For the end of only Day 2 of NaNoWriMo, I’m very happy with the word count I’ve managed to rack up. It’s a few hundred words shy of the ideal Day 4 word count. It certainly helps that yesterday was a Sunday and I took the day off today to make the most of the Melbourne Cup public holiday tomorrow.

But I’ll be away next weekend, so I want a comfortable word count buffer to make sure I don’t fall behind if I can’t get a lot done while I’m in Sydney. Not to mention that for the rest of the week, every evening is booked up with dinners with friends, and house inspections (there was one of those today as well, but that doesn’t matter so much when have the whole day off).

Ideally, I would like to be at 10,000 words by tomorrow. That way, even if I only do 1,000 words per night for the rest of the week, and nothing over the weekend, I’ll still pretty much be on track come next Monday. Maybe I’ll have to come up with some creative ways to squeeze in a few hundred words here and there over the next week.

It all adds up in the end.

Yep, it’s that time of year again. November: the month of novelling insanity. A race against yourself to a 50,000 word novel.

This is my third year doing NaNoWriMo. In the previous years, I felt like I’ve written decent, yet distinctly first-draft novels that have evolved over the course of the month.

This year, I feel better prepared for what lies ahead. Maybe it’s the experience of past years, but for the most part I feel better prepared because I’ve been outlining my story for the past month.

About 2 months ago, I came across the site Storyfix.com. It’s a blog about writing by US author Larry Brooks. For me, it started with a series of posts he wrote on story structure, and more recently an expanded ebook on the subject. He advocates a strong understanding of story structure if you hold any hope of one day being published. Obviously with such a bold statement, he’s got his decriers, but I’m with him on this one. He takes a lot of his story structure queues from the world of screenwriting, but they are just as applicable to novels. It’s all about story, regardless of the format used to deliver it.

Even if your skeptical or a by-the-seat-of-your-pants writer, I recommend reading his posts on Story Structure. You might be surprised what you learn, and even if you prefer to delve into the writing process without an outline, an understanding of conventional story structure will stand you in good stead for making the right decisions about your story as you proceed.

So as NaNoWriMo starts this year, I feel like I’m much more in control of the story I’m telling. I’m not blindly jumping into writing without knowing where the story is going, how it’s going to change and how it’s going to end. I’ve been making decisions about the major plot points of my latest novel for the past month, and slowly, scene by scene, filling in the outline to move the story from one point to the next.

And far from the writing being a tedious afterthought, I’m excited by this story, maybe moreso than my stories from previous years of NaNoWriMo. I get to focus on writing each scene to the best of my ability. I can focus on the emotion and conflict rather than wondering how this is going to get me to the next scene.

And even just in the first day, I feel like writing this way makes the prospect of 1,667 words per day a much more manageable task.

Hopefully today was the last day this month where I won’t be able to find the time I need to write. Today was the day of my sister’s Half Ironman in Shepparton, VIC. It’s not her first Half Ironman, and she has completed a full Ironman previously, but this was the first I’d been to.

The day of the spectator at one of these Ironman events is not as easy as you might think sitting on the sidelines is. And if you take into account that at the end of the day, spectators don’t get the endorphin rush that the competitors get, it may just be harder … at least, that’s what my sister says – I intend never to see if from the perspective of the competitor.

The start of the day is not quite as early for the spectator as for the competitors. If you’re keen, you’re there for the beginning of the swim (about 7am). Unless you are right at the start, you probably won’t be able to pick out your spectatee (ie, person you are there to watch … I love making up knew words!!) from all the other bodies thrashing around in the water, even if you know what colour cap they may be wearing. You might get to have a few words with them as they are transitioning onto the bike leg, but then, depending on number of laps being covered, you might only see them twice in the next few hours as they whizz past at 30-40km/h. And you better be quick if you want to get a photo of them. Then again, a few words at transition if your lucky, and they are off for a leisurely 21km run. See them a few more times for a brief 30 seconds and then you wait around for them to finish.

So in the course of 4-7 hours (depending on the spectatee), you may only see them for 5 minutes all up between the start and end of the race. A lot of time to squeeze in a day’s worth of writing, you might think. But no … somehow, the day gets filled up very quickly: chatting to your parents who are also spectating, comparing photos to see who’s are best, and moving from place to place. And then at the end of the day is the 2.5 hr drive back to Melbourne.

