Write a Story, Part III: Character Motivation & Change

***This post is the third in a series of eight.  From now through September I'll be posting weekly exercises designed to take our short stories from rough draft to finished "masterpiece"(or as close as we can get ;-) with the help of the late John Gardner and a host of other well-known authors and teachers.  Click here for Part I ***

Now that we’ve set the mood of our stories and grounded them in time and place, let’s focus on our main characters for a bit. What motivates your character to behave the way she does?  What does she want at the beginning of the story, and how does that desire change by the end? Does your character at least begin to undergo a change by the end of the story?

Of course, not all protagonists change during the course of a story, but according to Brandi Reissenweber of Gotham Writers’ Workshop, they should at least “possess the ability to change, and the reader should see this potential. Change is particularly important for a story’s main character.  Just as the desire of a main character drives the story, the character’s change is often the story’s culmination…. If you don’t create the potential for change, the character will feel predictable and the reader will quickly lose interest.”

Showing character change (and the potential for change) is not simple.  Nancy Kress, author of Beginnings, Middles & Ends, devotes twelve pages to character motivation and change, and tells us how to pull it all off in her chapter “Under Development: Your Characters at Midstory.”  The first thing we need to do, she says, is to convince the reader that a character is capable of change by “showing him doing it” either through flashback or small parts of scenes that “can foreshadow your character’s ability to become whatever you eventually have him become” (for example: maybe the reader sees through flashback that your character has changed his mind once before).  In a short story (as opposed to a novel) you obviously won’t have much time (words?) to accomplish all of that. 

Once you’ve shown that a character is capable of change, the next step is to show the character actually changing, and to convince the reader that the change is genuine.  This, according to Kress, is accomplished through a pattern of incidents that the character is forced to live through.  As Kress says, “…one mention [of your character changing] on page sixty-eight isn’t going to do it.”

Josip Novakovich, author of Writing Fiction: Step by Step says, “When you introduce a character, imagine what her motive is.  Setting several characters in motion, with conflicting motives, may give you enough momentum for the whole story.  You need not worry about plot as much as about getting several characters together with strong motives at cross-purposes.  Let the motives in conflict work until a climax, a showdown, occurs, and from there a conclusion will flow.”

Nancy Kress: Beginnings, Middles & Ends

Josip Novakovich: Writing Fiction: Step by Step

Brandi Reissenweber: Gotham Writers' Workshop: Writing Fiction, the Practical Guide, "Character: Casting Shadows"

Write A Short Story:  

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Setting & Emotion  

Part III: Character Motivation & Change

Part IV: Story Shape

Part V: Dialogue

Part VI: Authenticating Detail & Description

Part VII: Tension & Reader Anticipation

Part VIII: Plot

Surprise Ending

Not all of us love a surprise party, but most of us probably enjoy a well-crafted and unexpected turn of events in the stories we read (be they fiction or nonfiction) just when we thought we had the whole thing figured out. I'm not talking about those playful-but-clever O. Henry kind of endings, but endings that feel organic and right--satisfying on every level. How do writers come up with those great endings? I wish I knew. I wish there was a simple formula for that -- or even a complicated one. 

Needing a break from my novel and the slow, seemingly never-ending progress I've been making on my third rewrite,  I thought I'd tackle something new for a while -- a project I could start and finish in a month or two -- a short story, maybe, just a few thousand words.  A piece of cake, or so I thought. 

It wasn't difficult to come up with a premise right away. A week later I even had what I thought was a pretty decent rough draft of the first two-thirds of the story.  So far so good, but as always, the final third of the story had my brain tied up in knots.  How do I find that perfect surprise ending, the kind of ending that resonates and sends the reader back to the beginning to see how in the heck I pulled it all off?  An ending that's totally unexpected, but feels in retrospect like the story was working up to that final moment all along...?  

To pull off a surprise like that, we need to really know and understand our characters, especially those who'll be surprising us with their unexpected and seemingly unpredictable actions.  We need to know who they are and what they're capable of.  What motivates them to behave the way they do? Have they shown through past action that they are capable of such behavior?   What are their secret and not-so-secret yearnings and fears? 

In Writing Fiction Step by Step author Josip Novakovich suggests that in order to avoid the sense of "foregone conclusion" when creating and defining our characters we should look beyond simple "character traits" that tend to pigeonhole our protagonists and other characters into behaving in predictable ways:   

When we do what Novakovich suggests above, we need to make sure that we've prepared the reader ahead of time. We don't want to spoil the reader's surprise, but we want the ending -- and the character's unexpected behavior -- to ultimately make sense. 

