Tag Archives: creative writing

Blog, Writing Craft

What to Avoid When Writing Fictional Characters

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Writing a believable character is difficult, and as readers we want that believability to be right there on the page. There is nothing worse than wasting your time on writing boring characters. As writers, you should know that if you do not want to read boring characters then you should not want to write boring characters. There are in fact some strategies to employ as a writer, and there are a few things to avoid when writing fictional characters.

How to Create or “Discover” Character Interests

We’ve discussed characterization before on the blog. But, there are many ways to write good characters. For example, a good strategy to figure out your fictional characters interests is to try to interview them formally. Simply put, get out a sheet of paper and write down a list of questions for your character to answer. Then, respond to the questions from your character’s perspective.

However, we must be a little careful with this piece of advice because it could enable some odd writing behavior. Answering questions on your character’s behalf simply changes your frame of reference. Chances are, as a beginning writer, you will respond by using generalizations and stereotypes. Of course, this does more harm than good. Without decent research, thorough planning, and prior knowledge, we are likely to fall back on tropes and archetypes. This can be poison for original fiction.  

Giving Your Characters Likes and Dislikes

You have probably heard this a few times as you have scoured the internet for decent writing advice:

Your fictional characters must have likes and dislikes to be believable (verisimilitude).

As Purdue University states: “When writers talk about believability, they talk about whether the constituent parts of a character make sense and feel cohesive.”

Likes and dislikes, much like desires and ambitions, simply adds nuance to your characters. These opposing traits help reveal how your character responds qualities to particular situations. If their responses seem real, then you have done your job as a fiction author.

Using Constructive Imagination

What you should do instead is think constructively about your characters. These characters include a protagonist, antagonist, or any ancillary people, animals, or monsters that appear in your story. This is regardless if they are static, dynamic, or just hanging out in a coffee shop in the background. Think about where they came from and how they ended up where they are now. What elements informed their decisions and reasons for their lifestyle?

For example, if you know your fictional character grew up poor and lived in a house with a bunch of siblings, what do you think would be their favorite food? We can probably rule out cheap food and ready-made meals. Or, maybe they actually love that type of food for nostalgic reasons. Because of this, maybe that sense of nostalgia has caused them to open a curiosity shop, which led them to find that mummified hand that helps your character discover some power they didn’t realize they possessed.

As such, we are building a character’s background by using real prior knowledge and personal experiences to inform the character. Whether you know it or not, that creates an interesting background for your character and helps the audience understand their goals in a more nuanced way.

Researching What You Don’t Know   

Understanding your character’s background also implies that you might have to conduct some research if you are unsure about the specifics. That is, if they grew up in a metro area, which you are clueless about, then you should seek resources that help you understand that lifestyle in a more vivid way. As a writer of fiction, part of your job is being an expert on many things. That only comes from studying. The best characters in the history of literature are really either mirrors of authors themselves or are characters they were able to create from other researched materials. A realized character is going to have more of an impact on your reader and your story.

Consider Judge Holden, from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Judge Holden is arguably one of the most evil, complex characters ever put to page. However, he also is like a spark that jumps from the book when you read about him. He’s evil and does evil things. Yet, he’s also nuanced and real. If you did not know, McCarthy developed this character from a real-life scalp hunter in New Mexico. By exploring this reality, McCarthy is able to deliver us a truly volatile antagonist, but that’s because he knows this character deep down.

“He Never Sleeps” by DeimosArt | NewGrounds

What to Avoid when Writing Fictional Characters

There are many things we have to try to avoid when writing fictional characters. Considering this, there are two main ideas to tackle here. As writers, we should avoid generalizations and cardboard characters.

Generalizations

Generalizations are stereotypes that use broad traits and assumptions to characterize a person. These are often characters we see far too often. For instance, a nerdy kid with glasses, a dumb jock, or a bubbleheaded cheerleader. You can also look at typical characters like damsels in distress, wise mentors, and tough, intelligent soldiers.

