Don’t get all excited, ladies. I don’t actually mean I took Dugoni away. Just a bit of his knowledge.
This weekend I had to pleasure and opportunity to attend the first inaugural Chanticleer Author Conference. I’m still overflowing with inspiration and information, and as a way of unpacking everything I learned this weekend, I’ve decided to blog about it. I thought maybe I could cover the whole experience in one post, but there was simply too much to squeeze it all in, so I’ll be covering different topics all week.
The CAC was a conference focused, more than any writing event I’ve attended, on the cutting edge of publishing. While the authors in attendance came from a variety of backgrounds–traditional, indy, and hybrids of both, we all shared one goal: reaching readers in this cataclysmic age of publishing. Because of that, and perhaps because the majority of authors in attendance already had a book or ten or more out, the focus was not on craft.
However, mainly because I miss the craft part of writing after three days away from it, I’m going to write this first post on what I learned about craft at the CAC this weekend. In particular, I’m talking about Sunday morning’s Keynote speaker, Robert Dugoni.
Robert Dugoni is a best-selling mystery/thriller author. He’s a west-coast author, but darned if he doesn’t look and sound like he stepped off the plane from New York City. If you look closely you’ll catch glimpses of a heart of gold shining through a Al Pachino-type tough guy exterior. He’s also old-fashioned–with all the fancy technical presentation equipment available, we were scrambling to get him a simple whiteboard just minutes before he went up. Screens, he pointed out, cause people to glaze over and stop engaging. Spoken like a true parent of teenagers!
Dugoni presented on the topic of Character, which was timely for me because I have been struggling mightily with one of my characters lately. He used the handy whiteboard to illustrate the point that structure, in books, is never unique–structure is not why people read books. People read books for memorable characters. He covered character development and illustrated how to make your characters stand out by giving them strengths and making them a little better than everyone else. He talked about giving your character self-regard–that is, have them assess the event that is about to happen, and reflect on the event that has happened, so that the meaning of the events to the character comes through to the reader. He had us do some quick exercises to illustrate how to get a character’s personality across by showing the reader what they look like.
I won’t retype my notes here, because you’ll get a lot more from hearing it from him directly (which you can: he teaches classes) but I will briefly explain the breakthrough he helped me achieve.
Dugoni talked about character development, asking us why do characters change? the answer–because people change. Why do people change? The experiences we through change us. How do you structure character development into your book? Here’s where my ears perked up, because I’ve been struggling with how my heroine develops in book II for months now.
He used an illustration from a book called The Writer’s Guide to Writing your Screenplay by Cynthia Whitcomb. There are five levels of development a character can go through:
- Caring only about him or her self
- Caring about one other person
- Caring about the gang or the people in the character’s close inner circle
- Caring about a whole community–a city, a type of people, a country
- Caring about everyone in the whole world, i.e. Gandhi or Mother Theresa.
Your character will most likely begin low on this spectrum and move to a higher level, although as he pointed out the opposite is possible (think a beleaguered PTA mom who takes a weekend off and has a steamy affair). The key is that if you have a character who starts out on level one and immediately jumps to level 5 for no reason, the reader is not going to tolerate it. You have to work your way up through the levels. If your character starts out a selfish prick and by the end of the book is willing to make a personal sacrifice to make one other person in the world happy, that’s progress. That’s believable, if the right circumstances have occurred in the book to make us believe it.
As he was talking, I could see clearly how many of my characters are on this journey from caring only about themselves and their own needs to having to expand their view of who deserves their attention, protection, and sacrifice. I have one character who starts out very much at level one. Because I was aware of how awful of a person he was to begin with, I’ve been very careful in book II try not to make him a nice guy right away, even though there is potential for him to change. He’s working his way slowly up these levels. But another character, who ends book I at level 4, is harder to work with. There’s very little room for development now. She’s already made the ultimate sacrifice for her people.
The epiphany I had was this: what if she made that sacrifice not because she is actually at level 4 already, but because she wants to believe she is? What if she’s actually still at level 1, and the reason she sacrificed herself was not out of selfless love for her people, but secretly out of her desire to be thought of as a good person? What if that’s her struggle now–coming to see herself in this light, and realizing how little she actually cared about her people? That she did what she had to out of vanity, pride and duty, not out of love? And that’s her growth now–to be selfless even when there is nothing in it for her emotionally?
And that might actually work, considering that she’s constantly thrust into the role of having to protect and defend someone she detests, something she gets no emotional satisfaction from.
We shall see. I’ll have to play around with these ideas for a little while before I see where this is going and how to work it all together. But I’m grateful to Dugoni for giving me this scale to look at and ask, where does my character lie in these levels? Where does the character think she lies? Where does she actually lie?
One other interesting fact before I sign off: Dugoni gave me something else yesterday, which was a possible title for the last book in the Dreams of QaiMaj series. Referring to climax, he used the phrase: Death of the Dream.
Back soon with more fun takeaways from CAC 2014!