Brandi Reissenweber, author of the “Ask the Writer” column for The Writer magazine (and my all-time favorite online writing instructor at Gotham Writers Workshop) explains in the following three snippets (from one of her many in-depth lectures on craft) the importance of carefully setting things up so that when the surprise comes it doesn't feel forced:

My favorite bit of advice on "endings" and "surprise" comes from author and creative writing professor John Dufresne in his enthusiastic and inspiring book on craft, The Lie That Tells A Truth.  It comes from his chapter on plot titled "The Queen Died of Grief." I find myself returning to this passage every time I approach the ending of a new story, and I imagine that you will, too:

Below the exercise I've listed a few of my favorite short stories with surprise endings that work really well. I'd love to hear about some of your own favorites. The more we read stories with good surprise endings, the closer we'll get to actually pulling one off ourselves.  Oh, and hey -- if, during your travels and studies, you happen to come across a simple formula for generating the perfect surprise ending, be sure to let me know, would you?

Maass notes that in his workshops, "nearly three-quarters of participants find that they prefer the approach to the scene that this exercise yields.  Why is that? First choices in writing a scene often are the easiest: the ones that make sense and feel safest.  But safe choices make a scene predictable. Reversing motives shakes up a scene.  It makes its course less expected, yet no less logical since the action still comes from your character's true, deep motives." 

Seems to me that you could use this same exercise for the "endings" of stories as well. Or the endings of novels.  Or the endings of chapters in novels. What is it your character yearns for? Make a complete list of his reasons for wanting it.  Come up with several new and surprising "endings" based on each of the motivations on your list and write a brief summary of each.  Do any of these new endings surprise you more than others? If so, find places earlier in the story to show that your character is capable of such an unexpected action. Can you convince the reader through your character's past experiences that his surprising action later in the story is not only plausible, but right? 

A few of my favorite short stories available to read online:

"Neversink" by David Benioff  

"Twin Study" by Stacey Richter 

"The Wig" by Brady Udall (transcript from "This American Life", NPR) -- my favorite flash fiction piece (only 372 words!)

~

Josip Novakovich: Writing Fiction Step By Step

Donald Maass:  Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook

John Dufresne:  The Lie That Tells A Truth

Brandi Reissenweber: writing instructor for Gotham Writers Workshop and author of the "Ask the Writer" online column for "The Writer" magazine

Flashback

Yesterday I changed my mind about how to structure my novel. This is nothing new -- I've gone back and forth with this for nearly four years now. My novel spans approximately six years in time, and though the events occurring in the earliest months are critical to the story's outcome, I want to keep the main focus on those events that take place during the final year of the story.

Telling the story in chronological order seems like the most straightforward way to go, but that option gives equal weight to both past and present events. Another option would be to tell the story in alternating parallel storylines, one chapter in the present, followed by a chapter of flashback, and then back to the present in the next chapter, and so on. This structure would also seem to put too much focus on my character's past actions. For now, I've settled on a third option: I'll begin each chapter in the present and then flash briefly back to an important scene from the past, giving just enough information to provide necessary motivation or to reveal character. These flashbacks will follow a chronological timeline, until hopefully by the end of Part I the past will have caught up to the present and I can proceed with the rest of the novel in the present time.

The only problem, of course, is that flashbacks can be difficult to pull off. "There is an inherent plot problem when you use flashbacks," writes James Scott Bell, author of Plot & Structure. "… forward momentum is stopped for a trip to the past. If not used properly, the reader can get frustrated or impatient (not to mention editors, who tend to distrust flashbacks altogether)."

But flashbacks can be a good thing, as Caren Gussoff notes in this excerpt from her excellent chapter on "Setting and Pacing" in Gotham Writers' Workshop: Writing Fiction, The Practical Guide:

One thing for sure, to be such a wizard we need to keep our readers from getting lost in time and space, to keep our transitions as smooth and inconspicuous as we possibly can. In her bookPlot (from the Elements of Fiction Writing series) Ansen Dibell writes:

One way to make sure you're solidly anchored before you make the leap back in time is through the use of sensory detail. Author  Rust Hills (Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular) writes:

Recently I've tried to pay attention to how some of my favorite authors manage to navigate so smoothly from present to past and out again. The following are just a few flashback transitions from one of my favorite short stories, "Tiny Smiling Daddy," by Mary Gaitskill (Read her stories. Gaitskill is a master at piloting the reader through time and space). Each of the following passages leads into a brief flashback scene. The last one is my favorite-- the way the author ferries the reader from a scene in the present action (He stopped at a crowded intersection, feeling like an ant in an enemy swarm), through a brief summary of events over a period of time (She wrote poems about heroic women warriors, she brought home strange books and magazines), to a particular, vivid moment in time (Kitty screamed at her, the tendons leaping out on her slender neck.... ) So fluid. So seemingly effortless!

So, if in your current writing project you're ready to "lean off the roof" and take your reader on a brief journey into your character's past, here's an exercise to help get you started:

James Scott Bell, Plot & Structure

Rust Hills, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular

Ansen Dibell, Plot

Gotham Writers' Workshop: Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide (chapter on "Setting & Pacing" by instructor, Caren Gussoff)

Mary Gaitskill's collection of short stories: Because They Wanted To