Small Town Mysteries. Big Time Suspense.
Since my theme this month for how to write a novel is how to write settings, I have a prompt that asks your first impression: what scene fits this setting? Without thinking much about it, what kind of scene would you place here? A meet-cute? An opening scene? A climax?
I won’t tamper with your first impression by stating here what came to my mind. Let me know how this photo inspires you!
Here are more writing prompts about settings.
This month’s theme is all about writing and exploring settings for your novel, and creating a home for the protagonist of your novel is critically important to it. But wait, you say. My novel is a thriller in which the hero never goes near his home. He races from his office in D.C. to locations around the world with the finale on top of the Great Pyramid of Giza and wrapping up loose ends in Cairo.
Keep reading. “Home” comes in many flavors and working it into your novel will add depth, characters, and plot points.
If you write a series, a home base can provide a lot of material for your novels. The home base for my young amateur detective Rae Riley is the alpaca farm where she lives with her dad, grandmother, and three half-brothers. What makes this home base so important to Rae?
Because her home base is so important, threatening it gives me a powerful plot point. When the crack marksman Colonel Sebastian Moran shoots through a window of 221 B Baker Street to kill Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure of the Empty House”, it means something more when he attacks him in his home than if he shot him walking along the Thames.
In the Nero Wolfe mystery series, eccentric detective Nero Wolfe charges exorbitant fees to maintain his luxurious lifestyle in an old brownstone in New York City. One of his hobbies is orchids. He raises ten thousand plants in greenhouses on the top floor of his home. Wolfe rarely leaves his home to solve cases, relying on his assistant to do the leg work, so the brownstone is a crucial setting to the series. When master criminal Arnold Zeck in The Second Confession decides to issue a warning to Wolfe to stop an investigation, he goes for the brownstone. He machine-guns the greenhouses from across the street.
Threatening the home base can inspire plot points like:
No problem. A motivation for your protagonist can be either to find a home that he has always longed for and never had. Or he has lost a wonderful home and either wants to find a new one, reclaim the old one, or exact revenge on those who took it. Any of these ideas can power a novel and do so effectively because home means so much to readers. It’s a universal concept that any reader can identify with.
Back to our hero of the thriller. How do you work a home into the novel? Perhaps the first attack by the villain is at his office. His people are attacked. If he’s an agent of the government, then home can be his country and he wants to protect the life he knows.
What are other ways to use creating a home for your protagonist to develop the plot of your novel?
Here are more tips on writing settings in a novel.
Just like you have to investigate the history and psyche of your protagonist, you need to dig deeper to create a compelling antagonist for your novel. The biggest mistake I think rookie writers make when writing the antagonist, especially if he’s a villain, is …
There is no more reason behind the antagonist’s dastardly actions than the writer needs him to do dastardly things. But that kind of shallow writing won’t create a compelling antagonist.
Do you know her likes and dislikes? What personality type does he fit? Understanding your antagonist as well as your protagonist will make him come alive on the page. Below are a few points to keep in mind as you do your digging.
When I create the villain in one of my mystery novels–the character who has committed a crime and is trying to prevent anyone from discovering it was he or she–I ask myself a few questions:
Here are all my tips and prompts this month on writing characters.
Who are some of your favorite antagonists? If you’ve created an antagonist, what are some problems you encountered while developing this character?
Creating an antagonist for your novel is as important as creating the protagonist or main character. Would Sherlock Holmes have achieved literary immortality if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hadn’t created the perfect nemesis in Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime? Below are three tips for creating an antagonist for your novel.
Yes, you read that right. An antagonist is someone or something that prevents your protagonist for achieving the goal she is working toward in your novel. Let’s say your protagonist is a high school senior who wants to become a cop like her late father. Her mother is dead set against it because her father was killed in the line of duty. So Mom is the antagonist of the daughter without being a villain.
