bookgeekconfessions:

Tips by Ali Hale

Originally posted on DailyWritingTips

The success of a story rests on its characters. We remember truly compelling, vivid characters long after we’ve finished reading a novel or watching a movie: I’m sure you can recall characters from books you read in childhood.

Great characters can compensate for a weak plot or a so-so writing style – but if readers don’t care about your characters, they’ll put your story down. That clever plot twist or beautiful passage of writing might hook them briefly, but without characters that leap off the page, readers won’t stay engaged.

If you need more evidence that characters are crucially important, search Google for “fan fiction”. Many, many books, TV series and movies have spawned a huge amount of creative writing by fans – and this writing is all about the characters. The plots and sometimes even the settings are different from those in the original, but the characters remain the same.

Simply knowing how important characters are doesn’t help you much, though. You need to figure out how to create truly compelling characters who readers care about, laugh about, even cry about. Here’s how:

What Does Your Character Need?

All compelling characters have a strong need, longing or desire. They should have a problem to overcome. They may not recognise this need (and indeed, many stories are about person coming to understand themselves better – for example, learning that they need companionship).

I picked up a great tip on figuring out what characters need from Holly Lisle’s Create a Character Clinic. Use Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Pick a level on the pyramid (you can find all you need to know on Wikipedia’s page) and then figure out what your character is seeking.

At the most basic, physical level, your character might be in a survival situation and need food and water. Going up a level, you might have a character whose security is threatened: perhaps she’s lost her job, or he’s facing a health crisis.

Quirks Don’t Equal Character

Keep reading

bookgeekconfessions:

Tips by Maeve Maddox
Originally Posted on DailyWritingTips

Anyone who writes fiction wrestles with the problem of how to convey a character’s inner dialogue without distracting from the flow of the story.

How not to do it
Setting off a character’s thoughts in quotation marks is a definite no-no. Such a technique is confusing to the reader. When we see quotation marks, we have the expectation that a character is speaking the words aloud.

Some writers and writer’s guides do use or recommend italics to designate thoughts, but the device is distracting to many readers.

Using a different font would make things worse.

As Suzanne points out, adding to himself to he thought is redundant.

How to do it
Sometimes it is necessary to use “he thought,” or “she wondered” to avoid confusion, but such tags can be used sparingly.

Here are some illustrations from Ellizabeth George’s mystery Deception on His Mind.

In an early scene, in which Rachel and Shalah are together, Rachel’s thoughts are conveyed without any tags through four paragraphs. Then, as Rachel watches Shalah, a tag becomes necessary:

Shalah made two more folds in the nappie and placed it on the pile at the end of the ironing board. She walked to the window and checked on her nephews. It seemed a needless thing to do, Rachel thought. They were sleeping like the dead.

When a character is alone, no tags are needed to convey unspoken thoughts.

Chapter 10 of George’s novel begins with internal dialog:

When she’d first made her escape from the jewellery shop, Rachel had only one destination in mind. She knew that she had to do something to mitigate the uneasy situation in which her actions had placed Sahlah, not to mention herself. The problem was that she wasn’t sure what that something might be. She knew only that she had to act at once.

This internal dialog continues without tags for about five pages before another character appears. In one place in her internal musings, Rachel recalls the words of a salesman. George puts the recalled words in quotation marks:

She didn’t want to think of the flat. “Our very last one,” the salesman had called it…

The Marshall Plan
In his writing guide, Evan Marshall does recommend using italics to convey thought. I don’t agree with this particular piece of advice, but overall, Marshall’s guide is one of my writing bibles.

If you’re not familiar with The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing, check it out. The cover copy bills it as “a 16-step program guaranteed to take you from idea to completed manuscript.”

In “Step 11,” Marshall talks about how to convey feelings, thoughts, and back story without slowing down the reader.

bookgeekconfessions:

In the article Less is More, I wrote that unnecessary words—pleonasms—should be omitted from sentences. Today I’d like to describe specific types of words to avoid.

Adjectives

While adjectives are often necessary, they are best avoided when possible. When you use the right verbs and nouns, adjectives becomes pleonasms — words that can be omitted without changing the meaning of the sentence.

Consider, for example: “Trog polished his sword to a sparkling, bright gleam.” We could remove the adjectives “sparkling” and “bright” and simply write, “Trog polished his sword to a gleam.”

Often, adjectives can be removed by using the proper verb or noun. Consider the sentence, “Trog moved at a quick pace down the narrow street.” We could remove the adjectives “quick” and “narrow” and write, “Trog hurried down the alley.”

