Character development the easy way

There are all kinds of books on writing that will tell you how to develop deep, multi-dimensional characters. And yet most leave out a few easy and essential early steps that make all the difference.

I’m not saying that character development is easy. Good, deep character development is very hard. It’s arguably one of the hardest things about writing fiction and also the most important thing.

But there are harder ways to do it and there are easier ways to do it. This the easier way to do something that is hard enough even if you don’t make it any harder than necessary.

Step 1: Choose models

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat. Using real-life people as models for you characters is not plagiarism and it is not slander. The whole point of using a real person as a model for your character is that you want to come up with a new person. The model is only a starting point and usually only covers one facet of the character.

The key point is that you actually don’t want one model for your character. You probably want at least three. You want one person who looks more or less like what you want your character to look like. You want another person who has a personality and speaking style like you want your character to have. And you want one person who has a job or situation like you want your character to have. It is much simpler to take these three things from three different people. That way you have the flexibility to work within your plot. And no one can say that you slandered them by putting them in your story.

Why is it important to have models? Well, models make it easy. You don’t have to do it this way. You can make your ten or twenty essential characters up out of whole cloth and try to keep their faces and mannerisms in your head through your book or series of books.

But… well, good luck with that.

If you’re name is George Martin or Diana Gabaldon you can ignore this and all of my advice. Those authors are either doing this already or they are geniuses with astronomical IQs.

Here’s a practical example of what I’m talking about. Let’s say you need a police officer in your story.

There. You already have a job for your character. But figure out what kind of police officer, in what position, in what size of town you need. Then if possible find someone who is a police officer in that sort of situation. The job part is actually one situation where people like to be models for fiction. If possible, find a friendly cop in the kind of position you need and tell them that you want to write about someone in a similar position who isn’t them, who looks completely different and has a different personality but the same job. Professionals will often be thrilled to tell you all the crucial details about that job.

I’ve got a landscaper in my current work-in-progress and my younger brother is a landscaper. It’s very handy to pick his brain to find out exactly what my landscaper should be doing at various times of the year. But my landscaper couldn’t be more different physically or emotionally from my brother.

Okay, I went a bit backwards on this one. The characters at the bottom of this cover (Rick and Kenyen, as readers of the Kyrennei series will know) are recognizable but I actually didn't find these pictures on ShutterStock until I was finished writing the first three books.  That made finding the right pictures hard. But I'd had these characters in my head for twenty years, and had a very clear picture of each of them, although Rick does sort of look suspiciously like an Iraqi friend of mine who likes to cook.

As for the physical picture of your character, think about what physical characteristics will suit the character in your story. Don’t forget that besides hair color, eye color and height you have many other factors to play with. Don’t make all your characters be of average weight and build. Don’t make all your characters the same race as you. Give your characters some small differentiating feature. Once you figure out what general kind of physical appearance you need, try to find someone who looks like that.

Think about your circle of friends and acquaintances or look up photos on Google. You can seriously google “Picture of tall brown-haired man” and get a ton of great pictures of tall, brown-haired men. Look at them and pick one. Then copy the link to your research file. Do NOT use this photo in any publication as you probably don’t have the copyright privileges to do so. But do refer back to it. Keep it in front of you enough that you can visualize the character.

With a main character or other key character you might still want to change some important detail of the character’s appearance but make it something you can visualize in that photo. Pick a person without a scar and give them a scar in your mind. Or glasses. Or sideburns.

The most difficult and most important part is your character’s personality. But again the same technique will serve you well. Choose a person to be your emotional model. This time it is really better to choose someone you know personally. Otherwise, you won’t know their reactions in enough depth. Then think about that person in various situations. How would he or she react if their spouse broke up with them or if they won a writing contest or if they had to tell a loved one terrible news? Get used to that person’s reactions and way of relating. Play amateur psychologist and make up reasons for why a person might have those particular reactions. Or if you know why your real-world model has those reactions, change the reasons up a bit.

You can in fact use more than one emotional model for one character. Combine different traits from two different people. Again think how your character with the personality he or she has would react in various situations.

I have a character in my current work-in-progress who is trans-racially adopted. I use what I know of people in that situation to inform me about her emotional make up. But she is also the kind of person who avoids conflict at all cost and tends to freeze up when there is tension.

A relative of mine, who is also one of my trusted beta readers, talks about struggling with freezing up in the face of conflict. So, I use my relative’s reactions to inform how this character might react. The character isn't “supposed to be” my relative. The girl in the story is very different in other ways, but it is handy to have an emotional model.

It is particularly handy to have one who likes being an emotional model and is happy to read through the story and pick out how I’ve slipped up on the personality type. That is a rare treat. You won’t usually be able to tell your emotional models that they have a personality double in your story and you might have to go on the run if you do tell, but it’s fun while it lasts.

Step 2: Fill out a character sheet

The next thing you do with your budding characters is print out a copy of this free character sheet I developed, combining the best qualities of the many character sheets out there. You’ll need a copy for each major character.

Stop!

Wait. You don’t have to fill out the whole thing immediately. In fact, you probably shouldn’t. Fill out as much as comes easily to you given your choice of models for this character. If you don’t know your character’s family history yet and it isn’t key to the plot in the beginning, leave it blank for now. You may find that the story will provide you with the answers you need as you deepen your plot.

So, in the beginning, just fill out those parts you can and then come back later and fill in other parts as you go.

Why am I asking you to do this exercise that looks like a worksheet from school and doesn’t seem to have much in common with writing? Because it will save you endless blood, sweat and tears later.

You may think you know your characters well now but after 70,000 words and many months of work are you really sure you’re going to remember the make of this character’s car or the color of that character’s eyes? Even when it was mentioned only once somewhere in your narrative?

Remembering those references will be much harder than you think. And finding them again is tedious and time consuming, assuming you even remember to look. What if you decide to put this manuscript aside for a couple of months and get back to it later? It will be much less work to get back into if you can quickly review the crucial information about your characters.

There is nothing worse than having a reader catch you being inconsistent. “I’m confused. In chapter 1 she had blue eyes. In chapter 10 she has brown eyes.”

