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Hi! Do you have any advice for planning all the characters in a story including everything about them? I love this blog, btw :)

First off, thank you so much for the ask and the compliment!

So I’ll start with the easy stuff first. If you have your characters sort of fleshed out, what you might want to do is make a character bio for each of them. I personally prefer to write the story first, figure out the character’s general motivations, then fill one out. Google has oodles to choose from, but I rather like the short and simple one here.

Another handy tool for characters you kind of know, but want to flesh out/keep in character, is to take the MBTI test (Meyers Briggs Type Indicator). There’s a free one here. Fill out the survey for each character, it helps tons to get to know them.

Now, if you need ideas for new characters altogether, there are a few good, easy ways to do this.

- If it’s a main character for a big project, you’ll want to spend some time thinking what they like/dislike, who they like/dislike, and why. Other stuff comes a little easier when you know these things. Try to get a feel for these things as you read books/watch shows and movies, using the info you are given to figure out what the character is like down to the bones.

- If it’s a lesser character or project, you might choose to use a random generator (Great for ideas, even if you don’t use them all). Here is a generator for personalities, and here is one for descriptions. I highly recommend this site for all sorts of generators–they even do maps and writing tips!

- If you need ideas, but don’t like the random aspect of a generator, search online for other people’s character bios, and copy bits you like, add or change other tidbits until the character feels about right.

And most of all, don’t fret while making new characters–a lot of characterisation comes out as you write about them. How they react to the world you put them in will define who they are.

If you need anything else, drop me an ask. Until then, Happy Writing!

git-writing-good

Grey characters are infinitely more interesting (and real) than one-dimensional goodguys and badguys. Everyone has at least a touch of villainy in them, and no one is purely malicious.

Good guys sometimes sacrifice others for their own gain, to further their goal of helping others. Bad guys do the same.

Bad guys do what they must to protect their families, even if it means killing others. Good guys do the same.

letswritesomenovels

The Strength of a Symmetrical Plot

One of my favorite studies of Harry Potter is that of the ring composition found both in the individual novels and overall composition. To me, that very composition is what makes Harry Potter such a satisfying story. In my view, it’s a large part of the reason Harry Potter is destined to become a classic.

And it’s an integral part of the series many people are completely unaware of.

So what is ring composition?

It’s a well-worn, beautiful, and (frankly) very satisfying way of structuring a story. John Granger, known online as The Hogwarts Professor, has written extensively on it.

Ring Composition is also known as “chiastic structure.” Basically, it’s when writing is structured symmetrically, mirroring itself: ABBA or ABCBA.

Poems can be structured this way. Sentences can be structured this way. (Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.) Stories of any length and of any form can be structured this way.

In a novel, the basic structure depends on three key scenes: the catalyst, the crux, and the closing.

The catalyst sets the story into the motion.

The crux is the moment when everything changes. (It is not the climax).

The closing, is both the result of the crux and a return to the catalyst.

In Harry Potter, you might recognise this structure:

Voldemort casts a killing curse on Harry and doesn’t die.

Voldemort attempts to come back to power

Voldemort comes back to power.

Harry learns what it will take to remove Voldemort from power.

Voldemort casts a killing curse on Harry and dies.

But all stories should have this structure. A book’s ending should always reference its beginning. It should always be the result of some major turning point along the way. Otherwise, it simply wouldn’t be a very good story.

What’s most satisfying about chiastic structure is not the basic ABA structure, but the mirroring that happens in between these three major story points.

To illustrate what a more complicated ABCDEFGFEDCBA structure looks like, (but not as complicated as Harry Potter’s, which you can see here and here) Susan Raab has put together a fantastic visual of ring composition in Beauty and the Beast (1991), a movie which most agree is almost perfectly structured.

source: x

What’s so wonderful about ring composition in this story is that it so clearly illustrates how that one crucial decision of Beast changes everything in the world of the story. Everything from the first half of the story comes back in the second half, effected by Beast’s decision. This gives every plot point more weight because it ties them all to the larger story arc. What’s more, because it’s so self-referential, everything feels tidy and complete. Because everything has some level of importance, the world feels more fully realized and fleshed out. No small detail is left unexplored.

How great would Beauty and the Beast be if Gaston hadn’t proposed to Belle in the opening, but was introduced later on as a hunter who simply wanted to kill a big monster? Or if, after the magnificent opening song, the townspeople had nothing to do with the rest of the movie? Or if Maurice’s invention had never been mentioned again after he left the castle?

