Keep it small (but not too small): Part One

As a reader, a voracious reader, a few things annoy me beyond reason: bad grammar, too much description, and characters that exist to further the plot are among the worst offenders.  

My issues with bad grammar should be self-evident. If you’re gonna publish a book, write good. (Get it?)  

Too much description is just boring, no matter how interesting the locale or the food or the people might be. When my eyes glaze over or I start skipping entire paragraphs or pages—or worse, I start wondering what’s new on Netflix—there’s a danger I set the book down and never return. 

But characters…let’s talk about characters. Characters are the main reason I read. They’re also the reason I write. When the subconscious mind—and it’s always the subconscious mind—presents a writer with a protagonist, the writer has no recourse but to oblige and make the character her life’s companion for however long it takes to write that story. 

In my experience, the characters come first. The plot follows. I’ve found that creating characters to fit a plot leads to artificial people (and your characters should be people). Plot grows organically out of the behaviors and choices of characters who are as real as creations of the mind can possibly be. 

And when they’re real, they do things you didn’t foresee, rather annoyingly. I suppose that’s what keeps the writing process interesting. I believe in outlines, but I believe more strongly in the freedom to deviate from those outlines when what you’ve planned clearly won’t work. Let the characters take over. They know best. If they cause trouble, then it’s on them to get themselves out of it. 

Conflict is key. Conflict between the good guys and bad buys, conflict between the good guys themselves, conflict between ideas and philosophies. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, as they say, just as there’s more than one way to get from the beginning of a story to its end. 

Obviously, the writer’s job is to make the metaphorical skinning of the cat as entertaining as possible, so no one gets to take the path of least resistance from A to Z. 

Whatever is at stake must be big enough to matter, but small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, e.g. that paperback or e-reader. 

Have you ever started reading a book and wondered why any of the characters are doing what they’re doing? Why any of it matters? Why everything is so…small? 

I’m about to be canceled by the women of the world, but I see this often in what little genre romance I’ve read. If the whole point of the story is just to get two characters together, then I’m already bored. I’ve also had the same “why does this matter?” thought while reading well-crafted mysteries and widely acclaimed literary fiction, etc. 

Sometimes, I just don’t care. (And I doubly won’t care if I don’t like the characters.) 

In contrast, ever had the opposite thought? Why is everyone and everything so big and sweeping and unrealistically heroic? Are these people really going to save the world? 

This is common in a number of genres: fantasy, science fiction, action-adventure. To be fair, I love a good heroes-save-the-world story as much as anyone, and I much prefer characters doing too-big things than characters doing too-small things.  

What I’ve learned over the years, from books and movies and television and all the ways that we tell stories, is that I gravitate toward a happy medium: Compelling characters playing their small part in something big. 

I consider much of what I write to have at least one foot in the action-adventure genre, so I might be throwing stones at my own glass house here. I don’t think I am, though, because I once tried to make everyone and everything so big and sweeping and unrealistically heroic, and you know what? It was a terrible book. 

Join me in my next post and I’ll explain what I mean.