Seekerville: The Journey Continues

 

 

Excerpt -- Opening scene in

The Elements of Love, quick character sketches

They were running away from the threat of misery, pain, degradation. 

And running straight toward danger, deadly danger.

Margaret Stiles chose danger.

What’s more, she chose it for her daughters and prayed without ceasing that she’d chosen right.

            Even worse, the girls had to face that danger alone. Going back by herself was the only way to be sure the girls made their escape.

In silence, she and her three daughters slipped into the night.

She waited until they were far enough from the house no wandering servant, absently looking out the window in the night, could see.

            Then she lagged behind her rushing daughters, her beloved, precious girls. Clouds scuttled across the sky. The dew-damp grass around the house ended in a dense forest. As soon as the forest swallowed them up, she stumbled and fell. Well, truth was, she stopped running, sat down and cried out in pain. Softly. She most certainly didn’t want Edgar to hear, though he drank enough, he usually slept heavily.

            Laura whirled around and rushed back, Jillian a step behind. Michelle brought up the rear.

Click to Buy on Amazon Click to buy Baker Book House

            Laura, her sweet, compassionate child. The blue-eyed blonde who was a fine-boned, feminine version of her father, Liam Stiles. Laura, who knew how to blow things up.

Jillian, the one with the oddly mathematical mind who made theories work. She’d been educated to build trestles across vast gorges, and build railroad tracks into the heart of a mountain. A fiery green-eyed red-head, a throw-back to her papa’s Irish grandmother.

Michelle the leader, the calm one who took charge of the sweet Laura and the fiery Jillian, and they mostly let her. Michelle the mechanical engineer who saw all the details and made everything and everyone work together. And in her spare time, she worked with machines, mechanisms to help the girl’s future project excel. She already had two patents with plans for a dozen more, if she could just get the ideas in her head to become reality. Michelle was the oldest, the brunette with the shining blue eyes who looked most like her mama.

            “Mama what happened?” Laura dropped to her knees on Margaret’s right.

I spent a while trying to figure out how to talk about characters. Putting into words something that’s just inherently hard to put into words.

Characters need to be three dimensional. And it’s hard for me to really explain what brings them to life.

These are my five steps. The first is the simplest.

1.       Make a character likeable by making someone like them

2.      Character arcs

3.      Give them quirks

4.      My main character types

5.      Avoid backstory dumps

This month I’m talking about step one

Click to Buy-Amazon Click to Buy-Baker Book House

Make a character likeable by making someone like them. This is possibly the single best piece of advice I ever got as a beginning writer. It’s a simple sentence but when you‘re doing it, it really affects your writing. Often, we want a character at the beginning of the book who has problems, who is resistant to love, who is immature or angry or in some way needs to change her life. Something she has to change about herself. This is at the heart of the character arc. But to make a character difficult we can risk making her (or him) unlikeable and that’s going to be a book no one continues reading. Who wants a main character they don’t like?

So the act of making someone like them, changes the way your write your character. Jerks don’t have good friends, or at least their friends are also jerks. They don’t hug their old, worn-out teddy bear. They don’t have a faithful dog. If you give them a loyal friend, you have to write a character who is responding to that friend in a likeable way. Make a character likeable by making someone like them is a simple statement that really makes you change your character.

The Element of Love

Coming March 2

She mixed danger, desperation, and deception together. Love was not the expected outcome.

With their sharp engineering minds, Laura Stiles and her two sisters have been able to deal with their mother's unfortunate choice in husband until they discovered his plans to marry each of them off to his lecherous friends. Now they must run away--far and fast--to find better matches to legally claim their portion of their father's lumber dynasty and seize control from their stepfather.

During their escape, Laura befriends a mission group heading to serve the poor in California. She quickly volunteers herself and her sisters to join their efforts. Despite the settlement being in miserable condition, the sisters are excited by the opportunity to put their skills to good use. Laura also sees potential in Caleb, the mission's parson, to help with gaining her inheritance. But when secrets buried in Caleb's past and in the land around them come to light, it'll take all the smarts the sisters have to keep trouble at bay.

http://www.maryconnealy.com

 

We all enjoy the secondary characters in stories, right?

The heroine’s best friend, the hero’s fun younger brother, the sidekick, the pal, the mentor.

