The Sex Scene That Wasn't; or, When You Say Yes and the Characters Say No

Something amusing happened to me last weekend.

In one of the stories I'm currently writing, I had reached the point where the next thing in my mental outline was for the main male character to seduce the main female character. I had, in fact, been looking forward to writing the scene with (shall we say) a certain amount of anticipation.

Now, I'm not the sort of writer who goes around throwing gratuitous sex scenes into every story I write, just for the shock factor of it. When I do include them, it's because there's a reason they need to be there. They further the plot, or develop a relationship, or define a character.

In this particular instance, the MMC was supposed to seduce the MFC so that later, when he has to try to persuade her to do something, they've developed the closeness that would allow him to talk her over to his side more easily. So I created a setting, and got them into it, and gave them the space to let it happen...

And then I discovered that the MFC really wasn't the kind of girl who would go hopping into a strange guy's bed on the first date. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't see any way for him to persuade her to take that vital step with him.

The turning point was here:

Then his finger traced the neckline of my dress, and I remembered – for tonight, I was beautiful. I was sexy and voluptuous and wearing a low-cut dress. It seemed a shame to waste that. Would it be so wrong to give in to him?

Yes, said my conscience, in my mother’s voice.

Let's face it. There are some things you just can't argue with. Mom's voice in your head when you're trying to get it on with this hawt dude you just met? That's definitely one of them.

So what do other people do when it's time for your characters to hop into bed together, but they're not inclined? What about the opposite situation, where characters aren't supposed to hook up, but they do anyway?

Turns of Phrase; or, I Never Thought Of It Like That

I'm toying with the idea of having a character in one of my stories who uses all sorts of colorful comparisons as one of his quirks. I think it could be a lot of fun, especially if I can figure out a way to work in some of my favorites.

I think my absolute all-time favorite has to be one I got from my father: "Slicker than snot on a glass doorknob." When I was a kid, it never occurred to me to question how he would know about such a thing -- after all I'd been to my grandparents' house, and it did indeed have glass doorknobs. It wasn't until later that I finally figured out that it wasn't something he made up, but rather something he'd heard somewhere and just repeated. I should ask him about it sometime.

But it's a very descriptive phrase. I mostly use it to describe icy roads. And once the people to whom you've said it get over the "ewww!" factor, they know exactly what you mean.

Another phrase to which I can relate is "Like a bull in a china shop". I was a klutzy kid who grew up to be an only slightly less clumsy adult, and proximity to fragile things only makes the likelihood that I'll break something much higher. So I have a great deal of empathy for that poor bull, surrounded by breakables, ones his horns might inadvertently knock off of a shelf, or that might be pulverized by an accidental twitch of his tail. I just want to tell him to get out of there, to run while he still can.

I like describing potentially unpopular ideas as being something that will go over "like a lead balloon." I can just see that doomed balloon, smashing into the ground again and again and again regardless of how much helium you put in it. It also reminds me of one of my favorite lines from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, in which Adams describes the Vogon spaceships by saying that they "hung in the air in much the same way that bricks don't." It's wonderfully whimsical, and perfectly conveys the image of spacecraft that stay in the air even though they look as though they should plummet straight to the ground, do not pass "Go", do not collect $200.

And finally, I do love the way of describing a person you find attractive as saying that you "wouldn't kick him/her out of bed for eating crackers." As in, "You know, Harrison {sigh} Ford isn't as young as he used to be, but I still wouldn't kick him out of bed for eating crackers." Which sort of implies that there are people you would kick out of bed due to the presence of too many cracker crumbs -- and that there was more than a snowball's chance of finding Mr. Ford in your bed in the first place!

Of course, for the character I have in mind, it might be more fun to have him either mangle a common cliche so as to negate its meaning ("like a bull in a mattress shop"), or make up ones of his own that don't quite work ("like a giraffe on an underground train").

What are some colorful descriptions you've encountered? What twists on common ones have made you either laugh or scratch your head?

(p.s. Sorry I'm late with this week's posting. I spent all of yesterday evening in Windows Update Hell, trying to get both of my computers to successfully download and install the last round of updates from Microsoft. Still have not succeeded. I'm about ready to scream...)

Bad guys, bad guys everywhere

A couple weeks back, I talked about how I was struggling with which opening for my WIP. Well, I settled that one. I went with the opening that dropped my MC into the mystery of the story. I added a wrinkle to the opening in that she also has to interact with someone that causes her quite a bit of conflict. As I was writing (or should I say rewriting because I somehow lost a couple pages from the other night), I added in a couple lines about another person in the room.

This person wasn't anyone of any significance at this point in the story, just someone on the fringes of the scene. Immediately, this person sprang to life in my head. I knew what he looked like, how he acted, and what his true motivations were. Three seconds ago he didn't even have a name, now he has dreams of world domination.

Uh oh. He wasn't supposed to be my villain. I had my villain all laid out. I loved my villain (is that bad to say?). And his revelation was going to be devastating to the MC. But now there's bad guy #2 standing there yelling at me that he's equally evil and could have come up with the same evil plot if only I had thought of him first.

Well, damn! Now I have two possible villains to play with. I already know that my original villain is still my villain, but now he has a cohort to assist if necessary.

What's In A Name; or Does The Shoe Fit?

We've had a couple of good postings here about book titles. But when you're writing a novel, the book isn't the only thing for which you have to find a name.

You also have to name your characters. And sometimes that can be a painful process.

