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Let’s say you’re writing a scene in your story, a scene that takes place in a beauty salon. Now, if you yourself have spent 20 years working in beauty salons, maybe you can write that scene off the top your head. But if you’re like most of us, you have only passing exposure to life in a beauty salon. And if you’re like me, you’ve never actually gone inside one.

The classic way out of this, of course, is to “write what you know.” So if you don’t know beauty salons, don’t write them…

Yeah, right. <sarcastic sneer and rolls eyes>

Don’t get me wrong: it’s nice when you can write in a field in which you have some expertise. But if you plan to write more than one or two stories, you’ll need to get into the details of many fields and situations, settings and cultures, in which you have little or no direct knowledge. To some extent, this is always true of a fiction author, because you’re writing events that never actually occurred, in places that may not exist, in cultures that you may have made up, using technology that may never be developed, in times that have not even happened yet. How, pray tell, in the nature of reality do they expect you to “write what you know”?!

The best that we can hope for is to get it as close to plausible as we can.

One way we can accomplish this is by researching areas we’re unfamiliar with, then describing and explaining them to our readers. The problem is that we tend to assume we “know” things we don’t.

For example, this may come in handy the next time you have to write a drowning scene: Neil Shurley posted on Facebook a fascinating article explaining that real-life drowning doesn’t look like movie drowning. Who would’a thunk it? Our widespread popular misperceptions of what a drowning person looks like and acts like— You could be swimming, and your kid could be drowning only a few feet from you, and you would never know it, much less how to save him. So how would your fictional scene play out? What would your average, everyday character see and perceive? But a lifeguard character would know what drowning looks like, because he’s been trained. And if you needed to describe the scene from the drowning character’s perspective, you’d need to understand the realities of drowning, what happens to the human body and mind.

Never assume you know how something looks, or acts, or what the rules are. Because our perceptions have usually been distorted by popular television and movies (and novels, too), for dramatic effect. If you’re a Mythbusters fan, you’ve seen them tear apart numerous movie myths, documenting the reality of each situation. Why these movie dramatics seem plausible in the context of the original fiction, that’s a topic for a different post. But if the unrealistic dramatics can be made to seem plausible, how much more so the reality?

The first time I wrote a scene that involved a gun, I was proud to have gotten the details right. Just a little research, on gun technology, types of guns, real-world best practices, things that anyone who has taken an introductory gun course would know. And integrating this knowledge into the scene did not compromise the integrity or drama of the scene; in fact, it enhanced it.

Even if you decide you want to stick with the dramatic myths, you should at least know what the truth is. Because this research can uncover related information that you can use to improve your story. When I was writing “The Widow’s Granddaughter,” my first idea for the hero character, Jeffrey, was to make him a repo man. But the only reason he’d be in a job like that was to be successful, and when was the last time you heard of a “successful” repo man? So I made him a bank executive instead. He hired the repo man. That worked for a while. I got several manuscript pages into the story, and then I needed to look up a detail about repossession. So I asked Google, read some stuff, and ran across a piece of advice written by the owner of a small dealership that self-finances many of its sales. That means the owner himself has to repossess some of the cars he finances. That’s it! I thought. That’s the perfect job for my character. It had an aspect of success, as well as a hands-on aspect that was perfect for my story. So I changed Jeffrey’s career once again. I’m still happy with the way the story ultimately turned out.

When it comes to research for my stories, Google is my friend. Whenever I realize that I need details on a setting, profession, activity, or situation, I pull up my web browser and start typing queries into my favorite search engine.

I’ve also found Holly Lisle’s “33 Mistakes” series of ebooks invaluable for broader subject areas. These ebooks aren’t actually written by Holly, but by authors, experts each in his subject area, whom she’s signed to share their knowledge. Each ebook in the series lists 33 common mistakes fiction authors make when it comes to disappearing in the U.S., blindness, camping, guns, hostels, ballet, construction, San Francisco, or whatever.

Now, don’t go research-crazy. You don’t have to become an expert in every field you write fiction in. We’ve all gotten into research mode, where we keep studying a topic, delving deeper and deeper into it, like there’s gonna be a test on it later. One reason we do this is that it feels good to discover new truths about realities we previously didn’t know about. And that’s cool, and I think every author should allocate time in his schedule to study non-fiction, and to study people.

