10 Polishing Characters

I recently received a comment about Clemency and the ‘state’ of its characters. The critique was that my characters were all very ‘base’ in nature. Put in different terms, the suggestion was that they were very crude.

I believe that a story needs to be event driven to keep a reader moving and engaged.  But on another level, I think that it is critical that it be character driven as well.  Let me explain.  What I think it’s important to establish a journey for a character. They should start in a specific position and end up in a somewhat different position in a story.  What kind of position?  Well that depends.  It might be emotional, moral, practical or some combination of all of these.  But characters, just as we are in life, need to be exposed to constant change.  After all, change is the only constant.

We all walk some road to redemption in life, and my characters are no different.  If I polish my characters on page one, and make them perfect from the beginning, then they have no journey to make and they have finished their roles in the story before they have even begun. They have no road to redemption, no means to improve either their outlook or their lot in life.

In Clemency, I exposed the main characters and established their flaws almost immediately. Why? Because their shortcomings become highlighted throughout the rest of the story, and end up driving the multiple storylines as they develop. By the time the book has finished, the reader is left with a host of questions about their feelings for eachother, their fate and their future.  But this is why we have sequels, right?  Now lets take a brief look at a character in Clemency who is relatively complete.

What about the Captain?  His ‘character cycle’ is not unlike one that you would find in a book not connected to a series.  In that case, all the characters need to be developed, apex and be resolved within the covers of the single story.  The Captain’s life is similar in nature.  He was established later in the book, and his character apexed when he was no longer needed. His life as a character was relatively short, but his development as a character was pretty complete. What does this illustrate? I think it demonstrates that because the Saint Chronicles is a series, that immediate and full development of all the characters would do nothing more then shorten their use in the story. So am I tipping my hand about character development in future sequels? Probably.

11 Clemency – The Bigger Picture

In my way of thinking, a defining moment is one in which circumstance collides with human weakness. Let me give you an example. For those of you who are parents, a defining moment was the moment that you looked into the eyes fo your firstborn child. I don’t care how many books you read, classes you took or seminars you went to, nothing could prepare you for that single event, and beyond it you were never the same again.  Am I right?

Defining moments change the course of our lives.  They are where our life’s trajectory is altered and we are muscled into a new direction that we never expected.  What happens?  We adapt.  We change our habits, amend our ways, take on new things, give up old things and the cycle continues until the next defining moment comes along.

So what are we doing between these defining moments in our lives? What we are really doing is, we are searching for clemency. Let me give you an example. The last time you were searching for clemency, you were probably on the side of a highway somewhere in your car, sitting there with the window down as the air conditioning escaped, and saying to yourself: “Please, please, PLEASE let this man make it a 74 in a 55”.  Or maybe you were praying as you opened the credit card bill that the latest thing you bought wasn’t on there yet so that you’d have another month to pay for it?  That’s searching for clemency isn’t it?  You are hoping for a lessening in the severity of your punishment… a punishment you are expecting.

If you sit back and think about it for a moment, you can find countless examples in your own life where you have been searching for clemency.

In my book Clemency, each of the divers crept along silently in the black of the deep seeking their reward and what they hoped would turn out to be their next defining moment.  Whether it was to save the business, get out of jail, pay all the bills, or because they were the victim of simple blackmail, all the while weren’t they each praying for clemency?

12 What I Don’t Read

My readers have asked me what I read. Then they often times will try and compare me to one of a handful of other writers, all of whom I am sure are great. But when they ask me if I have read any specific work of fiction from any of the list of authors that they rattle off my stock answer is ‘No’. I am generally pursued for a yes at this point until the broad question of ‘Well have you ever read anything by so-and-so’ breaks upon the shore. The answer is most certainly ‘No’. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been compared to several presumably great authours, but the truth of the matter is that I don’t read. You heard me correctly.

I actually don’t read for enjoyment. Why? Well, mainly because I don’t want my characters to be influenced by the characters of other writers, whether they are great writers or not. I know, imitation is the sincerest… blah blah blah. Do I sound like Andy Rooney here? Probably. But as I said in an earlier post, I know up front that my vision is narrowed by my limited life experience. I know that to develop a story and its characters, they must have their own unique voices. But rather than borrow those voices from other works, I would rather listen to the unique voices of the strangers around me, and take from them the intreaguing aspects of character, rather than copy the voices of one of the great writers of our time then try and support that character through my storyline.  if you are one of those voracious readers, wouldn’t you rather hear new fresh voices, rather than hear from somebody you remember hearing from three or four books ago?

My overall objective is to bring my readers a new perspective by exposing them to my life experiences in such a way that they feel as if they have been there with me.  But in my way of thinking, as important it is to have fresh

So next time you ask me about a character in another book? I’ll smile sweetly, because I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.

14 – The Allure of the Sea

In a recent interview, I was asked about my career as a diver as it relates to Clemency.  I started diving a little over fifteen years ago, and at that time concentrated on shallow reefs as I built my experience and interest in the sport.  But as time passed and my experience grew, I succumbed to the allure of the sea.  For some it is above the waves, but for me it would be beneath them.

It is simple physics that dictates the world underwater.  Every twenty feet in-depth doubles the atmospheric pressure exerted on our body and the things around us.  As a result, our volume is compressed while our weight remains the same.  The result?  Under the law of displacement, we become smaller with the same relative weight so we sink.  As a matter of fact, the deeper we go, the faster we sink!

