Part Two of Three: The Mechanics of Desire--Controlling Belief and Announced Strategy

 
This is part two of my three-part series on desire. This is one more priceless part of my experience with Martine Leavitt at the Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers conference this summer. It continues to direct everything I do as far as story creation. The next novel I'm writing has been fleshed out entirely using this way of thinking. I think it is going to be a lot easier to write than any of my former books.

You can read part one of this series here. It addresses the character's emotional and concrete desire lines. 

CONTROLLING BELIEF:

A controlling belief is what your character believes he or she needs to do in order to meet his or her emotional needs.

Especially when you're writing about/for children, and even teens, the thing he or she believes they need to do can be completely random, because young people have little to no power to meet their emotional needs. It does not have to be rational, and it does not have to be correct. It is often a key point of character growth when they realize something mistaken in this core belief, and grow or change  at the climax of the story.

What does your character begin to believe that he or she can do in order to solve his or her problems?

An example that Martine gave, from a book whose title she didn't remember:

A young girl protagonist whose father is away at war, believes that the odds would be more in her favor of her father coming home if her dog died, because the universe wouldn't be that cruel to take the father of a little girl whose dog was dead. In this book, this girl believed that she needed to kill her dog in order to get her father home safely. She spends time convincing herself that she doesn't even like the dog, plots to kill the dog.

In Lord of The Rings, Frodo's emotional need is for safety and security, and his concrete desire is to save the Shire. His controlling belief is that he must destroy the ring in order to overcome the powers of evil, and return to his safe, peaceful life in the Shire.

Your character's controlling belief should carry us through from the beginning of the story to the climax. We should know this belief within the first few chapters. It fits in with the announced strategy, which I'll talk about next.

 

ANNOUNCED STRATEGY:

If controlling belief is what a character believes he or she can do to fulfill his or her emotional needs, announced strategy is when your character tells us what he or she will specifically do to fix it. (What will your character be physically be doing to make their controlling belief a reality?)

What specific plans would the little girl with the dog make to kill the dog? Would she buy poison? Would she build toward a specific set of circumstances on a specific day when she will do him in?

Your announced strategy should be revealed fairly soon—within the first fifty pages if possible. Once your character says what they are going to do to follow their controlling belief and fulfill their emotional and concrete desires, the reader is committed to reading to find out if they will be able to succeed.

This gives your character a reason to move and act. It gives them motivation in every scene, in every conversation. We then know what this character wants more than anything, and what they are committed to do. 

The announced strategy may change as the character moves through the story. The character may have several "try-fail" cycles, and have to adjust their plans.

My main character in my current work in progress (WIP) is a pregnant teenage girl whose mother kicks her out when she refuses to have an abortion. 

Emotional need: love and family

Concrete desire: to keep her baby, to fulfill her need for love

Controlling belief: If she doesn't keep this baby, nothing else can ever fill her need for love. She will be entirely alone, and without family.

Announced Strategy: In chapter two, Tessa makes a list on a yellow legal pad of her options for finding somewhere to stay so that she can keep this baby. It includes the women's shelter, foster care, her lost aunt Nancy in Kansas, the baby's father. Throughout the novel, Tessa keeps this list with her as she tries out different options, and runs out of resources. 

In two weeks, the final installment of this blog series will discuss:

1. Obstacles

2. Stakes

Take a character, give them a strong enough desire, a strong enough controlling belief, and an announced strategy. Make them want it so badly we hurt for them, and then give them huge stakes, and insurmountable obstacles. This is where we get a beautiful story. This is where we have readers breathless over the tension and conflict in our stories. It's what keeps me coming back to the laptop day after day.

Mechanics of Desire Part One of Three: How Martine Leavitt Changed My Life

The first time I tried to write a novel, it took me six years.

Inconsistency in writing habits meant the first draft took for years to complete. Even so, finishing felt amazing. I celebrated with my writing girls at Barnes and Noble over Italian cream sodas.

Then I had to revise. I knew the story didn't entirely work, so I rewrote for a year. I had to fix the whole front end of the novel, which was all telling and very little showing. I wrote better lines, funnier scenes.

And in a year I had draft two.

And then my lovely, awful, wonderful, torturous friend, Nikki said these six words to me:

What does your main character want?

Crickets.

Tell me I'm not alone here.

What did my main character want? We went over some other paradigms. What was her arc? What was the central question of the novel?

But it all came down to the fundamental problem in my novel.

