Creating Compelling Characters: Don't F*** up the Landing

As always, Writer's Digest is a plethora of wealth and wisdom for fellow writers.  The article below entitled "How to Craft Compelling Characters" by David Corbett is just one more of those gems.  Mr. Corbett's article details his take on creating memorable literary denizens that readers can relate to and, in some cases, become so emotionally attached to that they can literary feel their pain.  It's a fine art, getting complete strangers to care so much about your characters that they can't get them out their minds. It's also a technique that all writer's must be able to capture if they are to have any hope of becoming successful.   For me this character emerged in the form of Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.  From the getgo, I found myself rooting for Howard Roark, wanting what he wanted, feeling what he felt and celebrating with him throughout all his minor victories along the way.  For those of you who haven't read The Fountainhead, I highly recommend it.  Although Ayn Rand is not an easy author to follow (she includes an incredible amount of detail--unnecessarily so--as well as complex ideals in her works), if you stick with the rather lengthy book, I promise you won't be disappointed. 


Recently, I found myself bathed in an onslaught of ticked-off readers among those I asked to read the first draft of Enigma Black. In my novel, something happens to one of the main characters about 3/4 of the way through the book that completely shakes things up a bit.  Lets just say it wasn't received too well...which completely pleased me in every conceivable way.  Why? Because it meant I'd done my job.  I made them care about the welfare of a fictional character.  Score one for me.  If you don't find yourself drawn to the characters in a novel or you find yourself so emotionally detached from them that you could care less whether they end up living happily ever after or perishing in a ball of flames, the writer grossly neglected their job.


Enough of my ranting.  Mr. Corbett's article details four crucial elements that all literary characters need to possess in order to capture their audience:  a driving need, desire, ambition or goal;  a secret; a contradiction; and vulnerability.  While these are all great examples, I believe an author needs to take it easy on the vulnerability part. A little goes a long way and too much will curdle your storyline like there's no tomorrow. Yes, it's good for a character to possess a degree of weakness, but if you make them too defenseless, the reader will (or should) become increasingly put-off by their behavior. 

To keep with the spirit of Mr. Corbett's four "do's" of creating compelling characters, I've decided to post my four "don'ts":

The Four Don'ts For Authors in Their Pursuit of Creating Characters That Readers Won't Want to Drop Kick


1.  Mopey, Whiney, Bitchy, Pissy and the rest of the seven kill joys:  It's ok to be brooding; it's ok to have your character get a little emo from time to time, but do not under any circumstance drag that mood out throughout the entirety of a book (hell, don't even do that throughout an entire chapter).  A constant state of depression does little more than make the reader want to chuck the book across the room--or slit their wrists.  When your character goes through an emotional, life changing event the reader completely understands that a few pages should be devoted to their reaction to this event.  However, like us here in the real world, the fictional world too goes on and how your character adapts to that speaks volumes for you as an author.

2.  Too passive: 

Bobby: "Hey Katie, I just got a new pair of shoes." 
Katie: "Wow."

Bobby:  "Katie, my dog just got hit by a car."
Katie:  "Wow."

Bobby:  "Katie! The zombie apocolypse is here! We're all packing heat and heading downtown to shoot those MF'ers."

Katie:  "Wow."

Passiveness:  Reserve it for animal reactions (unless your animals are of the psychedelic talking variety) and/or characters on their death beds.

3.  One dimensional characters = flat-lining interest:  This goes along with Corbett's list in that, in order for characters to be somewhat endearing to readers, they also have to be interesting.  Give them a past, an interesting present and a quesitonable future.  If they went bobsledding in the Amazon with a purple giraffe somehow incorporate that  into their storyline.  In order for a character to be liked--loved even--they need to expose themselves until they are standing virtually naked before the judgemental eyes of the reader.  Look at it this way, if your fictional house were on fire and you had to choose between saving a character--Bobby--whose entire life story had been laid out before you to the point where you knew what they had in their refrigerator and a character you knew absolutely nothing about--Katie--which would you choose?

4.  Naughty, naughty-Please refrain from making your characters Mary Sue's (perfect, flawless characters a la Sandra Dee from Grease)  A little naughtiness goes a long way. Now this doesn't mean you need to make your characters deviants with a jacked up history capable of landing them a one-way ticket to hell. Just please, please stay away from perfection.  NO ONE is perfect and everyone has a past.  Even those beautiful figments of your imagination.

How to Craft Compelling Characters

April 12, 2011
by  David Corbett

To make characters seem real, you need to tap into what drives them. Use this foolproof method to bring the emotion of your story to life.

The source and exact nature of the curious phenomena we refer to as characters remains something of a mystery, but the craft of characterization is not.