Generalizations often create harmful stereotypes as well, including people of different races and religions. Sometimes, our gut is to go with a villain who hails from a strange, exotic land far away. Yet, this generalization seems to imply that people from far away are villains, or are evil in some way. This can’t be true, especially if their stories similarly imply that we are the villains.

Horror film director John Carpenter once discussed the idea of internal and external conflict when describing his philosophy of storytelling. In a 2011 interview with Vulture, he stated, “There are two different stories in horror: internal and external. In external horror films, the evil comes from the outside, the other tribe, this thing in the darkness that we don’t understand. Internal is the human heart.”

While generalizations can simplify characters, it can also lead to hateful stereotypes.

Cardboard/Static Characters

Static characters do happen, but they shouldn’t happen to main characters (or even some secondary characters). Essentially, your character should change by the end of the story. They should grow and mature. If your character is a super-intelligent, impervious hero in the beginning, they should at least learn something by the end. Otherwise, you are going to bore your reader to tears.

Remember that your main character should always change by the end of the novel. This is a classic trope that work. Characters must learn through conflict and evolve as a person. If they do not change, then what is your book about? The humdrum nature of everyday life?

In the film Adaptation (2002), protagonist Charlie Kaufman visits a lecture by writer Charlie McKee, who chastises him for his story’s premise in which “nothing much happens.”

McKee states: “First of all, you write a screenplay without conflict or crisis, you’ll bore your audience to tears. Secondly, nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your f****** mind? People are murdered every day. There’s genocide, war, corruption. Every f****** day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save somebody else. Every f****** day, someone somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love. People lose it. Christ, a child watches his mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know crap about life.”

Conclusion

Learning what to avoid when writing fictional characters is a tricky business, but there are strategies to conquering how you craft them in your own writing. While this is only one piece to the puzzle, developing likes and dislikes through interview and research can immediately make clear your character’s preferences in a variety of situations. They go from one-dimensional to three-dimensional quickly. If real people are shaped by what they love and what they loathe, then so too must your characters.

Blog, Writing Craft

Writing Tips to Transform Your Writing Routine

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Writing tips are useful only if you can use them. I know, that’s not very helpful, but neither is a lot of writing advice on the web. However, this post is going to offer you a few writing tips that will change your writing routine. I know this is true because each tip is actually tangible, practical advice that you can put to use each time you sit down to write.

Tip 1: Set a Schedule and Chunk It Out

The hardest part about writing is setting a schedule. It’s extremely difficult to sit down and just get to it, and there are many reasons for this. Very few of them have to do with loving or hating writing. It’s a motivation issue. We know we can get to it, but we just aren’t going to do it right now. Here’s a piece of advice: set a writing schedule. Writing is effective when it’s done in short bursts, which actually increases efficiency. Being alert and capable allows you to read with a clear head, edit precisely, and write with creativity and earnestness.

In practical application, this tip asks you to form a schedule for your writing project. If you are writing a novel, create a plan that involves you writing every day. Set the objective on the page with how much you are going to get done and what. Are you outlining? Did you start drafting a chapter? Are you writing character backgrounds?

Write it out over the course of a week, a month, or a year, but make sure it is clearly labeled and you know what your expectation is when you sit down. If you get done with a section early, don’t just ram yourself into the next section. Consider taking a day off. You are “chunking” your writing. That means breaking it down into digestible chunks instead of running headfirst into it miserably, expecting something to change. Additionally, you can use a host of apps to help you schedule and organize. PowerPoint and Google Slides, for instance, can help you map your novel and see it visually. Or, you could just use a good old sheet of paper and a pencil. Whatever works for you!

Here’s a tentative writing week setup with this idea in mind:

Five-Paragraph Essay: Argumentative

  • First Day: Research and find sources
  • Second Day: Draft 1/2 of the Essay
  • Third Day: Draft 1/2 of the Essay
  • Fourth Day: Revise for ideas and structure
  • Fifth Day: Edit for syntax
  • Sixth Day: Edit for grammar
  • Seventh Day: Peer review and/or publish

Tip 2: Find a Place to Write That Works for You

A writer’s room doesn’t have to contain a million leather-bound books. Nor does it need to look fancy or have a giant walnut desk. It just needs to be a place where a writer can write. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be a room. As long as you have a comfortable place to write, that’s all that matters.

