Jane Austen and the worst character ever

I have a terrible fear of Fanny Price.

For those of you who may not have undergone the torturous (okay, okay, at least call it tedious) process of reading Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, let me tell you a little bit about Fanny Price:

She's worried about appearing rude or impatient.

She's "extremely civil."

She gets headaches from "nothing but the heat." She quite literally gets a headache from cutting roses for 45 minutes in the sun. And from walking.

She's ridiculously weak.

"The sudden change which Edmund's kindness had then occasioned made her hardly know how to support herself." C'MON.

"That he should forego any enjoyment on her account gave her pain." No, seriously.

"Every sort of exercise fatigues her so, Miss Crawford, except riding."

She tells a boy that she's glad they didn't perform a play, and then, since she had never said anything so angry before, "she trembled and blushed at her own daring."

"The sight of so many strangers threw her back into herself," but "she found herself occasionally called on to endure something worse. She was introduced here and there by her uncle, and forced to be spoken to, and to curtsy and speak again. This was a hard duty."

I think by this point you understand what I'm trying to say. To sum it up, Fanny Price is arguably the most dull, uninteresting, colorless character ever written—or at least she was, until Bella Swan swooped in and stole that title away.

If you MUST watch Mansfield Park, always choose the right.
You'll forever regret choosing the left.

Ever since Mansfield Park became one of the few books I returned to the library without finishing (claiming a spot along with Alice in Wonderland and ... nope, that's about it) I've been afraid of writing a Fanny Price. I never want to write a Fanny Price.

Fanny Price isn't the only literary character I've hated over the years. When I went through my LDS fiction phase back when I was 12ish, I ran across a couple of books that I absolutely loathed because of the main character. Characters who are too perfect are horrible, and yes—I'm always grateful when a too-perfect or an annoying character bites the dust. I feel like Thumb Wars' Loke Groundrunner when a fistfighter blows up the Stray Dog/Red Rooster/Swollen Ostrich pilot…

THANK YOU

I think writing a character people want you to kill would be terribly depressing, a la Maid Marion in the BBC Robin Hood (bless you, writers) or Rachel Dawes in The Dark Knight (bless you too, writers). If Fanny Price had contracted some fatal fatigue disease and withered away to a boring, dry shell, I probably would've liked Mansfield Park more. Sad but true.

It's this depressing thought—"thanks for killing your character! The story is better without him/her!" that makes me worry, because I think I'm writing a Fanny Price.

OH, THE HORROR!

See, I'm trying to write a character who's a bit shy, a little timid, and who allows himself to be bullied for part of the story. And dagnabbit, he's turning into a character I would dislike. I obviously don't dislike him because he's mine, but if I were an unattached reader… I don't know…

I've been watching a boatload of Bollywood movies lately (Dil Bole Hadippa, guys – it's just like She's the Man, only with cricket… and dancing…) and I thought I had found the answer in Pyaar Impossible!, which is about a shy main character. I thought I could learn from the movie. Unfortunately, he got on my nerves within the first twenty minutes. I just wanted to yell at him. "Speak up! Stop letting people walk all over you! Be a man!"

So there's a challenge, and I want to know how other writers deal with it. Shy, timid people occur in real life, so how do you write about them in a way that keeps them endearing, relatable, and likable? How do you make the story worth reading when your character is sometimes less than interesting? Every single character can't be charismatic, outspoken, and forceful, because that would make every character the same. But how do you avoid walking into the boring/too perfect trap when going for an unobvious hero in a story? So many questions.

Hopefully I'm just being too picky. Hopefully my shy character doesn't annoy anyone else. Hopefully he's got more gumption than he appears to have thus far.

And hopefully I can avoid making the worst mistake of all…

Writing a Fanny Price.

The chopping, er... chapter test

I call it the chapter test.

I've been editing a book for months and months. It was about 27,000 words too long (which, if you're keeping score at home, broke down to about 44 single-spaced pages in Word). That's a whole lot of wordy. And — as pretty much every entry on this blog clearly shows — I have a problem with wordy.

That's why I invented the chapter test.

