Category: Fiction Writers’ Advice

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Creating Characters Fiction Writers' Advice

Creating a character to drive the plot

 

One of my favorite parts of writing novels is making up the people who will populate it. I don’t understand those authors who seem to use the same basic types for every novel they write. I will admit that there are people that just end up turning up in different roles with slightly different faces. (I think I mentioned the prevalence of Franz Liszt in a previous post.) But you have to take into account that each story is unique. And the characters make the story.

  A story is the interaction of the characters with a series of situations. How the story goes is determined largely by how the characters react. Of course, things will happen that the characters had nothing to do with, but how they play the cards dealt to them is the essence of the plot.

  So constructing these characters should be a well-thought-out process. It’s possible to create a character while writing your book, but it will help you a great deal to prepare one ahead of time, so they can be fully developed from the start. I’ve done it both ways, and since I tend to write quite slowly, going so far as to edit as I go along (a lot of authors strongly discourage this behavior) it’s not too disastrous to introduce aspects of my characters as I think of them. Still, I would recommend some planning beforehand. It will make it easier to focus on the plot.

  What do you need to know about your character to make them affective? When I’m creating a character, there are four things that I make sure I make for them. They are: a body, a personality, a background, and a moral character.

  Let’s look at these one at a time. First off, every character needs a body. Writers differ on how important this is, which I think is funny, since you might as well do it. It’s really the easiest part of your character-making, and, like in real life it is often your first impression of who a character is. Write up a detailed ID for your main characters. How old are they? How tall? What coloring do they have? What’s the length and style of their hair? How do their facial features look? And, what is their overall body type? That last one carries more weight than you might think. (No pun intended.) It really helps to have the general physique in your mind’s eye. In fact, it almost runs over into the next element.

  Personality.  This is what is going to get your readers attached to your character. This is their humanity. This is probably going to be where the outside world comes into your book most. You want your readers to feel like they’ve met this person somewhere before. More than any other element in your entire book, the personalities have to be real.

  And by the way, God doesn’t copyright. Those people you know and love—they’re all in the public domain. Rarely, if ever does a personality spring purely from your imagination. In fact, almost all the characters in my Stardrift Trilogy are based loosely on a facet of myself. If you wonder if such a person could actually exist, check it against the standard you know best: your own personality. If this person is acting the way you might act, chances are, you’ve got a realistic character.

  In spite of  the fact that we observe personalities all the time, this seems to be one of the hardest parts of character-developing for some people. How many times have you complained that the people in a book just didn’t seem like anyone that would ever actually exist? One of the problems is sometimes people try to base their characters’ personalities on their morals or their stereotypes in reference to their respective roles in the plot. Here’s a bad guy. Here’s a love interest. Here’s the hero’s meddling mother.

  No. Think about these things instead: How do they smile? How do they laugh? What do they smile and laugh at? What scares them? Are they introverted or extraverted? Optimist or pessimist? Focused or distractible? Do they have any obsessions? Talents? Disabilities? What’s their default emotion? How would you describe them in three words?

  Sometimes, a character’s personality has been developed in some way by their background. Depending on your story, the background of your character may need to be developed more or less extensively. Sometimes a character’s past is vital to the plot. Other times (and quite often with my stories) not much has happened to the protagonist up until the novel starts. (In any case, you might want to make a note of that.)

  Think about your story. Might you need to include your character’s parents, or mention the town where they were born at some point? Is there some important event from their past that left a permanent mark of their views or understanding of life? Is there something that started way back when that might come back to haunt in a significant way during the course of the plot? Use discretion in thinking out just how much you need to know about your characters’ pasts.

  Finally, moral character. This is going to be quite important for those big moments in your story where the characters have to decide what to do. Your character is going to be driven by the principals her or she believes in, the things down at the heart of their existence.

  So, what kind of a person are they? Here’s where roles become something to consider more than in your other elements. Are they a hero? An indifferent side character? The villain?

