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Music.
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Are you a writer whose mind is a whirlwind of creativity and distraction?
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Hello, and welcome to Writing While Distracted, the writing podcast that helps
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you transform your scattered thoughts into literary brilliance.
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I'm Brenda Murphy, your NeuroSpicy writing coach. For writers of all kinds,
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but particularly those dealing with distraction and mental health issues,
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this podcast will offer positive advice for staying focused amidst the chaos
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of your mind, along with tips to help you find your story's beginning and use
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your strengths to get to the end of your novel.
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Because here, creativity thrives in the midst of chaos.
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Stay tuned as we talk about character creation and how it influences our fiction.
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Creating characters for our fiction is one of the most fun, complex,
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and sometimes terrifying writing tasks.
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Every writer has their method of character creation. Some use a checklist or
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a list of questions to interrogate their characters.
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Others write out elaborate backstories and long histories of their characters' lives.
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At the heart of every story are characters. And character growth drives every
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bit of fiction, no matter what kind of novel you're writing.
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Even those stories that rely on more detailed plots, depend on their characters'
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reactions, inactions, actions, and behaviors to move the story along.
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So what is the terrifying part of character development?
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Getting it right. We must work to have our characters' behavior ring true.
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Character creation, the heart of storytelling, is the one thing most likely
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to keep me up at night worrying if I got it wrong.
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What does it mean to get a character wrong? I know that I'm not alone.
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And there have been times I'm reading a book or watching a film and one of the
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characters does something so beyond their nature that you close the book or
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turn the movie off because they've jumped the shark.
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And now the beautiful bubble, that suspension of belief that keeps you reading
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or keeps you watching is broken.
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And you're left muttering to yourself, what the heck was that about?
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And what about writing characters outside our lived experiences?
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What are the key things we need to know about our characters to prevent our
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readers from closing the book and wondering what the heck we were talking about.
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Fear of getting characters wrong stops many new writers cold.
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They get so twisted worrying about how their characters will be received that
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they give themselves a massive case of writer's block.
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And this is a pro tip for me. If you write contemporary fiction,
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folks will often assume the characters you create are based on people you know or yourself. self.
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And this is also part of our fear.
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We often use elements of ourselves in creating characters, even if we are not
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conscious of it at the time.
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We worry that we will reveal too much of ourselves, or that others will see
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themselves in our characters and be really angry.
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The cure for this is to write it anyway.
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Portray your characters as honestly as possible.
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Don't be afraid to create characters who differ from you in gender identity,
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race, or culture. Do your research.
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Conduct interviews and work with sensitivity readers when you're creating characters
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that are outside your lived experiences.
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And this is how you create relatable characters.
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Pay your sensitivity readers.
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Pay people that you work with. to help you perfect your characters.
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If you can't pay money, work out some kind of an arrangement or an exchange of goods.
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I've had people that I've worked with, sensitivity readers, where I have been
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able to offer some of my services as a writer for their work.
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Find people that you can talk to who are willing to share and will help you
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perfect your characters.
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Don't assume, however, that one person or talking to one person will give you
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insight into everything about that particular character or that particular culture
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if you are writing outside your own culture and even writing within your culture.
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Culture is not a monolith.
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There are so many layers and so many facets.
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Your goal as a writer is to bring realness to your characters in what they experience
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in their everyday lives and what they're going to experience in your novel.
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This is how you create relatable characters. At the very least,
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I found it helpful to know these things about your characters.
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I don't use a detailed checklist for my characters, but I do have a set of questions
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that I ask myself about my characters and about who they are.
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And I've spoken about this before, but there is a character workbook that you
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can download for free from my website that will get you started in the direction
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and show you a little bit of behind the scenes in how I go about creating characters.
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At the very least, I've found it helpful to know these things about your characters.
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As I'm going through this list, know that internal refers to those behaviors
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that are unobservable, and external refers to tangible and observable behaviors.
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And I'll give you an example of this. Wanting financial security is an internal goal.
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Having a million dollars in your bank account is an external goal.
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So for my characters, I go through this list.
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What are their internal and external goals? What do they want?
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And then I go through their internal and external motivations.
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Why do they want it? I go through their internal and external conflicts.
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Why can't they have what they want? Why can't they achieve their goals?
