bookgeekconfessions:

This is a problem for me as well. I think even professional writers have this issue. It’s really hard to focus on side characters.

I think the most important thing is that if you are going to name a character and have them in scenes they have to have a purpose and a function. Their purpose cannot be their function. If that makes sense. If you don’t want them to be flat, they cannot be there just to give us information. Or just to show what the author could be if blah, blah didn’t make them special.

For yourself, you have to develop the character. Give them a life and a family, even if you never write them into the story. Knowing the characters history will help you with their reactions, their speech, the way they carry themselves, how they wear their hair and how they dress.

Hopefully these will help:

#5: Character Outline
#12:Cassandra Clare’s Two Things to Ask Yourself About Your Characters.
#30: Creating Characters That Jump Off the Page
#37: Top Nine Character Development Tips
#38: Twelve Character Writing Tips for Fiction Writers
#39: Three Tips For Writing Heavy Emotional Scenes
#45:How to Avoid Creating Plastic Characters
#46: Three Tips for Developing Enthralling Characters
#48: Fifteen Stock Characters – And How to Restock Them.
#59: How To Create Your Main Character’s Backstory
#64: Fifteen Figures of Speech to Color Your Characters
#73: Top Ten Tips to Create a Character Arc
#80: Quick & Dirty Characterization Tips & “Cheats”#81: So You Wanna Write/Play A Powerful Character That Probably Won’t Be Perceived As A Mary Sue?
#82: Basic Tips To Write Better Chosen Ones
#85: Nine Kick-Ass Excercises to Find Your Character’s Voice

bookgeekconfessions:

Write whatever you want. Then take out the first paragraph and last paragraph. Here’s the funny thing about this rule. It’s sort of like knowing the future. You still can’t change it. In other words, even if you know this rule and write the article, the article will still be better if you take out the first paragraph and the last paragraph.

Take a huge bowel movement every day. And you won’t see that on any other list on how to be a better writer. If your body doesn’t flow then your brain won’t flow. Eat more fruit if you have to.

Bleed in the first line. We’re all human. A computer can win Jeopardy but can’t write a novel. If you want people to relate to you, then you have to be human. Penelope Trunk started a post a few weeks ago: “I smashed a lamp over my head. There was blood everywhere. And glass. And I took a picture.” That’s real bleeding. My wife recently put up a post where the first line was so painful she had to take it down. Too many people were crying.

Don’t ask for permission. In other words, never say “in my opinion” (or worse “IMHO”). We know it’s your opinion. You’re writing it.

Write a lot. I spent the entire 90s writing bad fiction. 5 bad novels. Dozens of bad stories. But I learned to handle massive rejection. And how to put two words together. In my head, I won the Pulitzer Prize. But in my hand, over 100 rejection letters.

Read a lot. You can’t write without first reading. A lot. When I was writing five bad novels in a row, I would read all day long whenever I wasn’t writing (I had a job as a programmer, which I would do for about five minutes a day because my programs all worked and I just had to “maintain” them). I read everything I could get my hands on.

Read before you write. Before I write every day, I spend 30-60 minutes reading high quality short stories, poetry, or essays. Books by Denis Johnson, Miranda July, David Foster Wallace, Ariel Leve, William Vollmann, Raymond Carver, etc. All the writers are in the top 1/1000 of 1% of writers. It has to be at that level, or else it won’t lift up your writing at all.

Coffee. I go through three cups at least before I even begin to write. No coffee, no creativity.

Break the laws of physics. There’s no time in text. Nothing has to go in order. Don’t make it nonsense. But don’t be beholden to the laws of physics. This post on my personal blog is an example.

Be honest. Tell people the stuff they all think but nobody ever says. Some people will be angry you let out the secret. But most people will be grateful. Otherwise, you aren’t delivering value. Be the little boy in The Emperor Wears No Clothes. If you can’t do this, don’t write.

Don’t hurt anyone. This goes against the above rule. But I never like to hurt people. And I don’t respect people who get pageviews by breaking this rule. Don’t be a bad guy. Was Buddha a Bad Father? — another one from my blog — addresses this.

Don’t be afraid of what people think. For each single person you worry about, deduct 1% in quality from your writing. Everyone has deductions. I have to deduct about 10% right off the top. Maybe there’s 10 people I’m worried about. Some of them are evil people. Some of them are people I just don’t want to offend. So my writing is only about 90% of what it could be. But I think most people write at about 20% of what it could be. Believe it or not, clients, customers, friends, family — they’ll love you more if you are honest with them. So we all have our boundaries. But try this: for the next ten things you write, tell people something that nobody knows about you.

Be opinionated. Most people I know have strong opinions about at least one or two things. Write about those. Nobody cares about all the things you don’t have strong opinions on. Barry Ritholz told me the other day he doesn’t start writing until he’s angry about something. That’s one approach. Barry and I have had some great writing fights because sometimes we’ve been angry at each other.