(As I write this, I’m half-eavesdropping on a pair of obviously successful businesswomen—one of whom apparently owns several Starbucks franchises, if I understood correctly, and the other who is wearing an engagement ring the size of the Pink Panther. They’re hobnobbing loudly at the next table, chatting about their histories, experiences, business values, best management practices, organizing techniques, and so forth. They’re talking at 90 miles an hour, moving from topic to topic at lightning speed. Someday, I’m going to have to write a character based on them.)

So, reading non-fiction is fun. Watching documentaries is also fun. Watching people, way fun, if you can get away with it. But when you’re writing a story, you need to focus on getting the story written. That means, you research until you know enough to write or revise the part of the story you’re currently working on. Then you put the research back up on the shelf and…

Keep writing!
-TimK

As of May 1st, prices are going up on Holly Lisle’s online career-survival course for novelists.

Update: I’m just going through the first couple of walkthroughs Holly has so far added to How to Think Sideways. And all I can say is, “Wow!”

Two important announcements that Holly Lisle posted on her blog last week: one about a new book, and the other about how she’s going about getting it written.

As you may recall, the Little One and I both loved The Ruby Key, Holly Lisle’s first Moon & Sun book. Our paperback copy got so tattered, from reading and lending out, I snatched up a NOS hardcover I saw listed at Amazon. We also liked the second book, The Silver Door, a lot, though I didn’t post a review. Unfortunately, The Silver Door left off before Genna the heroine conquered the villain and saved the universe. To be continued?

But the story never was continued… until now.

Says Holly, “More than a month after I intended to start, (due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control™), today I’m beginning The Last Moon & Sun…which is not the title of the book, but I have to call it something until I have a real title.”

And as soon as I read these words, I told my Little One “Guess what?!” and she said “Yay!”

From what Holly says on her blog about this new title, it sounds like exactly what we’ve been waiting for.

And the way she’s funding it sounds like what I might do in her situation:

I have a huge risk going into this. I don’t have (or want) a contract. I want to be able to do this the way it needs to be done, and that means I don’t want an advance that has to be paid back hanging over my head if the publisher doesn’t like the story I come up with, or doesn’t like the length of the book and wants me to rip out half of it and remove one of the two main characters, for example (because, gee, THAT’s never happened to me before), or wants me to change the story in ways I don’t like.

She’s alluding to the story behind Hawkspar, whose ending made me cry, because it was one of the best endings I’ve ever read, and whose story earned the novel a place in my list of all-time favorite books. Hawkspar almost never made it to print, because of the way the book industry works.

So to help fund this book, she’s releasing a major upgrade to her How to Think Sideways online career-survival course for novelists, which I myself got into early and for which I am a proud affiliate… But I’ll get to that part of the story in a moment.

Says Holly about the upgrade:

I’m going to be adding mostly-weekly demonstrations on how I apply the techniques of How To Think Sideways to my own work to the course.

As happens with every book I write, I’ll make some discoveries on how to write better, more richly, more efficiently, more passionately, and more deeply while I’m doing this book. Anything I discover, I’ll pass on to you. Any tools I come up with, any worksheets I create for my own use, any techniques…you’ll get them as I figure them out.

I’ll make time to be on the boards to answer a few questions, to ask a few questions, and to set up some specific discussion topics.

And I’m adding one other thing. Each week that I post my own Walkthrough, I’ll also be offering a one-hour brainstorming session to one student. I’ll record that session and include it in the course so you can see not just how that week’s techniques work for me, and how they might work for you, but how another student can apply them to his or her work—getting that third perspective can be enormously helpful when you’re facing situations you hadn’t anticipated.

I was lucky enough to get into How to Think Sideways as a beta tester, 2½ years ago, and it gave me so much food for thought, I still don’t feel I’ve really made best use of it all. Instead, the course materials have become one of my go-to writing resources. As soon as Holly opened the course to the public, I posted a link on my sites. And when she set up an affiliate program for it, I immediately signed up, because I was certain that every novelist in the world would need this course.

The course was originally supposed to span four months, but the amount of material she included ended up stretching across seven. (I know the feeling. It’s exactly what I’ve been encountering with Character Fiction 101. I’m up to 114 pages of a planned 100-page ebook, and I’m not even half-way through yet.)

I haven’t even made regular use of the HTTS forums—which have apparently grown into a professional writers’ online community.

Then she added the How NOT To Write A Series (And Why You Don’t Want To) mini-course, as a graduation bonus. (Only “mini” compared to the size of HTTS.) (Which will be invaluable when I pick up Abe’s Turn again.)

Through all the additions, ever since Holly first released this course 2½ years ago, she has maintained the debut price.

But only for a few more weeks.