In order to speed up the pacing of every story I write, I force myself to read back through it and chop chapters. Now, chopping chapters is extremely difficult. Like, hold-still-while-I-cut-off-this-arm difficult. You feel a little bit like the mom in the King Solomon story, where you'd rather give away your baby than see it cut in half. In my first edit of the book that is almost ready to be sent out to agents (curse you, you evil appendix), I probably cut out 50 words, and every one of them hurt like the dickens. At that point, I thought the pain was over.

However, after reading some interviews with book agents, I concluded that my book needed to be around 75,000 words long — a far cry from where it was. That convinced me that I had to get serious. Rather than scraping away a few words here and there with a scalpel, I had go full Jack Nicholson and attack the story with an axe. The chapter test helped me do it.

See, I decided that every chapter needed to drive the narrative forward. That seems like a stupid conclusion — OF COURSE the chapters should drive the narrative forward — but you wouldn't believe how easy it is to veer off course with your characters. Nobody loves your characters more than you do, so it's easy (so painfully easy) to transform into a doting parent. Your characters become your baby, and you want to capture their every move.

Walking?

Yes!

Talking?

Yes!

Shopping?

Yes!

Breakfast?

Yes!

It's very, very easy for the actual story to get buried under things that seem important to you as the writer, but tend to bore the reader to death. Hence, the chapter test.

So (having put it off for this many paragraphs — see the wordy problem?!) let me explain:

The test probably evolved from my journalism background. All through college I worked on the campus newspaper, and part of my job was writing headlines. An 800-word story would need to be summed up in eight words, or maybe five words, or even (heaven forbid) as few as three words. It was terrible, but I learned, and I've transferred it over to my writing. With the chapter test, I read through the chapter and summarize it with a brief headline explaining what it's about. If the chapter doesn't push the narrative forward, it's eligible for axing.

I've got 33 pages of chopped chapters saved on my computer, and they can all be summed up like this:

"Character tries to avoid girls"

"Character remembers a conversation"

"Character draws a picture"

"Character gets annoyed"

Let's face it — none of those chapters were make-or-break-the-story types. They needed to go. I may have loved them to death (the drawing one is a favorite) but they were bogging down the story, stalling the narrative, and belaboring points that could have been made more succinctly elsewhere.

That's the chapter test — sum up the chapter, see if it adds to the narrative, and then chop if it doesn't. It's clinical, it's clean, and it's far less painful than you might think.

Once you get the theory behind the chapter test, you can apply it to all sorts of books. If I had a copy of Twilight (I don't, but if I did) I could probably narrow down the chapters like this:

"Bella whines."

"Bella mopes."

"Bella stares."

"Bella wonders why everyone likes her." (So do the readers…)

Don't think I only pick on "Twilight," though — other books could benefit from my brilliance. If I were to cut out all of the "Harry whines" chapters from the fifth Harry Potter book, it would've been about 400 pages shorter. And if I cut out all of the "Fanny is boring," "Fanny is tired," "Fanny is silent," "Fanny is dull," chapters from Mansfield Park, that book would cease to exist. Take out the "Dang, these Parisian sewers are awesome" chapters from Les Miserables, and that book would be a breeze. If only Jane Austen, J.K. Rowling, and Victor Hugo knew about the chapter test…

Parents may love their kids to death, but they're also willing to tell their kids to stop being ridiculous when the kids act out. The same theory can apply for authors.

So, chapters, stop being ridiculous.

Characters = disobedient little buggers. Or not.

"My characters won't do what I want!"

Don't even pretend you've never heard that before. It's a phrase I don't understand, and for which I blame kitschy romance novelists — the same ones I usually blame for everything.

"They won't do what I want!" was the phrase that kept me convinced I wasn't a REAL writer for a long time. Whenever I wrote stories, my characters did exactly what I wanted. I never had any rebellion in the ranks. If I wanted the characters to go left, they went left. If I wanted them to go right, they went right. If I wanted them to grow wings, run into the air while clutching on a cellphone, and then land in the fairy realm, they would.

(Of course, I've never asked them to do that, so maybe I'm just making stuff up now...)

