be the story

PersonalityPage, Character Traits for Writers

I frequently use PersonalityPage.com to assemble personality traits for characterization. The site is not organized for writers. In fact, the site navigation is poorly designed and pretty difficult to figure out. I had to poke around the site a bit to find the best pages there for characterization and how to use them. But having done so, I discovered that the content on those pages is perfect for writers trying to create characters. (Read more…)

Discovering Character Secrets from Your Relatives!

Much of the time, we treat relatives as obligations: “Yeah, but what can you do? He’s family.”

This year, during the holiday break between December 25 and January 1, the kids and I and Grandma and Grampa piled into a rented minivan and trekked 7 hours to southern New Jersey… where the aunts and uncles and first and second cousins reside. And while I was there, I finally understood why Brothers and Sisters makes me laugh.

But the biggest epiphany I had… (Read more…)

The Most Important Story Element

In the beginning, I was a software developer, not a writer. And if you’ve read any open-source documentation, you know how badly software developers write. So you know how wide a chasm I had to jump if I wanted to learn how to write fiction.

The fiction bug first bit me in 2002, when I had an inspiration for an idea I wanted to write about, and I knew I had to explore the idea from within a story, because it was the only way to make the words personal, concrete, not just to explore an abstract idea. So I sat down to pen the great American novel… (Read more…)

Is my story cliché and contrived?

An actual question asked on one of the writer’s boards. An aspiring author gave a two-paragraph summary of his plot idea. He said he feared it was just a series of clichés, then he asked whether it was too contrived to be taken seriously.

Now, I don’t know whether publishers would take it seriously. I can only speak as a writer and as a reader. (I have little faith in most publishers to do the right thing by readers, but that’s for another blog post.) But for what it’s worth, here’s my answer: (Read more…)

100 Free Fictional Character Ideas

… a tiny sample from 1001 Character Quirks for Writing Fiction. Literally, the full list is more than 10 times as big. Of course, the list of quirks is the easy part, because they’re just character ideas, and ideas are a dime a dozen.

-TimK (Read more…)

When to Use Character Quirks

I’ve read plenty of writing advice to improve your fictional characters using quirks, or hooks, or tags. That is, make the character more interesting by having her play with her hair, jiggle her keys, overuse a catch-phrase, or the like. These quirks are usually just lumped together with other character traits, but I think there’s an advantage to thinking about them separately. Because you can’t just take a bunch of quirks, throw them together, and have a compelling character. Quirks only work in the context of a character.

Holly Lisle hit the nail on the head on her website in her advice about how to write a fictional character: (Read more…)

Character Ideas Through Substitution

Here’s another way to generate character ideas. Substitute one reaction for another. We all tend to make our characters behave like ourselves or like people we know. So let’s say I’m a computer geek who tends to be shy and reserved, except when I’m talking about computers. Then I’m talkative and outgoing. They say, write what you know. And if I can work these feelings into my character, the character will be more realistic. If I want a character who is different than me, I can feel these same reactions, but apply them in different situations.

For example, I could create a character who is passionate about horticulture or some other subject. He’s quiet and reserved, but ask him about plants and suddenly he’s a fountain of knowledge and amusing anecdotes of our green leafy friends.

Or I could create a character who is generally outgoing by drawing on my own outgoing side and by looking to people I know who are also outgoing. Think of the behaviors they exhibit. But this character has a different background, different passions, different fears, different needs than either I or my friends. She will behave differently than us in the same situations, and she’ll behave the same in different situations.

There are only a few different ways we respond to the world around us. But we each respond differently, with a different mix of these ways, depending on the context. There are only a few character reactions. And a character reaction only becomes a characteristic in a situation. By supplanting reactions and situations, you can produce different characters, each of which is a completely realistic new personality.

Better Character Ideas: Throw Two Away

Here’s a simple way to generate better character ideas, or story ideas of any sort. This isn’t so much a source of story ideas as a way to improve existing ideas. You can do the same thing with setting, plot, or whatever story idea you need. It’s exceptionally simple. Just throw the first two ideas away.

“What?!” I can almost hear you saying. “You want me to throw away my ideas?”

(Read more…)

Where to Get Character Names

After all my bellyaching about how little character names really matter in the grand scheme of things, here are some of my favorite on-line sources for character names.

(Read more…)

Ender vs. Anakin

Orson Scott Card’s classic award-winning novel Ender’s Game features Ender Wiggin, a six-year old boy genius who saves the world. Ender has superhuman talents that enable him to accomplish great feats, just like Anakin Skywalker from George Lucas’s Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. But unlike Ender, Anakin Skywalker is more cutesy than heroic and more annoying than inspiring. What did Orson Scott Card do right that George Lucas didn’t?

(Read more…)