Have a shocking title. I blew it the other day. I wanted to title this piece “How I torture women” but I settled for “I’m guilty of torture.” I wimped out. But I have some other fun ones. Like “is it bad I wanted my first kid to be aborted” (which the famous Howard Lindzon cautioned me against). Don’t forget that you are competing against a trillion other pieces of content out there. So you need a title to draw people in. Else you lose.

Steal. I don’t quite mean it literally. But if you know a topic gets pageviews (and you aren’t hurting anyone) then steal it, no matter who’s written about it or how many times you’ve written about it before. “How I Screwed Yasser Arafat out of $2mm was able to nicely piggyback off of how amazingly popular Yasser Arafat is.

Make people cry. If you’ve ever been in love, you know how to cry. Bring readers to that moment when they were a child, and all of life was in front of them, except for that one bittersweet moment when everything began to change. If only that one moment could’ve lasted forever. Take them back to that moment.

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bookgeekconfessions:

Before writers can share their stories, they have to decide what type of storyteller they’re going to hire for a particular gig. Here are the job candidates:

First Person
For this narrator, it’s all “Me,” “Me,” “Me.” (Or, more precisely, “I,” “I,” “I.”) But it’s not that simple. The first-person narrator can be integral to the story, in which case they know only what they observe or discover. Alternatively, they can be a minor character, which may actually free them up to know more than the major players. The first person might also be once or twice removed from the story: They heard it from a friend or a friend of a friend (or some other indirect source).

But keep in mind before you hire this applicant that it’s a challenge to keep the first-person narrator from telling too much, and that such a person is subjective and therefore unreliable. (Actually, that can be a good thing, dramatically speaking.)

First person is an effective device especially for action-oriented genre fiction: detective stories, thrillers, and the like, because this type of narration keeps the reader close to the action and privy to the cogitations of the protagonist, who is usually trying to solve a mystery or foil a plot.

Second Person
The second person (“You”) doesn’t get much work. You might think second person is the most engaging type of narrative, because it puts the reader in the thick of the action, but the device gets old quickly. However, it can be used incidentally, in a prologue or in one or more asides, cued by the first-person or third-person narrator.

Third Person
This narrative device (“He,” “She,” “They”) is the most common, for good reason(s): The third-person narrator is an objective observer who describes and interprets the characters and their actions, thoughts and feelings, and motivations without direct knowledge. (That objectively doesn’t always prevent the narrator from making satirical or otherwise judgmental observations, however.)

But before you leap up and cast this role, there’s one more decision to make: Is this narrator omniscient, meaning they know all, or are they, like the characters, limited in their knowledge? Beyond that, is the third person partisan about the proceedings, or neutral? Consider, too, that just like a first-person narrator, the third person might be unreliable: An observer, whether they have limited or unlimited access to knowing what the heck’s going on, may have a mischievous streak and decide to deceive the reader.

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bookgeekconfessions:

Writers deliver their stories — fiction and nonfiction alike — to readers more effectively when they use appearances of people, places, and things to help drive the narrative and illuminate personalities. Consider these ideas:

People

Some writers omit or minimize description of physical characteristics, considering them peripheral details, but revealing details about a person’s appearance can be a valuable narrative tool, especially when the description up-ends expectations. Helping readers picture a diminutive authority figure — or a sturdy, six-foot-plus word nerd, for that matter — lets them know that the tale isn’t going to be trite.

Practice by jotting down notes about people you know or have seen in person or in images, but take care not to write as if you’re filling out a police report. Instead of describing someone as extremely tall, note how they have to duck their head to walk through a doorway. Rather than using a pedestrian word like huge or petite, use formidable or bantam.

In describing hair or eye color, avoid “lustrous raven locks” and “limpid azure pools of light” phraseology (unless you’re penning a romance novel), and reach for unusual imagery like “hair like a tangle of copper filaments” or “milky-green eyes open wide in an attitude of perpetual astonishment.”

Places

For locations, employ the same strategy: Rehearse your writing by explaining the feel of a room, a street, or a park. Is it expansive, or economical? Friendly, or foreboding? Clean, or chaotic? What do your other senses tell you? What is the noise level? How does it smell? What are the textures like? Is it easy to walk through or along, or to otherwise navigate, or do obstacles interfere?

If your story takes place in a natural landscape, describe the terrain and what associations it has based on whether it conjures a sense of grace, harmony, and peace or whether it is full of bleak, harsh, jagged features. How does the presence of vegetation, or bodies of water, contribute to the feel of the terrain? What effect does the weather produce?

Place your characters in the context of their locations by showing, without telling, whether they are at home in their setting or whether the environment is alien to them, and how they respond to their feelings.

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