Writers in the Storm

by Jenny Hansen

Does anyone else here do that thing where they worry about their weaknesses too much? I've noticed a worrisome trend in the writing world, and sometimes in my own psyche. It's a disturbing phenomenon that occurs in creative types (especially writers). These creatives seem to think they have to be good at everything. Or that, because they have weak areas, they're not good enough at their jobs.

I have a question for you perfectionist writers out there:

Why is it acceptable for multiple attempts when learning to ride a bike, or dance the tango, or knit but it’s an “epic fail” to write a few books before you get good at it?

Lots of first novels remain unpublished for a reason. They were practice for the other books. 

I don’t get why it’s expected to take years to learn a musical instrument but it’s not acceptable to sit down at the writing page and have less-than-perfect prose fall from your fingertips. I don't get why that so often makes words like hack, imposter, what-the-hell-am-I-doing come to mind.

(If you're still in doubt about this, read Laura's Dust Bunny Books post, or watch my favorite pep talk video below.)

https://youtu.be/Nyhv80HDSj4

Let's Get To Those Strengths

Let me tell you a story about the best job I ever had. Before motherhood, I was a corporate software trainer for almost 20 years. The #1 requirement was the ability to be ON each day in the classroom.

It didn't matter whether I was up all night with a screaming baby or if my best friend and I had a fight. Nobody cares about those things when they come in for a day of training. Those students are focused on what they need to learn and it was my job to deliver.

There are personality types who would hate that type of work. They’d get tired by all that “on” business. I saw it a little differently. Every day that I walked into a classroom, I knew:

• All my problems would get checked at the door.
• I was going to provide a service.
• I'd meet new people.
• I’d have a fun day.
• I’d experience the utter joy of watching people learn, and light up over what they learned.

Do you see a trend with perks I listed above? It was me, me, I, I. Training was a vacation from my own busy head and a chance to focus on other people. It worked for me because it played on some of my innate strengths.

How do I know my strengths?

I went to a training conference several years ago that changed the way I see the world, especially the creative world. The keynote presentation -- “Building a Strengths-Based Organization” -- shined a bright light on another disturbing trend:

Society, starting with our schools and continuing through our workplace management teams, puts a mighty amount of focus on "improving our weaknesses." They use words like shore them up, compensate for them, overcome them.

After hearing some speakers at that conference, I started thinking crazy thoughts....

What might happen if those organizations put the same amount of energy in developing peoples’ strengths?

What kind of mountains could we move as writers if we applied our efforts toward being stellar at the things we’re good at, rather than focusing all our energy on our “faults?”

I’m not talking about turning into a bunch of narcissists who can do no wrong. I’m talking about making it a primary goal to discover your innate strengths and spend more time playing to them.

A Quick DIY Strengths Test

We did an exercise in the conference pre-session where we listed the things we were good at – we had 60 seconds to scribble them down. The first ones that came to mind - no deliberating. We were directed to find the skills we’d always been good at, for as long as we could remember.

Go ahead. Grab a piece of paper, set a timer for 60 seconds, and scribble yours down. We'll wait.

Don't think. Just start scribbling a list of the things that are easiest for you, whether they have anything to do with writing or not. You can do a writing-specific one later if you want.

Now stare at that list and be honest with yourself about how much focus you put on those talents.

It's interesting to me that most people don’t see their innate skills as anything nifty or unusual. In other words, they don’t see their own "specialness."

Just to give you an example, my innate strengths, in no particular order, were:

• Writing
• Teaching
• Motivating others
• Making friends
• Doing hair
• Learning software and languages

I felt extremely lucky when I looked at my list. Life pushed me early into a job I am uniquely suited for. Except for the “doing hair” part, my innate strengths describe the perfect software trainer. No wonder training always felt so easy…it draws on nearly all of my innate strengths!

Back to the conference...

The abilities people came up with in that session were amazing. There was tons of talent in that room. And you know what made me sad? The majority of it was not being used in the workplace, where everyone spent at least 50% of their waking hours. So many of those really cool and rewarding abilities were being relegated to the "someday I'll devote time to this hobby" side of the fence.

My Personal Epiphany

I did that hobby thing with my writing for years. Put it on the back burner...didn't make it a priority...downplayed my talent because words came easily to me. And I did that dumb thing I talked about up at the top of the post...I spent the majority of my time working on my weaknesses, both at work and on the page.

And then I went to that conference and those speakers turned my thoughts around enough for my personal epiphany to sneak in:

It doesn’t mean you’re a slacker just because you like to do the things that come naturally to you. 

In fact, I’m going to take this further and issue you a challenge: Pay attention to the things that are easy for you and try to do them more often. I personally think the easiest way to bring your “A” Game to your writing life is to play to your strengths.

The Need for Perfection

I'm going to use a baseball analogy for this next bit.

A quick primer for the the non-baseball peeps: US baseball has two different leagues - National League and American League. The two have slightly different rules, which we'll discuss below.

In American League Baseball, the rules allow for some weak spots. For example, pitchers are not expected to also be great hitters and they get a pinch hitter. Other players who can't hit the ball for whatever reason are also allowed to use a pinch hitter. They then have to leave for the rest of that game, but for a player who is tiring, this isn't a bad deal. Ditto for a slow poke or hurting player who uses a pinch runner.