With this new, major upgrade, she’s raising the price. But through the end of April, you can still get into the class for $25/month for 12 months or $47/month for six months— That’s the original price for the upgraded course. When you join at that price, you’re grandfathered in at that price, and as long as you don’t quit, you stay at that price all the way through to the end of the course, and through all the upgrades.

May 1st, though, prices are going up.

Even if you wonder how much use you’ll make of it, at least check out How to Think Sideways: Career Survival School for Writers, because you can try it risk-free with Holly’s refund policy. (If it turns out not to be as useful for you as it has been for me, you can always cancel for a full or partial refund.)

And whatever you do…

Keep writing!
-TimK

This year, during the holiday break between December 25 and January 1, the kids and I and Grandma and Grampa piled into a rented minivan and trekked 7 hours to southern New Jersey… where the aunts and uncles and first and second cousins reside. And while I was there, I finally understood why Brothers and Sisters makes me laugh.

But the biggest epiphany I had…

The last time I was in New Jersey was the summer of 1995. It was a year after my grandmother died and a year before my eldest was born. Back then, I knew little about human personality, and even less about how to write fiction. In that time, my entire perspective has changed, and I was honestly amazed at how much real-life character drama passes by right under our noses. The old adage is true: You can get loads of great character ideas by looking at the people around you. Of course, using these character ideas is another matter. But notice just some of the things I noticed about the people in my own family:

• My dad, aunt, and cousin talked football for, like, an hour. I mean, I love a good game as much as the next guy. But to debate the sport for a whole hour? Meanwhile, I had a good nap.

• One of my aunts is actually afraid of the Internet. This is also the one who has an opinion about everything and would rather tell you what it is than to listen to what you were about to say when the thought occurred to her. (Except that she is proud of the fact that she does not do so when it comes to her team beating the other guy’s team, because she knows he wants her to make a big deal of it, and she knows it’s eating him up inside when she keeps her gloating to herself.) All I had to do was to mention “doing business on the Internet,” and that sparked a tirade that took me completely by surprise. Of course, business is just the first in a long list of things I do on the Internet that makes it indispensable to me. We never got to number 2.

• Another aunt has a hundred and one potty jokes that are actually funny. At one point, I was laughing so hard, I couldn’t breathe. I had to stop and focus on my breathing, because I was afraid I would pass out, I was laughing so hard.

• Most of my parents’ generation are not Internet savvy. They still happily live without email.

• While we were debating the finer points of when it is and is not appropriate to use a cell phone… We were discussing people who talk on the phone while in the car. Ah! I remembered, the Mythbusters did that one, didn’t they? My cousin and I were the only ones who seemed to know about the Mythbusters. But between the two of us, we remembered which episode it was and what they had concluded about talking on the cell phone while driving. (Talking on the cell phone can be worse on your driving than being legally drunk, if you have to split your attention between the road and on the conversation your having on the phone.)

• My kids’ second cousin always carries a book with her and is always reading it. She’s not even in high school yet. Can you say “Rory Gilmore”? Yikes!

• My uncle tends to forget things my aunt has told him, which drives her up the wall. They’re still together, though, and they’ll never get divorced.

• And me! I can’t stand it when incompatible food items touch on my plate. I mean, it’s okay for my turkey, stuffing, and gravy to slosh together. Because they go together. But keep the gravy out of my potato salad or cranberry sauce!

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Actually, the trip inspired me at almost every turn. Indeed, it is true that the best ideas come from real life.

Of course, the most touching realization is that no matter how much your family makes you laugh, it’s always hardest when you have to say goodbye. We’ll have to go back soon and visit again.

-TimK

P.S. That is, if they haven’t disowned me after this post.

P.P.S. I picked up a bunch of postcards from my trip. I’d be happy to send you one. Just click here to email me, and ask for a postcard from Longwood Gardens. First come, first serve, and I can’t get any more until who-knows-when. So if you’d like a free postcard, email quick.

For example, I could create a character who is passionate about horticulture or some other subject. He’s quiet and reserved, but ask him about plants and suddenly he’s a fountain of knowledge and amusing anecdotes of our green leafy friends.

Or I could create a character who is generally outgoing by drawing on my own outgoing side and by looking to people I know who are also outgoing. Think of the behaviors they exhibit. But this character has a different background, different passions, different fears, different needs than either I or my friends. She will behave differently than us in the same situations, and she’ll behave the same in different situations.