Oops!

Keep character sheets. I’ve made one for you and it’s free.

Step 3: Think about what your characters want

I know the character’s desires are on the character sheet but it is likely that with many characters you won’t be able to come up with all of their desires in the very beginning.

This is a step that starts in the beginning and keeps going throughout the writing process. Remember that good fiction requires conflict or at least a problem to be solved. Conflicts and problems create suffering of some kind in a character. And if you ask a Buddhist guru (or a writer) what the root of human suffering is, you will be told that it is desire.

Without desire, there is no suffering and without suffering, there is no conflict. Make your characters yearn for something and you have story.

Deny your characters what they want and you create suffering. There is a law in fiction that says that the more you make a characters suffer, the more your reader will love them. This is almost always true. You can make a character too pitiful and lose the reader’s sympathy and respect but generally if your character suffers, your reader will keep reading.

Desire doesn’t have to be a fantastic dream or an overt goal and suffering need not involve physical pain. Sometimes a character simply wants to be able to live in peace or to find the answer to nagging internal questions. But this desire must be made clear and vivid to the reader. The more abstract the desire, the harder the writer’s job is.

Suffering is the same way. While commercial fiction usually involves a character suffering in some dramatic way involving physical injury, grief, betrayal or denial of love, it is very possible to make a compelling story in which the suffering is deep and less easily understood. It is only that doing more abstract and less overtly tangible things with a character is harder to do well.

Step 4: Visualize scenes like a movie or act them out

Either before you write or in the early stages of writing your first draft, visualize new scenes in your head. Let them play like a movie a few times. Get a picture of the characters and watch how they move. Get a feeling for them and watch what they do and say.

Try out the scene in a few different ways. What works best? What actions and words seem natural to your characters?

I have been known to act out scenes from my stories, standing in the middle of the room and stepping back and forth to take on the roles of different characters in a heated debate or moving around the room to block out a combat scene, making sure the physical actions will add up in three-dimensional space. I don’t really recommend doing this when other people are watching or listening. It requires too much stopping and backing up and redoing to be very entertaining and your goal is not to be silly but to iron out specific details that will then come across very real in the story.

Do I look slightly crazy while I talk to myself and have fights with the air? I might but this is another reason to do it in private. If the NSA is spying on me through my computer’s webcam, at least they’ll know what all my Google searches involving borders, bridges and weapons are about.

Step 5: Start writing or plotting, whichever is relevant.

There are two kinds of writers, it is said. The plotters and the pantsers.

Plotters carefully plan out their story with note cards, time-lines and outlines before they ever sit down to write.

Pantsers fly by the seat of their pants. They get the basic groundwork in place, particularly the settings, premise of the story, key conflict and the characters, including their initial desires. Then they sit down at the keyboard and let the characters do their thing.

I’m a pantser, in case you hadn’t noticed.

Pantsers don’t necessarily do less work in preparation for writing. Flying free in writing is best done if you have all the necessary back-up - well-developed characters, settings, premise and initial conflict. I usually know where the story is going within the next 20,000 words. And I have a vague idea of the ending but I don’t usually know how I’m going to get there.

I have often pulled up Google Earth, plunked my characters down in one place and told them they have to get to another place, given whatever the conditions of the story are (chase, pursuit or search for something), and then I let Google Earth surprise me and the characters. It almost always works beautifully, providing me with plot twists I never would have come up with on my own.

Oh, there’s a river there. That’s a problem. How are my heroes going to get across while being chased by helicopters. Ah, there’s a bridge… But only one bridge. And it will be guarded by the antagonists, obviously.

You can see where that’s going.

But this isn’t a general guide to plotting. This is about characters. And which ever way you choose to write, whether plotting or pantsing, you have now come to the point where you have to just do it. You hold onto the sense of your characters as individuals that you have developed in the previous steps and you feel their desire while you work out the specifics of your story. This will result in what is called a “character-driven story.” But that is just a fancy name for good fiction. All good fiction is character-driven, even the fiction that is action packed.

Step 6: Now change your characters

I know. I know. I said keep your characters consistent. But there is a difference between “consistent” and “stagnant.”

Real people faced with challenges and conflict change. Characters with a realistic personality should too.

Aranka Miko, the main character in The Soul and the Seed, is initially a frightened teenager imprisoned in a dark cage. How she rises in a troubled world to kindle the first flicker of hope in a thousand years is the core of the story..

Maybe this is the hard part for some, but I contend that if you’ve done the previous steps well this will be the easy part. I have rarely decided beforehand how my characters are going to change. I have simple set up characters and given them unfulfilled desires and a conflict. Then I followed where they led and the characters changed by the time the story was done.

Several reviewers of my first book gushed, “You can see the characters growing and changing before your eyes.”

I hadn’t realized when I started the story that the growth of the characters would be so obvious so soon. I also thought the only character to really change would be the main character. But that wasn’t the case. Because my major characters were strong and unique and had real personalities and they were faced with huge challenges, they had to change and I didn’t have to force it or consciously manipulate it that much.

In case this doesn’t come as easy in every story, remember to go back to the character’s desires. Do they get what they want? Are they thwarted? Does what they wanted turn out to be as good as they thought it would be? How does this impact the character?

Step 7: Rewrite and edit with an eye to character consistency

When you are done with your first draft, it’s time to rewrite and edit, then edit some more, then put the story aside and pick it up again and edit some more, and then edit again… and again.

That’s just the reality of writing. I edit certain parts roughly as I go and my first drafts are relatively clean. I rarely have to change major plot twists after the first draft is done, despite my seat-of-the-pants writing style. But I do have to edit and edit and edit. Everyone does who wants to turn out good writing.

When you edit, pay particular attention to what your characters look like and what they say and do. Make sure you have kept their appearances consistent and that the actions and words of each character fit their personality and situation. If you have a feisty, firebrand for a heroine, you can’t suddenly have her meekly take insults just because the plot requires that she is calm and collected for once. You can get away with having her learn to be calm and collected but that is going to take some work.

