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Hello.
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I'm Zara a self-published author of young adult and new adult fiction and I'm Kelli a fantasy writer being held together by threads of optimism, and this is Write-Ish, the podcast by writers for writers where we discuss craft and hot topics in the writing community.
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Mhm Alright, so character first or plot first, I feel like this is a big question that sometimes writers have and for myself personally I will imagine a loose plot and then from there create the characters afterwards and sometimes on the rare occasion I will create the antagonist regardless of what people who tell you that multitasking is possible and that we're not focused switching.
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I would say that the closest thing to multitasking is what happens with me because I get the idea that comes to me is always a character is in a situation and that situation is almost always the first chapter, the character is in a specific situation which is the inciting incident and then I kind of just go from there.
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So I don't picture like, oh here's a scenario, what if someone was in it aside from my nano project which is like the exception to this rule and I think it was that was just such a but then very quickly I was like, okay, Romy is my main character and her real name is Rosemary, but like her sister calls her Romeo as like a small rebellion against their mom and where the sister didn't know her name immediately, but you know, it's going to have a super graceful name that like doesn't really match her kind of combative rebellious personality which like irks the mom, I kind of just had everything I needed for the start for someone who doesn't do all the world building in advance, which you know, this isn't a world building episode, but I feel like, you know, very often a premise arises from the world or the world arises from the premise which is true for me, but it's always later.
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Whereas the character and the premise come together, I'm sorry, that was very long winded.
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No, no, that's totally fine.
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Also, if you missed the last episode where Zara talked about what she was going to be doing for NaNoWriMo, make sure you check that out.
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It is on the website and also foreshadowing to future episodes about world building and what we will be doing with that.
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But um I feel what you're saying because with some projects like Project D for me, I wasn't even inspired by the main character or wanting to create a main character.
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First, the story for Project D came from my loathing for Zeus and how I wanted to showcase how much of a douche bag he was, because let's be honest, Disney messed it up.
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Zeus is not a loving doting father and husband.
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Okay, I was so opposed to writing retellings because I never thought I would like do it good enough or I thought that they were like a lot of people do them and I was like, you know what, screw it, I want to do a retelling and I'm going to have a Zeus inspired character that is actually a douche bag and the bad guy of course, now there are some twists and the Zeus inspired character isn't the main bad guy, he's still a bad guy and obviously a big douche bag, but my main big bad is someone with more of an unexpected twist.
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So, while I had my antagonist in my plot already kind of created, I did not refine anything about the main character until afterwards, and the main character is a Dionysus inspired character, so I thought, you know what better person or an unexpected hero to be the party boy or you know, stereotyped party boy and also stereotype drunkard according to some myths.
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Yeah, I'm actually gonna implement that.
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So, um touching lightly on the area I live in alcoholism is pretty heavy and runs through a lot of families mine included, so I am going to implement that into the story as of an internal conflict for the diagnosis inspired character, I thought it would be interesting to do that and it might be a little bit cathartic on my end.
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Yeah, totally, I mean, I know we literally just talked about doing an episode in the future about how much you as the author should put yourself in a character and I mean just off the top of my head, the most obvious example and also kind of the cathartic feeling that we talked about in our first episode I gave, unfortunately for her, the main character in my new adult sci fi romance trilogy PTSD.
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It's not the same as my PTSD.
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What I've been through is not the type of PTSD that she has because she didn't have my experiences but we both have nightmares and conflicting feelings about things and then being angry at those conflicted feelings that it's I feel like people don't talk about the things we just mentioned as own voices but it is in the spirit of it because who better to write a certain experience and people who have gone through it.
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You know that was something to that I was thinking about with Project Curse Breaker because as you know, I am someone who lives with dissociative identity disorder I've talked about on my channel briefly, I've talked about how it's impacted my stories and impacted my life and how it has evolved around my characters.
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None of my characters directly have my diagnosis.
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However, there's other qualities that are implemented into the story or implemented into the characters to kind of resemble me as an author living with this, but I never really thought about doing own voices.
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A because I am a white lady be my character.
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It's not like my story is driven by an LGBT+ plot line even though I am on that spectrum.
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My story is not driven by that It's more so mental health driven.
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And speaking of curse breaker also known as the colorful legacy of Lara every werewolf, her character characterization I should say came about very differently than my main character for project D.
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Because Lara has grown with every draft and she's changed with every draft whether it be physical appearance, physical or mental conditions because at one point in time she was going to be ill due to me being around my aunt who had like chronic illness and you know, she was sick with cancer.
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Um, but I changed it to where her mother figure had the illness and not her so much.
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And I even changed some of her personality traits because I thought at the beginning, she was too passive and too much like the story was happening to her and not her being active in the story and once upon a time ago her age was actually middle grade age so that you know, the story could have been completely different if I would have stuck with that age category.
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But I feel like it's important that all those changes, you know, take place because it's natural and organic and should take place with each draft.
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And I feel like sometimes writers stress about making the perfect main character right off the bat and that's just not how it happens.
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Your main character will grow as you're writing grows and as your storytelling abilities grow and that's okay.
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Yeah, I mean I totally agree.
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I went through the, is my character too passive and I did make the choice to maybe keep her more passive than I think some writers and definitely some editors would have advised, but she fights back in her own way.
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And I think that reflects a part of me, like the way I've lived my life up to a certain point, but also when you have God playing God with your life, it's a little bit hard to um not be the tiniest bit passive, but also with like the age thing.
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I initially wrote it as squarely young adults and then as I was writing and revising it from the Belgrave legacy as its own trilogy only about Fawn and Caleb and turning it into a single book called The Belgrave Legacy, which was then followed by two sequel slash companion books about the other characters in the story.
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It was young adult.
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And then just by virtue of the fact that I needed my main character, my main female character, I should say to be more isolated and cut off from her mom's very good and wise influence.
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So, I was like, she's got to be away at college which could be up a young adult.
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New adult.
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It's the themes are still kind of more Young Adult, than New Adult.
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So, I normally say its upper young adult, but it gets the point across that like the anti-hero slash the main male protagonists could have done shadier things while being employed by the devil, you know, like, I didn't have to whitewash it as much.
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Um I'm not graphic or anything because, you know, I did write it for like a partially young adult audience, but it's things change either because you get to know your characters better as you're writing and you're like, oh, they wouldn't react like that, or sometimes the story influences it like minded.
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Now, we've talked about main characters a lot as we are talking about character plot first, but something else that I think comes up frequently is who's more fun to write villains or your main character.
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Oh yeah, I would say it depends when your villain is the literal devil and you've kind of based it off Ian Somerhalder as Damon Salvatore on the Vampire Diaries and kind of off of tom Ellis as Lucifer in Lucifer, you kind of have to have, I was really sexy.
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Well, that, but like, I don't play into it that much.
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The dynamic felt very wrong, although I gotta say that that very dynamic is kind of what drives my new adult sci fi romance, so clearly I got over some stuff, but like, his snark and his complete disregard for authority and his kind of like, I have a lot of power, I'm gonna do whatever I want with, It was just a lot of fun to write for someone who is unfortunately, you know human, it's kind of just fun to write that type of character who maybe also gives some cathartic release for not as nice desires that you know, sometimes intrude in our thoughts, but then yeah, because we're human because we're human, but then by contrast, the villain and my new adult sci fi romance trilogy, he's an alien, but he's also a sexist jerk.