Humans are nostalgic beings. We love returning to old things. We don’t want the things we love to be forgotten.

This is true of readers, too.

We love seeing story elements return to us. We love to know that no matter how the story is progressing, those events that occurred as we were falling in love with it are still as important to the story itself as they are to us. There is something inside us all that delights in seeing Harry leave Privet Dr. the same way he got there–in the sidecar of Hagrid’s motorbike. There’s a power to it that would make any other exit from Privet Dr. lesser.

On a less poetic note, readers don’t like to feel as though they’ve wasted their time reading about something, investing in something, that doesn’t feel very important to the story. If Gaston proposed to Belle in Act 1 and did nothing in Act 3, readers might ask “Why was he even in the movie then? Why couldn’t we have spent more time talking about x instead?” Many people do ask similar questions of plot points and characters that are important in one half of a movie or book, but don’t feature in the rest of it.

Now, ring composition is odiously difficult to write, but even if you can’t make your story a perfect mirror of itself, don’t let story elements leave quietly. Let things echo where you can–small moments, big moments, decisions, characters, places, jokes.

It’s the simplest way of building a story structure that will satisfy its readers.

If there’s no place for something to echo, if an element drops out of the story half-way through, or appears in the last act, and you simply can’t see any other way around it, you may want to ask yourself if it’s truly important enough to earn its place in your story.

Further reading:

If you’d like to learn more about ring theory, I’d recommend listening to the Mugglenet Academia episode on it: x

You can also read more about symmetry in HP here: x

And more about ring structure in Lolita and Star Wars here: x and x

And about why story endings and beginnings should be linked here: x

writeroftheprompts

Thinking About Character Motivations

Whether it’s about why a character would commit murder or why someone would want a do-over in life, I get a lot of questions about character motivations. This is a very important question to ask yourself to develop a believable character because for every action and decision that is made there is some sort of motivation. You eat because you’re hungry, you sleep because you’re tired, you plot to take over the country because the current government killed your sister and framed it on you to further their political agenda. Or maybe you eat because nobody can turn down the deliciousness that is mint chocolate ice cream, you sleep because you’ve got a ridiculous migraine from all the ice cream, and you plot to take over the world because you plan to outlaw eating mint chocolate chip ice cream to have it all for yourself. No matter what the motive is the important thing is that the character has one. To help you come up with one for whatever insanity you’re planning (the scenarios I’ve seen from all of you make me equally proud and baffled) I’ve come up with a few points to consider to get your thinking gears moving.

1. Consider how it relates to the main plot and subplot(s).

Going back to taking over the country, there are millions of ways this story could unfold. What differentiates each and what makes it interesting is why the character wants to do this. Martin Scorsese once said “The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.” This is the way a character’s motive works: your story tells the reader what happens but the why and how is always more interesting. So ask yourself what kind of impact you want this motive to have on the plot because it is what will drive everything. When a character doesn’t have a motivation (like a villain who is evil because) there is no direction and no intrigue in the events as they unfold.

2. Is it out of fear or desire?

To put it very simply, character motivation is fueled by either fear or desire (or maybe both). You could eat because you saw someone else eating cake and now you really crave some too, or you could eat because you fear dying of hunger. There are always primal fears and desires like the desire for survival, companionship and happiness and a fear of death and pain. These are great and can often come up but also try to personalize them to your character so the reader feels why it is important to them. Once you having something fueling the motivation it becomes much more real and gives you a better idea of how to use it.

3. Make it fit with the genre.

Along with personalizing to the character, it’s good to keep in mind the tropes of the genre (remember tropes are not the same as clichés). In a romance the reader expects one of the motivations to be love, in a thriller it’s often about a fight for personal survival and/or to save someone or something. The reason this is important is because it would be odd for a character’s main motivation in a story about saving the country from foreign invasion to be becoming a pianist. Unless, of course the story is really about a young talent who loses their chance to travel to a music school because of war, but now the plot has changed, hasn’t it? There can be multiple motivations, especially when you cross genres like a YA adventure, or thriller with a romance but just remember that readers who give your work a try have certain expectations based on the genre so either try to match or rethink the genre you’re really writing.

