Worldbuilding

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Now that your characters are dynamic, we need to give them a place to explore, a place to live that is worthy of them. A dynamic character is useless without a properly developed world to live in. What I’m referring to is worldbuilding.

Just like your characters, you need to be thorough and realistic with your world. Don’t leave glaring holes that will need some creative thinking to fill and require a lot of work on your part. Your world won’t be cohesive and will probably seem sloppy.

Following that thread, your world needs laws. They don’t need to be the laws of our world, but you need a set of laws that every part of your world follows (every part affected by the law, that is). Once these laws are in place, don’t break them to suit your character’s needs. You’ll undermine your own foundation and make your novel and setting less believable. Turn these laws into an obstacle, into a challenge for your character to overcome. Your world will be better for it.

Every character is different, and any group of people will develop similarities to each other, different from any other group. Culture. People from one country will look, act and speak differently than people from a different country. They will eat different foods, use different slang and build their houses and structures differently. Status will be developed in unique ways. This is very important to remember when worldbuilding, especially if your characters intend to travel. Without culture, your world and towns won’t have any sparkle.

Remember that ports and trading towns, as well as capital cities, will have people of different nationalities. There will be an intermingling of cultures, so take a moment to describe the sights. These are places where turban-wearing nomads in for supplies might rub shoulders with wealthy merchants from the island country.

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Also when creating your world, you need to keep distances and landscapes in mind. Unless you have a good description of how they got there, don’t have your characters instantaneously going from the middle of a forest in the foothills to being on a ship in the middle of the ocean. That’s a bad idea because it won’t make much sense unless you explain it well, but also because you pass up an opportunity to give your characters all sorts of other challenges.

Keep in mind that too much travel is also boring after a while. Somewhere, there is a sweet spot that needs to be found.

Landscape can be a powerful tool. It can help or hinder your characters, sometimes both at once. A river can hide the character’s tracks, but it can also slow them down. The moment they have to fight, it becomes even more of an obstacle. Even when they don’t have to fight, they’ll have to dry any wet clothes and equipment when they leave the water.

So. Using your world and creating it well has many advantages for you as a writer. It can present opportunity for challenges and different interactions between the major and minor characters. It can help or hinder your character. Always keep in mind that landscape can make or break your story.

Characters

Everyone can remember a book that they’ve read that had terrible characters. They were flat, had no personality and were all based on stereotypes, with minimal research. It was probably not a very enjoyable read, even if the book itself had an interesting plot.

That’s because your characters will make or break your book. You can have a fantastic plotline, with a twist ending and all of that, but if your readers don’t like your characters, they won’t read, or buy, your book. For an author, that’s a serious problem.

I am no expert on this subject, but I have read a lot of books, with characters that I liked and characters I didn’t. Here are some of my observations about what makes a character interesting and likeable.

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First, the reader has to be able to relate to them. Everyone has some kind of flaw, usually several, so a character that doesn’t have this essential part of being human won’t be relatable. For example, I hate a hero who is brave in every circumstance and never seems to be afraid. A pit of snakes? No problem! An army of bad guys? Bring it on! In this situation, showing your character’s fear will help to make them real, help to make them human. Sometimes it hurts to make your characters weak, because you, as an author, would like them to win, and for the reader to see them as the hero you do. They can win, and be a hero, and be weak, too, because you can use their weakness to make them stronger.

Your characters should each be unique. No one person is exactly like another, and none of your characters should be either. Give them personality, loves, quirks and faults, to turn them into a cast of people that might actually fit in the real world. For example, a character’s quirk in a book I recently read was that he was forever changing his heritage. In the first book he was Irish, the second Australian and the third English. He had reasons for changing, but it made him memorable as a character.  You want your characters to be memorable.

This one seems obvious, but too many authors fall into the trap of always making everyone in their tale handsome or beautiful. Life isn’t like that, and while I’m not saying that no one is handsome or beautiful, not everyone is in the same way. You can use that fact to make a struggle for a character. The appearance of the players in your story is as important as their personality, because their appearance will tell the reader something about them. Someone with lots of scars on his face could be a fighter. A woman with a white streak in her black hair could have a traumatic event in her childhood. A teenage girl who doesn’t care about her appearance or how she dresses could be an outcast.

You need to develop your characters, in ways that the reader will never even see. I use a questionnaire that covers many more aspects of the character than those that actually make it into the novel. For example, one of the questions is about what the character’s room looks like, or their hobbies. These seem minor and unimportant, but a character whose hobby is woodworking will be able to create things out of wood that a character who has a different hobby would not be able to make. This questionnaire would never make it into the novel, and many things you won’t even mention. But it’s good for you to keep these seemingly minor things in mind, in order to make an even more dynamic character.