These characters are necessary to your story. They provide someone for your characters to confide in and someone to push your hero or heroine to make the move toward romance or toward the next plot point in your story.

But what about the background characters?

First, let’s define what a background character is.

“Good afternoon,” I said to the older couple. “You must be Rick and Debbie Harris.”

“That’s right.” Rick smiled at me, his graying beard unable to hide the friendly gesture. “We’re sorry we’re late, but we hadn’t expected the Dignity statue in Chamberlain to be so captivating.”

“Have you seen it?” Debbie asked. When I shook my head, she went on. “You have to. It is so beautiful and conveys the dignity of the Native Americans perfectly in the graceful lines of the woman. Like a dancer captured in motion.”

Her hands fluttered in the air as she spoke as if she was trying to express the movement that the statue could only represent. Her gently curled silver hair with strands of gold lowlights added to the ethereal quality of her description.

“I’m sorry.” She laughed as her hands dropped to her side like birds coming to roost on a branch. “I get carried away sometimes.” She shook her head as she laughed again.

Let's give today's guest author T.I. Lowe a warm Seekerville welcome as she shares her heart for writing characters who are considered different by embracing the marginalized.

I was asked the following question in an interview for my book Under the Magnolias and thought I would elaborate on it for you in this post:

Why did you choose to represent characters who are “marginalized” or “misunderstood” in this book?

My answer: I am just so tired of the labels and the unrealistic boxes society creates and expects you to live up to. That’s hogwash. If God wanted us all to fit in the same box, he would have created us as carbon copies. He didn’t, so that means it’s a gift to be different and I think differences should be celebrated. I did a lot of celebrating this in Under the Magnolias.

That’s the blunt answer, and I feel like bluntness is needed for this question. No beating around the bush.

As a writer, I think it would be an injustice to write solely about cookie-cutter characters. I don’t know about you, but I’m a hot mess. I have issues. I’m pudgy. When I’m nervous, I cannot find eloquence to save my life. And those are just some of my issues. Other folks have other issues. Honestly, that’s what makes them interesting in my book.

My desire is to showcase differences, in all forms, and to have people realize how unnecessary labels and boxes are. The ones who are typically overlooked are the ones I always gravitate toward when investing in character studies.

Labels created by society come with scarlet letters of shame. Body-shaming. Race shaming. Gender shaming. Social views shaming. I could go on and on. If one person reads Under the Magnolias and can relate to one of the marginalized characters and realize they are perfectly acceptable as is, then I’ve done the job I wanted to achieve.

Here’s a sneak peek at the interesting mix of characters you will meet in Under the Magnolias.

As the piano came to life, I sat a little straighter and scanned the small pews and felt certain the ragtag congregation near about represented any walk of life you could think of.

A fortune-teller accused of being a witch doctor. Check.

An ex-con with a glass eye. Check.

An atheist believer with a Polish accent. Check.

The town’s undertaker whose sexual orientation was questionable. Check.

The town floozy with a penchant for neon-blue eye shadow. Check.

A poor farming family with way too many kids. Check.

A madman leading them. Check.

As you can see in this small excerpt, there is quite a colorful group of people just waiting to introduce themselves to you. Sadly, they carry labels and shame formed from falsities and gossip. Mostly because those characters didn’t look or act like the “normal” townsfolk. Surfaces can be deceiving, but with a closer look, my readers are going to meet a spectacular group of people.

It’s time to stop the shaming and start being encouragers. I know this sounds more like a soapbox speech, but I think it’s important to grasp, in real life and in fiction. And as a Christian author, I feel like it’s my duty to love as Jesus loved. That means encouraging and not shaming. I want people to read my stories and see themselves walking through the mistakes with my characters, and I want them to celebrate in the moments of redemption as well.

Sometimes our issues or the labels placed on us due to our issues hold us back from seeking help when we need it. Shame will send us into hiding. Readers will discover how detrimental this is in Under the Magnolias. My characters hide behind the labels, become prisoners to them actually, until it almost becomes their ruin.

As a writer I have the gift of giving the story a happy ending. Sadly, this isn’t always the case in real life. Please, if you are struggling with any form of mental illness or have been hiding some other issue, I want to encourage you to get help. As Austin Foster discovers in this book, you’d be surprised how supportive those around you can be if you just let them in.