Read your text out loud and particularly your dialogue scenes. Go through dialogue several times, trying to hear the voices of your characters. What kind of voices do they have? Do they have an accent compared to you? What is the emotion behind the words?

I hope these tips come in handy. What are your favorite tips for developing characters? I would love to hear from you. Put a comment in below and keep in touch.

The Self Publisher's Ultimate Resource Guide is less than ultimate

I received a review copy of The Self-Publisher’s Ultimate Resource Guide in an exchange for an honest review.

This is essentially a master list of some of the top service providers and resources for authors. Some of them are relevant for new traditionally published authors as well. The lists are good and helpful as a very basic starting place for research. The sections are reasonably chosen and organized.

There are two reasons that this book doesn’t get an enthusiastic review from me. First, the descriptions of the services are vague and uninformative. Often the listing simply states the claims of the provider without giving any independent confirmation of quality and bang-for-buck.  As a self-publisher who has already published several books, I can see how the early sections of the book sum up information that I already know. I had to learn all this on my own through simple research but what I know from my research is far more than is contained in this book. But when I picture a newbie coming to these lists, I don’t see how the lists would save more than a little time.  

Because the listings are vague, the newbie will still have to do exhaustive hours of research to determine which of the providers is makes sense for their circumstances. I found the information on these lists within an hour or two as a newbie. I spent months researching which providers to use. If the experienced authors of this book had provided some more detailed information about the various providers, including things that many of us know simply because we have enough experience to have learned the difference between Smashwords and Draft2Digital, the guide would be much more useful to the newbie.

 That alone would have knocked this book down a bit in my rating. It gets knocked down further because of the price. I’m sorry but with the going prices of ebooks these days, charging $7.99 for a “book” of lists that is only 180 pages borders on exploitation of the new and inexperienced. I gave the book three stars on Amazon. give three stars to books I buy that I don’t find entirely useless but wish I hadn’t spent that amount of money on. Had I paid $7.99 for this book I would have been disappointed and disgruntled.  

That said, if you have the money this book would save a little time if you are still in the very early stages of research. It is a handy summary for those who are more experienced and simply want easy links to everything all in one place. 

The Nine Mortal Sins of Worldbuilding

Here is the second part of my free worldbuilding workshop materials. The previous post outlined what you should strive for in worldbuilding. Here is a quick rundown on what not to do. I'm not implying that you are doing these things, but at the very least this is good comic relief for readers and writers of fantasy and science fiction. 

1.      The sin of illogical history: Don't forget to indicate why the events of your story are happening now. Stories involve conflict. So, first you have to determine what the conflict is. Second, you have to say why it is happening now instead of 20 years ago or 20 years in the future. If aliens are invading, why are they invading now?

Example: In my book The Soul and the Seed, the mind-controlling Addin Association has been around forever, meddling in most of the wars and dirty politics of human history. BUT the story is happening now (in today's world) because a fluke of genetics (influenced by some ancient magic-wielding mystics has caused Kyrennei genes to crop up in a few individuals. That gives rise to the core conflict of the story.. The reason for this happening right now is a minor point but it is essential to believability.

2. The sin of completely logical history:  If you create a fictional history, don't make it entirely logical and simplistic. Determine the major events of history that affect your characters. Make up reasons for the social norms and economic realities of your world. You don't have to write them into your story but you should have a general sense of them. Make them mostly logical but include the occasional chance event.

Example: J.R.R. Tolkien developed detailed backstories and histories for all of his characters and cultures. His history is as full of intricacies and discrepancies as real history is. There is an overall logic but the details have the realism of chaotic and natural events.  A brother's jealousy unleashes an unforeseeable cascade of major historical events and so forth. This is one of the reason's Tolkien's world rings so true to generations of readers.

3. The sin of illogical magic: Don't make up magical powers for the inhabitants of your world without considering how they will affect history, society, the environment, relationships and so forth. Don't allow your magic users to do anything they want without limit or cost because the logical consequences of that in your society will get out of hand fast and you will be stuck with a huge mess. The best way to invent magic is to set limits on it or make it costly or exhausting to carry out. In essence, fictional magic requires a system of checks and balances. You also need to consider whether or not everyone in your world has the same special powers and if they don't, why those with special powers haven't taken over the world yet.

Example: David Eddings developed one of the best systems of magic in fantasy. His sorcerers can do almost anything, except will something out of existence. But the use of magic makes a kind of "noise" that other magic-users can hear and it expends energy. There are logical rules to Eddings' special physics and his world feels quite possible and authentic, despite all the magic. The rules aren't explained straight out or very early in the story. They come up when they are needed and a handy narrative device is used for the explanations of the more complex rules. An older sorcerer has to teach a younger sorcerer about the rules of magic and the reader gets to learn too. But because this doesn't happen in the very beginning and the reader cares a great deal about the younger sorcerer by that point, there is no sense of this being an info dump. There are opposing sides among magic users and even the protagonists among the sorcerers tend to be few, eccentric and anti-social, which is why they haven't taken over the world yet. And Edding's magic-users do hold a lot of political and social power even so. That is part of what makes his world so believable. 

4.  The sin of too much explanation too soon: This is the worldbuilding rule that everyone knows about and almost no one can follow. It is very hard to start the action off in your world in the beginning without explaining your world to the reader. You have the feeling that your reader can't possibly understand what is going on unless you explain the specifics of your world first. There are two keys to doing the explanation right and avoiding the dreaded "info dump."

First, accept that your reader not knowing everything about your world is usually a good thing. The mystery over what exactly is happening can be key to creating suspense in the beginning of your novel. Don't keep secrets from your reader in an obvious way. Instead, either have an inexperienced, young or foreign character who doesn't know the specifics either and let your reader learn along with them OR make your narrator speak or think as though addressing someone who already knows and drop hints as you go. 

Second, make sure YOU know your world (and particularly any magic or special physics) really well BEFORE you start writing. One of the main causes of info dumping is actually writers who are exploring their world while writing. Do some background writing first. Make sure you know your world very well before you start your actual story and then get yourself into the mindset of your characters. Your characters won't feel the need to explain everything right off the bat because the world is "normal" to them or in some cases they won't know about the special physics of your world either. In either case, if you know your world well enough and you put yourself in your characters' shoes, the details of your world will come up when they are truly needed. 

