Writers in the Storm

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.

More about Sarah Sally Hamer

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.

by Ellen Buikema

By 2018, I’d organized myself into a fairly neat routine. Worked a bit on the house in the morning after a meal, reviewed email, went over the previous day’s writing, fixed what needed fixing, and compose new material until I needed a break or went blank.

The remains of the days varied, but I worked at our family dining room table in the same spot each day with a worry stone given to me by the mother of a past student and a stuffed dragon that guarded my writing area.

Occasionally, Bailey, our lovable black lab, would lay down on the floor with me and help me think when I was stuck for what to write next. That’s part of my process, either lay down to think or play solitaire using physical cards. Solitaire on the screen doesn’t work for me. I need to remove myself completely from electronics when temporarily stuck. I have no idea why that is, but it is.

The Big Move

Bailey, our wonderful, unofficial therapy dog and writing partner passed over the Rainbow bridge that year.

Since we’d both retired, we decided to move to Mexico and use living there as a base for travel. Eventually we found a place that felt right for us, Mazatlán, off the sea of Cortez.

Now, settled in a condo off the beach, I could get back to the business of writing. Except there were differences:

• Worry stone, hiding somewhere.
• Dragon Guardian, in a box with a friend in Phoenix.
• Dining room table, left behind for the new owners of our house.
• Writing Partner Pup, in heaven where he belonged—angel on four paws.
• Daily schedule, drastically changed due to neighborhood noise.

Living in a port city can be fantastic. Busy. Lots to do of cultural interest in El Centro Historico. Opportunities to meet people from all over the world.

Mazatlán is home to Banda music. If you’re not familiar with this musical genre, imagine a marriage of Mexican Norteño and German Oompah music. It’s not on my favorites list, but is very popular there.

When the Germans came though Mazatlán in the mid-to-late 19^th century they left beer (Pacifico) and Oompah. Sometimes, very late at night, musicians would play their tubas along the beach. That being a horrific way to be roused from sleep.

Basically, the beauty of the area aside, my writing process and writing comforts were caput.

Do we need the perfect writing conditions?

Some days when you open up the laptop the writing flows. Other times you stare at the screen and nothing comes to mind. Author Kris Maze, in a blog post for WITS, has helpful suggestions for getting the writing flow back after falling into a slump—never a fun place to be.

Having the perfect writing condition for one’s self is wonderful but life happens and you must either change your methods or be distraught at not being able to write.

Instead of perfect, try aiming for what works.

Dealing With Your Inner Perfectionist

You sit in front of your notebook, laptop, or for me recently, a blank canvas. You think, well isn’t it lovely, all that blankness—perfect just as it is.

My canvas depicting a polar bear in a blizzard of blinding white needed to become a jungle scene with parrots for the grandbaby’s nursery.

• What if I get the perspective wrong?
• How on earth can I possibly mix that unusual shade of blue?
• I’ve never painted anything misty before. What if it ends up looking blotchy?

This need for everything to go right can cause a whopping case of paralysis. Instead, take a deep breath, pick up the brush, pen, pencil, keyboard, and get something down.

Perfection is not real; it is an illusion. There is beauty in imperfection.

Walk into a library and look around at the many books, all works of art in their own right. Not one of them was flawless in the beginning. Even the best writers have published works that still have the occasional error.

Keep These Points in Mind

Your first draft will be a hot mess. No worries! First drafts are supposed to be messy. It takes a village to put together a great book. Lots of eyes-on help.

Remember that the goal is to tell a good story, which will take many drafts. But you have to start with the first one.

Focus on attainable goals. The over-arching goal is to complete your story, but there are the day-to-day benchmarks along the way:

• Mastering your writing routine
• Getting in your daily word count goals
• Improving your writing skills

Final Thoughts

Try what my best friend does, write as if no one is ever going to read your work. Write for yourself. Get it out of your head. In this way, there is no fear of composing words on a page.

Learn to embrace imperfection.

There will be disappointing days when the Muse refuses to show up to work. On those days step away from the computer, notebook, canvas, and do something that gives you joy. Short breaks can do wonders. A bit later, with a fresh outlook, read over what you’ve started, ask yourself “What happens next?” and move forward.

* * * * * *

About Ellen

Author, speaker, and former teacher, Ellen L. Buikema has written Parenting ... A Work in Progress, non-fiction for parents, and The Adventures of Charlie Chameleon chapter book series with stories encouraging the development of empathy—sprinkling humor wherever possible. Her Works in Progress are The Hobo Code, YA historical fiction and The Crystal Key, MG Magical Realism/ Sci-Fi, a glaze of time travel.

Find her at https://ellenbuikema.com or on Amazon.

Top Image of Mazatlán at sunset taken by Ellen L. Buikema

How Your Inbox is Holding Your Masterpiece Hostage

by Lisa Norman

We talk a lot about protecting our writing time. We close the office door, put on noise-canceling headphones, and warn our families that if the house isn't actively on fire, we are invisible.

But there’s a quiet, heavy burden sitting right on your desk, masked as a tool of the trade.

Your inbox.

