Writers in the Storm

by Lynette M. Burrows

To borrow and slightly twist Samwise Gamgee’s words*, the great stories, the ones that really matter, are stories about people, about their relationships. Relationships are a large part of what your readers relate to because we can’t escape them. We all have relationships with other people. Whether they are friends, acquaintances, enemies, or lovers, your characters' relationships can break a reader’s suspension of disbelief or indelibly mark your reader’s heart.

This is the first of a two-part series that will help you learn to develop unique and compelling relationships by understanding that each relationship is its own entity and how to create compelling relationships in your stories.

The Relationship As An Entity

Friend or foe, character A doesn’t act exactly the same way when she is alone as she does when she’s with Character B (and vice versa for B.) One key point K.M. Weiland teaches is to make the relationship an entity in itself. Basically, she means treat the relationship as a third character. One way to embrace this idea is to think about how the ethics of a group can lead an individual to behave differently than she would if she were alone.

Knowing what the relationship is and how the group reacts differently as a group than each individual would, will give your story more depth and meaning to your readers.

Relationships are composed of many parts. Some of those parts may not overtly be in the story but will influence every interaction between the characters. First, you must understand that there are many types of relationships.

Types of Relationships

Your characters may only have one relationship or many relationships in your book. Choose the type of relationships you will create for your characters with your story goals in mind. Here are a few types to consider:

• Parent and child
• Siblings
• Romantic partners
• Friends
• Teacher and student
• Mentor and mentee
• In-laws
• Neighbors
• Business Partners
• Parent and teen
• Roommates
• Extended family
• Doctor and patient

There are many more types of relationships. In longer stories, relationships can be interconnected such as the antagonist is the ex-boyfriend of the big sister or best friend of the protagonist. Revisit the stories you love and look for the clues to the relationships the main characters have.

When you treat the relationship as an entity in your story, the dynamics between your characters will create motivation and movement that keeps your story from becoming too plot driven. 

Example

The story of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, is a quest. If Tolkien hadn't created the friendship between Frodo and Samwise Gamgee, it would have been an entirely different story. Tolkien created that relationship out of his own experiences, but that relationship influences how the plot of the story moves forward.

Samwise is a loyal friend and servant to Frodo at the beginning. And Frodo accepts his role as master. 

Over the course of the story, Frodo questions Sam's loyalty and resents his protectiveness. Samwise learns kindness and acceptance from Frodo. Over the corse of the story, Sam also gains confidence in his decisions. As both characters learn, they change, and their relationship changes from master and servant to equals. 

How Many Relationships

As with any other story writing advice, there is no right way to creating relationships. Nor is there a right number of relationships.

Studies show that in real life, people can have 150 relationships during a lifetime. At any point, in a person's lifetime, only 3-5 of those relationships are likely to be close ones. Each relationship is unique to the two or more people involved.

The number of relationships your character has and forms during your story will depend on the genre, the plot, and the theme or point of your story. Be deliberate about the relationships you develop. Start with the smallest number of characters.

In any story, there are at least two entities, a protagonist and an antagonist. Both of these characters have a relationship with each other, even if it's only as antagonist to one another. Usually, they each also have relationships with other characters.

Once you've identified the relationship between your antagonist and protagonist, identify the other types of relationships you may need. For your story to work, does the protagonist need a best friend or a lover? What about school friends or work friends and neighbors? The easiest and most natural relationships of your protagonist are family members. But unless your story is a family saga, you don’t want all your protagonist’s close relationships to be family. 

Do the same process for your antagonist.

Words of Caution

Unless you are writing super long sagas, you cannot recreate the numbers of, or the complexities of, real-life relationships.

Make certain only one relationship fulfills a specific role in your story. Too many similar relationships can muddle the story so much your reader stops reading. 

You now have a list of anywhere from two to ten (or more) different relationship types, ie characters, to fill in your story. It’s time to make them work for the story. How?

Make the Most of Your Story Relationships

As in real life, story relationships are more complicated than a role or what they can learn from one another. The key elements to making the relationships in your story memorable to begin with interesting groupings of individuals.  

Choose Interesting Groupings

By interesting, I mean choose character groups or pairings that will create some tension. (See "Beguile Your Readers with Tension, Suspense and Conflict" for the difference between tension and conflict.) A few ways tension can exist between characters include attraction, natural antagonism, language barriers, or societal rules. 

Look at the pairings in your favorites, in classics, and in bestseller fiction. Examples include: Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, Romeo and Juliet, the trio of Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, Luke Skywalker and Leia, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, or Hawkeye and Black Widow. What causes the tension between each of these groupings? 

