Tag Archives: character

Coffee & Conversation: How to keep your characters from being interchangeable? (1/2)

04 Monday Oct 2021

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How to keep your characters from feeling interchangeable? (1/2)

I’ve talked a little bit about how to expand your writing on a sentence level by expanding your vocabulary, etc. But now, I want to discuss characters and how to practice making them unique rather than interchangeable.

There are two ways of looking at this. First, all the characters in a particular story read and feel the same and it’s difficult to tell them apart, and second, all the characters across the author’s many stories feel the same, particularly their point-of-view characters.

This second one is interesting in the romance industry because it often means that a character who was once a side character in someone else’s story becomes the lead character in their own, only, they end up feeling like a completely different person because they read like the previous main character instead of who they’d been in that previous story. (As an example, because this reads a little confusing: Paul’s story is great. Paul is friends with side character, Lyle. Lyle is beloved by fans. Author writes book about Lyle next. Only Lyle suddenly acts like Paul rather than the Lyle everyone loved.)

So I’m going to address ways in which to help out with both these situations in two different posts since they are actually different things entirely.

First, how to keep characters in the same book from all reading the same.

1) Give each character a unique physical/visible trait.

This has to do with imagery. You want a different image in each reader’s mind when you bring up a specific character in your story. A lot of people need something physical to latch on to, something that helps paint a picture in their imagination. So giving each person a particular physical trait can make all the difference.

When I say unique, I mean unique. If all the characters have brown hair, then brown hair isn’t unique. If all the characters have scars across their faces, then the scars aren’t unique. You see this often in stories where you’ll have the blond-haired one, the brown-haired one and the red-haired one as a set of three. That’s one way to do it… Continue reading →

Coffee & Conversation: What makes you instantly dislike a character?

08 Monday Mar 2021

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What makes you instantly dislike a character?

This is an interesting question for two reasons.

Firstly, you would assume that what makes us dislike a character would be similar to what makes us dislike a real-life person, and to a certain extent that is true. This means the question can feel repetitive or pedantic on the surface: manipulative, cruel, or dismissive behavior can all immediately have us cringing away from a character.

However, there are plenty of characters we love to hate. Many more who have large or deep enough flaws that while we wouldn’t want to be around them in our real-life, we find them fascinating to watch or read about.

Secondly, characters have arcs, or at least they should have arcs. This means that they aren’t stagnant and will change, whether for the better or worse. You might fall in love with a character in the beginning of their arc only for them to take action after action that leads you to disliking them immensely. The opposite is also possible.

We, as readers, come with particular biases that will supersede the arcs of the characters and/or the desire to love a character beyond their unlikable traits. These biases are different in all of us, though there are some things that large groups of audience will lean toward.

My own personal biases mean that the following traits of a character will instantly make me dislike them, regardless of their arcs, even a redemption one, or their other attributes that might make them likable as villains. Continue reading →

Coffee & Conversation: What’s the quickest way to make you crazy in a romance?

22 Monday Feb 2021

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What’s the quickest way to make you crazy in a romance story?

Most of my stories, particularly the novels, have multiple plot threads: a romantic one intertwined with an adventure or mystery. Some lean more on the romance arc; some lean more on the adventure arc; some are pretty even-handed. One of the great advantages to having a second arc intertwined with the romance is that I can use outside forces that might push the characters together/apart and craft interpersonal conflict via the adventure or mystery aspect of the story. This is something that romance writers who have sole romance plot arcs aren’t able to do.

When you can’t use outer journeys or adventurous conflicts to interact with the interpersonal conflict of the romance, there’s a serious limit when crafting the necessary interpersonal conflicts. This can mean that a lot of the interpersonal romantic plots can feel over-used and rehashed and trope-reliant rather than fresh and fun. This limiting number of conflicts can also mean that some authors reach for whatever is easiest, no matter that it might be completely nonsensical and that something far and away better might exist if they’d bothered to push themselves.

One of my least favorite romance “conflicts” is the ridiculous reliance on a silly misunderstanding. You know the type—the kind that could be cleared up with ONE SINGLE ADULT CONVERSION.

That, to me, isn’t conflict. Or, if you call it conflict, it’s the weakest, frailest, lamest conflict ever to exist in the entire adult fiction world. A misunderstanding should not be the backbone of an entire romantic plot. A misunderstanding should never be the catalyst for a story.

Misunderstandings should be used sparingly and only for tiny threads within the entire plot. If they are even used at all. The best use of misunderstandings (imo) is comedic beats, to elicit a momentary smile from the reader.

The second best use is to indicate something larger at play. A good example of this is the lemon scene in the movie The Breakup, where the male lead only gets a couple lemons when the female lead wanted a lot more—this is a great example of using a misunderstanding to represent a much larger, difficult problem that exists rather than having the lemons themselves be the problem. (Also, using a sour fruit in the scene was an epic choice for symbolism.)

But yes, the quickest way (or at least one of them at any rate) to make me crazy is to have the entire plot of a romance be completely centered on a fake conflict that could be easily solved within a single chapter. Making the rest of the novel utterly eye-rolly.

~Emmi

Coffee & Conversation: What do you daydream about?

08 Monday Feb 2021

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What do you daydream about?

A lot of writers are daydreamers, in the sense that sometimes they will stare off into space, crafting sequences and scenes with characters of their own making. It took a long time for me to realize that not everyone did this, that it was specific to certain types of creators and readers.

I’d often get the “Are you okay?” or “Is something wrong?” types of questions. Sometimes the person would add (after I said “Yes, I’m good” in some fashion) “No, something is obviously wrong because you’re not talking to anyone and you’ve got an annoyed look on your face.” When the annoyed look came from having my personal movie sequence playing in my mind interrupted by silly questions. I’m sure many of you can relate :)

As for the daydreams themselves, they are often ways to figure out plot points or character arcs, the characters pushed through different scenarios until one suddenly pops into place perfectly. Daydreams are also ways to pinpoint good emotional beats, so when the emotions resonate with the daydreamer powerfully enough, they know they’ve found a good one.

This tends to mean that the heightened moments in a story get daydreamed the most clearly. Maybe the final showdown in an action sequence. Or the moment of deepest despair. Or the settling of a romantic conflict. It’s like having the crux points of a story without the transitional information.

Which means that the transitions and the lead-up scenes are usually more difficult to write because they haven’t been as clearly daydreamed. The ultimate goal is to craft stories where everything feels important, even if a particular scene is a relaxing from an emotional high or a lessening of tension in order to slow the pace or give the reader a chance to catch their breath.

But ultimately, it’s the pivotal moments that we replay in our minds most often, whether as writers or readers or dreamers.

~Emmi