Once upon a time, email was a digital mailbox—a nice place where readers sent fan mail, agents sent contracts, and colleagues sent ideas. Today, it feels more like a slow-moving swamp of quicksand. Every single day, a fresh layer of digital noise pours over us: sophisticated phishing scams, AI-generated pitches, and endless newsletters we signed up for years ago and never read.

Before you know it, you aren't managing your correspondence anymore. You’re just trying to keep your head above the sand.

The Quicksand Real-World Horror

Years ago, I had a client whose email address was harvested by a particularly nasty scam group. Within days, his inbox was flooded faster than he could physically hit the delete key. Fake invoices, urgent security alerts, and desperate pleas cascaded in by the thousands.

He tried to keep up. He spent hours every day frantically scanning the noise, terrified he’d miss a real customer contact, a valid invoice, or an important career link.

You know what happened? He lost the real contacts anyway. The digital quicksand completely swallowed them. The overwhelming noise paralyzed his business, drained his mental energy, and eventually forced him to do the unthinkable: delete the address entirely, abandon his established contacts, and start over from scratch, new business cards and all.

That was a decade ago. Today, the swamp is wider, and the quicksand pulls harder.

I recently talked to a brilliant author and editor who confessed she was staring at nearly 7,000 unread emails in her business account alone. She spends valuable time every single day just shoo-ing the digital vermin away, watching the junk pour in faster than she can clear it, while warnings pop up that her storage capacity is hitting the danger zone.

If that sounds familiar, you are not alone. When I’m working with authors and entrepreneurs, I often see accounts with 20 thousand or more unread emails.

This is not your fault.

But we have to talk about what that struggle is actually costing your creativity.

The Mental Weight of the Unread

When your unread count climbs into the hundreds—or the thousands—you aren't just letting data pile up. You’re carrying a massive cognitive load. Your brain is trying to survive the quicksand pull of those unmade decisions.

Our brains aren't built to process a chaotic crowd of strangers screaming for our attention all at once. Yet every time you open your email to look for a specific note from your editor, your brain has to process through that quicksand. You glance past a discount code for shoes, a pitch from a publicist you don't know, a fake notification claiming your streaming account is suspended, and three urgent-sounding requests for your time.

You might think you’re just ignoring them, but your brain is actively working to filter them out. It’s making micro-decisions with every scroll: Is this a scam? Is this real? Do I owe this person money? By the time you finally find the email you needed, your creative energy for the day is cut in half. Your focus has been pulled into a dozen different directions. The scammers and marketers didn't have to steal your identity to win. They just had to steal the best part of your attention.

As writers, our brains are our creative sanctuaries. We need deep, uninterrupted focus to build worlds, untangle plots, and understand our characters. When we leave our digital front door wide open to every salesman and random notification, we are telling our creative souls that their peace doesn't matter. We’re letting the sands of wasted time swirl around us, pulling us down.

Finding Solid Ground

You don't have to live in a state of constant digital overwhelm.

Getting your digital house in order isn't about being a corporate efficiency expert. It’s about building a safe harbor around your creativity. It’s about ensuring that when you sit down to write, your brain isn't secretly chewing on an unread message hyping an artificial crisis.

If you feel yourself sinking, here are three ways to stop struggling and find solid ground:

• Separate the Rooms: Your fan mail, your industry newsletters, and your critical business or bank alerts don’t want to sit in the same inbox. When they all crowd into one space, the noise chokes out the important messages. Build digital walls so the vermin can't find your sacred creative space.
• Declare Email Bankruptcy: If you are sitting on thousands of unread emails, accept the truth: you are never going to read them. Select them all and hit Archive—not delete. They are still searchable if an emergency arises, but they are out of your sight. Clear a path so you have a safe place to stand. By hitting Archive we leave behind the fear that we’ve missed out on something critical. It will be there if we need it.
• Guard Your Access: Stop giving your email address away for free downloads you don't care about. And don't just substitute a throw-away address that piles up digital clutter elsewhere. Every time you fill out a form, you are giving a stranger explicit permission to interrupt your writing day. Be stingy with your access.

Your inbox can become a tool that serves your career, not a quicksand pit that swallows your time. Don't let digital quicksand stand between you and your next book.

How many unread emails are currently pulling at your attention? What is one small boundary you can set today to keep the digital noise out of your creative space?

About Lisa

Lisa Norman's passion has been writing since she could hold a pencil. While that is a cliché, she is unique in that her first novel was written on gum wrappers. As a young woman, she learned to program and discovered she has a talent for helping people and computers learn to work together and play nice. When she's not hanging out with her family, writing, or teaching, she can be found wandering the local beaches.

Lisa writes as Deleyna Marr and is the owner of No Stress Writing Academy. She also runs Heart Ally Books, LLC, an indie publishing firm.

Interested in learning more from Lisa? Sign up for her newsletter or check out her school, No Stress Writing Academy, where she teaches social media, organization, technical skills, and marketing for authors! This post is based upon a lesson from her class, Digital Organization Skills for Authors.

Her most recent book, The Work of Joy is now available here.

Top image from depositphotos.