I swear up and down, this blog will not be all about my books. I will still blog about writing craft and other writerly stuff! But I do need to use this blog for my books, too.

Okay with that disclaimer out of the way, I’m looking for blogs to take part in the book launch tour for I, Spy and Mr. Nice Spy June 3 – 7! I’ll link to your blog from mine for that day, as well as a static page on my site listing all the participants. Each post will be part of a contest, so you should get even more traffic.

FAQ

What do I have to do?
Fill out the form below and wait. I’ll confirm your date, and then two days beforehand, I’ll send you the post materials.

Will I have to read or have read your book?
Nope! If you want to read it and review it, that’s great, but I’m not going to ask that of you.

Isn’t that weird?
Nah.

Agh, my blog is already booked for all those days, but I want to help! What do I do?
You can click “other” and give me a day/range of days you have free, and we’ll work something out.

What will I get out of it?
Um, my gratitude? Good karma? A free post that you don’t have to think up and write? And I’ll have a freebie for your readers. They’ll love you for it, right? Love fest!

Form

Any questions or concerns? Shoot.

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Earlier this month, I presented at the LDStorymakers Writers’ Conference on character arcs. There was one question that my examples didn’t seem to address very well on character arcs at the climax. The other day, we were watching my two-year-old’s favorite movie when it hit me: this specimen of high art is a perfect example of the model of character arcs at the climax!

So I present to you this amazing, insightful analysis of character arcs at the climax featuring . . .

Kung Fu Panda 2!

My model for character arcs at the climax is very loosely based on what I remember from Michael Hague’s 1988 book on screenwriting, which I read last fall. I think. This is only one method of showing the ultimate moment of change for the character’s arc, of course, but it’s pretty awesome.

Creating the ultimate moment of change at the climax

Here’s how you can do this at home. The characters must already be following Michael Hague’s model described in his RWA workshops: the character starts off with a longing or need. They have a wound, some event in their past that affected the way they view themselves/the world. This wound led to a belief (usually mistaken), which also affects the way the character acts and interacts with the world (his/her mask). But this isn’t how the character really, truly is (or could be or should be), his/her essence.

My example is from a WIP where I’m still honing this aspect. The heroine’s wound is something bad that happened to her and challenged her faith, and she no longer believes in much of anything. Throughout the course of the book, the hero begins to show her the power of believing (in a religious and nonreligious way).

• Set up the bad guy (internal, external, weather, whatever) the right way—align the bad guy with the mask. I set up my villain as believing belief is bad. (That’s the part I’m still working on.)
• Show how the MC is (or has been) like the bad guy: they have this same weakness or mask. They recognize that bad in themselves, they see how it’s not working in their own life, and REALLY not working for the villain!
• Make the MC choose—it’s all about forcing the character to make a choice to leave behind that comfort zone (the mask) and embrace the change (the essence)
• AFFIRM THE CHOICE—because of what the character has learned or how s/he has grown—ONLY WITH THIS—are they strong enough to defeat the bad guy. This is the bad guy’s weakness, after all, that they’ve taken this to an extreme! Because my heroine has the courage to believe, she’s strong enough to defeat the bad guy.
• Timing—the events should be in close proximity, if not simultaneous. The change happens at the climax (or shortly before/after) because that’s when the character ceases to grow and change—and be interesting.

Again, this is hard!

Character arcs in action: Kung Fu Panda 2

I haven’t seen Kung Fu Panda, but I’ve seen the sequel probably 30 times. It’s my two-year-old’s fave (“Panna,” she calls it.)

The basic premise of the movie is that Po, the eponymous martial artist panda, realizes that he’s adopted (his dad is a goose…). The villain, Shen the peacock, is threatening to take over all of China and destroy kung fu.

Often when we see this, the wounds that create the characters’ masks are very similar. Po’s wound is that (he thinks) his biological panda mother abandoned him. Shen’s wound is that, when his parents saw his psychopathic tendencies, they exiled him (even though they loved him, which he doesn’t see).

Po realizes that Shen persecuted and killed Po’s parents to try to circumvent the prophecy that Shen would be defeated by a warrior of black and white. Despite Shen’s attempts to kill Po, and the turmoil of Po’s past, Po is able to appreciate the friends and family and abilities he has now and find inner peace. With that inner peace he quite literally has the power to defeat Shen’s weapon (a firework-based cannon).

But the character arcs are even openly stated immediately after Po destroys the weapon:

SHEN: H-how did you… How did you do it?

