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My third grade daughter brought a children’s chapter book home from her school library a week ago. The book was about a fifth grader who decides that grades and standardized tests aren’t accurate assessments of children’s abilities and can make students feel stigmatized. The girl decides to make straight Ds on her report card.

I know…my eyebrows went up, too. :)

But she’d picked the book out herself, was excited about the novel, and was reading it carefully to take (ironically) a content test on it through the school’s accelerated reading program.

I read it, too, so I could quiz her on it and help her get prepped for her test.

After she finished the book, she said, “Mama, it was only about the report card. The whole thing! How the girl hated report cards, how she decided to fail her report card, how she had a meeting with her teacher and parents about the report card…then she had a meeting with the principal about the report card…”

She had a good point. The entire book dealt with the protagonist vs. her big conflict. Even the protagonist’s conversations with other characters were solely on the conflict.

And, obviously, that’s important. The whole point of the book is the main conflict facing the protagonist. It needs to create obstacles and confrontations for the character.

But we also need to view the protagonist in other ways:

How does he interact with other people?
How does he deal with other conflicts and stresses?
What’s he like in his downtime?

To get a well-rounded view of a character, it really helps to view the character from other angles.

That’s tricky. You don’t need to go veering off the subject for long periods of time. But short subplots or bits of dialogue with characters on topics other than the main conflict are important to develop our characters.

My sleuths don’t talk about the murder the entire book. The murder is a main focus of the book—the whole reason for the book. But I think readers get a multi-dimensional view of my protagonists through other scenes, too—humorous scenes, scenes where they’re working on a different problem, etc.

If we don’t offer the reader glimpses of other sides to our character? We risk having the characters look flat and having our readers get bored.

How do you show other sides to your characters?

Please pop by tomorrow when Bob Sanchez will be guest blogging at Mystery Writing is Murder on his writing process.

My husband’s sister and her husband live in Africa where they work as translators. My sister-in-law speaks French fluently and perfectly accented. Her husband speaks 5 or 6 languages, including Swahili.

For years they lived in Nairobi, Kenya. Life there; apart from election violence over a year ago, living in a guarded housing compound, and occasional run-ins with police (who aren’t like our police); was pretty tame compared to life in their current home in Bunia, Congo. Congo hasn’t historically been the calmest place on the globe to live.

Their day to day life is an adventure: for fresh water, reliable utilities, and even a safe place to live. Their country is exotic…the plants and wildlife are different, the language and customs are different.

In many ways, it’s the perfect place to write. But they’re not writers.

In contrast, I look at my life in suburban America. My adventures are pretty tame in comparison. Will I find my daughter’s missing library book before it becomes overdue? Will I make my deadline? Why is the washing machine making that strange noise?

Some of us write fantasy and sci-fi and the appeal there is completely clear—it’s the escape from reality for readers.

But what about those of us who write using everyday settings about everyday people? What’s the appeal there?

I think it must be that our readers can imagine themselves in the same circumstances. That we’ve made a connection with the ordinary reader. That we’ve either 1) created people like themselves who are suddenly facing extraordinary circumstances (they’re accused of murder, won the lottery, gotten lost in a snowstorm), or 2) we’ve created extraordinary people that our readers wish they could be, but aren’t.

My two protagonists both fall under the first category, I think…ordinary people who have been put in extraordinary situations.

What about you? Do your characters fall into either category? Both? Or do you write a genre where the extraordinary part is the escape from reality?

My upcoming Delicious and Suspicious will be released July 6, 2010, under my pen name Riley Adams. Just in time for the backyard grilling season! Here’s the back cover copy:

Welcome to Aunt Pat’s barbeque restaurant–family run and located in the heart of Memphis, Tennessee. Named in honor of Lulu Taylor’s great aunt, the restaurant is known for its ribs and spicy corn bread, but now the Taylor family will be known for murder–unless Lulu can clear their name…

Rebecca Adrian came to Memphis to suss out the best local BBQ for a prominent Cooking Channel show. Trouble is, Rebecca doesn’t live long enough to mention a bad review. A mystery ingredient has killed her–and now all fingers are pointing to Aunt Pat’s restaurant. Horrified that her family is being accused of murder, Lulu fires up her investigative skills to solve the crime before someone else gets skewered…

*************

I was thrilled yesterday when FedX dropped off my cover copies from Penguin. There’s just something about having a cover connected to your book to make it feel more real! I had a lot of fun writing this book and exploring characters that are different from my Myrtle Clover series. I can’t wait to share it with y’all in July! Oh…last bit of BSP. It is available for preordering from Amazon or your favorite independent bookseller. :)

I get a lot of emails for different organizations that I either volunteer for or belong to. Sometimes I want to get out my highlighter and mark the information I need.