Although it’s clearly a cause for celebration—or at least relief—when a character appears in the mind’s eye fully formed, the reality is that for most of us, this is a rare occurrence. Certain techniques are required to will our characters to life. We need to draw on the unconscious, memory, the imagination and the Muse until our characters quicken, assume clear form and, with hope, begin to act of their own accord.


Can this process—so inherent to the success of any novel—really be condensed into a single method? In my experience as both writer and writing instructor, the answer is, to some extent, yes. The key is first to understand what your characters require from you in order
to come to life, and then to determine how you can draw on your best available resources to give them what they need.


CHARACTERISTICS OF COMPELLING CHARACTERS


The most compelling characters are those who appear internally consistent and yet are capable of surprise. In my own work, I’ve found that the art of crafting such fully realized characters can be boiled down to four crucial elements: a driving need, desire, ambition or goal; a secret; a contradiction; and vulnerability. Let’s take a closer look at each one.


A Driving Need, Desire, Ambition or Goal


The fundamental truth to characterization is that characters must want something, and the stronger the want, the more compelling the resulting drama. This is because desire intrinsically creates conflict, the primordial goo in which character is formed.


Take, for example one of the most memorable characters in American literature—Blanche Dubois, from Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. At the start of the story, Blanche has lost her family home and has been left with nowhere to stay. Desperate, she has come to New Orleans to find her sister, Stella, and ask to be taken in.


This is a perfect demonstration that simply by giving the character a deep-seated need or want, you can automatically create conflict, for the world is not designed to answer our desires as easily as we might hope.


A Secret
For your character, a secret is that inclination or trait (such as a psychological disposition to dishonesty, violence, sexual excess, or the abuse of alcohol or drugs, to name a few) or an incident from the past that, if revealed, would change forever the character’s standing in her world, among co-workers, neighbors, friends, family, lovers. Secrets inform us of what our characters have to lose, and why.


Drawing on the example of Blanche Dubois, her secret is that through drink and illicit sexual liaisons, she has become so emotionally and physically dissipated she could not hold on to the family home.


We are our own best source for understanding secrets. We know our own, and if we’re insightful, we understand how they affect our behavior—specifically, how they make us afraid.


A Contradiction


We all know people who are both shy and rude, cruel but funny, bigoted but protective. This complexity, which seems to particularly manifest itself during times of stress or conflict, is what can make a person inherently unpredictable, setting the stage for the kind of surprising behavior that can keep readers enthralled, wondering what might happen next.


Our senses and minds are tuned to focus on irregularities—the thing that doesn’t quite fit, doesn’t make sense, or is simply changing. This is an evolutionarily adaptive trait; it helps in analyzing the environment for threats. But it also attunes us to whatever is unusual in what we perceive; contradictions reveal what we couldn’t predict, the enigma, the surprise.


Again, let’s look at how this applies to Blanche Dubois: She is desperate and weak, hopelessly vain, with an alcoholic’s capacity for denial and delusion—but she is also fiercely proud and resourceful with a surprising steeliness. It’s contradictions like these that can automatically pique a reader’s interest.


Vulnerability


Nothing draws us into a character more than her vulnerability. When people appear wounded or in need of our help, we are instantly drawn to them—it’s a basic human reflex. We may also sometimes be repelled or frightened, but either way, the fact of the matter is that injury to another person instantly triggers a strong response.


Obviously, vulnerability may be the result of the character’s secret: He is afraid of being found out. Or it may come from the intensity of his need or want—because, as we all know, desire can render us naked in a fundamental way. For your character, the ambition and focus inherent in a strong desire can imply some form of inner strength, while at the same time rendering the character vulnerable to being deprived of what he most wants.


Blanche’s desperation to find a safe place makes her vulnerable, as does the tawdry nature of her secrets, which threaten to shame her beyond redemption if revealed. In other words, needs or desires, secrets, contradictions and vulnerability are almost always interconnected.


METHODS FOR DEEPENING CHARACTERIZATIONS


Often our characters first appear to us as we flesh out the idea for a story. But characters who emerge from story ideas can often be flat or two-dimensional; this is because at that early stage, they serve the purpose of filling a role, rather than acting as independent beings with needs and fears and affections and concerns “outside
the story.”


Compelling characters are not cogs in the machine of your plot; they are human beings to whom the story happens.


Some stories begin with the characters, of course, and the narrative emerges from an exploration of their needs, their defenses, their secrets and contradictions, or some problem they face. The trick in those cases is making sure the narrative doesn’t meander, creating, as writer Philip Larkin called it, “a beginning, a muddle and an end.”


But more often in mainstream fiction and especially genre fiction, the novel begins with a story idea, and the characters need to be fleshed out to keep them from being stock players in the drama. We might wonder how many uniquely memorable world-weary detectives there can be, for example—and yet every year at least one more seems to emerge from the wave of crime novels crashing onto bookstore shelves. It takes skill and insight to breathe life into stock characters, something too often dismissed by those who disdain genre fiction as inferior.