4. External and internal motivations.

External motivations are ones that are imposed on your character by external forces while internal motivations come from within themselves (personal desires). For example, take a police officer tasked with finding a kidnapped victim. They have the external motivation of solving this case because it is their job and failing at it would be failing their assignment and leaving a life in peril. They could also have many other personal motivations driving them like having lost their best friend to trafficking or something completely unrelated, like they are motivated to make their little kid proud. You can also try to make these motivations specific to differentiate from characters, at least in your own mind so you can weave that into the characters. External motivations can push the character into the plot but the internal ones can keep them going when things get tough and make readers truly sympathize with them.

5. Finally, do your homework.

No matter how many tips you read here or anywhere else, none of it is going to matter if you don’t sit down and work out your character’s motivations to fit them and your plot. If you need motivations for something that you might not be familiar with (eg. why someone would commit a specific crime) or you need more information about the topic…RESEARCH! Remember, remember, remember that there are no cutting corners when it comes to writing so take a seat, let your mind explore the possibilities, and get to work.

Good luck!!

git-writing-good

Grey characters are infinitely more interesting (and real) than one-dimensional goodguys and badguys. Everyone has at least a touch of villainy in them, and no one is purely malicious.

Good guys sometimes sacrifice others for their own gain, to further their goal of helping others. Bad guys do the same.

Bad guys do what they must to protect their families, even if it means killing others. Good guys do the same.

git-writing-good

Grey characters are infinitely more interesting (and real) than one-dimensional goodguys and badguys. Everyone has at least a touch of villainy in them, and no one is purely malicious.

Good guys sometimes sacrifice others for their own gain, to further their goal of helping others. Bad guys do the same.

Bad guys do what they must to protect their families, even if it means killing others. Good guys do the same.

maxgrayarchived

Writing a manuscript you haven’t outlined like, Am I writing a villain or a love interest

git-writing-good

Why not both?

sonatagreen

A tradition

In peacetime, the ruler grows their hair long. In war, they cut it short. A ruler with long hair is held in great esteem, for defending the peace. The traditional declaration of war is for the ruler to send their cut-off hair to the enemy ruler. The statement carries greater weight the longer the hair: to receive long hair says that you have angered one who is slow to anger, that you have incurred a wrath not easily woken.

wakor-rising

Violent war-mongering leader frantically and aggressively tries to shave just a LITTLE hair off the top of their head into an envelope.

A faraway king receives a heavy wooden crate filled with a coil of the longest hair he has ever seen.

A despised ruler finds hundreds of pounds of cut-off ponytails at her castle entrance, each one belonging to her own people.

A young emperor refuses to cut their hair and insists on trying to make peace with invaders. The enemy leader steps forward, draws their blade, and cuts the emperor’s hair themselves.

Hellen cuts her hair off and throws it in Cathy’s face at her son’s soccer scrimmage.

flotsamie

A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.

Richard Bach (via writerniche)

kiramartinauthor

8 Ways to Get Past Writers Block

Read. Read a lot. Read everything you can, but don’t read like a reader, read like a writer. If you’re doing it right, there’s nothing that gets the juices flowing quite as well. This is the way you develop your style; you see things you like and things you don’t like in books and you put these values into your writing.

Read a good book. Reading a good book is why you got into writing in the first place, right? There’s something new you can learn from every book. You can see what works well and what you ARE doing. It’s inspiring to read good writing and it makes you want to try harder where you might be lacking.

Read a bad book. Not only will reading a bad published book make the world feel more hopeful, but it will make you see what you can avoid doing in your novel and what you KNOW you can do better than them.

Find other writers. Connecting with other writers is so important, whether online or in person. Not only is it nice to able to share your writing, but knowing you have a group or person to depend on with your same goals in mind is motivating. Even just talking through ideas with someone tends to yield more powerful results, and they have their own tips and trick they’ve learned that may help you.

Break it up. Chapters are there for both readers and writers. If you can get through one chapter, you can get through them all. Even make a different word document for each chapter if you need to. It will stop you more from going back and getting caught up in your plot holes that occurred fifty pages earlier.

Read the last page you wrote. The darkest of my writers block days have been stopped with this technique. Tell yourself you’ll just read the last page, maybe edit some phrasing. Then write the next page. Stopping off in the middle of a sentence helps as well. All this settles you into your story gently and gets you involved and editing a more polished draft at the end.

Keep notes. Texts messages can be sent to your email. Finding a pen and paper is hard sometimes, so you can just text ideas to your email. Not only is this handy to get fresh ideas down, but every time you check your email you’ll see these awesome ideas. Or keep a notebook if that works for you. Or write in the margins of your school work. Just get the ideas out.

