writing fiction - Lynette M. Burrows

Writing How-to: Create Characters Your Readers Love and Hate

It’s time for my monthly appearance on the Writers in the Storm Blog. This one is a continuation of my creating characters series. A portion of that post appears here. For the full post please click the link at the end of this excerpt.

African-American female at a coffee shop reading a book that's open about 1/2 way and she has a concerned look on her face as if she can't stop reading this exciting or concerning part.

You can create charming good guys and vicious villains, the hookiest of hooks, brilliant worlds, and twisty plots with the most intense cliffhangers, but if readers don’t care about your characters, they won’t recommend your book to their friends. Or worse, they’ll put the book down and never buy your books ever again. Why would they do that? Because they didn’t connect with your protagonist, antagonist, or viewpoint characters. Your reader wants to connect with at least one of those characters. They open the book wanting to love or hate your characters. But creating characters your readers connect with takes work. What makes readers not care? It could be one of several problems.

Why Readers Put Down Your Books

You’ve put a lot of work into writing your book. You love your characters and your story but your readers, be they critique partners, alpha or beta readers, or your book reviews, tell you your book was boring, or they couldn’t finish your book and put down your book, or they didn’t like it at all. It hurts. A lot. But it’s time to put aside your emotions and examine your reader and your story.

If one reader has issues, the reader is probably not your target audience. If more than one reader makes similar complaints, it’s probably something your book does or doesn’t do. Evaluate it as objectively as you can. (Ask for help if you can’t.) Does it suffer from one of these common issues?

There is no problem that matters.
The conflict happens off stage.
Unrelated cause and effect.
Your character is a stereotype or trope.
You aren’t putting your reader in your character’s shoes.
Your character didn’t earn the ending.

No worries. All authors experience at least one manuscript with faults that stop the reader. Take heart. There are ways to fix these problems in your writing. You can learn to create characters your readers will love or hate and will pay to read more of their stories.

The Problem Doesn’t Matter

If your character is happy and content, why should the reader care? Even if the story problem is a big bad guy or a world-ending catastrophe, if your character doesn’t care deeply and personally, neither will your reader. Being an altruistic superhero isn’t enough. The problem must matter to the protagonist or it won’t matter to the reader.

Remember the 2008 movie, The Incredible Hulk? Not a blockbuster. People didn’t connect with the film or the character because Banner’s needs and problems were largely unconnected to Hulk. In fact, he wanted to control Hulk. And Hulk’s limited reactions were usually “Hulk angry” or “SMASH!”

Compare that movie to the deep characterization of the 2018 movie, Black Panther. We see T’Challa as a child yearning for a place he’s never seen. We feel the trauma of his father’s murder and we know his need to find his place, his destiny, to be the man his father wanted him to be. Most people can relate to that. Watching him struggle and fail and struggle again against a foe and against himself, we grow to care about him and his challenges. The problems T’Challa faced mattered both personally and in his larger world. His personal connection to the problem became the viewers’ connection.

We human beings gravitate toward the personal. The challenges we choose or we make for ourselves may have some level of altruism, but deep down, it is something specific and personal. Look for a personal connection your protagonist has with the problem in your story. Ask yourself:

Is this problem one that he could solve easily by doing one thing?
Does the problem challenge his beliefs, his morals, his sense of duty, or his worldview?
Does the problem test his resolve to reach a solution?
If he does not face this challenge, will it change his sense of success or worthiness?
What does he fear will be the catastrophe if he doesn’t act?

Thanks for reading this far. I hope you find it valuable enough to click through and read the remainder of the piece on the Writers in the Storm Blog.

What story and character have you read that kept you turning pages? What was it about the character that kept you reading?

Make Flat Characters Genuine in 8 (Sort of) Easy Steps

Have you been told you have “flat characters” in your story? Reel in your emotions and re-examine your characters. Does your character have little to no internal life? As your character moves through the story, does she overcome nearly every obstacle? Does she have a crystal-clear need? Is she unchanged at the end of the story? If even a few of your answers are yes, you probably have a flat character. Is that a problem? Probably. Flat characters are usually uninteresting and unmemorable. Got flat characters? Don’t worry. You can take your flat characters to genuine in 8 (sort of) easy steps.

Image of two rows of a chain of paper dolls in shades of green against a green background. .

1. Diagnosis: Flat vs Round Characters

What Does Flat Mean?

If you guess flat characters are the opposite of round characters, you’re right. But let’s take it a step farther. Typically, when a reader says your characters are flat, they mean the characters don’t feel real. They want to read about realistic characters, people like themselves or people they know. Writers often call realistic characters round characters. A round character is a character who has multiple-dimensions to their personality.