So how do we flesh out our characters when they arise from the needs of our stories, or when they otherwise lack the specificity, uniqueness or power necessary to engage a reader (or the writer)? The best inspiration often comes from within us—and from our experiences with the people in our lives.


Real-Life Characters


Near the end of his life, John Updike wrote a poem titled “Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth,” in which he thanked his childhood friends and classmates—the “beauty” and “bully,” the “fatso” and others—“for providing a sufficiency of human types … all a writer needs.”


Whether we know it or not, our minds and hearts are populated by all the characters we will ever need—though we may disassemble them and rearrange the parts into composites for variation.


To fully tap this potential, begin by reflecting upon the following real people in your life—jot down their names, fix them in your mind, remember a few details about their lives, their physical appearances, the effect they’ve had on you, and anything else you think would be important if you were to describe them to someone who didn’t already know them.


Include in your exploration:


A family member you feel particularly close to
A family member you particularly dislike, or from whom you’re estranged
Your closest friend from childhood with whom you’ve lost touch
Your closest friend from childhood with whom you’re still in contact
A stranger whose path crossed yours this past week
A person you know personally and admire
A person you know personally and fear
The love who got away
The love you wished had gotten away
Your first love
Your greatest love
Your greatest childhood nemesis
Your greatest adulthood nemesis
The person from childhood who annoyed you the most
The person in your present-day life who annoys you the most
Your favorite neighbor
Your least-favorite neighbor
Your favorite co-worker
Your least-favorite co-worker
Your postman or someone else you deal with on a “business” level daily
An older person who has inspired you
A child who fascinates you
Someone for whom you harbor a secret crush or feel sexual attraction
Someone you believe has a crush on you
A person who believed in you
A person who thought you would never amount to anything
A person whose life you would never trade for your own


The list can go on, of course; it’s limited only by one’s own inventiveness. But writing out such a list provides a larger cast of characters than we originally might have realized we possessed. We can sometimes unwittingly get into ruts, writing variations on the same character over and over—the overbearing parent, the needy lover, the insufferable phony, the lonely aunt. The value of using people we know to inspire our characters is that we already see them so vividly and specifically.


Emotional Triggers


Of course, we know a great deal about the people in our lives, but we don’t know everything—and this is why real people provide excellent but not perfect source material for characters. We will also have to draw on our own lives, at least as a starting point, to fathom a character’s inner world.


It often surprises me how frequently writers, especially young writers, fail to explore the rich veins of emotion they possess in their own lives, so they can translate that to their characterizations.


The most important emotional incidents to explore in a character’s life—and one’s own—are:


THE MOMENT OF GREATEST FEAR: This is perhaps the most important emotional trigger, because almost all of our limitations, failures, frustrations and disappointments—and thus our secrets and vulnerabilities—can be traced back to or relate to some fundamental fear.

THE MOMENT OF GREATEST COURAGE: This may be physical valor, moral isolation or simply persisting in the face of some dread.


THE MOMENT OF GREATEST SORROW: Think of death, grief, loss.


THE MOMENT OF GREATEST JOY: It’s strange how nebulous moments of joy can seem—and what a loss. At what stage in your character’s life (or in your own) did the golden moment occur? What’s happened since?


THE WORST FAILURE: Ouch, I know, but don’t shun this moment; from a writer’s point of view, it’s golden (as are all our travails, sorrows, embarrassments and screw-ups—embrace them).


THE MOMENT OF DEEPEST SHAME: Shame is connected to self-image, and this moment will be when that image was seriously undermined in a particularly personal way in front of others.


THE MOMENT OF MOST PROFOUND GUILT: This involves some violation of a moral code. It may also make us ashamed, but guilt involves having knowingly done something wrong.


THE MOMENT OF MOST REDEMPTIVE FORGIVENESS: If you’ve been forgiven for some serious wrong, it’s not likely you’ve forgotten it. It’s permitted you to regain your place with some crucial loved one.


When performing this exercise, my students sometimes get caught up on trying to think of the “greatest” such moments. Don’t fall into this needless trap. Instead, think merely of one moment (presumably of many) of particularly strong impact in any one category.


Obviously, plumbing your own life will not provide access to the whole of your characters’ inner lives (unless your characters inhabit the same world you do). Rather, these moments provide touchstones, points of access to begin the exploration into similar moments in your characters’ lives—a necessary but not sufficient precondition for a compelling portrayal.


Each of these triggers a vulnerability or a secret, perhaps a desire, maybe even a contradiction, depending on context. By envisioning these scenes in your characters’ lives, after first exploring them in your own, you gain key insights into the formative episodes in their emotional lives, and, with hope, begin to see them more vividly in your mind’s eye, the better to render them on the page.