I didn't understand the mechanics of desire in story.

My main character didn't have a solid goal. Her motivations were wishy washy.

A third rewrite got me most of the way there.

I wrote two more novels.

And I tried to make sure my characters wanted something. But you know, easier said than done.

People would read my writing and say, "I'm not sure why you included that. It doesn't add to your story."

Of course it adds to my story. It happens in my story. So there. Pbthpppp.

When I attended my first session of Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers this June, some simple, clear principles that I am now calling The Mechanics of Desire changed my life. Martine Leavitt is one of my writing idols for many reasons, but most recently because she has altered my view of creating story forever. She showed a drawing of the classic story arc with climax and denouement and rising action, and then told us she didn't care about that at all. She didn't have any use for it.

Instead, she taught us the principles of storytelling as relate to the main character's emotional and concrete desire lines, their controlling beliefs, their announced strategies, their obstacles, and their stakes. She encouraged us to never, ever write a story without knowing these things first. I have created a worksheet from all of her lectures on this subject, which I will share in a couple of weeks.

But for today, I'm going to start with breaking down my notes from the topic.

Today I'll talk about emotional and concrete desire lines.

Some of this will be direct quotes from Martine, and some will be my interjections. I'm not sure which is which anymore. I just typed as fast as my fingers could move, anxious to soak up every bit of wisdom from this incredible lady.

In every story there are two threads. The emotional story and the concrete/physical story line. We need to know one or the other on page one. Chapter one for sure. The other can come along after that, but very quickly after that in Children's fiction.

EMOTIONAL DESIRE LINE:

Must carry us all the way through the climax. What does your MC want most in the entire world?

We need a desire line in each story line--exactly what that character is all about.

What does she want? What does she need? for each character in each story.

Every character that you put in your book needs to want something. Every character has a story. Even if all they want is a glass of water. Why are they there? - DESIRE LINE.

Your characters need to be real people with real motivations.

In Lord of the Rings: Frodo wants safety and security. That is his emotional desire line.

CONCRETE DESIRE LINE:

Sometimes the concrete desire is revealed way before we know the motivation / emotional desire line. But the writer needs to know both, and reveal them as he/she goes along.

Frodo's emotional desire line is safety and security. His concrete desire line, which must parallel the emotional desire line, is to save the shire. The shire represents that safety and security for Frodo.

CONCRETE DESIRE IS THE THING THAT MOVES THE CHARACTER AROUND MOST, TAKES THEM FROM BEGINNING TO END.

Both the emotional and concrete desire lines take us right to the climax. When you're trying to figure out what this is, it's the desire that doesn't change for your character from the very beginning right to the climax. Both emotional and concrete desire lines will span almost the whole book.

In youth literature, the main character will typically have one or both desire lines fulfilled in the end.

If they get the emotional, and not the concrete, or the concrete, but not the emotional, we have a wistful, sad feeling ending, with just enough to satisfy us, and give us hope for our character.

If they get neither desire line, it is a tragedy.

Often they get both, and it is a happy ending.

In my current work in progress, the main character receives her emotional desire, but not her concrete desire. At the end of the story, she sacrifices her concrete desire line, because she can't have both. It means that the ending is really emotional, and somewhat painful.

But satisfying, I hope!

I hope this was helpful. These principles are simple, but have helped me so much.

Read Part 2: CONTROLLING BELIEFS, AND ANNOUNCED STRATEGIES—two other principles that changed how I look at story, and made plotting SO much easier!

Read Part 3: OBSTACLES AND STAKES

Happy writing, all!

More Than You Ever Needed To Know

Some fun questions so you can get to know me a little better:

1. What books and / or authors are most inspiring to you as a writer?

It's an eclectic assortment. There are a lot of books that when I read them, I wish desperately to have written them. These are books that carry me away in the characters or the setting so completely that I forget that what I'm reading isn't reality. They build real people who become my friends.

Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdoch. She can take me into the life of one athletic farm girl so completely that I never want to leave.

Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt. Just read it. Then you will know.

The Casson Family series by Hilary McKay. I love this writer. I want to go find her and sit next to her while beautiful, real, dry, funny, innocent words fall from her fingers onto the keys of her computer. I also want to go live in England with Rose Casson. These books are pure magic. Go read them, if you've ever wanted to fall in love with pretend people.

The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall. Same. I love these children. I love how high stakes can be for children, even while they're just living their mundane lives. No witches, wizards, or vampires, here.

