Five Traits

So Pirate Boy's teacher is going out on maternity leave and the substitute sent home a note asked me to "describe" my child so she can get to know him as she takes over for the next few weeks. Yeah . . . long-time readers, pick yourselves up from the floor. DESCRIBE Pirate Boy.

Well, she must have caught me in a mood. Because I didn't FEEL like describing him. I mean he is EVERYTHING to me. He is infuriating and wonderful and a maniac and a wild man, and how can I POSSIBLY sum him up? So, poor woman, this is the gist of what I wrote:

I think of my child as an iconoclast. He is cautious about strangers until he gets to know you, and then he is wickedly and subversively funny with an extraordinary vocabulary. He doesn't suffer fools gladly. He is a lefty--he has terrible handwriting. I love him.~His Mom

Yeah.

But I got to thinking. We all "sum up" in life. Our characters, our friends. In a group of pals, who's the loud one, the funny one, the serious one, the . . . .

I also stepped back and looked at the sum total of my characters--seeing the common traits. Nearly always, it's courage. I didn't realize how important that was--not when I was a kid. I think I thought "real life" was fairly ordinary. But live a while, bury a few loved ones, survive an illness, survive other things, and you realize it takes a fair amount of courage to get through life, to get back up when you get knocked down. The other shared trait is a sense of humor (often but not always).

So I tried to think of five traits I would use to describe the hero in my work-in-progress.

• Courageous
• Brilliant
• Dedicated
• Devoted
• Enigmatic/difficult to read

Your turn . . . five traits for your hero or heroine. And how scared do you think Pirate Boy's new teacher is about now?

Courage

In one of those delightful bits of serendipity, a chance phone call with a client, who ended up becoming a friend and occasional Skype partner (we do Happy Hour long distance), and I discovered we both believe most of life can be explained through the analogy of the Wizard of Oz movie. The Yellow Brick Road, clicking our heels. It's the Zen of the Wizard of Oz.

And I was thinking lately about courage.

And the kinds of people who have it. And the kinds who don't.

In the last few months, I had the misfortune of possessing a front row ticket to moral cowardice, back stabbing, and gossip. Thank GOD in heaven I don't anymore. I suppose in the grand scheme of things, these events always occur--to us, to friends, to our children. Bullies in schools, bully bosses, and Desperate Housewives with scheming agendas. But I've always been a bit of a Pollyanna. I've always believed in people. I always believed if you did the best you could, the right thing, tried to be kind, things always worked out for the best. And come on now . . . at my age, I don't know that's not always the case? In one instance, it's someone with a strong personality who regales others with tales of "telling people off." As if that's a good thing. And maybe from a societal standard, AGGRESSIVE communicators (versus ASSERTIVE) are thought of as strong. I have heard that certain CEOs, Steve Jobs among them, are so blistering, verbally abusive, withering, etc., in the face of perceived errors or the slightest bit of perceived weakness, that they are truly terrifying. There are whole COMPANIES with toxic fear pulsing through them because the culture is this sort of extreme nastiness. I know the profile of Enron, post-collapse, all pointed to this sort of communication style. Abusive in nature, with backstabbing tossed in for extra fun.

And I know the people AROUND people like that tend to buy into it. Drink the Kool-Aid. Well, you can't be head of a zillion-dollar company without being like that. Can you? I'd like to think so (see, I really HAVEN'T given up being a Pollyanna). I mean, can't we talk about issues on TV without saying hateful things? The culture wars have reached hideous proportions. KIDS think it's okay to be nasty because their parents are . . . and let's not forget the talking head on x or y channel? Or better yet? The tweets of this politician or that one.

Now, this guy writes about someone with the skill set to save the world from terrorists. Trust me, you want this hero in your corner. Courage. REAL courage.

But I think there's quieter courage too. Maybe more important now than ever. The sort of people who quietly do what needs doing. In my wip, in the face of a world gone mad, two people choose to remain loving to each other, to nurse a friend, to love their dog, to just go on living. Sometimes, going on LIVING and (way more importantly) LOVING in the face of horrifying surroundings or events, is a fierce act of great courage. Anne Frank comes to mind.

And I don't think courage is the person who can yell the loudest . . . the talking heads on TV who scream about morality. Courage is not unkindness. Courage is not "anonymous" posts on various boards with ugly sentiments. Courage is overhearing a racist sentiment or a piece of ugly gossip, even if one is in a group and QUIETLY saying, "That's not right." It's sure as heck not getting in someone's face to defend your position. Courage is sometimes admitting you are NOT RIGHT. Wow . . . what a concept.

The courageous are teachers sometimes. Soldiers at other times. Firefighters. Mothers. I don't think (much as I adore my Yankees and NY Giants--and HELLO! FOOTBALL SEASON IS ALMOST HERE!) courage is much found on the field. Not in my definition of it. I don't think if you are paid $100 MILLION dollars and you win some game in crazy overtime that you are particularly "courageous." That's what you're paid to do. But I think sometimes, yes, showing up after a death in your family or a terrible event, and still playing the game? I give you that.

Full confession. I used to be the sort who would, by virtue of being articulate, "get into it" with other people. But my opinion of what is cowardice and what is grace has been reshaped over the last ten years. Now, I'm more like Lion. I do believe in spooks. I do believe in spooks. I do, I do, I do. Hell, they're all around. But you do the right thing anyway. Just like Lion.

And one more thing . . . I like courageous main characters. Sometimes, they're like Derek Stillwater. Sometimes not. Sometimes they are moms trying to do the right thing. Sometimes they are middle-grade monsters going to a new school. Sometimes they have flashy careers and sometimes they just are making their way through the world. But courage is something I like seeing in novels I read. It's just not always the kind of courage the rest of the world thinks of first.

