Writers in the Storm

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

World building is one of my favorite aspects of writing science fiction and fantasy. It’s a chance to open up the creative floodgates and let the imagination run wild. But world building is more than just the physical and descriptive details of a place. The culture, history, and language of a group of people contribute to what life is like in that world.

This history and culture is where those clichés, metaphors, and similes come from.

Consider how even within the United States terms and phrases differ. If you’re from the Midwest, you probably order a pop with lunch, but on the East and West Coasts it’s a soda, and in many southern states, it’s a coke (regardless of the type of soda it is). You can often tell where someone is from by the words and cliches they use.

So how can you use these devices to bring your world to life?

The key is to be intentional. Don't just throw in a cliché or a metaphor because it sounds good. Think about why you're using it and what effect you want it to have on your reader. Is it helping to create a more vivid image of your world? Is it revealing something about your characters or their emotions? Is it adding depth and complexity to your story?

For example, you could write:

• The city was a labyrinth.
• The air clung to me like a wet towel.
• "Actions speak louder than words," he said, shaking his head at my gaff.

But look what happens if you added a hint of the world and the characters who live in that world:

• The city was a labyrinth of twisting streets and paths that led to trouble.
• The air around the old biddies clung to me like a towel dipped in Chanel #5.
• "Actions speak louder than words," he said, “and you just shouted at the whole room.”

These take a basic phrase and turn it into something more. The city has an air of danger now, we get a stronger sense of what the air feels and smells like, and the cliché adds a bit of character voice.

Here are some tips to make the most of your clichés, metaphors, and similes:

Choose your clichés wisely.

Although clichés get a bad rap, they can serve a valuable purpose. They’re cultural shorthand that can suggest the larger world a character lives in. Using “common” phrases and clichés in your writing misses an opportunity to flesh out your story world—even if that world is New York City. How often have you seen a blanket of snow, a head spinning with ideas, or a smile as bright as the sun? These mean nothing to readers because they’re so general. 

But clichés are effective when used in the right context. For example, if you’re writing a scene where a character is trying to comfort a friend who has just made a terrible mistake, saying, “You can’t change the past” might be appropriate. But you might also brainstorm ways you can evoke that concept in a way that better fits your world.

For example, in my Healing Wars trilogy, my protagonist says, “What’s done is done,” and her sister finishes it with “And I can’t change it none,” suggesting this is a common cliché in their world. It carries the same vibe as “you can’t change the past,” but in a fresh way.

Use metaphors and similes to create vivid descriptions.

Metaphors and similes are useful tools for creating sensory descriptions that help readers imagine what your world looks, sounds, smells, and feels like. For example, “the wind whispered through the trees like a lover’s sigh” creates a vivid image of the sound of the wind blowing through the leaves.

I once wrote a pirate character who'd spent his life at sea. When he referenced things, he used sea metaphors or similes, because that’s the world he existed in. People went “white as a sail,” or something was “hard as a north wind.” It reinforced who he was and how he saw the world around him.

This applies even in the real world. Maybe your software developer compares things to coding, or the teacher makes math metaphors. The Iowa farm girl might pepper her speech with colloquialisms. Every culture and group has their own “language” and how they communicate, and the phrases everyone knows. “Let’s see if this dog is gonna hunt,” is clear for those in Arkansas, but a New Yorker might be lost as to its meaning.

While you don't want to dip into purple prose trying to "write fancy," think about how your character would use a metaphor or simile and how that fits into your story and world. What metaphors show an aspect of your world? How would your character describe the world around them?

Make sure your comparisons are accurate.

An inaccurate or nonsensical comparison can pull readers out of the story and undermine the effectiveness of your scene. For example, comparing a playful person’s smile to a “crocodile’s grin” is an interesting image, but it’s not an accurate comparison because crocodiles are usually associated with aggression and danger. It sends the wrong message to readers.

Also consider the tone and style of your story. For example, if you're writing a gritty crime drama, using a lot of colorful, literary-style metaphors and similes might feel out of place. If you're writing a humorous tale, creative and unexpected comparisons might add to the overall tone of the story.

Mix them up for the most impact.

Too much of anything is usually bad, so be wary of overusing any particular device. Too many clichés can feel stale and unoriginal. Too many metaphors or similes can feel overwritten or even pretentious. Mix all three into your story where they feel the most natural.

You can even use them to show the characters’ individual voices. Maybe one character frequently uses clichés because they think it makes them sound smart. Another might compare things using similes on a regular basis. The narrator or point of view character might fill their internalization with metaphors.

