Digging Deep to Find Your Character's Emotional Journey by Natascha Biebow

Writing is hard. Not only because you have to put your bum on seat and dedicate the hours, not only because you have to dream up super-original ideas with a new take on what’s already been published in a very crowded marketplace, not only because you invest in a story and then someone may not share your vision, but because you have to dig deep inside yourself to be able to seamlessly convey how it really feels to be your character.

So how do you do this? I’ve previously blogged on the importance of asking your characters difficult questions to discover their true motivation, so you can write from a place of knowing. This is an important first step. But, now how can you use this to take readers on a compelling and satisfying emotional journey?

The trick is to BE the character. If you ARE the character, you don’t need to tell the reader all the external stuff that is going on, because they will be in the character’s shoes as well. So you can show not tell.

Get into your character's Olympic running shoes! (From Sky Private Eye and
the Case of the Runaway Biscuit by Jane Clarke & Loretta Schauer)

Stories are about change. So, if there is no conflict, there is no gripping story. In picture books, authors have to set up the problem and resolve it quickly within just 32 pages. There isn’t time or space to ‘tell’ . . . The relatively easy bit is often figuring out the plot arc, the external journey of change. For example, the story is about a runaway gingerbread biscuit, the farmer who has some cows that type, the time Arthur met The Truth, or what happened at Lily and Blue Kangaroo’s birthday party. 

The action in these plots could be interesting . . . but so what?

IF the author writes from a place of knowing and adds an internal emotional journey of change, the story will be one that has heart. 

Readers will experience the character’s thoughts, beliefs and behaviours in the face of adversity. They will become so engulfed by being in the main character’s shoes that they become the character. So, when the character is sad or uncertain, the reader cries and worries for them. When the character laughs, the reader laughs, too.

It can be helpful to break these two story arcs down in two strands, using the three-act structure. For example, in HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU, BLUE KANGAROO! by Emma Chichester Clark:

	ACT ONE	CONFLICT	ACT TWO	BLACK MOMENT	ACT THREE
Plot arc	Best buddies, Lily and Blue Kangaroo are having a birthday party. The theme is pink. Lily dresses top to toe in pink.	Everything is pink themed! Lily is so caught up in her party, she forgets Blue Kangaroo.	Lily’s friends arrive in pink party clothes, give her pink presents, and a magician even conjures up a pink rabbit. Lily loves it!	Mum brings in the birthday cake. It is a pink kangaroo!	Blue Kangaroo tries to make himself pink. When he can’t, he hides in the bedroom. Lily finally misses her special friend. When she finds him, alone wrapped in a blue sock she understands immediately.
Emotional arc	Blue Kangaroo shares everything with Lily – even birthdays.	Blue Kangaroo isn’t sure he likes the pink ribbon Lily ties round his neck.	Blue Kangaroo is the only one who is blue. He bets Lily wishes the magician could make him pink, too.	Blue Kangaroo is NOT pink . . . Lily’s forgotten about him – he falls off the chair in the excitement of the birthday cake moment.	Lily changes into a blue outfit and declares, “I love blue and I love you!” She recognizes that she needs to include Blue Kangaroo. Her friends all admire him, but there is only one Blue Kangaroo – and he is Lily’s.

When you write from the heart, you are right there in the moment with your main character. You don’t have to tell the reader what the character is doing or feeling. The narrative shows it. Like this:

When you successfully tell a story that has a compelling emotional journey, everyone – agents, editors, librarians, booksellers, parents, grandparents and children – will say 'aw' and want to READ IT AGAIN AND AGAIN!

 ________________________

Natascha Biebow
Author, Editor and Mentor

Blue Elephant Storyshaping is an editing, coaching and mentoring service aimed at empowering writers and illustrators to fine-tune their work pre-submission.  

Check out my small-group coaching Cook Up a Picture Book courses! Natascha is also the author of The Crayon Man (coming in 2019!), Elephants Never Forget and Is This My Nose?, editor of numerous award-winning children’s books, and Co-Regional Advisor (Co-Chair) of SCBWI British Isles. 