What is courage to you? And how does your main character embody it? Read any books with courageous characters lately? Seen any flying monkeys lately?

Namaste.

Turtle in the Road

The other day, on a busy stretch of a four-lane highway, I stopped my car to pick up a turtle that had crawled into the road, and I carried it to the side where I sent it on its way toward a pond.
I thought . . . this is the sort of thing my heroines would do.

I've been setting about creating a love interest in a YA idea I am working on. And I thought a lot about what I think is my ideal of beauty. And I thought about all the heroines I have created over the course of all my romantic comedies, and all my other novels. Most are attractive. One or two have been "beautiful"--the kind of woman to really cause people to pause (Ava in The Roofer, for example). But most of them, I think, are beautiful by virtue of their inner selves.

I had posted in the comments section from yesterday the idea that I know a couple of women who are very beautiful on the outside. And very not-so-beautiful on the inside. Almost in proportion to their external beauty. And I have know many, many, many women in my life who have been plainer by society's standards, and they have grown to be so incredibly beautiful in my eyes. They radiate something from the inside that transforms them.

In fact, I suppose by the standards of a lot of romance writers, I spend actually very little time describing the external appearance of my heroines. There's a detail or two. Usually hair color or length. Maybe some unique feature, like freckles (Kate in Freudian Slip). But that's it. Instead, I spend a lot of time describing who they ARE inside.

In my adult wip, Memory Falls, Evie is a documentary filmmaker, and she is very pretty (even when she shaves her head at one point), but to me she is most beautiful when she interacts with an elderly woman and kneels down to look her in the eyes and make a true connection with her.

Those are the moments of beauty in life. Like helping a turtle cross the road. Or kissing a child's boo-boo.

I have a friend [we'll see if he comments] working on a book with an UGLY hero. But I am finding, like Shrek . . . I am rather finding him endearing.

Thoughts? What is beauty? What outer actions reflect your hero or heroine's inner life?

Have a beautiful day!

Hidden Talents

When I was a little girl, my Russian grandmother was an enigma to me. She never (and I mean never) cracked a smile. She spoke with a thick accent. She would walk--in the middle of summer--MILES to the grocery store down the sides of highways and lug back groceries rather than wait for a ride. She wasn't touchy-feely. And, frankly, she was a terrible cook. When she would babysit me, she would make (!!) me drink bitter tea with milk in it. INSIST on it. And she would tell me horrible stories about the Communists that murdered people she cared about.

We never talked. Not really. She was too different. Too much a Russian--brooding and usually very unhappy and pessimistic. EVERYTHING was gonna kill you. But one night, after I was showered and in my pajamas, she asked me if I wanted her to curl my hair. Like all girls with straight hair, I wanted curls. Ringlets. And so I of course agreed. She ended up ripping up a New York Times magazine section and wrapping my hair with magazines. And WRAPPING does not do this process justice. It was torture. I swear I thought huge clumps of my hair were going to be pulled out by the roots. In the end, there I was, like Medusa, with MAGAZINE pages all wrapped around my hair. They hurt, pressed up to my face. I had no idea how I was supposed to sleep with these things on. As usual . . . my grandmother was . . . in a word . . . as weird as ever.

Except. The next day, she unraveled all my magazines, and I had ringlets. Not just ANY ringlets either. They were PERFECT ringlets. Ringlets that, shockingly, never grew limp as the day wore on. My grandmother, taciturn, refused to tell me how she learned this trick. But my aunt told me that was how my grandmother wrapped her hair in Russia--in newspapers. And that the way she did it worked better than hot rollers even.

Lo and behold . . . my grandmother had a hidden talent.

One of my favorite ways of showing, not telling, of weaving back story, is through hidden talents. Those things characters can do--that come with a tiny story. Might be a sentence. Might be a paragraph. The character who can ink a prison tattoo--because he's been in prison once. Or, in two of my books, the Amazing Coaster Trick--learned in a bar at age 7. THAT ONE is based on me. And I really DID bring my beer coasters to second grade for show and tell and do my Amazing Coaster Trick, taught to me by Eddie the Fox. And my teacher really DID call my mother to tell her how inappropriate it was for a young girl to be hanging out in the Bowery on Sundays learning coaster tricks from men named Eddie the Fox. But hey . . . you want to win a bar bet? I'm your gal. It's a hidden talent--and one I've given a character or two of mine, like Ava in THE ROOFER and Skye in DOUBLE DOWN.

So tell me . . . what hidden talent do YOU have? And what about your character?

World Series--Second Base

Let me bask in this day. For a moment. GREAT game last night, and for once, Burnett didn't choke.

On to the next World Series post.

I have a very strange confession to make.

I like baseball. I really do. I like going to the stadium. I like rooting for my team. I really (!!) like farm teams maybe even more than the major leagues. I like the atmosphere. I like being close to the field and cheering. And occasionally heckling. But there's an entirely unexpected, unusual reason why I love baseball. It's so evocative as to be . . . well, weird and eccentric, but it's totally true.

I like the sound.

Growing up, my most favorite place in the entire universe was not home. It was my grandmother's house. I could bore you all with the thousands of little reasons why, but it was basically heaven to me. I could, ALL (ahem) these years later, "walk" you through the apartment and every detail in it from memory. And the "soundtrack" of my time there was . . . baseball. I forgive my grandparents in that they rooted for the Mets, but no matter, that strange sub-roar of the crowd . . . perculiar only to baseball . . . that is the soundtrack of childhood for me, or at least the happiest part of it. For some reason, when I hear baseball on TV, it is as calming to me as a lullaby.