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What's keeping them blocked?
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What is their internal conflict?
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What is their external conflict? Is someone preventing them from making money?
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Are they locked away in some closet and they can't get out to go to a job?
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Or do they have an internal conflict in that they can't work the kind of job
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they ethically don't want to take the kind of job that they feel is going to
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make them that kind of money because they think it's a creepy kind of job to have?
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Fears. What are they afraid of? What scares them? What keeps them up at night?
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What worries them the most? How far will they go?
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And this is a very big part of plot development because you have to know what
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they'll do to get their goals or what they won't do.
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So this is where you draw those lines that help you connect the dots in your plot.
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What will they sacrifice? What will they overcome?
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What will they do to get where they want to go?
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The other one, and I love this one the most, the lie they tell themselves and
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the lie they tell others about themselves.
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And hat tip to Molly O'Keefe for sharing this bit of wisdom at a conference
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workshop that I attended years ago, and it has informed my fiction ever since.
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That's a huge part of all of us.
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We all lie to ourselves about certain
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things, about our behaviors or our personality or what we're doing.
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And then we also misrepresent ourselves to other people.
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We might be, on the outside, strong and capable and confident,
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and on the inside, we are an anxiety-riddled mess.
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So that's a false front that you're presenting.
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Those are the kinds of things, if you can get those perfected in your characters,
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it makes them, again, extremely relatable.
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I do a timeline for my character for significant events in their lives,
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up to the point of the novel and how they feel about them.
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For example, a divorce can be seen as positively or negatively by the character.
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Directions for this kind of an exercise can be found in chapter six of Eileen
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Cook's brilliant book, Build Better Characters.
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And if you can only afford one
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book, one craft book about building characters, this is the book for you.
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It has made such a difference in people's response to my characters.
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And I highly recommend you either own a copy or borrow a copy from the library
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and read the book. It is so helpful.
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The other thing I always wanna know about as far as my characters go are who
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are the important people in their lives? What are their relationships?
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Who do they have in their lives? Do they have parents? Do they have sisters
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or brothers or half siblings?
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Do they have children? Are they an only child? All of those things influence
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how you go about in the world.
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And those are the things that, again, inform your character's behavior.
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The books and classes that I recommend for learning how to create characters are, again,
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Eileen Cook's amazing book about the psychology of backstory and how to use
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it in writing characters that'll hook your reader. That's Eileen Cook's book.
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I'm going to link to all of these books in the show notes so you can find them.
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Deborah Dixon's Goal, Motivation, and Conflict was the very first book I ever
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read about character development and character arcs.
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It's not a very long book, but at the heart of any story are your character's
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goals, their motivation for achieving those goals, and the obstacles in their way.
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And this book is a must-have. Either, again, borrow it from the library or own
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it if you can, but it is an amazing, amazing help to creating characters.
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Her simple explanations and worksheets are outstanding.
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A class that also helped me in learning to write characters for books,
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and this may seem a little out there, was Hal Ackerman's screenwriting class,
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that I took through CreativeLive.
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And it was offered as part of a package.
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You can look, CreativeLive often has sales. You can get into the program.
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It's not free, but look around for it. You can often find coupons and codes.
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The best part of Hal's class was his explanation of how characters' behavior drive your plot.
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And it is so worth the price.
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I'm going to add a link for the Creative Live in the show notes and for that class in particular.
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I found it super helpful. The other books that I often turn to in developing
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characters when I start to look at what are the lies they tell themselves,
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lies often revolve around emotional wounds, something that has happened in your
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life and then you make up a story to tell yourself to deal with whatever that event was.
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Some of the best books that I've found about emotional wounds,
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positive and negative character traits, and conflicts are Angela Ackerman's
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and Becky Puglisi's Emotional Wound Thesaurus and their Conflict Thesaurus.
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They have several volumes of those. Again, I'm going to link to those in the comments.
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I use this collection of books in two. if I'm starting to noodle a book,
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if I'm really starting to think about it and I'm casting about for plot ideas
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and conflicts that'll power the story, I thumb through these books for ideas.
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And if I already have a rough idea of the conflict at the center of my story,
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I use these books to define how they'll play out.
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Please don't skip the introductions in these books because again,
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they'll explain the concept of how to use each thesaurus.