There are only a few different ways we respond to the world around us. But we each respond differently, with a different mix of these ways, depending on the context. There are only a few character reactions. And a character reaction only becomes a characteristic in a situation. By supplanting reactions and situations, you can produce different characters, each of which is a completely realistic new personality.

“What?!” I can almost hear you saying. “You want me to throw away my ideas?”

Yes. I want you to throw them away. And make sure you’re throwing away good ideas, ones that you actually might be able to use, not stupid ones you thought up just to throw away.

Don’t worry. You won’t be losing much, because ideas are plentiful. There are so many ideas locked inside of your creativity. You just need to get them out. Because there are so many ideas, though, per the law of supply and demand, ideas by themselves are worth little. Or as John Paul Mendocha put it, “An idea is worth one ten-thousandth of one percent of nothing.” Your readers can’t do anything with raw ideas. That’s your job. The value is in taking those ideas and turning them into something that people actually want. Still, you do need ideas, and the better the ideas you start with, the more you can make out of them.

Do you want to write exciting characters?

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Avoid storytelling sins, except when they make your story come alive. Learn when to describe instead of show, how to use characterization cliches without becoming one, and lots more.

Jam-packed, step-by-step guide, with examples and exercises.

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Now, there are good ideas, and then there are great ideas. With practice, you can learn to generate lots of good ideas. But what you want to do is sift through them to find the great ideas, those perfect gems that stand out from the rest.

So don’t be afraid to throw away good ideas, in return for great ones. Consider the first good idea that comes to you, and reject it. Think of something better. Then reject that idea, too. Turn it into something even better. Throw away two good ideas in return for a single great idea.

-TimK

During my years as a software engineer, I’ve seen more brain abuse than I care to think about. (How’s that for irony?) And I’ve even committed a little myself.

Software development is closely akin to writing. Some even say it’s a form of writing, creating a non-physical work product that only has meaning when you read it (or run it), though in a different industry, in different languages, with different goals, requiring a different skill set… I think I’ll stick with “closely akin.” Like writers, software developers have a passion for their craft. Their work is primarily thought-work. The industry measures their output in words (or lines of code), because that’s a metric non-writers (or non-programmers) can understand. And like writers, software developers can burn themselves out, frequently with the help of their managers.

As John Carlton pointed out, you need to be fully rested in order to operate at peak effectiveness and efficiency. And the more you push yourself, the more tired you get, and the worse you will perform. We assume that if we work an extra hour, we can just get that last chapter done, or get that last feature implemented. And everything in our industries push us to that conclusion. But it’s wrong, dead wrong.

I was working at one company, doing software development. During a couple of weeks I became very excited about a project I was working on. I wanted to finish it to a certain point. I passionately wanted to. I took work home. I worked weekends. Unlike most software engineers, I keep track of how I spend my time, and so I know that I worked 60 hours a week for a week and a half. And not 60 hours where you spend the first 20 of them in meetings, the next 15 surfing the web, and 10 more drinking coffee. These were thought-heavy hours full of productive work.

I finished the project to the point I needed in order to satisfy my passion, and I was ready to take it easy. I was ready to come in late, leave early, goof off a little, take a creative break. That’s when hell boiled over. They needed me on another project to write some software so that they could figure out what was wrong with our custom electronics. This issue was holding up production. Everything else had second priority.

On Thursday of that week, one of the hardware engineers was telling me what he needed, and I was telling him of the software challenges I was facing getting it done. He said, “Why can’t you just do this?” and explained an approach I knew wouldn’t work. So I told him so, or rather I tried. I looked for the words. I’ve practiced for years ingesting technical concepts, applying them, and communicating them even to laymen. It should be much easier to get another engineer to understand. But I was so mentally exhausted, I couldn’t even put together a simple English sentence.

It was about 2 in the afternoon. I told him I needed to leave to pick up my kids and I would not be back that day. (That was true, though what I didn’t tell him is that I could have picked up the kids as late as 6.) On the way home, enlightenment. I realized that there are few crises so urgent that they can’t wait 18 hours for me to get a good night’s sleep. And since I don’t work in the emergency services, none of the crises I encounter are likely ever to be that urgent.

Nothing I do is so urgent that it can’t wait for me to get a good night’s sleep. No one will die. No one will starve. No one’s life will be ruined. Remember this the next time you feel you must work a few extra hours to get another article written, or a blog posting done, or a podcast out. Yes, there is some work that needs to be done by a deadline. So get that done first, long before the deadline. The rest will wait for you. Your brain is not a drill press. If you push it hard enough, it will not just keep drilling holes. It will deteriorate, subtly at first, but noticeably. Except you won’t notice it until you’ve churned out pages and pages of garbage.