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But writing him isn't fun for me because I love my main characters so much.
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He is sexist jerk.
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Yeah, there’s a scene that he's in where he gets in a few good bars, like that's because how it comes to me, but I'm more having fun in that scene if at all, because my main characters like give it back to him in somewhere, I'm not like having fun writing these like really like sexist jerk comments that I've had to deal with.
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Yes, I understand that completely.
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I agree that, you know, as writing villains that can be more fun because you get to push the limits of whatever world you created and the rules that exist in that world and the morals and different things and you can really dig into what makes them the way that they are if you want, you also get to play with them a little bit more so than you do the main character because I feel like certain readers hold a main character to certain standards of traits that they think are good and I mean, yes, you can have morally gray main characters, I mean look at Deadpool right, everyone loves Deadpool.
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He kind of is an anti-hero, he does his own thing, but he also has his own set of rules.
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Like it doesn't get more I guess in the middle than that, but not everyone can write a Deadpool, but I think also he doesn't do bad things, or he doesn't do bad things for bad reasons, you know what I mean?
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Yeah, he does them for good reasons.
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Yeah, so people get behind that whereas a villain, they might think it's a good reason, but to everyone's house, like writing the story and the other characters are like that is an awful ready.
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Yes.
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Yeah, and it's more fun to play around with villains like that because I feel like sometimes writers get stuck in the hole, well they're just bad because they're bad.
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Okay, well what made them bad, not you're not born bad, something made you that way, because there's a whole environment versus nurture thing, like what drove them to be that way?
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And I think that too, in contrast to how you would normally write your hero, it's just it allows you to get more into nitty gritty stuff because while your hero may have a tragic backstory that there's still something inside of them that's inherently good where with a villain, they're inherently good trait got corrupted and what made it corrupt, that's the things I want to know.
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But sometimes as a writer, whenever I'm creating a backstory for a villain, that's some stuff that the reader may not ever know.
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But at least I know and then that contributes to why the villain is such a good villain and I'm thinking like Azula, oh yeah Azula is so complex and the fact that she's also a victim of Ozai and I think a lot of people overlook that.
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I know I overlooked that as a child watching it but as an adult and as a mother looking and rewatching the series, I still feel for Zuko and he is still my favorite character, my first like cartoon boy crush ever.
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But I feel for her and the fact that like you watch her slowly psychologically break down and it just makes her as a villain that much more interesting and I feel like that was a while and was probably fun to write.
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It was also probably really fun for those writers to delve into her psychology definitely like in the later episodes and there is an almost hour long YouTube video that I watched that goes all into Azula psychology and why shouldn't just diagnosed her as one thing or another and how nature and nurture but mostly nurture actually created her my favorite line and wicked the musical, which is a flip on the wisdom of Oz based on the novel Wicked by Gregory Maguire Glinda asks are people born Wicked or his wickedness thrust upon us and then in once upon a time the villain slash anti-hero kind of depended on what the plot was which side of the line Rumpelstiltskin was on but he would always say evil isn't born dearie it's made.
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And we see that play out with Regina and eventually the Wicked Witch of the West and just so many characters and also in X men first class we see that Xavier and magneto they were friends because they were united over the fact that they were mutants but their ideologies brought them so far apart that they align themselves with different groups that had to fight each other because of their ideologies but they, magneto wasn't a villain from the start, he was you know a victim of the holocaust which is not a spoiler.
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You find out that in like the 1st 15 minutes I think of the original X men film and then it's rehashed in X men first class, so he's traumatized obviously and then he finds a found family only to have that found family attacked.
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So, he becomes militant, and you can disagree with it but at least you can understand it.
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Yes.
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Also, sometimes we're talking about like all these very well-known villains and how much fun it was probably for the writers to write them and why it's fun to get into the villain mind and why it's fun to kind of unravel their psychology and write about them.
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But some stories like my project Curse Breaker it doesn't have a main villain.
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The villain is the circumstances that are created by the plot and basically it is something causing the main character to have something more internal struggling and more internal going on.
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So, and Curse Breaker or the colorful legacy of Allora ever wolf.
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The main thing putting pressure on Allora is with her breaking the curse and that also being her mother's last dying wish.
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And how many will see a specific character as an antagonist of the story.
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You kind of see their perspective a little bit better once this character is introduced and as we were talking earlier you can understand them and why they are going about the things that they are going and that they're not really a bad.
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Like the bad guy of the story.
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That's just an example with Curse Breaker though because obviously there are villains who yes you may be under like be able to understand why they're doing what they're doing.
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But there's still a villain where with Curse Breaker it's more so the rumors around this character and the reputation that is proceeding this character makes you think that this is the big bad but in reality, and Curse Breaker the big bad is the circumstances that the plot creates because that's just how the plot came to me.
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I don't know there's just different types of stories where the where the villain isn't always embodied in a character.
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I think it's also important to talk about the difference between villain and antagonist, they can be the same person but, in my mind, and antagonist is someone whose wants and or actions conflict with the heroes and a villain is someone who is actively going against what the hero is trying to do.
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I think that's a very good point because you can have an antagonist who wants the same job opportunity as your hero let's say.
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And if they're just doing their best and not sabotaging the hero then they're an antagonist.
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But if they're purposely and repeatedly because it has the last length of a novel, sabotaging the hero that would make them a villain, I think that's a good example.
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I'm also thinking of with Project D my Zeus inspired character is a bad guy, he is actively seeking out to fulfill this prophecy that he thinks is about him and he's actually trying to fulfill it, which is causing chaos and disarray among the other Greek God inspired characters.
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But the villain of that story is actually behind the scenes pulling the strings, moving chess pieces where they want them to be and it's not revealed until the end, I love a twist ending.
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If there's a way that you can tell upon reading it a second time, where you can pick up breadcrumbs, you know, otherwise it's kind of sloppy writing but I like the popularity again of a villain not being so obvious and I feel like Disney has obviously done an amazing job, very obvious villains and all you have to do is look at the renaissance films that you know, and then we have newer films where a character is introduced by the end of the first act and then is at the end revealed to be a villain, some with quote unquote justifiable motives, although obviously not condone noble motives and others where you're like you didn't really flush out your villain, but the twist was so good.
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So that's what I am excited about with this is that this is the first time I've written a villain in this way because my villains have always been more like a parent, like a very in your face, this is the big bad and I think by doing it this way it's going to be challenging me a bit.
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So, I'm curious to see how this draft ends up.
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I'm also thinking that because of the way I'm preparing for this NaNoWriMo in November with all the prepping I'm doing that should help, but I agree like it has to be done right and you know, you do a lot of deep work on your villain and you have a backstory for your main characters and by comparison, I feel like I don't do any, I mean it works for me, but I guess the question is, is like how deep do you outline your characters before starting to write the first draft?
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Okay.
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Mhm.