The key is to intuit the character so distinctly she seems capable of acting on her own volition. Once this happens—and as I said at the outset, it’s a mystery how or why it does—you’re capable of beginning the dialogue that will form your story, asking your character: Where are you going? Why? How will you get there? With whom? And who will you have become when the journey is over?

Writer's Digest

What Covers Your Literary Bones?

"Rules are a point to build a story around. They are a plain, solid, square foundation. If you stick to that foundation, you get a solid, plain, square building. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing notable either. To make an interesting building, you've got to go beyond that foundation, ignoring it as much as you can without having the building fall apart. The bending of the rules until the story is ready to crumble is what makes a good story--interesting, intriguing, and plausible, but almost ready to burst." --David "Pasha" Morrow

Whether your an outliner or a fly by the seat of your pants kind of writer, there's one basic principle that congeals us all as literary painters: the beginning, the middle and the end.  These three elementary principles are the barest of the bare bones in any story. It's at this point that everyone's stories are essentially the same.  Every story has a beginning, whether it starts out on the Prairies of The Midwest or 3000 leagues under the sea; a climax, where the proverbial shit hits the fan; and an ending where the protagonist(s) are provided with a resolution to his/her/their conflicts. What makes all the difference in the world is the kind of meat the author chooses to encase their literary bones with.

Sure, chicken is nice, but you can get chicken anywhere. It resides in every grocery store and meat market.  Hell, there's even a fast food restaurant devoted to it.  Be that as it may, as good as chicken is, it's basic, even boring at times.  Eating chicken everyday isn't considered exciting; chicken is not a delicacy.  Unfortunately for us lovers of literature, chicken is becoming just as common an occurrence on bookstore shelves as it is on dinner plates across the country.  Authors are afraid to take chances, afraid to deviate from a formula that's already been proven successful.

Sadly, one of the major proponents of the poultry movement amongst literature today are literary agents; the very people who claim to have  love for the written word and classic literature. Although they'll deny it, literary agents are afraid to try steak and shun filet mignon altogether.  Agents want the now; the trends that have been beaten to death so severely that the ink on the pages of their client's novels are black and blue.  Why?  Because agents know these trends are a security blanket  These trends will sell and the agents will risk nothing by publishing them. 

I fear the days of Emily Bronte have long since passed.  Gone are the days where an author took risks.  Sure, in Bronte's day her work was critically panned (Wuthering Heights was widely condemned for its "portrayal of amoral passion"), but look where deviation ultimately landed her.  Wuthering Heights is now regarded as one of the 100 best novels of all time. To create is to deviate, but to deviate is to alienate (until those alienated pull their heads out of their asses that is).

To write is to create and creativity should not be hampered by restrictions. Yet, with that said, there should be some rules when it comes to writing.  For instance, all books should have a conflict, a clear origin, and a defined resolution (whether vague or an all out slap in the face).  Nevertheless, that's where the rules should end. Authors, I  implore you to take the basic structure of a novel and renovate it in any and all ways you see fit.  As an example, start out with the conflict first.  Personally, I'm big on this.  Any book that starts out with guns blazing has my undivided attention.  If you're brave, start with the resolution first and completely tear down the structure altogether. The bottom line is, don't write the cookie cutter novel just because that's what other people want you to do.  Write what's in your heart and write it the way you want to do it. Break the rules of structure.  Break them into a million pieces and then fit them back together in whatever way you see fit.

If you stick with chicken your entire life, you'll never experience the juicy taste of filet mignon.

References:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Bront%C3%AB

In A Perfect World Originality Would be Trendy

"I think the only person a writer has an obligation to is himself. If what I write doesn't fulfill something in me, if I don't honestly feel it's the best I can do, then I'm miserable."--Truman Capote


One of the worst sins a person (let alone a writer) can commit is to sell themselves short.  If the only reason you write is to please other people, then why write at all? Who's more important than you and your sense of integrity? What fulfillment are you getting out of penning words that have absolutely no meaning to your soul? When you die, what kind of mark will you have made on the world by simply going with the flow?  Personally, I don't want to be remembered for sticking to the script of a particular genre,  I want to be remembered for ad-libbing it. No, I want to take that script, re-write it, show it a good time and then take it to levels it's never seen before.  I don't want to be remembered for the menial and the mundane, I want to be remembered for taking people on one hell of a ride.  Sure, following the crowd may get you where you want to go, but deviation gets you noticed; it engraves your very essence into people's memories and takes you, as the author, on one hell of a ride in the process.  A well-worn path is boring. You know where it leads, where each curve and each dip appear.  Your writing should carve its own paths into the earth.