Is there a marginalized character you’ve discovered in a book you related to? If so, what book and how did it affect you? 

Share your thoughts in the comments and one reader will win a print copy of Under the Magnolias courtesy of Tyndale House Publishers.

 

by Mindy Obenhaus

Take two stubborn people from completely different backgrounds, add one orphaned little girl and you just might have the makings of a happily ever after.

When I began writing my upcoming release, A Brother’s Promise, I knew my heroine because she’d appeared in the first book in my Bliss, Texas series, A Father’s Promise. Christa Slocum was a no nonsense, take-charge kind of gal who’d given up a high-power tech industry job to purchase a small-town hardware store. At forty-three, she was comfortably single with no desire to have a man in her life. So coming up with a hero who wasn’t afraid to go toe-to-toe with her was a challenge.

Enter Mick Ashford, a rancher who’s lived his entire life in the same small town and happens to be Christa’s neighbor. He was raised in the farmhouse she’s spent the last few years renovating, preferring to live in the rustic camp house he and his father built when Mick was a boy. Still single at age forty-five, he has no need for a woman in his life because, in his experience, women only wanted to change him into someone he wasn’t.

Though Christa and Mick cross paths frequently, often butting heads, they’re more acquaintances than friends, never taking the time to get to know one another. So how did I bring this confirmed bachelor and bachelorette together?

Common goal – Every h/h needs a common goal. Something that, inevitably, forces them to spend time together. In Mick and Christa’s case, it’s Mick’s recently orphaned, five-year-old niece, Sadie.

As Sadie’s legal guardian, Mick is determined to do right by her, even though he knows nothing about little girls or being a father. So when Christa offers to help him redecorate Sadie’s bedroom, he’s more than willing to accept.

However, Christa wants to help with more than just Sadie’s bedroom. Having lost her mother when she was five, Christa understands what Sadie is going through emotionally and vows to help both Sadie and Mick navigate the turbulent waters that lie ahead.

Overcoming misconceptions - The more the hero and heroine are together, the better they come to know one another, shifting their perception of each other.

While Christa is a well-educated, big-city girl, Mick is a country boy who makes his own sausage and lives a simple life. Yet as they become more familiar with each other, Christa realizes that Mick is anything but self-absorbed, not to mention more complex than she imagined. He learns that she’s down to earth and shares his appreciation for life’s simpler things. And they soon discover…

They complement each other – Where one is weak, the other is strong. Learning each other’s strengths and weaknesses is the beginning of a lasting relationship. In the face of adversity, they learn they can lean on one another. However, there is always one thing that stands in their way.

Fear keeps them apart – We’re all afraid of something. Things that might seem silly to others, can be very real to you and are usually based on past experience.

Every woman Mick ever dated has tried to change him. To turn him into something he’s not. Is he enough for Christa? What if she grows bored with him because he doesn’t challenge her the way a more educated man could?

Meanwhile, Christa’s had her own share of heartbreak. Everyone she’s ever loved has left her. What if Mick left her, too?

So will Mick and Christa overcome their fears to discover their happily ever after? Well, I can’t give everything away. 😉

Choosing the right hero and heroine is like building a winning team. You want diversity. Different backgrounds, different strengths and weaknesses. Things that, when put to the test, will challenge them, strengthen them, bring them closer together and, perhaps, give them the happily ever after they didn’t even know they wanted.

Writers, how do you choose your hero and heroine? Readers, what do you think makes a great couple? I’m giving away a copy of A Brother’s Promise, so leave a comment to be entered (US mailing addresses only, please). Oh, and if you’d like a sneak-peak at the first chapter, you can do that here.

He didn’t realize he wanted a family… Until he suddenly became a single dad.

After his sister’s death, rancher Mick Ashford’s determined to ensure his orphaned niece, Sadie, feels at home. And accepting guidance from Christa Slocum is his first step. But just as Christa and Sadie begin to settle into Mick’s heart, Sadie’s paternal grandparents sue for custody. Now Mick must fight to keep them together…or risk losing the makeshift family he’s come to love. 

“Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.”

“Tara, do you know what you are?”

