"What Are We Going to Say?"

 

By Claire Booth

There is a homage to character and story and a great actor today in the New York Times. Michael K. Williams, who played Omar Little on The Wire, died this week. And showrunner David Simon remembers him through the lens of his commitment to the story they were trying to tell. 

“What are we going to say this year?” Williams would ask Simon at the beginning of every season, as the show shifted from the Baltimore streets to its port to its city government, schools and newsrooms. And Simon had to answer Williams’s question, had to articulate his vision and his reasoning. What a gift for a writer to have a person like that in her or his corner—one who forces you to explain yourself. I know my stories are better when I have to do that for someone. I can only imagine if that person was someone of Williams’s exceptional talents.

Read the whole essay in the New York Times here:

Make it worse

by: Joelle Charbonneau

If you ever read tweets or Facebook posts by writers you will often see the phrase “I have no idea what comes next.  Maybe I should kill someone.”  Or something similar.  If you follow me on social media, I know for a fact you’ve seen many variations on that theme.  Not that I actually bump off that many characters.  (Well…at least not in my adult mysteries.  In my young adult stuff—well, the body count does tend to rise more than might be expected by the term young adult.  But that’s another story….)  When I post that kind of comment, I don’t always kill someone.  However, I do exactly what that kind of sentiment implies.  I make it worse.

What’s “it”?  It is the story.  The character’s personal conflict.  The motivation of other characters.  The emotional investment of the main character. 

When in doubt make “it” worse. 

Story is about conflict.  No one wants to read about someone getting up in the morning, making coffee (although if you have some extra I’d take a mug about now), going to work, eating dinner, going to bed and doing it all over again tomorrow.  Fiction is about story ideas that are bigger than every day life.  It is about conflict that keeps us turning the pages. 

So, when in doubt as to what comes next, you need to up the stakes.  You make “it” worse.

This week, I had to remind myself of this rule.  I’m writing something new.  Brand new.  Nothing like anything I’ve written before.  It requires huge amounts of world building and tons of research and a plot that is filled with ideas that fascinate me.  But something wasn’t working in the book.  All the ideas were there.  The world building was there.  But something wasn’t quite resonating no matter how many tweaks I did as to the order of events or the layers of world building and motivation.

That’s when I realized.  I wasn’t making it worse.  So, that’s what I’m doing.  I’m upping the stakes.  I’m making it worse for the main character who becomes more and more real with every tweak I make. 

Will the book be any good?  Got me.  Will a publisher want to buy it?  Here’s hoping.  I guess I need to finish making “it” worse to find out.