In real life, we humans are a complicated bag of emotions, contradictions, and quirky bits. Our relationships with others are just as complicated as we are. We often make a whole range of mistakes in relationships, jobs, and every other aspect of our lives. In order to write a “simple” story, authors must be certain their characters come across the page as just as complicated, even if not all those bits show up on the page. So the first step in diagnosing flat characters is to see what IS on the page.

What’s On the Page?

To fix a flat character, you must re-examine how that character appears on the page. Re-examining your character is harder than it sounds. You created these characters. You likely know them as well as yourself. Unfortunately, that may be part of the problem. As the creator, you read things into the story and character that may not be on the page.

If you don’t see why readers say your characters are flat, print your manuscript. Mark your primary character’s internal thoughts, emotions, dialogue, and descriptions. (Hat tip to Margie Lawson’s excellent courses.) Then take a step back and look at your pages. Missing one area? That’s a definite area of flatness. If one color dominates the page, lack of balance may be part of what makes your characters flat. Don’t despair. You can fix flat characters.

Read how to fix flat characters on the Writers in the Storm blog.

Image Purchased from Deposit photo.

Make Music with Character Voices

On the Writers in the Storm Blog, I offer suggestions how you can create characters with voices so distinct that your readers can “hear” theme music for each one.

Bright jolly vector staves with musical notes on white background, decorative major wavy set of musical notation symbol.

Do your characters feel flat? Do they all sound like you and only you? Tune in to the music of character voices, make them sound more like the different instruments of a band or orchestra. Make music with your character voices and your readers won’t be able to get enough of the stories you write.

Great characters are the key to great fiction.Donald Maass, Writing the Breakout Novel
Donald Maass, Writing the Breakout Novel

What or Who Your Character Is

There are many things to consider when creating your story characters. Many how-to-write articles suggest creating a detailed profile of your characters. Delving into a character’s birth place, likes and dislikes, job, hair color, and using tools like spreadsheets and fill-in-the-blank questionnaires can be helpful, but characters are more than the details on a spreadsheet or form. Character are more than their story role, more than the point of view you choose for them, and more than what they do in the story. Your characters each need a voice, a unique voice. But how do you create that?

The Key to Understanding Characters

When a writer is told they’re too young or haven’t lived enough life to write about it, it’s often because of a lack of understand the basics of character or even life. A general understanding of psychological personality types will go a long way to helping you create varied and interesting characters.

Learn about the fundamental personality types. Go deeper than Wikipedia, though it may give you an overview that is helpful. There are literally millions of sites on the internet that discuss variations on personality types. Choose one that’s reliable like psychcentral, psychology today, and The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

Psych Central has a helpful explanation of what is personality. Psychology Today discusses the basics of personality traits. NIMH has a great resource on personality disorders. Those three sites offer multiple articles on personality, personality traits, and personality disorders.

Read about establishing your character’s musical pitch and more in the rest of my post at the Writers in the Storm blog.

The Blessing and Curse of Research and Inspiration

The more you practice creativity, the more you realize the blessing and curse of research and inspiration. It happened again while I was planning and writing my Fellowship Dystopia series. When we left Miranda at the end of My Soul to Keep, she had sworn off shooting to kill and taken to the water to help rescue fugitives from the tyranny of the Fellowship. So I had an obvious place to start book two… on the water. But the inspiration for her yacht, the Lady Angelfish, came from writing a completely different book.

Blessing and Curse

The blessing and a curse, research and inspiration come hand-in-hand for me. I can dive Marianas Trench deep down some of those research rabbit holes. When I do that, I lose time… days and days… All right, not days, but I definitely lose hours.

Some of you may have read a sneak peek at another novel I’ve started, Paladina. I needed information about life in Greece told from both natives and non-natives. While researching that, I came across blogs and vlogs of expats living on boats as they explored life outside the U.S. Life abroad and aboard a boat fascinated me. Their blogs gave lots of details about the benefits and challenges of that life. Their vlogs added to those details.

The Great Loop

I ate up those blogs about life on boats, and that led to a revelation. I discovered that there are boaters who take a year-long epic boating adventure in the U.S. They call it the “Great Loop.”

The Great Loop is the name of a continuous waterway that allows boaters to explore Eastern North America using the Atlantic and Gulf Inter Coastal Waterways, the Great Lakes, Canadian Heritage Canals, and the inland rivers of America’s heartland. Anyone who completes the journey becomes an official ‘Looper.’ Boaters can travel all or part of it.

The blessing and curse of inspiration hit me when I saw this map of the Great Loop that show the primary and longest route in purple that travels from the great lakes down the Mississippi to the gulf, around florida and up the east coast to the hudson then the great lakes again and a shorter version in green that avoids the Hudson and half the Mississippi.