I did go home. I slept well. The next morning, I woke up, and I reflected on the challenges that had seemed so mountainous the previous afternoon. The answer was obvious, and it was simple to implement. I went into work, and within a half-hour, I had the software they needed. Unfortunately, I don’t think they actually used that software to diagnose the problem they were facing. They must have done so through some other means.

-TimK

BabyNames.com has a list of American first names that includes names imported from many languages.

Behind the Name, the etymology and history of first names, has a database of English, ethnic, and mythological names, browseable by category.

Straight from the twilight zone, the Kalabarian Philosophy site has various name lists.

For last names, browse the white pages at InfoSpace.

I also generally do a quick white-pages search, as well as a Google search, on the full name of any characters I create. If there’s only only person in the world by that name, I may consider changing the name, although I don’t know why. All characters are fictional, and all that…

-TimK

I myself have a text file on my computer. Some people use a little notepad or a PDA. Whenever an idea occurs to me, often while listening to podcasts, add it to the list. Sometimes the idea comes to me while I’m taking my walk or quietly thinking in the morning. Then I have to run to my computer and type it in before it overwhelms me. Because if I don’t, and if it’s a good idea, it’ll dominate my mind such that I can’t think of anything else.

Numerous ideas occur to me each day. With them all on my mind, I’d never get anything done. Alternatively, if I focus on each to completion, I’d forget what the next one was before I got to it. Writing an idea down gets it out of my head so that I can focus on one thing at a time. When I’m ready for the next best idea, I go to my journal.

-TimK

I’ve started watching Stunt Junkies. The reason why is that the people on this show are so unlike me, yet this modern documentary gives me a window into their souls. Why do they do the extreme stunts they do? What drives them? What do they need? Are they after glory? Or thrill? Or some sort of satisfaction? There are many less dangerous ways to make money, so it can’t be that. What was the most traumatic thing that happened to them? What was the most glorious? How do they perform their stunts? How do their minds work? Do they feel the world around them or do they have strong intuitions? Are they introverted or extraverted? Do they rely on logic or emotion? These are just some of the questions I ask myself.

Beginning writers generally make all their characters like themselves, or some variation thereof. We all naturally expects others to be like us, even if they’re not. This is in fact the source of many disagreements and arguments. If you want to fill out your characters in ways you couldn’t imagine, look at people who are most unlike you. Don’t judge them. Just understand what drives them and what personality traits they have. Then weave these characteristics into your fictional characters.

-TimK

A character’s name represent just a few words out of a hundred thousand. But these few words some writers labor over incessantly. It’s like a religious experience. A character’s name represents that character. It’s arbitrary, but at the same time immensely important. Some writers even get so obsessed with finding the perfect name, the one that represents their character to a tee, that they find they can’t choose. They hate naming characters, because whatever name they choose isn’t good enough. I want to solve that problem.

Quick! When you meet someone, what’s the first thing you notice? Probably his sex. Maybe the color of his hair or how tall he is. As you get to know him, you’ll come to identify him with his personality. Have you ever, upon meeting someone, drawn any conclusions about him based on his name? Probably not. Names are only affect our opinions of people we’ve never met. But as authors our job is to introduce the audience to our characters. If we’re doing our job correctly, no one’s going to care about their names.

Pick up any good tutorial or reference on character development. Does it mention character naming? Probably not. Neither Orson Scott Card’s Character & Viewpoint nor Holly Lisle’s Create a Character Clinic does. If you read through these, you’ll think characters don’t even have names. Indeed, in some stories, they don’t. Yet even in these, we feel we know the character, because the author has introduced him to us.

HOWEVER…

Sometimes we can use a character’s name to identify his nationality, bringing in with it all of the stereotypes of that nationality. What if I—without telling you anything else—named a character Tahib El-Qadar? You’d immediately get an image in your mind of what he looks like, his culture, and maybe even his opinions. I could then start manipulating that image, introducing him to you. Many of your preconceived notions will prove to be correct. Some will need to change.

And then there are exceptional cases. When Robert Heinlein in his novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress names the main character Manuel Garcia O’Kelly Davis, we immediately realize he has a varied heritage and lives in a society in which this fact is the norm.

Character names are like any other words in a story. Choose them carefully only if they’ll make a difference. Otherwise, don’t sweat. Just pick something and move on. It’s much more important to develop the whole of the character than to obsess over a few little words. That’s the big secret to naming characters.