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I found these books in the the library, take advantage of your free resources
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to check them out to decide whether or not you want to own them.
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I'll link to them below. But again, check out your library first and then decide
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if the book's for you. And that goes for anything that I recommend on this podcast.
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Check it out for free first, if you can, through a library. Or maybe if you
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have a friend that's a writer, ask them if you can borrow it.
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But those are great ways to add to your craft library without spending a lot of money.
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After reading and rereading all of the books that I've talked And all of the
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resources that I've used.
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And full credit here, I credit Eileen Cook's Build Better Characters for my Goldie win.
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That was the first time I feel like I really grasped how characters' backstories
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and the characters themselves' behaviors drive your plot.
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I've come up with a form that helps you organize the information that I presented
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in this podcast in what I hope is a helpful way.
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And again, I will link to that down in the show notes. It's entirely free to
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get it. Just click on the link below.
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It'll take you to a landing page and put in your email address and download
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that PDF and get started building characters.
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My final bit of advice as far as character creation goes, and especially for
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neurodivergent people, is
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to pay attention to those things that make you back away from a character.
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If you start to write a character or develop a character and it feels a little
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sticky or you get a little worried, pay attention to that because sometimes
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that resistance is where the gold lies in that character.
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Write the horrible person. Write the really good person. When you write the
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horrible person, don't be afraid of going too far.
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That is what keeps a lot of fiction stuck in the mediocre category.
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What drives powerful fiction is having characters that make you feel something.
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Either you love them and wish they would be your best friend or your partner,
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or you absolutely hate them and you really read hoping that they will get the
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horrible comeuppance that they need.
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And think about all of your favorite stories. Why do you go back to them?
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You go back to them because the characters are like your best friends.
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They're people you can count on to deliver a really good and entertaining story.
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Why do you return to favorite authors? Because you can depend upon them to give
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you characters and stories that keep you turning pages, that they'll excite
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you, that they make you happy.
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They make you feel things when you write.
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And if you don't feel things when you write your characters,
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your readers are not going to feel anything either.
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And that's not an original thought about your fiction.
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But if you're writing a character and you don't feel anything writing that character,
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you need to review everything you've done because you should feel something.
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You either love the character you created or you hate them, but you're going
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to use them anyway because they're the most excellent antagonist or villain.
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But use those things, use those feelings that you have around your characters
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to create characters that will keep your readers coming back.
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Pay attention, do your work.
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Think the hard things, do the hard
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things, get your characters nailed down before you go off on your book.
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And the reason I'm saying this is because when you get to the sticky middle,
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and you will, or you've run into a roadblock and you don't know where your story is going to go,
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having fully developed three-dimensional characters is going to help you drive
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your story forward because you can back up and say, what would my characters do in this situation?
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If you get stuck, like, I don't know what they're doing here,
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or I don't know what should happen here.
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Lean on your characters. Use that work you've done.
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Use the knowledge of your characters to drive your story forward.
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And especially for all of you pantsers out there or people like me that have
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a trellis that I hang my story on, use your characters. They're a vital part
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of your story pre-writing.
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So take the time to do it. It is not wasted time. It is not time that you should
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be doing something else.
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Take the time to get to know your characters. Because once you've created fully
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3D characters, they still will surprise you.
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But you'll know that their behaviors are underpinned by things you know about them.
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You won't have characters doing outrageously ridiculous things that don't make
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sense that have readers tossing your book aside and going and picking up another book.
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So final word, do the work, enjoy the work, have fun creating your characters.
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It can be the most fun, even if it feels like the most fraught part of creating a book.
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Until next time, keep writing. Thanks for tuning in to Writing While Distracted,
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where we navigate the whining roads of creativity amidst the chaos of distraction.
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If you've enjoyed this podcast and found it useful, share it and tag me.
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DM me and let me know what you found most helpful.
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Please leave a review. It really helps get the podcast in front of more folks.
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Remember, in the dance between focus and aversion, every stumble is a step closer
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to mastering the art of writing.
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Join us next time as we continue to unravel the mysteries of the writer's mind.
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Until then, keep writing, keep wandering, and embrace the distractions that fuel your creativity.
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Stay tuned. Stay inspired.
