Real People vs. Characters

fictionwritingtips:

As a writer, one of your main jobs is to get your readers to believe in the illusion you’re creating in your story. Deep down, we know that characters aren’t real people, but we suspend our disbelief to really put ourselves inside a fictional world. While characters can also be layered and complex, there’s a big difference—they’re not real people.

Here are a few differences to consider when building your own characters:

Characters are simpler than real people

I know, I know. How can I say that your favorite character from your favorite book series isn’t as complex as your next door neighbor? You know a lot more about your favorite character because you’ve followed their ups and downs for like 5 books now.

But the truth is your next door neighbor has a very real and very complex life and they’ll always have more depth than any character in a fiction novel. Authors only tend to focus on certain traits of a character; ones that pertain to the story and help drive the novel forward. Adding a lot more detail could bog the story down and feel unnecessary. Like I said before, characters can be complex and layered, but we’re only experiencing a powerful illusion. This is actually helpful for writers because it helps manipulate your readers’ emotions depending on what story you’re trying to tell. You get to guide your characters and where they’re going.

You’re only sharing a slice of life

Most of the time when you’re writing about a character, you’re only sharing the most dramatic moments of their existence. There’s a reason you’re telling the story and it’s not just them living their normal day-to-day lives. There’s usually the stasis that moves on to the inciting incident that gets them away from what they’re used to. We all know that real life can be tedious and boring for the most part. I’m not saying nothing exciting happens to real people, but we do work and go to school and sleep every night…the boring parts are usually cut out of fiction (depending on your story)

Again, obviously this all depends on your story, but there’s usually some excitement that pops up in stories that doesn’t always happen to real people. We are reading about what’s most representative of your character’s life.

You never know exactly what real people are thinking

This is one of the biggest differences between characters and real people. In novels, if the writer chooses to do so, the innermost thoughts of characters can be revealed. In real life, it’s impossible for us to know what someone else is thinking. They might tell us, but we’ll never have that sort of deep insight we’d have in a work of fiction.

Use this to your advantage as a writer because it doesn’t happen in real life.  Share your protagonist’s thoughts if you think it will help develop your story.

-Kris Noel

Making Unlikeable People into Likeable Characters (with April Ludgate)

septembercfawkes:

Unlikeable people can be a pain to write if they’re a main character. After all, our audience needs to like them enough to be around them for the course of the story. If our readers can’t stand them, they won’t want to read about them. But sometimes our protagonists are meant to be bad. They need to be bad. Heck, sometimes even the likeable people in our stories have jerk-qualities.

So how do we render their bad-qualities without driving our readers to throw our books across the room?

We turn our unlikeable people into likeable characters.

We make them such likeable characters, that the audience forgives, accepts, or overlooks that they are unlikeable people.

Here are six ways to do that.

Keep reading

An Introduction to Character Flaws

fictionwritingtips:

Creating a perfect character usually isn’t a good idea, so you might want to consider giving your characters a few well thought out flaws. There needs to be something internally that prevents them from reaching their goals or something that stops them from being the most wonderful/impressive person in the room.

Here are a few tips on writing character flaws:

Balance Negative/Positive

No one’s perfect, so your characters shouldn’t be either. We all have both negative and positive traits—some that drive people crazy and some that people talk about affectionately (Also, this depends on who you talk to). Maybe we have great ideas, but we never take the initiative to execute them properly. Flaws will help balance out your characters and make them feel real. This should be something beyond “I’m so awkward it’s adorable” or “I’m so pretty/handsome, but I don’t know it”.

Tie them into the plot

It’s super important that these flaws play into the plot somehow or they run the risk of falling flat for your readers. If your character is notoriously lazy or lacks motivation, how will this affect the rest of the story? Will your character have trouble snapping into action? If you don’t do something with these flaws, there’s no point in mentioning them. A great example is Ned Stark from Game of Thrones. He is loyal/honorable to a fault and it causes huge problems for him later down the line. Being honorable isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but depending on the story, it can cause a character’s downfall.

Get to know your characters

Creating great character flaws really comes down to knowing your characters on a deeper level. Some writers throw in flaws that don’t really matter because they don’t know what to do with their characters. Maybe they haven’t thought out the story enough or maybe they’re afraid readers will see their characters in a negative light. The truth is we like reading about people who are flawed because they feel real and relatable. There’s no one in the world who does the right thing all the time. Do some planning before you start penning your novel and you’ll be able to shape who your character really is and what they want.

-Kris Noel

Twenty rules for writing detective stories

stevechatterton:

Originally published in the American Magazine (1928)

1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery.  All clues must be plainly stated and described.
   
   
2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.
   
   
3. There must be no love interest.  The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.
   
   
4. The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit.  This is bald trickery, on a par with offering some one a bright penny for a five-dollar gold piece.  It’s false pretenses.
   
   
5. The culprit must be determined by logical deductions — not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession.  To solve a criminal problem in this latter fashion is like sending the reader on a deliberate wild-goose chase, and then telling him, after he has failed, that you had the object of his search up your sleeve all the time. Such an author is no better than a practical joker.
   
   
6. The detective novel must have a detective in it;  and a detective is not a detective unless he detects. His function is to gather clues that will eventually lead to the person who did the dirty work in the first chapter;  and if the detective does not reach his conclusions through an analysis of those clues, he has no more solved his problem than the schoolboy who gets his answer out of the back of the arithmetic.
   
