A few years ago, here in Austin, this old VCFA grad (yes, I mean me) met a young and talented current VCFA student (and now grad). We bonded over all things VCFA, books, vodka slushies (back when Glee was still the show to watch), the Indigo Girls, and while I recommended her for a position at the Writers’ League of Texas, Amy Rose turned me on to Veronica Mars. How I had lived that long without Logan in my life, I will never know. But, I have Amy Rose to thank for my Veronica addiction which will be satisfied when the kickstarter movie comes out and for turning me on to Battlestar Galactica: for you see Amy Rose is a fan of quirky characters with incredible dialogue (Veronica) and also a lover of all things sci-fi. So it makes perfect sense, that Amy Rose Capetta’s debut novel is a quirky, intelligent, and fast paced space adventure, Entangled. Today she joins us for Craft Talk Tuesday to talk about character, connection, and how to develop both while still maintaining a semblance of author sanity.
Welcome, Amy Rose Capetta.
Craft Talk Tuesday
I’ve been thinking about protagonists a lot lately. Growing up I often found myself attracted to the secondary characters in novels. The funny ones, the strange ones, the ones who were there to offset the main character, offer depth and variation on the themes, and flesh the fictional world out by being so real, yet so specific to the story.
I loved ensemble casts, and I still do. But as a writer, I had to admit that while some stories work without a protagonist at the center, most of the ensemble stories I love still tend to have a central character. So it became a challenge of learning how to craft protagonists that I cared about, who weren’t just pushing the reader through the story at a forced march while the rest of the characters put on the real show all around them.
Entangled was special, because I knew the main character before I knew anything else about the story. Character and setting came to me in one quick smack—a punk-rock girl, with a guitar, on an unfriendly planet in the far-off fringes of space. She was angry about something, and she had reasons to be angry. That was all I knew about her. (For years!)
It was a start, but it wasn’t enough. I knew that she needed to go on some sort of journey, one that would test her and change her. When I learned about quantum entanglement, it matched up in essential ways with what I already knew about Cade. Quantum entanglement is a form of connection, and Cade was isolated and alone. I needed that resonance between main character and plot to help me get excited about the story.
It also helped that I now had the story in the form of a question, rather than a few scraps of impressions. I started with “girl, guitar, and crummy sand planet,” and now I had this: “What happens when Cade goes from the least connected girl in the universe to the most in two weeks flat?” Having the shape of her story made me care about following her journey. (Both the outer one with the sentient spaceships and black holes, and the inner one with the feelings.)
Then there is the question of what the main character wants, what drives the story. A character with a strong want can hook a reader, but it’s the underlying reason, why they want it, that became even more important to me in crafting a protagonist. I had to question what was so important about making a deep and scary connection for the first time. What are the risks? What are the possible rewards? What can go wrong? (And then I had to make as many of those things go wrong as possible!)
I knew that my character was a tough girl, but I had to take that apart, too. There is always the fear of a flat protagonist, one who has
just enough characterization to trick someone. An optical illusion! On further inspection, some protagonists don’t have three-dimensional character. They’re not believable, flawed, complicated, recognizable human beings. This can be a tough one in science fiction, where characters often take on stories with a scope and stakes that are much bigger and higher than we see in real life. But it’s all the more reason to ground a character in real human emotion. We need it to make all of the (actual) explosions important.
I got very invested in Cade’s complicated snarls of new friendship, and her intensely-late-bloomer interactions with the idea of a relationship and with a potential love interest. And I found I’d given myself a gift in Cade’s love of music. It’s such an essential part of who we are. Writing passages where Cade plays her guitar had a special texture and weight, and connected me to the way she experiences the universe like nothing else.
There is one more piece that I have found essential in this process, which I’m still learning about and which I’m sure will grow with each new story. I think that readers often wonder how much a writer is like their main character. The relationship is, of course, not a 1:1 ratio, it’s a process that for me involves isolating pieces of my personality or experience and blowing them up, or combining them with new elements.
When I wrote Entangled, the pieces of me that existed in protagonist were obvious and I didn’t have to think about them much. But when I started in on the sequel, Cade had changed a lot since the first book. While I still liked her and empathized, I couldn’t get into her experience as easily. I was struggling through a draft when the always-brilliant YA author Cori McCarthy asked me, “Where are you in this story?” And I couldn’t answer. That little question changed the sequel enormously. I didn’t have to make the character more like me in some recognizable or external way. But I did have to find a new way to connect to what she was going through. If everything else is in place, that shard of empathy can be enough to bring a character to life.
A big thank you to Amy Rose Capetta for being with us today. And if in Austin for the Texas Book Festival, join Amy Rose on the panel Move Over Katniss: New Heroines at 12:15 pm this Sunday.
Amy Rose Capetta has an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She grew up in New England, and has lived all over the country, but currently resides in Michigan. Before embracing the science-fiction genre she wrote plays and screenplays. She has a particle-level love of mind-bending science and all sorts of music. She adores her small patch of universe, but also looks intently at the stars. Entangled is her first book.