Examples: The book Open Minds by successful indie author Susan Kaye Quinn opens with an everyday high school scene in a world where everyone can hear everyone else's thoughts, except the main character who has a sort of disability so she can't hear thoughts. Because she is unique in her world and this is an issue for her every day in high school (she is ostracized by other kids), it is natural that she thinks about this and explains it to the reader immediately. It doesn't feel like an info dump. It makes for a great opening to a good series. My first book The Soul and the Seed, also starts in high school, but my main character believes she lives in the same world as you and me. She knows nothing about the clandestine mind-control cult that rules the world or the genetic fluke that makes her at threat to their power and the reader is pleasantly confused until chapter 5, when the narrative switches to someone who knows what is going on. It works (at least according to my enthusiastic readers) because the suspense of not knowing why the world is going haywire is delicious. And by the time you get my second narrator's explanation, the reader is so hungry for the details that I have never been accused of info dumping. 

5. The sin of everyone speaking English: Don't make everyone on an entire planet speak the same language unless they have lived with instant long-distance communication for at least five generations. Don't allow aliens who have never been in contact to talk to each other in a common language. You are free to indicate that there are other languages being spoken while still writing the dialogue in English. Use the fact that characters can't always understand each other to enhance tension. If you want to dabble in inventing languages, expect to do a lot of research. That is one of the more advanced worldbuilding options.

Example: I'm actually going to give a negative example here. I love Robert Jordan's fantasy world. I love it. I love living in it for long periods of time. But there is one thing that really bugs me about it. The invaders from across the sea speak the same language as people they have had no contact with for centuries. It only takes a few hundred years for a language to change so drastically that it can no longer be understood by the original speakers. Try reading Beowolf in the original some time. That's English and you won't understand three words, unless you are a serious linguistic scholar. Even Shakespeare takes work and there is a reason for that. Languages change. Robert Jordan actually gets a pass on this because the rest of his worldbuilding is so spectacularly well done and he does actually have other languages in other parts of his world. There are many many books that are seriously damaged by this sin, however.

6. The sin of stereotyping real cultures: Don't abuse ethnic, religious or other groups of people from the real world. This isn't just political correctness to avoid being labeled as a racist or something similar, although that is a real danger if you accidentally make all your good guys "fair" and all your bad guys "dark lords." But at the most basic level this is about believability. If you are even going to hint at a real ethnic or religious group in your story, you had better do your research and make sure you can portray that group in detail. It isn't just that promoting stereotypes is despicable. It is that someone among your readers will know at least something about any culture you can come up with and they will be very annoyed and ditch your story if you get the details wrong or make the group too stereotypical.

Example: Okay, another negative example, but this time I'm going to pick on myself. I didn't stereotype another culture but I do use a lot of real existing cultures in my Kyrennei Series. I am an international journalist and linguist, so I am generally pretty confident about my cultural stuff. I did some serious research to come up with a Hebrew endearment that a man raised in Israel might really use under the circumstances in the book. I didn't, however, call up my friend who is married to a Japanese woman and spent ten plus years in Japan to ask about my Japanese character's name. I should have but there were reasons. I went on my own research and used a name I found on a list of uncommon Japanese names. I needed an uncommon name because my character's subculture likes uncommon names. The name Cho is very uncommon in Japan and would have to be a shortened version of Choko, which was my original idea. But other names I considered would have been better. I should have made that call. No one who doesn't know Japan will ever care but readers who do know Japan will pause and wonder about Cho's name when they read my book. That is distraction and distraction in fiction is almost always bad by definition. 

7. The sin of stereotyping your fictional cultures: Don't make everyone in your fictional culture, religion or nationality agree on everything. That just isn't realistic. Unless you are creating a new version of the Borg, individuals within your fictional cultures and religions should disagree on details and sometimes even on major issues. And if you are creating a new version of the Borg, the effects of that monolithic society should be explored and shown in your story.

Example: This is really too complicated to summarize easily. Read Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. Seriously. If you haven't read it, what are you thinking trying to write speculative fiction. :) It's required reading! Jordan did a spectacular job of worldbuilding in general and particularly of portraying believable, diverse and well-textured fictional cultures.

8. The sin of no place: Gone are the days of "It was a dark and stormy night…" Today the most fashionable writing sin seems to be ignoring climate and place. It should at least randomly rain in your story. If it truly never rains, that would affect the climate, the smell of the place, the kinds of plants that grow there and so on. Have a sense of the natural environment and weather, even if your story is urban and primarily indoors. It greatly enhances believability.

Example: I think clouds may be mentioned once in the Divergent series. It's a fun read but the one major weakness of this popular series is the lack of a sense of place. I fear that the Divergent series, which is otherwise good enough to become a lasting classic will be a short-lived wonder, rather than a long-term phenomena, partly based on this sin.

9. The sin of no place to pee: Don't ignore infrastructure and sanitation. If you're constructing a whole society or city, you should know how waste gets taken care of, how food gets delivered and so forth. If you are dealing with a prisoner, don't forget that they do eventually have to go to the bathroom. If there is none, there will be consequences. You don't have to discuss these things in the text of your story but you have to have them in mind. Otherwise, you won't respond correctly  when one of those issues should have been mentioned in passing and you'll lose your reader's faith.

Example: I can actually think of quite a few examples in popular fantasy and science fiction where a prisoner has no possibility relieving themselves and the consequences of that are not taken into account, but I'm done picking on my favorite authors for today. I'll just point out how I solved this problem. In The Soul and the Seed, I have my narrator imprisoned in a cage in a warehouse for two and a half chapters. In order to create enough of a sense of place, I had to describe that environment with significant detail and there was simply no way around it. I had to equip the cages with bedpans. 

Writing Workshop Series: Worldbuilding for Believability

This is the first of my writing workshop posts in coordination with writing workshops at the Art Center at the Old Library in La Grande,, Oregon. 

