poems

If you want to tell the best story possible, you can only do so with characters who are fully alive and made for the world that you’ve created— Not characters who are borrowed from a world that someone else created a long time ago. . . . Characters are storytelling devices that help the reader experience and process the story. If your character is one-note, your story will likewise fall flat. It won’t be as rich and nuanced as it could have been because your stereotypical characters aren’t able to carry the weight.

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It’s Tough Not to Play Favorites With Your Characters

It’s a point echoed by everyone from William Faulkner to Agatha Christie to Ernest Hemingway all the way to Stephen King: you’ve got to write without playing favorites, even if that means killing those that you’re fond of. I get it. After you’ve spent weeks, months, or even years plotting out characters, ideas, scenes, or backstories, the last thing you’ll want to do is delete them like they never even happened. It becomes even more complicated if you get emotionally invested in these characters and root for them.

This is why it takes guts to be an author. It takes an incredible amount of self-control to write a story that you don’t control. It takes bravery to allow the characters to play out exactly as they need to.

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Give vague descriptions of your characters to allow the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks. It’s okay to share hair color, body build, and general features, but if you’re getting into tooth color, you may be going too far.

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“Give your antagonist a virtue. A fully evil villain is boring and two-dimensional. Everyone has at least one admirable trait, such as loyalty, honesty, or bravery. In fact, make your villain likable in some way.”

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“Give your protagonist a flaw. Your readers cannot relate to a perfect, goody-two-shoes main character.”

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Backstory. It’s the best tool you have to develop relatable, realistic, three-dimensional characters for your novel. Sketching out a backstory is not the sexiest part of writing a novel. Investigating motivations, creating genealogies, understanding the socio-political landscape of the world you’re creating— that’s pretty heavy stuff, especially since most of it won’t even make it into your novel.

A backstory is the history of the character. It addresses the following:

• • Who the character is
  • Why the character is the way he or she is

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“Every good story has a plot and every good plot needs a theme.The story is a series of events. The plot is a structure that the storyteller uses to show how the events are connected. The theme is the central message behind the story. To tell the best story possible, you need both a plot and a theme. But here’s the thing: Themes cannot be spelled out. Instead, you’ll need to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to help the reader figure out the story’s theme.”

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“Write from the seat of your pants, especially if you’re accustomed to outlining. Writing without the safety net of an outline can unshackle your creativity.”

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Write every day, whether you feel like it or not. Good writing isn’t an accident. It comes from the daily discipline of sitting down and writing. Yes, you’ll get sick of writing, but eventually, you’ll fall in love with it. Break through to that other side where you must write every single day.

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