Discovery of Witches and Maass

My first Kindle book, A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, is one recommended in a class I took on descriptions of setting in novels, Setting as Character.  Very interesting class, and the instructor, Devon Ellington, recommended this book as one with great descriptions of the setting.  She's right.  The descriptions are brief--they don't slow down the story--and very evocative.  It's also quite obvious that either a lot of research or experience went into this book.  I've never been to Oxford (though I'd give my eye teeth to go) but I think I'd feel at home there via Harkness's descriptions. 

I'm not done with the book yet, so I'm not giving out any spoilers because I can't, though thanks to my handy new Kindle I can probably polish it off today.  Harkness also uses quite a few of Maass's techniques, with several unexpected twists in the novel.  The heroine ( a witch) just went to a yoga class with the vampire/hero.  Never in a hundred years would I have imagined a vampire in a yoga class, but she made it seem, if a bit unusual, highly logical.  Loved that scene, even though I know less than nothing about yoga. 

Anyone else read this book? What are your thoughts?  What techniques of Maass did you see in there? 

Back to Maass--Raising the Stakes

In last week's Maass class we were reversing motives; finding different ways to motivate the characters into what they do in the story.  Now we're working on raising the stakes. But as Maass says on page 60 of the book, the reason we care about the character when the stakes get high is that we care about the character, period.
 
And therein lies the rub, eh?

We've all read books where we really connected with the characters, and books where they seemed, well, flat.  Maass has already covered a few techniques that he says will help you connect with your reader through words: open with the character in action, show him/her with heroic qualities, have them demonstrate larger-than-life qualities, etc. 

But on page 61 he says that by clothing your protagonist(s) in a cloak of "high principles and codes of personal conduct" you'll create a character who has value, who is worth saving in the readers' eyes.  A book must have, he says, "high public stakes and deep personal stakes" to have breakout potential.

This, of course, is work that's done well before Word One gets set down.  You have to know and understand your character at a very deep level to know what he or she stands for, what matters to him or her. 

So how do you do that?  I've taken a wonderful class with Alicia Rasley that forced me to go deeper, and it was a great help.  I've used Meyers-Briggs personality tests.  I've interviewed my characters.  I've read about their occupations, their time periods, and a zillion other things.  What do you do to dig deeper, to really understand the heart and soul of your characters so you know what matters to them, and thus what you can put at risk?

. . . . or smaller

In "Adjudting the Volume", Maass says that larger OR smaller reactions than the reader expects can increase tension and make your book better.  He uses an example from The Da Vinci Code, where Langdon and Sophie have just escaped the Louvre where it seems all of Paris had run after them.  As they're racing away in her Mini Cooper, he doesn't yell or scream or whoop for joy.  He says, "That was interesting", which, of course, makes the whole series of events from which they just escaped a little bit larger.


Then he asks you to go through your manuscript and find 24 places to heighten or diminish something your protagonist says, does or thinks.  Wow! 


If you're writing about someone who's naturally quiet, is there a danger of making this person a caricature?  Then again, even 24 instances in a 300-page manuscript isn't that much.  Plus it's a mix of increased reaction and understated reactions.  This shall be very interesting.