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Well, I normally start with a loose concept and that loose concept is with the loose plot and I just write whatever I can I brain dumped.
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And then basically as the time went, the writing muscle grew, and I started giving little descriptions to my characters before writing.
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So, I would do little paragraphs for each character before I wrote.
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And then I was like, well this isn't working.
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Let me make a backstory for these characters, even though the reader might not ever see this back story, it will be vital for me.
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And then I was actually watching an Abbie Emmons video recently, I'm going to be talking about her lots, but she was talking about how if you do that, if you have back story and somewhere in your book the manuscript, you need to insert a flashback, you just go take from your backstory and insert it and it makes it seem more realistic.
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So, I almost right, very at least with Project D.
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This is the first real time disclaimer.
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I went this far in depth with plot, like planning out and giving back story and fleshing out where before it was these little snippets of that may be a paragraph 22 paragraphs long about each character and how it's tied to another character, but I'm curious to see how this more detailed outlining experience of my characters for Project D versus all my other projects, how that fares for me.
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And if it's going to make the draft cleaner and if it's going to make the characters more three dimensional and the hope is that all this work, I'm putting into it will do that.
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Because while some people don't need to do that, I feel like I am the writer that needs that story before I write the story.
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If that makes sense, that makes a lot of sense to me.
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I think it applies to most writers that I've talked to through author to or through creative writing classes I've taken, and I get my character I normally know their relationship with their parents whether or not it's a single dad, single mom.
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My young adult dystopian romance will have both parents living, but my two already published trilogies only have one.
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So, like I know that, and I generally like to have a very vague idea of why the other parent isn't there, but I don't really flesh it out unless I'm like, I need to mention this in the story for a reason and then who are their friends and how do they interact when I did, I guess you would call it a flashback.
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But to me it didn't feel like a flashback because it was like the president of the novel and then you flash forward a few years later and then that becomes the president of the novel.
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I knew that was going to be at school with her best friend and her twin brother and her brother's best friend was her first and only boyfriend before she meets Caleb who's the main male character of look and that was important to know because brother's best friend slash ex-boyfriend but also her friend.
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It grew out of that was a to contrast her relationship with Caleb, how that came purely from passion basically.
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And the other one came from friendship turning into something more and then it's a romance.
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So, things inevitably go wrong for the main couple Before they get right again, I wanted her to have someone she could talk to who is more removed from the situation but still have tension there because it's her ex-boyfriend.
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But I know that I need something to happen.
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I have a character, but I don't just have a cardboard cutout of the character either I come up with the history of the relationship in my mind, but I don't necessarily be like this character was born this year at this time, which makes her this horoscope and this Chinese zodiac, and it explains her traits and why she would react to this situation this way.
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It's much more by gut feeling.
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She reacts this way because that's just how she reacts.
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Yeah, there's no like right or wrong way to create a character.
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Obviously, everyone is different, and their brains work in their own unique way and as you know, we're going to talk about this a lot.
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But as you go through your writing journey, you will learn what works for you now, Zara I know like with me I can picture my character in my head.
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I can get a very good visual idea of what I want them to be, how I want them to carry themselves.
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I know that your mind doesn't work like that.
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So how do you or how does this affect your character creation?
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It definitely affects my character creation.
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Kind of goes back to my pantsing thing even though like I am more of a plot of words like I need these events to happen in a story which we kind of briefly talked about in our last episode for me, a character's appearance doesn't matter to me until it matters.
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And an example of that would be my main character in my new adult sci fi romance.
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There's a scene actually, there are two scenes that kind of influenced what her hair looked like.
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One is, she's in a fight and I needed her to whip someone in the face with her ponytail because I've done that before and they said it hurt and I was like great.
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And then I also needed the male main character to compare it to sunlight at one point.
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So, I'm like, okay, she's a blonde and then also her height is kind of short for human, but then the aliens are extra tall.
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So, the height difference is very pronounced.
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Whereas in the Belgrave Legacy unmoored and taming the alpha.
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I didn't really think about the heights that much because I was going to say everyone was human, which I guess is true because werewolves and witches and sirens are human enough.
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But my point is that they were all human enough.
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That in my head I could just be like, oh, they're average and like the guys are normally a little bit taller.
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But it does matter unless I haven't seen the female character lifts her chin like in a defiant manner and like stairs.
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The guy in the eye, he's also being argumentative.
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So, he's refusing to dip his head to, like, make the eye contact easy.
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But even then, like in my head, I don't see the height.
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I generally don't see, you know, like, oh, their nose looks like this, and their mouth looks like this.
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It's more just like, I know that if a character's pissed off if they cross their arms or they're frowning and does a line up here on their forehead when they found or does that not happen because it doesn't happen to everyone, but I never see it.
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Which is, I would say strange, but it is called a thing called a fantasia where you can't visually imagine things.
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I can visualize things very, very well from memory, which is great because I can kind of watch any Broadway show that I've ever seen on goop in my own head.
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But when it comes to my characters, I can't just be like, oh, this is what they look like, and this is the space that they're in.
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I more have to think like, okay, they're in this space and this is what happens in the space.
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And more likely than not, someone angrily storms out.
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Is it a big enough space that they can storm out without accidentally brushing past the person they're mad at?
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And if so, my you know, the person they're mad at normally gets in their way.
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But like if they can't be it just their shoulders brushing or is it, we are in way too close personal space for how angry I feel right now.
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And that would change the rest of the scene and the dynamic and things like that.
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Now I know you mentioned like heights and stuff and that wasn't something that I put a lot of thought into.
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And like for the adventures of Templeton manuscript that I did because it was lowers the human and then the rest are like anthropomorphic animals.
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So, the heights vary and it's very crazy, very cookie.
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But with curse breaker, I had to really be aware of birdies height because he is a troll versus Celera was a human and their dynamic with each other because he's supposed to be acting as her mentor.
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And it's very hard sometimes to keep reminding myself, OK, I'm giving him human qualities because you know, to relate with a reader Like he's more humanoid, but he's still a troll, he's still 89 ft tall.
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He has a tail, he has this big boulder that you know, could be mistaken.
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Like it's for camouflage, but he can also store things in it like a backpack.
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That's cool.
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He has glasses, he enjoys reading.
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He has very big cat like ears and whiskers.
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And I had to, like, think about him very carefully though because whenever you think troll, you don't think that right off the bat.
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Yeah, no, definitely not.
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I think of the harry potter troll, I think of the Spiderwick Chronicles.
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I think of like the underground trolls.
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I mean either way it's different than what your troll is.
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But spoiler alert for people who have not been to every single one of our livestream Kelli and I are kind of on the short end have a human female background and I don't know about you Kelli, but Heights was something I was always made very aware of and not necessarily in a good way.
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And so, I've always been very cognizant of it when it became an issue, if that makes sense.
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So, kind of like in an argument or something or trying to reach anything above a certain height.
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Something that I think really in calculates as well is I've been binge watching not only shadow and bone, but every shadow and bone behind the scenes video I can find on YouTube and there's a certain scene that happens between Alina Starkov who is our wonderful heroine and she's not super tall and the darkling played by Ben Barnes who is at best foot or like a head taller than Jessie Mei Li and there is a scene that we're the dynamic changes between them where she's talking to him, but he's like sitting on a desk so they're actually at eye level to each other.