Openings with a Promise – the Emotional Journey of Your Character • Natascha Biebow

 
I love it when as a writer you realize that other creative people face similar struggles or challenges with their craft. 






Like when I attended the SCBWI conference in LA last summer, I was heartened to hear how Drew Daywalt, the author of the NY Times bestselling The Day the Crayons Quit, waited six years for his agent to find a publisher who ‘got’ his book and wanted to publish it.

 

The Day the Crayons Quit
by Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers

Or like how Jon Klassen of I Want My Hat Back fame was stuck because:

“… I had a problem in that I didn’t like drawing characters. I like drawing scenery and inanimate objects and I especially liked it back then. The challenge of making a piece where the subject wasn’t a living thing was really fun, and I liked how quiet the effect was.”

I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen

I recently received a gift. It was one of my favourite kinds of books – the story of a fellow writer. As I savoured the book, its pages, beautifully designed windows into E.B. White’s life and writing, I realized a few things:

Some Writer! by Melissa Sweet

• E.B. White kept a journal and he finished each entry by asking himself a question that he could think about as he was drifting off to sleep.

from Some Writer! The Story of E.B. White by Melissa Sweet

 

from Some Writer! The Story of E.B. White by Melissa Sweet

Yes! This is such a good technique – to mull the questions of the day, of the story, of a stuckness that becomes unstuck in the subconscious of slumber. I love to do that too!

• In his column One Man’s Meat for Harper’s Magazine, he wrote in 1982 about the influence of moving to a farm in Maine, where “confronted by new challenges, surrounded by new acquaintances – including the characters in the barnyard who were later to appear in Charlotte’s Web – I was suddenly seeing, feeling, and listening as a child sees, feels and listens”.

from Some Writer! The Story of E.B. White by Melissa Sweet

I thought about this. As I read on . . .

• It took E.B. White a year of revisions to settle on the iconic opening for Charlotte’s Web. 

Charlotte's Web by E.B. White, illustrated by Garth Williams,
published 1952

In Some Writer!, Sweet includes images of White's original manuscripts, complete with crossings-out and musings in the margins. 

I learned that E.B. White tried at least six different tacks to nail the opening of his most famous book. First:

“Charlotte was a grey spider who lived in the doorway of a barn.”

Then: “I shall speak first of Wilbur.”

Then: “A barn can have a horse in it, and a barn can have a cow in it, and a barn can have hens scratching the chaff and swallows flying in and out through the door – but if a barn hasn’t got a pig in it, it is hardly worth talking about.”

After a year, White wrote: “At midnight, John Arable pulled his boots on, lit a lantern, and walked out the hoghouse.”

Next, he cut to the action: “Where’s Papa going with that hand ax?”

Which was shortened to: “Where’s Papa going with that ax?”

opening chapter from Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

I was struck by this journey to find the way into the story. The story was there all along, wasn’t it, but it was only when White cut to the emotional core of the characters’ emotional journey and told it like child might experience it that it felt right.

In previous blogs about creating compelling openings and using “show, don’t tell”, I wrote about the importance of:

• showing readers through the character’s body language, action and dialogue

• including the answers to the questions who, what and where to create a compelling opening

• clear character motivation – why?

• creating vivid, detailed scenes

But, connecting these elements with

• the promise of the characters’ emotional journey and

• “seeing, feeling, and listening” like a child

is what will really hook readers into the story and get them to keep turning the pages.

When we read the opening line of Charlotte’s Web, these elements come together almost effortlessly. But the weren’t effortless at all . . .! 

E.B. White with his beloved dog

Wow, some writer!

  

________________________

Natascha Biebow
Author, Editor and Mentor

Blue Elephant Storyshaping is an editing, coaching and mentoring service aimed at empowering writers and illustrators to fine-tune their work pre-submission.  Check out my small-group coaching Cook Up a Picture Book courses!

Natascha is also the author of Elephants Never Forget and Is This My Nose?, editor of numerous award-winning children’s books, and Regional Advisor (Chair) of SCBWI British Isles.