Writers in the Storm

by Rhea Dionne

First let’s get a definition:  What is Found Family?

It is the phenomenon where a group of people come to love each other like family, even through (and because) they aren't biologically related. The LGBTQ+ community in particular tends to favor this trope because it allows them to escape overbearing or harmful biological family.

Found families can be found in real-life as well, as close friend groups may feel closer to each other than to biological family.

Found Family is also known as Families of Choice.

The "Found Family" or “Family of Choice” trope refers to a device in literature and media where a group of characters find themselves united in a family-bond based on shared experiences, mutual understanding, and interpersonal connection. These arrangements often bring familial love they may have otherwise missed into their lives. Rather than the blood ties that may dictate some biological families, found family stories emphasize the connections and communities we choose for ourselves.

These narratives are often especially resonant for members of disenfranchised communities, such as those in the LGBTQ+ community, who keenly understand that unconditional love comes in all forms, and so do families.

Some examples of Found Family in fiction:

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo is one example that utilizes both the band of misfits and LGBTQ angles to forge together her lovable band of rogues.

Seanan McGuire’s series-all of her book series have characters that protect those who are different and gather other misfits to their side.

A final use of the found family trope is that of a displaced ruler. Sometimes this character may or may not know their royal heritage. The Ash Princess trilogy by Laura Sebastian and Throne of Glass series by Sarah J. Maas are two such examples. However, eventually, they set off to reclaim their birthright, encounter friends and allies along the way who become closer than family.

Now why is it important and how can it enhance your writing style?

Many of us were either different from our families growing up or had families that were not the best to say the least. I had a dysfunctional family, and while I have interests in common with some of my family, we were not close. So my friends became my family, especially as I grew older and have lost the family that I was closest to. Others never had family they were close to so friends have become their family.

Seeing the concept in fiction, in gaming, film and television, gives a model that we can relate to, that allows us to see ourselves reflected back. Just like LGBTQ and POC, it is important to have this representation.

1. Drives Character Development

Found families offer a built-in support system. By pairing characters with opposite backgrounds, you create natural friction. These differences challenge their perspectives and assign them unique social roles within the group.

• The "Cheerleader": A character who lifts up a struggling protagonist.
• The "Mom" or "Dad": A member who acts as the anchor or caretaker.

2. Creates Meaningful Conflict

Unlike traditional families with fixed hierarchies, found families lack a safety net. Members must learn to accept hard feedback, navigate disagreements, and overcome difficult circumstances to stay together. These internal arguments and discomforts push the story forward. When characters reconcile after a fight, their bond feels incredibly strong.

3. Builds High Stakes and Motivation

Nothing forces characters to grow quite like having something to lose. When a protagonist finds people they genuinely love and want to protect, the external stakes (such as saving the world or the city) become deeply personal. This motivates characters to take risks and make sacrifices for one another that they would never make on their own.

4. Resonates Deeply with Readers

Found family stories appeal to a wide range of readers. For individuals with complicated or absent family ties, this trope offers a message of hope—that you can find people who care for you unconditionally. For readers with great families, it demonstrates that you can create your own community and support system as you navigate life.

5. Balances the Tone

Writing a high-stakes adventure or a dark story can be exhausting for readers. Found families provide a natural mechanism for pacing and levity. You can insert moments of comfort, playful bickering, and quiet support between the more intense or dangerous plot points.

Honestly, for me as a writer, Found Family is something that not only resonates with me as a reader but I think makes my writing better. I tend to write characters that fall into the LGBTQIA spectrum and my characters need to forge connections outside the standard family.

When I incorporate the Found Family trope into my writing, I have stronger characters, and it allows me to add secondary characters who have a stake in the action and narrative. It allows me to resonate with readers and give them hope that there are communities that will accept them for who they are.

Beyond adding value to my writing, connecting with readers like myself is the most important aspect to Found Family. I hope you will consider using it in your writing as well.

Have you used the found family trope in your own writing, or do you have a favorite example of it as a reader? Please share it with us down in the comments!

About Rhea Dionne

I’m a native Arizona girl that grew up loving sci fi, fantasy, gaming and comics. Characters started whispering to me in grade school and I’ve been writing ever since, especially lgbtquia characters. I took a winding road which includes movie and book reviews but my fiction includes romantic fantasy and horror. I have a horror story published in the anthology Post Mortems and am putting out a serial, Rekindling, a Gay Romantasy on my Patreon,  www.patreon.com/RheaDionne.