By choosing the right clichés, metaphors, and similes, you can give readers a deeper understanding of your characters' personalities, emotions, and perspectives, which helps illustrate your world.

Remember to use them sparingly and strategically, and always be intentional about the effect you want them to have on your reader.

If a cliché, metaphor, or simile helps create a more vivid image or reveal character, then it's serving its purpose. But if it's just a gimmick or distraction, then it's better to leave it out.

How do you feel about clichés, metaphors, and similes? Do they add to a story or just muck it up?

About Janice

Janice Hardy is the award-winning author of the teen fantasy trilogy The Healing Wars, including The Shifter, Blue Fire, and Darkfall from Balzer+Bray/Harper Collins. She also writes the Grace Harper urban fantasy series for adults under the name, J.T. Hardy. When she's not writing fiction, she runs the popular writing site Fiction University, and has written multiple books on writing, including Understanding Show, Don't Tell (And Really Getting It), Plotting Your Novel: Ideas and Structure, and the Revising Your Novel: First Draft to Finished Draft series. Sign up for her newsletter and receive 25 ways to Strengthen Your Writing Right Now free.

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Top image by Deleyna via Midjourney

by Stefan Emunds

This is the fifth article of the article series The Yin and Yang Relationship Between Psychology and Storytelling. The first article is about reader investment and reader engagement. In the second article, we covered how to create story experiences that feel real to life. The third article shows how to tap into your readers' subconsciousness and engage them in your story. The fourth article dives into characters’ goals, motivations, wants, needs, and objects of desires.

This article covers psychological engineering, aka characterization.

Why Do Writers Need to Know Psychology?

Writers need to know psychology for four main reasons:

• Know how readers think and feel and use that knowledge to engage them.
• Understand the psychology of experiencing so they can create story experiences that have a real-to-life feel.
• Design characters with plausible traits, flaws, talents, motivations, etc.
• Know themselves — why they write, what they really want to write about, and how to get out of their own way.

The Eight Crafts of Writing

This article is written with the eight writing crafts in mind. The eight writing crafts are:

• Big Idea (aka theme)
• Genre
• Narrative
• Story Outline (aka plotting)
• Characterization
• World Building
• Scene Structure
• Prose (aka line-by-line writing)

Note: To avoid confusing readers, the author of these articles avoided the alternation of she and her and he and him. Instead, he uses the nonexclusive she and her to mean writer and reader.

Psychological Engineering, aka Characterization

Psychologists are analysts, writers are psychological engineers. They use psychology to engineer story characters.

Characterization is complex. Among other things, writers need to know how to:

• Engineer characters
• Design character arcs
• Weave sympathy and empathy
• Set up character conflict
• Show and reveal character
• Reveal backstory

This article covers character engineering. The Eight Crafts of Writing recommends engineering characters in four steps:

1. Determine your characters’ story outline profile (prior to writing the first draft)
2. Give the character a simple, one-dimensional profile (prior to writing the first draft) 
3. Engineer your characters’ psychological profile (aka deep characterization)
4. Dress your characters with superficial attributes

How to Give Your Characters a Story Outline Profile

Many writers discover their characters while they write about them and they have no character profiles to begin with. This poses a challenge, since characters need to fit into the roles they play in the story. Discovering a character randomly may mess up the plot.

The solution: Create a story role profile for important characters prior to writing your first draft. It helps to have a cheat sheet for each character, something like: 

1. State the character’s story outline role, e.g., protagonist.
2. Show the genre role, e.g., victim in a crime story.
3. State the subplot role, e.g., lover.
4. State how the character relates to the story’s adversity? Is she a protagonistic or antagonistic agent or does she shapeshift?

As you can see, role profiling can already give you some characterization ideas. For instance, a victim needs to have a weakness, otherwise, the antagonist won’t be able to victimize her. What could that weakness be? If the character is a love-interest, she needs to be lovable somehow. In which way is she lovable?

What Makes the Character Tick?

To complete the story role profiling, you still need to define what makes the character tick. You can do that by answering the following three questions:

1. What is the character’s primary motivation? Is it fame, fortune, romance, or partying?
2. What is the character’s goal before and after the inciting incident?
3. What is the character’s need? The need determines the character’s subtext.

These three characteristics belong to the story outline too, and they should support the plot. The character’s motivation, goals, and need can give you a good inkling what kind of person she is. What about turning that into a one dimensional character profile before you write your first draft?

Define a Simple, One-dimensional, Psychological Profile Prior to Writing Your First Draft

It helps to give story characters a simple, one-dimensional psychological profile before writing the first draft. This can kick-start the discovery of your characters without stifling your discovery of characters while writing.

