“Love Thyself,” © 2010 Kaili Williams CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Click here for the original photo.

Inspired by the Pendragon Variety Podcast relaunch episode—in which the Pendragon ladies vamp on the topic: “Character Flaws – Balancing Your Character’s Awesome”—I decided to expound on… uh… character flaws.

First things first: We’re all told that our characters should have “flaws.” But what are these mythical creatures? What makes a flaw?

• any imperfection in a character?
• something that gets the character into trouble?
• something that makes us unsympathetic to the character’s plight?
• something that keeps the character from meeting his needs?
• a dysfunctional character behavior or habit?
• a self-defeating character trait?
• a physical characteristic?
• an emotional characteristic?

While many authors and commentators ask this question, I’m not sure many have given a good answer.

And asking Google does not help. For example, here’s Wikipedia’s definition:

…a limitation, imperfection, problem, phobia, or deficiency present in a character who may be otherwise very functional… a problem that directly affects the character’s actions and abilities, such as a violent temper; [or] a simple foible or personality defect, which affects the character’s motives and social interactions, but little else.

There’s a lot in there. But one thing I think we can agree on:

Character flaws matter when they are part of the character’s character.

That is, useful character flaws are character traits. Or: Character flaws matter when they affect how the character meets his needs.

Unfocused character quirks, that is, character flaws that do not impact the story, don’t make the reader feel good or bad about the character. They are at best neutral, only adding spice to an already full character.

On the other hand, flaws that serve as obvious plot gimmicks, changing the course of the story without actually being integrated into the character’s character—like the clumsy heroine who is clumsy only so that she can stumble into the hero’s strong arms… Gack! These can grate on the nerves and even reduce sympathy for the character.

So we can limit discussion of “flaws,” looking only at those flaws that are also deep character traits. But not all character traits are flaws. A “flaw” has a negative connotation. It gets in the character’s way. It doesn’t necessarily need to be something with a social stigma, like alcoholism or drug addiction. It can be something as simple as the character turning to food whenever she feels her life is careening out of control.

Therefore, to find a character’s flaws…

Start with character needs.
Try to meet them in a self-destructive or self-defeating way.

In real life, you’ll find these flaws everywhere. In studies of addictions. Of depression and suicide. Of eating disorders. Of battered women. Of crime. Of divorce. Of political action and terrorism.

Once we realize that a character flaw is just a specific case of character trait, we can identify two more truths:

A flaw can change,
once you make a character-centric case for why it should.

BUT this assumes you’ve already provided compelling reason for the flaw’s existence in the first place. (Note that this is just a restatement of the Second Law of Character Action.)

And…

Add complexity by calling on multiple related, interacting needs.

So the character tries to maintain control over his life by arguing with his wife, but this also distances him from his family, which makes him feel lonely, so he flirts with the pretty receptionist at the office, which produces another fight, etc.

In the Pendragon Variety discussion, the ladies at points said, “The character’s flaw is…” And then, “Actually, I think the character’s flaw is…” Followed by: “No! The character’s flaw really is… Meooowww!”

I made up that last line. They weren’t really fighting about it. However, in a different time and place, with a different group of commentators, they could have been. In all such disagreements, I take the middle position:

Deep characters have multiple flaws.

In other words, a realistic character is never composed of a single, fatal flaw. Realistic characters are made up of many character traits, all interacting in complex ways. Which one comes into play in a given scene or story depends on which others are also in play.

One more note from the discussion: They talked about “flaw” and compared it to “evidence of flaw,” another discussion that seemed to have no firm set of rules, for a very simple reason:

You need both “flaw” and “evidence of flaw.”
Which is which depends on where you’re standing.

“Flaw” vs “evidence of flaw” is the difference between show and tell. And which is which will depend on what zoom level you’re looking at. Just as we can have the narrator zoom in and out and look at a scene from different perspectives, we can look at a character from different perspectives.

For instance: With even the slightest unexpected event, the character feels her life careening out of control (flaw); therefore, she disagrees with the next person she talks to, in order to reassert control (evidence of flaw).

Zooming in a little: Whatever her coworkers think, she always seems to take the opposite view, and can never let up, even for the sake of peace (flaw); instead, she engages them in heated fights (evidence of flaw).

These fights distance her from her coworkers. She’s known as someone who can’t go along to get along, who doesn’t play nice with others (flaw). She overhears someone saying that management is looking for a reason to fire her, and so she finds a good-for-nothing lawyer who will seek out a legal rationale to sue her employer (evidence of flaw).

You need both in a story, both the zoom-out and the zoom-in, both the establishing shot and the close shot. So it may be useful to recognize that, from such-and-such a perspective, this is a character flaw and that is evidence of the flaw. But I’m not convinced it’s all that useful to make general statements about a story: “That’s evidence of the character’s flaw, which is…”

I hope this brief foray into character flaws has led to some insights for your own writing. If you start with character first, as you flesh out your characters, flaws will provide a natural way for you to increase the drama of your stories without making your characters feel fake. If you look at them from that perspective, as dramatic character traits, they’ll never lead you astray. And always…

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2005 Sylvia Wrigley CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Click here for the original image.

I found this photo on Flickr. Entitled “The Problem with Character-Driven Stories,” the photo had an amusing story to go along with it.

As the story goes, there was a writer who was auditioning characters for her next novel. Characters lined up all the way out the writer’s waiting room and around the corner. And most of them, unfortunately, were about the same as all the others. Here’s an example that exemplifies what I’m talking about:

A character named Jean entered, sat down.

“Okay, then, Jean,” said the writer. “Tell me about yourself.”

“I’m 24. I have medium-long mousey-blonde hair. I drink vodka and Coke. I’m pretty boring.”

“And you’d like to be in a story?”

“Yes, please.”

“Any particular subject matter?”

“Well, lost love is sorta done to death, I think. Epiphanies are always good. Some life-changing event, basically.”

“Changing your life from boring to interesting?”

“If you could.”

“Well, I do like character-driven stories, but you really don’t seem to be… well… driving this.”

Jean shrugged. The author continued.

“You don’t have any obsessions, don’t appear to have ever been involved with anyone, aren’t particularly religious. I just really fail to see how I can make a plot from that.”

They went on like that, talked about Jean’s smoking and drinking habits—she didn’t have any and had even made up the part about vodka and Coke. Talked about her friends—again, didn’t have any. Talked about her fluffy, white dog that she walks in the evenings, until it came out that Jean had imagined the dog in order to appear more interesting.

“I’m sorry, Jean,” the writer said. “I really don’t see how we can go anywhere with this. Feel free to come by again once you’ve got a life.”

“Well,” said Jean, “I was rather hoping you’d give me one.”

It’s all in how you tell it

Now, I’ve modified that story slightly, because I think it demonstrates a common misconception about character and what drives character stories, and I wanted to focus on that misconception.

There’s a myth among writers that “interesting” characters make for a compelling story. And that’s not exactly true. Because usually what they mean by “interesting” is characters with family problems or psychological dysfunctions or bizzarre quirks that make them so unlike normal, average, real people. Indeed, many wonderful stories feature such characters. But that’s not what makes those stories compelling.

At core, what makes a story compelling is how a character perceives her needs, and how she seeks to meet those needs. This principle works hand-in-hand with the First Law of Character Action:

The First Law of Character Action
Everyone acts to fulfill their perceived needs.

And everyone has needs. These needs motivate the character, and how she perceives them determines how she will interact with the world around her. Even if a person is living in complete comfort, with all her physical and emotional needs met, she still has a need to grow, to become something more than she already is. And she might, for example, turn to study, or perhaps to a dangerous hobby, or maybe she’ll turn in on herself and sink into depression because her needs aren’t being met. Or she may audition for a part in an author’s upcoming novel.

But Jean above isn’t living in complete comfort. For example, she has no friends. Not even a dog to hang out with. Everyone needs friends, because having friends helps us meet several core human needs.

So yeah, maybe Jean thinks her life is boring, and maybe she thinks she needs a writer to give her some qualities that someone would want to read about. But as a character, it’s not her job to figure out what makes a compelling story. That’s her author’s job. And the character author will ask, “Why does she want a life? What needs is she pursuing? And what can I do to her in order to exacerbate those needs and bring them to crisis, in order to make a more interesting story?”

Yes, character authors are cruel beyond words. We have to be. It’s our job.

In all the dark places you must walk

“May the Gods stand between you and harm in all the dark places you must walk.” That’s an ancient Egyptian blessing, appropriate to speaking of character arc, which is the second core component of a character story. This blessing is appropriate, because a character arc is all about bringing your character through her own personal hell.

Why? Because of the Second Law of Character Action:

The Second Law of Character Action
Extraordinary changes require extraordinary forces,
and extraordinary forces produce extraordinary changes.

And character change is what makes a character arc. A character arc takes shape when a character changes in how she perceives her reality. The reality itself doesn’t change; only the character’s perception of reality changes.

Jean’s perception of her reality will determine her thought process, what choices she makes, what actions she takes, and how she will rationalize these decisions. And as these change, they’ll shape her story.

Why your character’s changing perception is so important, the reason may not be immediately obvious, because the reason is fairly complex, involving the nature of story conflict and how it interacts with the psychology of your characters. I don’t have space to go into it in this article (though I am going into it in Character Fiction 101). Suffice it to say that if you can convince your character to change the way she thinks about her world, you will be well on your way to plotting out a character arc.