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I don't think it's happened before that point in the show and then something happens and I'm not going to say that although I'm pretty sure the whole internet has already spoiled it at this point.
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Anyway, something happens and then he stands and towers over her, which completely changes the power dynamic from them being like equal so that we're not equals.
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Yes, so it's some attention to, I have a character, Matilda, she's a mouse and Adventures in Thimbleton and she is a very fierce mouse and she's a very small mouse.
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She is I believe second smallest of her five sisters.
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And in this town, she was adopted by the mayor who is an alligator who when standing on his hind legs is about eight ft tall and he has five little daughters.
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But compared to lower, I always make my female characters more my height lore, even though she's like 5253, this mouse standing next to her is like the size of a toddler but whenever they're like in a conflict ng situation it's Matilda who stands up and is more assertive and I like to think it's because she was raised by an alligator but I'll be very aware of okay, I need something here that Matilda can like jump up on to make herself seem bigger in this situation because there are other animals in the storyline such as a wolf cats possum that are more quote unquote fearsome than a mouse.
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So that was that was very fun to write with her character dynamic even though she was so small because I feel like both of us, even though we are smaller scaled women were still very outspoken oh 100%, but it also reminds me of in the behind the scenes for Avengers: Age of Ultron Elizabeth Olsen who plays Wanda Maximoff and then finally becomes the scarlet witch, although at the time marvel couldn't say that because of legal things with Fox, she is working for Ultron at first and Ultron has played by Kevin Spacey and then the behind the scenes that I found he is in a gray onesie within pong balls all over it as a lot of motion capture suits are nowadays and he had a pole attached to his back that went up so much higher than his head and had a neon green tennis ball and that was Ultron online and Elizabeth Olsen was like, there were so many takes where I looked in the wrong place and I looked at Kevin Spacey instead of what Ultron is because it's so unnatural to look at something so much taller than a human.
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And it's like I can only imagine the amount of like CGI and stuff that we have the ability to do is amazing.
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But yeah, with Matilda is a lot of, whenever I'm writing her into a scene, I have to be aware of what is in this that she can make herself appear to be bigger if the situation arises.
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Because Lore is very taken aback by this world because she is the only human there the rest of humankind is extinct and has been extinct for eons.
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So, everyone around is kind of on edge already around the human and she's kind of on edge because she thinks this is all hallucination.
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So, it's Matilda who has to like keep her reined in and keep everybody else like off of her shit keeps the peace.
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But we've been talking a lot about good like characters whether they're our own characters or whether they are characters from other series other works.
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So, let's talk about what we think is necessary for good character creation and I'll go ahead and let you start and then then I'll go I think you need to have characters react in ways that a make sense.
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Even if you can't articulate a reason sometimes if I were that I would maybe feel that I would maybe do the same thing or it could be less articulated where you read that they reacted to certain when you're like yeah that tracks and you don't know why but those actions need to lead somewhere and it doesn't necessarily have to be like a hero's arc and it doesn't have to be a redemption arc.
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Their actions need to lead to them making more decisions and actions that reveal their character more to the reader and they don't have to be likable either.
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But to me a good character arc is someone is you know a fictional someone who when I see what everything they've done I'm like again I understand I might not agree I might you know actively disagree if it's you know a villain, but it makes sense enough that if they were a real person even if the circumstances are fantastical and impossible to exist in the real world.
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Where I could be like yeah, this person could exist.
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I think that's good.
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I think it's like talking about what makes good characters whether it is an antagonist or villain or your protagonist.
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Even side characters.
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Good character arcs are important now.
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Not like I know sometimes character arcs can be a bit messy and whenever you're first getting into taking your writing seriously all of this stuff that we're talking about might seem intimidating but really it is very good to learn about character arcs and whether it is a positive one that your main character will go through, or a negative character arc think Loki and the M.
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C.
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U.
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Universe and how many people adore him?
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It's not because he's the one that we you know we should be rooting for.
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But it's because his negative character arc was done in such a way that you want to root for him even though he's morally gray.
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So, I think really nailing character arcs and the direction you want to take your character and knowing where you want to take them is good for good character creation.
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So, for example, you're going to have to know what this character is fearing and are they going to make fear-based choices or they're going to rise above that fear and make those kinds of choices and whether they make the choices based on fear and that they're scared, that's going to maybe lead them down a road that is going to do take care of the problem temporarily and not permanently.
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And then now they have to keep on trying to think of ways to fix it.
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Like the best thing I can think of is my character and project E.
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That is my diagnosis character.
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He's going to be struggling with drinking and he is scared to not drink because of these false memories that were put in his head essentially he doesn't want to experience them and he doesn't want to feel the pain that is tied with that, but there's going to be a point in the story where he's going to have to choose to overcome this fear of his and take the positive character arc and understand basically what all is what all is happening, that even though those memories hurt and those memories felt real, that they weren't and that he actually has real characters and real people depending on him that need him.
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So that's just a good example that I can think of off the top of my head, I think going off of that to like even though probably your most pivotal moments of character development should be at least partially internal where character makes a decision to be different or be brave or something, you also need to remember that characters don't exist in a vacuum.
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Your character's interactions with people can either stay the same because everyone like the relationship stays the same or you know, the character grows and realizes like, oh I'm going to interact differently in this relationship, even if they don't say it outright or consciously think it or realize it.
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But something that my family has always said is that if you want to know how a person really is, watch how they treat restaurant staff and obviously I'm not relegating your side characters necessarily like that low level of film extra necessarily, but you want your character to also be revealed by interact because that's what happens in her life.
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Yeah.
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And I think that's a really good, it's a really good point to bring up because how your character is also interact with side characters or the mentors or just the characters are supposed to be there stepping in and helping them is really vital, so you don't want to give too much away for project.
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He just because I'm so excited about it, but there is a character that is aiding my Dionysus inspired main character and she's a little bit more stern with him.
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But it's because she also has her own motives that you learn about later of why she's pushing him so hard and whenever that comes to a fold, and he fails her basically the first time around he sees what he caused her to lose, and she was the one that was believing in him and trying to really push him to do it.
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So, then he's stuck with the choice of well do I continue to do what she was wanting me to do and asking me to do or do I just call it quits now because you know what's the point?
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He's also already very depressed character if you couldn't tell poor guy, I haven't even met him.
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Yeah, he's also loosely based off one of my very close friends and he's gonna, once I tell him this he's going to love and be all about it.
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But I'm like yeah, but you know, he's going to go through this really awesome character arc and then he's going to be like Kelli.
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That's not me.
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I see the potential of my friend.
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He'll get there one day.
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All right.
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So, with all that said, I think this is a good place to wrap up.
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This has been the right dish podcast and we'll be back with another episode next week.
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Don't forget to follow us on Instagram @thewriteishpodcast and on Kofi at ko-fi.com/writeish.
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And be sure to join us for a conversation next week where we talk all about outlining and I am super pumped for it. Bye!