The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. Pure straight magic. Lots of witches and wizards. Delightful humor. Page-turning plot. A reading experience I'm not sure I'll ever be able to repeat. The first time in my life waiting with baited breath for every installment.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Not my genre, or so I would have thought. Too violent, or so I would have thought. How did she do what she did to me, and everyone else who has read this book? I need to read it like a textbook.

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner – A reminder that not every minute has to be action packed. A reminder that sometimes reading a slow-burning story pays off in amazing ways. Every word is perfect.

I could go on and on. And I have. Those are just a few of my favorite reads.

Add in Character and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card, and On Writing by Stephen King, and I think you've got a pretty good reading list.

2. What is your writing background?

I have been filling notebooks with the starts of novels since elementary school. I have wanted to be a writer since I wrote a short story that won an award and some serious teacherly acclaim in the classroom of Max Foran at Midnapore Elementary School in Calgary, Canada.

In high school I wanted to write pioneer romances, and spent hours in Heritage Park, a pioneer village theme park, dreaming up characters and scenes and writing them down. I narrated my sister Kathryn off to sleep every night with my stories.

In college, I majored in French teaching and minored in English teaching and read and wrote entirely too much to think about fiction. Then I taught high school French for three years, and was too busy to think much about writing. But when my first baby was just over a year old, I did my first NaNoWriMo, and wrote 25,000 words of an epic fantasy.

The next year, frustrated by thinking up what to have my characters wear, and what to call their breakfast, I decided to write a Young Adult contemporary novel. With many breaks, and three sets of rewrites, that novel took me six years to complete. But by the time I was finished, I was a serious writer.

From 2009 to 2013 I have completed that novel, co-written a MG contemporary mystery with my husband, and written another YA contemporary. My next project is a MG contemporary. I am now represented by the lovely Louise Fury of the L. Perkins Agency in New York. I am so excited to continue writing. I can't imagine ever stopping.

3. Describe your writing process / writing schedule.

I write a minimum of fifteen minutes every day, five days a week. I have little children, a photography business, and a lot of housework, gardening, and cooking to keep up with. If I'm not careful, writing will never appear on my schedule. So I make time. My fifteen minutes every day of determined writing means that I always show up, and I'm ready to be inspired and continue my writing.

The only way I can write well is to do it in the morning, so I try to write every day as soon as my one-year-old goes down for his nap. Often that includes my three year old pressed up against my arm while she snuggles and watches a movie. So a zen place with all quiet and no interruptions is a fantasy for me, as I think it is for many authors. Instead of waiting for the perfect time, I write every single day. Most days I write for at least an hour. My personal best is 6200 words in one day. I like to check my word count every day, and report it to my writing group, for accountability.

I'm still learning about my writing process all the time. I generally find that while drafting I can produce about 1200 words in an hour, and that they need editing the next day before I go on.

My one recent breakthrough was a determination to finish a first draft regardless of what I discover on the way there. So if on chapter 6 I decide that my MC is really a dancer instead of a writer, I change from that moment on, and keep writing as though the changes are already made. I feel like you can't have all the discoveries and breakthroughs that you need until you write all the way through to the end, so I don't allow any criticism, feedback, or changes derail me from making it through once, changing as I go. Then I go back and rewrite, removing what doesn't work, and putting in new material now that I know my characters and their arcs.

One more thing I'll be posting about is the Mechanics of Desire worksheet that I put together during my week-long Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers course with Martine Leavitt. Before I start any novel, I work through my character's desire lines, and I understand what they really want. It's only by doing this that I can really understand what will naturally develop in my plot.

4. What is one tip you'd like to give to a writer just starting out?

Two tips?

Know what your character wants more than anything in this world (emotional desire) and know what they want most in the physical/concrete world that parallels this (concrete desire.) Know what your character thinks he/she needs to do to meet his/her emotional needs. (controlling belief.) Once you know this, give your character a big obstacle (man vs. self, man vs. nature, man vs. man) that stands between them and their desires. Amp up the obstacles. And make the stakes high. (What does your character stand to lose if they fail to meet their emotional and concrete desires?) These elements will will interact to create your story in an organic way without a lot of intense, external plot structures. When I finished my rewrite of my first novel, I still didn't know what my MC wanted. Near-disaster ensued.

Write for at least 15 minutes every day! DO IT!

5. Why do you write? Why do you write what you write (genre, age group, etc.)?

Here's my short answer. I write because I have to. It fills me up in ways that nothing else does. It's my personal take on the creative process and I think creativity is a fundamental human need.