Make your main relationship, the one between your primary characters, different from the relationships with side or supporting characters. 

Make Your Characters Individuals

If a character is only developed as “the friend” or “the spouse,” that character will be flat and uninteresting. Every character that shows up as an individual gives your reader another chance to connect. Yes, even the spear carriers, passersby, and crowds should be an individual in some small way. 

Wait, you say? You’re protesting that to make every character an individual will make your book too long and too boring? 

Think about the movie, Toy Story. The main characters, Woody and Buzz Lightyear, have obvious differences that make them individuals. Their roles of cowboy and astronaut influence their actions and dialogue. But Woody has leadership skills, a grasp of reality, and will put himself at risk for others. Buzz has charm and confidence but doesn’t know he’s a toy.

Now think about the side characters. Hamm, the piggy bank, Mr. Potato Head, Slinky Dog, and Rex each display their own personalities through their much smaller but unique bits of action and dialogue. The writers probably know a lot more about these characters and their relationships to Woody and Buzz, but only a little shows on the screen.

Return to that favorite book of yours and look for the side characters and how their relationships come across. How does the dialogue and actions between characters help you understand what their relationship is?

Relationships in Fiction Are Complicated

So far, we’ve touched on how each relationship is a unique entity in your story, relationship types, relationship groupings, and making each character an individual.

Overwhelmed yet? Don’t be. You get to decide how complicated and deep each relationship is in your story. 

Creating fictional relationships can be an organic discovery process that you improve with rewrites and practice. You can base your fictional relationships on the real ones you experience or observe. Analyzing other authors’ books for how the relationships work in their books will help you internalize what works for you.

Part Two discusses what components you need to create relationships your readers can’t stop reading about.

Which fictional relationships have you enjoyed the most? Do you write the relationships between characters as a separate entity?

* “It's like the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered.” Samwise Gamgee, The Fellowship of the Ring, Lord of the Rings, J. R.R. Tolkien

About Lynette

Lynette M. Burrows is an author, blogger, creativity advocate, and Yorkie wrangler. She survived moving seventeen times between kindergarten and her high school graduation. This alone makes her uniquely qualified to write an adventure or two.

Her Fellowship series is a “chillingly realistic” dystopian alternate history. The story follows Miranda, one of the elite who dared to break the rules but in 1961 Fellowship America following the rules isn’t optional. Even the elite can be judged an unbeliever and hunted by the Angels of Death. Books one and two, My Soul to Keep, and  If I Should Die, are available everywhere books are sold online. Book three, And When I Wake, is scheduled to be published in late 2024.

Lynette lives in the land of OZ. She is a certifiable chocoholic and coffee lover. When she’s not blogging or writing or researching her next book, she avoids housework and plays with her two Yorkshire terriers. You can find Lynette online on Facebook or on her website.

Images within the post were purchased from DepositPhotos.com

By Janice Hardy

One of the problems with telling is that’s is often hard for writers to know when they’re doing it.

Show, don’t tell is subjective, which is why one rule doesn’t cover it all. It depends on the genre, the market, the audience, the point of view style, and even the narrative distance. What works for an omniscient third middle grade novel might feel told in a first-person romance written for adults. 

If you look at only the text, you risk missing “told prose” in your writing, since a sentence that technically shows can feel told in context. It’s important to examine the different levels of telling so you know what to look for.

Here are three places to look for told prose.

1. Telling at the Sentence Level

You’ll find most telling at the sentence level. Most of these types of tells can be caught by searching for common red flag words, such as because, since, or when.

Keep in mind “tell” is subjective. A sentence can tell and still read and work fine. It’s up to you to decide if the sentence would be stronger with or without the telling. Such tells include:

Telling that Explains

These explain the reasons why characters feel or act as they do. They also sneak into the manuscript when you fear the text isn’t clear enough and you have to explain information so readers “get it.” Most times, they really don’t need that extra help. You’ll often find filter words in these types of tell, such as “looked” and “felt.”

Telling that Summarizes

These tells take a shortcut by summarizing instead of dramatizing. They often read as though someone is watching the scene unfold from the sidelines, giving a general overview of the action. They might even sound like a summary you’d find in an outline instead of a novel. Sure, you might get the point across to your readers, but it’s not an entertaining read.

Telling that Conveys Information

Many tells exist only to convey information the characters would never think (or have reason) to share, such as world-building details or character backstories. They often sound too self-aware, or read as if the author was jumping into the story with a mini-lecture. These types of tells are good old-fashioned point of view shifts.