  Choose virtues and vices for all your main characters. Remember that your hero can’t be perfect, and your villain can’t be totally evil. They’ll both be flat and unrealistic if you forget that. Think about your story again. Chances are you’ve got a good idea of what your hero and your villain are going to do. Why are they doing that? What drives them? What do they value? What character traits do they possess or not possess?

  Is your hero heroic because they’re selfless? Courageous? Compassionate? Loyal to their friends? Can they feel the pain of the afflicted? Find the truth in the confusion? Stick it out when everyone else gives up? Stand up to people who are used to doing whatever they want at the expense of others? Where’s their weak spot? Can they be distracted from their purpose? Do they sometimes just want to stop fighting? Maybe there’s something that they’re hiding that they’re afraid will be found out. Maybe they’ve got guilt over something in the past. Maybe they’re tempted to take revenge.

  What about the villain? Why would they do a thing like that? What’s their messed-up philosophy? What’s the main thing that makes them despicable? Are they deceivers? Do they take advantage of people? Are they self-seeking? Power-hungry? They can’t have all the problems though. There’s probably a good side somewhere, even if it’s just that they’ve never hung up on someone while they were still talking, or are nice enough not to throw things at the neighborhood cat. Maybe some of their terribleness grew out of some good quality that got blown out of proportion some time back. Maybe they wanted to protect someone they cared about. Maybe they were outraged at some injustice and overreacted. Another likely scenario is that they’ve been hurt somehow and were too weak to handle it correctly. Could they be redeemable after all? 

  Basically, the thing to remember when you’re creating a character is that they can’t just be a role with a name. You have to create w whole person that your readers will connect with, and want to hear more about. Great characters can cover a multitude of literary sins, and an extraordinary character is something your audience will never forget.  
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Fiction Writers' Advice

You Are What You Read

Some of the information in this post relates back to former posts, such as “How Not to Write Like A Girl…or a Guy.” You’ll notice when a person is asked to write a creative work, they’ll often fall back on what they know for inspiration. In other words, what they read.

  I’ll use myself as a case study because my case is rather interesting. First off, as an author of almost eight novels, it might be imagined that I like to read. Well, that isn’t necessarily the case. At least, I really haven’t been a big fan of novels. I read all the time, but I’ve always preferred science books. I spent this last summer reading Brian Greene’s Fabric of the Cosmos and The Elegant Universe. I like theoretical cosmology. (Actually, all cosmology is theoretical, but it sounds more impressive to give it an adjective.)

  I also recently enjoyed a rather hefty biography. I don’t read a lot of biographies, there aren’t a whole lot of historical figures that intrigue me that much, which is probably my problem, but I had a great time with Alan Walker’s Franz Liszt trilogy.

  When it comes to fiction, I read almost nothing but classics. Of course, all Christian fantasy authors read Tolkien and Lewis, it seems, and they probably will always rank as my favorite authors, but I try to vary what I read. I enjoyed in no particular order:

Bronte’s Wuthering Heights

H.G. Well’s The Invisible Man

Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451

O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins

All of which I would recommend, along with many others. But only you know what turns you on. It’s important to find writing this inspires you. Not all classics are the same. Know what fascinates you in the way of subject matter. I have preferences for out-of-the-ordinary elements in stories, adventure, survival, plots twists, fantasy, etc. These are the things that are likely to show up in your own stories.

  One thing I don’t recommend is imitating another author’s tone. For one thing, it never comes across the same with from a different writer’s pen, neither does it allow you, as your own person, to express yourself in your own voice. You have your own voice as an author, and if you spend your career trying to sound like somebody else, no one will ever get to experience the magic of your natural style. Don’t sell yourself short.

  Something else that is a danger particularly to new Christian authors is starting to sound like the last devotional they read. It’s awful when two characters are just talking along, and all of a sudden all their dialogue is practically copy-and-pasted from the latest Randy Alcorn release. It’s even worse when the narrator does this. Remember, these deep truths are so much more real when the action of the story tells them, not the characters or the disembodied author.