Speed Round:

Music or silence while writing?

Silence, or as close as my three children let me get.

Do you act out your scenes for accuracy?

No. But I do read aloud.

Favorite dessert?

Cheesecake. Hands down. Preferably lime-flavored.

Drafting or revising?

I always prefer drafting.

Notebook or computer?

Alphasmart Neo for drafting.

Laptop for editing.

Word or Scrivener?

Scrivener, baby!

Favorite Genre you've written in?

YA contemporary.

Favorite Genre you'd like to try?

MG contemporary. (Familial, delicious!)

Blog Tour

Thanks so much to Stephanie Kelley for inviting me to be a part of this blog tour! Go read her blog post for the tour. It was fun to get to know her better.

Without further ado, here are my answers to the questions:

1. What are you working on right now? 

I’m currently prepping my literary MG contemporary novel for NaNoWriMo. Here’s the pitch:

I SEE YOU, EM PERKINS

Em Perkins' distracted writer father has Relapsing-Remitting MS, and her grandmother has cataracts. Em herself has a case of Relapsing-Remitting invisibility, and it's about to become chronic. The day she writes a description of herself into her father's novel, and he deletes it, she knows time is running out to make herself visible again. But when she snips one of Mrs. Hindley's roses, she hears the words that change everything. "I see you, Em Perkins." Bad deeds can make an invisible child visible, if only for a little while. But when Em's unlikely friend, dirty, fat, neglected Henry is going to have to spend three weeks in summer with his abusive father, Emily knows they've got to become visible, permanently. Otherwise how will anyone pay attention to what they say, and how can she save Henry? How to pull it off--commit an act of Ultimate Evil.

2. How does it differ from other works in its genre?

Tough question. I think this story is not edgy at all. It’s really innocent and sweet. It has a literary feel, and I think it will make people cry. If my test audiences are any indication, it will. I hope people will fall in love with my spunky, action-oriented MC. She is a fireball, and she won’t stay down for long.

3. Why do you write what you do? 

I write for children because I can’t bring myself to care about writing for adults. I enjoy reading about adults, but when I try to think up an adult novel concept, I draw a complete blank. Always have.

I finished reading The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall and the Casson Family series by Hilary McKay—both masterpieces—and I knew my next project had to be a literary MG with a familial feel. Something that almost feels like it was written in another time, because it’s so innocent and ageless. This story came to me, and I had almost the whole thing plotted in a few days while I attended the Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. Martine Leavitt and her lectures on desire and obstacles in fiction were life-changing for me as an author.

This story was born from learning how to use those building blocks to make a story with high stakes. Also, I think children’s feelings are amazing. I will never stop being interested in what makes us grow and progress and discover who we are.

My last two novels were YA contemporary stories. I am so excited to write about the emotional journeys of teenagers. They are right in the crucible of becoming. It never gets old to examine why they do what they do, why they feel what they feel.

Plus, who wouldn’t want to professionally relive their deepest fears, most embarrassing moments, and first loves? It’s a permanent high.

4. How does your writing process work? 
 

It involves a lot of stolen moments. Early mornings before my kids wake up for school, nap time sprint-writing, post-bedtime while my husband works on his MBA and I type until my fingers fall off with my friend Rebecca checking in with me every half an hour to keep us both accountable.

I draft at about 1000 words a day. I go from beginning to end, straight through. Whenever I make a major change, I make note of what I have to go back and fix, and keep writing. I’ve learned that if I keep going back to Chapter 1 to tweak things, I’ll never finish, and I’ll never find out what my book really is in the end. I do write to an outline, but I change things all the time. I don’t think I’ll ever write a book straight through as originally planned.

When that is finished, I chop up the novel, cutting out all the stuff that no longer fits, and rewriting for story.

Then I do a syllabic, word-choice cutting edit. This last novel required a cut of about 25%. Honestly, I think I’ll do that every time. It was amazing, watching my writing grow stronger by the minute. I cut 34,000 words in about three and a half weeks. My brain hurt. Then I lay down and died, and my children climbed all over me, so thankful to have their mommy back.

Then, I get several critiques, and do another round of revisions, and send things off to my fabulous agent, Louise Fury of The Bent Agency.

At least… that’s what I do this time around.

I’m learning the process one day at a time. Maybe one of these days, I’ll just know how to write an awesome novel straight through, but I’m not holding my breath.