Football--those announcers work in quiet, generally--and even if they are talking over the crowd, it's a totally different roar. But baseball announcers, that unusual commentary they give, it's always over the chattering roar of the crowd, and it's a true play-by-play as it's happening. That's why I love it. As I snuggled down into bed last night to watch my beloved Yankees, it was the sounds as much as their game, that made me feel like all was right with the world. It's not something I've ever told anyone. But that strange sound only in the world of baseball is what makes me feel happy inside.

So second base today . . .

What is something "unexpected" about your character?

What I See

This is the opening line of my new possible proposal . . .

Camden, New Jersey, smelled of diesel fuel and desperation.

It establishes setting. And it establishes voice. And it establishes that Rob is the kind of guy who notices that. The line may change. It may not. But no matter if it changes or doesn't change . . . the art of getting inside a character's head is to notice what they notice.

I don't think the average guy notices what kind of pattern is on my couch. My Oldest Son, age 14, has lived with the couch for four years. I doubt he could tell you its color. But I was once in a waiting room with him for approximately three minutes and by the time we were show in to the doctor, he offhandedly remaked, "Did you notice there were 64 ceiling tiles and one of them had a crack in it?"

Um. Nope. Didn't notice. He notices how many steps to buildings and how many cracks he steps over on what I think is a merely random walk down the street. He thinks in math. He doesn't say, "My birthday is August 10"--he will announce the birthday statistics throughout the year, like "It's 187 days and four hours and 11 minutes until my birthday."

Oldest Daughter thinks in music. And she notices clothes. Like apparently you can't wear brown shoes with black pants.

What do I see? I see people's lies and mannerisms. I think I would make a good interrogator. I see when someone is shifty. I see when the woman the next street over spouts about praying for someone and in the next breath viciously gossips or makes a snide remark about someone's child. I see the mom up the street who slurs and clutches her coffee cup just a LITTLE too tightly in the a.m. She is rude. She is loud. I don't think she can walk a straight line. She has insulted my kid. I have little doubt she has vodka or something in that coffee cup. I'm just grateful her son rides the bus instead of her driving. I see how people establish a pecking order at parties, how some people don't talk TO you but at you. I see the world by the people in it, and that's just what I notice. I have a photographic memory, or close to it, so I can tell you, though I have only been there once, the precise color of someone's paint and what they had on their fireplace mantle and the pattern on their dishes. I don't MEAN to retain it. It is just what I see.

So I consider it an incredibly important writing trait that, when discovering your character's voice, you ensure you describe what THEY see. How they piece together the world. Rob notices depseration and crack vials. As the book goes on, I have doubt he will always notice how many people he might be up against in a fight.

What does YOUR character notice?

Character Traits: The Little Things All Around

Oldest Daughter is home from college. Classical music plays so loud the house shakes.

"Sorry I have to listen to it on the living room stereo. I can't listen to classical in my room. The speakers I have wouldn't let me play it this loud."

We're talking LOUD, folks. Shouting to coverse loud. So loud the neighbors hear it. But you might ask, "Why not play it in your room at a more reasonable volume?" But then YOU are not a parent of a classical violinist.

"Okay," I said.

But just in case, as if I needed her to explain (which I did not . . . I have been her mother for 19 years after all), she added, "Because to really listen to the New World Symphony, to classical, you need it ALL AROUND YOU."

I wonder if someone was writing a novel about a classical violinist if they would remember to get that right.

Baby Girl never matches her socks. Yesterday's were neon orange on the right foot, purple on the left. A t-shirt with a black vest over it. She is an artist at heart. If writing a novel about an artist. Would you remember to not match their socks? (Check out the link on the CEO of a company that sells umatched socks.)

When people tack on traits as afterthoughts, they forget to make it like classical music. ALL around, all through, vibrating through the character so you can organically feel it. A tremor. A pulse. A crescendo.

It's the little things made very real. All around. All the way through.

What's a little thing that reveals much about you or your character?

Happy Sunday!

Inhabit

I had the good fortune to have a table reading of one of my short stories by two actors a few years ago. My thought had been to adapt the short story into a one-act play. Called "Waiting for the Monkeyman," the story was about a woman with AIDS who grew up on the fringes of society in the world of prostitutes. I wrote it first-person, and it had a dialect.

One of the table readers was a woman. The spin she put on it was nothing like I had imagined. I didn't warm up to it. The other reader was a man. I actually liked how he inhabited my female character . . . and it was more in line with my vision.

If you ever have the opportunity to do something like this, grab it. In fact, I have come to believe in it so much, I would say it's worth it to try to arrange, particularly if you write in first person--but even otherwise.

Why?

We often joke around here that a set of quirks does not make a character. Genius often likes to post character ideas here poking fun at the whole idea of quirks taken to the extreme--I have no doubt he will trot out his gin-swilling midget detective with a hunchback or whatever it was he posted last time. He is great at pointing out just how quirky a character can get. And the idea with the table reading is that you can create a series of quirks on paper, you can create what you think is a good character, but until that character becomes flesh, blood, and believable, it will remain a cobbled-together set of traits.

Even Law & Order: Criminal Intent's new Jeff Goldblum character . . . the brilliant, "out there" detective who also plays piano, who is distracted, speaks obtusely at times, is awkward at others . . . someone WROTE that part. And it's entirely possible that played by another actor, it would seem . . . a mess of characterization, but Goldblum inhabits the skin of that kind of part, so it works.

So how do you know when your character has started to be inhabited? The table reading showed me that dialect alone, for example, cannot be enough. Nor can dialogue. There are a whole range of emotions, body language and nuances that are important. A couple of odd traits are not a character. Traits can be a tic . . . something memorable . . . but that's not enough.