Immerse yourself. The reason you started your story is because you have such a huge passion for it. What you need to do is remind yourself of these reasons as much as possible. Surround yourself with writing and creativity. Think about how your characters would respond to situations you find yourself in. Describe people you see in the streets as you would if you were introducing them to a novel. Look for people that look like your characters. Tell your friends about your book, give them your ideas. If your life isn’t a little bit about your story, you’re not doing it right.

Like my blog? Follow me on Facebook here.

explore-blog

We now know that telling writers to avoid the passive is bad advice. Linguistic research has shown that the passive construction has a number of indispensable functions because of the way it engages a reader’s attention and memory. A skilled writer should know what those functions are and push back against copy editors who, under the influence of grammatically naïve style guides, blue-pencil every passive construction they spot into an active one.

Harvard psycholinguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker on the art and science of beautiful writing

(via explore-blog)

The best kind of writing advice is the kind that explains what effect your stylistic choices have on your readers. “Said” is invisible. Short sentences speed up reading, long sentences slow it down. Active voice creates agency, passive voice doesn’t.

Don’t believe anyone who tells you to “always” or “never” do something in your writing. Ask why. Ask what happens when you do it the other way. Try it and see. Then use it when you want that effect.

(via

nadiacreek

)

wondrousworldbuilding

“DON’T INFO DUMP,” said every writing-advice-giver ever.

And that advice is so annoying, isn’t it? You’re going along, writing your first draft…or maybe you’re revising your old draft…whatever stage your in, if you’re trying to build a world in a well-paced, interesting story, then it can be difficult to find places for brief bouts of exposition and backstory.

It would be so much simpler to just have a paragraph or seven where you spout out all of the relative information in one go so you can get to the meat of the scene. Or maybe you could find a way to use your powerful brain waves to transfer all that information to your reader. Or…can information be absorbed intravenously?

Stop worrying! There are more options for your in-narrative worldbuilding than info dumping or even exposition-sprinkling.

Did you know that there’s huge chunks of worldbuilding that can simultaneously be character development?

Yeah. I know. In the process of character development, you can give the reader any and all information they might need about your world.

Example time!

So, what do we see here? There’s nothing inherently wrong with this set up, and it might be fun (and necessary) to write this as your first draft. But what are the potential problems?

A prologue exists - Now, I personally really like prologues, but you know who doesn’t? Agents. Publishers. And lots of readers. It’s often safer to just jump into the action of chapter one. The purpose of this prologue, at a glance, is likely:

to introduce the world, or a specific aspect of the culture

to introduce backstory of an important, but not primary character

to introduce the backstory of the situation that our MC will find herself in.

The prologue isn’t narrated or focused on our POV character, Donna. One of the biggest complaints about prologues is that they so frequently don’t introduce the main character or the main conflict (and why should they? They’re prologues). But many readers feel cheated by starting with one narrator and then getting a new one once the main story starts.

So, instead of letting these issues remain, we have an alternative. Cut the prologue. It’s fun backstory, but it’s not needed in-narrative. It’s good that you, the author, now have it as a reference, though, so don’t feel like you’ve wasted time. Open with Chapter One and our main narrator.

“But…but…how will the reader understand Bill and where she’s coming from!? It’s so important for understanding the state of the world!!! ARGHHH.”

Don’t worry. All of this will be revealed in due course.

Okay, so here we have a tiny snippet of dialogue. This doesn’t encompass everything, but it’s a start. We’ve skipped Bill’s backstory, right? So what does that give us? Well, simple. If Donna’s our POV character, then it lets us readers get to know Bill through her eyes. This can go on. As Donna watches Bill interact with others, watches her lead, watches her flinch and close-off and open up…all of these actions will reveal her backstory.

What other benefits does this method of world and character introduction offer?

More organic feel of dropped details.

Information is given through dialogue and so we get to hear that information, but we’re simultaneously getting character voice

It’s easy to “show” how Bill feels about her past because we aren’t in her head, so there’s no chance for telling. Donna–and the readers–will only get the information that Bill gives plus all of her physical and tonal cues.

The omittance of details can speak as much or more about Bill as the details she gives. And since this story is being filtered to us through Donna, those details might be questioned or pondered. She talked all about ___, but I’ve heard so many people talking about ____, and she didn’t bring that up at all…I wonder why.