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Hello.
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I'm Zara a self-published author of young adult and new adult fiction and I'm Kelli a fantasy writer being held together by threads of optimism, and this is Write-Ish, the podcast by writers for writers where we discuss craft and hot topics in the writing community.
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Mhm Alright, so character first or plot first, I feel like this is a big question that sometimes writers have and for myself personally I will imagine a loose plot and then from there create the characters afterwards and sometimes on the rare occasion I will create the antagonist regardless of what people who tell you that multitasking is possible and that we're not focused switching.
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I would say that the closest thing to multitasking is what happens with me because I get the idea that comes to me is always a character is in a situation and that situation is almost always the first chapter, the character is in a specific situation which is the inciting incident and then I kind of just go from there.
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So I don't picture like, oh here's a scenario, what if someone was in it aside from my nano project which is like the exception to this rule and I think it was that was just such a but then very quickly I was like, okay, Romy is my main character and her real name is Rosemary, but like her sister calls her Romeo as like a small rebellion against their mom and where the sister didn't know her name immediately, but you know, it's going to have a super graceful name that like doesn't really match her kind of combative rebellious personality which like irks the mom, I kind of just had everything I needed for the start for someone who doesn't do all the world building in advance, which you know, this isn't a world building episode, but I feel like, you know, very often a premise arises from the world or the world arises from the premise which is true for me, but it's always later.
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Whereas the character and the premise come together, I'm sorry, that was very long winded.
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No, no, that's totally fine.
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Also, if you missed the last episode where Zara talked about what she was going to be doing for NaNoWriMo, make sure you check that out.
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It is on the website and also foreshadowing to future episodes about world building and what we will be doing with that.
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But um I feel what you're saying because with some projects like Project D for me, I wasn't even inspired by the main character or wanting to create a main character.
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First, the story for Project D came from my loathing for Zeus and how I wanted to showcase how much of a douche bag he was, because let's be honest, Disney messed it up.
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Zeus is not a loving doting father and husband.
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Okay, I was so opposed to writing retellings because I never thought I would like do it good enough or I thought that they were like a lot of people do them and I was like, you know what, screw it, I want to do a retelling and I'm going to have a Zeus inspired character that is actually a douche bag and the bad guy of course, now there are some twists and the Zeus inspired character isn't the main bad guy, he's still a bad guy and obviously a big douche bag, but my main big bad is someone with more of an unexpected twist.
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So, while I had my antagonist in my plot already kind of created, I did not refine anything about the main character until afterwards, and the main character is a Dionysus inspired character, so I thought, you know what better person or an unexpected hero to be the party boy or you know, stereotyped party boy and also stereotype drunkard according to some myths.
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Yeah, I'm actually gonna implement that.
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So, um touching lightly on the area I live in alcoholism is pretty heavy and runs through a lot of families mine included, so I am going to implement that into the story as of an internal conflict for the diagnosis inspired character, I thought it would be interesting to do that and it might be a little bit cathartic on my end.
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Yeah, totally, I mean, I know we literally just talked about doing an episode in the future about how much you as the author should put yourself in a character and I mean just off the top of my head, the most obvious example and also kind of the cathartic feeling that we talked about in our first episode I gave, unfortunately for her, the main character in my new adult sci fi romance trilogy PTSD.
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It's not the same as my PTSD.
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What I've been through is not the type of PTSD that she has because she didn't have my experiences but we both have nightmares and conflicting feelings about things and then being angry at those conflicted feelings that it's I feel like people don't talk about the things we just mentioned as own voices but it is in the spirit of it because who better to write a certain experience and people who have gone through it.
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You know that was something to that I was thinking about with Project Curse Breaker because as you know, I am someone who lives with dissociative identity disorder I've talked about on my channel briefly, I've talked about how it's impacted my stories and impacted my life and how it has evolved around my characters.
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None of my characters directly have my diagnosis.
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However, there's other qualities that are implemented into the story or implemented into the characters to kind of resemble me as an author living with this, but I never really thought about doing own voices.
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A because I am a white lady be my character.
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It's not like my story is driven by an LGBT+ plot line even though I am on that spectrum.
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My story is not driven by that It's more so mental health driven.
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And speaking of curse breaker also known as the colorful legacy of Lara every werewolf, her character characterization I should say came about very differently than my main character for project D.
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Because Lara has grown with every draft and she's changed with every draft whether it be physical appearance, physical or mental conditions because at one point in time she was going to be ill due to me being around my aunt who had like chronic illness and you know, she was sick with cancer.
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Um, but I changed it to where her mother figure had the illness and not her so much.
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And I even changed some of her personality traits because I thought at the beginning, she was too passive and too much like the story was happening to her and not her being active in the story and once upon a time ago her age was actually middle grade age so that you know, the story could have been completely different if I would have stuck with that age category.
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But I feel like it's important that all those changes, you know, take place because it's natural and organic and should take place with each draft.
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And I feel like sometimes writers stress about making the perfect main character right off the bat and that's just not how it happens.
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Your main character will grow as you're writing grows and as your storytelling abilities grow and that's okay.
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Yeah, I mean I totally agree.
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I went through the, is my character too passive and I did make the choice to maybe keep her more passive than I think some writers and definitely some editors would have advised, but she fights back in her own way.
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And I think that reflects a part of me, like the way I've lived my life up to a certain point, but also when you have God playing God with your life, it's a little bit hard to um not be the tiniest bit passive, but also with like the age thing.
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I initially wrote it as squarely young adults and then as I was writing and revising it from the Belgrave legacy as its own trilogy only about Fawn and Caleb and turning it into a single book called The Belgrave Legacy, which was then followed by two sequel slash companion books about the other characters in the story.
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It was young adult.
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And then just by virtue of the fact that I needed my main character, my main female character, I should say to be more isolated and cut off from her mom's very good and wise influence.
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So, I was like, she's got to be away at college which could be up a young adult.
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New adult.
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It's the themes are still kind of more Young Adult, than New Adult.
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So, I normally say its upper young adult, but it gets the point across that like the anti-hero slash the main male protagonists could have done shadier things while being employed by the devil, you know, like, I didn't have to whitewash it as much.
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Um I'm not graphic or anything because, you know, I did write it for like a partially young adult audience, but it's things change either because you get to know your characters better as you're writing and you're like, oh, they wouldn't react like that, or sometimes the story influences it like minded.
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Now, we've talked about main characters a lot as we are talking about character plot first, but something else that I think comes up frequently is who's more fun to write villains or your main character.
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Oh yeah, I would say it depends when your villain is the literal devil and you've kind of based it off Ian Somerhalder as Damon Salvatore on the Vampire Diaries and kind of off of tom Ellis as Lucifer in Lucifer, you kind of have to have, I was really sexy.
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Well, that, but like, I don't play into it that much.
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The dynamic felt very wrong, although I gotta say that that very dynamic is kind of what drives my new adult sci fi romance, so clearly I got over some stuff, but like, his snark and his complete disregard for authority and his kind of like, I have a lot of power, I'm gonna do whatever I want with, It was just a lot of fun to write for someone who is unfortunately, you know human, it's kind of just fun to write that type of character who maybe also gives some cathartic release for not as nice desires that you know, sometimes intrude in our thoughts, but then yeah, because we're human because we're human, but then by contrast, the villain and my new adult sci fi romance trilogy, he's an alien, but he's also a sexist jerk.
