Writing Is A Bad Habit: The Eight Deadly Words a.k.a. Creating Character Investment

“I don’t care what happens to these people.”

These eight deadly words comprise the sentence you never want your readers to utter.  It is the death knell of creative character-driven media of all kinds.  If the readers don’t care about your characters, they won’t care about your narrative either.  It’s important to note that ‘caring’ about characters does not always equate to ‘liking’ them.  A reader might like a character, but not be invested in them and, to flip it around, a reader might hate a character but be totally entranced by their actions.

So how do we combat this and avoid those eight words?  The first and most obvious step is character relatability.  Again, a relatable character doesn’t have to be liked or disliked, just understandable.  We’ve talked about this quite a bit, but it never hurts to reiterate this.  Characters need to have motivations, thoughts, and feelings that make sense.  If these things make sense to your audience, they will relate to the characters and, likely, become invested in them.  It’s the classic ‘we like what we understand’ thought in action.

There are other things we should do to create this needed investment.  Another way to create that ‘caring’ from the reader is to ensure that there is sufficient risk in the plot line, that there are stakes to the conflicts involved.  Not just stakes, but stakes that fit the conflict involved.  If there is no risk or stakes or drama connecting the plot and the characters, there’s no compelling reason for the reader to become invested in the plot, no matter how they feel about the characters.  Yes, you can have a fully character-driven scene or story, with no real tension from the plot, but that won’t sustain a full-length novel very well.

I think the ‘appropriate stakes to the conflict’ part is something that is often a stumbling block.  Not that you can’t sometimes overblow the stakes, hinging lives on a stand-up comedy routine as an example, but it’s usually best to keep them under wraps.  You especially can’t understate the stakes.  The stakes to a gunfight, for example, needs to, at the least, be the lives of the protagonists, if not more, otherwise there is no tension and no investment.  Risk, sacrifice, and threat are all vital to creating that investment we all desire, be it physical, emotional, spiritual, or social.

What techniques and elements do you use to ensure that your readers care?  If you’re just a reader, what do you look for in the characters that you do invest it?  Let me know in the comments below!

Until next time, good reading, good writing, and good luck!

Writing Is A Bad Habit: My Chemistry Romance a.k.a. A Bad Song Reference a.k.a. Creating Realistic Relationships

On the surface, writing romances in fiction looks simple.  All you have to do is write, with a flourish of your pen if you so desire, ‘He loved her, and she loved him.’, and by your authorial power so it comes to life!  Except we all know that doesn’t really work, does it?

Yes, you can indeed write that sentence in your work, but it does not automatically create a romance that will seem believable or ‘real’ to your readers.  Love is an emotional state that’s easy to put into words, mainly because we have a short, simple word for it, but can be difficult to have properly supported through character actions and reactions.  No matter how difficult it is, though, we authors must try our best to get that romantic chemistry across or else the love we say is simply an informed attribute of the characters, one of those nasty things that leads to the breaking of the reader’s suspension of disbelief.

As love itself is no simple emotion, creating that sense of love between two characters has no easy guidebook, no quick checklist to draw your readers into the notion of that love’s reality.  This is complicated by the (hopefully) complex characters you all ready have running around in your world.  No two people express their love in the same way and, even if two people are in love, their relationship can falter or even shatter if their beliefs and expressions of love aren’t compatible in some way.

To create a relatable and believable romance, you have to start with the characters you want to put together and think about how they see the concepts of love and relationships in the first place.  No, they don’t have to see eye-to-eye or be perfectly identical.  Part of the fun of writing and reading about a relationship comes from the hurdles and the challenges as two people discover each other and the give-and-take of the relationship.

Avoid, if you can, the ‘whirlwind romance’ or, at least, be realistic in terms of the aftermath of said romances.  Love is rarely an ‘at-first-sight’ thing and what may seem like a perfect couple at first can run into turbulent times in the near future (watch Frozen if you haven’t by now).  Even ‘love-at-first-sight’ couples that stick together often have to go over plenty of rocks in the road ahead to true romantic bliss.  Don’t be afraid to present realistic challenges, real emotion, conflict, and drama into your written relationships!  Even the mildest, most compatible couple fights.

‘Familiarity breeds contempt’ is a bit too strong of a saying, but it’s not entirely untrue.  Very close couples, when they do fight, tend to be able to sting their significant others the hardest, simply because they know where to hit.  They are just as quick to come back together, though!

Really, the core, key component to keep in mind at all times is to ensure that there is some connection, some chemistry, between your romantic pairings and then to show that chemistry.  Avoid constant protestations of undying love, especially in narration, and focus on actions and interactions that show that love, then make sure those interactions aren’t out-of-character.

Do you have any more tips or thoughts about writing romantic chemistry?  Feel free to drop it in the comments!  Until next time, good reading, good writing, and good luck!