Increasingly, this concept is being thrown to the waysided by authors--especially new authors who are far too agreeable to compromise.  To them, fulfillment is spelled A-G-E-N-T, not U-N-I-Q-U-E or, heaven forbid, O-R-I-G-I-N-A-L.  If it makes you miserable to do so, why write for the sake of a trend; for the sake of the approval of a few teeny boppers whose interests are as fickle as their dating lives? These are the same people who, when the next big and incredibly annoying thing comes along, are going to drop you like a worn out Backstreet Boys CD. Do you remember the Backstreet Boys?  Yeah, no one does.  There's only so much a trend can be beaten to death, only so much a person can have hammered into their consciousness.  Be unique.  Be original.  Don't sell yourself short.  Write what makes you happy and not what a soon-to-be extinct middle man says should make you happy.

None of the literary classics still on bookstore shelves today were the product of trends.  There aren't 50 different versions of To Kill A Mockingbird out there and there's a reason for that. True classic literature is not uninspiring drivel meant to entice sales and pad corporate pockets.  True classic literature is written to entrance, to intrigue, to inspire a country, not a bank account.  In 100 years, I can and will guarantee you that Twilight will not hold any kind of relevance to society, but classics such as To Kill A Mocking Bird, Wuthering Heights, Gone With The Wind, The Catcher In The Rye, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead will remain best sellers.

To repeatedly beat a dead horse is to question the readers' intellect.  When the public finally arises out of the vampiric fog they've been blindly stumbling through, perhaps they'll finally be able to see these trends for what they are: fleeting, meaningless, and uninspired.

I will now descend from my soapbox, pick up my machete and resume carving my own path to happiness.

My Unnatural Obsession with Conan O'Brien

Oh Conan O'Brien, you ginger-haired Adonis.  Only you could take something as craptastic as Rebecca Black's "Friday" and turn into one big pile of awesome.  Although the difficulty quotient of ripping that song a new one wasn't that high to begin with, your simplistic approach was still spot-on.

 Like a filth-ridden, bacteria-laced mop in a Swiffer commerical, NBC should be begging you to come back.



To keep with my blog's theme, for those of you who don't already know this, Conan O'Brien is a comedic writer of sheer genius (in my humble, borderline-stalker opinion).  He's written for Saturday Night Live and The Simpson's.  For those of you reading this blog who are comedic writers, I suggest you take a page out of Mr. O'Brien's book.

Link to Laughs:

Team Coco

Common Syndromes Afflicting Authors

As we tediously paint words upon blank pages with every stroke of a key, it is only natural that we authors experience afflictions.  Sure, there is the usual writer's block which heals itself over time and a sudden bought of enlightenment.  However, there are also those afflictions that can be pathological in nature.  Afflictions that can tear apart a writer's hopes and dreams rendering their carefully crafted sentences dull and their manuscripts lifeless.  The good news is these afflictions (a/k/a common mistakes writer's make) can be cured with a small dose of reality and common sense.

1.  Claustrophobentences-What the reader develops when reading a sentence packed with so many adjectives, adverbs and prepositional phrases that they're praying for a period to make the room stop spinning.  As those more eloquent individuals than I have so aptly stated: "Sentences are not mini vans."  Sure, you want your sentences to have more depth and verbiage than an elementary school book report, but there is a fine line between crafting a sentence comprised of elegant fluidity and one filled with utter foolisness.  Plenty examples of the latter are contained within the pages of a Stephenie Meyers novels, but that's a blog for another day. 

For the love of God Don't:   It was such a gloriously beautiful morning that I decided to hop out of my warm, comfy bed, pull on my magenta slacks with the the copper buttons positioned vertically down the side of each leg and skip down the road to Grandma's home; the white house on the corner of my unusually quiet but quaint neighborhood.

Thank God I can put the Aspirin away now, Do:  I'm going to Grandma's house today.

The latter sentence states the same idea without going into all of the unnecessary and cringe-inducing detail. 
Claustrophobentences,  if you've finished an entire page of your manuscript and you only have two punctuation marks, you may want to up the meds.

2.  Descriptochondria-The new blue silk shirt rubbed against my tan, smooth skin as I swiftly walked down the weathered sidewalk, aligned with dying, sun-scorched plants, purposefully avoiding eyecontact with those of whom I passed.

Descriptions (or adjectives) are meant to be fun like the occassional cocktail and night out on the town.  Like those indulgences, they are also to be used sparingly adding just an added touch of zest to your manuscript. Enough to get your readers buzzed without the unpleasant hangover.

3.  Punctuficiency and Punctugluttony-There is a happy medium between using entirely too much punctuation and not enough punctuation and it's the author's mission to find it.  We've all read novels where we had to read and re-read a sentence, paragraph or entire page because something just doesn't jive well.  Chances are those novels either suffer from comma deficiency or semicolon gluttony.