I think a character starts to be inhabited when--table reader or regular reader--others already KNOW what the character will do in a situation. Ever watch a TV show or a movie, and something happens and you think, Oooooooooh, man, when so-and-so finds out they not only stole his car but they took his damn DOG, he is going to go ballistic. The bad guys are really going to regret that. In other words, the character has already established what is meaningful.

Thoughts?

E

P.S. He who WAS taking a break now has a book contract and his blog is up. Go congratulate him.
P.P.S. Magickeepers comes out on Friday. And I am definitely looking to visit blogs all over cyberspace the month of May. If you are interested, email me at erica@ericaorloff.com.

Character Traits: Why Bring It Up?

I love my father more than just about anyone in this world, but there's an unspoken rule of thumb when around him. You avoid certain topics. Don't bring up overcrowded schools, unless you want a ten-minute rant on the downfall of the U.S. educational system. Don't bring up a problem, unless you want to be asked about it for possibly the next decade ("So how IS that cyst you told me about five years ago?"). Just don't bring it up. It's not worth it. Even the most innocuous of subjects--pizza--comes with a long diatribe--don't even ask, it's not worth it. So when around my father, I have long list of "safe" topics, most of them sunny. They often involve bragging about my kids--ANYTHING positive about a grandkid is safe for discussion within reason. So Baby Girl's piano lessons are fair game for the next two years, at which point he will be asking why she hasn't moved on to the Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30 by Sergei Rachmaninoff ("And REALLY, just how good is this piano teacher anyway? What are her references?") Oldest Daughter adores my dad--and the fact that she's a musician? Well, many, many gold stars for that one in his book.

Ever meet one of those people who like to get their digs into conversation, so they "conveniently" bring up something from the past? We all know people like that. My main thought is always "WHY bring this up?" I actually once heard from a woman via Facebook who had perfect recall of a 6th grade lunchroom incident and felt the need to bring it up. Not only did I not recall the incident, I don't get bringing it up decades later.

But none of these "bring it up" scenarios apply to character development. If you bring it up . . . you better bring it.

What do I mean? It's NOT enough to make a cop an alcoholic as a character defect or flaw. Done to death, first of all. But WHY BRING IT UP unless his drinking causes him to blow a case. Causes him trouble in the very book. Real trouble, significant trouble.

In fact, better not to TELL us this flaw. Just show it anyway.

I have an alcoholic ex-priest in my work-in-progress. I show it. But, more so, when he falls completely into the bottle about a quarter of the way through the book, the female lead character faces an agonizing choice. Throw her lot in with an unreliable sometime-drunk who has demon experience (and really, how many of those are there in the world?) or . . . well, damn, she has no other choice. So she has a sense of anxiety over her once he sobers up--when is he going to crack again? And where will that leave her?

This is where I think editors talk about organic storytelling. About tacked-on traits. Quirks with no reason for being there other than to be quirky.

If the trait is there, it should serve the story. Everything serves the story.

Why else would you bring it up?

Oh . . . and one more thing I've lately come to feel very strongly about. Yes, my characters run my life. They present themselves fully formed. And it's all right for me to tell my fellow writers my characters' back story. It's all right for me to possess an encyclopedic knowledge about my characters. I have little control over that, it's just how I am. It's how they are.

What's not okay is to insert all that knowledge into the story. I CAN control that. And if story isn't running the show . . . if you aren't in control there . . . if you aren't writing to the higher purpose of story, but instead just to make characters interesting, then you can run the risk of ending up with a book of fascinating character sketches. And not much more. If you bring it to the book, it should be exploited.

Thoughts?

Character Building

So where do these people in my head come from? I often wonder, since they chatter away incessantly.

I am playing around with a Shiny New Idea. And I am dissecting the process of character creation as I am doing it.

In this case, I started with a career because the career is central to the plot. But I have had many books in which the main character's career was a side note, a way for them to earn a paycheck until the real crux of the problem took over.

Next a name. Tricky. I usually start with a baby name book. I almost always have characters with identifiable families of origin. They are Irish or Italian or Russian or African-American or bi-racial, or . . . My own experience is that some of my life has been most definitely colored by the traditions of my mother's Slavic family--from the foods we ate at holidays to the weddings we had, to our funeral luncheons. So I tend to give my characters families that do the same.

Appearance. I spend very little time on this. I don't know why, but beyond a couple of identifying details, I don't think it's important. Most readers are going to create a picture of the character in their own mind anyway. I have actually had readers write to me and say, "I picture Teddi as looking like Elaine on Seinfeld . . . am I close?" Hey, if that is what works for them . . . go for it.

Traits. I nearly always write about geniuses because I suppose I don't think it would be terribly interesting to write about people who aren't smart. Sometimes the genius is very upfront (Cassie Hayes in Spanish Disco wore her genius a little closer to the surface). Sometimes it's just something I know. Or they may not be true geniuses, but they are very bright, plus have other talents. While I never watched the show, I always thought the MacGyver was a fun hero because he could use his brains to invent crap on the fly. I need to know my character's talents. Good cook? Writer? Compassionate? Scientific? Once I figure out the traits, then it's on to the best part.

The back story. Mine are hugely elaborate. I have helped a couple of famous people write their memoirs. And I always came back to the point that for most of us, though we are shaped by our entire lives, when recounting the highlights and lowest points, we usually have ten or so seminal moments--those events that we really think are KEY to who we are. The back stories for my characters are about those moments.