Here’s another example, only focused on the narrator this time. A picture of the world, and a whole lot about the character.

You could easily do one or the other–character or world, plot or world, backstory or plot–but when you take the chance to combine them, then you save on unneeded exposition, word count, and it helps keep things saturated and interesting.

It comes down to this: In many ways, our world is what we perceive it as, especially in the story we tell. So objective worldbuilding within a character and story-driven novel doesn’t quit grip the interest of the reader to the same extent. Worldbuilding becomes especially interesting when it’s revealed in relation to story and character. A lot of your note-taking worldbuilding (the stuff in the background) will be objective, matter-of-fact. But within the story, what matters most is what relates to the people and the matter at hand. Compiling your world building onto your character development is easy, because what a character reveals about their own world also reveals a lot about them.

A post from me wouldn’t be complete without some prompts/brainstorming ideas for this subject, so here you go.

Things to consider when worldbuilding in-narrative through your characters:

How they interact with the environment

How “normal” any given situation or place seems to them

How people around them are treating them and their reaction to it

How they and others are dressed, their thoughts on “fashion”

How their home-life is seen by others, how others’ home-lives are viewed by character

How character handles money or trade

How well-educated your character is and how that is viewed by others

How your character views the education of other people.

How your character deals with the political climate

The kind of foods that they like, the kinds they eat regularly

How strangers talk to them on the street

The kinds of people they’re friends with

How they view, treat, and are treated by other social classes

The environment of their workplace, how others treat them on a professional level

Happy writing!

redditfront

Some examples of why the Oxford comma is generally a good idea

trekkingwilbury-deactivated2017

Please don’t let the Oxford comma die. If you were apathetic about it before, I think this will help you understand why it is necessary.

azriona

On the other hand, these sentences are pure gold.

andercas

I feel like when you’re writing, organizing chapters and dialogue is easy

but jfc, the amount of time it takes to constantly keep people moving and make sure they’re in the right spaces and trying to come up with wording for it is always such a shock.

Like, fuck, I made you pick up a coffee cup, you need to put it down at some point. also I can’t remember what I dressed you in, can you push up your sleeves? I don’t remember if you even have your shirt on.

and YOU. YOU OVER THERE, you got out of your chair earlier, but did you come back yet? Are you coming back? Where did you even go and why’d you get up? Fuck, I can’t make you sit down again already, you just stood up, go…over there. go get more coffee. Did you bring your mug with you? fine. bring the pot to the table and—wait, wasn’t the coffee pot already over here? shit, hold on, I need to go back and re-read and re-write

julystorms

this is the most relevant thing i have ever read.

thlayli-rah

I think one of the most wild things as a writer is the sensation that you’re not actually directing your characters– they’re sort of directing themselves, and you’re scrambling around attempting to copy down whatever it was that they just did, but they don’t wait for you to finish copying. They just keep walking and talking and moving around and existing of their own volition and at some point you look up and you’re like “WHOA OKAY EVERYBODY BACK THE FUCK UP WHERE ARE WE”

It’s kind of like trying to write sheet music for an orchestra while it’s playing

kjsama

#thatwritinglife

thewordriven

theanticakes

how to write smut

- Fire. Everything is metaphorically on fire - All the things that are on fire are also dripping - Name seven things in the room. Those seven things are now pulsing - Pulsing with fiery drippery - Someone is heaps like a swan - Five sentences of physically implausible positions - The transition of two of those positions would probably turn one person inside out and heaps maim the other person - Three hundred names for a penis - One really poorly thought out name for a vagina - Both are on fire, but neither have chlamydia - She didn’t think she could do the thing. She did the thing. She gasps for the thirteenth time this paragraph - He stuck his throbbing memberpoledickpenisrodthingbishophosejackhammertool into her flowery fuckhole - Person A is bending backwards into anatomically incorrect positions again, nobody seems to care or call an exorcist - Person B hasn’t stopped gasping, someone should probably find an inhaler to alleviate their “swanlike neck” - Ends in some kind of imagery of fireworks or sunset or some other really orange thing you’d see on a middle age woman’s screensaver

missviolethunterwrites

100% accurate.

gr8writingtips

writing tip #1799:

foreshadow tragedies in your novel by having your characters read a news article about a similar event happening and saying “oh good golly i hope that doesn’t happen to me”

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