There are so many factors to consider:

1) The time and place in which your story is set. If your story takes place in the past, this requires research into the kinds of names in use at the time of your story. One of my stories, set in 1873, has a character in it by the name of Grant Tomlinson. It sounded like a good Victorian English name to me. "Tomlinson" is just fine, but only later did I find out that "Grant" wasn't commonly used as a first name until the 1860's (twenty years after the character would have been born), and then mostly in America. Oops.

That's fairly obscure, of course, and unless you happened to have the misfortune of having a large number of people among your readership who are fanatical about the origins and meanings of names, it probably wouldn't be a problem. But your characters' names should all be suitable for the story's time and place, or it will jar readers out of the world you are building in their minds (imagine a samurai warrior named Ezekiel or an Indian princess named Heather).

2) On the other hand, if your story is set in the future, or in outer space, or in some fantasy setting, you have free rein, right? Well, not necessarily. If you're setting your story in a bronze-age village on a fantasy world with unicorns and dragons, and most of your characters have names like Tar'jil and Kun'axa and Rog'min, when your readers come across the character Nixelthorpmoojman, you'll almost be able to hear them humming that song about how one of these things is not like the others. So unless you're prepared to explain how poor Nixelthorpmoojman washed up on the beach after a really bad storm, and even he can't explain where he's really from, you'll want to have some consistency in naming practices.

Also, your names should be pronounceable and preferably not too unwieldy -- Larry Niven's The Ringworld Engineers, as I recall, had a section where all of the people had nearly-unpronounceable five-syllable names, which was at least consistent, but it made that part of the book very tedious to read.

3) One problem I've run into is having names for my space pirates that are almost too familiar. I wanted them to be accessible, strange without being too strange. Instead, I've received comments that they're not alien enough. So people have asked why Shon Braca is named Shon and not just Shawn (they sound the same, don't they? ... well, not quite, but the difference is *very* subtle). But these are space pirates. Shouldn't they have more interesting names?

4) And then, once you've addressed all of those questions, you have to make sure that you don't have characters whose names sound (or even are) too much alike. We all know that in Real Life, everyone you meet doesn't have a unique name. The company I work for, for example, has had two Beccas and three Wendys all at once, and a Sean and two Shawns (one of whom was female). But in a story, you probably want to avoid having more than one character with the same name, or even two names that sound too much alike. Geoffrey and Gregory are two that will make me struggle every time, but I also have problems with names that have the same cadence and vowel sounds -- Julian and Lucien, for instance.

5) Sometimes you also want the name to have a meaning that's important to the character. Would Severus Snape have been the same kind of character if he'd been named George Smith? How about Ebenezer Scrooge? Luke Skywalker?

6) Finally -- and perhaps most importantly of all -- the name needs to fit the character. It's true that when parents name their children, they don't really have much of an inkling of what the child's personality will eventually be. So occasionally in Real Life, you'll see a Marigold whose blonde curls have darkened and who grew up to be a hard-bitten police detective, but unless you want that kind of irony to be a part of your story, your characters should have names that fit them. If they're to be evil wizards or cold-blooded killers, their names should not evoke bright sunshine. If they're to be heroes, they should have strong, bold names. And if they're to be involved in a romance, they ought to have a name their loved one can sigh, well, romantically.

I've run into just such a situation in my current work-in-progress, set in 1870's England. My main character, Celia Winterbourne, seems reasonably happy with her name. However, when I went to name her Romantic Interest, I decided upon Bartholomew Fletcher. Fletcher is a good British surname, no problems there. And I thought Bartholomew was a good choice, too ... right up until I wrote the first scene that has Celia whispering her beloved's name in his ear, along with a profession of her love.

Yeah. Mr. Fletcher did not hesitate to inform me that "Bartholomew" is not a name one can murmur lovingly in anyone's ear. Nor, he was quite certain, did "Bart" suit him. Not in the least.

In fact, he and I have been having a series of discussions as to what his name should be. Those can be found over at my LiveJournal, starting here (including the poll I ran). As of this writing, we have yet to make a final decision, but I think we're homing in on it. I'll keep y'all posted.

(And we're not even going to talk about the story I wrote in high school, where I decided it would be funny to give my Romantic Interest the most unromantic name I could come up with, so the poor fellow got stuck with the name "Glunk". Yeah.)

What challenges have other people found when naming characters? How did you solve them?

By the way, here are a couple of my favorite sites for finding names:

The Fantasy Random Name Generator
English Census Results for 1881
The Random Name Generator (uses U. S. Census data)

Connecting With Characters

Characters. Can’t write with out them and you sure can’t have any kind of a story without them. You can have the best setting in the world, the greatest idea, but without people to bring that to life you won’t have much of a story.

There are just as many ways to develop characters as there are to plot. There are entire books on the subject of creating a character. Some writers conduct “interviews” to get the feel for their characters, others fill out questionnaires and still others fly by the seat of their pants.

I’m a visual person so I usually come up with the description of my character right away. I have to be able to picture them in my head and since I am hardly an artist I go to the next best thing – celebrities. When I was developing my anti-terrorist team for my romantic suspense series I looked for actors that resembled the men I had pictured. I found screen shots of these actors and saved them with the name of the character they were representing.

Beyond knowing what they look like I have to know the personality of my characters, especially my main hero and heroine. I need to know how they are going to react to the situation I’m putting them in and how they are going to react to each other.

Background is also important but I don’t spend a lot of time on it unless it’s important to the story or important to why they are the way they are.

Right now I’m working on developing the characters for my next project. I don’t feel that I can do the kind of plotting I want without first knowing who my characters are going to be. Once I have that down, plotting will be next.

So how do you develop characters? Do you fill out questionnaires? Have you ever had a character that you’ve just connected with? What about one that you didn’t like?