In Invisible Girl, my character is a recovering alcoholic. When she is confronted with having to stitch her brother up with a sewing needle and thread on her living room floor, she finds it's rather like riding a bicycle. Her seminal moment, the first time she drank for courage, was having to stitch up her father's bullet wound on his back when she was a teen. He told her to pour them both shots, and he talked her through the process for digging out the bullet with a knife, which nearly makes her pass out, and then stitching the wound up. Afterwards, she drank until she passed out and stopped her brain from thinking about the bullet wound--and more importantly, the type of father who gets bullet wounds. Not only did my character discover that the shot or two of alcohol give her courage, but she had tried not to think about her father and what he did when he didn't come home at night. Now there was no avoiding the truth. A seminal moment.

Some of these moments make it in the book. Some are just a single line sneaked in here or there. One time, I read a review of one of my books in which a woman just was furious that I had clearly not made my character's age right because she couldn't have been going to clubs at a certain age unless she was much older. Except that the woman missed "club kid"--which is a specific reference to kids getting into clubs below legal age.

Once this immense back story is created, then I get to write the first word. It's not that certain events don't happen when I am writing so that I add more back story . . . but I need most of this in place before I can even begin.

How about you?

Spock

This is for all my Trekkie buddies. I love you, but I just don't understand you. :-)

Spock was the logical one--his mother was a human, and dear old daddy was a Vulcan. I am not going to say anything more, because surely I will them mess up on Spock's life history, thereby uncurring the wrath of Trekkies.

But most of us . . . we're not Spock. There are some things we do as humans that simply make NO SENSE. Case in point, I am planning on visiting Oldest Daughter by train. I like trains. I like them less than cars, a lot less than walking, but more than planes and WAY more than buses. I am utterly phobic about buses. Cannot GET ON a bus (not kidding). I SEE a bus and break out in a cold sweat. I feel trapped and claustrophobic on buses.

Oldest daughter asks why do I hate buses but not hate trains. Well, for one, on trains, you can get up and walk around. They have bathrooms. They have club cars. "So then why do planes bug you so much? You can get up and walk around." OBVIOUSLY, it's because planes crash. Not often, but that doesn't matter. I used to have to fly heavily medicated--I mean, enough tranquilizers to put down a lame racehorse. But no more--thanks to deep breathing, prayer, and forcing myself to fly sometimes. Still . . . not LOVING the plane as a transportation vehicle. Now . . . none of the statistics about ANY of these elements makes any sense of my phobias. In fact, I KNOW (before anyone starts trotting out stats), that cars crash. Often. Doesn't matter. I am illogical.

I think my mailman is a serial killer. When he arrives at my mailbox, my mother, when she visits, is amused at how I wait until he is three houses up before I retrieve my mail. Do I have a REASON for thinking he is a serial killer? The first few times I was out at my mailbox when he arrived, he talked way too much to me. He creeps me out. Reason enough. Illogical? Indeed, Captain Kirk. I think my mailman reads my mail--where it's from, who's writing to me.

Clowns. Look, I won't even go into how dangerous they are. I dont' have to tell you WHY. I don't.

So bringing it back to the writing . . . I think when searching for ways to make characters real and interesting, it's important to not be too logical. Real people aren't built logical. Spock is. But flesh and blood people are full of contradictions, and things that make zero sense, but somehow make sense in that person's worldview.

One of my favorite D.A. series, the Butch Karp series, has the D.A. build a powerhouse team. Except that he hires his lawyers based on what position they can play for his softball team. Logical to Karp. Illogical to Spock.

So . . . Trekkies . . . how Spockian are you? What about your characters?

How Soon Is Now?

Most of us are guilty, at some time or another, of judging someone before we really know them. I try not to. I think as we go through life, we learn the lesson that we shouldn't. When we're teenagers, we tend to judge people by what they wear or who they hang out with . . . and there's that first time we meet someone we assume to be not our type only to discover they really aren't so bad after all. When I was in high school, and maybe I can drag out my prom picture and scan it, I dated a jock. ME! Me, skipping my entire senior year . . . tutoring a jock who I considered dumber than dirt (because I was, of course, an opinionated teen), and discovering a nice guy after all. He didn't get to graduate (so much for my tutoring skills), but he got the girl. We dated for a year and a half.

When we get a little older, we still judge. Maybe less on clothes and more on behavior. I can't tell you how many times I would meet someone who was an utter jerk. Only to discover they had lost a child, or their wife had cancer, or there was some other tragedy behind their behavior. Thus the roots of compassion are born. We start to understand and see the world less from a ME-ME-ME perspective and start to see that every person we encounter has a story, and we're not privy to it.

But here's the thing . . . . when writing, I now realize I need readers to form some pretty fast judgments. By the end of chapter one, they should have some pretty clear picture of who this main character is. We don't have to dump the entire back story there. But human beings do a pretty good job of filling in the blanks. So there must simply be enough quirks and dialogue cues, enough of a conflict and behavior, that we "get" who the main character is, and hopefully decide to stick with him or her.

The trick, too, is to make sure there's enough of a character arc for CHANGE to occur. We don't want to "know" them on page 1 and by page 300 not see anything new.

So, opening any one of my books or works in progress . . . I see what I fit into chapter one. In Spanish Disco by the end of the first chapter you know that Cassie Hayes is a book editor, a bitch (she really is very snarky), and having phone sex with her favorite author, who lives in London. She never cooks, keeps her condo in Florida colder than an icebox, is like a daughter to the publisher who owns the small independent publishing house where she works, so she rarely has to put in hours at the office, that she drinks tequila--straight--to be able to fall asleep, and that she's very bright . . . and skilled at pulling the best book possible out of her authors (if they--and her boss--are willing to put up with her difficult nature). You know she is confident enough to--at her age (not yet 30)--drive a mint-condition banana-yellow Cadillac that she bought from a dead person's estate. That she drinks enough coffee all day--whole pots--to give her an ulcer. As for the phone-sex author, Michael, she clearly has a thing for him--they can talk literally until dawn. But she refuses to meet him. In short . . . you don't know everything about her--but she's quirky, eccentric, smart, and very, very crabby in the morning.