My friend sipped her coffee and leveled me with a kind but far too direct stare. The kind of stare that is only earned through truth and years of hard-won trust.

“What?”

“You’re a rodeo clown.”

I blinked, unable to formulate a reply in the sting of her assessment. I didn’t relish being compared to a clown. All I could see were the floppy shoes and bright-red nose. I contemplated dumping the coffee in her lap when she smiled.

“I don’t mean like Bozo the clown. I mean you stand in front of the crowd doing tricks, telling jokes, making everyone laugh. You see to their happiness while plastering yourself in makeup to give the illusion of a whimsical clown. But sometimes you hide behind that painted smile.”

She was all too correct. It’s easier than some might think to hide in plain sight.

I grew up as a preacher’s kid. I saw the good, the bad, and the ugly in churches. Somewhere along the way, I fell for the lie that approval and love are the same thing, but I was wrong. They are polar opposites.

Approval is a stamp that says, “You meet my expectations.” It drips of condescension and conditions. Love says, “You’re a mess, but I’m crazy about you anyway.” For too long, I lived as a people pleaser, looking for unconditional love in conditionally-minded people. I failed. Over and over again.

Thankfully I grew older and wiser. God brought amazing people—teachers, doctors, and friends—who helped unearth the wounds I kept locked away in the shadowed places of my heart. For a while I thought I had it all figured out . . . until I started writing. That’s when my characters began to teach me things I’m often afraid to confront.

In my debut novel, Engraved on the Heart, my heroine Keziah battles epilepsy while working as a conductor in the Underground Railroad. She struggles against the expectations of her staunch Confederate family, hiding her frailties from society’s critical eyes and pleasing the brother she adores while still trying to remain true to her own convictions. As Keziah’s story unfolded, I realized I fell for the same lie she had . . . that broken means worthless.

In my latest novel, Where Dandelions Bloom, Cassie Kendrick escapes her abusive father by enlisting as a male soldier in the Union Army. Cassie hides in plain sight yet fools herself into thinking she is finally liberated from the torment that has shadowed her life. In her quest for freedom, she comes to realize the only thing keeping her captive is her refusal to forgive her father.

While penning these two novels, I came to understand two things. First, I discovered Cassie and Keziah are reflections of my own secrets, the wounds I’ve tried to mask behind grease paint and wide smiles. Second, I realized why I write. Writing to win over the masses or for my own personal ego is a broken cistern of despair, nor do I write to escape. Instead, I start each book with a question I don’t know the answer to and ask God to reveal the answer as the story unfolds. To reveal himself.

In other words, I write to know God.

Many writers think their main goal should be voyaging off un-pubbed island. A noble goal, as long we don’t forget why we write. Published or unpublished, they both have their place and can teach us beautiful things at our particular point along the journey. Be careful not to base your identity in being a published author or as a writer at all. The more you build your identity on something other than Christ, the greater the pain if that identity crumbles.

“The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.”

Know why you write. The motivation makes a difference.

And if, like me, you discover you’ve been hiding behind face paint and false identities, that’s okay. Write about that too.




Cassie Kendrick is on the run. Her abusive father arranged her marriage to a despicable man, but she's discovered an escape. Disguised as a man, Cassie enlists in the Union army, taking the name Thomas Turner.  On the battlefields of the Civil War, keeping her identity a secret is only the beginning of her problems, especially after she meets Gabriel Avery, a handsome young photographer.

Anxious to make his mark on the world and to erase the darkness and guilt lurking from his past, Gabriel works with renowned photographer Matthew Brady to capture images from the front lines of the war. As Gabriel forges friendships with many of the men he encounters, he wonders what the courageous, unpredictable Thomas Turner is hiding.

Battling betrayal, their own personal demons, and a country torn apart by war, can Cassie and Gabriel learn to forgive themselves and trust their futures to the God who births hope and healing in the darkest places? 



Tara Johnson is an author, speaker, and passionate lover of stories. She loves to travel to churches, ladies’ retreats, and prisons to share how God led her into freedom after spending years living shackled as a people-pleasing preacher’s kid.

From the time she was young and watched Gone with the Wind with her mother for the first time, the Civil War has intrigued her. That fascination grew into all aspects of American history and the brave people and stories who make up its vibrant past.