First up is worldbuilding - the magic of creating believable settings and societies in fiction. Worldbuilding is often used as a specialized term for science fiction and fantasy writers but it's also a crucial craft tool for writers of historical and intercultural fiction. In many genres you will need to develop complex settings, cultures and societies. 

While this may seem like a minor issue in comparison to plot and character development, worldbuilding provides the foundation for two things even more basic to readable fiction - believability and conflict.  

Believability: A writer's portrayal of settings and culture is crucial to the reader's feeling of reality when reading fiction. That feeling of reality is closely tied to the sense of being engrossed in a story and the inability to put a book down.

Conflict: Every story revolves around a conflict of some sort. Often that conflict is rooted in a social, cultural or physical characteristic of the fictional world. In fact, if you need to heighten the conflict in any given story, adding an element of worldbuilding to it can often mean the difference between a mediocre conflict and a real whopper. 

And so... here are the top things to consider when building your world or describing the setting of your story:

1.       Your setting or world should have a purpose in your story. Avoid adding fantastical special effects "just because." That gets old fast. Even the world of Alice in Wonderland is carefully constructed for a purpose, even if it may seem to be a world endless absurd fantasy.

2.       You can start with the general setting or start with the main conflict of the plot or start with a great character. But wherever you start, these things should be tied together. If you start with the setting, your plot should be related to the setting. If you want to write story based in medieval Morocco, choose a problem for your characters to encounter that is integral to that setting. If you start with the plot, figure out which type of setting will serve the plot best. Is the conflict you've chosen best placed in the past, the future or the present? Will it benefit from being seen through a real culture of today or through a made-up culture?

3.       Think about the central conflict of your story and how it is affected by the world of your story. Do social or political factors play a role? Is there a culture clash? Is there a major need or hunger that economic or environmental conditions influence?

4.       A key to plot and character development is determining what your characters want and what stands in their way. Worldbuilding plays a big role here. Consider what social, political, economic, environmental or other factors influence what your characters want and how hard or not it is for them to get what they want.

5.       Ask yourself detailed questions about the setting and society where your story takes place. You won't need to include all of these details in your story but you do need to at least go over them in your head. There are lots of lists online detailing the types of questions you can run through.

6.       Take notes on whatever details you come up with. Keep cheat sheets on locations, characters, cultures and languages for quick reference. Just as it is important to keep notes on the hair and eye color of your minor characters, so that you don't have cousin Fred have gray eyes in Book 1 of your series and blue eyes in Book 3, it is also important to keep a record of places, cultures and languages, so that they stay consistent. You would be amazed at how glaring such mistakes are to people who aren't as wrapped up in the story as you are.

7.       Draw maps and plans of buildings, streets and towns whenever you are going to have characters in a specific location for more than one scene and do it even for one scene if it is an action scene. Draw a map of the whole country or world if you are going to have characters move around much or any sort of major political or economic intrigue.

8.       When describing events keep in mind whether it is night or day, what angle the sun is at, what the weather is like, which direction is east or west. You don't have to include all this but you should know because otherwise you will easily end up with sunlight streaming in a window that you said faced north.

9.       Ponder:

• The climate: how it smells and feels
• The food: what is available or popular and what isn't
• The economy: what portion of the people are well-off or hungry
• Clothing: don't assume it is the same as yours or Tolkien's, be specific
• The physics: if there are multiple moons what does that do?
• Hierarchies: who is in charge and why, who is above and below
•  Needs: What do the people in your society need most, what is scarce?
•  Luxuries: What are the signs of wealth and privilege, certain foods, clothes, etc.
•  Instability vs. stability: what would it take to upset the order of your world?
• How long have things been the way they are?
• How has history affected the issues that are important in your society?

Writer's Toolbox: Screwdrivers and pliers - Writing and publishing terminology

Every profession has it's secret language and writing is no exception.

I'm putting together a collection of tools and inspiration for writers here on my blog site. And one of the first things that goes in that toolbox are the terms that writers use to talk about writing. I'm not talking about things like "grammar" or even what kind of keyboard one should use. I'm talking about the professional terms that are crucial to development of the craft and surviving in the world of authors. 

I have been writing since... I don't even know when. Maybe since I was seven and my family took a trip to Mexico and I wrote bits and pieces about it in a scrapbook. When I was a teenager I dabbled in fiction and then I turned to what I thought of as serious writing, i.e. newspaper journalism. While working as an international correspondent in places like Kosovo, the Ukraine, Ecuador and Bangladesh, I also took writing classes and joined writer's groups.

And from all those years of experience, I know for certain that writers get better. I haven't slid off the fence yet in the argument over talent versus experience. I think there are some assets that are handy to get genetically to be a writer. But I definitely know that no amount of inborn "talent" will make up for lack of practice and knowledge.

And the most basic knowledge, as with any profession, is knowing the professional lingo. That's not just so that you can talk to other writers and sound like you know what you're talking about. Each of the terms I will list here packs a key concept that writers use as surely as a carpenter uses an electric screwdriver or a sander. 

There are probably too many words I could list, so I'm going to just start with those terms and concepts that I have seen writers struggle with. I'm going to be teaching writing workshops this fall, so I am likely to add to the list as I go.

Genre woes

I'm not going to cover everything to do with genres. That's a huge topic but here are the terms that I have seen cause misunderstandings.

Genre-blending and genre-mixing: 

Genres were made up by the publishing and bookselling industry. It was an attempt to get people to buy more books and it worked. If a type of story was successful, publishers put out more of that kind of book and booksellers put them on a shelf next to the successful books of similar type.

But these categories are essentially arbitrary. Someone somewhere decided that all stories that hinge on a character trying to find out a secret (such as who done it or where is it?) should be put on a shelf together. And then someone else decided that stories where a romantic relationship is the central point should be on another shelf. Thus the mystery and romance genres were born.

That may be simple enough but then came science fiction, fantasy, chick lit... And now we have steampunk, new adult and dystopia. Each of these "genres" has a description but they are often indistinct and not mutually exclusive. For the publishing and bookselling industries this is a problem.