If your novel is a story about how a family tries to survive on a mountainside when caught in a freak snowstorm while hiking, then nature itself is the antagonist. In a scene from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo and his crew from The Nautilus battle giant squids. In that scene the squids are the antagonists. If your protagonist is battling the oppression or corruption of a political system, then the characters advancing that system are the antagonists but the specific political system itself can be one too. That leads me to my next point …
This concept is often used in mystery novels. A murder has taken place, so the antagonist is the murderer. But he may have a friend who is shielding him from the police. So you have a second antagonist.
My next example is a spoiler, but it’s from a very old novel, so I don’t mind divulging it.
In the novel, Too Many Women from the Nero Wolfe mystery series, a wealthy man commits two murders. He wants to prevent Nero Wolfe and his whip-smart assistant Archie Goodwin from catching him. Standard mystery antagonist. What makes this novel different is that the man’s wife is pretty sure she knows what he’s doing but says nothing because it would interfere with her luxurious lifestyle. To protect herself even further, she manipulates her husband into committing suicide. She’s antagonist #2 and I find her far more repellant than her obsessed husband.
Next week, we’ll dig deeper into creating an antagonist, just like we did when creating the protagonist.
Who are the antagonists that stand out in your experience?
Last week, I gave advice on beginning the creation of the main character or protagonist of your novel, developing their physical appearance, basic personality, and some backstory. This week, I want to dig deeper to write a compelling protagonist, delving into goals, lies and fears. All three elements can be uncovered with one question.
Sometimes, the genre dictates the goal of your protagonist. I write mysteries for teens. So the goal of my teen sleuth Rae Riley is to solve the mystery. But I have to go deeper with my why questions: why does Rae have to solve this mystery? Since I write a series, her goal can change for each novel. In the short story that started the series, “A Rose from the Ashes”, Rae is looking for the father she’s never known and trying to figure out if he attempted to murder her late mother when she was pregnant with Rae.
She wants to solve this mystery for personal reasons. But why? That might sound silly–everyone wants to know who their father is, but I need to find out why Rae does. Well, she was raised by her mother, who had no family. Now that her mom has died of cancer, Rae is alone. So loneliness and the innate desire for family are driving Rae to uncover a possible killer.
In later stories, the goal is still to solve the mystery but for different reasons. No matter what the reasons, they still have to fit with Rae’s basic character, which is she’s observant, curious, and likes to help people in trouble. Nothing angers a reader more than for a series character to suddenly acquire deep motivations that have never even been hinted at before because the author needed those motivations for this particular novel.
Many tips on developing your protagonist say he must believe a lie, and through the course of the story, learns it is a lie and grows from this new knowledge. This approach works well for protagonists in stand alone novels. But if I have the same series character believe a lie in every novel, she will eventually come across as a nitwit.
Another way to create growth for a character is doubt, which works for both a stand alone and a series characters. In fact, I even put doubt in one of my titles, A Storm of Doubts. In that novel, Rae wrestles with the doubt that Mal, the man her late mother said had to be her father, actually is. Because Rae and Mal thought they didn’t need a DNA test, Rae worries that her con man uncle’s insinuations that he is her father might be true.
I like working with Rae’s doubts rather than her belief in a lie because it gives me more room to explore her experience and keep readers guessing about what will happen next. When a character believes a lie, most readers can pick it out easily and know right away that the story will be about the character learning it is a lie. I want to surprise my readers, and a protagonist with doubts lets me do that.
In a stand alone novel, your protagonist’s greatest fear should be the most serious threat he faces as he works toward his goal. The hero of a fantasy novel fears letting down his father the king, once again, and the whole kingdom as well, if he doesn’t recover the item that will rescue it from the forces of evil on his quest.
Keep asking why questions to uncover your protagonist’s greatest fear. In A Storm of Doubts, why does Rae care about her uncle’s hints, especially when she knows he’s a con man? Because she loves Mal and the family that’s accepted her. His hints stoke her greatest fear, losing her dad and her family.
Since I write a series, I can’t invoke this fear in every novel–too repetitive. But Rae has other fears that mix with her doubts and are tied to the mysteries she solves.
What techniques do you use for digging deeper to write a compelling protagonist?
JPC Allen Writes