Author Interview with YA Author Natalie Whipple

Today, my post on www.realwriterswrite.com was an author interview with Harper Teen author, Natalie Whipple. She is delightful, and her books are, too. Head on over and check it out!

http://www.realwriterswrite.com/2013/09/real-writers-write-first-author.html

Anne Lamott - Bird by Bird

 This is not a formal review. I don't do those. I just read books, and then I think about them a lot and then, sometimes, if I'm feeling bloggerly, I tell you the takeaway.

1. Don't read this book if you're one of those angry, hostile writers Anne is always talking about who just want to get published, and want her to tell you how to do this. She will not tell you how. She will tell you that you most likely won't succeed in gaining this dream, and that if you do, you will most likely not enjoy it once you get there.

How's that for an upper?

2. Anne Lamott is a real person. Her voice and her experience are dripping with down-in-the-trenches-beside-you-my-sista kind of wisdom. She's been there. She's suffered that. She's a human being with all her battle-wounds, and she is going to tell it to you straight. Which is what she wants from you. She wants you to write who you are, with no gloss and no candy-coating. I get the impression that Anne and I could sit down for a four-hour heart-to-heart therapy session, and I'd come away feeling like nothing I said could really surprise her.

3. Anne says that writers need to be present. They need to really live, observe, listen, experience. They need to live life to its fullest. She says that writer's block is a misnomer, because nothing is blocked, in reality we're empty, when we're stuck like that. That we need to fill back up. Live our lives, be with people, view the minutiae, and express it.

I was on a family camping trip with strep throat this weekend while I devoured her book, along with Natalie Whipple's Transparent, and Robison Wells' Variant. (It's amazing what being away from all my responsibilities can do for my reading speed. Good night, I love to lose myself in a good book.) Anyhoo, I was on this camping trip with all these amazing people who I love, and I found myself settling into the moments, noticing things, really noticing them. Seeing the magic in the people and the beauty of the world around me, and writing about it.

4. Anne Lamott is all about the art. She is not about the money or the fame or the idea of being published, although she admits to struggling with all of those demons. But at the heart of it, this book is for people who love to express life honestly through the written word, and want to do more of that in little pieces every day.

5. This book is humane, humble, hilarious, pessimistic, realistic, and delightful. *Go read it, my darlings.

*Go read it with the caveat that her language is a mite salty. She is not too reverent to toss around a few "colorful metaphors." (Thank you Spock in Star Trek IV for that expression.)

6. I am done now. What are you still doing here? If I had been planning on this review, I'd have quotes for you and a format for this blog post. I'm going to bed. But not before brushing off the gross pizza breath from my teeth. Hooray for Colgate.

Word Count Disaster

Writing along. Loving every minute. Delighted by my characters, my story, my dialog. So excited to finish my novel on May 6th. 80,000 word deadline set.

80,000 word deadline met.

Only trouble is...

I'm just at the midpoint, story-wise.

And I'm pretty sure my agent and her editor friends would tell me that a 160,000 word YA contemporary is... ahem... unpublishable.

Grandiose? Self-indulgent? Not. Happening.

So, new goal for the month of May.

Every day instead of producing 1000 words minimum, I have to produce 500 new words minimum, and then delete their equivalent from somewhere earlier in the story. I'll be working on the story from two different places, and that may make me unproductive, or less efficient. I'll have to see. If it's problematic, maybe I'll rotate days. Cutting day and writing day. But I kind of like the idea of earning my new words by cutting old ones.

My only problem is that if I stop producing new content, I lose the momentum, and I find myself paralyzed for a few days when I come back to writing prose. Which is bad for my arbitrary and totally self-imposed deadlines.

My husband and I have a smallish house and a large wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Awhile ago I told him that until we have a bigger house, once the shelves are totally full, we either have to get rid of books or stop buying new ones. Thank heaven for him the e-reader came along. Whew! Dilemma solved.

I'm viewing my novel like those beastly shelves. You want new words? You want your MC to ever get to find out the meaning of her life, make the tough choices, and get the guy? Then sacrifice her ten paragraph rant about how rough her life is in chapter 2. (I kid. If there is such a rant, may I be barred from my keyboard. Although if it does exist, that might make cutting 20,000 words a little les torturous!)

Nikki, seriously, you're not going to take the axe to my story for me? Caryn? Anyone?

I tremble in fear of today's writing session, but I thought stating the truth here might help keep me honest about the tough love this novel needs.