I can open any of my books and feel like I know the character. However, when I did some contest judging recently, I noticed that often by the end of chapter one, I didn't really know much. Too often what I knew were character sketch items, but not the character him- or herself. They were things like age and hair color, where they lived and what clothes they wore. But nothing more than that.

It's never too soon to know your character. To have readers make a judgment or two. No, we shouldn't do it in real life. But in books, it's essential.

Thoughts?

Defining Characters

Over at Anti-Wife's blog, she discussed her characters the other day and got me thinking. Really thinking. Which is dangerous.

And my thought is . . . that especially when you are making a pitch or writing a synopsis, the quirks and traits you choose to reveal are very important. In a larger work, you have more room to explore your characters--but to me, that doesn't give you any more leeway on how precise you must be. You just have to sustain that preciseness for more pages.

Think about it. Just because you have 350 pages to tell your story doesn't mean you can get sloppy. Every word counts. Every trait. Every quirk. Every action.

And what I decided, thinking about it, is that I boil my characters down to these words, "The kind of person who . . . "

I'll explain.

I could say that a grandmother is cruel. One word. One adjective. Tells me nothing.

Or I could say, "The kind of woman who would slap her 2-year-old grandson for sticking his finger in the icing of a birthday cake."

Which is clearer?

I could say, "She volunteers in the community."

Or . . . "The kind of woman who runs the PTA and Junior League."

Or . . . "The kind of woman who, pregnant, piles her three kids in the car and drives to the 'hood to deliver food to a family in need, occasionally wondering if she will accidentally stumble on a drive-by shooting."

Two different picture emerge from those "types." I have nothing but admiration for the Junior League. Those women raise a LOT of money that helps a LOT of people. Someone who RUNS one of those organizations has to be organized. Maybe even anal-retentive. I am neither. But then my desk has not one clear speck of bare desk once again. It's pathetic. I volunteer in the community, but I don't do fundraising work. I leave that for the people who do that well. I hate asking people for money. My volunteering is the second. It's personal and often dirty and dangerous. And that's both insane . . . and who I am.

I could say, "He was loved."

Or I could say, "My godfather was so loved, and so remembered for taking his nieces and nephews to the bakery for jelly donuts, that one of them had a flower arrangement made to look like a jelly donut sent to the funeral home."

Two different pictures.

And when I say "type," it's not that I mean a stereotype. I just mean that there are ways to embody a character in a sentence. Something vivid.

I decided to pull a paragraph from a synopsis for something being considered right now:

Gina Palermo, forty, elegantly beautiful and perfectly clothed in Chanel suits, is the proverbial fish-out-of-water. Make thatYankees fan out of the Bronx. A brutal opponent in the courtroom, she was a high-priced New York divorce attorney—the kind who handled cases with settlements in the tens of millions of dollars for the uber-rich who shed wives and husbands like last season’s fashions.

Rather than "well-dressed" . . . Chanel tells you a certain look. Yet she owns a signed game ball from the 1964 Yankees . . . so she's diehard . . . if you are a New Yorker, then you know the love we have for our teams borders on obsession--and a woman in Chanel who loves the Yanks tells you something. "Divorce attorney" tells you one thing. But "the kind who handled . . ." is a whole 'nother league.

So . . . when every word counts, we have to choose our examples wisely. Even more so in the tricky synopsis.

Thoughts? Can you say ONE thing, one snapshot about your main character . . . "the type of person who . . . "

Peace,
E

Character on the Couch

And now . . . something new on the blog. (Drum roll and trumpets please.)

Characters. We're always talking about them. Booklist reviewed Do They Wear High Heels in Heaven and said, "Readers will recognize Orloff's trademark snappy dialogue and lovable characters . . ." I didn't realize I had a "trademark" but if I were going to have one, I would think that's what I would want.

My characters. Now, I wish I could tell you where they come from. Yesterday's post raised some interesting thoughts. Maybe they all come from me. Bits and pieces. I do know though, that finding a new voice for every book, finding new characters (lovable or unlovable) is a challenge. I can't tell you how many first chapters I have on my computer for unwritten books, as I "tried on" voices for size.

Kathy . . . a regular reader on the blog . . . and I have been discussing just how you get that voice, how you "connect" to your characters. And I offered to stick her work in progress, and her character, on our proverbial Couch. Analyze. Ask questions. Dissect.

So here's Kathy's "pitch":

Genre: Dark Paranormal Romance

During the Salem Witch Trials, a group of paranormally gifted women, to prevent their possible discovery, persecution, and destruction, encased a primary demon within an East Tennessee mountain. Aubrey Covington strives to prevent the release of the demon and the annihilation of the cornerstone of mankind.

Got it?

All right. Now for the character:

Aubrey is an intuitive healer. Her mere touch can give supreme pleasure or administer exquisite pain. At the risk of forfeiting her own, she is capable of granting life or ministering death. She has used all aspects of her abilities, even the forbidden giftings, and for doing so, the price she pays is steep. Her ancestors ingrained within her the responsibility of overseeing the imprisoned demon, but nothing could have prepared her for an encounter with a phantom warrior who is determined to destroy the demonic entity Aubrey must ensure remains trapped within the mountain.

So Kathy's going to drop by here today. She is struggling, fellow writers and readers. Not plot so much . . . but character. To relate to Aubrey, to write her.

So this may not be your character, but how do you approach this? What questions do you ask?