Other variations

These two laws, I believe, comprise the fundamental aspects of a character story, because they define character motivation and character arc. Most authors will add plot that doesn’t result in character change, overarching themes and moods, a favorite setting or character trait. An author might write a story starring a teenage girl, because she’s writing her story to be read by teenage girls. Or she might write a story that includes a bigger-than-life villain who places the hero in mortal danger, because she’s writing a suspense novel. Suspense novels are not necessarily character stories, but there’s no conceptual reason why your suspense novel couldn’t include character change. Plenty of plot-based, suspense TV shows certainly try to do character arcs, some more successfully than others. And there’s usually a character-arc component to romantic suspense, because the romance usually involves character change.

Some authors go on at length dwelling on their characters through slow sections of the story in order to “build” the characters. This is unnecessary, and I myself prefer stories that reveal character through compelling conflict. Scenes that stop the story from moving forward, in order to let the characters talk abstract philosophy or political ideology, not so interesting (unless the discussion is effecting a compelling story conflict). Even so, a character story, by my definition, can take either path.

A simple definition: To write a character story, start with your character’s perceived need, and set about changing how your character repsonds to that need.

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2008 "Sunny laid back L.A." CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Finishing out these posts on character needs, extracted from Character Fiction 101: How to Write Fictional Characters and Character Stories. Today, a basic need that provides motivation for many powerful stories, the need for autonomy.

Each of us needs to feel in control over his own life and his own choices, a measure of independence and freedom, a corner of the world that is “mine, all mine, to do with as I wish.”

A character may seek to obtain direct control over her own destiny by rebelling, perhaps even if there’s no reason for her to rebel. She might object to a rule against smoking for example, even if she herself does not smoke, even if smoke and dust aggravate her allergies. Or she may seek out ways to control her space in ways that others will not or cannot challenge. An office worker who drinks out of her own special coffee cup that she brought from home, or sets a picture of her family on her desk. Or she might respond to a stressful situation with deep breathing or other relaxation techniques.

Just asserting a token bit of control can make the difference between going on and giving in. Tales have even been told of prisoners who survived torture by exercising control over how long they held out before screaming or losing consciousness.

A character can sometimes gain a feeling of autonomy if she merely obtains information about the future. She might see a psychic for that reason, although she herself may not reason that her need for autonomy is the driving force. The same logic applies if the knowledge seeks her out. For example, she might feel better about an operation she is about to undergo if the surgeon and anesthetist discuss with her ahead of time everything that will happen to her and everything she will experience, and then lets her control her own dosages of postoperative pain medication, all of which is standard procedure now in many hospitals.

A person can become overwhelmed by too much responsibility, but too little can produce as much stress. Lack of autonomy has been associated with physical illness, fear, anxiety, sensitivity to pain, and depression. Feeling helpless can cause despondency and depression, and conversely control over one’s own life is a core weapon against depression.

Changes that we can’t control also tend to generate fear and threaten our sense of autonomy (as well as our sense of security). And our modern obsession with global news doesn’t help, because most of it we can’t control. Politics. Wars. Natural disasters. And the ever-looming prospect of losing your job in the midst of an economy we perceive as uncertain. Broad social and natural phenomena, because they take place within complex systems that no one really understands, all provide potential challenges to your character’s sense of autonomy and security.

If a character is desperate for autonomy, or if she pursues the need in a dysfunctional manner, she may reject her family or community (threatening her sense of community, intimacy, and security), “rail against the world,” or engage in crime or other antisocial behavior.

If you look at your favorite stories, you should see the need for autonomy pop up everywhere, from the rebellious teenager to the demoralized prisoner (or office worker).

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2009 mrmayo CC BY-NC 2.0

I’ll fess up and say I’ve avoided teaching about character, because, well, it’s complicated. And everyone has their own process. So I have to ask myself: How do I write character? Because I do write it. But how? What’s my internal process?

Let’s start with the main character. The process is basically the same for all the secondary characters.

First of all, after thinking and planning out my story, I get a sense just through my imagining, what the main character looks like. (And of course, whether male or female. For this study, I’ll go with female.) I nail down the basics: height, weight, hair. Then I give her a name. This is subject to change as I get to know her and what the story demands. In fact, all my first assumptions about my characters are subject to change— and they usually do… in more senses than one, because that’s what a Character Arc is.

I know a lot of people will do character study lists at this point, including deep emotional questions like what’s their biggest fear, what’s their favorite food, etc. And it works for them, but for me, I can’t do this up front. These kinds of deeper questions are answered in the writing of the story, so I like to do those deeper lists on the second draft.

So for the first draft, besides basic looks and name, I try to determine the Felt Need. This is a concept that I seem to understand better than simply motive or motto. Felt Need to me is that deep underlying need that propels them through each day. I can usually figure this out easily once I’ve mapped out some of the story, even if that information is all in my head.

For instance, in Clockwise, the protagonist’s felt need is to be “normal.” We all want to feel included and to fit in, but she laments because she can’t control the fact that she’s a time traveler— and how inconvenient this “gift” is!

Once I determined her felt need, I gave her other problems or self-perceptions that fed into that belief system. She’s too tall, too skinny. Her knees are knobby. Her hair is too big and curly. And because of these personal problems, she believes she’s unworthy of the “cutest boy in the school.”

Other examples of felt need: the need to belong, the need to feel safe, the need for acceptance, the need to find something, like a loved one or the truth.

Finally, I can determine the Character Arc. Characters need to change as the story progresses. My character in Clockwise can’t be the same person by the time the book ends. All of the conflicts and crises she goes through in the story must bring change to her character. This happens gradually over the course of the story. By the end, she sees herself much differently. She’s grown into her scrawniness and likes her new curves; she doesn’t mind her hair; she’s accepted her brand of normal and that she is worthy of the cute boy’s affections. I try to nail down the basic character traits and the arc path before I start writing. However, sometimes these are revealed as I write. Or at least, become more clear.

How do you approach writing character?

Photo © 2007 Jennifer König CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

One thing I try to figure out before starting a new book is my main character’s felt need.

What do I mean by felt need? Some people might call it the character’s motivation, but I think it goes deeper than that. For instance, a character may be motivated to do his father’s bidding because if he doesn’t he’ll get a beating. He obeys to prevent something harsh from happening. He’s motivated to please his father to preserve himself. His felt need goes beyond motivation: his felt need in this situation may be to be accepted by his father. What he really wants is unconditional love. This felt need drives the character not only in how he acts and reacts but in how he feels.

For instance in my book Clockwise, my main character’s felt need is to be normal. She will never be normal according to the world’s definition, but by the end of the book she has defined her own normal and accepts it.

In another manuscript my character’s felt need is to belong.

Felt need doesn’t eliminate character motivation—it enhances it. Motivation drives a character’s action, felt need drives action and emotion.

Felt needs are pretty basic to humanity and you’ll find that there’s a short list of needs that really drive people. The need for acceptance, to be normal, to belong, to be loved unconditionally, to prove oneself, the desire for justice, to be safe.

In The Cay by Theodore Taylor, Philip’s felt need is to be safe. He wants to reunite with his family, get away from Timothy and he wants his vision back. A lot of his drive—his actions, reactions and emotions are the result of not feeling safe.

In the movie Napoleon Dynamite, to use the same illustration as last week, Napoleon’s felt need is to be taken seriously. He’s belittled or ignored by everyone except his new friend Pedro and this drives him to help Pedro win student council president.

How about you? Do you know you’re main character’s felt need?

Photo © 2008 Storm CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Another post on character needs, extracted from Character Fiction 101: How to Write Fictional Characters and Character Stories. Today, a need that has been on my heart of late, the need for community.

Feeling part of a wider community, beyond one’s immediate family, involves shared perceptions and identity with others and connections to them, a feeling of belonging, that we matter to one another, that we’re all watching each others’ backs, a belief that our needs will be met through the community that we share. We are not just a collection of individuals all competing to win; we are also all parts of larger communities.

A character meets her need for community by identifying with, joining, and becoming accepted by a community of others. This may be a community of residents of her town, her coworkers, members of a church or civic organization, or even fellow AA members. She participates in community activities and supports them. She prefers to interact with community members, rather than with strangers or non-community acquaintances. She may dress a certain way, talk a certain way, and communicate using insider lingo. She identifies with the community’s shared heritage, with shared dramatic moments, a shared mythology, symbolism, rituals, and other social conventions. She accepts the community’s appointed leaders and expects them to establish and enforce community norms. She also joins with other members in lobbying those leaders, and expects the leaders to listen.

Community comes into play whenever your character joins with others, experiences peer pressure, or engages in group interactions. Community is an exclusive club, whose flame grows from “the spark of friendship” (in the words of David McMillan), so friendship can grow into community. A character may choose who to open up to based on community, because community insiders are more willing to reveal their inner thoughts to other insiders, because they feel safe doing so.

A number of situations can threaten its members’ sense of community. When members feel the leadership is acting unfairly or failing to represent them, they may withdraw their allegiance, sometimes even resulting in a community split. Your character may end up in one camp or the other, or may be caught in between; in any case, she will experience a crisis of community. Or if she feels she is giving more to the community than the community deserves, that they are taking advantage of her, she may begin to distance herself from the community.

The alpha-male, dog-eat-dog philosophy, so prevalent in modern western society, also threatens sense of community, by decreasing cooperation. More highly evolved creatures (e.g., chimpanzees) cooperate more with each other and depend on each other more than less evolved ones (e.g., shrews). Make your character part of a politically ruthless community (like many corporate careers), and she’s sure to encounter problems.