Don’t worry!  They make equipment for this!  Yes we wear a lead belt, but we also have a Buoyancy Compensator (BC) that we wear like a jacket.  We add air to it to increase our displacement and slow or stop our descent.  So why am I going through this mini SCUBA lesson?  Because when I learned to dive, I was the one who always WANTED to go deeper.  I WANTED to get down there into the black just to see what was there!  People had to come GET ME OUT!  Most people liked to stay up in the shallows where the pretty fish were and the water was eighty-seven degrees.  Me?  FORGET THAT!!!!  I wanted to penetrate the darkness and rip open the oceans secrets!  Deep? BAH!  Cold?  NAH!!! Bring it on!

We all make friends in dive class, and I have a best friend and buddy that I dive with whenever I can, even though our basic diving desires are a little different.  While I like the deep and the cold and the black, he prefers the warm and the colorful.  He also owns my home dive shop now too, so there may be something to his plan.  Nevertheless, I am destined to fool with Nitrox, and rebreathers, and every technical aspect of diving I can conjure up while my buddy is well above me in the warm sun counting beautiful fish.  I guess it’s just my nature to want to seek out discoveries in places that are hard to get to and uncomfortable once you arrive.

So I ask you:  Isn’t the Ocean our last earthbound frontier?  Couldn’t your next dive be a dive of discovery?  Are we not finding things down there all the time?  Treasures?  Medical breakthroughs?  New forms of life?  With most of Earth’s surface covered by the Oceans, and while we wait for time travel to come of age, shouldn’t we do all we can to understand a universe that is right in our own back yards?

I think so.

9 Research versus Access

The research for developing the backdrop in Clemency is encapsulated for the reader in Chapter 7.  Here, our lead characters and the reader are openly exposed to the facts surrounding the demise of the ship, and the conditions under which the operation is about to take place.  I haven’t hidden anything.  Why?  Because I believe that there is a difference between research and discovery; between facts and circumstance.  One can spend all the time they want researching what a Liberty ship looks like, and make all the plans they wish for dissecting it.  But to be in its presence is a completely different matter.

While it is true that the lead characters have the entire mission laid out for them, the actual environment would turn out to be nothing like the facts they had been given.  They would be forced to slip from research into discovery, and no two things could have turned out to be farther apart.  Research is by its very nature reliant on given facts.  Sometimes these facts are derived from previous explorers who make discoveries and bring information back with them.  This was at least partly the case in Clemency.  But many times, research is contained within sterile conditions.  We might know everything there is to know about an object, but we cannot know what it will do in a given environment.  This was also the case in Clemency.  No level of research could have prepared any of our characters for what they would find when they arrived.

This leads me to the consideration of the term access in fiction.  As I touched on last time, I believe that powerful fiction is derived from truth and truth is derived from experience.  To derive experience, one has to have access to circumstances which in turn, unlock that experience.  Research in fiction is critical to establish plausibility, but access is critical in establishing a backdrop of realism that will engage a reader and propel a story from the realm of plausible to the realm of convincing.  It is not enough to know all there is to know about an object, and to be able to blurt back the rote facts about that object.  These facts are awash in the public domain.

I have done the research and I have lived the moments.  Thank you for coming along with me.

Clemency, The Saint Chronicles Part 1 Book Trailer Released!

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Clemency, Trailer

Its here! The long awaited trailer to Clemency, the first in the Saint Chronicles Series has arrived! Check it out here!

What’s Your Secret?

‘Skeletons in the closet’ or whatever you chose to call them: everybody’s got ’em. And I mean everybody. From a squirrel hiding its favorite morsels underground for a cold winter day, to international espionage, nobody can escape the insidious nature of the secret. But isn’t that what makes secrets so compelling? The fact that we have them? Of course it does! Which is more compelling to you? An expansive park where you can run the dog with four hundred of your closest neighbors every Saturday morning, or a walled garden with a fifteen foot locked iron gate that you pass every day on the way to work? You can look in through the gate, but you can’t see much in the shade. The answer is the walled garden is far more intriguing. Why? Because over the weekends of walking the dog you learn every inch of that huge park and, in essence, you lose respect for it because you eventually know all of its intricacies. It simply loses its identity to common knowledge.

Governments (including our own) are focussed on keeping their secrets while their own medias and thousands of people from other countries are driven to risk their very lives to ferret those secrets out into the light. Each and every one of us has secrets. As transparent as we might think we are (or try to be), we all have that little treasure chest of secrets that nobody, save ourselves, is allowed to unlock, let alone peer into. I call it a treasure chest because that, in the end, is what it really is. It is not a closet because it is not a mess, and it is not large. Our secrets are wisps. They are small little scraps and shreds of critical information. Our secrets are carefully categorized and ordered so that we can easily examine them over and over again.

Why? Because our secrets are actually our true identity. They are our deviant nature contained. They are the remaining brush strokes of the incomplete painting we hang out on the sidewalk for everybody to see. We covet them and protect them from the daylight. We never truly share them, so sometimes they live out their lives as wants or needs that are never fulfilled. They are our weaknesses that we shelter from the critical eye of a stranger.

Are they necessary? Absolutely! On every scale! Why? Because without them we would all be the same. We would all be vulnerable. We could never be ourselves. We would all be perpetually subjected to the abuse from those who would wish to exploit us. And most of all, we would live our lives under the constant threat of acceptance, because our paintings would be finished and our worth as an artist would be truly known.

Clemency ended with its treasure chest of secrets only partially opened. Without secrets, there would be no discovery scheduled for tomorrow.