2. Telling at the Paragraph Level

If the told prose is explaining or summarizing a situation, the telling can affect an entire paragraph or even a page. You’ll find these tells most often when you pull away from the point-of-view character and start describing what’s going on from afar. These told sections can read like a summary of the scene in your outline. It might even read as if you planned to do more, but never got around to it.

Infodump Telling

An infodump drops in the reasons why something is important in the overall world or setting of the story, and infodumps focus almost exclusively on information relating to the world. This is information readers “need” to understand the story, but in most cases, dramatizes it or backgrounding that information leads to a much stronger story.

Backstory Telling

These tells explain the history of a character, place, or item and why it’s important. Frequently, they’re more extensive than an infodump, sometimes using flashbacks and long internal monologues to reveal frequently unnecessary history. Backstory telling usually focuses exclusively on the histories of the characters, explaining why characters are the way they are instead of showing those behaviors and quirks in action.

3. Telling at the Scene Level

Telling doesn’t stop with summarized paragraphs, and it’s possible to tell an entire scene. These are some of the sneakier types of tells, because writers rarely think to look for told prose at this level. These are scenes that contain important information, but you don’t show the scene unfolding—you just explain it and why it matters.

The most common scene-level tells are flashbacks. They dump history or explain backstory, since showing the scene tends to stop the story. Flashbacks are particularly tricky because they’re often shown, but they’re still telling readers information.

What’s annoying about these tells is that technically, they’re not traditional tells. They just read as though the author is summarizing or explaining events in the novel while nothing is happening on the page. Readers get bored, skim through them, and complain nothing happened in the novel. Since these scenes look like solid, functioning scenes, writers are left scratching their heads and wondering what’s wrong and why no one wants the book.

What Are You Trying to Tell Your Readers?

No matter where you find your told prose, before you revise it, take a step back and consider this: What are you trying to tell your readers? Once you pinpoint what’s important and what needs to be conveyed in that sentence, paragraph, or scene, you’ll be better able to choose how to show that information. Look for ways to:

• Suggest motives through what a character does, says, or thinks.
• Show world-building rules through how those rules and details affect the character’s actions or behavior.
• Show character backstory by choosing details and actions that had an influence on someone who lived through that history.

Show, don’t tell is a troublesome beast, but it’s a tool like any other. If you think about how you want to use it and what you’re trying to say, you’ll have a much better sense of how to convey that information to your readers.

And showing them a fantastic story is what it’s all about, right?

Do you struggle with show, don’t tell? Where do you most often tell?

About Janice

Janice Hardy is the award-winning author and founder of the popular writing site Fiction University, where she helps writers improve their craft and navigate the crazy world of publishing. Not only does she write about writing, she teaches workshops across the country, and her blog has been recognized as a Top Writing Blog by Writer’s Digest. She also spins tales of adventure for both teens and adults, and firmly believes that doing terrible things to her characters makes them more interesting (in a good way). She loves talking with writers and readers, and encourages questions of all types—even the weird ones. 

Find out more about writing at www.Fiction-University.com, or visit her author’s site at www.JaniceHardy.com. Subscribe to her newsletter to stay updated on future books, workshops, and events and receive her ebook, 25 Ways to Strengthen Your Writing Right Now, free.

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By Sarah (Sally) Hamer

Writing a strong, interesting, and compelling character is one of the most important aspects of creating a successful novel. How do you do it? By giving that character a strong goal, motivation and conflict. 

It works like this: the goal is the "what?" the character wants, the motivation is the "why?" of why he or she wants it, and the conflict is the "why not?" of obstacles. Each of these pieces of the puzzle is important in its own way, but each also has to hold its own in the triangle of characterization. They all must be strong, clear, and easy to determine by the reader.

So, what's your characters' WHY? And why does it matter?

In Deb Dixon's wonderful book, Goal, Motivation & Conflict: the Building Blocks of Good Fiction, she tells us that motivation is "what drives your character to obtain or achieve his goal." A character can certainly have more than one motivation in a story but Deb continues: "Keep it simple. Keep it strong. Keep it focused." Even though real humans have multiple and often conflicting reasons for what we do, we don't want to confuse a reader with more than one or two. 

Scarlett O’Hara

Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind, for instance, was a spoiled, hard-headed young woman who, on the eve of the American War Between the States (aka the Civil War) had two main motivations for what she wanted: 1) she wanted to marry Ashley because she thought she loved him and, 2) she wanted Tara, the Southern plantation they owned, because it was her father's dream. Both were so important to her, she was willing to lie, steal, and starve to get them. 