Adjectives are sometimes necessary. Whenever possible, I avoid them.

Adverbs

As with adjectives, adverbs are also best avoided when possible. Adverbs can be avoided by choosing a stronger verb. Instead of “said quietly”, write “whispered”. Instead of “ate ravenously”, write “devoured”.

Replacements for Said

I often find myself replacing “said” with verbs such as “growled”, “opined”, “shouted”, etc. I try to avoid this as much as possible. When used too much, these verbs not only become annoying, they interfere with our interpretation of the dialogue.

Consider the following bit of dialogue:

“I’m tired,” Alice complained.

“So go to bed,” Fred suggested.

“But I’m hungry!” Alice whined.

“So eat something,” Fred grumbled.

“But I don’t have any food,” Alice lamented.

I’ve seen some writers avoid “said” as if trying to impress us with their array of synonyms. These days, “said” is the preferred verb to use in dialogue; most editors will reject a manuscript which uses too many “said” alternatives. It’s almost always better to use “said”, a neutral verb, and let the dialogue itself convey the tone.

writeworld:

Anonymous asked: I am so frustrated. I have had so many brilliant ideas. I put pieces together in my head and I get excited about it. But every time I’ve tried writing a beginning, I end up erasing the document and never going back. This. Keeps. HAPPENING. I really don’t know what to do, or what’s wrong with me. Could you help me out?

Alright, tough love, bro.

Writers write. That’s it. There’s nothing wrong with coming up with ideas and getting excited and letting that be the end of it. There are plenty of non-writers that have cool ideas for stories. But at the end of the day, if you want to be a writer, you have to have the courage and the discipline to write. Write even if you’re afraid, even if, on second thought, you’re pretty sure the idea sucks. Write with the understanding that you’re not perfect and neither is your writing. You’ll have time to buff and polish your story later. Writers write. That’s the whole shebang. 

If you have brilliant ideas but you’re not writing, maybe this whole writing thing isn’t for you. Maybe you’re a painter or a violinist or a ballet dancer. Maybe there is some other way you could get your stories out there that would be a better fit for you. Maybe you’re not a writer. That’s okay. There are plenty of ways to tell a story. 

There’s only one way writers tell stories, though: they write. 

If you’re still willing to give the writing thing a chance, here’s what I’ve got for you.

• First of all, don’t erase your work. Please don’t erase your work? For new writers, having your old ideas around—even the ones you didn’t particularly like—can be very helpful. You can learn so much from the projects you didn’t finish, and you might find new inspiration to continue an old project sometime in the future. If you delete your work, you make the things I just described to you a heck of a lot harder. I avoid the delete button altogether by writing in notebooks. 
• Give yourself permission to suck. You’re never going think you’re as amazing as your favorite authors, so you might as well give yourself permission grow as a writer free of the self-imposed pressure to become Hemingway or Heinlein or anyone else but you. Allow yourself the freedom to make mistakes without getting too down on yourself. No one reaches their fullest potential overnight; it takes practice, and practicing means making mistakes. 
• Write often. When you practice a lot, you learn more. Writing often earns you the discipline to create continuously instead of in random bursts and the confidence of Woody Harrelson wielding a baseball bat in the midst of the zombie apocalypse (#convoluted analogy)…
  So, a lot of confidence. And trust me, a healthy ego is half the battle. The other half is divided pretty evenly between discipline and innovation. Writing as much as you can will help you develop all three of these things. 

I’m not here to tell you what you are or aren’t, and I don’t pretend to fully understand your problem. I’m just going to reiterate that writers write and suggest to you that actually writing might be a good place to start cracking this conundrum. 

Thank you for your question! If you have any comments on this article or other questions about writing, you can message us here!

-C

writeworld:

Anonymous asked: I need some help describing characters of color. Any advice or references?

This is from our Towel on writing people of color:

• Gee, I don’t know how to research writing Characters of Color tastefully
• A Few Tips and Resources for Writing POC Characters
• Additional tips on writing PoC characters
• Cedarseed’s Guide to Human Types
• Writing Racially and Culturally Diverse Characters (short answer)
• Describing Skin Colors
• EXTREMELY IN-DEPTH GUIDES TO DRAWING DIFFERENT ETHNICITIES
• Sordid Fairy Tale: Offensive Mistakes Well-Intentioned Writers Make!
• The Term POC
• Our “Skin Deep” Tag

Thank you for your question! If you have any comments on this article or other questions about writing, you can message us here!

-C