Punctuficiency:  I went to the barn found a shovel walked to the back yard and began digging the grave for the novel whose utter senselessness consumed my thoughts sending me into hysterics.

Punctugluttony-After I buried that monstrosity, I went to the kitchen, ransacked the cupboard; and found a jar of peanut butter, to make a sandwich.

4.  ImgoingtopushmyselftogetthisnoveldonesoicanbethenextJKRowlingitis-At one time or another we've all suffered from one aspect of this.  True, as writers most of us don't care about making money as we write just to satisfy the aching within our souls.  Still, there are those who hear about an author's success or the success of a particular genre (vampires anyone) and decide that writing a novel can't be that hard.  Hence, thirty days later after they've quit their jobs, they have the first draft of their novel hammered out and are counting down the days until the bejamins start rolling in (these people are still sitting on the couch with one hand down their pants and the other stuffed in a bag of Doritos counting).  For those of us living on planet Earth, we know the process of writing a novel is a little more involved than putting a few coherent sentences together.

5.  Firstdraftisperfectnia-There is a high that comes after one completes their first novel that is like nothing they've ever experienced before.  It's as though tapping that final period on the keyboard has somehow validated you as an author.  Now, instead of saying to yourself  "one day I will have to sit down and start writing that novel", you can honestly say that you've written that novel.  With that high comes the dangerous assumption that the first draft is the finished product (for those writers who haven't done any research that is).  So, when those authors pitch their novel to an agent who asks to see their manuscript, they are shocked and dismayed when, five minutes later, they are greeted with a flat-out "thanks, but no thanks," response.  I know this may come as a shock to you, but you are not perfect.  With that being said, neither is your writing. I don't know how many times I've gone through my first novel and still, after each and every time, I'm finding errors in grammar, spelling and puctuation along with dialogue and sentence structure that would be better with additonal revisions.  When you read your own work, you know what you mean; your mind mentally corrects those mistakes that would be glaring to others.  To correct this affliction, I suggest you do the following:  Take your manuscript and put it away for at least a few weeks (some sources say as long as six months, but who can wait that long); after that time has passed, take it back out and start editing.  You will be amazed by how much you actually do change and how much closer to perfect your manuscript will be.

6.  Monowordpotence-One of the most basic of rules that any author is or should be well acquainted with (in fact, I distinctly remember learning about it in grade school) is varying the words you choose to begin your sentences.  Or, in layman's terms, "don't use the same damn word to begin each sentence or, if unavoidable,  more than two sentences within the same paragraph."  In a popular saga, that shall remain nameless, there is at least one page where the word "the" (at least, I think it was "the") was used over 40% of the time.  This means that nearly half the sentences on the ENTIRE page began with the word "the". That's enough to make any manuscript go soft (pun intended).  Let's take a look at what monowordpotence looks like:

The quick, brown fox jumped over the lazy, brown dog.  The lazy, brown dog was having a bad day.  The lazy, brown dog told the quick, brown fox to stay off his lawn.  The quick, brown fox did not listen.  The lazy, brown dog went all Chuck Norris on the quick, brown fox.  The lazy, brown dog had stew that night.

The previous paragraph makes my head hurt.  The gun in the corner of my room may fix that.

7.  Stairing at this page makes me want to rip my hare out as nun of the words hear make sense the way they are written, you sea what I'm saying?-Homophones--words that sound alike but have completely different meanings and spellings--are one of the most battered, bruised and abused step-children in the English language.  Whenever I go onto public news forums and read the comments posted on some of the articles, it makes me cringe to the point I start fearing my face will permanently freeze that way.  If you are absolutely not 110% positive that you are using the correct spelling of a word, by all means do yourself and your reader a favor and LOOK IT UP.  Just say "no" to homophone abuse.

8.  Whose, who's, it's, its, mania-Contractons are a beautiful thing as they are used to efficiently combine two simple words together to form one even simpler word requiring less work on the part of the reader.  However, it's those individuals who don't understand their concept nor take the time to learn from their mistakes that make others want to pull their hair out.  Common contractions such as I'm for I am; won't for will not; it's for it is; who's for who is; and they'll for they will have been part of our grammatical society for eras.  Yet, still there are those who have absolutely no idea how to use them.  If you have to ask someone when to use whose instead of who's, you may seriously want to reconsider a career in writing as you're going to be in for a huge headache when their, there and they're creeps up on you.

9.  Don't Turn your head and ignore-Feedback is critical for any author.  For a new author, it may mean the difference between an admirable career and writing term papers for little Billy next door.  The opinions of others matter--especially those in the demographic you're aiming to appeal to.  What you may think is an airtight plot after reading it over and over again a thousand times may, to your reader, really contain enough pinholes to sink the Titanic.  You are biased; your readers are not.  Keep an open mind and the doors will follow.