Either way, this idea that characters were supposed to be rebellious people who torture an author all the way through a story confused me greatly. Since my characters have never done that, I just assumed I wasn't a real author, and that I would never be able to write a book and get it published. I figured that my characters, in comparison to the apparently self-willed characters other authors invented, must be bland, dull, and boring.

If everyone else has characters who obey, does that mean I'm doing it wrong? I'm writing wrong! I'm a wrong writer! The horrors!

My dear Watson, who happens to be a real author with a book and everything (see here) wrote her first book (did I mention that you can find it here?) around the same time I was writing mine. She finished hers first and succeeded in getting it to a publisher while mine continues to sit in my hard drive. C'est la vie.

BUT, a couple of months ago, Shannen wrote this piece on her blog that reminded me of this whole inner struggle I had with characters who did EXACTLY WHAT I TOLD THEM TO. Luckily, since I personally witnessed the writing process of another writer, I'm convinced that I'm not "wrong." I'm just "different."

(There — doesn't that make it sound better?)

Around the time Shannen wrote that post, she texted me something like, "I just figured out how my book is going to end!" This was the book she was like, two chapters, away from finishing.

I went, "WHAAAAAAT?!"

Every writer has a different process, and the fact that Shannen (and I'm sure other writers with disobedient characters) make things up as they go along blows my poor little mind. I've never been able to make up stories as I go. It's not my style. Maybe my characters all obey because their storylines are computed, arranged, and debated before I even bother writing anything down. (Seriously, if I die tomorrow, about 9 fully written books die with me.)

For me, the writing process begins with just one scene. The best way to describe it is like a seed — one tiny idea gets planted, and then I build on it mentally, bit by bit, until suddenly I've got an entire story. Then I have to go through the trouble of writing it down and tying the scenes all together.

Or — for a visual — it's like making a clay creation. (This is what I do when I'm supposed to be editing)

Start with cardboard and tinfoil, and then end with a... a something!

Anyway, so last month I went to a performance of "Aida" at Hillcrest High School. I went on a whim, and because I start each year with a list of plays I'd like to see, and "Aida" was the last one I needed to hit. (By the way, it was freaking amazing. Go to Hillcrest plays. You'll be impressed.)

So I was innocently sitting there during intermission trying to see if the cute cameraman was married (what? I'm single. I can do that stuff.) and reading my program, when suddenly, a scene came to me. It went like this:

"Are you normal?" ____ demanded.

"What?" ____ asked.

"Are you normal?" she repeated.

That's it. That's my scene. Despite the fact that the characters didn't even have any names (hence the blanks), in the past few weeks that scene has become an entire book in my head. I've molded it and built it over many December tooth-brushing sessions. (Brushing your teeth = 2nd greatest time to think.)

Every single book I've written (which is technically none, since they're just sitting in Word files on my computer) ... Okay, I feel like I'm overreaching...

Clarification.

Every single Word file I've written that one day has the potential to become a book if I can find a sucker publisher and some editing gumption — has a scene just like that. Some are shorter than others, but each one sparked a story. I'll call it the genesis scene.

There's this one:

“But look at the girls he’s dancing with,” I said, letting my insecurities slip out. “They’re beautiful.”

Or this one: Suddenly, a flash of red appeared, rolling down the slope of the mountain. As I stared, i realized that the shape was actually a girl, and my mouth dropped open.

Or this:

"According to government statute 65921, this tower must be registered with the Ministry of Zoning and Urban Development."

And this:

"Excuse me. Do you know where I can find _____?"

Or this:

The rain fell in a gray curtain, hiding the city behind him and muffling all but the sound of his own breathing.

And this one:

I know who the ____ is. And his apprentice, too.

This too:

“You’re the President of the United States,” she said.

Or even this:

"I’ve got a phone call for you,” the secretary called.

From each of those tiny scenes (and more!) my obedient, happy characters in their obedient, happy storylines grew and developed into full stories. Maybe I'm not a real author, but the characters seem real to me, and I suppose that's what counts.

Someday I'll get around to putting the stories onto paper. But first, maybe I'll make another clay thing...

(Just kidding Shan. I'm editing. I'm totally editing.)

(Actually, I'm still cleaning my room... Sigh.)