Frequently I’ll get a page-long email with only one sentence that was actually important.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with information overload.
On one hand, it’s wonderful to have so many writing resources and tips online.  When I was starting to seriously write (seven years ago), there wasn’t enough information online.  Now there’s so much that it can be hard to know where to start. 

The basics you should cover if you’re about to submit a finished manuscript:

Going pro?  You need to check out those agents and publishers before you submit.  There are some really wicked people out there that prey on writers (who are sometimes more creative than they are business-headed.) 

If you are submitting (and you’ve checked out your agent and editor and done your homework there), you really do need to make sure your manuscript has been proofed by a separate set of eyes.  You could go several ways with that: the free route (a really objective-minded friend or family member), a critique group (you can find them online if you’d rather say at home or have time constraints), or you can even pass it by a professional editor that you pay yourself.  You want your manuscript to be as clean as it can possibly be.

Review those industry guidelines:  You need to be really sure that you’re following agent and publisher guidelines when you submit. You can easily find guidelines online these days.  You’ll want to make sure you don’t send your thriller to a romance publisher, or make similar mistakes.

Have an email address.   I’m always surprised at who doesn’t have a professional email address. You can get one that’s separate from your family email through a free provider (Google Mail, Hotmail, Yahoo.)  Try a professional-sounding address like Your Name @gmail.com.

Personal website or a blog that functions as your home base.  I could be argued out of the notion that this is a basic…but I really do believe it is. Even one page that  introduces you in a basic, professional way to an editor or agent works fine.   Blogger, through Google, offers free blogging, as do some other providers.  You could also go through WordPress, which can provide you with a blog that’s also a website (with a home page and other tabs.)  I have a separate website from my blog— I bought my domain name from GoDaddy (they have silly commercials, but they do have good deals). I designed my site with their program, “Website Tonite.”

What information should your website or blog contain? How to contact you (email), your genre, and what you’re working on now is probably good enough.  You can put up a friendly looking picture of yourself or an image related to your book and call yourself done.

What basic tips do you have to add that I’ve forgotten or left out?

I belong to a couple of Yahoo groups for cozy authors. One subject that’s been hot on the boards lately is the way some authors argue with their readers on (mostly) Amazon.

It’s almost like the social media phenomenon, which has resulted in a casual relationship with our readers via Facebook and Twitter, has gotten authors in the mood to fight back when a reader gives a negative review.

I think it’s a really bad idea.

Usually, if a reader doesn’t enjoy your book then they’re honestly writing a review of what they personally didn’t like. It’s almost a buyer-beware type post—a note to the reading community: “Hey, if you’re like me and you don’t like this particular thing in a novel, then you might not like this book either.”

Honest dialogue on your book should be happening.  You want people discussing your novel, good or bad. If people are talking about your book, then they’re reading it.

There is absolutely nothing gained, in my opinion, by trying to debate someone who doesn’t like your novel.  There are plenty of books that have been well-reviewed that I didn’t enjoy: maybe they were really graphically violent, or had lots of long, descriptive passages…whatever. People have a right to their opinion. Every book isn’t right for every reader.

And, yes, then you do have the other kind of reader.  They’re sometimes a little flaky. They might say things that don’t reflect an objective, professional-sounding review—they might even be downright mean.  They could say something really odd about how your book promotes a particular political bent (when it doesn’t) or that you had an environmental agenda or were anti-vegan, or whatever.

But these aren’t professional reviewers.  And they’re not expert readers/critics like book bloggers who review books daily.  They’re not writers who express themselves well. They’re regular readers.

And if you start arguing with these people about how your book doesn’t espouse any kind of an agenda, then you’re just going to look bad.  I can’t think of a time when it would be worth the author’s time to counterattack.

Because the reviewers will frequently write back to argue your points. And then you’ve pulled attention away from your book and made yourself look unprofessional to boot.

The worst case scenario is when an author really flips out…like Alice Hoffman did last year. She got so upset with a reviewer (and this was a professional newspaper reviewer) that she posted the critic’s phone number on Twitter and asked her readers to call the critic and complain about the negative review.

Of course authors feel very protective about their books. There’s so much of ourselves in every one of them, and we put many hours into books that can be read in a fraction of the time it took us to pen them.
I’ve seen quite a few authors jumping in to defend their novels.

But to me, when we enter into the fray, we’re drawing attention to the negative review, making ourselves look unprofessional, and certainly not convincing the reader to change their mind about the book.  What’s gained?