Isolation from community can cut off your character’s psychological resources for dealing with stress, anxiety, and grief, resulting in depression and other mental illnesses. Conversely, community participation fights depression. In tribal societies, with a deep sense of community, depression is almost unheard of, because whenever a member starts to give off signals that he’s hitting an emotional wall, his community mobilizes to help and guide him back to emotional health. Being physically cut off from family and friends, as so often occurs in our modern world, your character might wrestle with depression for many months before someone notices that something is wrong. This can cause physical illness or prompt your character to turn to self-help books or professional counsellors, just to help her live through each day.

The human drive for community is not all peaches and cream. In extreme cases, communities can become cliques or isolated anachronisms. Your character may be part of a community that shuns outsiders, or need to get into such a community from the outside, situations that have provided for some wonderful story conflicts (and more than a few clichés as well).

Being part of a community helps us meet our other needs, in particular, our need for security. In tribal societies, if a hut burns down, the whole tribe immediately joins in to rebuild it. Because of her community ties, your character has someone to call when her car breaks down out on the road, leaving her stranded in the middle of the highway. A strong community can maintain its unity even in the midst of dispute or disagreement, and this stability can help your character through hard times.

A healthy community maxes out at around 150 people, a number that seems to be pre-programmed into our brains’ capacity for community relationships. But your character may try to fill her need for community through broad political activism, especially at the national level, or by identifying with the large corporation that employs her, or by attending a large church. These efforts are bound to backfire, because unless she joins a small subgroup, she will not be able to establish a firm sense of community in such a large group.

She may also try to compensate for her lack of community through weak substitutes, like Facebook and Twitter. Or she may turn inward, or commit crimes, or act out by exploiting or abusing others.

Look to the need for community for innovative, meaningful stories. Modern society has in many ways shortchanged and diluted human community, ripening this need as a source of cultural relevance in contemporary stories.

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2010 Aylwin Lo CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The next post on character needs, extracted from Character Fiction 101: How to Write Fictional Characters and Character Stories. Today, the need for intimacy.

We all need emotional and physical closeness to at least one other person. This is the person who sees us as we really are, naked and undignified, and whom we see the same way, and love anyway. The need for intimacy, both physical intimacy and emotional intimacy, generates some of the oldest and most powerful story conflicts, and most romance novels.

A healthy character will usually meet her need for intimacy through strong, supportive relationships. And these relationships can mean the difference between her success and failure. They can help her through hardship, or even help make her more resistant to disease. Even the simple physical contact that comes, for example, by petting a beloved cat, can reduce stress and make your character feel more able to meet the world. Many people meet their need for intimacy by owning a pet. Sexual closeness is also an act of physical and emotional intimacy.

Whenever two characters participate in a relationship, their need for intimacy—and how they meet that need—can affect their feelings and behaviors. This is true in any sort of relationship, whether romantic or platonic, whether close or casual. And anything that threatens the intimacy of two characters can limit how deep the relationship grows or even prevent a relationship from forming.

A character might neglect her need for intimacy if other needs are taking center stage: the stereotypical heroine too focused on her career to have time for a boyfriend, or the mid-life hero who sacrifices long-held family ties in an attempt to “find” himself. A character might also avoid intimacy if she’s afraid of its implications: afraid of being taken advantage of by a smooth talker, because she’s fallen into that trap before; afraid of getting too close and getting her feelings hurt later on; afraid of a new romance developing and harming her relationship with her current boyfriend.

Negative experiences in the relationship will threaten intimacy, such as anger or bitterness over a perceived wrong, or if the other character seems domineering, distant, or needy. And sometimes delusional or dysfunctional thinking can prevent a character from getting close to another, such as when she wishes to get close to him as a substitute for a lost loved one, refusing to see him for the individual he really is; or when the other character is simply getting his need for intimacy met elsewhere and doesn’t want a relationship with her. These can make for some surprising plots, and some heartbreaking ones, too.

We may sometimes pretend that intimacy is unimportant. But we so desperately need intimacy, unless we get it we will experience loneliness, emptiness, eventually depression and sometimes even psychoses and physical illness. For example, in a 1980’s study (Psychosomatic Medicine, 49:341-354 [1987]), Teresa Seeman and Leonard Syme found that the intimacy a person shares is more important in predicting heart problems than even cholesterol, diet, smoking, exercise, and family history of heart disease.

Before intimacy comes friendship and attention, so a character who feels a need for intimacy may start by seeking attention through more casual relationships with new acquaintances. On the other hand, a character desperate for intimacy may appear overly needy, greedy for attention, or self-centered. And a character may try to find intimacy by pursuing sex or contriving fantasies, neither of which are likely to satisfy.

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2006 Mona Kwon CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The next post in my series of character needs from Character Fiction 101, the most basic of all: physical needs.

Physical needs include air, water, food, and sleep, and the other things our biologies need to survive. (The other 10 categories deal with emotional needs.)

A character meets her physical needs by breathing, eating and drinking, exercising, sleeping, and even evacuating (although I’d be careful about working that into a story).

And any situation or environment which denies these physical activities will threaten a physical need. The vacuum of outer space threatens a character’s need to breathe. A lack of food may prevent her from eating as she needs, just as feelings of low self-esteem may encourage her toward anorexia. A touchy social situation—or a really dirty public restroom—could also result in some awkward physical needs.

When a character’s physical needs go unmet, she experiences direct, physiological symptoms. If she doesn’t eat, for example, she will grow weak; her body will use energy stored in fat reserves; after those are exhausted, it will begin feeding on muscle and brain; and eventually, if she still doesn’t find nourishment, she will die. Denying other physical needs similarly cause her health to deteriorate, and searching on the web frequently reveals real-life cases on which you can pattern your character’s experience.

The classic extreme has enchanted each of us at least once: the pregnant woman wrestling with raging pregnancy hormones, who not only craves bizarre food combinations but also cannot seem to make up her mind what she wants to eat. You don’t have to explain why she’s ravenous for deep-fried cheese with honey mustard one second, and pineapples and potato salad the next. All you have to do is point out that she’s pregnant, and all of us who have either had a baby or known a loved one who has, we all immediately understand.

Most biological activities also have emotional components. Sometimes a character eats, not just because she’s hungry, but because she finds comfort in food. She’s using food to fulfill some emotional need, as we’ve all turned to comfort food at some point, to relieve stress or after breaking up with a romantic partner. In the extreme, this behavior can grow into a dysfunction, in which the character eats—and feels hungry—not for nourishment, but as a substitute for something else, such as emotional intimacy.

Biological activities also commonly tie indirectly with emotional needs. Eating and drinking are obvious examples. We eat and drink not only for nourishment, but also as a social activity (which supports our senses of security and community) and for taste sensation (which ties in with our spiritual needs).

Some people include sex as a physical need, because sex itself is a biological function, a physical act, like eating or peeing. And this physical act is necessary to keep the species going, so we are pre-programmed to perform that physical act. (All of us have felt horny on occasion without prompting or explanation.) So as a physical act, you could include sex as a physical need. However, if a character doesn’t have sex, he won’t die. Moreover, sex’s emotional implications are usually more significant than its physical characteristics, a fact all romance writers should keep in mind. Sex stands as one of the most powerful and profound human activities, because we link it with a wide variety of deep emotional needs, including our need for attention, emotional and physical intimacy, family stability and security, status, and even spiritual growth.

While physical needs may be the most basic, almost clichés, don’t shortchange them in your characters, because they are core human needs that can add sympathy for your characters, and they’re related to the emotional needs that we usually think of when we think of “character story.”

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2005 Delfo CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Another post on character needs, extracted from Character Fiction 101: How to Write Fictional Characters and Character Stories.

Today, the need for security, which played a significant role in the life of the character “Eddie” in From the Ashes of Courage.

Security includes our need for shelter, cleanliness, protection, and safety, and the like.

From the time we were newborns, we instinctively knew how to establish rapport with our mothers, whom nature had already primed to fulfill our need for security. From the moment they’re born, babies how to recognize human faces and to imitate them. And they instinctively know how to cry. No one needs to teach them how. They immediately use these innate communication skills to establish a relationship with their primary caregivers, which will provide them everything they need to survive, until they are able to provide for themselves.

No longer newborns, we now find security in other relationships, in control over our environment, in our jobs, even in our governments. In general, if we feel we have the resources to deal with any situation we find ourselves in, we will feel secure. That’s why we instinctively seek rapport with others in our families and communities, because we can find security in close relationships. And it’s why we instinctively seek control over our environment, because the power to control the world around us enhances our feeling of security.

Change and fear tend to threaten our sense of security, anything that might result in us not being able to meet our other needs: An economic recession. Losing a job. Rising gas prices. A fight with our significant other. Our boss’s angry tone. Disease. War. The armed criminal lurking around the next dark corner. The terrorist we suppose will board the next airplane with us. The monster chasing us through the Tunnel of Love. Some people feel threatened by immigrants working for low wages, by next-door neighbors of a foreign culture speaking a foreign language, or by shifts in political opinion or religious practice. Others are afraid of black cats, step ladders, and broken mirrors.

So whenever a character feels he might lose his ability to meet any of his needs, he’ll react to that loss of security. This can happen even if circumstances aren’t that bad, because it all depends on his imagination. If he imagines that he’s running out of food in his pantry and that he won’t be able to afford to go grocery shopping this week, he may act as though he’s about to starve, even if he has enough bits and pieces to scrape together another month’s worth of nourishment, even if he has friends and family that would never let him actually starve, even if he weighs 237 pounds and could stand to lose a third of that.

