by Nicole Brooks
I’m going to tell you one very important thing about me; I love to learn the hard way. It seems that in order to learn anything meaningful, I must try things out for myself. And it must go wrong, often many times, for it to be wired into my brain the right way. Now that you know this, you’ll understand why it took me querying six manuscripts over six years to finally get it right.
I guess that could show another side to me. Stubborn. Persistent. Determined.
I had worked very hard on my craft over the years. Collaborating with critique partners and beta readers, reading craft books, doing mini-courses, hiring editors. During this time, one thing that I had honed quite well was how to create a compelling hook and this led to lots of requests from agents. For my stories in particular, the big hook tended to be setting. The fifth book I queried was about a family trapped in a 100-car pile-up during a blizzard on a snowy mountain pass. It was atmospheric and cinematic, dangerous and propulsive. But slowly the responses to the full requests trickled in. This was such an exciting premise! I loved the sound of this! Such a unique idea! BUT. The consensus was the same across the board. Something was missing.
I was devastated. I had really thought I’d nailed it this time.
I actually took a step back at this point and really thought, because this was a common response across all the other books I’d queried. There was something fundamentally missing in my work. I knew I only had the energy for one last attempt at making this traditionally published dream work so I had to figure out where the black hole in my craft lie; everything I had learned to do well was being sucked into the abyss where this flaw existed.
But don’t we usually know what the flaw is? Isn’t it the thing you hate working on the most? The thing that you try and work around by making another part of the story bigger and louder? That thing for me was always character. In the blizzard book, I had come up with the most exciting premise ever, just so I wouldn’t have to drill into the protagonist, her flaws, and what she needed to change. Thinking about these things made my brain hurt. I didn’t understand character.
In a last-ditch attempt at getting traditionally published, I decided to work with a well-known writing school. Through them, I met the mentor that changed my writing, the right way. She told me, as kindly as she could, that my protagonist and my setting did not work together. She told me that I needed to write a new setting if I wanted to keep this character. I pouted. Then raged. And eventually realized she was right. Even if I didn’t know her properly yet, Raven, her story, and her arc were very important for me to tell and get right. It was personal, because a lot of myself existed in Raven. She, like I, grew up without a real mother and I wanted to drill into what that does to a person as a child and then later as an adult and a mother themselves.
I forced myself to dig deeper than I ever had before and once I knew Raven, her wound, and what she did to protect the wound aka the flaw, I knew I had finally done it. And from here, I needed a setting that would force her to finally confront the past, by herself. You see, in the blizzard book, she could have gone to any of ninety-nine vehicles in the crash to get away from the secrets of her past and her stepmother Joan. I needed them trapped alone with time running out. Quickly. I needed to force her to rip the band-aid off after years of taking great care to make sure the edges stayed stuck to her skin, protecting the infected cut underneath.
I dug deep, letting my mind run wild for weeks. I don’t remember the moment the flood idea came to me, it was not a lightning bolt of inspiration. It was more of a slowly solidifying idea. It had been about eight or nine years since the 100-year flooding of Southern Alberta. I remembered stories of houses being washed away in several overfull rivers. I remembered tractors saving people. I remembered my daughters kindergarten teacher having to race to High River to save her grandmother and uncle who were trapped on their roof.
That was it. No Higher Ground was born. I rewrote the blizzard book, turning it into a flood book. That book got me an agent (finally!) and a publishing deal. And now, everywhere I go, I tell writers what I learned:
You must put the protagonist in the exact situation they need to change the right way; not the way they want, but the way they need to complete the arc in a satisfying way.
This new craft mantra has served me well since. It has made my writing easier and more focused. Identifying the characters flaw and then putting them in the exact situation (against their will, we can’t do consent as authors) that they need to heal. It has to be the only situation that will force them to change, not the way they want, but the way they need. Kind of like real people; we rarely get out of our own problems the way we want.
To add a little more, it’s best if the character gets themselves in a jam. Characters with agency, even if their decisions are dumb or just plain wrong, are always more appealing to me.
I’m so glad I cared enough about Raven to figure out what she needed. It was always easier for me to come up with a fantastic setting and then create a character to live there. Pushing through my own weakness as a writer has been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done.
Understanding character first was a hard lesson to learn, but wasn’t that what I said I loved doing anyway? Learning the hard way?
I suspect this was the journey I needed.
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