10.  Kitschy Cliche Syndrome-"My cheeks turned as red as a rose", "Your eyes are as blue as the ocean/sky/Smurf's butt" (pretty much anything obviously blue).  This is a syndrome that I have to constantly treat myself for--a thesaurus works pretty effectively. It's also one of the easiest syndromes to develop as, although the writing may not be bad and the grammar correct, it doesn't bring anything new or exciting to the table.  We all know that roses are red and the sky is blue--why beat that dead horse some more?  Readers want new and enlightening.  They want passages that make them think and challenge their intellect, not something that rehashes phrases contained within the notes they passed to their middle school crushes.

Vendetta Nation Excerpt-Second Book in the Enigma Black Trilogy

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Vendetta Nation.  It's not the whole chapter as there are parts in this particular chapter that reveal key turning points in the first book of the triology, Enigma Black, of which I'm not going to give away.  I'm not entirely in love with this excerpt and I know there are grammatical errors, but that's what the editing stage is for.


For those of you who don't know what the trilogy is about and haven't read earlier posts on Enigma Black, I will give you a very quick synopsis: It's a superhero/science fiction novel with a dystopian environment similar to that presented in 1984. 

Using fear tactics in order to force society to turn a blind eye from his true agenda, President Brooks utilizes a series of attacks perpetrated by a being dubbed as The Man in Black to rewrite the Constitution.  With complete control and essentially unlimited power, he has free reign of the country.  His motives go unquestioned by the majority society as they feel the New Order he's created is truly keeping them safe from the chaos surrounding them.  However, the remaining members of the population are not so convinced by the President's tactics and form a Rebellion whose mission is to overthrow Brooks and take back their country.To counteact The Man in Black a group of scientists has discovered a way to genetically tweak human beings making them stronger and faster.  Thus, superheroes are born restoring hope to the devastated country. 

The main protagonist in the series is a young woman named Celaine Stevens.  After Celaine's family is killed in one of The Man in Black's earlier attacks, she vows retribution and ultimately finds a possible path to it when she's approached by a mysterious stranger. 

Enigma Black focuses on the death of Celaine's family and her transition from average human to engineered superhero.

Vendetta Nation focuses on Celaine and her continued mission to find and eradicate The Man in Black wherein her story quickly becomes intertwined with the Rebellion and their mission to overthrow President Brooks.


Vendetta Nation-Chapter 2 excerpt


Marshall Leitner stood before the crowd delivering an oration teeming with premature satisfaction during the rebel’s Wednesday night meeting. His boisterousness infused the crowd, many of whom were already basking in the glow of their own adrenaline. Tonight, their leader’s infinite energy bordered on being almost enough for his audience to ignore the stifling heat baking them within the bedraggled cabin from the combination of bodies, a fire roaring in the archaic fireplace and the numerous monitors set up around the room allowing members from other parts of the country to gain access to their meetings . The plan had been set, the date, the time, and, most likely, the hour of their deaths was being set in motion. No one betrayed President Brooks without meeting repercussions; their disappearances were evidence of that. Soon, Washington D.C. would be taken by storm forcing the rest of the country to stand up and take notice of the injustices being carried out right under their noses. Marshall Leitner was invigorated; today, his secret liaison would be joining their well organized and ever expanding group.


Near the middle of his address, he found himself interrupted by a slight, hesitant knock at the wooden door. A knowing smile crept across his face in synch with the looks of hesitation throughout the rest of the cabin. Roll had been taken; all were accounted for; no new membership requests were there to considered. Had they been found out?

Marshall nodded to Tagitt Buckley, their inch-shy-of-seven-foot-tall guardsman, to open the door and allow the stranger entry.


Across the cabin, tensions mounted while the hooded stranger, whose face was none too discernable as he kept his head down towards the floor, cautiously trekked through the cabin without so much as a glance in anyone’s direction but Marshall’s. Slight relief spread through the atmosphere as their leader greeted the man as one would a friend whose absence had been particularly prolonged. After their quick greeting, Marshall turned to face the crowd.


“Ladies and Gentlemen,” he announced, “what we have here is our mastermind, the person by which none of this would be possible. He’s my right-hand man and my eyes and ears to every pertinent piece of information we’ve received thus far and shall continue to receive until we’ve served our purpose.”


Applause thundered off the wooden walls of the cabin creating an impromptu source of airflow to saturate the stagnate atmosphere. Marshall motioned for the mystery man to join him at the podium where they locked eyes, nodded, and, with the removal of his hood, the man revealed his identity to stunned gasps emanating throughout the room.