We all want to feel the ground stable beneath our feet and the world firmly anchored around us. Remember that whenever one of your characters encounters change—and he will—in your story.

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2010 Eyesplash CC BY 2.0

Says children’s-book author Elise Broach in a recent blog post about likable characters, “Nothing in a story keeps readers as enthralled as a character who has won their hearts.”

You’ll get no argument from me on that count!

Elise talks about putting your character in a jam to inspire sympathy. Always a good idea, because we tend to feel sorry for people who get a bad rap that they don’t deserve. “A difficult situation with a high emotional investment for the character sows the seeds of compassion and affection in the reader.”

She goes on to talk about “personality traits” that endear characters, or that put readers off: “spunk; persistence; courage; kindness; ingenuity; loyalty… funny” versus “boring or predictable… overly earnest or preachy or self-pitying… Whiny… Passive… mean to animals” and so forth. Definitely a thought-provoking post.

And here are a few of my thoughts.

I haven’t yet completed the “Sympathy and Empathy” chapter in Character Fiction 101. But a few of my ill-digested notes stick out at me.

1. You need to give your audience a reason to care about your characters. Therefore, you need a reason to care about your characters. Then you need to forsake them; to understand exactly what they need, empathize with them, and stick them in the worst possible situation you can imagine for them. You need to be able to sympathize with your characters, else how can you expect your readers to? But sympathy has no place in the life of a writer, because your job is to attack your sympathetic characters at every turn. No wonder so many writers go mad.

2. To evoke sympathy, you must persuade the reader. The art of writing sympathetic characters bears much in common with the art of selling used cars. You’re trying to trick the reader into feeling a certain way, regardless of the facts (as it were). Your character can be determined, or she can be stubborn. Easy-going, or flighty. Entrepreneurial, or rebellious. Empathetic, or mushy. Principled, or self-righteous. It’s all in how you portray her. Go through your copy of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Note how your favorite authors use Cialdini’s tactics (probably without even knowing it) to make you love some characters and hate others.

3. A sympathetic character does three things: (a) She feels human needs and tries to fulfill them. This makes her a real human being, like any of us. It’s much more difficult to hate someone, even an enemy, if he’s only doing what we might do in his situation. (b) She pursues a noble cause. Therefore, we root for her, because everyone wants to be on the side of right and good, and against the forces of evil and rottenness (as Maxwell Smart might say). This is where your fast-talking used-car-salesmanship comes in handy. (c) She confronts an obstacle that prevents her from realizing her noble goal. That’s where the “story” part of your story comes from.

What do you think? Am I onto anything with these points? Is there a magic formula to character sympathy? Or as character authors are we doomed to faking it forever?

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2008 Will Laren CC BY-NC 2.0

I’m posting a series on character needs, extracted from Character Fiction 101: How to Write Fictional Characters and Character Stories.

I’m starting with the need for attention, which inspired my story, “The Friendship Dress,” posted at Danielle La Paglia’s blog.

We all need both to give and to receive attention. We all want to feel special at least some of the time, want to be the center of attention, even those of us who are quiet and introverted. Our need for attention is the root of the adage that you get what you focus on, and is surely part of the magic behind positive thinking and the law of attraction.

We draw attention to ourselves by the way we look or act. And this provides a fertile ground for story characters. The teenage girl who dresses in sexually provocative outfits. The kid who acts out so that his parents will scold him. The executive who’s always talking about the size of his bank account. The patient who feels sick—yes, he really suffers from disease, but maybe he also craves the attention that his illness brings him.

Photo © 2008 Stephen Poff CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

We also draw attention by engaging in activities that provide us opportunities for attention. The security officer who takes that particular job just so that he can wear the uniform. The expert who is always giving a quote to some reporter or another. Or the twenty-something who spends 80% of his waking hours connected on Twitter.

People tend to perform better when they believe they will get noticed, a phenomenon known as the Hawthorne Effect.

We also need to give attention. A character who’s a groupie of some celebrity may at some level be trying to give attention to the celebrity. (She may also hope to receive some attention from him.) And when a character sees another character upset, begs him to talk to her, to unload his problems, to get them off his chest, she probably desires to give and receive attention.

Any time two or more of your characters interact, their need for attention comes into play. You the author should realize this, but your character almost surely will not. If she gets her need for attention met, she will feel good about the encounter. And if you ask her about it, she’ll say that the other person was nice to her, or that he was in a good mood, or that she’s having “a good day” or a “stroke of luck,” or that it’s God’s blessing, or some other explanation.

People can also pursue their need for attention by focusing on an organization, a cult, an idea, a place, an object, a belief. A character who reveres a religious icon may at least partly be trying to give and receive attention. Again, she won’t see it that way. But even though she doesn’t realize it (or perhaps because she doesn’t realize it), this need for attention will open her up to indoctrination, if she encounters a religious leader who can provoke it in order to manipulate her worldview.

A more common story is the character who has fixated on a romantic interest, and so he looks for excuses to be around her, seeks out subjects she enjoys so that he can talk with her about them, suddenly becomes interested in all the things she’s interested in, regardless of what he was interested in before he met her. (And the converse, too, the heroine who fixates on a guy.)

On the flip side lives the character who questions the status quo, carefully examining any truth he encounters. This terribly unromantic character has learned to calm his instincts and to distance himself from the beliefs he himself holds. He may come off as a Mr. Spock “logic above all” character, even though (like Mr. Spock) he feels all the same feelings everyone else does. He may himself be engaged in a search for truth (as part of fulfilling his own need for purpose), or he may simply be aware of the cognitive dissonance intrinsic to his own belief system. He may also serve as a wizened mentor, because he’s sure to have a few unusual ideas that could inspire the story hero.

The need for attention is a core human need we all know and possess. If you remember it in your character, you’ll add a layer of depth and sympathy to her story, no matter what her circumstance.

Keep writing!
-TimK

I’m working on an ebook, entitled Character Fiction 101: How to Write Fictional Characters and Character Stories. I plan to give the ebook away for free, for a number of reasons that I lay out in the book’s introduction— Mostly because I long to see more online authors turn out high-quality character stories. Many of the stories I read hit-and-miss at best. I’m hoping that authors will explore the ideas I’m overviewing in this book and that they’ll integrate them more fully into their stories.

Yeah, maybe that’s a little egotistical. But these are the principles and characteristics that I personally value in a character story. They define what I consider “good” fiction. Naturally, I’d be overjoyed if more authors only wrote like me. (Eh. What’y'a gonna do?)

BTW, I also plan to release the book in print, probably at a nominal price-point, because the book is only an overview (probably about 100 pages) of an exceedingly deep subject area, as deep as the human psyche.

Much of the content of this book comes originally from this blog and from research I’ve collected during my years as a character author. Of course, I still need to revise what’s already written and flesh out what isn’t yet. I’m hoping to have that done sometime next week, working at breakneck speed. (But please don’t hold your breath, because there are a dozen things that could go wrong.)

UPDATE: Early April, and I’ve discovered it’s going to be weeks before I finish, because I’m extending the content, in some cases by an order of magnitude. But in the meantime, I’m posting extracts from the new content on this blog.

For now, I have managed to put together an outline for the book, which I’m including below in the form of an extended Table of Contents.

Keep writing!
-TimK

About This Book

What Is Character?

How do you know you’ve got character?
Stereotypes

Writing a Character Story in 5 Easy Steps

The Most Important Story Element

Writing as a spiritual journey
Caring about your characters

Three Dimensions of Character Development

Psychological profile
Thought process
Action and reaction

Personality Traits

Personal preferences
Types and temperaments
Demographics and psychographics
Personality profiles

Character Needs

Physical needs
Security
Attention
Autonomy
Intimacy
Community
Privacy
Achievement
Status
Purpose

Asking Character Questions

The APET model
Character actions
Thoughts and feelings
Past, present, and future
Reputation
Family, friends, enemies, colleagues
Talents and skills
Physical characteristics
Psychological disorders
The Five Whys

Your Character Bible

Character bible template
Continuous development

Majors, Minors, and Throw-aways

Major characters
Minor characters
Walk-ons

Sympathy and Empathy

An unsympathetic character
Who cares about sympathy?
Sympathy is not for writers
Three aspects of sympathetic characters
Nobility vs. ignobility
Persuade the reader

Character Arcs and Character Change

What is a character arc?
Plot and character
The shape of a character arc
Extraordinary forces
Keep them consistent
But… people do crazy things!
Following your characters

Narrator, Voice, Tense, Style

Head-jumping
Showing vs. telling
Dialogue

For More Information

Photo © 2009 姒儿喵喵 CC BY-NC 2.0

When I first started writing stories, I read numerous online articles and guides about developing characters. You’ve probably seen them yourself. Even many established authors have posted similar character profile worksheets. Most of them focus on surface characteristics, quirks, or hooks, like her hair- and eye-color, her smoking habit, the way she eats her hair while she’s talking on the phone, or the lisp with which she pronounces her R’s. But these are all just, at best, surface manifestations of what really makes a character feel like a real person— or fails to make her real.

These quirks are just what we see on the surface. But character is what happens under the surface. The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English defines character as “the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual” (emphasis added). Character is not the physical manifestations we observe on the surface, but the psychological ones we don’t necessarily observe. Or as Holly Lisle put it, character is “who you are when no one is looking, and who you are when someone is looking, and how those two people are different, and why.” Character is what you discover when you dig deep down into a person’s personality.

