The Wellspring: Sarah Lovett Workshop #2

Anyone who has ever been put in charge of a kindergarten class will understand the futility of trying to be in CONTROL of a bunch of high-energy self-willed beings like the creative entities amongst which writers try to create some sort of order to produce a book.

How I had worked before was to lock myself into a plot structure and try to make the characters, like puppets, walk through it filling it out. So what if some of them lost a limb or two as I jammed them in! Painstaking frustration for me, because they’d never quite fit—and I was presenting the reader with characters who never quite became whole.

In her workshop, Sarah Lovett coaxed me to work from the heart of character, and the interaction of character with character, that leads to true action and plot.

How did she get me into to do this?

We talked often, and in many different ways, about the important difference between my protagonist’s wants and needs; about how that divergence creates an eventual dilemma for the hero, which s/he needs to resolve by changing…herself, if she is going to grow. How the antagonist has a similar split; how the interactions between protagonist and antagonist illuminate and challenge their pursuit of their divergent, sometimes even mirroring, paths.

We discussed how vital it is to let interaction, action, plot, scenes, flow from this source. Sarah advised writing frequent interactions and explorations in these areas, since each character’s understanding, goals, and actions in these areas will change as the story progresses; these could become platforms for new plot or character directions, or story scenes in themselves.

She also raised several issues that I am still pondering, and will probably drive me to further blogs, including:

• Does your Antagonist challenge your Hero to the very core?
• Don’t shy away from testing your Hero; this is what displays her worthiness to the reader.
• Is your Hero compelling, complex? On the surface this sounds simple, but I find it a compelling and . . . uh, complex question.

If you can believe it, there’s still more. I’ll tell you in my next blog.

Find out more about Sarah Lovett’s workshops at http://writingcoachsarah.com/, and about her bestselling novels—the recent Blowback and Burned with former CIA operative Valerie Plame, and her own “Dr. Sylvia Strange” series set in the NM Penitentiary—at http://sarahlovett.com/.