This week’s blog post is about how to write rather than how to submit, which means that it’s going to be full of advice you either don’t need or won’t take. However, knowing that what I have to say is unnecessary has never shut me up before, so here we go!

Here’s a little-known fact! Most of the stories that get rejected from Shimmer are rejected because the slush reader(s) detect a deficiency in one of the core categories on our submissions check-list. Even though Beth told me not to give away our secrets on pain of death, I have risked receiving angry emails to show you this:

Now, most stories are able to get the first eight check-marks on their own. I’m here to talk to you about the mysterious ninth requirement. (The typo on page four is so that we can make sure our copy-editors are doing their jobs.)

The ninth requirement? Character motivations. No shit.

Look.

The most awesome stories have characters doing weird and unusual things. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be fiction, it’d just be a journal entry entitled, “Stuff I did today and my feelings.” Or your Twitter feed details about every meal you consumed in the past week. You know, boring.

However, sometimes when I’m reading a story, I still find myself wondering WHY, for the love of everything good and holy, would anybody ever do what the protagonist just did.

This usually stems from a shocking lack of self-preservation on the character’s part. Not, mind you, recklessness. If your protagonist is nineteen and is on their first drunken bender, I’ll believe almost any stupid thing you tell me they want to do. (Whether I’ll actually enjoy reading said story…)

Think about oft-parodied horror movie tropes. You know that getting out of the car in a creepy, abandoned gas station in the middle of nowhere in Northern California is a bad idea, right? Especially if it’s full of creepy vehicles and you can hear howling monsters, and there are dead animals everywhere! Don’t get out of the car!

Of course, if you need to put gas in the car in order to escape, or you just don’t believe in monsters, fine. There just needs to be a reason more compelling than, “The author thought that having the protagonist fight for their life at a gas station would be awesome.”

Or, take contemporary fantasy. I never have a problem believing that the vampire character drinks blood, wants to drink blood, obsesses about drinking blood, craves blood like a heroin junkie in withdrawal – whatever. But I do sometimes get jostled out of fiction where perfectly ordinary protagonists fail to react to their exceptionally weird neighbors.

Or “twist” endings. The character will be doing whatever it is that they do through the story, until they make a bizarre and unexpected choice at the end. I mean, I like being surprised, but just because I didn’t see it coming doesn’t mean that it was good. This is why “rocks fall and everyone dies” is a joke ending.

It sucks as a slush reader. Life is hard. I’ll finish reading these stories (assuming I make it to the end, but I digress) and feel strangely sad. I usually know what the author wanted me to feel, but all I end up thinking instead is, “But why would anybody DO that?”

The first step to avoiding this problem (yes! There is a plan! With steps!) is to make sure that YOU know why your character behaves the way they do. Why does your character want to join the evil empire? Why would anybody eat a frickin’ pomegranate in Hell? Etc.

Step two is also pretty obvious – make sure that the reader knows. There are as many different ways to do this as there are ways to write, so don’t let me cramp your style. Personally, I prefer subtle approaches. For instance, feeding the reader information slowly so that instead of getting an answer to the question, “WHY?” they just never ask in the first place.

You don’t want your reader to wonder about stuff like that while they’re reading. Wondering leads to thinking, and thinking leads to escape.

Oh man. So this is where I should tell you how to do this, right? Well, I can’t. You just have to try, fail, try, fail, fail, fail some more, revise, and then give up and submit the story.

Unfortunately, if I’ve got you paranoid about whether or not your character’s motivations make sense, the best test is to have someone else read your story.

Hint 1

If several readers independently tell you that they didn’t understand your character’s motives, you have a problem. If it’s just one reader, well, maybe they were having an off day, but try not to be too patronizing. These are SF fans, so they know all about revenge being best served cold, which means you won’t see it coming.

Hint 2

“But people just do that!” NO! NO! NO! Nobody cares! NOBODY CARES! Sure, people make stupid, terrible, awful decisions for no reason every day, (How else do you explain Easy Mac?) but readerly people like to pretend we aren’t the lowest common denominator. No matter how many people you know who Totally Behave This Way, if we’re supposed to sympathize with the character, we want their behavior to make some amount of sense. Probably.

Step three isn’t really a step, but it is an imperative sentence! “Don’t be neurotic.”

The submissions we get at Shimmer tend to be pretty good, so I see more problems like this than I do submissions in which the character’s behavior makes no sense.

Essentially, if you’re TOO worried about the story and you second guess yourself, it’ll show up in the fiction. (A rough indicator is usually too much internal monologue in which the protagonist thinks about what they’re going to do and why they’re going to do it. Which isn’t to say that all internal monologue is a Bad Thing, mind.)

I’ll be reading along and the character is about to do something completely in character. Maybe the vampire next door has just captured a new victim, and your kick-ass protagonist is about to break in the door and save the victim. Great! Exciting! But then the fiction shudders to a halt as the protagonist thinks something like, “I could have just called the cops, but…”

As a reader, I then start to think, “Hey, yeah? Why aren’t you calling the cops? They’ve got guns and like using excessive force.”

That’s the last piece of unsolicited advice I’m going to give you – don’t implant doubts in the heads of your readers. Because doubting, just like wondering, also leads to thinking, which leads to escape. And, subsequently, rejection.

As always, none of this matters if you do whatever you do so well that I don’t care.

I’m supposed to leave you with some kind of question that sparks comments, but I can’t think of any.

So… hey. Go write a story, or something.