Earlier in the week I mentioned the Men With Pens post that reminded me I have to make characters that my readers will care about, and the Men With Pens gang mentioned there would be more character tips to come. True to their word, the latest post is about making your character flawed, and it’s another timely reminder as I prepare to sit down with my opening chapter this weekend.

The ideas I don’t want to forget from that post are mostly about leaving room for the characters to grow. That is to say, I know already how they are at the end of the novel, but I have to make sure they start from a different point and change throughout. In fact, I’d really only thought about that for the most main character, but it will also be important for the other two main characters. I’ll have to really think about how their characters will change in the course of the story.

The post also discusses the flaws that a character has; two of my characters have clear flaws, but the third is perhaps a bit too flawless … actually no, as I think about it, I realise what her flaw is. So that’s pretty much taken care of. But my novel is really very character based, so I’ll have to be careful about how I manage all of this. How exciting – I have to make time to get to some serious writing (or rewriting) soon.

You might remember I’ve set myself a March 31 deadline to rewrite the first chapter of my novel. Of course, the first thing I realised is that until I figure out a good structure for the novel, I won’t even know what the first chapter is, but I have a pretty good idea of that now. (Admittedly only for the first half of the novel, but that’s a good start).

Yesterday morning I even woke up with some opening lines – even though I haven’t consciously been thinking about the story that much – so something must be going on in that mysterious mind of mine.

And then this morning a friend dropped over a Louise Doughty novel called Honey Dew – I was inspired by her after seeing her speak a couple of times at the Perth Writers Festival – and having read the first chapter over my macaroni lunch, I was reminded of some points to remember as I rewrite my own first chapter:

1. Opening sentences are important. Doughty’s in Honey Dew is “It was four days before the bodies were discovered, by which time Mr Cowper had begun to mottle.”
2. But it doesn’t have to be all action. Doughty starts with two short paragraphs mentioning a husband and wife whose bodies have been found, but then spends a long paragraph on the weather, and lets the narrator explain something of their garden, which obviously doubles as character description, but in a “show don’t tell” kind of way.
3. I don’t know the right term for it, but something like “premonitions” are important too. Leaving small hints about what is to come, or what might be to come – leaving open questions for the reader.
4. And more on the “show don’t tell” – Doughty doesn’t tell much at all. The narrator is a newspaper reporter, but we first see her at home in the garden, then in court – and we don’t know why she’s in court, only that she goes there regularly. The facts just become somehow obvious as we read on.
5. Leave things hanging. Finish a chapter with a reason for the reader to keep reading. Not a trashy Hollywood “who’s he going to use the knife on” kind of reason, but something that’s open, and interesting.

My RSS feeder brings in all kinds of writing info and tips for me each day, most of which I skim and ignore pretty quickly because I’m always in a hurry to get to the actual writing I have to do. But this morning a post from Men With Pens (cool name, hey!) caught my eye.

In their post Fiction Writing: Characters Rule the Story, I got a good reminder about a mistake I was about to make with the first chapter of my novel rewrite. Characters are more important than I’ve made them. In my plan for the new version of the first chapter, I had carefully decided that the three main characters should all be introduced somehow, but what I haven’t perhaps paid enough attention to is that they must be characters which the reader can love, and they must be real.

In particular, this bit from the Mens With Pens post rang true:

Your characters, once they’ve been let loose, lead the reader through the story much more than you ever could. You’re not there on the pages. They are. So let your characters run the show, because they’ll make or break your book. Not your plot, not your descriptions, not your scenes or settings – your characters.

The trick of how you make your readers love your characters is something that eludes me right now, but I hope I can get it half way right when I get writing. I love the characters, but how can I make others feel that way? I also struggle sometimes to make characters seem believably real. I already think that just giving them “actual” characteristics and behaviours of people you know doesn’t cut it. If a reader doesn’t believe it, it doesn’t matter that I actually know someone who does that. So I have to work on that, too. And then let the characters tell the story without me.

I heard somewhere of Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile so when I saw it on the library shelf I grabbed it. And yesterday during 40+ degree heat, I devoured it. Full of really useful advice, it’s an editor’s viewpoint on what gets a novel rejected – with tips on how to avoid this, of course.

And so that I don’t forget, here are the most important things I should remember:

• When it’s time to send a book proposal to an editor, research the publishing house carefully by checking for similar style novels: and mention this in your covering letter.
• I can’t hear this often enough: use less adjectives and adverbs. Use stronger verbs and nouns instead.
• Read some poetry to get a sense of the sound of language. Read your manuscript aloud or get others to read it. (I read a tip on this somewhere, to get this monotonous internet voice to read it for you, at ReadPlease.)
• Dialogue dangers: not enough attributives, too many attributives (“he said”), too much interruption, too much dialogue without interruption, too commonplace (“I’ll have two sugars in my coffee please”) …
• Avoid dialect (not that I need to remember this, but I wish Irvine Welsh could remember this, so I wouldn’t have to give up his novels because I can’t follow the Scottish dialect)
• Show don’t tell: the most often given advice, but still a good reminder.
• And stacks of other little tips: I must re-read this when I finally have a novel to edit.