   
7. There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better.  No lesser crime than murder will suffice.  Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other than murder.  After all, the reader’s trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded.
   
   
8. The problem of the crime must he solved by strictly naturalistic means.  Such methods for learning the truth as slate-writing, ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic se'ances,  crystal-gazing, and the like, are taboo.  A reader has a chance when matching his wits with a rationalistic detective, but if he must compete with the world of spirits and go chasing about the fourth dimension of metaphysics, he is defeated ab initio.
   
   
9. There must be but one detective — that is, but one protagonist of deduction — one deus ex machina. To bring the minds of three or four, or sometimes a gang of detectives to bear on a problem, is not only to disperse the interest and break the direct thread of logic, but to take an unfair advantage of the reader.  If there is more than one detective the reader doesn’t know who his codeductor is.  It’s like making the reader run a race with a relay team.
   
   
10. The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story — that is, a person with whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest.
    
    
11. A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question.  It is a too easy solution.  The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person — one that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion.
    
    
12. There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed.  The culprit may, of course, have a minor helper or co-plotter;  but the entire onus must rest on one pair of shoulders:  the entire indignation of the reader must be permitted to concentrate on a single black nature.
    
    
13. Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no place in a detective story. A fascinating and truly beautiful murder is irremediably spoiled by any such wholesale culpability.  To be sure, the murderer in a detective novel should be given a sporting chance;  but it is going too far to grant him a secret society to fall back on.  No high-class, self-respecting murderer would want such odds.
    
    
14. The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be be rational and scientific. That is to say, pseudo-science and purely imaginative and speculative devices are not to be tolerated in the roman policier.  Once an author soars into the realm of fantasy, in the Jules Verne manner, he is outside the bounds of detective fiction, cavorting in the uncharted reaches of adventure.
    
    
15. The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent — provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. By this I mean that if the reader, after learning the explanation  for the crime, should reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a sense, been staring him in the face-that all the clues really pointed to the culprit — and that, if he had been as clever as the detective, he could have solved the mystery himself without going on to the final chapter.  That the clever reader does often thus solve the problem goes without saying.
    
    
16. A detective novel should contain no long descriptive   passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no “atmospheric” preoccupations.Such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction.  They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion.  To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude.
    
    
17. A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story.  Crimes by  housebreakers and bandits are the province of the police departments — not of authors and brilliant amateur detectives.  A really fascinating crime is one committed by a pillar of a church, or a spinster noted for her charities.
    
    
18. A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide. To end an odyssey of sleuthing with such an anti-climax is to hoodwink the trusting and  kind-hearted reader.
    
    
19. The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal.  International plottings and war politics belong in a different category of fiction — in secret-service tales, for instance.  But a murder story must be kept gemütlich, so to speak.  It must reflect the reader’s everyday experiences, and give him a certain outlet for his own repressed desires and emotions.
    
    
20. And (to give my Credo an even score of items) I herewith list a few of the devices which no self-respecting detective story writer will now avail himself of.  They have been employed too often, and are familiar to all true lovers of literary crime.  To use them is a confession of the author’s ineptitude and lack of originality.  a) Determining the identity of the culprit by comparing the butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime with the brand smoked by a suspect.  b) The bogus spiritualistic se'ance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away.  c) Forged fingerprints.  d) The dummy-figure alibi.  e) The dog that does not bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar.  f)The final pinning of the crime on a twin, or a relative who looks exactly like the suspected, but innocent, person.  g) The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops.  h) The commission of the murder in a locked room after the police have actually broken in.  i) The word association test for guilt.  j) The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually unraveled by the sleuth.
    
    

“If you’re writing about a character, if he’s a powerful character, unless you give him vulnerability I don’t think he’ll be as interesting to the reader.”

-Stan Lee (via fictionwritingtips)

Top Ten Things That Are Not Impressive For Action Characters

readingwithavengeance:

1. Sticking the landing . All this does is jack up joints. Collapse and roll. Hit the ground with the largest surface area possible.
2. Headshots . You sound like bragging gamers.
3. “One shot, one kill.” Same as above. Aim for center mass and unload until they stop moving.
4. Disabling shots . Depending on the time period, you’re either consigning them to a lifetime of nerve damage and pain or a slow death from infection. Also, injured people can still fight back.
5. Anything with a flip . Telegraphing your moves and taking several extra seconds to get it done just allows the other fighter time to block.
6. Throwing people . Unless you’re literally trying to get some space for an escape or a ranged weapon, why did you throw them? It takes a ton of effort and now they’re all the way over there.
7. Prolonged fights . Most brawls are over in seconds. Seconds. Competition fights last longer because there are safety limits and controls in place.
8. Ignoring backup . Congratulations on your ‘does not play well with others’ sticker.
9. Overly complicated weapons . Different weapons were developed to take advantage of specific conditions, be they environmental, tactical, or weaknesses in your opponent’s situation. Picking the wrong one because it looks cooler just puts you at a steep disadvantage.
10. Basically anything overcomplicated . Climbing in top floor windows when you could walk in the service entrance. Fighting through twelve guards when you could poison someone’s dinner. Training in eight martial arts styles when a pillow over the face will get them just as dead. It’s not really that impressive to make more work for yourself.