I write a lot of characters with lives completely beyond my first-hand experience. I attack this part of character building the same way I imagine stories in general. I take things I know and then extrapolate out all of the things that are different and how they affect what kind of person that character must be. I admit this might be a lot easier for me than a lot of people, as an anthropologist I’ve had more training in how different things affect individuals and populations, but 90% is careful observation and research. It’s the difference in acting between someone who does impressions and someone who embodies a character.

My favorite example of people misunderstand how it is possible to internalize things beyond your experiences is about Patrick Stewart. Someone asked him how it was possible for him to play a gay man in the movie “Jeffrey” when he himself wasn’t gay. Patrick Stewart replied he’d never been a starship captain either, but no one ever asked how he managed that.

If it’s possible for you to think up worlds with starships, it is possible for you to think through and think up the people who populate them.

• Give yourself permission to get everything wrong. This is a plan. It is something that will change and morph as you write, learn things, and get feedback. As an extension of this, give yourself permission to write notes and bits of stuff no one else will ever see. There are a multitude of things that are important to YOU as the writer that have no place on the page in your story, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to write them down somewhere.

• Make an effort to find out what other people have done wrong before you. You’ll find plenty of critiques on the internet of how writers have written various characters into tropes or manage to make an otherwise normal character feel like a complete alien construct by given them a voice or perspective that matches the writer and not the character. Ask your friends what the worst examples of “getting it wrong” are. You’ll be surprised how much you’ll learn and the different perspectives you can get. Asking in this way also doesn’t put anyone on the spot.

• Make an effort to find out what other people have done RIGHT. While asking about “doing it wrong” will be largely more illuminating, it is always helpful to get the other side too. If you ask a group of people about this, you’re not generally going to get consensus. You don’t need consensus, you need your character to make sense and for there to be an internal logic system to their thought and their existence. Find the things that make sense to you and your story and pull them together into a cohesive fully formed fully realized person through the act of telling their story.

• Realize you can’t get everything on page 1. A character on the page is not you. You, even as the writer, will not know everything about them. You need to know enough to spot them in a crowd, recognize the sound of their voice, and a few details about them. Imagine them at the level of an acquaintance you went to High School with and have recently reconnected with at an event and are now just starting to hang out. That’s generally the level of character information you need to start a story. By the end of the story you should have learned and internalized enough about them that you’d be willing to go pick them up at 4 in the morning at the bus station when they call out of the blue. If you’ve done your job right, any reader who picks up the book would give serious thought to going to pick them up from such a call too.

• Think about their view of the world and have it reflected. This is a relatively literal aspect of this, but important: Height. For example, I am 5’6″ and Aaron is 6’5″ I hide cookies on the low shelves. He hides things on the top of the fridge. I’m very conscious of where on a person (collarbone, lips, neck, eyes) my natural gaze rests because of the height of the person I’m talking to. Aaron mostly notes the people he doesn’t have to look down to meet their gaze and anyone who reacts badly to his invariable downward gaze (short men in authority, women with low-cut shirts). Knowing where and how your character grew up are important to how they see the world. Did your character grow up in a wealthy family who now loves all things peanut butter as it was something they were forbidden to have as a child because that was something only ‘poor people’ ate? Did your character grow up with no resources and is constantly disgusted at the wastefulness of Western society? It is the little details that shape a character’s point of view and show the reader their world.

• Look at the world around you and try to see it through your character’s eyes. What would they think of that store display? Would they eat that? If you are doing your job right people will send you links and clippings saying “This made me think of your character” so be sure that YOU can find those types of things in the real world.

What things do you do in creating characters for your stories?

Be genuine. Be nice. Be confidant. Care about people, because it is people who will listen to your story. Forgive yourself. Forgive others. All storytellers are on the same strange journey, we’re just on different paths and in different places along the way. The person who was behind you in one turn may be barely a speck in the distance ahead of you on the next. Wish easy travel upon those you meet. Commiserate when the road is difficult. Even those we think of as having reached their destination are still journeying. Don’t give up. Encourage those you meet along the way. Share what is available to you and others will share with you. It is a journey, not a battle. Those who treat you as an enemy do so because they are in a dark place. Offer them a light. Be the light.

How do you write a villain who is capable of throwing your protagonists world into turmoil, but doesn’t turn into a moustache twirling caricature?

A villain (or any other character) must be the protagonist of their own story– it just isn’t the story you’re telling. The key to characters and world building and everything is to make it clear that the story is simply a window of time in a world that existed before and after the story. The characters had lives before and (if they survive) will clearly continue living their lives after it. You need to know all of the decisions in your villain’s life that have put them in the position they are at the beginning of the story and all of the decisions they will make to put them in conflict with the protagonist at all of the key junctures during the story.

I personally, find it easier to plot my villains that my protagonists. They often have clearer goals and it’s easier to have the protagonist react to the villain’s decisions than the other way around. You’ll be shocked how easy it is to create an outline based on your villain’s arc rather than your protagonist– and then just make sure your protagonist’s motivations and goals put them in conflict.

So, to illustrate my point I’m going to use Lucifer. Everybody say “Hi, Lucifer!” Awww, look, he’s blushing– at least I hope he’s blushing. So, in case you’re less than familiar with our esteemed guest, he’s an angel. He used to be the first among angels, the light-bearer and Morningstar. He was God’s right hand dude. In events that are not particularly clear to anyone other than Lucifer and God– Lucifer stops being God’s right hand dude in Heaven and falls to our world where he becomes the tempter of Man. Our protagonist (let’s call him Bob) is a young man of prophecy on a divine quest to find and return the Sword of Heaven.