Research Stretched into Inspiration

You know, with a name like Looper, I was hooked (wordplay intended.) I didn’t know it then, but that the blessing and curse of research and inspiration had hit me for a book I hadn’t even outlined yet. That rabbit’s hole took me on vicarious journeys via blogs and vlogs. Some shook loose memories of short boating trips I took as a kid. And boy, some of those blogs and vlogs were super educational.

A Little More Research

I learned about locks and I learned the rules of boating etiquette. Previous to my research, I hadn’t thought about who policed the waterways. I learned that, too. (Do you know which U.S. Agency patrols our inland waterways?) I used as much real detail as I could.

I also researched what size and type of boats travel the Great Loop. Then, I had to factor in the alternate world of the Fellowship Dystopia and determine what Miranda’s boat looked like. Fortunately, there are a ton of online marinas that sell boats with lots and lots of pictures and details. At the time, sYs International Yacht Sales had exactly what I had hoped to find.

Here are a couple more of the photographs I used to help me plan Miranda’s yacht. Some of these details appear in If I Should Die. But for the story, Miranda’s boat has more interior space and a few special features.

If I Should Die

If I Should Die, is book two of the Fellowship Dystopia, now available for pre-order on Amazon, KOBO, and Barnes & Noble. But the clock is ticking on the pre-order period. Order your copy now.

The protagonists from My Soul to Keep, Miranda and Beryl, return two years after their battles in book one. Although the rebels didn’t uproot the tyrannical Fellowship Council, Miranda kept her promise to herself and hadn’t picked up a gun to shoot another person. She’s piloting the Lady Angelfish through the inland waterways of the U.S. and rescuing fugitives from the Fellowship. She never expected to have to make a choice between sister and brother, peace and war.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll give you a taste of locations and characters from book two. You can read If I Should Die as a stand-alone novel, but you’ll enjoy it more if you’ve read My Soul to Keep.

Research and Inspiration

No matter how much research I did, I could not get my poor brain to remember nautical terms. In early drafts, I used port and starboard as if they were interchangeable. SIGH. Inspiration doesn’t mean you don’t have to work at it. To avoid confusion, I kept a cheat sheet beside me during revisions.

If you are a Looper, and you read If I Should Die, know that the book takes place on a very small portion of the Great Loop. I hope I did enough research I didn’t make any glaring errors, but whatever errors I made were mine and mine alone.

A writer’s life isn’t a comic book. We don’t get cartoon bubbles of lightbulbs above our heads. But we have the blessing and curse of research and inspiration being linked. Linked and a possible “waste of time.” A waste of time that often brings inspiration.

Had you heard about the Great Loop before? Are you a Looper? Even if you aren’t a Looper, I’d love to hear about your boating or inspiration experiences.

Better Characters through Lies, Secrets, and Scars

This week I’m revisiting and improving a post I wrote in 2019. Lies, Secrets, and Scars Create Better Characters appears today on the Writers in the Storm Blog. You may remember this post but it’s been improved with examples. If you check it out on the WITS blog, please say hi.

Image of a train coming around the mountain full of fall foliage is one kind of train that depends on rails to keep it moving like lies, secrets, and scars keep your character and story moving forward.

Lies, Secrets, and Scars Create Better Characters

Many writers spend days, weeks, months, even years creating characters using complex character profile worksheets. The best characters aren’t a collection of data points on a worksheet. Depending upon data points like the genre, physical attributes, favorite desert, or what he’s wearing may disrupt story flow even to the point of what many call writer’s block. Not that those data points are unimportant, but focusing on the lies, secrets, and scars of your characters will give your stories power. That emotional journey ties everything together into a book your readers can’t put down.

The Why

Lisa Cron calls it your character’s misbelief. KM Weiland calls it your character’s lie. Brandilyn Collins calls it inner values. And Donald Maass says it’s how we get readers to make their own emotional journey. What are they talking about?

Most people have morals, values, or other belief systems that guide them in their choices. It’s the reason they choose B over A when A and B are equal. Call it an inner guidance system. Most of us don’t think about it much, it just is.

When we read a story or watch a film, we connect with characters whose inner guidance system is like ours. Choices the character makes, and the possibilities rejected by that character, fascinate us. The more we wonder, “would I have done that” and “what’s he going to do now,” the more we are hooked….

The Rest of the Story

To read more of the updated the Lies, Secrets, and Scars Create Better Characters post, go to Writers in the Storm. I hope you find it helpful.

Image Credit: Balazs Busznyak on Unsplash