Your character herself, in fact, may not even be able to describe to you her character. Most of us, if asked, would not be able to explain the true, deep-down reasons why we do most of what we do. The human mind has an amazing ability to rationalize any choice, any decision, any action. But even though your character may not realize that she lashes out at her boyfriend because of the same psychological trigger that causes her to lash out at her older brother, even though she may not realize this, you her author must.

So don’t expect to be able to throw a bunch of quirks together to form a character. Quirks can enhance character, but they cannot make it.

Use quirks judiciously. Deep characters usually have well chosen quirks that support their character. These apply to a plethora of situations and make the character seem consistent in his quirks and character.

Quirks can flesh out a character. They can pull us deeper into a character. They can show us who a character is. But quirks are not character. Quirks can only bring out what character is already there.

You should generally know who your character is before you start giving him quirks.

On the other hand, characters with many quirks can serve a purpose in a story. These characters are frequently shallow by nature, because the overabundance of quirks makes them inconsistent. However, because they’re so entertaining, you can add these characters to a scene to spice it up. You don’t have to think much about being consistent with the character, because there’s not much character to start with. You might just add an appropriate quirk to make that particular scene work. These characters can work as minor characters, but they usually can’t make an engaging story.

One such character is Kirk Gleason, from the television show Gilmore Girls. Kirk has a different career in every episode, whatever fits with that episode’s gag. He lives with his mother, but he also has hundreds of thousands of dollars saved (from all those careers no doubt). He suffers from numerous phobias and psychoses, yet he’s always engaging in stunts or taking charge of something and screwing it up. He’s hilarious. It was said that if a scene felt slow, the writers would just add Kirk to it, and that would fix it right up. We remember Kirk, but throughout the show’s seven-season run, he was never asked to be the center of any major story line.

Still, at least he had some character. You could put Kirk in an arbitrary situation, and you had some idea of how he would react.

And that’s as good a definition for character as any: If you were to put your character in an arbitrary situation, do you have a sense for how she would react? If so, she has enough character for that story situation. If not, back to the drawing board.

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2009 姒儿喵喵 (crystaljingsr) CC 2.0 BY NC

Ideas are a dime a dozen, which is no consolation when you just can’t seem to come up with that perfect idea that will pull you past your writer’s block and bring the story you’re trying to write into focus. And the more you wrack your brain, the harder it is to come up with ideas.

Instead of giving up, sometimes it helps if you take a step back and look at the problem from a different angle. Here are 9 creativity exercises that may help generate ideas for fictional characters.

1. Mind-map a feeling. Or an object or another character in the story. For example, write down “confident” in the center of a piece of paper. As you connect it to related concepts, on one side of the graph you may come up with “headstrong” and “CEO” and “domineering” and “pushy” and “conceited” and “get others to run with his ideas” and “takes credit for their work” and… Now you’re starting to describe a character. And on the other side, maybe you have “stable” and “unshakeable” and “sense of identity” and “strong community” and “family values” and so forth. Could these even be describing the same character? Or start with an object or setting in the story, or another character, and explore how your character might respond to that object, setting, or other character.

2. Observe the people around you. Sometimes cool character ideas come to me as I’m standing in line at the grocery store, or sipping at corner coffee shop, or wherever. The character ideas are all in the “Why?” A mother and small child; she looks sad, but he’s all smiles and energy. Did some tragedy occur in their life that the little one is oblivious to? Or is she just tired, because she got no sleep last night, because she’s worried about something? Why would she respond the way she does?

   This is how I created the girl in “An Indelible Design”, inspired by one of the employees at my favorite Starbucks, who appeared to be having a bad day. On her break, she curled up in one of the comfy chairs in the corner and just stared out the window, while I worked nearby. I couldn’t help but notice her. I have no idea what she was thinking about. The next week, she seemed in a much better mood, smiling and friendly, though still quiet, reserved.

3. Watch a television documentary or news program. I prefer the former, because the stars of news reports are usually just terrorists and politicians, and sometimes you can’t even tell the difference. In any case, this is similar to #2 above, except that instead of sitting at the coffee shop, you’re observing people through the eyes of the reporter.

4. Watch a sit-com. This is the flip-side to watching real people. Sit-coms have some of the craziest, quirkiest, and most senseless characters around. You’re looking for inspiration in the fictional characters of other writers. Don’t rip off whole characters, because that’s not cool. Rather, look at individual quirks, and theorize as to why someone might react that way in real life.

5. Throw a dart at the human-needs chart. Everyone acts to fulfill their perceived needs. That’s the fundamental law of character action. So start with one of the 10 basic human needs, and ask about your character, “How does she perceive that need? How does she seek to fulfill it?”

6. Think about the most traumatic experience you’ve ever had. Or the most exciting, or romantic, or whatever. Create a character that is similar to you, or different from you, or has an analogous experience. Include elements from multiple experiences, and mix with a healthy dose of the benefit of hindsight. You can do this even if you’re only beginning to write fiction, because you’re writing what you know personally.

   I used this method in an early story I wrote, “Pine”, which I still like. I talk about some of the real-life experiences upon which this story was based in Love through the Eyes of an Idiot, especially chapter 2.

7. Play “What If?” In other words, ask questions to stimulate ideas. This is a way to challenge limiting assumptions, which you may not even consciously be aware that you’re making. We naturally assume that others are like ourselves, even though we realize that this is not necessarily so. As authors, we sometimes unintentionally give our characters the same personalities as we have. So what if Suzie had challenged her boss’s orders? What would that indicate about her personality? And what would be the implications for the rest of the story? Or what if Harriet has had traumatic experiences that she associates with snow? How might she feel about moving to Buffalo? You get the idea, right?

8. Meditate. Or try taking a walk, which actually can stimulate creativity. If you’ve done all your research, and you know what you want your character to accomplish, but you just don’t know how to bring that together into a real person, maybe you just need to quiet your mind and listen to that still-small voice in the back of your mind. Frequently, it has the answers, the ideas you need, but if your mind is too noisy with other thoughts, you won’t be able to hear it.

9. Tweak your character journal. You have been writing down cool character ideas as they occur to you, right? Go to that list of ideas and experiment. Like “What if?” above, tweak specific parts of a possible character trait, replacing it with something different or its opposite. Try combining multiple traits. Take a trait to the N’th degree, until it becomes unhealthy. I usually end up performing this step when I’m looking for random ideas, just to generate possibilities, and I usually come up with at least one good one.

Keep writing!
-TimK

They say ideas are a dime a dozen, even character ideas. Many experienced authors don’t even think about it anymore; they don’t remember when they were just starting out, facing a blank page, without any idea how to make their characters full and interesting. Because when it comes right down to it, if you want ideas for your fictional characters should be like, you can just look at the people around you. I tend to write down character ideas, as they occur to me, in an idea journal, which I can then go back to for inspiration when I’m when I’m writing a story. All authors at some level base their fictional characters on what they observe of real-life people.

But it takes more than just throwing character ideas at the page, if you want to end up with an actual story. Character ideas may give you zany and quirky, but if you want your characters to have depth, you have to make them feel like real, full-fledged people. In other words, you need characters that have a story to tell.

The image I chose to appear above for this post, that’s a special photo. I searched on Flickr and iStockPhoto, my standard sources, for photos of quirky and eccentric characters. Most of the interesting ones were just crazy-looking dudes with stupid hair or dorky glasses. But this particular photo stuck out at me, because I couldn’t help but ask myself, What is her story? Sitting in an ancient city; wearing a very short, wild, tasseled skirt; knock-out pretty, except for that look on her face; blue hair. What’s her obsession with wild blue? Who’s she sticking her tongue out at? What’s she waiting for, sitting on that wall? This character has a story to tell.

You don’t just want random, quirky characters. (Or if you do, you don’t need to be here. Just throw random character traits at them, and you’ll be fine.) You want characters who have a unique story to tell. And then you want to tell their story.

1. Find the story conflicts: where does the change happen? Without conflict, you don’t have a story; and without change (or at least the promise of change), you don’t have conflict. This is what turns a mere character sketch into a real story.

   Look again at the photo above. Maybe this day, she’s going to meet someone who will change her life forever. Maybe she gets into a fight with a passerby, who unintentionally injures her severely, and she finds herself in a hospital bed in a struggle for her life, and with anger and forgiveness.

2. Ask deep questions about the character. Start with what the character needs and how he’s pursuing these needs, because perceived needs are the root of all character action. Then delve into the character’s past, his future, his social status, his job and hobbies, his religion, his family life, his sense of morality. And don’t just fling characteristics randomly onto the canvas (unless you want something that looks like a Rorschach test). Rather, seek to understand how each of these characteristics defines who he is.

   The blue-haired girl in the photo, maybe she was never allowed any independence while she was growing up. Now, she works just enough to make ends meet, but otherwise, she’s seeking to find herself. She also has always felt looked down upon by society, and so she often acts out, as an alpha male, in an attempt to dominate those around her. Maybe she’s about to lose her job because she doesn’t get along with her coworkers. And so forth and so on.

3. How does character affect the story? Each person is going to respond a little differently to the same situation, based on his personality and his past experiences. In a gripping story, these responses will serve to intensify and resolve the story conflicts. A person’s also interact with each other, sometimes in very complex ways, and sometimes create new problems or generate behaviors that may seem extreme.

   In the photo, maybe she stops at this spot every day at the same time, to mock innocent passersby, because she’s a rebel, independent, suppressed in childhood, now disdaining many social conventions, and this is how she makes herself feel better than everyone else. When one passerby decides to confront her, she refuses to back down, as does he, and confrontation eventually turns into violence.