PO: You know, you just gotta keep your elbows up and keep the shoulders loose…

SHEN: Not that! How did you find peace? I took away your parents! Everything! I– I scarred you for life!

PO: See, that’s the thing, Shen… scars heal.

SHEN: No, they don’t… wounds heal!

PO: Oh yeah. What do scars do? They fade, I guess…

SHEN: I don’t care what scars do!

PO: You should, Shen. You gotta let go of that stuff from the past ’cause it just doesn’t matter! The only thing that matters is what you choose to be now.
via Kung Fu Panda 2/Transcript – Kung Fu Panda Wiki, the online encyclopedia to the Kung Fu Panda world!.

Shen then makes his choice—to continue to fight and try to change the prophecy, to keep doing what he’s been doing. Po, having changed and grown beyond the state where Shen remains stuck, is able to escape and Shen destroys himself.

Because of what Po has learned on his journey (as prompted by external events), he is now strong enough to defeat not only his own mask and wound, but also to defeat Shen. Sometimes this works on a more metaphorical level, but in Kung Fu Panda 2 it’s very literal and very real.

What do you think? How do you handle character arcs at the climax?

Photo credits: Character arcs—Riccardo Romano

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	Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë	This is a sad story: we were assigned to read this my senior year of high school, but after only a few days, another teacher wanted the books, the only set we had at our school. So we gave them up (though at least one friend read the whole thing really quickly before we had to turn them in). I really lucked out later that year when I drew a passage from WH for my IB oral analysis exam—and the teacher said she’d meant to take that out, and I could draw again (John Donne FTW!).
	The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers	Just didn’t have time
	Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain	Ag! A classic! Barely cracked the cover.
	Great Expectations by Charles Dickens	Another classic! I totally read the first part of this book, and I didn’t find it as horribly boring as everyone else. But then I just . . . stopped. Apparently just when it was getting good.
	Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut	I was supposed to read this for the History of Technology. At least I think it was Player Piano. Yeah, that’s how little I read of it. I was in a very heavy reading semester (I can think of 3 classes with a total of 18 books to read from that semester, and I had at least two others on my schedule), and I decided I could let one book in each class slide. (Later I discovered one class had quizzes on every book. Fortunately, not this one!)
	The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald	Wait, what? Yep. It’s my favorite book and I read it in high school, but it was assigned at least once (I think twice) more in college, and I figured I remembered it well enough to muddle my way through. Yep.

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Come join us for readings, a self-defense demo with Sensei Kristi & Sensei Kim, book signings, and light refreshments! (Yes, there’s food. I know, I wouldn’t go unless there was food, too.) And yes, we will have copies of our books for sale!

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Find your dialogue info dumps

How can you tell if you’re dumping in dialogue? Here are a couple tips:

• If one character is sharing something with another character who should already know this—that might be an info dump
• If you’re really trying to talk to the reader with the dialogue—that might be an info dump
• If it’s more than a sentence or two of backstory—that might be an info dump
• If it doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on in the present scene—that’s an info dump.

Fix those info dumps!

Here are a couple made-up instances of “info dumpy” dialogue. How would you fix them?

“As you know, my darling, we’ve been married for seven years, and our two children, Tina and Tommy, are almost perfect angels.”

“Yes, my love, and we’ve lived in this same house for three years, but we’re thinking about moving.”

“That’s the reactor or coil. It’s a a passive two-terminal electrical component which resists changes in electric current passing through it. It consists of a conductor such as a wire, usually wound into a coil. When a current flows through it, energy is stored in a magnetic field in the coil. When the current flowing through an inductor changes, the time-varying magnetic field induces a voltage in the conductor, according to Faraday’s law of electromagnetic induction, which by Lenz’s law opposes the change in current that created it.”

“Do you remember Jimmy? The guy from high school who was virtually president of the A/V club, but then went on to make it big in the dot-com boom? He managed to get out before the bubble burst, and he’s still living large in Silicon Valley. I heard he actually sold Page & Brin the name for Google. It was originally called Backrub, of course.”

“Look, I know you’re going through a hard time with your breakup, but I just need to tell you this right this minute: when I was seven, I had this puppy, and he got lost and we looked everywhere for him . . . [ten pages later] . . . and that’s why I don’t like cheese.”

Share your solutions in the comments and we’ll take a look at some fixes next week!

Photo by Ricky Bragante

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