When a writer (I'm looking at you Morgan Daimler) writes what at first sounds like a mystery but puts it into a fantasy world with a romantic relationship as central to the action and aims it at a specific cultural or religious group of readers, your local bookstore is in trouble. They don't know where to shelf it and if Daimler had shelved hers in mystery, where it seems to belong on first inspection, I never would have read it, because mystery is one of the few things I almost never read.

Enter the age of Amazon and similar retailers. Thanks to complex algorithms, we can now categorize books much more precisely and readers can find what they want to read based on a lot of factors - the reader's age, culture, gender and interests as well as the the type of story or what is central to the plot. This means that writers and readers no longer have to stick to these arbitrary and ultimately claustrophobic categories known as genres. 

The result is a lot of genre-blending and genre-mixing in which writers take interesting facets of various genres and come up with something fresh and new that would have been "impossible to publish" ten years ago.

Dystopia:

I would like to define one particular genre because I have seen several online forums where significant confusion over the definition reigned. Thanks to the popularity of books like The Hunger Games and Divergent, writers love to claim that they are writing dystopia these days.

The problem is that the virtual shelves of dystopia have been inundated with piles of books about zombies, vampires and apocalyptic disasters. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this fiction, most of it isn't dystopia.

The quick and dirty definition of dystopia is as easy to formulate as that for the romance genre. It is said that it isn't a romance if you can take the love part out and still have a plot. Similarly, it isn't dystopia if you can take the socio-political problems out and still have a plot.

Dystopia is the counter to utopia. It is society gone wrong in some crucial way. George Orwell is often held up as the father of the dystopian genre and a lot of dystopia is like Orwell's work, overt social commentary set in a totalitarian society that exaggerates certain elements of our own world to show what could happen if we continue in some unwise direction. Some dystopia is more subtle, showing an outwardly ideal society, often set in the future but showing how an individual can be harmed even within an ostensibly perfect system. More rare is dystopia set in our times and essentially in our world but highlighting particular aspects of contemporary society as dysfunctional.

Steampunk:

Steampunk is a relatively new genre that includes stories that take place in a society that is not high tech but includes some technological advances. Some of the technology tends to be a bit fantastic, such as flying machines with flappable wings that run on steam engines. But it isn't all silly. Some steampunk is set in a future world where much of the high technoogy has broken down for one reason or another. Some of it is set in a fantasy world that is neither entirely modern nor entirely medieval.

New Adult:

New adult is sort of like a genre that occupies the crack between Young Adult and general adult-level genre fiction. I like the theory of a genre that appeals to twenty-somethings but alas New Adult has been largely taken over by stories set on or around college campuses that involve romance. It should legitimately be called New Adult Romance now, but for the time being the going term is New Adult. 

Narrative nonfiction:

Narrative nonfiction is a writing style as well as a genre. I have again seen a lot of confusion about it in the online world. Just about any sort of nonfiction can be written in narrative form, meaning written as if it were fiction... as a story. A lot of the best history books are being written this way as well as memoirs, self-help and inspirational books. There are also some pretty good technical how-to books written with at least elements of narrative style. 

Style and writing terms

This is not a comprehensive list, just the things that I have run into in discussions with writing students, writers or editors in the past year. 

First person

I am now writing in first person. I personally prefer first person narratives, even when I'm reading fiction and the author isn't really the character talking in the book. I like first person because it brings the reader right into the story intimately. I know there are disadvantages to it though. For one thing, the reader has to take my word for it. If I had written this paragraph in third person, I could have made the advantages of first person sound much more universal and authoritative. This way you just know that I like it.

Second person

You may be reading this either to stock your writer's toolbox or simply to be entertained. Whatever your reason, you are now reading a paragraph written in second person. Second person is what happens whenever you the reader are the primary character in the narrative. You can try it in fiction if you want but you'll find that it is exceedingly difficult to pull off well.

Third person

Most writers choose to write in third person. It's probably the most versatile point of view in terms of the types of voice and tone that the writer can employ. Third person simply means that the story is about a character who is named and referred to as he, she or it. The reader isn't addressed directly and the narrator remains in the background, never speaking directly about him- or herself. Arie Farnam wrote this paragraph in third person, which creates some minor problems when it comes to avoiding the passive voice.

Passive voice

Passive voice is often misunderstood. I am amazed at the number of writers and editors who are confused by what is passive and what isn't passive voice. The phrases above with "misunderstood," "amazed" and "confused" are all written in passive voice, as is this sentence.

Here, let met me fix that. (Because passive voice is evil, right?) Many people misunderstand passive voice. I see a lot of writers and editors who confuse awkward sentences and passive voice. I wrote the last three sentences in active voice.

If you go to a high school composition class, you will be told to avoid passive voice like the plague. And it is a good thing to do at the beginning. Beginning writers almost always overuse passive voice and it is very helpful to try to avoid it. The vast majority of sentences will be more concise and interesting in active voice.

The easiest way to avoid passive voice is to go through your writing and look for passive adjectives (adjectives that describe something that has happened to the noun, like "written", "flown" and "misunderstood.") Try turning these sentences into active sentences and see if they're better that way. Usually they will be.

Biut there will be times when they aren't. Passive voice isn't bad to the bone. There are reasons to use it. Laziness is, however, the most common reason it is used and that isn't a good reason. When I said "Passive voice is often misunderstood," I was avoiding having to say who misunderstands passive voice. I could have been doing that as a way of being diplomatic, which is sometimes a good idea, but I was surely also doing it partly because it is easier to hint that some mysterious "them" out there misunderstands passive voice than to do the hard work of thinking about exactly who does. 

I've recently had editors tell me things are passive voice when they aren't. Past perfect and present perfect sentences like "She had read all of my books" and "I've been working at the store" are not passive. The are easy to confuse with passive because the form of the verb used in those tenses in English (Fun fact: and in Russian!) is the same as the passive adjective used in passive voice. The linguistic term for this type of word is "the past passive participle." You really wanted to know that, didn't you?