  So there are pros and cons to the fact that what you read has influence on what you write. One of the most effortless ways to improve your writing is to read good literature and observe what you like about it. As long as you don’t fall into the trap of losing your originality to it, what you read will inevitably build your writing skills.
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Fiction Writers' Advice

Voices

Think about the people you know. When you start a conversation with one of your friends, you have certain expectations. You’re familiar with the kinds of things they say in various situations, and how they say them. You tend to have a good idea of how they converse. You can tell when they’re in a weird mood because they tend to say things that are out of character.

  Characters have voices. You can open a well-written book and read a conversation, and deduce things about the personalities behind the words. There’s an art to establishing character voices, of course. I know I could do better myself, as sometimes I catch myself just having all my characters talk like I do. There are some things that I try to keep in mind while writing dialogue that may help you.

  Keep in mind that different people have different vocabularies. Your education, line of work, areas of interest, social circles, and age are some of the factors that influence what words you use in casual conversation. You personally might be studying anatomy and physiology intensively, but the character you’re writing about doesn’t necessarily know the technical names for his different bones or muscles. If you are writing about an expert in a certain field that you aren’t so familiar with, study a bit and pick up some useful terms. Think about you’re character’s social life, and the time period when they probably established most of their conversational skills. Watch out that you don’t have an old person who uses a lot of millennial slang, unless he’s trying to be that way, or something.

  Which brings us to the subject of period writing. I tend to be critical of historical fiction. I wouldn’t exactly recommend imitating the way people talk in historical fiction paperbacks. I’d recommend reading some original sources from the time period in question. Don’t assume that the more awkward and wordy a sentence is, the more authentically historical it will be. You might be surprised by the informality that sometimes shows up in dialogue from the past. Take note of the words used, and be careful not to fall into using obviously modern expressions.

  The setting where your story unfolds also will have profound effect on dialogue. Phrases and terms are different in different countries, and even different regions of countries, sometimes. We all know a few U.K. terms: the trunk of a car is a boot and the hood is a bonnet, etc. Americans might make mountains out of mole hills, but a Pole can make an ox out of nothing, top that.

  It isn’t important to obsess over regional things like that all the time, casual readers probably won’t notice or care. What any reader will have opinions about is the use of dialect cues and phonetic spellings when it comes to foreign accents. My feeling here: just don’t do it. Go ahead and tell your reader that a character has a certain accent when they talk. Don’t try to write it down. Why? Because it almost never captures the essence of the accent portrayed. For example, I once read a book by one Jean Stratton-Porter called Freckles. (The only romance I’ve ever choked down.) In it there was a Scotch-Irish couple. Apparently, the word “well” with that accent sounds like “Wheel.” Somebody help me here. It that right?

  Even if the author is pretty good at it, (like Mark Twain) it tends to be really hard to read when all the words are grossly misspelled. It can be so distracting for an important character to have an accent that it detracts from the whole book. (At least for me.) Listening to a foreign accent is one thing, trying to decipher it in print is quite another. 

  I just wrote a book (A Hand with Five Fingers) in which the main character was from the United States, but everyone else was foreign. There was an Englishman, a German, and three Hungarians besides. Imagine the fun I could have had with phonetic spellings and how chaotic that might have turned out.

  Lastly, I want to point out how much the character’s intrinsic personality makes a difference in their speech. I wrote a series that spans three books so far called the Rhapsody Threnody Series tentatively, and in my opinion the characters in it are some of the strongest I’ve ever developed.

  The main character, Carmen Hess is cynical, and often depressed, but is carried through by her resolve and sense of humor. The books are written in first-person from her perspective, and therefore the whole narrative as well as her own dialogue are in her voice. She utilizes deadpan sarcasm and a lot of negative asides, and the whole text is embellished with weird analogies and unusual observations.