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But writing him isn't fun for me because I love my main characters so much.
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He is sexist jerk.
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Yeah, there’s a scene that he's in where he gets in a few good bars, like that's because how it comes to me, but I'm more having fun in that scene if at all, because my main characters like give it back to him in somewhere, I'm not like having fun writing these like really like sexist jerk comments that I've had to deal with.
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Yes, I understand that completely.
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I agree that, you know, as writing villains that can be more fun because you get to push the limits of whatever world you created and the rules that exist in that world and the morals and different things and you can really dig into what makes them the way that they are if you want, you also get to play with them a little bit more so than you do the main character because I feel like certain readers hold a main character to certain standards of traits that they think are good and I mean, yes, you can have morally gray main characters, I mean look at Deadpool right, everyone loves Deadpool.
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He kind of is an anti-hero, he does his own thing, but he also has his own set of rules.
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Like it doesn't get more I guess in the middle than that, but not everyone can write a Deadpool, but I think also he doesn't do bad things, or he doesn't do bad things for bad reasons, you know what I mean?
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Yeah, he does them for good reasons.
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Yeah, so people get behind that whereas a villain, they might think it's a good reason, but to everyone's house, like writing the story and the other characters are like that is an awful ready.
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Yes.
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Yeah, and it's more fun to play around with villains like that because I feel like sometimes writers get stuck in the hole, well they're just bad because they're bad.
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Okay, well what made them bad, not you're not born bad, something made you that way, because there's a whole environment versus nurture thing, like what drove them to be that way?
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And I think that too, in contrast to how you would normally write your hero, it's just it allows you to get more into nitty gritty stuff because while your hero may have a tragic backstory that there's still something inside of them that's inherently good where with a villain, they're inherently good trait got corrupted and what made it corrupt, that's the things I want to know.
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But sometimes as a writer, whenever I'm creating a backstory for a villain, that's some stuff that the reader may not ever know.
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But at least I know and then that contributes to why the villain is such a good villain and I'm thinking like Azula, oh yeah Azula is so complex and the fact that she's also a victim of Ozai and I think a lot of people overlook that.
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I know I overlooked that as a child watching it but as an adult and as a mother looking and rewatching the series, I still feel for Zuko and he is still my favorite character, my first like cartoon boy crush ever.
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But I feel for her and the fact that like you watch her slowly psychologically break down and it just makes her as a villain that much more interesting and I feel like that was a while and was probably fun to write.
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It was also probably really fun for those writers to delve into her psychology definitely like in the later episodes and there is an almost hour long YouTube video that I watched that goes all into Azula psychology and why shouldn't just diagnosed her as one thing or another and how nature and nurture but mostly nurture actually created her my favorite line and wicked the musical, which is a flip on the wisdom of Oz based on the novel Wicked by Gregory Maguire Glinda asks are people born Wicked or his wickedness thrust upon us and then in once upon a time the villain slash anti-hero kind of depended on what the plot was which side of the line Rumpelstiltskin was on but he would always say evil isn't born dearie it's made.
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And we see that play out with Regina and eventually the Wicked Witch of the West and just so many characters and also in X men first class we see that Xavier and magneto they were friends because they were united over the fact that they were mutants but their ideologies brought them so far apart that they align themselves with different groups that had to fight each other because of their ideologies but they, magneto wasn't a villain from the start, he was you know a victim of the holocaust which is not a spoiler.
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You find out that in like the 1st 15 minutes I think of the original X men film and then it's rehashed in X men first class, so he's traumatized obviously and then he finds a found family only to have that found family attacked.
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So, he becomes militant, and you can disagree with it but at least you can understand it.
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Yes.
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Also, sometimes we're talking about like all these very well-known villains and how much fun it was probably for the writers to write them and why it's fun to get into the villain mind and why it's fun to kind of unravel their psychology and write about them.
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But some stories like my project Curse Breaker it doesn't have a main villain.
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The villain is the circumstances that are created by the plot and basically it is something causing the main character to have something more internal struggling and more internal going on.
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So, and Curse Breaker or the colorful legacy of Allora ever wolf.
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The main thing putting pressure on Allora is with her breaking the curse and that also being her mother's last dying wish.
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And how many will see a specific character as an antagonist of the story.
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You kind of see their perspective a little bit better once this character is introduced and as we were talking earlier you can understand them and why they are going about the things that they are going and that they're not really a bad.
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Like the bad guy of the story.
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That's just an example with Curse Breaker though because obviously there are villains who yes you may be under like be able to understand why they're doing what they're doing.
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But there's still a villain where with Curse Breaker it's more so the rumors around this character and the reputation that is proceeding this character makes you think that this is the big bad but in reality, and Curse Breaker the big bad is the circumstances that the plot creates because that's just how the plot came to me.
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I don't know there's just different types of stories where the where the villain isn't always embodied in a character.
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I think it's also important to talk about the difference between villain and antagonist, they can be the same person but, in my mind, and antagonist is someone whose wants and or actions conflict with the heroes and a villain is someone who is actively going against what the hero is trying to do.
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I think that's a very good point because you can have an antagonist who wants the same job opportunity as your hero let's say.
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And if they're just doing their best and not sabotaging the hero then they're an antagonist.
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But if they're purposely and repeatedly because it has the last length of a novel, sabotaging the hero that would make them a villain, I think that's a good example.
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I'm also thinking of with Project D my Zeus inspired character is a bad guy, he is actively seeking out to fulfill this prophecy that he thinks is about him and he's actually trying to fulfill it, which is causing chaos and disarray among the other Greek God inspired characters.
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But the villain of that story is actually behind the scenes pulling the strings, moving chess pieces where they want them to be and it's not revealed until the end, I love a twist ending.
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If there's a way that you can tell upon reading it a second time, where you can pick up breadcrumbs, you know, otherwise it's kind of sloppy writing but I like the popularity again of a villain not being so obvious and I feel like Disney has obviously done an amazing job, very obvious villains and all you have to do is look at the renaissance films that you know, and then we have newer films where a character is introduced by the end of the first act and then is at the end revealed to be a villain, some with quote unquote justifiable motives, although obviously not condone noble motives and others where you're like you didn't really flush out your villain, but the twist was so good.
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So that's what I am excited about with this is that this is the first time I've written a villain in this way because my villains have always been more like a parent, like a very in your face, this is the big bad and I think by doing it this way it's going to be challenging me a bit.
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So, I'm curious to see how this draft ends up.
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I'm also thinking that because of the way I'm preparing for this NaNoWriMo in November with all the prepping I'm doing that should help, but I agree like it has to be done right and you know, you do a lot of deep work on your villain and you have a backstory for your main characters and by comparison, I feel like I don't do any, I mean it works for me, but I guess the question is, is like how deep do you outline your characters before starting to write the first draft?
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Okay.
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Mhm.