You can find more about what I’m working on at my website, www.rheasdesigns.shop.

Header image from Deposit Photo

by Jenny Hansen

Having recently completed a rigorous scientific investigation into the relationship between writers and holly bushes (over at Writers Helping Writers), I felt obligated to continue my “research.” My snarky writing-self demanded it.

Backstory

For those who missed my Writers Helping Writers post, here’s the scoop:

Holly leaves don't begin life with spikes. They start smooth, and get stabby only after repeated encounters with grazing animals. The plant adapts. It develops defenses. It becomes (in less-than-botanical terms), quite stabby.

The Parallels with Writers Can’t Be Unseen

This holly bush discovery explained so much about writers that I immediately began cataloging the various subspecies. After decades in writing communities, conferences, critique groups, and online forums, I can report that Writer Holly exists in several distinct varieties.

You’ve likely met some of these sub-varieties of “Writer Holly.” (You’ll have to let me know in the comments if you belong to one. I sure do.)

The Critique Group Holly

This variety can hear the phrase "I have a suggestion…" from three blocks away.

Researchers believe their hearing evolved after prolonged exposure to comments such as:

• "The middle feels a bit slow."
• "I wasn't connecting with the protagonist."
• "Have you considered cutting Chapter Eight?"

The remarkable thing about Critique Group Holly is that it voluntarily returns to the very environment that wounded it. Sometimes weekly. (Scientists remain baffled.) It is undetermined whether the repeated stimuli of weekly vs monthly vs quarterly make a difference in the spiky-ness of Critique Group Holly.

More research is needed.

The Query Letter Holly

This sub-species begins life cheerful and optimistic. The ego-chomping nature of querying changes their leaves from smooth to spiky, almost overnight.

After approximately thirty rejections, new spikes appear.

After sixty rejections, their spikes look sharp enough to key a car.

After one hundred rejections, this subspecies can identify a form rejection from the first six words and has developed the prickly protection of a medieval fortress.

Common behaviors include:

• Refreshing email every nine minutes.
• Interpreting silence as an ominous communication strategy.
• Saying things like, "I'm fine," while maintaining a spreadsheet that would impress an auditor.

This variety survives almost entirely on caffeine and spite.

The Conference Holly

Conference Holly appears friendly. But beware of sitting too close during industry panel discussions.

This subspecies has spent hundreds or thousands of dollars to hear publishing professionals answer pressing writer questions with:

• "It depends."
• "The market is changing."
• "Nobody really knows."

Conference Holly develops a fascinating defense mechanism. Ask what they're writing, and they'll immediately launch into a polished pitch they've rehearsed in the shower, in traffic, and while standing in line for coffee.

It should be noted that Conference Holly members are champion queue-ers. They’ll stand patiently in line for coffee, elevators, book signings…and industry chats.

The Amazon Review Holly

One of the most sensitive species in the ecosystem.

Amazon Review Holly can receive ninety-nine glowing reviews and one negative review. Guess which one it remembers? A five-star review is treasured. A one-star review can trigger more spikes than a cactus.

Years later, the writer will still remember: "I couldn't connect with the characters." Meanwhile, they cannot recall where they left their keys ten minutes ago.

Amazon Review Holly memory is an ongoing mystery.

The Goodreads Holly

This species evolved from the Amazon Review Holly, but in a much harsher environment.

Goodreads Holly understands a terrifying truth: Readers are talking about your book even when they aren't talking to you. Their reviews are not intended for the author, and that changes everything.

A Goodreads reviewer might write: "The heroine annoyed me." And fifty-seven strangers will arrive to discuss the heroine as if she were a problematic aunt at a holiday dinner.

Goodreads Holly tells itself: "Reviews are for readers." (Then immediately reads every review.) Goodreads Holly also possesses an extraordinary ability to locate a two-star review hidden among hundreds of positive ratings.

The writer then spends the rest of the afternoon wondering whether the reviewer was right. (Even when the reviewer admits they only read three chapters.)

The Social Media Holly

This subspecies, which did not exist when I started writing, now appears everywhere.

Social Media Holly can spend four hours creating content about writing in order to avoid writing.

Its natural habitat includes:

• Instagram analytics
• Facebook engagement reports
• LinkedIn impressions
• Threads conversations
• Twenty-seven browser tabs explaining algorithms

A common mating call is: "I should really be working on my manuscript." (The manuscript, meanwhile, has not seen its creator in days.)

And finally we come to…

The Veteran Writer Holly

This is the most interesting variety of all.