Now that I’m back, I’ve written almost 700 words, but I am just sooo tired, and miserable due to a burgeoning sunburn, I’m giving up and going to bed – and it’s only 9:30pm. For anyone that knows me, they’ll know that that never happens…

What we want is a big part of human psychology. What we desire, what we want to achieve in life, is part of what makes us individuals. If everyone wanted to the same thing, there would be nothing interesting about meeting other people, and there would be no place for marketers (ok, so this might make the world a better place.) What we want gives a reason to get up in the morning, gives purpose and meaning to the activities we perform between when we wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night.

In fiction, asking what a character wants is the first thing that you need to find out about any character you create, even minor ones which might appear only for a page or two. There are numerous insights you can gain into a character by working out what they desire:

• Why do they want this? This gets deep into the motivation of the character, and can be used to tease out backstory and other character traits.
• What do they hope this bring to their lives? When people want something, they usually have some vision of how their lives will be better in the future when they get it. Characters need these same imagined futures as well.
• How will they go about fulfilling this desire? Two people with the same goal may find different approaches to achieving it, depending on their values, morals, standards and many other factors. How the character chooses to fulfill their desire will drive the action of the story.

Depth of character can be drawn out by giving a character multiple desires, especially if these desires clash with each other. This causes internal conflict and can add shades and personality to an otherwise 2-dimensional or stereotyped character. You get to see who a character really is, how she will juggle both desires and try to achieve both.

Most importantly, characters need to fight to achieve their desires – they need to want what they want. This is the one area where fiction needs to be depart from the real world. It will happen a lot that real people will give up on a desire at the first sign of conflict or hardship. Fictional characters cannot do this. It makes them weak, and really, what’s the point in telling their story. There is a place in fiction for weak characters, but it should never be your main characters.

Knowing what the character desires – and how he will fight to achieve his goals – you now have all the information you need to develop conflict in the story. A story where the character gets everything he wants easily is boring. If achieving a goal isn’t a challenge fraught with opposition, competition, dangers, self-doubt and any other road block to success, then it’s attainment is hollow and unsatisfying – for the reader as well as the character. Readers will have a hard time suspending their disbelief if the events conspire to fulfill a character’s desire easily – in most people’s experience, that’s not the way the world works.

Good conflict comes about when one character’s desires clash with those of another.  Maybe they have the same desire – winning a competition, finding the hidden treasure first, winning the heart of the beautiful princess, etc, etc – but only one of them can have it. Conflict can also be found where characters want different things that are at odds with each other – for instance, one partner wants to stay in the relationship, the other wants out.

If a character’s only desire is stop another character from achieving their goals, the conflict here could easily come across as fake or melodramatic. Unless you are trying to create an entirely malicious or evil character, stay clear of this approach. People aren’t usually like this, so unless you are deliberately trying to write a psycho- or sociopathic antagonist, try to give characters opposing desires, not the desire to oppose.

Many writers just starting out are told that they need to make the reader empathise with the protagonist, but this can be a tricky business to do consciously. For me, my writing to date has been mostly about plot and story without a lot of conscious choices regarding characters. Some characters have happened to be empathetic, others not as much as they could or should have been. So I’m in a position now where I’m trying to consciously learn this skill.

If empathy is an intellectual understanding of the way someone is thinking and feeling – to be able to step into someone else’s proverbial shoes – your job as a writer is not to make the reader think and feel the way a character does, but to make the reader understand why.

The first step you must take as a writer you want any hope of creating empathy in the reader is to empathise with the character yourself.I has this experience recently of coming to relate to one of my own characters. This character is the villian, the baddie, the antagonist. To me, he’d always been a manipulative SOB, the puppetmaster making everyone dance on his strings. His primary motivation was to have control of everything. He was very two-dimensional, not a solid character at all.

But I’d been exploring his past because it was very important to the progression of the story and found that an action I’d always thought motivated by the desire to manipulate another person had in fact been done to keep a promise. All of a sudden, I could relate to him and even see that deep down, he was actually a decent person. This makes for a very interesting villain, the sort I’d want to read about myself.

So what was the change here? Why did looking at it this way change my view of the character? I believe it is because I found a positive intention behind the action. The character wants to keep his promise – a value that I can relate to. I can now see myself taking that same action in the same circumstances.

Maybe this is the trick to creating empathy: find the positive intention, the relatable quality of any motivation. This can be applied to almost any motivation – even a villain’s – and by delving into these actions we can get to the humanity beneath it.

