This week I finished reading a book I couldn't wait to get my hands on, because I loved the last book I'd read by the same author. It took me a couple months to read, though--sure, I've had other stuff going on to distract me, but I didn't have that can't-put-it-down feeling I get when I really, really love a book. You know the ones, where you look up at the end and notice your house is a mess and your family is hungry? Wasn't happening here.
Although my writing so far has been only realistic fiction, I read all different genres, so I'm willing to do my share of suspending disbelief. Traveling in a spaceship to live on a new planet? Yeah, let's see what that's like. Vampires sitting at the next table in the cafeteria? Sure. I may even spend time debating whether I'd prefer a werewolf boyfriend or a vampire boyfriend. (Not saying I've done that. But if I did, I'd pick werewolf.)
But in any book, the real-life stuff has to be believable. If it isn't, that's when I start thinking about Austin Powers.
We can actually learn a lot about writing by watching that groovy international man of mystery and his nemesis, Dr. Evil:
"Start the unnecessarily slow-moving dipping mechanism!" Here's a great bit of dialog from the first movie, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, between Dr. Evil and son Scott:
Dr. Evil: Scott, I want you to meet daddy's nemesis, Austin Powers.
Scott Evil: What? Are you feeding him? Why don't you just kill him?
Dr. Evil: I have an even better idea. I'm going to place him in an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death.
And later, when Austin and Vanessa are suspended above the tank they'll be lowered into:
Dr. Evil: All right guard, begin the unnecessarily slow-moving dipping mechanism.
Close the tank! Scott: Wait, aren't you even going to watch them? They could get away! Dr. Evil: No no no, I'm going to leave them alone and not actually witness them dying, I'm just gonna assume it all went to plan. What? Scott: I have a gun, in my room, you give me five seconds, I'll get it, I'll come back down here, BOOM, I'll blow their brains out! Dr. Evil: Scott, you just don't get it, do ya? You don't.
Is your antagonist acting like a parody of a villain? Are your readers going to feel annoyed and frustrated like Scott and yell at the book, "Why don't you just shoot him?" Of course, you don't want your protagonist to die or your story would be over. But if someone's out to get her, why don't they catch her right away? There has to be a reason they miss, a reason for the chase. Does the heroine somehow evade her pursuer, just when he's gotten close? That's suspenseful. Or does the villain have a chance to stop her, but let her go because he's holding out for something more dramatic? That's Dr. Evil. If the bad guys are out to get us, they're not going to wait around for sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads.
"A lot's changed since 1967." Technology and language changes from one year to the next, even. Unless it's meant to add authenticity to a historical setting, avoid using slang that can make your book seem dated within a couple years. If your character's dialog doesn't ring true--he no longer sounds like himself, he's talking like his mom or like someone who grew up in the 80s instead of now--you pull your readers right out of the story. Keep up with what's going on in the world and with your audience so you won't sound like someone who's been cryogenically frozen for thirty years.
"You're semi-evil. You're quasi-evil. You're the margarine of evil. You're the diet Coke of evil. Just one calorie, not evil enough." The Austin Powers movies have no shortage of one-dimensional bad guys. Dr. Evil and is henchmen are funny in the movie, but we don't want our own characters do be accidentally funny caricatures with all the emotional depth of Fembots. If characters have no flaws or weak moments, readers don't feel like they know them, because they don't know anyone who's all good or all bad. Don't you feel more connected to a story when you see what a character seems familiar to you?
Think about the villains people love, or love to hate. Why is Hannibal Lecter such a memorable and convincing bad guy? None of us would want him living next door, but he's intriguing. If he were repulsive at every moment we'd turn away, but we see his human side too. He loves classical music. He's respectful to Clarice Starling, even cares about her, although they're on opposite sides of the law. (For more on how Hannibal Lecter can help with character development, here's a great post I came across on Suite 101.)
If we saw Hannibal's evil plotting only, he'd be forgettable or laughable. We remember Hannibal; we laugh at Snidely Whiplash and Dr. Evil.
Hey, where did that come from? That's something your readers should never have to ask. A character can defend herself with a nearby object if it fits the setting and we're not seeing it for the first time. We have to see the object in an earlier scene so we're not taken aback when it conveniently shows up right when she needs it. We're okay with the henchman Random Task throwing a shoe at Austin Powers in Goldmember, because it was introduced earlier as his weapon of choice, however ridiculous. But if your heroine grabs a pool cue from her car trunk during a fight and informs us just then that she was planning on taking pool lessons, we're going to be confused and annoyed by the deus ex machina-ness of the scene.
In this comical fight scene from Goldmember, some of the objects used as weapons make sense, like the mini bottle that Mini-Me grabs from the hotel minibar, but things like the inexplicable frying pan add to the absurdity of the scene.
Avoid the frying pan.
There are probably many more lessons we can learn from the smashing Austin Powers, but these are just a few to keep in mind while writing and revising. We give our story the attention it deserves when we work to create well-rounded, three-dimensional characters who act and speak in ways that make sense, within a setting that makes sense.