At first glance, it still appears prickly. The spikes are definitely there. But something changes after enough years of being gnawed on by predators.

Veteran Writer Holly learns the difference between criticism and catastrophe. It learns that one rejection isn't the end. One bad review or disappointing lunch isn't the end.

It learns that most writing wounds are survivable.

More importantly, it has learned that not every deer deserves a response. Veteran Writer Holly has wisdom. And exhaustion. (But mostly wisdom.)

Final Thoughts

What fascinates me most about holly is that the plant itself never changes. Underneath every prickly leaf is the same DNA that existed before the outside world nibbled at it. The spikes are an adaptation, not an identity.

Maybe that's true for writers too.

Beneath the rejection letters, critique comments, conference pitches, Amazon reviews, algorithm panic, imposter syndrome, and emergency chocolate...

...the original writer is still there.

That person who loved stories. Who wanted to make something. The one who sat down one day and thought, “Writing sounds fun.”

That person still lives inside each of us.

Even on the days when we’re exhausted by the rest of it. Even when we’re feeling a bit stabby. We still keep writing, and we still love words. (Which may be the strongest evidence yet that writers are a little bit crazy.)

But at least we're all here, hanging out together in this writing forest.

Cheers, y’all!

So now enquiring minds want to know... Do you belong to one of these various writing subspecies? Perhaps to several? I'd love to hear about it down in the comments!

About Jenny

By day, Jenny Hansen provides brand storytelling, LinkedIn coaching, and copywriting for small businesses. By night, she writes humor, memoir, women’s fiction, and short stories. After 20+ years as a corporate trainer, she’s delighted to sit down while she works.

Find Jenny here at Writers In the Storm, or online on Facebook or Instagram.

Top photo purchased from Depositphotos

by Sarah Sally Hamer

A book becomes a universe the moment a character draws breath. Not the moment the plot begins, not the moment the setting takes shape, but the moment a presence stirs on the page and begins to exert its quiet pull.

Characters are the gravitational bodies of a story. They are the weather systems, the shifting seasons, the tectonic plates. They are the reason a reader steps inside and the reason they stay. A story without characters is a landscape without wind. A story with characters is a world in motion.

When we talk about the universe of characters, we’re not talking about a cast list. We’re talking about the ecology of a narrative. The way one person’s longing changes the temperature of a room. The way another person’s silence creates a pressure drop. The way someone’s wound bends the emotional space around them. A character is never just a person. A character is a force field.

And a universe is made of forces.

The First Law: Characters Create Gravity

Every character has a center of gravity — a pull that shapes the space around them. Some characters pull inward, drawing others close, creating intimacy, confession, and collision. Others push outward, creating distance, tension, or the sense that something is always just out of reach.

A protagonist’s gravity is often the strongest, but not always the most interesting. Sometimes the most powerful gravitational field belongs to the character who barely speaks, or the one who appears only in memory, or the one whose absence is the loudest presence in the room.

Gravity is not about page time. It’s about emotional mass.

A character with a wound, a longing, a secret, a contradiction — that character bends the narrative space. They make other characters react. They make the reader lean in. They create the sense that something is happening even when no one is moving.

When you build a universe of characters, you’re really building a map of gravitational pulls. You’re deciding who orbits whom, who collides, who escapes, who burns up on re‑entry.

The Second Law: Characters Generate Weather

Every character carries a weather system inside them. Some walk into a scene like a cold front, dropping the temperature by ten degrees. Others bring heat, humidity, the kind of air that makes everyone sweat. Some are lightning, some are fog, some are the stillness before a storm.

A character’s weather is the emotional atmosphere they create simply by existing.

Think of the friend who makes everyone relax the moment they enter the room or the colleague who makes everyone sit up straighter. Think of the relative who turns every holiday into a pressure cooker. These are weather systems. They are predictable, recognizable, and powerful.

In fiction, a character’s weather system is one of the most reliable tools you have. It lets you shift tone without changing setting. It lets you create tension without adding conflict. It lets you reveal relationships without a single line of exposition.

When two characters with opposing weather systems meet, the story experiences a front. A clash. Maybe even a storm. And storms are where stories crack open.

The Third Law: Characters Shape Time

Time in a book is not chronological. It is emotional, stretching, contracting, looping, fracturing, and freezing. It all depends on who is in the room.

A character who lives in regret pulls the story backward. A character who lives in fear pushes the story forward. A character who lives in longing suspends the story in a kind of shimmering present — a moment that feels like it could last forever or break at any second.