Monday Musings: Everyone Should Roleplay!

Do you know what’s fun and surprisingly insightful?  Roleplaying!  More specifically roleplaying games, but honestly my points about RPGs count for lots of other roleplaying venues.  Of course, some of you may be asking exactly what I’m talking about, so …

Roleplaying in general is when people take other personas or personalities.  In this case, I’m talking about roleplaying terms of entertainment, like in actual pen-and-paper roleplaying games.  But if you think about it, most people have done roleplaying since they were children.  What else would you call make-believe, after all?  That, really, is what makes roleplaying games as an adult such a good thing.

Primarily, it’s a chance for adults to keep their imaginations strong.  Imagination is the source of creativity and it helps us all enjoy books, movies, and other creative works better.  It’s fun, it helps us get more fun from other things, and it keeps our minds and our wits sharp.

There’s another thing that RPGs are good for: it enhances our ability to relate to others.  It may not be possible to literally walk a mile in another man’s (or woman’s) shoes, but you can at least you can try to put your mind into the personality of one.  RPGs not only let our imaginations loose, they also let us experience new things, work out emotions, and learn about other people and other kinds of personalities.  Roleplaying at its best is the finest form of interactive group storytelling, and that’s a mighty good thing.

Stay tuned, friends, for this week’s Writing Is A Bad Habit on Wednesday and our Starving Review on Friday!  Until then, good luck, good reading, and good writing!

Looking at Character: Bring on the Bad Guys!

Being a writer isn’t easy.  The biggest obstacle to writing something people accept as ‘good’ is, well, the readers themselves.  Everything is subjective to that audience and they are the ones you need to get to invest in the world, the characters and the story you have to tell.  That means we, as authors, can’t skimp on any part of creation because any lapses could trigger an onset of disengagement that will make the readers turn away.  Which leads, meanderingly, to today’s Looking at Character article, which is devoted to the bad guys, the antagonists, in literature, more specifically in making your villains something the reader will want to invest in.

Much like your protagonists, your antagonists need to have a ‘real person’ at their core, at least in most cases.  They need to have understandable motivations for doing what they are doing.  If you don’t bother with providing your bad guys with reasons for doing what they are doing, they become something more akin to a hurricane or thunderstorm, threatening but impersonal.  The reason to use actual people as villains is to explored that characterization so you better bother to actually do it!

Closely related to this ‘why’ of the antagonists, you should closely consider the ‘who’.  Who are they?  What are their origins?  What are their capabilities?  What do they look like?  These are all components of the greater ‘who’ of the antagonists and is their core characterization, something vital to all your major characters and important to the minor ones as well.  It’s all about building a realness, something the readers can understand, even if the antagonists themselves are inhuman.

Once you’ve put some thought into the ‘why’ and ‘who’ of your antagonists, it may be smart to consider the ‘how’.  How do the antagonists fit into and help move the plot along?  How are your antagonists threatening to the protagonists?  How can they be overcome?  These, and others, are vital questions to consider, as the lack of an answer to any of them can cause you to paint yourself into a corner in your writing.

If you don’t know exactly how the antagonists move the plot forward, they may feel ‘tacked on’ to the actual story.  If you don’t know how they threaten the protagonists, they will be seen as ineffectual at worst or nebulous at best.  If you don’t know how they can be overcome, any victory you write for the protagonists will seem like sudden or cheap, as you haven’t established the means to that victory before hand.  All of these things press hard against the suspension of disbelief and threaten to break it and, as we all know, once that is broken, the entire story tends to collapse.

Really, this is a topic that could be an entire book in and of itself.  Still, I hope that this basic look at the creation of good antagonists will be a big help to all of your writers out there.  If you want to add more do’s and don’t’s, add them in the comments!

Until next time, good luck and good writing!

Looking at Character: Everyone Can Be A Hero!

I wanted to step away from some of the more politically and emotionally charged articles and reblogs I’ve been doing lately, vital as they are, to touch on some lighter writing topics.  With that in mind, in today’s Looking at Character, we are going to examine the ups and downs of a favorite character archetype: the Everyman Hero.  Few kinds of protagonists can score higher in the reader relatability department than the Everyman, because at the heart of it, he/she is a normal citizen, just like most of us.

That very fact makes the Everyman Hero both easy and hard to write for.  Obviously, most authors know very much what it is like to be an everyday person so there are fewer chances to make mistakes at the base character level.  You know what a normal person is capable of, you have an idea of just how varied their background and personality can be, and you have a good idea of how they might react when faced with unusual situations.  It sounds like an ease to add to your story.