  Her best friend Candace Leonardi is colorful, upbeat, and always ruining Carmen’s bad moods. She tends to tease other characters good-naturedly, and uses a lot of informal language. She calls people things like “tiger” and “chiquita” and tells them not to give her “that jive”.

  Cecil Vorosvari, Carmen’s young ambitious piano teacher is emotional, obsessive, sensitive, and highly intelligent. He’s also foreign, and throughout the series is speaking his second language. His English is very good however, and he only “losses his English” on occasion, and, true to his personality, he is extremely eloquent. Another note about foreigners: just because they might not know a lot of English, doesn’t mean they don’t use complex words. Depending on the language, complex words may actually be easier to understand for them because they’re often similar to a related word in their own language.

  Now, this has been an incredibly long post. Sorry. I hope it was helpful enough to make up for it. As one final tip I advise that you read your dialogue aloud to yourself without the narrative to see how it sounds. Your ears don’t lie. If it sounds wrong, it is wrong. Tweak it, you’ll get it.

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Fiction Writers' Advice

Dictionary and Thesaurus

One of the easiest ways to make your writing stronger and more artistic is to broaden your vocabulary. It’s natural for people to know the definitions of a great many words in their own language and quite a few in others, but the percentage that we actually use in speech or writing is pretty measly. We tend to favor certain words.

  That’s okay, until certain symptoms of limited vocabulary arise. I don’t like using the same word twice in a paragraph, especially a descriptive word, like an adjective or adverb. There’s a little more leeway with nouns. And, of course, if there really is no other word for a particular noun, there’s not much you can do about it. Verbs should only be used twice in a paragraph intentionally for emphasis, in my opinion.

  When you turn to your thesaurus to find a better synonym, there is something you have to be aware of. First, let me illustrate the problem. I was once working on a group English comp. project in college. (I hated it.) There were three of us and we were writing the paper “together”. We were writing a business proposal that supposedly was trying to solve the problem of over-crowded prisons by re-opening Alcatraz. (I hated it.) We kept having to use the term “violent criminals” over and over. The forensics major who was sort of spearheading the whole idea noticed this and suggested we find a synonym for “violent”. She decided she liked the word “vehement.” (I hated it.)

  Red light. A slightly more wordly-wise writer knows that a “vehement criminal” is by no means the same thing as s “violent criminal”, or a “pugnacious criminal”, or a “ferocious criminal.” The point here can be summed up in a definite fact of life. There is no such thing as a synonym.

  This is why you also will need to keep your dictionary handy. There are really two reasons to vary word choice: for color and variation, and to be sure you’re getting the best word for the situation. Clarity is generally considered to be a virtue in writing of any kind. In the interest of the clearest possible description, you want the word that means exactly what you want to say. When we say “violent criminal” we mean a criminal that has committed a violent crime such as murder, or assault. We do not mean a criminal that shows intense feeling. (Another so-called “synonym” for “vehement” was “convicted”, but it might have taken from my point to say we didn’t mean that.)

  You can use a thesaurus to take the ambiguity out of your writing and to make your descriptions more vivid. Think about the word “fight.” Somebody says, “Oh, they got in a fight” and you’re not absolutely sure how you are supposed to take it. Depending on the context, you may be able to make a safe guess. If we’re talking about a couple of girls who used to be friends, you might imagine they argued over some issue that was important to them. If we’re talking about a couple of cats, they might have clawed each other’s faces viciously and make horrible noises. Or it could be the other way around, but we don’t really know.

  The mystery is cleared up a little if you say, “they got in an argument”, or “they got in a wrestling match.” You can also imply things about the nature of a character by the words you use on him or her. “He walked in” is one thing, “he stalked in,” or “he shuffled in,” or “he swaggered in” have different implications, entirely.    

