Characters build the novel. If your
protagonists don’t have enough substance so you can get into their soul and
experience what they feel, or you can predict how they are going to respond to a situation, you are going to lose
your reader. Beginning writers hear, from their writer’s group constantly, the
words, “Show, don’t tell.” Isn’t enough to say, ‘he felt lonely, alone and
abandoned’?
No, it is not. Consider my male
protagonist, Gideon, in Maddie’s Choice. Grandparents raised Gideon and his
brother when their parents were killed. Zeke was about ten. Gid was about six. His
grandfather, who had no time for the rebellious Gid, favored Zeke. After Gid’s
grandmother died, when he was about ten, there was no love at all for Gid, so
he joined the military right after high school, and became a sniper in
Afghanistan, which led to his return to the ranch with Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder.
Now, this is entirely too much backstory
to dump on a reader during a scene. Bits and pieces of this are revealed
throughout the book, but I use a flashback scene to reveal the source of
Gideon’s loneliness. To whit:
“A wisp of memory floated through his
mind, of a time right after his parents disappeared. He was six years old,
feeling sad and lost because his dad had gone. He wondered if they were dead,
but the word was never used. He’d been told Dad and Mom went to “a better
place,” and it confused him. They were his whole world. Why would they go
someplace better and leave him behind?
On that day, lonely and yearning for
comfort, he’d found his grandfather working in his office. Needing to be held.
He tried to climb up onto his lap, only to be pushed off.
“I don’t have time to play with you,
Gideon. Go find Zeke.”
As young as he was, he understood that is
grandfather was lost to him. His older brother, Zeke, was the favored one with
lap privileges.”
Where did that scene come from? It came
to mind when I remembered something similar happening to my young son and his
grandfather.
As I said before, draw from within
yourself to give life to your writing. This tale is a preface to a PTSD attack
in which Gideon seeks refuge in the corner of the barn, where Maddie finds him.
This is much better than simply saying, “Lonely,
and distraught, he sought refuge in the corner of the barn.”
I’ve had readers ask me if Maddie was
somehow me in this book. Well, yeah, as it will be in every other book. If you
don’t pour yourself into your book . . . the famous advice to ‘open a vein and
bleed,’ your readers won’t sense the realness of the story. It doesn’t have to
be you, but you have to listen to every conversation you will ever have and
sense the story underneath, so you might use it.
There is a t-shirt out there that says, ”Careful,
you might be in my next book.”
So true!