When looking for a place to write, get rid of the notion that you need writerly attire and thick-rimmed glasses. After all, you just need to sit down and get the work done. In bed? While you are sitting in your recliner? At the kitchen table with the radio on? If it works, it works. We need to find places that are conducive to writing, and we have to remember that this has nothing to do with the mythological idea of the writer persona. Separate yourself from the idea of being a writer and actually write.

Tip 3: Use the Read Aloud Function

One often overlooked tool on most word processors is the “Read Aloud” function. Many authors and writers give the advice that you should read your text aloud to yourself to catch errors. My first writing teacher in college offered the same advice. This is because it actually works. Changing the modality in which you revise and edit can help you see things that you were unable to see before. It clears up missing conjunctions, misplaced modifiers, and missing punctuation real quick.

However, if you spend more time focused on your own voice than the errors, that could be a problem. As such, using the “Read Aloud” function on Microsoft Word (or any app, really) can be extremely helpful. Play the text and sit back and listen to what you have written. It’s very good at catching wonky sentences and missing words. Also, there are many apps like Microsoft Word that only execute a read-aloud function. Regardless, this writing tip may change how you approach editing overnight.

Tip 4: Use Templates and Mentor Texts

Whether you are writing fiction or informational works, you should consider using a template. What is a template? A template is a scaffold for a text that shows you the form and structure of a given piece. For instance, a template for an argumentative essay will have starter sentences for all five paragraphs and will show the layout of the essay. Run a web search for the keyword “Template” along with the type of essay, story, or text that you are working on at the moment. You will find immediate examples. Writing tips often employ vapid language about studying craft, but what does that mean? Here, that means studying a template to see the inner workings of a text. It may seem like cheating, but pushing to internalize structure is an age-old method of perfecting craft.

Moreover, one should consider using mentor texts to help guide them through the writing process. That is to say, if you are new to fiction, consider finding a story that fits the narrative you are trying to weave. Now, don’t steal the author’s words and story, but consider their layout, and investigate their moves. Very quickly, by paying attention to how they convey imagery and characteristics, you will be able to identify the text features that you need for your own work. Using mentor texts also helps in writing essays and informational works through the same process. Painters use images for reference, and you should use mentor texts for writing.

Tip 5: Write Trash

Admit to yourself that your draft is going to be terrible. There is no way around it. It is not going to be very good, because that’s what drafts are, after all. With that in mind, you need to sit down and start writing all of the trash that is on your mind. If you are writing an essay, just spit out all of the ideas as you move across the page. If you follow the writing process, schedule your writing, and identify a template, then you should be in a fine position to put garbage all over the page. Your job is to produce ideas and put thoughts into text. You can’t do it perfectly the first time, so sit down and get the work done, so that you can come back through and revise and edit.

Furthermore, writing is recursive, therefore you can come back to it when you want. That means you can clean it up when you want as well. Do not sit down and expect to spin gold—it will never happen. You must embrace writing trash in order to overcome those immediate deficits with writing—procrastination, imposter syndrome, anxiety, etc. In this way, writing trash will get you to the good stuff, which is revealed through revision and editing.

Conclusion

A good writer does what they have to do to get the writing done. This involves sitting down regularly and pumping out words, texts, stories, and whatever else crosses their brain. Writers also utilize all of the resources afforded to them and are not above any process until they have at least tried it once. Similarly, writers do not have to be in fancy rooms spinning gold. They just have to sit down and write it out, which can be done anywhere that is comfortable for them.

Simply put, a true writer is somebody who writes. They are not worried about whether they are considered a writer or not, whether they look like a writer, or whether they actually ever get to it or not. A true writer hones their skills and perfects their craft by any means necessary, and practical tips always help.