Word count is up to 9,901 now.
No. I don’t hate Maxime. In fact, I kind of like her — a lot. She’s a little neurotic and scatterbrained, something I identify with at a molecular level. She’s incredibly normal, and totally forgivable (if you look after the jump, you’ll see how she’s first described in the opening chapter). The thing is, in chapter four, she does something kind of mean.
Kind of really mean. I can’t really leak that particular spoiler yet, partially because I think it’ll be sort of a punch in the gut to the reader (if this thing ever has any readers), and partially because I don’t have it totally hammered out yet. But here’s why I’m concerned about it:
I don’t what those future (potential) readers to see her action in chapter four and put the book down, thinking she’s some sort of callous jerk. This mean action ends up being a character-building experience for her. It’s something for which she pays dearly: Chapter Five is titled “Karma.” I promise. She’ll redeem herself.
But just how much character development am I supposed to write during the first few chapters to help a reader realize they don’t want to give up on her just yet, and that she’ll win their affections back pretty quickly?
I don’t want to slow down the action. I want the book to have a quick, witty pace. It’s chatty. It’s informal. It’s everything Maxime is and most things I try to be (when I’m not at work, where I’m sort of forced to be unchatty and a little more formal with my writing and interviews.) I don’t want to weigh it all down with a David Coppefield explanation of who she is, how she got to be where she is now, and just how good of a person she is underneath it all. But where do I find that balance? Is there some sort of guideline that says just how much we should know about a protagonist by the end of Chapter One? Two? Three? Four?
Any suggestions are truly appreciated.
And now, as I promised last night, a peek at the first four paragraphs of Matched:
He swirled his wine. Swirled it. Like he was checking to see if it had legs, or sniff the bouquet or whatever those crazy wine-swirling people do. And in that moment, the fact that he had beautiful brown eyes, a good job, killer arms and had taken me to the nicest restaurant in Stamford even after I had to push our Thursday night date back by three hours, was completely irrelevant. All I could see was his right hand. Swirling.
Nowhere in his match.com profile did it say he was a swirler. Yes. It said he liked vacationing in distant places, watching How I Met Your Mother, hanging out with his friends, and witty conversation. It said he was 6’2”, graduated from a good college, and is the youngest of three children who likes dogs. It showed pictures of him drinking a beer with his buddies in bars downtown, and skiing in the Swiss Alps. I know all of this because I spent about an hour reading and re-reading his profile. And in all that reading, never once did I see a sentence about his swirling tendencies.
Sure, my profile didn’t exclaim that I don’t know the difference between Carlo Rossi and whatever pricy Chianti he was swirling in his stemware at that particular moment. It didn’t state that I nervously split the ends of my hair when I can’t focus or find the right words for an article at work. Never once does it mention that I keep a bag of chocolate chips in my freezer for nighttime nibbles.
But dammit, I expected 100 percent honesty from his profile. How could he leave out this critical piece of information? This is the kind of character trait that could just be a deal breaker, you know.
Until tomorrow!
I always find that sort of situation in fiction–where a basically good character does something terrible and ruinous not necessarily out of spite but out of misinformation or poor timing or whatever–to be almost unbearable. I watched the adaptation of ‘Atonement’ for the first time last night, and even though I’d read the book before, I had to pause partway through The Terrible Revelation scene near the beginning, like, three different times in order to have a minor freak-out before I could go back to watching it. I just want to reach into the page/screen/etc. and shake everyone involved in these scenarios, all “no, you shouldn’t believe her” or “look, it wasn’t like that” or “ARG you’re all WRONG why won’t you LISTEN.”
(Also, James McAvoy needs to call me. Like, pronto.)
But, well, in this case, it sounds like there might be some…shall we say intent behind the act, which kind of changes things. I dunno. I’d still read on because you’re Maggie and I love you, but I think even readers who aren’t acquainted with you would stick around if they have a sense that Maxime, despite this act of unspeeeakable eeeevil or whatever, is at least a considered character, not just a caricature who Makes Bad Choices. You know? Like there’s some sort of logic behind why she’d do this thing. Or if the illogic itself is the point, then that has to come through somehow, either in her immediate reaction after the fact or in the time you’ve spend sculpting her character beforehand.
…Which, you know, is pretty vague and not-terribly-useful advice, actually, and I’m not going to pretend like I’m the resident fiction expert or anything, so I’ll shut up. Hee. But I think you’ll figure it out one way or another. And besides, there’s always rewriting! (Don’t hit me.)
By: Colin on November 9, 2011
at 8:01 pm
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By: NaNoWriMo: Day 11 | My Writer's Cramp on November 11, 2011
at 10:19 pm