Another thing is to avoid stereotypes, at least for your major characters. As an example, a murder mystery. The postman, who is murdered, can be the stereotypical postman, and, depending on your plot, the detective (if he isn’t the protagonist) can be the typical donut-loving, bumbling cop. Be careful though, that these stereotypes don’t creep into your main characters.

A way for you to help keep your characters unique and realistic is to research. Yes, it’s hard for you to research something that you are creating, but you can observe the real people around you. Take notes on the quirky habits you notice, on people’s appearance and mannerisms. Once you start to notice more of the little things, your characters will start to have them. Of course, don’t let the people you are observing know that you are taking notes on them. That can lead to awkward questions and theories. I find it incredibly irritating to have people ask me if a character in my book is based on them. The characters always have elements of everyone around me, but no one character is meant to be a specific person.

So. Keep these tips from a reader (and aspiring writer) in mind, and flesh out those characters.

Research

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Recently, I started to research a new novel that I intend to write. Because the topic of the research is interesting, for me, I love doing it. Research shouldn’t be a chore, or a colossal amount of work.

There are several reasons for this. If you hate doing research on the topic you’ve chosen, you will avoid it, or do it as quickly as possible. And things done quickly often have mistakes, or misinterpretations. Obviously, if the research doesn’t get done because you avoided it, it will have glaring things wrong with it.

Another reason is that if your research is a chore, writing the book will be as well. Think of your time in school. As a student, you would’ve had to do some research for essays on topics that weren’t really all that interesting to you. Those essays were a lot harder to write than the ones on topics that interested you.

Writing should be fun, a reward almost. It shouldn’t become a chore, something you have to force yourself to do. If writing is becoming something you try to avoid, evaluate why. It could be that it doesn’t interest you. And what you aren’t interested in writing, your readers aren’t interested in reading. Now, that sounds like a bit of a blanket statement. Yes, there will be someone in the world who wants to read about what doesn’t interest you. That isn’t what I’m saying. If you aren’t interested in writing about something, you won’t put in the same care and effort for something that you are interested in.

Research is something that can benefit your book, if it is done right. For example, a historical fiction novel that doesn’t have any time put into researching it won’t be all that believable. A dystopian novel that has completely unrealistic technology and concepts in it won’t make sense. I think that one of the main things that makes a novel an escape is if it is believable. No one wants to escape somewhere unrealistic. Science fiction with an actual grounding in scientific technologies is, I would say, better than science fiction that is completely made up.

Research done wrong will harm your book. If you only visit sites that have one point of view, your book will display the same, possibly slanted, point of view. Research, and writing, should challenge you to walk in someone else’s shoes, should make your reader look at something from a point of view that they have never considered before. Writing is meant to challenge, to teach. Storytelling holds a lot of power. Too many writers abuse that power, or ignore it.

All writers need to remember that they have the potential to reach thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands (I’d say millions, but I don’t want to scare myself). Would you want to tell thousands of people the wrong thing? Integrity is also an essential part of writing. If you can’t stick to what you’ve written, how can you expect anyone else to take you seriously? Good research will help allow you to stick by your writing, especially if it’s true. No one wants to be connected to false research and obviously biased work.

So. Research should be something that you enjoy, because if it isn’t, you won’t do it to the same level that you have done other research to. If you don’t enjoy the research, you won’t enjoy writing. Research done right can be a huge benefit to you as an author, but if it is done wrong, you will hurt your book, and possibly your standing and integrity. No one wants to damage their own reputation. The importance of good research can’t be stressed enough.

Story

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Storytelling is as old as humanity. Even before the stories were written down, there were oral traditions and legends. Each culture developed its own stories to encompass all areas of life. Stories have shaped our beliefs, our ideas and our religion. If there ever was a way to change the world, it can be found in story.

Many people enjoy story, but don’t understand the affect it can, and will, have on them. A well-told story that triggers the emotions will stay far longer with the listener than a well-researched and supported speech that triggers the listener’s intelligence. It seems as though we as humanity are wired to sympathise and celebrate with each other. That is why a good story can manipulate our emotions, why actors can make us cry, even though we know that the drama on our screen is not real. It’s why we cry when those around us cry, why we celebrate when they do and why we feel their pain and failures.