And in the end, isn’t that what all good fiction is about…

This friend is actually the brother of another good friend of mine. We’d met in London during the year I lived there, and we’d hit it off immediately – we were both writers. He’d been writing for longer than I have, and more consistently too no doubt – breaks between writing for me are often measured in years. He’s delved further into the publishing industry than I ever have, rewritten one of his novels countless times, so as far as I’m concerned, this is someone who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to fiction writing.

I thought I’d share some of the advice he gave me – you never know who else might find it interesting:

1. Understand how you write – my writing style is not something I give a lot of thought. I just tend to write stuff, and if it comes together with decent grammar, I’m satisfied. Maybe I do have a style of my own, but it’s just unconscious and I don’t recognise it. But as is often the case, once I started thinking about this, I realised that my style is very … proper. My grammar is often probably too good. One of the things that I always find myself doing is correctly those red squiggly underlines that MS Word uses to make you feel bad about yourself. Anyone Most people can create a grammatically correct sentence. But the more I learn about it, a writer’s style can often come from how they break the rules, not how perfectly they follow them.
2. Avoid cardboard-cutout characters – my friend did qualify this point by saying that my characters were pretty developed in this regard, but I know that this is the weakest part of my own writing. This has come from my own analysis of what I write, as well as from other peer feedback and professional appraisals. I think that my faults in this area result from:
   1. Not knowing enough about the characters – I tend to balk at delving too deeply into a character’s past and/or psychology. It’s not hard – you can make up whatever you want about them. But without this, you end up…
   2. Not knowing enough about their motivations – Writing a character’s past will give you clues about how they will behave in the context of your story. It will give you hints about what drives them, what’s important to them, what will make them laugh, cry, shout, etc. And if you don’t know any of that, you can’t help…
   3. Creating stereotyped or similar characters – I started reading a book last year where the two main characters spoke in the same cynical tones and told the same jokes. I didn’t make it through the book, it annoyed me that much. But my own writing suffers in the same way. I’ve never mastered how to make each character’s dialog sound different, and characters of the same gender share very similar behaviours at times. Someone told me once that all my female characters tend to cry at the slightest provocation.
3. Know why each chapter is there – the advice was pretty much this: justify the existence of each and every chapter – and hell, every scene for that matter. He suggested asking two questions:
   1. Why is this chapter here?
   2. What do I want from this chapter?

   To answer these questions, as a writer you’ve really got to think about why you wrote the scene in the first place. We writers often get attached to particular scenes – maybe they were fun to write, or we used lots of flowery language that we think sounds great – but a writer should always be prepared to delete a scene if it’s not serving a purpose for the story.The second question is a gem. I’d never thought to think what I – as the writer – wanted from a chapter. This uncovers a lot of bad reasons for the chapter being there. If it’s there merely so you can have one character tell another character what the reader needs to know – ie. exposition – then you have a serious problem, and you seriously need to rethink the first question. But you answer that you want the chapter to reveal a mystery, characterise your hero, or even just be a damn entertaining interlude, then at least you know consciously what you purpose is when writing the chapter, and this will surely show.

I have a few different people in my life who provide this for me: my girlfriend (yes, I let my partner read my work – I know many who wouldn’t), my writing group and other various friends. My experience is that other writers and people that read a lot give the best feedback. Particularly with other writers, they constantly have the same concerns on their mind as you: structure, characterisation, plot, imagery, etc. They are more likely to be able to point out what you’ve done right or wrong than other readers. They might tell you “The character lacks motivation in the first chapter” rather than a more vague “I just couldn’t get into it.”

Joining a writing group is one of the best things I’ve done for my writing. If you meet regularly – we meet about once a month – you can workshop short stories and improve them quickly. If you are working on a longer piece, it takes much longer to turn around changes, and for the group to read them too, but this is invaluable for getting varied feedback from people with (potentially) different reading interests. And everyone has skills and areas of study outside of writing – we had a doctor in our group who picked up many flaws regarding injuries that occurred in my first novel.

If you don’t have any friends that are writers, I highly recommend making some. It’s really not that hard to do. Many cities have writers’ centres, and they often maintain contact details of writing groups you could join. Or go to a writing course – the writing group I’m in came about by through meeting a few writers at a short story course. We were all interested in meeting regularly to discuss writing, and it just came together from there.

You’ve got to be prepared to give the kind of feedback you would want for yourself – this often means spending time reading other people’s work. I’ve found that you’ll easily see the same problems in other’s work that is plaguing your own writing, but you’re too close to it to see. It will make a better reader of your own work by teaching you to read with a critical eye.