Putting in all that effort isn't the easy way out, but it's worth all the work you put into it. 'Cause when you get it right, it's a beautiful as sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their frickin' heads.
I'm sure everyone's been to those workshops or conferences that are just okay--the speakers are good, and you pick up one or two things you might use in your writing. Or a few days later you tell someone it was a good workshop, but you can't think of anything specific you learned.
Luckily, even a couple of rotting tires couldn't get in my way. Before leaving town I stopped for an oil change. "Change" may not be the right word, really. The way my jalopy leaks oil, it's more accurate to say "oil replacement." But I digress. The mechanic told me not to go anywhere without getting two dry-rotted tires replaced. I wondered if it would help to rub the tires with a really good moisturizer, perhaps a hydrating mask, but mechanics look at you funny if you suggest things like that. Seems what I was driving around on were about as sturdy as papier-mâché, so a detour to Discount Tire was next.
Finally, I was on my way for real. I got to the workshop only about 15 minutes late, and there was chocolate on the table! In bowls that kept getting refilled all weekend!
I'd used Darcy's book Novel Metamorphosis: Uncommon Ways to Revise while revising CHAINED, and it helped so much (like with adding those pesky feelings I've mentioned), but it was even better seeing the activities and discussing in our small groups how we could use what we'd learned to revise our own novels.
For several of the activities, we used our "shrunken manuscripts" (the full novel printed single-spaced in an 8 point font). You can read more about the shrunken manuscript here, and it's a great way to visualize the big-picture stuff in your novel. Here's an example:
So that's my whole novel on my living room floor. At the workshop I placed a blue "X" over the chapters I thought were the strongest. They're pretty well spread out throughout the beginning, middle, and end of the story, so that's good. If you do this for your own novel, see if there are huge gaps between chapters you marked. If the strong chapters are all at the beginning and at the end, the middle of the novel may not be interesting enough to keep a reader going till the end. If your first chapter isn't one you marked as strong, see if there's a better place to start telling the story.
In this next activity, we used different colors of highlighters to mark the sensory details in one scene.
The scene is from chapter 3 of my YA novel REASONS FOR LEAVING. The main character, Minna, is lying in bed after being fired from yet another job. Here's an excerpt from that scene before the revision:
Our bulldog Marge walks in and climbs onto my bed. Well, not so much climbs, I guess. It's more like, she puts her front paws on the bed and waits for me to help her up. She always knows when I'm having a bad day. She licks my face once before lying down next to me.
After highlighting the sensory details there (not too many, other than what she sees and the dog licking her face), I set the page aside and rewrote the scene, keeping in mind that it would be stronger with more sensory details. Here's the "after" excerpt:
Our bulldog Marge saunters in and climbs onto the bed. Well, not so much climbs. It's more like, she puts her paws on the edge of the bed and waits for me to hoist her up. She's panting from the effort, even though I'm the one doing the heavy lifting. Her breath smells bacony--like real bacon, not like those treats that look just like bacon (but trust me, taste nothing like bacon). "Margie, have you been getting into the trash?" She's probably been chewing on paper towels I threw away after making BLTs last night. She licks my face once and flops down next to me. She always seems to know when I'm having a bad day.
I'm sure I'll end up tweaking that more as I revise, but just that couple minutes of scribbling results in a scene that works harder to bring the reader into the story with more sensory detail.
Later in the story, Marge throws a wrench into Minna's plans when she again gets into the trash and then the laundry, so the scene now does something Darcy mentioned she learned from Linda Sue Park: every chapter should have something that looks forward and something that looks back. When Marge does this again later, the reader will already know that this is a habit of hers.
Saturday night after taking waaaaay too long at dinner (What? The restaurant had a dessert called "ooey gooey chocolate cake"), we returned to the hotel meeting room to watch Pirates of the Caribbean. Can you believe I'd never seen it before? But even those who had seen it were able to watch it in a whole new way, because throughout the movie Darcy pointed out things we'd learned from our revision activities.
Objects weren't placed in a scene for no reason. That bed warmer? Nice weapon for whacking a bad guy in the face. We saw examples of mirror characters, like the two incompetent English soldiers and their pirate counterparts; repetition, like everyone swooning whenever Johnny Depp appeared Jack always grabbing for his personal effects, and Elizabeth singing the pirate song--once as a young girl at the beginning of the movie, and years later on the beach with Jack; and reversals of dialogue: a couple times throughout the movie, someone calls Jack "The worst pirate I've ever seen." At the end, an officer says, "That's got to be the best pirate I've ever seen."
These are all things we don't usually notice when watching a movie, but they add to the character development and the storyline, so novel writers can learn a lot from the big screen. I'm sure I'll spot those literary devices in movies from now on. But I won't mention them out loud while in a movie theater, unless I want people beating me up with popcorn buckets.
So, if you ever get a chance to go to one of Darcy's workshops, go!
Will Write for Cake is a critique group based in the Houston area made up of seven children's writers who happen to love baked goods.
Click on our websites to get to know more about us. Laura Edge Doris Fisher Lynne Kelly M. G. King Christina Mandelski
Monica Vavra
Tammy Waldrop
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