Oddly enough, my process is bizarre enough (or perhaps not, you tell me), that when a character springs to mind, they pretty much arrive with a full back story, life, friends. Spontaenously, or so it seems. The only thing I have to fill in is "voice." The specifics of how they talk, walk, tell their tale. Sometimes, like Booklist said, I go for "snappy"--and sometimes I know I have to pull back my natural tendency to write a little snarky. It doesn't fit the voice I'm aiming for.

My other "piece" is I worked as an editor. TRUST ME when I say other than acting, writers have the highest degree of propensity for insanity. So that job is part-editor/part-psychologist. Sometimes you babysit an author. And sometimes, like today, you babysit their characters. You have to pull out the details, the voice. As an editor, I would ask Kathy . . . .

What was Aubrey's childhood like?
Did she always know she had this gift?
Did it isolate her? Could she have any friends (or did her family isolate her intentionally)? Did she have to hide her gift?
How did the answers to those questions wound her?

So there you go. What questions do YOU have for our friend Kathy? AND . . . what questions do you ask when you're striving to get to know your characters? Note that I didn't ask what has become . . . almost routine on writing blogs. What's her motivation? When you're struggling with character, I think Jungian analysis is better. Motivation is too "big picture." It's too easy to summarize it in a throw-away sentence. I think, when you struggle with character, you have to start with intimacy . . . with the details.

But maybe I'm wrong.

Discuss. Ask questions. HI KATHY! Welcome to the blog.

And I'll run this feature from time to time, so if you want to be the next character "victim" on the Couch, email me at erica@ericaorloff.com.

Be Nice to Your Bartender

There's a fairly consistent thread in all my books. Be nice to your bartender.

And no, not so he or she pours you a heavy drink. Be nice to your bartender or server, the person who slings your eggs at the diner, the man who delivers your Chinese food . . . be EXTRA nice, not because they can spit in your food (though that is wise advice because of it), but because I have done that job--bartender, waitress, blackjack dealer--on my feet, a single mother, tired and worried if I didn't get enough tips I wouldn't be able to pay my mortgage. I've been there and KNOW how hard it is to get by hustling tips. I know how hard it is to be nice to people even when they are condescending and think they are better than you are. I will always have a soft spot in my heart for soldiers, because they invariably would hear I was a single mom at this one bar I worked at, and would slip me an extra twenty for diapers, and tell me I reminded them of my kid sister and I should find a nice guy to take care of me instead of having to work until 2:00 a.m.

And so . . . in my books, there are often waiters and waitresses and bartenders. I set scenes in restaurants. And there is a line in the sand. If you see a character be at all demeaning to a server or bartender in my books, chances are he or she is going to get killed off. Because there is NOTHING (or at least not many things) I loathe more than people who treat service people like crap--and that includes housekeepers, hotel chambermaids, bellhops and so on. I have refused to return phone calls after dates from men who I felt condescended to service people. Life is WAY too short for men like that in my life. WAY too short. And so . . . that's this little thing that somehow ends up in all my books. It's a Philosophy of How You Treat People, if you will.

Other little quirky things that end up in my books? Characters who put ketchup on scrambled eggs. If they do? They can be trusted. It's a NYC thing. We ALL do it from Manhattan and that area. And so somehow, I make the good guys like their eggs that way.

People who get down on one knee in my books to look a child in the eye to converse with the child? Definitely the good guy.

Geeks who can fix computers? Good guys. I LOVE geeky men. Pocket protectors are kind of cute. If they love MATH? Oh . . . very sexy.

What else? My characters often light candles in cathedrals regardless of their faith. My characters all pray. I know that seems weird since romantic comedies or women's fiction don't often have people who pause to pray--but they do in my books.

Nan in Diary of a Blues Goddess? She said, "If God takes you to it, he'll take you through it." My characters have faith.

Drag queens? Always sweetie-pies. Based on a queen or two I know. (As I wave hi.) Gay marriage? Makes it in there sometimes. Lilies of the Valley? ALWAYS the flower of choice of characters. Gardenias? The scent my characters love.

My books aren't me. But I'm there all the way through in the way bits of me drift in. So how are YOU present in your pages???

And ladies and gentlemen? Tip your bartender well!

Stealing Your Trait

I think writers go through life with the strangest of intentions sometimes. Say you meet someone with a very odd quirk. Or a fascinating story. Or an obvious thread of insanity. Someone else might just note it. Might even be uncomfortable around it. Me, I just steal it.

The whole reason I stopped conventional medicine for Crohn's disease was an aggressive doctor who insisted I get into clinical trials (like THAT goes well for the patients most of the time) and insisted I'd get cancer. Soon. Because of all the medications in my lifetime. He had a tic. Now, I know lots of people who have tics. But he couldn't look me in the eye and he kept clearing his throat every other word. "Well, cough . . . Mrs. D. . . . cough. . . . you . . . cough . . . have . . . to . . . cough . . . understand . . . cough . . . you will get . . . cough. . . . cancer . . . cough . . . with . . . cough . . . your . . . cough . . . history . . . cough . . . they all . . . cough . . . do." Well, f*ck you and the horse you rode in on, Doc. So now I do Chinese medicine. And will I have a cold amd impersonal, tic-coughing doctor who can't look patients in the eyes and thinks he's God in a future book. Hell, yeah!

I'm editing a book on visual design for a publisher and much of the beginning of the book underscores how we do--or don't--remember faces. When I write, I have no particular face in mind. People have become, sometimes, traits, to me. I can tell you I once had a waiter tell me his fiance called off the wedding two days before it was to occur under pressure from her family. And he was a little odd--talked too much, incessantly actually. I can recall his face--I could maybe even pick him out of a line-up, but it was the weird way he told too much of his life story to strangers that I remember most.