  I still prefer physical books to online sources. Online dictionary and thesaurus tools vary quite a bit in quality and usability. I still use them when hauling giant books with me is impractical but at home, I stick to the paper. One thing I like about using books versus the internet is I often end up finding other words that I wasn’t even looking for alongside my target. Whatever you prefer, getting in the habit of utilizing these sources is guaranteed to improve your writing overall. 
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Fiction Writers' Advice

Don’t write like a girl…or a guy.

You can’t always be sure by reading a piece of literature whether the writer is male or female. Subject matter, plot, and the gender of the main character can, but don’t always offer clues. But there are particular style problems that arise more often in female writers, and others that are more typically male. I’ve observed them for a while, and thought it might be of use if I made a note of them.

  Aside from things like choice of subject matter and certain writing nuances that they obviously picked up from the literature that is targeted at them, guys and girls also have different downfalls in their ability to carry a story altogether. My observations on this subject may sound familiar, or they might surprise you.

  As I was taking a creative writing course last semester, I noticed that boys and girls often have different overall tones they naturally fall back on when they have to write something off the top of their head before planning a full story. There was almost an equal amount of girls and boys in the class, which was good, since I have a feeling guys might be a little under-represented most of the time in the world of amateur writing. We had an exercise where we were all asked to develop a setting.

  Without a single exception, (besides me) the males portrayed a gritty, dark, imposing atmosphere, and the females created a sunny, fun, breezy atmosphere. I thought this was kind of funny. But aside from default settings, the way the two genders wrote stories, when we got to that, made it evident that there were certain things that they struggled with apart from each other.

  Ladies first: In that particular class, the worst writer, and the best were both boys, the girls weren’t as noticeably bad or good. They weren’t real big on creativity for plots, though. One did a story on a teenage girl with anorexia, one on a girl who made some bad decisions and ended up in bad situations with some guy she shouldn’t have fallen for in the first place, another wrote about a grade-school girl enjoying summer break, and another tried a different genre and surprised us all with a thriller involving a cursed doll. (Really, how many times has that been done before?)

  But I keep getting side-tracked from the thing I’m actually criticizing. The thing that girls do that makes a story hard to read is they often get so wrapped up in the moment they’re describing, that the reader is unable to actually see what’s happening, or what it has to do with anything. Especially in romances, where the couple is talking, and all of a sudden…her eyes were shining…their hearts were beating…he was glad he had polished his shoes before going out today… “Do you truly believe me?”

  Wait. Believe what? Who? Who’s talking? I thought they were having problems of some kind. Why’d the action just, like, totally stop? That’s kind of an example of what I’m talking about. What makes it even more confusing is when that sort of disintegration sets in, not in some emotionally intense scene, not when she’s staring up at her man, but rather, staring at her coffee, or her car keys, or at some other mundane moment. You can’t just trust your readers to understand the significance of any point in your story just by letting your writing fall all apart. Keep the narrative intact, please.

  Now for the guys. I have read both rather lousy amateurs and published, famous authors who write the way I’m about to describe. I think it would be easier for some publishers to let the male mistakes slip because you can still understand the story, and it also is a rather serious-sounding way to write. However, I think most people would agree that if the story isn’t truly extraordinary, it’s extremely dull to read this kind of writing.

  Here’s the gist of it: some male authors have major trouble conveying a very essential element in writing, and that element is—believe it or not—suspense. I recently picked up a sci-fi novel that was written by none other than Buzz Alden. I generally enjoy reading things that astronauts wrote, but I had never read a novelwritten by one. The book is called The Return, and there were some rave reviews on the back cover.

  But what I found inside frankly bored me. Alden wrote the story as if it had already happened. Even before he said what happened, you already knew it had happened and were just waiting around to be surprised by something. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t that he foreshadowed, or hinted. You just already knew that at least that one really nice guy was going to get killed on the shuttle, and that the main guy was going to lose his job, and blah, blah, blah. And it didn’t matter after the fact, because we weren’t there when it happened and we didn’t care if it did before it did.

