With over 70k words written, I’m well into my current novel, a follow-up to Hard Choices. However, for the first three weeks this month my protagonist, Rogue, was very uncooperative. Worse, she was ignoring me! I wouldn’t have minded so much if she’d been changing my storyline and coming up with ideas of her own – at least then, she’d have been active and participating. I felt she just wasn’t interested.
So I spent a week or so reading articles about firing up a stalled novel, fixing broken plots and how to rescue your story. The suggested solutions usually revolved around interviewing the character and determining their ‘why’ – why they were pursuing whatever goal had been assigned to them by me, the author.
Two long and tedious interviews later, I didn’t feel like I’d made much progress. Driving home from work one evening, I was listening to a writing podcast and heard this advice: put your character through hell, make trouble for them, push them to their limits.
That night I dived in and wrote a ‘save the cat’ scene for Rogue. If you haven’t heard that term before, it’s the first scene of a book which features the protagonist and where they are acting positively, often saving someone from a threat (e.g. a cat stuck in a tree). This event gives the reader an insight into the characters personality and is a promise of how they will behave throughout the story.
Anyway, I’d skipped writing this intro scene months earlier, choosing to leave a placeholder with the intention of doing it after I’d finished the first draft. I reckoned it wouldn’t matter when I actually wrote it. I figured that once Rogue was involved in her new case, the saved cat would be stuck up a different tree and another author’s hero would rescue it. It turned out that I was wrong.
Once I plunged Rogue into the action, I got the response I’d been looking for. She started to engage, slowly at first but as she interacted with the environment and the people I threw at her, she became more committed. Because of her nature, she couldn’t stop herself taking control of the situation and, before she realised it, the intro scene was over, she had saved the day and was eager for the next challenge. Problem solved.
The characters we create are just like us: they have good days and bad days, they get motivated, and they get lazy. That’s the bad news. It’s also the good news because it means we know how to get them moving. Once we know their personality and what causes a reaction, we can prod and poke them, put them in situations where their values or safety is at stake, and present them with something they just can’t resist. That ‘something’ might be a lost puppy for a caring nurturing type of character, or a gang of thugs beating up an innocent for a Jack Reacher type of hero.
Treat the cat scene like a short story and have fun with it. If your first attempt doesn’t work, try one or two more. The time invested early on might just save you weeks of frustration and rewriting later in your novel.
Happy Writing,
Harry
Useful Links
‘The Howdy Factor’ (What does save the cat mean)
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