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Well, I normally start with a loose concept and that loose concept is with the loose plot and I just write whatever I can I brain dumped.
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And then basically as the time went, the writing muscle grew, and I started giving little descriptions to my characters before writing.
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So, I would do little paragraphs for each character before I wrote.
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And then I was like, well this isn't working.
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Let me make a backstory for these characters, even though the reader might not ever see this back story, it will be vital for me.
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And then I was actually watching an Abbie Emmons video recently, I'm going to be talking about her lots, but she was talking about how if you do that, if you have back story and somewhere in your book the manuscript, you need to insert a flashback, you just go take from your backstory and insert it and it makes it seem more realistic.
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So, I almost right, very at least with Project D.
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This is the first real time disclaimer.
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I went this far in depth with plot, like planning out and giving back story and fleshing out where before it was these little snippets of that may be a paragraph 22 paragraphs long about each character and how it's tied to another character, but I'm curious to see how this more detailed outlining experience of my characters for Project D versus all my other projects, how that fares for me.
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And if it's going to make the draft cleaner and if it's going to make the characters more three dimensional and the hope is that all this work, I'm putting into it will do that.
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Because while some people don't need to do that, I feel like I am the writer that needs that story before I write the story.
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If that makes sense, that makes a lot of sense to me.
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I think it applies to most writers that I've talked to through author to or through creative writing classes I've taken, and I get my character I normally know their relationship with their parents whether or not it's a single dad, single mom.
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My young adult dystopian romance will have both parents living, but my two already published trilogies only have one.
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So, like I know that, and I generally like to have a very vague idea of why the other parent isn't there, but I don't really flesh it out unless I'm like, I need to mention this in the story for a reason and then who are their friends and how do they interact when I did, I guess you would call it a flashback.
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But to me it didn't feel like a flashback because it was like the president of the novel and then you flash forward a few years later and then that becomes the president of the novel.
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I knew that was going to be at school with her best friend and her twin brother and her brother's best friend was her first and only boyfriend before she meets Caleb who's the main male character of look and that was important to know because brother's best friend slash ex-boyfriend but also her friend.
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It grew out of that was a to contrast her relationship with Caleb, how that came purely from passion basically.
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And the other one came from friendship turning into something more and then it's a romance.
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So, things inevitably go wrong for the main couple Before they get right again, I wanted her to have someone she could talk to who is more removed from the situation but still have tension there because it's her ex-boyfriend.
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But I know that I need something to happen.
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I have a character, but I don't just have a cardboard cutout of the character either I come up with the history of the relationship in my mind, but I don't necessarily be like this character was born this year at this time, which makes her this horoscope and this Chinese zodiac, and it explains her traits and why she would react to this situation this way.
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It's much more by gut feeling.
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She reacts this way because that's just how she reacts.
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Yeah, there's no like right or wrong way to create a character.
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Obviously, everyone is different, and their brains work in their own unique way and as you know, we're going to talk about this a lot.
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But as you go through your writing journey, you will learn what works for you now, Zara I know like with me I can picture my character in my head.
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I can get a very good visual idea of what I want them to be, how I want them to carry themselves.
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I know that your mind doesn't work like that.
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So how do you or how does this affect your character creation?
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It definitely affects my character creation.
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Kind of goes back to my pantsing thing even though like I am more of a plot of words like I need these events to happen in a story which we kind of briefly talked about in our last episode for me, a character's appearance doesn't matter to me until it matters.
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And an example of that would be my main character in my new adult sci fi romance.
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There's a scene actually, there are two scenes that kind of influenced what her hair looked like.
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One is, she's in a fight and I needed her to whip someone in the face with her ponytail because I've done that before and they said it hurt and I was like great.
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And then I also needed the male main character to compare it to sunlight at one point.
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So, I'm like, okay, she's a blonde and then also her height is kind of short for human, but then the aliens are extra tall.
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So, the height difference is very pronounced.
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Whereas in the Belgrave Legacy unmoored and taming the alpha.
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I didn't really think about the heights that much because I was going to say everyone was human, which I guess is true because werewolves and witches and sirens are human enough.
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But my point is that they were all human enough.
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That in my head I could just be like, oh, they're average and like the guys are normally a little bit taller.
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But it does matter unless I haven't seen the female character lifts her chin like in a defiant manner and like stairs.
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The guy in the eye, he's also being argumentative.
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So, he's refusing to dip his head to, like, make the eye contact easy.
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But even then, like in my head, I don't see the height.
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I generally don't see, you know, like, oh, their nose looks like this, and their mouth looks like this.
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It's more just like, I know that if a character's pissed off if they cross their arms or they're frowning and does a line up here on their forehead when they found or does that not happen because it doesn't happen to everyone, but I never see it.
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Which is, I would say strange, but it is called a thing called a fantasia where you can't visually imagine things.
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I can visualize things very, very well from memory, which is great because I can kind of watch any Broadway show that I've ever seen on goop in my own head.
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But when it comes to my characters, I can't just be like, oh, this is what they look like, and this is the space that they're in.
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I more have to think like, okay, they're in this space and this is what happens in the space.
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And more likely than not, someone angrily storms out.
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Is it a big enough space that they can storm out without accidentally brushing past the person they're mad at?
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And if so, my you know, the person they're mad at normally gets in their way.
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But like if they can't be it just their shoulders brushing or is it, we are in way too close personal space for how angry I feel right now.
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And that would change the rest of the scene and the dynamic and things like that.
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Now I know you mentioned like heights and stuff and that wasn't something that I put a lot of thought into.
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And like for the adventures of Templeton manuscript that I did because it was lowers the human and then the rest are like anthropomorphic animals.
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So, the heights vary and it's very crazy, very cookie.
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But with curse breaker, I had to really be aware of birdies height because he is a troll versus Celera was a human and their dynamic with each other because he's supposed to be acting as her mentor.
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And it's very hard sometimes to keep reminding myself, OK, I'm giving him human qualities because you know, to relate with a reader Like he's more humanoid, but he's still a troll, he's still 89 ft tall.
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He has a tail, he has this big boulder that you know, could be mistaken.
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Like it's for camouflage, but he can also store things in it like a backpack.
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That's cool.
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He has glasses, he enjoys reading.
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He has very big cat like ears and whiskers.
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And I had to, like, think about him very carefully though because whenever you think troll, you don't think that right off the bat.
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Yeah, no, definitely not.
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I think of the harry potter troll, I think of the Spiderwick Chronicles.
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I think of like the underground trolls.
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I mean either way it's different than what your troll is.
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But spoiler alert for people who have not been to every single one of our livestream Kelli and I are kind of on the short end have a human female background and I don't know about you Kelli, but Heights was something I was always made very aware of and not necessarily in a good way.
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And so, I've always been very cognizant of it when it became an issue, if that makes sense.
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So, kind of like in an argument or something or trying to reach anything above a certain height.
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Something that I think really in calculates as well is I've been binge watching not only shadow and bone, but every shadow and bone behind the scenes video I can find on YouTube and there's a certain scene that happens between Alina Starkov who is our wonderful heroine and she's not super tall and the darkling played by Ben Barnes who is at best foot or like a head taller than Jessie Mei Li and there is a scene that we're the dynamic changes between them where she's talking to him, but he's like sitting on a desk so they're actually at eye level to each other.