Characters shape time by the way they experience it.

A child’s time is different from someone older. Someone who is grieving a loved one experiences differently from someone in love. A character waiting for news experiences time differently than when they try to outrun it.

So, when you build a universe of characters, you’re building a universe of clocks — each one ticking at its own pace, each one telling a different truth about what matters.

The Fourth Law: Characters Carry Mythology

Every character is a myth in the making.

They carry origin stories, sacred objects, taboos, rituals, omens. They carry the stories they tell about themselves and the stories others tell about them. They carry the stories they refuse to tell at all.

A character’s mythology is the symbolic layer of their existence — the archetype they echo, the pattern they repeat, the shadow they cast. And, ultimately, the way the reader understands them.

We have characters who are heroes but don’t want to be heroes. Villains don’t always know they’re villains. Some are tricksters, healers, guardians, wanderers who guard the threshold over which the protagonist must pass.

When you understand a character’s mythology, you understand their purpose in the universe of the book. You understand what they awaken, what they challenge, what they protect, what they destroy.

You understand why they matter. And so will the reader.

The Fifth Law: Characters Create Ecosystems

A universe of characters is not a collection of individuals. It is an ecosystem — a living, interdependent network of needs, fears, desires, and histories.

Characters evolve in response to one another. They adapt. They compete. They cooperate. They form alliances, symbioses, rivalries. They create balance or imbalance. They create scarcity or abundance. They create harmony or collapse.

When one character changes, the ecosystem shifts.

A character who finds courage destabilizes the character who depended on their fear. An honest person destabilizes the character who depended on silence. Someon who leaves can destroy the character who depended on their presence.

This is why character development is never isolated. It is always relational. Always ecological. Always part of a larger system.

The Sixth Law: Characters Are Portals

Every character opens a door into a different way of seeing the world.

Some teach the reader to notice beauty. Another teaches them how to survive. The wise one, or better yet, the fool can teach them how to grieve, or hope, or forgive, or fight, or surrender.

Characters expand the reader’s emotional vocabulary.

They let the reader inhabit lives they’ve never lived, feel feelings they’ve never felt, and imagine futures they’ve never considered. They let the reader practice empathy, curiosity, courage.

A universe of characters is a universe of portals — each one leading somewhere the reader has never been.

The Seventh Law: Characters Are Alive

This is the law writers whisper about. The one that feels like magic.

Characters are alive.

Not in the literal sense, but in the creative sense — the sense that they surprise you, resist you, argue with you, refuse your plans, demand their own arcs, their own truths, their own endings.

A character who is alive will not let you write the wrong scene. They will not let you force them into a shape that doesn’t fit. They will not let you silence them when they need to speak.

Bottom line, a universe of characters is a universe that talks back.

And that is the moment a book becomes more than a book. It becomes a living world.

The Writer as Cosmologist

To write a book is to build a universe. To build a universe is to understand the laws that govern it. And to understand those laws is to listen — deeply, patiently, reverently — to the characters who inhabit it.

You are not their puppet master, you are their cosmologist. Their cartographer. Their witness.

Writers map their gravity, track their weather, listen to their clocks, study their myths. You observe their ecosystems. You open their portals. You honor their aliveness.

And in doing so, you create a universe that feels real enough for a reader to enter, wander, and remember long after they’ve closed the book.

Because the universe of characters is not just the world inside the story. It is the world the reader carries with them when the story ends.

What does your character universe look like?

Join Sarah Sally for a free video on this subject at this link: https://youtu.be/OmNaZLsmIjQ.

About Sarah (Sally)

Sarah (Sally) Hamer is a lover of books, a teacher of writers, and a believer in a good story. Most of all, she is eternally fascinated by people and how they 'tick'. She’s passionate about helping people tell their own stories, whether through fiction or through memoir. Writing in many genres - mystery, science fiction, fantasy, romance, medieval history, non-fiction – she has won awards at both local and national levels, including two RWA Golden Heart finals.

A teacher of memoir, beginning and advanced creative fiction writing, and screenwriting at Louisiana State University in Shreveport for over twenty years, she also teaches online at both margielawson.com and nostresswriting.com with blogs for writersinthestormblog.com/ as well as her monthly blog for thewriteconversation.com. Sally is a free-lance editor and book coach at Mind Potential, with many of her students and clients becoming successful, award-winning authors. 

You can find her at sally@mindpotential.org

Featured picture from Canva Magic Media.