“What the hell is this!” Charlie Withers, a weathered Army vet, proclaimed in outrage, standing on fatigued, yet miraculously sturdy, legs victimized by the early stages of Lou Gehrig’s Disease.


“Calm down Charlie, calm…”


“Don’t admonish him, he’s absolutely right to question this,” Bruce Vaupel interrupted.
“Have you gone mad, Marshall? This is utter insanity, this man is the enemy.”


“With all due respect, Mr. Vaupel,” Marshall interceded. I’ve got my wits about me and plan to keep it that way. I’m assuming you’ve all heard the saying ‘keep your friends close and your enemies even closer’. Well, that’s exactly what’s going on here but I’ll let Mr. Delaney convince you of that.”


Vice President Jeremiah Delaney cleared his throat, a look of contemplation spread across his refreshingly sincere, handsome face.


“I know you don’t trust me,” he began greeted by a slew of ‘You’ve got that rights’. “You have every right not to trust me. Hell, you have every right not to trust anyone ever again. When Carver and I first became running mates, I fell in love with a vision: his vision. He had a vision for the world. A vision of economic prosperity, of uniformity. I was proud of being a part of his Presidency. Even after the initial attacks, I was proud to be the second-in-command to such a revolutionary, powerful thinker and brilliant leader. Like you, I was duped into falling in love with an illusion and now, like you, I’m seeking a way to right the wrong that has been done to our country.”


“Somehow, I’m not convinced,” a woman’s voice rang out met with prompt approval from the crowd. Marshall shook his head in agitation.


“I don’t expect you to join my fan club now, if ever, but I promise you on my life, I want the same things you do. Carver is out of control and must be brought down. This devastation has got to end. My only regret is that I can’t actually partake in the final takedown myself.”


“Oh, but you are partaking my friend,” Marshall interceded. “Mr. Delaney here is far too modest to admit this, but the information he’s provided has been crucial in the instrumentality of our revolution.”


Jeremiah nodded. “In just a few short weeks, there will be a very public soiree at Potomac Park. Carver will be there; his livelihood depends upon it. Also present will be those superheroes everyone seems entranced with. Public opinion of Carver is dwindling in direct response to the people’s realization with what’s really been transpiring this last decade. That superhero duo is the last thread holding his presidency together. Not surprisingly, he’ll be parading them by his side as if their very creation depended solely upon him. The sad part is that despite the outright transparency of his actions, the people will buy it along with whatever else Carver wants to sell them because of their misguided faith in this duo. The very duo whose strings unknowingly belong to Carver, the ultimate puppeteer. Like our country, they will be used and he will be bought the time he needs and of which we cannot afford. During the soiree is when you need to strike. Security around Washington DC will be tight but distracted with concentrations focused on the attendees.   Your best bet is to surround the park and create a barricade on the major thoroughfares. You’ll need to act quickly; your aim will need to be precise."


“What about those super schmucks?” A man’s voice came from one of the monitors. “How are we going to get through them?”


“No one ever said there wouldn’t be fatalities,” Marshall answered.


“But they aren’t invincible,” Jeremiah added. “They’re strong, they’re fast and they know what they’re doing, but they can be brought down. In fact, quite a few of them have been; we've all  just been kept in the dark about it.”


“Alright,” Marshall regained control of the podium. “You know the plan, you know the consequences and you know the identity of our informant. If there’s any of you who want to back out now, who want to reintegrate back into Brooks’ dystopia, I suggest you leave now.”


Without qualm, all twelve thousand two hundred thirty-eight members of Marshall Leitner’s rebellion remained in their chairs, both inside the cabin and from within the glow of the monitors , their eyes fixated upon their leader and their unlikely ally.

Writing for Your Livelihood

In our modern world it seems almost inconceivable that one would have to literally sing for their supper.  Unfortunately,  that's exactly the dire predicament being faced by Missy Jones and her family.  After scrimping and saving to purchase their new home, the Jones family settled in the quaint town of Colon, Michigan (yes, that is really the name of the town).  However, their American Dream was short lived.  Unbeknownst to them, the Jones family had been sold an illegal mortgage and the meager payments they were once able to afford skyrocketed into the stratosphere.  This story illustrates not just the economic cesspool Michigan has become but the height of corporate greed, corruption and downright fraud infiltrating our country.

Now faced with foreclosure, and apparently one to turn lemons into lemonade, an ever resourceful and multi-talented Missy wrote a song based upon the curveball life has unfairly thrown  her and her family.  Her song is entitled "Don't Cry",  and was written, performed and produced solely by Missy Jones.  "Don't Cry" is on sale at I-Tunes for $0.99.  As a fellow writer, I implore you to check out Ms. Jones' music video attched below as well as her family's aggravating story at:  WWMT .