I was going through my blog reader recently and came across an interesting post from writer Jeff Cohen: “Stuff Not to Do” on the Hey, There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room blog. The whole article was good, but the part that particularly caught my eye was this:
“Don’t decide on the crime and then create a character to fit it. Character comes first. The crime is the bait; it’s what Alfred Hitchcock called “the MacGuffin,” something the people in your book are desperate about but the reader should find secondary. Your characters are first. Write characters the reader cares about one way or another, and you’re halfway home. Killing someone with a guillotine in the middle of Indiana isn’t the key to your book.”
I thought Jeff nailed it.
I don’t know how long it took me to figure this out, but it was a while. I thought, since I was being paid to write mysteries, that my primary focus was that mystery…for you, it might be the magic in your fantasy or the science in your science fiction. It was very important to me to get my clues, red herrings, motives, murders, and solution perfectly written. And I think I did a good job with that. But one day, one of my editors told me, “Elizabeth, your mystery is very sound. But what your readers particularly care about is the characters. What’s going on with them? I’d like to see more of what they’re up to in between the time while they’re working on the case.”
When I was starting out my series, I thought that the interpersonal relationships of my characters, their problems, what was going on in their non-mystery-solving lives was interesting to me, but I wasn’t sure if my editors were going to perceive it as filler that needed to be edited out. After all, wasn’t I deviating from the plot—the mystery? Then I realized that the in-between stuff was the way I was connecting to my readers—the characters were pulling them into my story. Readers had purchased my book in order to read about my characters…who just happened to be solving a murder mystery while my readers caught up with their lives. In some ways, the subplots that developed my characters and hooked readers were just as important as the A Plot—the mystery itself.
I can write a 45,000 word book that’s solely the mystery. That’s as long as it takes to introduce suspects, outline the crime, and focus on an investigation and a puzzle and a solution. But that’s only the puzzle—straight mystery. Adding in the subplots, the personal interaction between characters, their conflicts, the way the mystery affects them…this adds in about 30,000 more words. It’s not fluff, either—it’s character development. It’s all about hooking the readers with the character personalities.
Why would readers read my mystery, otherwise? They wouldn’t care about the victim (who is frequently a nasty personality anyway), they wouldn’t have enough information to identify with or pull for the sleuth, and the suspects…well, they’re all suspected of murder. To hook readers, you have to make them care about all of the characters—even the victim. The reader has to care enough to want this case to be solved and to solve it alongside the protagonist. To help out.
This is true with any genre. As Jeff Cohen put it, the genre functions as the MacGuffin. It’s not all about the romance or paranormal aspects of a story’s creatures, the science fiction or the fantasy. Those function as just the premise that lures readers of that genre to our books. Most popular books are popular because of the characters populating them.
As a reader and writer, how important are the characters to you? How do you enrich the story by revealing more about them while still keeping up your story’s pace and keeping to your genre restrictions?
****Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi from the Bookshelf Muse (now at Writers Helping Writers) are holding a special event to celebrate the release of two more books in their Descriptive Thesaurus Collection: The Positive Trait Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Attributes and The Negative Trait Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Flaws. They’re offering a free opportunity for help with pitches/hooks/queries/more. See http://dld.bz/cSHq6 for info or to sign up (I’m one of the ones helping with the event). Thanks! ***
I find if I start with a plot, one of my characters soon takes over and changes all my plans anyway. Easier just to give into them from the beginning.
dream… write… publish
Great point. Plots may interest and even fascinate me, but it’s the characters I remember! :)
Elizabeth – You make such strong points here. Characters are everything in a story, really. After all, when there is a crime, it comes out of their network of relationships. So how can you have a really engaging crime novel without strong character development?
Characters are everything to me. I have purchased best-sellers or books by best-selling authors and put them down after one chapter because I didn’t care about the characters or what happened to them.
I read this as well last week on _Dead Guy_ and thought it instructive. I just naturally begin a story with characters largely because living with them through the drafts is so very important.
I’m glad you site this for your audience. I should probably add MacGuffin to a post-draft checklist to make sure I don’t lulled by plot! Oh, plot – so sexy.
er …cite
This explains why The Man Who Did Too Much came in over 90k words, even though the murder plot is relatively simple. (Duh.)
But as to your point, I think that, aside from the detective characters – whose lives we cozy into – developing the killer, victim and suspects allows us to make the mystery more twisty and interesting. Christie often hinged her murders and solutions on the psychology of the killer and victim.
Characters always come first for me. I see them first, and then the storyline appears. I’ve read books with good stories, but if I didn’t care about the characters, I didn’t enjoy it. Or finish reading it.
As a reader, I like characters with minimum descriptions. For me a book is first and foremost about the story and then the characters (that rule doesn’t hold in certain books like the Classics). I want the story and not the characters to role from page one. As a writer, I’d probably feel the opposite.
Agree with all the above. I tend to start with plot, because I’m an idea guy who got hooked on mysteries by Hercule Poirot. But over the years I’ve realized that I stick with an author because he/she has created a character or ensemble that I really enjoy spending time with. Even if they are idea guys, they have to be real people.