She says, “History is crammed full of larger-than-life characters. Doc Holliday, Annie Oakley, Helen Keller, Daniel Boone, George Washington, Amelia Earhart, and Frederick Douglass are just a few examples of flawed, wounded humans who battled their demons with determination and left an indelible mark on the pages of history. I suppose that’s why people are so fascinating. No matter the era, we all battle the same wounds. Abandonment, abusive fathers, overprotective mothers, loss, grief, rejection, addiction, crippling anxiety, loneliness, or the yearning for unconditional love, to name a few. We all battle the same junk and have to decide whether to fight or cave. Run or stand. Cry or smile. That’s what great characters do. They are a reflection of our struggles, our own wounds. Our own need. And, when written well, they remind us whom we need to turn to for healing.”

Tara has written articles for Plain Truth magazine and has been a featured guest on Voice of Truth Radio and Enduring Word Radio. Tara is a member of American Christian Fiction Writers. She and her husband, Todd, live in Arkansas, and the Lord has blessed them with five children: Bethany, Callie, and Nate, as well as Taylor Lynn and Morgan Lane, who are with Jesus.

Visit her website at www.TaraJohnsonStories.com and connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.

The literary world has changed in the last fifty years. In the past, authors like J.R.R. Tolkien could spend three pages introducing us to his main character in “The Hobbit” (Bilbo Baggins,) complete with a description of his home and family history – and he does this in the first three pages of the book. I happen to like that style, and when I read “The Hobbit,” I settle into my comfy chair ready to lose myself in the story.



But things have changed! In our time, authors need to get to the action as soon as possible and leave the backstory and descriptions for later.

How do you do this?

Layer by layer.


 

Onions or cake. Take your pick!

Either way, we peel our character’s layers back little by little, letting our readers learn to know our characters by their actions. Or a comment here. A thought there.

It’s tempting to tell the reader everything! We love our characters and we want our readers to love them, too!

But an information dump (where you give your reader way too much information at once) is like your co-worker setting you up for a blind date with her favorite cousin. She has been gushing over this guy for two weeks, telling you all about his job, family, house, dog, his appendicitis attack in 8th grade… But really, don’t you want to meet him first? Don’t you want to be the one to decide if you want to get to know him better?

Do your readers a favor and peel away those layers little by little.

Here’s an example from my work in progress, Softly Blows the Bugle. We’ve already met the hero, Aaron, in the first scene. There we found out that he was wounded and captured at Gettysburg. First layer.

In the second scene, we begin to see him through his own eyes as he’s talking to his friend Jonas:

“But the war changed you.” Aaron let his mind go back to the angry, fiery young man he had been, hot to kill any Yankee he could find after a scouting party shot Grandpop. “It changed both of us. War will do that.”

That snippet is all we know so far about Aaron’s past. It’s just one more layer, but the story isn't finished yet.

Later in the book, but still early, we’ll learn more about Grandpop and what he meant to Aaron. Another layer.

Somewhere around the middle of the story, memories of Aaron’s mother will begin to surface. Thin layers peel away, revealing his home life as a child.

Toward the end, we’ll learn the secret of Aaron’s past, and the reason he believes the lie that has ruled his life. Peeling back layer by layer by layer.

Meanwhile, all through the story we watch Aaron’s actions, how he treats other people, and how they respond to him. Layers.

By the end of the book, if I have done my work well, we will know Aaron’s story, his struggles, his spiritual battles, and his physical battles. And we will know the inner man. The hero the readers will fall in love with.



At the same time, we need to be careful not to peel back a layer, revealing a hint of an important detail, and then never bring it up again.

For example, what if you read that smidgen of information at the beginning of the book (Aaron let his mind go back to the angry, fiery young man he had been, hot to kill any Yankee he could find after a scouting party shot Grandpop,) but then you never learned any more about Grandpop or that event? Or what if I didn’t let the readers see the process of the change between then and now? What if I never let the other shoe drop?

Among the things I look for in my revision process are unfinished trails like this. And if I don’t catch them, I pray that my editor will!




Let's chat! Have you ever experienced the "information dump" in your writing? What about in your reading? Or, does it bother you when an author leaves a detail hanging? (It's one of my pet peeves!)

Thanks for reading, and have a blessed Holy Week!