Victoria Janssen

Over at the Romance Divas forum for the next three months, I’m serving as mentor to another writer. As a result, I’ve been thinking about plotting and how to plot and how to teach to plot. And how to teach one to teach one’s self how to plot. *whew*

To help out my thinking, I’ve been browsing among various articles, books, saved messages, etc. that I saved thinking I would get to them later, when I needed them. I’m not reading any of it closely, just skimming, and letting ideas come together in my head, loosely and probably confusingly connected. Yes, it’s my usual “let the backbrain do it!” methodology.

I remember being taught in school about the external conflict and the internal conflict. But how about in relation to plot? There are plots where the characters go somewhere physically, and plots where they don’t travel far at all. This physical placement of the characters can be related to what type of conflict they’re experiencing.

Right now, I’m more intrigued by the trapped protagonist, perhaps because I haven’t explored it much in my own writing, yet.

If the protagonist is trapped somewhere – in a house, in a town, in a network of tunnels, in a relationship – the tension of the story is automatically ramped up. The character is trapped and wants to escape. The barriers she has to overcome are right in her face, perhaps even familiar to her (her home town taken over by the Children of the Corn! her own husband turning into a vampire!). It’s claustrophobic. Her emotions can be compressed like the space, and then explode with concomitant force.

Plus, there’s making old things new again. If the character is in a familiar setting, perhaps the town where she grew up, people and things surrounding her haven’t necessarily changed. But she is changing in the course of the book, so her perceptions of familiar things will change. That’s movement. That’s part of the plot arc.

Suddenly, I’m seeing another level to the appeal of the Gothic novel.

The body language of one’s characters of course must have something in common with the readers’ experience, or it won’t communicate anything to them. But how to make descriptions of body language interesting? And reveal character in the specific as well as in the general sense? And be clear to the reader but at the same time be as invisible as the word said in one’s prose?

I tend to focus on the characters’ eyes and on their hands. They often glance at each other, meet each other’s eyes, or look down or away. They touch another’s arm or hand. Habits are also useful. A character who is a smoker might have a whole separate vocabulary: when he is agitated, he might chain-smoke and fling the butts away into the darkness; when contemplating, he might light up slowly and blow smoke through his nostrils in long streams.

I also tend to have characters eat and drink while engaged in dialogue. In my earlier work, the characters ate all the time, in scene after scene. True, I could work in worldbuilding details about what they ate, and character details about how they ate it, but after a certain point it became ludicrous. A coffee-loving friend informed me that one of my manuscripts left her craving coffee because the characters indulged in it so much. I’ve become more careful since then.

I think body language is something to which I can’t pay close attention while I’m drafting, for fear of distracting myself from more important matters. But it’s a prime subject for when I’m rereading and editing.

A character’s body language can embody, pun intended, their emotions and some of their habitual traits and give them additional meaning. Graceful movements versus abrupt, jerky movements. A slow, weary pace instead of a brisk, lively one. A movement towards a touch, cut short.

The possibilities are endless.