I have always created the characters first, working on detailed character sheets. Once I know the character, I can drop him or her into any storyline.
And a story with good characterizations does NOT have to have a lot of description.
Chandler’s mysteries are so complex even he didn’t know who committed all the murders.
But Philip Marlowe is a guy I could chat with for the rest of my life. And the other characters are fascinating glimpses into courage or cowardice or lust or love or selfishness or sadness.
I write mysteries, but so far, they’re not murder mysteries. Bodiless.
If my characters aren’t thick and juicy, who’s gonna read that?
I think I really needed to hear this right now. I am trying to come up with what story I want to write for NaNoWriMo, but maybe my focus should be on what character I want to tell a story about….
Thanks!
Charmaine–They do have a way of doing that!
Alex–I’ve got a stack of unfinished books like that, too. I’ve got to care about the characters–even if I don’t like them, I’ve got to be at least intrigued by them.
Jemi–Same with me!
Margot–Seems completely impossible. Even a fairly unlikeable protagonist (and there are a few in crime fiction) can be popular with readers as long as he or she is *interesting* and we find out more and more about what makes him tick.
Prashant–Oh, I agree with you about the descriptions. I barely sketch out what they look like (I’m hoping readers will fill in the blanks by thinking the character reminds them of someone they know), but I do fill out their personalities.
Diane–I love your method. :) You’re so organized!
Karen–Me too. Or someone who at least intrigues me and shows some change as the story continues (like Mary from “The Secret Garden.”)
jack–Great blog, isn’t it? I haven’t done much with MacGuffins (in the regular sense of the word), although I had an antique quilt act as one once.
jack –That’s the very one on my watchlist now! I use site about 98% more than cite these days…
The Daring Novelist–Very true….although with my suspects, the more I get to know them (and what’s going on in their heads) , the less I like them lately–I think I need to break that pattern and let the psychology take an unlikeable suspect into a kinder, gentler direction and make them more sympathetic to the reader. Change it up a bit.
Joel–Chandler made Marlowe fascinating…and real. He seems like a living person. I’d know him if I met him on the street.
Very true. Even with books populated with bodies (at least 2 in each of my books…I shudder to think of my body count now), there’s only really the puzzle and the people. That’s all the reader gets with mine and both have really got to be good to keep them reading.
Michael–I’m a Christie lover myself. I have to remind myself that although I do remember the plots of the mysteries that hooked and surprised me through the years, the reasons I really kept reading them were Poirot (I have a real fondness for him especially…love the vanity flaw) and Marple.
Jon–Sounds like the perfect way to start out a book!
RE – Likeable or unlikeable suspects and killers (and even victims!):
That’s really an issue for writing the modern cozy. The more we like somebody, the less we want it to turn out that they did it — and so, as writers, if we want to help our readers stay feeling “safe” and cozy, we’re limited as to how likeable we can make our suspects.
I’ve always thought Christie did a great job of how the most likeable character might well be the cold-blooded killer – but I think it’s harder for the modern cozy writer.
Camille–Funny you should say that…I have two editors with two totally different takes on it. One of them has asked me on two separate occasions to make my killer very likeable (through rather extensive rewrites) because she felt that the reader *wanted* the unlikeable character to be the murderer and wasn’t surprised. This editor is big on surprise endings
The other editor felt the opposite.
For my self-pub, I try to make everyone dimensional enough that they all have likeable and unlikeable qualities.
It’s a challenge…except, maybe, for self-pub.
Hi Elizabeth
Great post, thanks.
As a pantser, i must confess to being all about the characters. I begin with a basic premise, but after that, the characters run the show. If they aren’t fully fledged, their decisions and reactions and choices don’t make sense, and the book falls apart.
In my genre particularly (sci-fi and fantasy), writers could be accused of using very stock characters, and focusing too much on the MacGuffin, so for me, it’s characters first every time.
With regards to revealing them, we judge people by their actions much of the time, and this ideally, is how we get to know characters, I think. My wonderful editor helped me hack about ten thousand words of introspection and inner monologue out of my first book and it was so much better for it!! :) So, brief initial description, and let their actions take care of the rest. (maybe just a little inner dialogue:)
cheers
Mike
Totally, totally, totally about the characters. Make me care about them, and it will take a REALLY lousy story/plot to make me stop reading. But even the most fantastic story won’t work for me if I don’t care about the characters. Hubster and I were watching a Netflix move a while back, and it started out with all sorts of action–but I didn’t know who the good guys were, who the bad guys were, and therefore, didn’t really care. Of course, Hubster liked all the shoot-em-up stuff.
Terry
Terry’s Place
Mike–I can see where the MacGuffin could end up in primary importance in SFF.
Great point that you have, too–let their actions speak for them. Then the readers can figure out the characters and their motivations and feel/be clever in the process.
I loves me some memorable characters. As a writer, it’s something I’m constantly working to improve.