The thing is, all of those things can also lead to complications.  Especially if your story deals with fantastic elements, you may have difficulty coming up with realistic reasons for the Everyman Hero to be involved in the larger plot or to justify his/her ability to not to participate in the plot, but to even survive it.  This can tie into the overall need for character agency in our protagonists and the possibility of the Everyman Hero to mutate into the Load, something that can be very jarring when said of a major protagonist.  It could also lead to issues of straining the suspension of disbelief (‘How did that toll booth worker fight off two werewolves with a roll of silver dollars?  She should be torn to pieces!’) when you have the Everyman Hero triumph in situations that would stymie even an archetypical action hero.

These aren’t impossible problems to overcome.  The most obvious means to deal with this is to make the Everyman status a beginning point and allow the protagonist to progress along and grow as strange things happen around them, getting by first by luck and talent and eventually becoming something greater than how he/she started.  A more subtle approach is to simply remain thoughtful and open-minded as you approach strange situations involving the character.  Everyman doesn’t mean dumb and everyman doesn’t mean incompetent.  All it means is the character is relatively ‘normal’.  Human beings are capable of some pretty impressive feats, so an Everyman Hero can do the same things when needed.

However you want to work it in, the Everyman Hero can be an excellent character type to use in a variety of situations, most especially if you need a highly relatable character to provide your readers a viewpoint into an otherwise arcane or complicated setting or plot.

If you have any suggestions, ideas, or critiques, feel free to put them in the comments below!

Looking at Character: The Invincible Hero

As an author who writes superhero books, I have a long-held love of the comic book medium.  I’ve been reading them since I was a little kid and still keep up with them in various formats.  The other day, I came across a discussion of what people thought were the rights and wrongs of the latest Superman movie and what it boiled down to, in essence, was a talk about the difficulties of writing an interesting story for so powerful of a character.  I came away from that forum mulling it over myself and decided to take the musings here to my blog.  It’s time for another round of Looking at Character with today’s guest, the Invincible Hero.

At first blush, the Invincible Hero looks a lot like our other friend, the Ace, but there are some vital differences.  Like the Ace, the Invincible Hero is the best of the best, a seemingly unstoppable force.  Nothing seems to slow him down and even the rare setback is fleeting and temporary.  However, unlike the Ace, who is a supporting character and used in various ways to interact with the protagonists, the Invincible Hero *is* the protagonist.  Hercules, Achilles, Superman, Hulk Hogan … all of those characters in their prime certainly fit the bill.  So the question remains: How do you write an effective plot about a protagonist that, by definition, easily overcomes any direct conflict?

There are a few ways to go about it.  The first one is to go about deconstructing the myth of the Invincible Hero.  In a deconstruction-based story, the conflict is generally not the obvious external one, but conflicts generated by the flaws and foibles that are hidden behind the shining facade of the Hero.  Concepts such as alienation from the rest of humanity, hubris from his/her invincibility, loosing touch with one’s humanity, the burden of the expectations of the masses (realistic or not), and so on can be explored to shine light on the realistic problems of being put above the rest of the Hero’s peers and relations.  In such a way, the Invincible Hero becomes relatable; though his problems may still be on a different scale, they are simply larger versions of issues everyone faces, allowing the reader to connect to him/her.

Another way to spark conflict and plot is the approach of ‘the bigger fish’.  Yes, the Invincible Hero is unstoppable compared to his usual opposition, but that doesn’t preclude an even more awesome threat from existing, thus creating a new conflict where the normally triumphant Hero is faced with the prospect of being the underdog.  As with straight deconstruction, this makes the Invincible Hero relatable by injecting all-too human feelings such as fear and a sense of inadequacy into the equation.  The potential stumbling block, though, is the possible temptation to inject these feelings then quickly have them ‘overcome’.  This is usually meant by the author as a show of the Hero’s true courage or what-not but it usually comes off as just another problem the Invincible Hero can shrug off, unlike the reader, causing an even larger rift in relatability.

The last way that came to mind to give an Invincible Hero a good story is to approach the primary conflict in a way that is outside of the Hero’s element.  However unstoppable the Hero may be, there are undoubtedly areas and problems where his/her particular set of abilities and skills are not useful.  Making the conflict revolve around some problem that cannot simply be directly confronted once more brings the Hero down to the human level, allowing the writer to showcase and develop the Hero’s character as he/she struggles with a problem instead of running it over as per the norm.  Another facet of this that could be fascinating to explore is the Hero’s social and familial life.  Again, it’s a source of conflicts, vital ones, that build character but cannot simply be approached by kicking down doors and beating up bad guys.

It’s not hard to see that all of these approaches revolve around finding ways to interject a strong dose of relatability into the Invincible Hero.  As characterization is usually the heart of a good story, that ability to relate to the protagonist is vital.  If we have no way to connect, we usually cease to care about the character in a short period of time and no amount of finely crafted action or well-rendered description will fix that.

What do you think?  Have you ever had to write an Invincible Hero?  If so, how did you tackle their relatability?  Comment below!