An easy way of doing that is assigning one of the Big Five character traits to your characters.

The Big Five theory is a well-researched psychological theory. According to Wikipedia, the Big Five is a suggested taxonomy, or grouping, for personality traits, developed from the 1980s onward in psychological trait theory. The theory identified five factors by labels for the US English speaking population, typically referred to as:

1. Openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)
2. Conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. extravagant/careless)
3. Extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved)
4. Agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. critical/rational)
5. Neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. resilient/confident)

Now, you can assign a Big Five trait or a sub-trait to your characters and work with that until their deeper psyches reveal themselves to you.

Deep Characterization: Psychological Profiling

After your first draft, it is time for deep characterization. Deep characterization makes your characters more interesting, removes inconsistencies, and shows character instead of telling.

Add some of these:

1. Pick a dominant trait, e.g., smart, lovely, serious, happy, or emotional. If you chose a Big Five trait, use that.
2. Identify their worldview, e.g., Catholic, Hippy, or Rasta.
3. A nickname
4. An internal paradox, e.g., a righteous man with a rebellious streak
5. A talent that fits the character’s role
6. A flaw - decide what wound caused it and reveal that wound (backstory) in a key scene to make it memorable
7. A goal and its opposite, i.e. the last thing she wants to do. You want to get her into a situation where she has to do exactly that.
8. Define their first impression vs. true character. Example: A neurotic character who hides her anxieties behind a mask of arrogance. Reveal the character’s subtext in key moments to make them memorable.
9. Props that embody characteristics, e.g., talismans, pets (John Wick’s dog), a piece of clothing (Indiana Jones' hat), or a unique weapon (Anton Chigurh’s captive bolt stunner in No Country for Old Men).
10. Facial expressions - use these to reveal emotional subtext
11. Gestures, habits, ticks, and mannerisms
12. A home and the way she lives. For instance, a rundown penthouse shows that the character is rich but lazy.

How deep should deep characterization go? This depends on the importance of the character’s role and how far you want to take it. A rule of thumb: characterization serves story outline, not the other way around. If it doesn’t serve the story outline, you can nix it.

Dress Your Characters With Superficial Attributes

Last but not least, you can assign superficial attributes to your characters. This does not serve the story, but it serves the reading experience.

You know if a character trait is superficial, if you can change the trait any time without affecting the character or the plot. Examples of superficial attributes are:

1. Name, age, gender, build
2. The character’s place in the story world, e.g., family, career, social standing, relationships, friends, and enemies.
3. Appearance — clothes, the way she moves, etc.
4. The character’s backstory
5. A character-themed vocabulary

The last one is super useful. Character-themed words distinguish characters in dialogues and POV narration.

Advanced writer tip: If you’re blocked, change one or two superficial attributions of a character and see whether that can get your creative juices flowing again.

Bonus Topic: How to Show, Hint at, and Reveal Character

Show character with the results of your psychological profiling and the superficial attributes you defined, in particular, character-themed words. Hint at character by revealing backstory and subtext. Reveal character through the decisions characters make.

A) How to Show (and not tell) Character

When you write in a character’s POV, you need to use character-themed words for descriptions, action beats, and internalizations. The same holds true for dialogue. Every character has her own way of speaking and uses character-themed words.

You can also show character through body language and smart dialogue tags. Example: “What did you say to me?” She puts her curly hair in a ponytail.

B) How to Hint at Character

You can hint at character by revealing backstory. For instance, you can show where and how a character lives, e.g., in a rundown penthouse or a tidy one-bedroom apartment.

The way a person dresses — neat, cheap, stylish, sporty — hints at character too.

The proverb If I know who your friends are, I know what your character is applies to stories too. Show your readers what friends the character has and how they talk about her. Then show her enemies and how those talk about her.

Last but not least, you can hint at character by revealing subtext. You do that by showing a character’s emotional reaction to her environment or the behavior of other characters.

Example: “You don’t scare me.” She lights a cigarette and blows the smoke in his direction. The cigarette shivers in her fingers.

C) How to Reveal Character

Plunge your characters into adversity, let the pressure strip away their superficial attributes, and reveal the truth about their selves by letting them decide on courses of action.

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

Kurt Vonnegut’s sixth of eight writing basics

I hope you enjoyed this article about psychological engineering and that it will help you fine-tune your characterization.

Why don’t you share an interesting character trait from your WIP?

