 along with your postal address to: Day6@CBC.ca, The subject line should read “Elmore.”

Good luck and may the worst writer win.

Turns out reading Lee Child may be more beneficial than reading back issues of The Wall Street Journal or that three volume biography of Benjamin Franklin your brother-in-law gave you for Christmas.

Anne Kreamer makes a compelling argument for reading fiction in The Harvard Business Review: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/01/the_business_case_for_reading.html

Stories are like computer simulations only for understanding human nature.  Our brains actually fire up as if we were actually experiencing Stories teach us to empathize with people who are different from us, and as a result of reading fiction we become more open-minded and socially intelligent.

For those of you who know me personally and are wondering why I’m reading The Harvard Business Review——it’s all research, baby.