Writing for a living

There is a lot of hype about writing as an entrepreneur lately. I get it. Writers need to think like business people in order to succeed. But the terminology can be scary. When you get right down to it "an author entrepreneur" is a person who makes a living from writing books.  

Self-publisher or indie-publisher:

These two terms get used interchangeably most of the time. Indie implies a bit more rebellion and a desire to keep independence even from retailers and other services. There are self-publishers who would gladly sign up with someone who would do a chunk of the business side of their work at the drop of a hat, in order to have more time to write, and independence be damned. But in general, both self-publishers and indie-publishers are writers out there trying to do serious writing and publishing, often as a business. Their primary goal is usually not fame and fortune or the kick of seeing their name on a book. And many never do see their name on a "book" because they stick to ebooks. It reminds me a bit of the culture of international freelance journalists of the 1980s and 1990s, minus the worn out shoes. It is chaotic and only the hardiest survive for long. 

Traditional publisher:

A traditional publisher is a company that makes a profit from actually acquiring rights to publish books, publishing them, selling them and paying authors a royalty. There will always be some overlap in these descriptions but a self-publisher doesn't become a traditional publisher just by giving their publishing "company" a name that is different from their author name. Neither does a vanity publisher become a traditional publisher by accidentally selling a few books and actually paying a royalty once in a blue moon. A traditional publisher has to turn a profit in the traditional way.

Vanity publisher:

A vanity publisher is a company that makes a profit by charging authors for publishing services. This isn't to say that a vanity published book has never sold a copy or made the author a cent. Some probably have but the difference between a traditional publisher and a vanity publisher is that a vanity publisher charges for things that a publisher traditionally covers. Vanity publishers don't pay advances and they don't have very high standards (if any) about what they publish, so they'll publish just about anything. They also don't promote books or help in selling them in any way. But traditional publishers often don't do that last very much either.

Proof copy:

This refers to a printed book that is sent to you buy the printer (or publisher possibly) for you to check for mistakes before the book is approved as final. Proof copies usually have a page or a stamp that says "proof" on it, so they can't be sold as "regular books." Printers often charge less for them and so they don't want you just ordering a bunch of proof copies and selling them as if they were the final book. Proof copies can be sent to reviewers to get early reviews.

Ebook formats:

When I first got into indie publishing I was a bit worried by all the talk of formatting headaches and woes. I thought this meant that formatting was going to be as hard as learning webdesign had been. It wasn't.

Maybe it's just me but I don't find formatting to be that terrible. Okay, some of the work can be tedious. If like me, you started writing in MS Word without a care in the world and just typed, you might well have used tabs to indent your paragraphs and then after a few paragraphs Word picked up on that and started automatically indenting. But when you started a new chapter, you had to go back to pressing the tab button. This is the dumb way to do things, Arie... Yes, I know but I didn't even know I was writing something serious at first.  So, anyway, if you foolishly did that, like me, then when you're finalizing your work, you have to go back and weed out all the tabs. Tabs are a big no no in ebook formatting. Put on some good music, get into a meditative mood and skim down the left-hand side of your screen and delete all tabs. Not hard, just tedious.

There are more complex parts of ebook formatting and I"m not going to cover them all here, but the essential thing to know is that, if you can organize a kitchen cabinet, you can format an ebook. Know the most important format names.

Mobi is the standard Kindle format. 

Epub is the format for Android-based systems.

Ibooks is the Apple format.

I use Scrivener to organize large projects and Scrivener converts to Mobi and Epub formats easily. You can also now use Smashwords to automatically convert and they'll do Ibooks too. But in either case, you have to start with a very cleanly formatted manuscript. Do not try to insert extra lines anywhere. Learn to use page breaks. You can run into trouble with graphic elements and things like drop caps. So, it is best to avoid those until you are used to formatting.

Cover design:

It used to be that writers wrote. Not so much any more. Today, if you want to make a living as a writer you need to at the very least also be a marketer. Think of it as going back to the medieval days of traveling bards. Back then, storytellers had to market their work as well. That makes it sound a lot more romantic at least. But I digress...

The other thing you have to do if you are publishing independently is worry about the design of your cover. There are hundreds of designers out there on Fiverr who will supposedly do it for $5  but if you look at their portfolios they are distinctly uninspired and you will have to provide all photos or artwork and tell them exactly how to do it. Ideas are not part of what they do. There are dozens of designers with webpages offering to design a more legitimate cover for anywhere from $100 to $1000. The average is around $200 to $300 at this point. Depending on your genre and your tastes, you can find a cover designer in that price range. 

Call me picky but I couldn't find a designer portfollio for less than $500 that I liked even slightly and $500 is out of my price range for a single cover. So, I downloaded a free Photoshop equivalent called Gimp and spent three months learning how to run it. Many experts warn authors away from doing this and I may be a fool. I'm also an artist and a photographer, so maybe I'm not. I don't entirely recommend that everyone try to design their own covers. There are way too many badly designed self-published covers out there. If you do want to try it, expect it to take at least a few months to learn and study book covers and graphic design principles. Consider it every bit as important as any of the writing of the inside of the book. Technically it is actually more important in terms of initially reaching readers.

You can buy the rights to photos to use on a cover from sites like istock.com and shutterstock.com. There is a lot of talk of creative commons photos and there are lists of servers where you can supposedly find free photos. I have spent hours searching these frree sites and not only did I not find many good photos on them, I did not find one single photo that was not marked as copyright protected.  These supposedly free site shave been taken over by photographers trying to sell their work. Be very careful about using photos from sites that claim to be showing creative commons images because many of the photos on these sites are copyrighted and downloading them from a site that says the photos listed should be creative commons is no protection. Read the small print. And that will take hours. The paid sites are not that expensive (less than $40 for 5 very large, very high quality photos of my choice from Shutterstock) and they are a sure bet.

In the end, I hired a model (i.e. a student friend) shot my own main photographs and then paid for a few more pictures from Shutterstock. I"ve very happy with the results so far. 