About Stefan

Stefan Emunds is the author of The Eight Crafts of Writing. He writes inspirational non-fiction and visionary fiction stories and runs an online inspiration and enlightenment workshop. Stefan was born in Germany and enjoyed two years backpacking in Australia, New Zealand, and South-East Asia in his early twenties. Prior to becoming a writer, he worked as a business development manager in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. At the moment, he lives with his son in the Philippines.

by Hannah Jacobson

It’s common knowledge in the publishing world that book reviews and awards are essential pieces of the author success puzzle. Authors know it’s important to get reviews and win awards, but may be left to wonder:

            “What can you do with book awards and reviews?”

After your book gets reviews and wins awards, there are several steps you can take to make the most out of your book’s praise. Read on to learn what you can do with book awards and reviews, and how they can work together to increase your book sales, generate opportunities, and streamline book marketing.

What can you do with book awards and reviews?

From boosting book sales to impressing industry experts, book reviews and awards are powerful ways to establish yourself as a notable author. Here are some innovative ways you can leverage book awards and reviews:

You can sell more books

One of the more obvious benefits of receiving reviews and winning awards is the positive effect both have on book sales. Book buyers see an award seal on the cover of your book and think, “Wait a minute, this one must be really good. It’s won an award!”. This validation of your book’s quality compels readers to purchase your work. Winning awards and selling more books? Quite literally a win-win!

Similarly, book buyers often rely on reviews to assess how well other readers have responded to your book. If your book can boast several positive reviews from reputable sources, buyers are more likely to add your book to their cart.

You can promote yourself on social media

Most authors aren’t marketers. This can make promoting their books difficult, time-consuming, and ineffective. The good news? Book reviews and awards act as marketing fuel: exciting and engaging content that authors can use to grow their audience.

The fastest, most effective way to reach new readers is through social media. Establishing a presence on social media as an author is important, but having quality, compelling content to share on your platform is even more crucial.

That’s where book awards and reviews come in. Whether you’ve won an award, received an impressive review, or simply submitted your book for consideration, these achievements are the perfect content to share with readers and attract new buyers on social media.

For authors on a tight schedule, Book Award Pro offers a Story Marketing feature which automatically generates engaging social media posts about your wins and reviews. You can market your awards and reviews like a pro in just a few clicks.

You can open the door to publishing opportunities

It’s not only readers who pay attention to awards and reviews. Publishers, literary agents, and other industry experts use reviews and awards as an important metric to measure the quality and selling potential of your book.

The more impressive your book’s accolades, the more likely it may gain the attention of literary giants. Additionally, some award programs offer career-changing publishing opportunities for winners and runner-ups.

You can network with other authors

Professional networking is valuable in nearly every field, but in creative circles like writing, it’s especially important to surround yourself with other successful authors. This is especially true for two reasons:

• You can learn from each other. For example,exchanging book marketing ideas with other award-winners can help you refine your strategy.

• You can discover more opportunities. For example, connecting with other winners and reviewed authors can expose you to new award and review programs.

You can advertise your wins

Advertising your award wins and reviews on your online book listing is an important and ongoing process. Updating your cover image with new award seals impresses readers and celebrates your wins.

It’s also important to refresh your listing with recent reviews. Some authors may also choose to include snippets of their most positive reviews on their book covers. Either way, making your wins and reviews as visible as possible can help you make the most out of your book’s accolades.

You can establish yourself as an acclaimed author

There are over two million books published each year. This means standing out from the crowd can be more challenging than ever.

Book reviews and awards are impressive eye-catchers to readers and literary professionals alike. In a world where just about anyone can write and publish a book, awards and reviews can help amplify your voice and establish your book as a noteworthy read.

Do I need both awards and reviews?

Most literary experts will admit that authors need reviews in order to excel in the competitive publishing industry. Considering the endorsement power of reviews, it’s no surprise that having your book reviewed should be a top priority for authors looking to achieve notability.

On the other hand, book awards are impressive accolades that declare the excellence of your book to the world.

When used in combination, reviews and awards are an ultra-effective way to increase your book sales, attract professional opportunities, and take your book marketing strategy to the next level.

What are some ways you look forward to using awards and reviews for your book?

About Hannah

Hannah Jacobson is the founder of Book Award Pro, the company that makes it easy for authors find and submit to book awards.

Book Award Pro is the industry expert on awards, researching and monitoring 9,000+ legitimate awards. Every year, authors spanning 6 continents win more than 1,000 new awards using this service.

As the company's founder, Hannah's expertise has been recognized as the industry's leading voice in awards and author advocacy.

Begin your award-winning journey for free or connect with Hannah and Book Award Pro on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.