Or the time I stopped to help a woman with a flat tire. I said, "I can't change a flat, but I can wait with you and wave traffic around, and call someone for you." And she instead pressed a number on a piece of paper in my hand and said, "Call my boyfriend. But he's married. So call once. Hang up. And then call back. Just in case his wife is there. That's our signal." (This was pre-cellphones; most people didn't carry them all the time.) I can't tell you what she looked like. What kind of car she drove. It was over 10 years ago. But will I someday use that? Sure.

So what about you? Do you go through life stealing traits and stories, then bending them and sticking them in your work?

Jung and Me

The responses from my post of yesterday were very interesting, and yet again made me wonder what I consciously write--and what subconsciously filters into my writing by virtue of that Jungian portion of myself I am only half-aware of.

I know this . . . there are some things you will see in my writing--almost reflexively, without thinking about it very much. These include: positive gay role models, very loyal families that can be related--but can also be a loose assortment of friends who love each other, bad cops (with the good ones being truly heroic) and corrupt authority figures, male chuavinists always "getting theirs" in the end, martinis with green olives, characters who pray before they go to sleep, eclectic home furnishings, characters who add ketchup to scrambled eggs, and characters with the occasional neurotic elements--like I can tell you, all my characters are afraid to fly and you are NEVER going to see a pilot in my books.

On the flip side, I also know--and as far as I can tell, this is never a conscious choice--you will NOT see: pilots (see paragraph above), characters who smoke (makes me cringe--even the bad guys . . . not even THEY smoke), warm and fuzzy dads, atheists, characters who like frilly anything, characters who do any sort of "home" thing well--most of mine can't cook, and if they try something crafty, they do it poorly. I also, frequently, have characters of other races than my own--and you have to really be paying attention--I will never tell you "this character is black or Hispanic or white"--you're going to have to figure that out for yourself if that is important for you to know. You will not often, I don't think, see my characters have friends who are "same" to them--they are usually other races, other sexualities, other ethnicities, other religions. My characters listen to certain kinds of music. They do not like Jay Leno--and the thread of Letterman runs through all my books. They like cats and dogs, but hate dog slobber. They do not--in my YAs--like math.

I do NOT make character sketches. I don't write anything down. So I have to say that somehow a lot of this just "is." I will never write a smoking character because (no offense to smokers), smoking makes me physically ill. I don't even want to think about it. I never said to myself, "Gee, Character X will be a nonsmoker."

There are a zillion ways I could go on with this train of thought. When writers "free-write," I think a lot of this is unleashed. But there is definitely a component of the subconscious in all we do--and writing especially.

So . . . welcome to The Couch, as we call it on this blog. Do you see Jung dancing gleefully through your work?

Going Green

I've been on a journey for a while now. Studied Buddhism, gave up meat, went on a macrobiotic diet, started walking 4 to 8 miles a day, planted a garden. Now, I am going green.

To that end, all the lightbulbs in my house have changed. I am (today, as a matter of fact) starting a compost. I now wash my clothes in cold water. I gave up my blowdryer. I am insane about turning off the lights and not using the air conditioning unless Oldest Child comes to me swearing she is going to hurl because the upstairs bedrooms are too hot.

And all that has gotten me thinking that . . . well, my characters are going to have to start recycling. I just want my characters to be responsible stewards of the earth. Maybe they will all get hybrids. I don't know . . . but I feel like even if it's a tiny detail here or there, they are going to be green.

Which also got me thinking . . . I have had a Buddhist vampire, and I have had characters who have donated big money to charity. I try to have them do the right thing. And lately, I have been thinking that with the insane gun culture in the United States, some of them are going to have to give up their firearms.

So I wonder . . . do you find yourself imbuing your characters with things you think are important or right? ALL my characters pray. It may be a single sentence, but I can't imagine a life without prayer, and so I can't imagine a character who doesn't fall to sleep at night praying. It's there, these traits I think are important, if you want to look for them in my characters. So how about you all? Going green? How about your characters?

It's All in the Details

Do you ever meet someone, or do something, and smile to yourself because you just KNOW you are going to use that detail in a book?

I recently met a gentleman in a restaurant and was introduced. He was confident, tall, and he shook my friggin' hand like he was going to break it while looking at me intensely in the eyes. I hate "fish"-limp handshakes, but THIS, this was bone-crushing. And I thought, what gives? He cannot be oblivious that his grip is like a vise. So I decided, for character's sake, that he had something to prove. He may not. It's immaterial . . . I am going to USE that particular character trait and decide that it's a "something to prove" ego thing.

I love details.

Take Neccos.

If you read my books, no matter what the genre, at some point, my most beloved characters are going to eat Neccos. In Diary of a Blues Goddess, the characters play POKER using Neccos.

When my significant other went to CVS with my eldest daughter (almost 17) and bought me Neccos, she rifled through ALL the packs looking for the rolls with the most WHITE ones. They taste the absolute best. Through some bizarre genetic fluke, she likes the same Necco flavors as I do. We both hate the chocolate ones. Don't like the licorice ones. We hunt for the white ones--sort of cinammon-flavored. Significant Other stood there, dumbfounded. "They have different FLAVORS depending on color?" Of course, they do, idiot. And any true Necco-loving fanatic knows it. And that detail? Goes in the book.

Martinis for my characters have three olives. They like flannel sheets. They hate Jay Leno and love David Letterman. They're often Buddhists. They light candles in Catholic churches, even though they're not Catholic.

You get the idea. I use little details, and sometimes, like I said, I meet someone and think, "You don't know it, buddy, but I'm using that."

How about you? What sort of details do you put in your books or stories?