4. Add quirks if you want, but add them judiciously. Anything that makes your character unique. Just remember that random quirks do not make a character deeper; they make him more shallow, because they displace deeper character traits. The more of your reader’s mental capacity you spend describing nonsensical characteristics, the less you have left to use for the stuff that really matters.

   There are exceptions to the rule, such as the Kirk effect, from Gilmore Girls: it was said that if Amy Sherman-Palladino needed to liven up a scene of Gilmore Girls, all she had to do was add Kirk to the mix. Kirk had more quirks than anyone could remember; he made no sense, and so he was an extremely shallow character and completely useless as a driving character force. But everyone accepted that about him, and so he was always good for a laugh. You didn’t even have to make fun of him; he made fun of himself. All you had to do was to drop him into the scene and then shake your head in amazement.

   In the photo, the blue hair and the dress she’s wearing are quirky. If she’s taunting passersby, those behaviors might also qualify. But of course, these are not just random quirks. They’re important, because…

5. Ask the 5 why’s. People may sometimes seem random, but very rarely is that the reality. They don’t wear certain clothes just because those clothes magically appeared in the closet; they’re trying to make a fashion statement. And they don’t show kindness or lash out at others randomly, either; even if subconsciously, they’re seeking to feel good about themselves. What do your character’s quirks tell you about him?

   I already noted that the blue-haired girl in my story lashes out at those around her in an attempt to feel bigger than them. So what if the guy who injured her turns out to be wealthy, a prime target for a lawsuit. But instead of denying accountability, he pays all her hospital expenses, demands the best care for her, pays living expenses for her while she can’t work, and dotes over her so much that he begins to sicken her, because that makes him a much bigger person than she is?

So, there’s a brief example of how you can begin putting together a character, not as a mere collection of raw character ideas, but as a full-fledged, realistic person. The key is to go deep with the characteristics you uncover. Ask yourself the why’s and wherefore’s. And don’t ever accept that your character is just random or strange, because chances are, she makes perfect sense, if you try hard enough to understand her.

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2009 Alec Lomas CC 2.0 BY NC SA

The other day, my Little One and her friend were going over a story they were writing, when my ear caught a dialogue tag: “she shouted angrily.”

Naturally, I butted right in. And unfortunately, my advice was not taken to heart by my Little One’s friend, who, I gather, had originally written the line and who actually loved Twilight. On reflection, I probably should not have butted in, or else my advice might have been more welcome. Too bad a line like that rubs me so raw, so fast.

That was not just a random jab I just took at Twilight. Look at Twilight on Amazon, and search for “angrily” with the Search Inside This Book feature. You’ll see 8 matches, most of which ought to have been edited out, if either Stephanie Meyer or her editor had displayed competence. To compare, Talyn has 0 matches for “angrily,” and Hawkspar has but one, which itself might have been edited but at least is not in a direct-speech tag.

I explained to the girls that you should never say, “she shouted angrily.” Because you should avoid adverbs. Instead, use strong, meaningful verbs that show what you want to convey. Use a relatively strong verb that demonstrates her anger, rather than a relatively weak verb, shout, together with an adverb that attempts to append to what’s missing, almost as an afterthought. Dump as much meaning into the verb as you can. So for example, “she raged” is much better than “she shouted angrily.”

Better yet, make her sound angry and shouting in the words that she says and the way that she acts. Then you don’t need a speech tag at all. (Or you can just use “she said.”) Actions show; adverbs tell.

Then it occurred to me to consider: how exactly does one make a character sound angry? Which is the subject of this post. The process is pretty straightforward, actually.

What Is “Angry”?

First, you have to understand what anger is and what happens inside a person’s mind when he’s angry.

Anger is an instinctive reaction that comes from the perception that one has been invaded in some way and is otherwise helpless to prevent it. If someone disses you, or if he physically attacks you, or if he threatens your community or your sense of identity, all of these can produce anger. This is why hurt and anger commonly go together.

When a person becomes angry, his heart beats faster to push more blood to different parts of his body, adrenaline flows through his system, his muscles become stronger, his attention focuses. It’s the “fight or flight” response that we and our animal cousins use to respond to a life-or-death crisis situation.

It’s the lion chasing the antelope: the lion is dumping everything she has into her attack, while the antelope has become one with his escape. Meanwhile, unnecessary systems shut down. Digestion, healing, fighting disease, all go on the back burner. Reproduction– This is no time to think about sex. Later, if you can avoid becoming dinner, then you can consider whether you want to procreate. In fact, it’s no time for thinking at all, because thinking takes too long. Later on, the antelope can sit down and analyze his escape route and countermeasures. But for now, his brain rewires itself to short-circuit his decision-making functions, instead connecting his perceptions directly through his emotions to his legs. Because the one who reacts the fastest, lion or antelope, he will win, and the other will die, either of soup or of starvation.

The same thing happens in a human when he faces a stressful situation. There’s an activating event that triggers some perception, which her brain automatically pattern-matches with experiences and skills she’s learned in her past. This past experience is usually not a traumatic event, although it could be. Usually, it’s just a something that she’s gotten used to. And now, circumstances are triggering that pattern that’s been set down in her subconscious.

Maybe, while she was growing up, her mother would repeatedly ignore her and then tell her she was not worth speaking to. Maybe her mother just meant to get her to stop nagging, like little kids are wont to do. But it didn’t work. And now, any time she perceives that she is being ignored, even if that’s a misperception, she overreacts, butting into other people’s conversations and making herself into a royal pain the ass.

Personify Your Character’s Tunnel Vision

So if you want your character to sound angry, demonstrate her anger through the things she focuses on and how she responds to them.

• She ignores subtle perceptions, instead focusing on the object of her anger.

• She refuses to listen to reason, because the reasoning centers of her brain have been short-circuited.

• She overreacts.

• She misinterprets benign circumstances as possible threats.

• She acts out physically, as in a temper tantrum.

• She tries to escape the situation, or deny that it doesn’t exist.

• She assigns blame, rather than asking how to fix the situation.

These are just some quick possibilities, but I hope they give you a feel for what I’m getting at.

A Quick Example

This post is running long, so one quick example, from one of my new all-time-favorite books, Talyn, which you can expect me to quote from repeatedly in the coming years.

On page 329, we read:

“I’m sorry,” Gair whispered, and put an arm around Talyn’s shoulder, meaning to offer comfort.

She jerked away, wordless, and sat on the cold, damp stone, her legs crossed, her hands resting on her knees in an odd attitude, and she closed her eyes.

Gair might have guessed that she was praying, except that was not how Tonks prayed.

There’s a lot happening here, and a lot of relevant facts that you don’t know unless you’ve read the whole story up to this point. But even if you have no idea of why Gair would offer Talyn comfort, what had happened to Talyn, or what she was doing, you can see that something is not right with her and that she does not accept his comfort. You have no idea why she might hate him or be upset with him, but you can still feel it in her wordless actions.

Later, on page 400, Gair sums up the situation thusly: “She healed herself of much of the damage they did. But healing the soul is a chancier thing than mending flesh and bone. And anger remains. After an ordeal such as hers, anger holds close to the bone.”

So one of the manifestations of Talyn’s hurt and anger is that she shuns Gair. Feeling the destruction of her community and her way of life, she makes an alliance of necessity with Gair, whom she still doesn’t trust. But she ends up dumping more than just that into how she treats him. It’s not about him; it’s about her, about her hurt and anger from what had happened to her and her people.

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2009 sylvar CC 2.0 BY

PJ Kaiser suggested—probably because I’ve been doing weekly “#FridayFlash Favorites” posts—that I write about what catches my attention in a flash story, and what turns me off.

I thought that was a pretty kewl idea, and I further decided to link to last week’s #FridayFlash stories (because they’re still fresh in my mind) in order to demonstrate each point. As it turns out, this post has grown long enough to span over two days. So I’ll go through the first 3 turn-ons (and 5 turn-offs) today, and finish up tomorrow.

(Maybe I’ll post another follow up next week, the short version, just a checklist without the explanation. That’ll be far fewer words, but you’ll probably need to read the long version to understand what I’m talking about.)

Having sifted through about 100 stories a week since I started these posts, I’m probably qualified at least to venture an opinion. On top of that, I (usually) know what I like, and (usually) know how to write what I like—which also comes with experience—so I know why I like it.

Even so, my opinions are just that: opinions. The more experience I gain as a writer and author, the more I realize that there’s no right or wrong when it comes to creative expression. (Us indie authors, that’s our rightful motto, you know.) There’s only what you like (or dislike) and what you like (or dislike) about it. So as you go down the following list of positives and negatives—especially if I linked to your story to exemplify one of the negatives—if you think I’m full of BS… well, you’re probably right.

In general, I look for pretty much the same in flash as I look for in any story. The only difference between flash and longer stories is that flash fiction is, uh, shorter. Therefore, the best flash stories respect the length and use it to effect. Other than that, I admire the same qualities in flash that excite me about short stories, novellas, novels, movies, TV episodes, graphic novels, …

1. Compelling Character Need

The most important part of any story is the characters. If you have compelling characters, you can screw up elsewhere and get away with it, because we’re willing to overlook a few inconsistencies for characters that we love.

I’ve taken this to the extreme. I’ve been known to read two-bit, mis-edited indie novels that would get laughed out of the typical snarky-agent’s office, and rate them 4 and 5 stars, simply because they have great characters who dragged me into their lives and held my interest. And isn’t that what a story is supposed to do? I’m just admitting what I like about the stories I read.