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I don't think it's happened before that point in the show and then something happens and I'm not going to say that although I'm pretty sure the whole internet has already spoiled it at this point.
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Anyway, something happens and then he stands and towers over her, which completely changes the power dynamic from them being like equal so that we're not equals.
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Yes, so it's some attention to, I have a character, Matilda, she's a mouse and Adventures in Thimbleton and she is a very fierce mouse and she's a very small mouse.
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She is I believe second smallest of her five sisters.
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And in this town, she was adopted by the mayor who is an alligator who when standing on his hind legs is about eight ft tall and he has five little daughters.
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But compared to lower, I always make my female characters more my height lore, even though she's like 5253, this mouse standing next to her is like the size of a toddler but whenever they're like in a conflict ng situation it's Matilda who stands up and is more assertive and I like to think it's because she was raised by an alligator but I'll be very aware of okay, I need something here that Matilda can like jump up on to make herself seem bigger in this situation because there are other animals in the storyline such as a wolf cats possum that are more quote unquote fearsome than a mouse.
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So that was that was very fun to write with her character dynamic even though she was so small because I feel like both of us, even though we are smaller scaled women were still very outspoken oh 100%, but it also reminds me of in the behind the scenes for Avengers: Age of Ultron Elizabeth Olsen who plays Wanda Maximoff and then finally becomes the scarlet witch, although at the time marvel couldn't say that because of legal things with Fox, she is working for Ultron at first and Ultron has played by Kevin Spacey and then the behind the scenes that I found he is in a gray onesie within pong balls all over it as a lot of motion capture suits are nowadays and he had a pole attached to his back that went up so much higher than his head and had a neon green tennis ball and that was Ultron online and Elizabeth Olsen was like, there were so many takes where I looked in the wrong place and I looked at Kevin Spacey instead of what Ultron is because it's so unnatural to look at something so much taller than a human.
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And it's like I can only imagine the amount of like CGI and stuff that we have the ability to do is amazing.
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But yeah, with Matilda is a lot of, whenever I'm writing her into a scene, I have to be aware of what is in this that she can make herself appear to be bigger if the situation arises.
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Because Lore is very taken aback by this world because she is the only human there the rest of humankind is extinct and has been extinct for eons.
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So, everyone around is kind of on edge already around the human and she's kind of on edge because she thinks this is all hallucination.
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So, it's Matilda who has to like keep her reined in and keep everybody else like off of her shit keeps the peace.
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But we've been talking a lot about good like characters whether they're our own characters or whether they are characters from other series other works.
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So, let's talk about what we think is necessary for good character creation and I'll go ahead and let you start and then then I'll go I think you need to have characters react in ways that a make sense.
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Even if you can't articulate a reason sometimes if I were that I would maybe feel that I would maybe do the same thing or it could be less articulated where you read that they reacted to certain when you're like yeah that tracks and you don't know why but those actions need to lead somewhere and it doesn't necessarily have to be like a hero's arc and it doesn't have to be a redemption arc.
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Their actions need to lead to them making more decisions and actions that reveal their character more to the reader and they don't have to be likable either.
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But to me a good character arc is someone is you know a fictional someone who when I see what everything they've done I'm like again I understand I might not agree I might you know actively disagree if it's you know a villain, but it makes sense enough that if they were a real person even if the circumstances are fantastical and impossible to exist in the real world.
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Where I could be like yeah, this person could exist.
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I think that's good.
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I think it's like talking about what makes good characters whether it is an antagonist or villain or your protagonist.
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Even side characters.
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Good character arcs are important now.
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Not like I know sometimes character arcs can be a bit messy and whenever you're first getting into taking your writing seriously all of this stuff that we're talking about might seem intimidating but really it is very good to learn about character arcs and whether it is a positive one that your main character will go through, or a negative character arc think Loki and the M.
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C.
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U.
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Universe and how many people adore him?
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It's not because he's the one that we you know we should be rooting for.
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But it's because his negative character arc was done in such a way that you want to root for him even though he's morally gray.
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So, I think really nailing character arcs and the direction you want to take your character and knowing where you want to take them is good for good character creation.
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So, for example, you're going to have to know what this character is fearing and are they going to make fear-based choices or they're going to rise above that fear and make those kinds of choices and whether they make the choices based on fear and that they're scared, that's going to maybe lead them down a road that is going to do take care of the problem temporarily and not permanently.
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And then now they have to keep on trying to think of ways to fix it.
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Like the best thing I can think of is my character and project E.
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That is my diagnosis character.
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He's going to be struggling with drinking and he is scared to not drink because of these false memories that were put in his head essentially he doesn't want to experience them and he doesn't want to feel the pain that is tied with that, but there's going to be a point in the story where he's going to have to choose to overcome this fear of his and take the positive character arc and understand basically what all is what all is happening, that even though those memories hurt and those memories felt real, that they weren't and that he actually has real characters and real people depending on him that need him.
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So that's just a good example that I can think of off the top of my head, I think going off of that to like even though probably your most pivotal moments of character development should be at least partially internal where character makes a decision to be different or be brave or something, you also need to remember that characters don't exist in a vacuum.
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Your character's interactions with people can either stay the same because everyone like the relationship stays the same or you know, the character grows and realizes like, oh I'm going to interact differently in this relationship, even if they don't say it outright or consciously think it or realize it.
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But something that my family has always said is that if you want to know how a person really is, watch how they treat restaurant staff and obviously I'm not relegating your side characters necessarily like that low level of film extra necessarily, but you want your character to also be revealed by interact because that's what happens in her life.
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Yeah.
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And I think that's a really good, it's a really good point to bring up because how your character is also interact with side characters or the mentors or just the characters are supposed to be there stepping in and helping them is really vital, so you don't want to give too much away for project.
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He just because I'm so excited about it, but there is a character that is aiding my Dionysus inspired main character and she's a little bit more stern with him.
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But it's because she also has her own motives that you learn about later of why she's pushing him so hard and whenever that comes to a fold, and he fails her basically the first time around he sees what he caused her to lose, and she was the one that was believing in him and trying to really push him to do it.
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So, then he's stuck with the choice of well do I continue to do what she was wanting me to do and asking me to do or do I just call it quits now because you know what's the point?
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He's also already very depressed character if you couldn't tell poor guy, I haven't even met him.
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Yeah, he's also loosely based off one of my very close friends and he's gonna, once I tell him this he's going to love and be all about it.
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But I'm like yeah, but you know, he's going to go through this really awesome character arc and then he's going to be like Kelli.
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That's not me.
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I see the potential of my friend.
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He'll get there one day.
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All right.
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So, with all that said, I think this is a good place to wrap up.
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This has been the right dish podcast and we'll be back with another episode next week.
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Don't forget to follow us on Instagram @thewriteishpodcast and on Kofi at ko-fi.com/writeish.
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And be sure to join us for a conversation next week where we talk all about outlining and I am super pumped for it. Bye!