For us to consider a story a good story, it has to manipulate our emotions, to get us involved. An author becomes a true wordsmith when they master the art of manipulation.

Yes, you read that right. Writing, when it is done well, is manipulation. You are taking, or rather are given, control of your reader’s emotions. That’s a real responsibility, and it’s what readers expect. I, as a reader, will not finish a tale that doesn’t twist my emotions, utilizing the control that I’ve given up.

A proper book has to control what the reader feels. The good news for writers is that the readers are smart people. Most read novels to escape, and will want to feel the emotions. They will be watching for cues. This doesn’t mean that a writer can get lazy and say things like, “he was angry,” because that isn’t making the reader feel the emotion, the anger. It’s just telling them how the character feels. Writers need to use all the signals a reader would look for in a face-to-face conversation. Simply put, body language. Facial expressions.  Instead of just telling the reader that your character is angry, describe how he stopped slouching, how the smile on his face disappeared, how his hands clenched into fists, how the muscles in his jaw tighten. It takes more work, but the reader will pick up on the emotion of the scene pretty quickly and will feel more involved than if you had just told them what to feel. No one can feel a certain emotion on cue (except your characters, of course).

There are ways to get better at this, thankfully. It’s not some genetic similarity that great writers have and no one else does.

As with everything, you improve with practice. Writing anger when you yourself are angry will probably help to calm you down and make your writing more real, because that emotion will bleed into the scene. Sometimes you can listen to music that makes you feel sad, or whatever, while you are writing a sad scene, because the emotion you are feeling will shine through.

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It will also help to watch the people around you, to see if you can guess what they are feeling from their stance and body language. You’ll start to notice trends that will make your writing easer, trends that you used to notice unconsciously. Another thing you could start to pay more attention to is how you act when you are feeling a certain emotion.

When I worked at a fast food restaurant, I made it a game with myself to guess what a person was feeling based on the tone and inflection of their voice (on the drive through headsets, I mean). As I did this more, I like to think I got better and better, and that ‘research’ has helped me to write more convincing emotions.

So. Storytelling is extremely powerful, as long as the writer understands how to draw the reader in, how to manipulate their emotions. A writer truly becomes a wordsmith when they master this fundamental aspect of their craft.

Inspiration

Hi. I go by J. I am a writer, with my first book coming out June 2020. A few words of introduction, first.

I’ve been writing since I was thirteen, and now, four years later, I am ready to show the world the fruits of my hard work. This blog is meant to help other teenagers who dream of writing their own stories do so.

So. Let’s get started.

Before you can write an amazing story, you need an idea. It has to be an outstanding idea, one that will grab your readers and hold them until the last page, until you’ve got your point across. You’ll need some stellar inspiration. Lucky for you, inspiration is everywhere. You just need to know where to look.

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Inspiration can be found in a song, a picture or even a conversation. As a writer, you need to be ready for it to strike, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing. It doesn’t come when it’s convenient, or sometimes even when you need it. That means you need to take what you can get when you can get it.

For me, I carry a small notebook in one of my pockets. The notebook is always with me, and always ready.  Whenever I get an idea, I write it down, usually only a few words. That’s enough.

There is some good news about inspiration. Sometimes, you can trigger it, if you know what to do. If there’s a song that you really love, or a picture you can’t get out of your head, ask yourself why. Maybe it’s inspiration, just waiting for you.

Another way is to go somewhere beautiful, alone, and write down your thoughts and feelings. Or just sit by yourself somewhere, writing whatever comes to mind.

You can also try to find what makes you feel free. Driving does that for me. Something about being alone, behind the wheel, theoretically able to go anywhere, feels like freedom. If you can find what makes you feel this way, inspiration will be there.

A few words of caution, from my own experience. If you are inspired by a story, whether in a movie or novel, be careful. Use some of the elements that inspired you, but make the story yours. Nothing good ever came out of an author trying to publish work that is already out there.

Even if that isn’t true, the story won’t feel as though it’s yours. I’d imagine that this is similar to the way a scribe wouldn’t feel as though he created a tale that was dictated to him.

Another thing to be careful with is copyright. Make sure you know where your ideas are coming from, and that they are yours.

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Something you need to know, and keep in mind. Even if your inspiration is on a topic that’s been written about a hundred times before, write it anyway! You could put a new perspective on an old idea, a spin that no one’s ever come up with before.

Inspiration is a beautiful thing. Its source is different for everyone, and yet we all know what it is, somehow.  Once you find yours, it could turn you into a writer.