So how do you make your characters compelling? It’s not enough to give them quirks, or qualities, or descriptions. You have to give them needs. That’s what turns them into real people, because everyone has needs, and everyone tries to meet his needs. The needs we have and how we try to meet them determine what kind of creature we are. Fish have fish needs. Lizards have lizard needs. Cats have cat needs. Dogs have dog needs. And the way we as humans pursue our human needs, that’s what makes us human.

I can clearly see the needs of not only the main character but also the secondary character in my favorite story this week, Jane Travers’s “The Shades of Chawton.” And that’s the first reason I loved it. (The second through seventh reasons I loved it follow below.) If you haven’t read it, and read it from the perspective of an author, like me, who just wants to write and to make a difference through his writing… Jane’s story is worth reading. Really, it moved me.

Characters that I fail to identify with may be missing a compelling need. (Turn-off #1.) More often, I suspect, they simply fail to reveal it. Maybe they’re not pursuing it. Or more likely, the author simply isn’t focusing on that need. It’s all in how you tell the story.

Take, for example, Jen Brubacher’s #FridayFlash, “Somewhere Else.” I mention this story, because I really liked it. But it didn’t make my favorites list, because I couldn’t figure out what the character’s compelling need was, or whether she even had one. She goes on vacation, does all sorts of things that are completely out of character for her, seems lonely. I felt for her, felt like I was beginning to get to know her. But what was she seeking? And did she find it? How did she feel about going back to the daily grind of her ordinary life? It’s not enough to merely feel for her; I want to understand her. I want to identify with her.

2. Character Growth

Coincidentally, I talked about character change and Aha! moments just yesterday. In that post, I posited that characters may sometimes grow—at least in our minds—because our perception of the character changes, even if the character herself does not change.

Even so, the traditional way to evoke character growth is to actually have the character change. For example, Melissa L. Webb’s story, “May I Come In?” A boy who’s too “old” to believe in monsters and the bogeyman, he reconsiders, because his grandfather always knocks on the door to an empty room, so that the monsters can clear out before he enters. The boy adopts the tradition of his grandfather, just to be safe. At the beginning of the story, the boy was too “old” to believe in monsters. At the end, he’s not necessarily too “old” anymore. That’s the Aha! moment. That’s character change.

The opposite of character change is, of course, character stasis. (Turn-off #2.) Consider Danielle La Paglia’s post, “Reflection.” Again, I mention this story, because I really liked it. A man faces himself in a mirror, which means he must face up to what he knows to be true. Yes, the “man meets himself” thing has been done and done and overdone before. So it might be a cliché. (See under #6 below.) But I’m frequently willing to forgive a cliché, as long as there’s something else there for me to hold onto. But this story didn’t make my favorites list, because the character ends up the same as he was at the beginning. My perception of the character doesn’t even grow, so that I might more fully appreciate him or learn something from him. There’s no Aha! moment.

3. Engrossing Narrative

Many readers put this at the top. I rank it up there, but at #3, because I’m willing to forgive a little boringness in exchange for compelling characters that bring me on a journey of self-discovery. Even so, I really do enjoy engrossing narrative. Usually, you spice up your narrative through plot and conflict, and the most reliable way to achieve it line-by-line is to use MRU’s (motivation-reaction units) in a pattern I call “ping-ponging.” That’s another post, but in short, narrate your story as though it were a ping-pong game, always on the edge of your seat as each player takes position and returns the ball to the other (or fails to return the ball).

The most common question I’ve been asked since I began the #FridayFlash Favorites is, how do I read through a hundred stories in a weekend? The answer is that most of them I don’t actually read. I do look at all the stories, all 100 or more of them each week, but most of them fail to engage me with their narrative. Somewhere between the second and fifth paragraph usually, I realize that my eyes have glazed over, and I can’t remember what I read 2 seconds ago, and I finally yell at myself in frustration, “Why do I care?!” And then I skip to the next story.

“Why do I care?!” narrative is the bane of my #FridayFlash existence. (Turn-off #3.) A variation on this is “…and then…” plotting and dialogue. ‘We did FOO and then we did X and Y and Z and then someone said “Ugh. Mee boo pob geee!” and then we threw up all over each other and went home. The End.’ I feel like I’m looking in on random characters performing random acts and talking to each other in disconnected statements. An effective plot is not just activity. That’s why the characters’ motivations and reactions are so important. They imbue activity with meaning. They turn mere ping-pong volleys into a game, with sides I can root for.

An example… There are so many of them. Here’s one: “Island Nights” by Laura Eno. I’m not trying to pick on Laura, and her story may in fact have something in it worth reading, but I simply never finished it. I barely started it. I read through where he woke up from his dream while he was suntanning, but I never discovered whether they decided what to have for dinner. Instead, my brain checked out and went for a walk. Eventually, I followed.

Sometimes a story is boring because it focuses too much on the gimmick. (Turn-off #4.) Most of the “telepathic parrot” stories this past weekend failed on this count. Gimmicks are like character quirks. Quirks can serve an already strong character, but they can’t make a weak character strong. Similarly, a gimmick can serve an already engrossing story, but it won’t turn a boring story into an interesting one. For an example of how to use a gimmick well, see “Bumwattle’s Bird,” Chris Chartrand’s “telepathic parrot” story. Note that the story doesn’t actually need a telepathic parrot. Chris could have written just as strong a story using almost any plot device, such as an exotic virus or a mind-controlling computer. (Or even zombies.) He doesn’t focus on the kewlness on the gimmick; therefore, the gimmick actually works in the context of the story.

Another common barrier to engrossing dialogue is verbiage so thick, I need a machete to make sense of it. (Turn-off #5.) For example, Karen Dash’s “Death Dance,” which is possibly a good story, except that it lost me somewhere between “susurration of his cloak wafting out in his wide berthed wake” and “pert tenacity of tripping the light fantastic in life, now elided into imagining they were auditioning for the great dance-off in the sky.” I realize that Karen was playing with the language here as an art form in itself, and many people love this sort of thing. I unfortunately am not one of them.

On online friend of mine posted last month that he was getting both laughs and blank stares with a phrase that I think should go on a tee-shirt: Extirpate sesquipedalianism!

(Continued: click here for part 2.)

Photo © 2006 Anna Lee CC 2.0 BY NC ND

I love character stories. In fact, I rarely enjoy a story unless it has a character-driven component.

So I was naturally surprised that I so enjoyed Al Bruno’s latest #FridayFlash story. It’s not really a character story, per se. Or is it?

I actually have a different take on that now, different than last week. I think it is a character story, but not in the traditional sense.

Entitled “Breaking the Girl,” here’s the story’s basic outline—

And BTW, SPOILER ALERT! If you want to read the 996-word story as originally written, you should do that now.

1. Lorelei has been drugged and tied to a chair.
2. She attempts to cast an incantation against her captor, but ends up instead with a searing pain in her own head.
3. Her tormentor reveals that he has painted the Sigil of Enfeeblement on her forehead, thereby preventing her from using her magic against him.
4. He begins to torture her for the information he wants, starting with a taser.
5. She goads him on, prompting him to pummel her with his fists, to her body, to her head, to her face.
6. The torturer prepares to pull out her tooth or fingernail.
7. She tries the incantation again. This time it works, throwing him off his feet. Then she casts one to release her from the ropes that bind her.
8. She explains to him that, in hitting her, he had smeared and smudged the Sigil of Enfeeblement with blood, corrupting it and rendering it useless, thereby freeing her to use her magic again.
9. Before she leaves, she prepares to treat her tormentor to the same torture he had prepared for her (presumably as a lesson to him and his ilk).

Aha! Moments

We can arrange conflict into two categories, internal and external, depending on how the conflict resolves. Internal conflict resolves when the character changes his perspective, thereby rendering the problem moot. External conflict resolves when the character changes something in the world around him, solving his problem.

Internal conflict is the stuff of character-driven stories, because it involves character change. External conflict is the stuff of plot-driven stories, because it involves the character manipulating the world around him.

Romance stories frequently rely on internal conflict and are character-driven, because the two lovers change the way they look at each other and their relationship. The characters change their attitudes, equals character change, equals internal conflict. Detective stories frequently rely on external conflict, because the investigator must uncover and interpret clues, leading him to bring the culprit to justice. The character changes how society treats the culprit, equals change in the character’s world, equals external conflict.

So then, “Breaking the Girl” is not a character-driven story, because the character never changes. Rather, from the start, she manipulates the situation, by egging on her tormentor, in order that she might ultimately triumph over him. That makes this a plot-driven story.

Even so, when I read this story, I experience the same feeling as I do reading a character-driven story. It’s not just a matter of sympathizing or identifying with the character, cringing that she is to be tortured by a ruthless villain. My feelings go deeper than that, exulting in the enlightenment of the big reveal, when she triumphs through her creativity. I experience an Aha! moment.

It’s the same feeling I have in a different kind of story, where the hero reaches an impasse, finally looking at the problem sideways and coming up with a totally innovative solution. That Aha! moment, that’s character-driven, because it involves character change. This character change then further drives the plot, allowing the character to manipulate his environment in order to solve the problem. To me, solving the problem is cool. But the Aha! moment is golden.

“Breaking the Girl” has no character change, no moment at which Lorelei figures out she can trick the villain and nullify the Sigil of Enfeeblement. By the time we get to the end of the story, we see that Lorelei always knew exactly what she was doing. So why do I experience an Aha! moment, somewhere around #8 in the summary above?