Kerning: 

If you are going to try designing your own cover, look up kerning and study it until you get it. Kerning is the technique of changing the distance between letters. It is a funny thing but you can take a perfectly professional photo and artfully arrange a title and an author's name on it and it will still not look like a real book cover, until you add kerning. Even the non-professional eye will know the difference if allowed to compare.

The overall explanation is that kerning is supposed to make it look as though the letters in a word are equally separated when actually it pulls some letters closer together or pushes others further apart. This is because some letters fit together nicely and others have bits that stick out and if such an awkward letter happens to be right next to another awkward letter they don't fit together easily.

Say in this font, "rt" tend to run into each other. You can't put them closer together and have them look nice, but "To" looks much better if the "o" is tucked protectively under the top line of the "T". You have to do this by hand on book cover titles and other large text. You need a solid graphic design program to do it and you have to know when and where to do it. That's kerning and it's one of the things you have to study if you want to try designing your own covers.

Coopetition: 

This is a term coined by self-publishing trail blazer Joanna Penn. It refers to the mixture of cooperation and competition that has become the professional standard among independent and small-press authors.

The theory behind coopetition is that readers tend to read a lot of books and often in the same genre. Traditionally, readers were stuck following those authors most heavily promoted by the publishing industry and that is still where the bulk of the market is. Today, however, readers who discover one independent author usually discover other independent and small-press authors, particularly those in similar genres. This creates an interesting dynamic among author-entrepreneurs.

We have been brought up to believe that business as primarily a competitive proposition but that mindset doesn't serve well in the current circumstances. The pool of readers is infinite because readers read many books and they read more books if they like what they read. The result is that it is in the interests of the individual author-entrepreneur to help and promote their fellow independent and small-press authors as much as possible.

In fact, the closer the competition may seem, the more it is in my interest to support and promote another author. That may seem counter intuitive but it makes good economics. The fact is that if a reader discovers a book that is similar to mine (contemporary dystopia or fantasy thriller) written by an independent author, they are much much more likely to discover mine than is the average person on the street. And readers who have already discovered my books are more likely to stick around and be satisfied readers, if they can read something similar that recommended to them, while waiting for my next book to come out.

This concept wasn't entirely foreign to me when I started on this adventure, but I have been pleasantly surprised at how well it works. A side benefit is that the more you post on your blog and website, the more readers you attract in general. So, I post about interesting indie authors on this blog both because I want to give my readers something to chew on while I prepare the next book for publication and because that boosts my site in general. I also post everywhere else I can about these interesting indie authors because if a reader sees their work and likes it, they are halfway to finding my work.

Key abbreviations: 

WIP

Work In Progress: This refers to whatever a writer is currently working on and has not yet completed or published.

POD

Print On Demand: This is a way of publishing a book in print format without having to pay for boxes of printed books that may or may not ever be sold before they gather too much dust and moisture and become undesirable. POD used to be fairly expensive and inferior in quality to comerically available paperbacks but today there are several companies offering POD services that make affordable books that are virtually indistinguishable from their mass-printed peers.

POV

Point Of View: This refers to which character's mind and senses the reader shares in a given section of writing. A lot of classic literature uses a distant or omniscient POV where the reader can see the story from many points of view but often not in great emotional detail from any one character. Recently, close third person and first person POVs have become more popular with stories that allow the reader to identify closely with the characters and their emotions. 

R4R

Read for Review: This refers to the practice of authors giving out free review copies of their book either before publication or early on when they have few reviews. Authors may give R4R copies to bloggers or other professional reviewers but they will often also give out free copies to random readers on sites such as Goodreads or LibraryThing.  There is an "honor system" involved. In exchange for a free book, the reader/reviewer agrees to post honest reviews, usually on Amazon at the very least and sometimes other sites.

It is key to note that there is no agreement about what kind of review gets posted. It may be hard to write a critical review when one got the book for free but the whole point is to help readers find books that they will like, so a modicum of honesty is an important part of the equation. R4R agreements are usually informal and made online between the author and the reader/reviewer. Sometimes the agreement calls for the review to be posted within a certain time period, usually two weeks from receipt of a free book, but authors will often wait longer for reviews from well-known reviewers.

If you have made it this far in this post, you are a serious reader and possibly a serious writer. So, if you would like to try out R4R yourself, drop me an email on this page and ask for a free Read for Review copy of my book.

Good luck in your writing adventures!

And the featured author of the week is... oops!

And the featured author this week on the Goodreads PFDR board is... 

OOPS!

Wait a minute here...

That wasn't supposed to happen yet. I'm not ready yet! Mys second book isn't out yet. I'm not ready! Oh well, no arguing with the gods of Goodreads. 

Yup, you guessed it. The featured author this week is yours truly. 

As a mark of my gratitude to all the wonderful readers at Goodreads I'm putting The Soul and the Seed on sale for 99 cents for just this week on Amazon. So, if there was ever a time to tell all your friends on Facebook and Twitter about it, now is the time. 

This week also happens to be Mabon week, which is the time of thanksgiving in our family. Now, how timely is that? 

I am grateful to all the Goodreads members who are spreading the word about this intense, amazing book that I was so honored to birth into the world. Thank you also to my family and friends who have tirelessly helped with technical details, advance reading and spreading the word.

Beyond that I am astounded into gratitude every day by the fact that I was given this idea, these words, this chance and the time to write it down. It was a gift of the universe and spirit, if anything ever was. The idea brewed for many years but the characters came like real people, telling me their stories. So, I am thankful to whatever it is that gave me this gift - goddess, spirit or my own luck of the draw in life experience. I have many gifts that can't be taken for granted, a husband who works a steady job, so that I don't have to work extra long hours like so many women today. I have a snug home and good fortune in health.

A recent calamity at a friend's home - one of those completely unpredictable things that could happen any day to any of us and leave harm that will last a lifetime - has reminded me to give thanks every day that disaster doesn't strike.  I have just finished writing a final chapter for Book 3 of the Kyrennei Series and that is a sentiment that comes out in the story as well - that simplest of gratitude, the miracle of another day of peace and wholeness.

I don't take this moment for granted.

And thank you for reading because then I am never alone.