Flaw 'Em Up! (Crit Diaries)

Before we get started: A request. I'm totally psyched that I get to guest post over at Zap's Lobster Tank next Friday for "F---ing Awesome Friday." I'm going to be writing about how F---ing Awesome UNAGENTED (/unpublished) WRITERS are. 

So. If you are an unagented and/or unpublished writer, send me something you're proud of.  Could be a concept, an excerpt, a sentence, a TITLE for crying out loud.  Just...whatever you have that your agent-seeking fingers have toiled over that makes you say, "Yeah. I am F---ing Awesome." I know you have it.

I'm going to do my best to work everyone's contributions into the post. Because you are F---ing Awesome, unagenteds. Don't forget it.

(Oh! And if you are an unagented writer and you know that I think you're F---ing Awesome - i.e., I have harassed you for your manuscript, synopsis, kissing scenes, or anything PLEASEGOD that lets me read more of your book...don't think you can get out of this. I'm coming after you. Yeah, Jamie Gray and Marcy Kate. That's you.

Because, after all - if you don't have rabid fans, what DO you have? )

Now, on with the post.

Well, friends, it's that time of the manuscript again.

Chessie and Maggie are plowing through crit at a pretty impressive clip, and along with the "break the paragraph here"s and "What made you fall in love with run-on sentences this year?"s and "Elias sounds like an old man"s, I'm also starting to sort through the novel's meta-questions.

When I sent the ladies my manuscript, I asked them to keep a lookout for a few things.

To avoid my second lead, Elias, being a douchebag (not least to avoid Gina's wrath), I didn't give him any really STRONG flaws. At least, not any obviously egregious ones.  And I wanted to know if it was a problem.

We all know that a main character must have identifiable flaws. For one thing, they make her believable, and for another, they clarify her character arc - how she's going to grow and change throughout the story - for the reader.  So, we writers worth our salt get to work flawing our main characters up. Maybe they have low self-confidence, or they are are really rude, or stuck-up, or can't handle their tempers, or maybe they don't believe in Love (*happy sigh*.) 

But what about secondary leads? How flawed must secondary leads, or any supporting characters, be in order to be believable - in order for us to root for them?

Before critique on ONE even got rolling, I posed this question to my patient writing coach Jean, and then after Chessie had hung out with Elias for a bit I asked the same of her. And they both answered the same way:

Every character must have a flaw, but the reader only needs to see it to the extent that it interacts with your main character's arc. Mostly because your character can't go this story on her own. She has to have people doing stuff and causing events for her to react to, and without flaws, other characters won't do that. 

In other words? Your cast of characters is kind of like Voltron. One unbelievably-unflawed link, and it all goes to hell.

So, in other words, the more involved your characters are with the main character's story, the more of their flaws the reader should be able to see.  For example, I'm pretty sure that Merrin's biology teacher spends too much cash on comic books and too little saving for retirement. But we don't see that, because they only thing he does in this book is look at Mer and Elias scoldingly for breaking curfew on a school trip. No problem.

But Elias has a pretty major, if quiet, flaw that ends up causing kind of a lot of trouble in its own way. Now, I could give him no flaws, so that he could just skate through the story holding Mer's hand and boosting her self-confidence, but then people would throw my book across the room. Because a perfect character is unbelievable, especially one that we see so much of,  the whole STORY would become unbelievable.

Okay, readers. Your turn! Please regale us with stories of how you've flawed your supporting characters up, and what that meant for the way you wrote your story.

Writing Hotness

I read a lot of YA novels where the heroine is described as beautiful and body-perfect, and the hero is some combination of gorgeous and devastatingly handsome, with a big helping of rippling abs on the side.


Now, I like reading about beautiful people as much as the next person. (Hello, RORY. Mmm.) But I'm with Beth Revis here - it's not the physical descriptions that make characters hot. In fact, in my writing, I try to  describe the beauty and brawn only as much as necessary.Only I know exactly what my characters look like in my head. 


Why? Because what's attractive to me may not be attractive to someone else.  And, in most cases more importantly, the way a character acts speaks louder than how a character looks.


Remember your first love? Junior high crush, high school boyfriend, college sweetheart? Remember how AMAZING and PERFECT he was? Remember how it felt to hold his hand, to kiss him, to hear him say "I love you?" And, now that you think back on it, remember how maybe his skin wasn't perfect, or he had kind of a weird haircut, or he was a little too short for you to wear heels when you went out, or maybe his jaw and stomach weren't so chiseled? 


And, most of all, remember how he was the CUTEST GUY EVER?


(Yeah. Me too.)


I guess my point is this: Non-gorgeous, non-buff people fall in love every day. They enjoy making out and...other stuff...just as much as the hot people. And to them? The people they're in love with look absolutely, totally, wouldn't-change-a-thing perfect. 


Most importantly, I don't for a second want one of my sweet teen readers to think that because she's really tall, or has frizzy hair, or wears a size 18, or WHATEVER, that she's not every bit as desirable as the heroine in one of my books.


(And that, watching all the sweet Buckeye couples striding through campus hand-in-hand, way more of them look like this:

Than like this:

And that, no matter what they look like, their love story could be absolutely incredible.)


See, at the end of the day, jaws and muscles and tallness and jeans size are all pretty irrelevant - the only thing that I care about is that my readers know how the characters see one another. Are they attracted to each other? Does the hero think the heroine is beautiful? Does one character want to rip the other's clothes off?


If we agree on the answers to those questions? I've done my job. 


Now! For the fun part (for me at least...)
I want to introduce you to two characters in my WiP, ONE. 


Here's how I describe Leni, short for "Helen":
She is beautiful, the sort of beautiful that knows it can stop anyone in his tracks. She’s tall, with strawberry blond hair so brassy-bright it almost glows, and curvy. Her skin is kissed with gold, then dotted with a spray of freckles.

She looks like the freaking sun itself blew kisses at her. She is the kind of girl that guys like Elias want to be with, always are with. She is a prize. 

And here's Daniel:
Daniel, nearly as tall as Elias, sits at the concrete table with pebbled legs, and looks up from his textbook, jerking his chin up in greeting again. His hair is jet black, and his skin is the color of cinnamon mixed with coffee. His eyes are black, too, but they flash fiercely when they look at me.


Those are pretty much the only physical descriptions of them in the book.


Now, here's part of a scene I wrote between them that does not appear in the book. (Let's just call it character study, okay?)


Slowly, Daniel turns his head to me, and I laugh out loud, then  throw my arms around his neck. His arms circle my body in response, and joy and excitement flood me all at once. I pull back just enough to look at him, and he whispers, "You did it. You really did it."


"We did it," I say, and the joy of it all propels me forward, and I crush my lips against his. I pull back after a second, cheeks flushing crimson, and look down.


I can't believe I did that.


I freeze, wait for him to stop, to push away, to finally tell me after all these years that he doesn’t feel the same way. But he deepens the kiss, takes a deep breath in through his nose, pulls my body closer to his.


Daniel's hands tremble against my waist. My breath shudders out of my chest. The space between us, or what's left of it, is so charged that I can hardly believe this is real.  It must be a dream.  It must,  it must,  and if I don't wake up now,  my heart will fly out of my chest and drag me out of sleep.   


But then his lips move to each of my eyes, then my jaw, then my neck, and I know that my heart couldn't possibly go faster than it is now. Yet he's still kissing me, and my body still aches to be even closer to his. 

Now. Do you have a picture of these two in your head? Yes? Good. So do I. One of the below pictures matches up with my idea of each of them, but any could work given the descriptions.

So, take a look.What do Leni and Daniel look like TO YOU?