The True Nature of Conflict

We usually define conflict as “the problem the character faces.” This is a standard definition. It’s not the definition I use, however, because it’s too vague. Character problems cause conflict, but they are not conflict per se.

Conflict is a perception by the reader that compelling change has occurred and will occur. (I explained this definition in more depth recently when I talked about alternative conflict.)

We say character stories involve character change. But is there also a place for a character story that involves a change in our perception of the character? An Aha! moment in which her character is revealed?

I believe that’s what’s happening in “Breaking the Girl.” The Aha! moment doesn’t go along with the character’s change (because there is no character change), but it does go along with my changing perception of the character.

Even when I know what’s coming, I still experience the moment. Even when I know at #5 that Lorelei is gritting her teeth and sacrificing herself for her ultimate victory, even when I know that the villain is digging his own grave, even when I know exactly what she means when she calls him an amateur, even when #7 is no mystery to me (because I know why her incantations worked)… When she then explains to him that he had smudged the Sigil, I blurt out, “Aha! I told you so! You rank amateur!”

I now notice this same effect occurring in numerous stories.

Sometimes, the character doesn’t tell us (the audience) what he’s thinking, because doing so would compromise his position or it’s not in his nature to do so. We have to figure it out on our own, and in that figuring, that’s where our perception of the character changes, and that’s where the Aha! moment occurs. Columbo did this wonderfully, because you never knew exactly when he had figured out who the murderer was, when he shifted from investigation to pursuit of the criminal.

Other times, the character himself doesn’t know what he’s thinking, or why he does what he does. Maybe he’s acting on instinct. And if he figures it out, we can revel in the same Aha! moment he does. Such as in the final episode of M*A*S*H, where Hawkeye gradually comes to terms with a traumatic experience. (That would be character change.) But even if he doesn’t figure it out, we might, and we can have the Aha! moment without him.

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2008 wizetux CC 2.0 BY NC

A couple Fridays ago— This is just after my computer gave out, and I was behind schedule on everything. Come Friday morning, I had not started writing a story for #FridayFlash. I didn’t even have an idea.

So I used the following 5-step process to whip one together, in less than 3 hours from start to finish. That includes the raw story idea, characterization, plotting, and drafting and editing the story. And the result, which I entitled “Just A Bite of Coffee and Ice Cream,” actually turned out pretty good. It’s a story about a 19-year-old woman, muddling through a job at an ice-cream shop, while she’s coming to grips with a direction for her life.

1. What’s your character’s unmet need? Always start with a compelling character need, because that will drive your character story. See my earlier post on basic character needs to get ideas. Just throw a dart at the list of needs, if you need to, and pick one. What circumstances in the character’s life are causing this need or preventing it from being met?

2. How is she striving to meet that need (and failing)? This is your conflict. Address it in the first sentence of your story. Get ideas from anecdotes you’ve heard told, personal stories you’ve witnessed, or even experiences from your own past (as I did for “Coffee and Ice Cream”).

3. What’s her defining moment of change? In her life’s story, there’s one moment that imbues her with a powerful new mindset, which will bring her success. This is the major plot point of your story. It defines your scene, setting, and plot. And this success should follow logically, without explanation, from the change that occurs. (Otherwise, you need to include an epilogue explaining how the change impacted her, and you usually want to avoid that if you can, in a flash story.)

4. Write the story. Start the story with the unmet character need (conflict); show the character making it worse (thickening); then show the character’s perspective changing (resolution). Once you know the character’s story, you can pretty much just tell it.

5. Give your story a title, something that will spark the interest of a prospective reader. I’m including this as a separate step, because the title is an important element of the story. Even though fiction titles are often more creative than non-fiction, the first thing a prospective reader will see is still your title. Ideally, it should draw the reader in, make her wonder what the story is about, and get her to read the first sentence of the story. For title ideas, I frequently focus on the main theme of the story or on the story’s hook.

Note that at each stage of this process, you’ll be looking for ideas. You should choose ideas that excite you and that you can identify with, because that will make the writing process go faster and easier, even if it means you have to pass up the first ideas that come to mind.

Keep writing!
-TimK

Photo © 2008 .craig CC 2.0 BY NC ND

They say that effective story characters have problems, because problems mean conflict, and conflict makes for an interesting story. True enough. (See Wednesday’s post for a better explanation.) But what they don’t usually tell you is that all problems come from character needs. Or more precisely, from characters not getting their needs met.

Like us, when a character’s needs are not met, she seeks to meet them. But there might be something preventing her from getting her needs met. For example, if a captor has sold her into slavery, that’s bound to ruin her day, because it interferes with her need for autonomy. Or maybe she simply doesn’t have the resources to meet her needs, as if a famine is making it difficult for everyone to find food. She may not possess skills she needs to meet her needs, for example, if she is lonely because she doesn’t know how to relate to others. And sometimes, as any real human would, she is bound to do things that she feels will meet her needs, but which really just create complications, such as when she turns to alcohol in a search for fulfillment.

You’ll also find that her needs are interrelated—as ours all are—and that she may seek to take action to fulfill two needs at once, or to satisfy one need at the expense of another. Or sometimes one need rebounds on another, such that if the one is not met, it will cause the character to perceive another also not being met. This interrelatedness can also thicken and complicate the plot. She drinks because she feels her life has no meaning (need #10 below), and as a result, she begins to lose intimacy with her husband (#5), which may affect her sense of accomplishment (#8), her sense of status (#9), and further decrease her sense of purpose (#10). Now she has four problems to deal with instead of just one.

If you’re having trouble finding a compelling conflict, start by choosing from one of the following 10 basic character needs.

(These needs I took from the Human Givens essential needs, most of which are expanded on in the book Human Givens: A New Approach to Emotional Health and Clear Thinking. Whether or not you agree with the Human Givens approach for psychological counseling, I find it a useful set of tools for understanding my fictional characters.)

1. Physical needs — Air, water, food, and sleep. (The rest of the needs on this list are emotional needs.) Some people may put sex in the “physical” category as well, although sex is not merely a physical act; it has an emotional component. (See “emotional intimacy” below.)

2. Security — Including our need for shelter, cleanliness, protection, and safety, and the like. From the time we were newborns, we knew how to establish rapport with our mothers, whom nature had already primed to fulfill our need for security. As we grow, we learn to find security in the rapport we’ve built in other relationships, in our ability to control our environment, in our jobs, even in our governments.

3. Attention — We all need both to give and to receive it. We all want to feel special at least some of the time, want to be the center of attention, even those of us who are quiet and introverted. We draw attention to ourselves by the way we look or act, or even by engaging in activities that provide us opportunities for attention, such as the security officer who takes that particular job just so that he can wear the uniform. People even tend to perform better when they believe they will get noticed, a phenomenon known as the Hawthorne Effect.

4. Autonomy — Control over one’s own life and one’s own choices. Independence. The need for autonomy is why office workers desire to have their own desk where they can set their own coffee cup and a picture of their own family, their own office that they can decorate however they choose, including by posting sardonic cartoons that make fun of the corporation who employs them, their own little island of autonomy in a sea of tyranny. Rapid change or volatile circumstances can also be perceived as loss of autonomy. (“Better is the devil that you know,” as the saying goes.) Loss of autonomy can make a person feel helpless, despondent, may cause him to give up trying to improve his situation, and may generate depression, which can further deepen the feeling of helplessness.

5. Emotional intimacy — One of the oldest and most powerful story conflicts, and the subject of most romance novels, we all need emotional and physical closeness to at least one other person. This is the person who sees us as we really are, naked and undignified, and we see the same way, and love anyway. Sexual closeness is part of emotional intimacy, which is why it also is frequently the focus of romance novels. In a more general sense, strong, supportive relationships can mean the difference between success and failure. They can help someone through hardship, or even help make her more resistent to disease. Even the simple physical contact that comes, for example, by petting a beloved cat, even that can reduce stress and make someone feel more able to meet the world.

6. Feeling part of a wider community — Shared perceptions and identity with others, and connections to them. We are not just a collection of individuals all competing to win; we are also all parts of larger communities. Isolation from community can cut off our psychological resources for dealing with stress, anxiety, and grief, resulting in depression and other mental illnesses.

7. Alone time — An opportunity to reflect on our experiences and process our thoughts. A total lack of alone time can be as stressful as having no one to talk to.

8. Achievement — Competence. We need to feel there’s something in the world that we’re good at. It can be any skill, either in work or hobby or social situations or whatever.

9. Status — Validation. The sense that we are valuable in a social grouping. This is why we desire that others think well of us. We often collect symbols of our status: jewelry, an expensive car or suit, or even a simple momento. Need for status may also cause a person to take on a provider role, where others are the recipients, because this makes him more important than those others.

10. Purpose — Spiritual need, the search for meaning, the quest to understand, fulfilled through personal growth, from being stretched in what we do and think. Something inside seeks to fill this inner need by completing it in the environment. This is the reason the monk meditates, seeking enlightenment. It is why the mountaineer scales ever taller heights, and why the adrenaline junkie executes ever more dangerous stunts. It is why a musician learns new songs and masters new techniques.

And the need for purpose is also why writers write, and why we seek to write better than we did before. We put out other reasons, like “I want to get published” or “I want to make a difference.” And these may be true, but at the end of the day, I think these are just surface reasons. The real reason we write is so that we can find inner fulfillment, by creating a substance that reflects our inner selves.

Keep writing!
-TimK