How do we keep this story from becoming a predictable good vs. evil, find the sword, and save the world thing?

• There’s a lot of wiggle room in Lucifer’s back story– always leave yourself wiggle room.
• Lucifer is the protagonist of his own story. If the story is about the Sword of Heaven– Lucifer must have his own quest line to protect the sword from mortal hands and his own set of decisions to make and motivations to make them.
• Lucifer must have knowledge the protagonist does not about the sword and events of the story. You can have a blindly ignorant protagonist at the beginning of the story who discovers knowledge– but your villain must think they have some of the answers (they can be mistaken or mislead, but they should be acting from a point of “knowing”)
• The best (or at least most devastating) villains (in my opinion) are those that are within a fingernail’s grip of walking a similar path as the protagonist. There should be one event, one decision that prevented the villain from walking that path. In this case I would NOT make that event Lucifer’s fall. I’d make that one thing within the time frame of the story and something that brings Lucifer directly and personally in conflict with Bob– like say, a mortal (Bob) touching the Sword of Heaven will undo all of the angelic intervention Lucifer has done to keep his adopted mortal son alive and if Bob succeeds, the boy dies.
• Every single decision Lucifer makes MUST make sense from his perspective. If it looks like sheer evil from Bob’s perspective, that’s a bonus.
• Write a rough draft of the conversation that happens between Lucifer and Bob at the ultimate climax of the story as either the first thing or very close to the first thing you write. Don’t worry about getting it right. It helps to know where the characters and the plot are going to ultimately end up. You will likely end up rewriting it from scratch when you get to that scene because there’s no way to know the characters well enough to nail it at that point, but it can provide the motivation and guidance to push you through.

None of these have to make Lucifer out to be a good guy. He can be doing horrible and evil things– there just has to be a reason that makes complete sense if you were telling his story rather than Bob’s.

It’s the second week of November which means some of you are bemoaning your NaNoWriMo word counts. Others are looking at the posted word counts of other writers and wringing your hands in dismay.

Stop worrying.

The process of writing isn’t a competition with anyone other than yourself. If you write 50,000 words in a month or a year doesn’t particularly matter. What matters is what you learn about how YOU write.

I’ve done NaNoWriMo (or an alternative January version of it– let’s face it November is a crap month for doing this) four times. I’ve never hit 50,000. The closest I got was 46,000. Writing at that kind of pace for a month drains me dry and makes everyone around me miserable.

I think I started my SRS WRITING with a goal of writing 10,000 words a week. Which, turned out to be crazy talk for me at the time. I lowered it and fought with it and argued with myself over how much I SHOULD be writing. I tried posting word counts publicly. I tried to shame myself into writing more. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Tracking what I wrote DID help. It let me see patterns. I wish now I’d kept even better records of where and when along with how much.

Writing always has an element of self-discovery. Learning your pace and your method is part of that self-discovery. Some people will learn that they can write 50,000 words in a month. I learned that I don’t work that way. Not yet. Maybe not ever. 46,000 words left me drained. It was like running the gas tank empty on the freeway to learn just how many gallons it really held. Sure, the information was valuable– but there are easier methods.

When I was a young actor I was commiserating to an older theater friend about a production I was in, and he told me, “Every director can teach you something even if that’s never to work with that director again.” I think that holds true for life experiences and people.

Hang in there. Push yourself how you need to push yourself to learn what you need to learn about yourself. No matter what happens this month you’ll know yourself and your writing that much better.

I’m starting to think writing is a bit like running a séance parlour for a living. Some days you’ve got a whole troop of spooks moving the furniture. Other days you’ve got the Duchess of Popularity and all her friends around the table without even an unexplained smell to entertain them. Your job is to make sure you are the only one who knows the difference. You wake up every day hoping the ghosts clock in and do all the hard work, but prepare to use every ounce of your intellect and abilities in case they don’t. You can’t sit back and trust the same old tricks every time because the majority of your clientele are repeats and will stop coming if you cease to astound and amaze them.

“First things first, to the death.”

“No. To the pain.”

“I don’t think I’m quite familiar with that phrase.”

-The Princess Bride

I’m in the midst of “End of Book Pain” right now. Because of sekrit things, I absolutely must finish the first draft of the WIP by as close to the end of the month as possible. I wish I had a method of talking to my younger self so I could tell her to always “write to the end” (also that the phrase “When in Rome” should not be applied to situations involving punk musicians and malt liquor).

I wrote a lot, but I did not finish very many things. I wrote and rewrote the beginnings of a great many things. I can write beginnings LIKE A BOSS. However, I never got around to practicing middles and ends to the same degree. I’ve been playing catchup with those for awhile now and sometimes I have a bit of a teenage-style pout about them being “TOO HARD”. They aren’t, I just haven’t had the same kind of practice at them.

See, at about the 1/2 or 2/3^rd point in a long work it becomes horribly obvious where I made terrible mistakes. These errors start to haunt my thoughts and make it very difficult to move forward. They groan, bleeding on the word battlefield behind me. I want to stop and tend to their injuries, but I must grit my teeth, reload, and push forward. There will be time to tend to my wounded once the battle is over. Finishing can be hell, but I’ll do a better job of triaging my mistakes once the bullets stop flying. If I stop, I might save one but lose the battle and forfeit the field.

Thou shalt not edit in the writing trenches. I can’t fix words I don’t write. Write to the end, regroup, triage based on the whole, then edit.