Dorothy 

Dorothy (The Wizard of Oz), an unhappy teenager who wanted to find happiness "over the rainbow" (she sings that famous song in the movie – if you haven't heard it, it's a perfect explanation of goal, motivation, and conflict) had to save her dog, Toto, who had bitten a neighbor lady and was going to be killed. She and Toto are caught in a tornado and whisked from her home in Kansas to the amazing, and terrifying, world of Oz. 

So, her secondary goal was to get herself and Toto back home. Why? Saving Toto was because he was her only friend and, probably, a link to her parents. And, "There's no place like home," tells us that she finally recognized that home is where the people you love are and that she could be happy there, which she so desperately wanted. 

Do you see how each of these motivations are crystal clear? They also are very human reasons for wanting something, which makes them even more believable. Getting those motivations right for the story is HUGE! How do we do it?

Goal, Motivation, and Conflict Triangle Method

I'm a nut for triangles in writing – good things come in threes, right? LOL! So, let's add in a triangle for Goal, Motivation, and Conflict with each one assigned to a different point. Triangles are one of the strongest building structures in the world, holding train trestles, skyscrapers, and old screen doors together, sometimes for decades. They also can help us hold our stories together. 

Each point is just as important as the other two. If one of the, let's say the motivation side, since we're working on it right now, is weak. We don't really know WHY the character wants whatever that goal is. So, the triangle, and therefore the entire structure, can too easily fall apart.

We can begin anywhere when figuring out motivation. It can start with motivation itself, or it can start with either the goal or the conflict. It really doesn't matter. Goal most often goes first, so we'll start there. Let’s create a fictional character using the triangle method, in which the three aspects of writing a compelling character are on each of the ends of a triangle for our planning purposes She's young, bright, and determined and we'll call her Tabitha.

Goal

Tabitha's goal is to be the top news reporter at her local TV station. That goes on the top of the triangle.

Motivation

Motivation goes next on either one of the other points. WHY does she want that job? 

• To prove something to someone who told her she wasn't good enough? 
• To follow in someone's footsteps? 
• To make money?

These are just a few of the thousands of reasons we could come up with. We will circle back around here in a minute, so just pick something and put it on the triangle.

Conflict

Last, but not least. is the conflict. Something/someone/multiple someones will get in her way. Conflict comes from both internal and external sources. Internal could be where she's afraid of taking that first step. Maybe she really doesn't have the skill. Or she has other obligations that can stop her. Or it can be other characters. Maybe an older woman holds that position and has no intention of stepping down. Maybe the management of the station doesn't like her. Again, lots of choices but pick one for the last point of the triangle.

Now, when we look at the triangle and the three options we have chosen, we have the beginnings of a story. 

Changing the Motivation and Its Impact on the Story

But let's play with the motivation side a little and take the motivation of trying to prove herself to someone – let's say her mother. Her mom had a dream of becoming "somebody" but there may have been a problem with Tabitha's father. Perhaps he left or died or didn't make enough money, so her mom had to let her dream go. 

Now, Tabitha's mom pushes Tabitha over and over to "be better," to do whatever it takes to make it in the world. If that's the case, Tabitha's motivation is to please her mom, which is an outside source. Maybe what Tabitha really wants is to marry that college sweetheart and have lots of babies.

So, we've shifted the goal – how does that change that motivation? She may still want to make her mom happy, but if she herself doesn't want to become famous, her motivation could instead be to get away from a helicopter mom. Would her conflict change too? YES! The entire story will shift, simply because she wants something for a different reason. She'll still be doing some of the same things, but her purpose for doing them – pleasing Mom or making herself happy – alters the bottom line. 

Bottom line. Sometimes we start a story with a great idea. We may even get fifty pages in. But, if we don't know WHY our protagonist wants something, it may not matter that they want it. And, our story falls apart.

Do you have a character in a book or movie you really enjoyed? Why? 

What conflict, motivation or goal are you working on in your own writing that you can share here?

What does your character really want? And WHY?

About Sally

Sarah (Sally) Hamer, B.S., MLA, 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 and has won awards at both local and national levels, including two 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 for Margie Lawson at www.margielawson.com and for the No Stress Writing Academy at https://www.worldanvil.com/w/classes-deleyna/a/no-stress-writing-academy.  Sally is a free-lance editor and book coach, with many of her students and clients becoming successful, award-winning authors. 

You can find her at info@mindpotential.org