  There was that guy in my class who wrote like a guy too. Now, his writing was considerably worse than Alden’s, but it was the same problem. He never put the reader into the course of the story. It’s more like he gave them a bird’s eye view of the maze. With the correct course already drawn out. I can’t remember what any scene in that story was like. I have no visuals and no feelings, and zero atmospheric impressions looking back on it.   

  I’ll inevitably end up talking about and criticizing sources of inspiration for authors and blame them for bad writing across the board. Most of the time people are just writing what they’ve read, with a few little variations and combinations. I won’t pretend to be an expert, and of course there are probably guys who write poorly “like girls”, and girls who write poorly “like guys”, but generally, this is what happens. And lastly, there are probably people who really like authors who write like this. Apparently there are, because these people do get published now and then, but you, personally have more potential than that, and know better now.

No pressure.    

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Fiction Writers' Advice

On Description

Hello everyone. Sorry about the lack of action, my access to internet is limited. However, I’ve decided to try my best to start posting regularly from now on—at least once a week, I hope. I plan to start a series of posts this week on the subject of writing. I’ve recently started writing my eighth novel, and in the process of all that writing, discovered a few things that might be of interest to other writers. I have very few readers to date, so spread the word that I’ve started up this series if you like it, or know somebody who might benefit from it.

  Without further ado:

The Art of Description

  I’m aware that right now, mainstream authors generally are looking down on highly descriptive writing. A lot of modern authors, novelists, and even poets discourage over-description but little is said about the issue of under-description. I was reading an article in a writers’ magazine giving something like “The Ten Rules for Success”, written by some author whom I frankly doubt that I would ever enjoy reading. One of his tips was to describe your characters as little as possible. What!?!?

  In matters of art, it’s of the essence to work in a way that is natural for you. If you really feel uncomfortable describing your characters, don’t do it–but as a general rule for success?  There may be readers who prefer to have a character left entirely to their imagination, but I’m not one of them, and as a writer…I really, really, want to tell you what I see.

  And they’ll say, “Oh, no! Don’t tell us, show us.” This is usually good advice, but spending an entire book implying what a character looks like is a waste of time. I use my characters’ physical appearances to imply other things. I’m extremely visual in my writing. That same article said, similarly to be sparse with your descriptions of settings. Again, if that’s you’re natural style, fine, I just won’t probably make it through the first chapter of your book, personally, but don’t think that when these “serious” authors say it’s the only way, that they have any idea what they’re talking about.

  Remember that I’m something of a sci-fi/fantasy author, myself, and that surely effects my viewpoint on this topic. You could never spend the whole of a science-fiction or fantasy story implying what the people and places looked like and come out with a particularly striking piece. You don’t particularly enjoy reading a story that takes place on multiple planets that you never actually get to see, unless that supposed to be the point of the story. The antagonist in my hopefully-soon-to-be-available sci-fi trilogy Stardrift, would not be nearly as effective if you didn’t know he was seven feet tall with very fair skin, eerily pretty hands, and hair down to the middle of his thigh.

  If you don’t trust the examples of my own writing, let’s look at a few others. Suppose Emily Bronte never told us what Wuthering Heights, or Thrushcross Grange, or Heathcliff, or the moors looked like. What if Ray Bradbury didn’t tell us how the hound looked in Fareinheight 451? What if James Barry didn’t describe Neverland, or Captain Hook? Success!!! Yep.

  Don’t think I advocate describing everything though. I can’t stand it when authors start giving the reader a laundry list of all the…laundry a character is wearing. Sometimes it really is important how a character is dressed, but not always. Have you ever read any Nancy Drew mysteries? Don’t do that. But there actually are reasons for describing  attire, it can be a great way to “show and not tell” a character’s mood, or what they’re doing, or as a symbolic element, if you do that kind of thing.

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