Why can’t we do a little of that in our own writing groups? It's a smart strategy to mix up the talent so we have help when we get tired or slow. I've shared some examples of my friends who rock various talents below:

• Pinch World Builder (Fae Rowen)
• Pinch Steamy Scene Pro (Monica Corwin)
• Pinch Description Writer (Laura Drake)
• Pinch Grammar and Structure Queen (Julie Glover) - she is also a sassy dialogue pro
• Pinch Theme Builder (that would be me)

When you get a crew like that together, it doesn't matter so much if you have weak points. As I mentioned above, a strategic writer might build their critique groups or editing groups around a mix of strengths like the ones above. Most writers trade time or pages with each other. Other writers pay an editor. (I'll be interested to hear what our WITS readers do.)

Know Your Weaknesses

Just because you know your own weaknesses doesn't mean you have to dwell on them, even though a lot of us do. Mine drove me bonkers for years, until I went to that conference and got some perspective on my ridiculous need to be good at everything.

Laura Drake finally got through to me with her profound observation on writers: "No one gets it all."

My list of writing "weaknesses"

Here's my list, just to make you smile.

• Writing scene transitions. I've had it take me an entire page to get my characters from an elevator to the front door of a building. (Yeah, it's embarrassing.)
• I want to cover my eyes when my characters’ clothes come off.
• I can’t figure out how to build a space world.
• Fight scenes give me fits.
• The thought of writing a full-length novel makes me sweat. (See my solution in this post.)

Do these weak spots make me a crappy writer? No. It just means that my strengths lie elsewhere. Sometimes I have to go to my A-Team to get my “A” Game. And that’s OK.

I want to know when the Writing Police decided that we have to be great at every single aspect of our writing.

The older I get, the more that notion seems full of the hooey to me.

Do we need to keep learning and pushing ourselves to be better? Sure. But perhaps some of us perfection seekers can get an early start on next year's New Year's resolutions and stop beating ourselves up over not being stellar at every-darn-thing. Who's with me??

What are your innate strengths? I’m not talking about the things you’ve learned to be good at. What were you always good at? Share your uniqueness in the comments section below – we want to hear about it!

About Jenny

By day, Jenny Hansen provides LinkedIn coaching and copywriting for accountants and financial services firms. 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.

Top Photo by Ryan Wong on Unsplash

by Ellen Buikema

Good stories have a cast of characters who each play a specific role. Minor characters, although not indispensable to the plot, matter.

Minor characters are not afterthoughts to the protagonists.

These characters can make or break a story. In addition to advancing the plot, they add depth and dimension. These individuals usually have a small role and often appear for a few scenes. But even if they aren’t in the story for long, minor characters can have a significant impact.

If you want to give a minor character more depth and dimension, you can give them their own story arc with something as simple as emotional or physical change.

Minor characters have many forms.

They can fill out the population of your world.

“The other townsfolk—rubes, as Uncle Al called them—had already made their way through the menagerie tent and into the big top, which pulsed with frenetic music.” Like Water for Elephants

Minor characters are great for providing information, which is a good way for the protagonist to overhear or see what’s happening.

In the Dead Until Dark: Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire Mystery #1 by Charlaine Harris,The main protagonist “listens in” telepathically to the thoughts of other characters to gather information. A gift that is both blessing and a curse.

They can set the tone of a scene.

Dean R. Koontz’s Lightning features a pair of foster parents that Laura, our protagonist, is afraid to love for fear of loss.  Her foster mom speaks.

‘“I owned an interior design firm, but I had to give it up eight years ago. Health reasons. Too stressful. I wasn’t used to sitting at home like a lump, so I did all the things I dreamed of as a businesswoman with no spare time. Like learning magic.”

“Health reasons?” Laura said.

“Security was a treacherous rug that people kept pulling out from under her, and now someone was getting ready to jerk the rug again.”’

These characters may be helpful in small plots. They might cause a problem and then leave or assist another character briefly.

Hugo, the drinking buddy of the protagonist’s father, drags the father home after a night on the town, warns the protagonist of trouble with the father in the morning, and then leaves, never to be found in the story again. (From a work in progress.)

The following tips can help to create great secondary characters.

1. Give them a reason for being

Minor characters without a clear purpose have the potential to unnecessarily complicate and disrupt the flow of your story.

Giving minor characters a reason for being doesn’t mean that each has to change the course of the storyline. A character’s purpose could be to support the protagonist, witness events, or point the main characters in a particular direction.

• In The Hunger Games, minor characters play a role in aiding, guiding, or hindering Katniss along her journey through the games.
• For a romantic comedy or family drama, the purpose of the minor characters can be to convey relationship history.
• A minor character in conflict with the main character helps create tension and keeps the readers turning the pages. No conflict—no story.

In each case, characters may have brief appearances. Having a defined purpose, they become an essential part of the story instead of window dressing.

2. Give them clearly defined traits

Whether on the physical or mental level, well-crafted features let even the most minor characters stand out from the crowd.

• Clearly defining an individual’s characteristics paints a vivid picture, fixing them in readers’ memories.
• A character’s defining trait could be their lack of tact. This person may own a closet filled with the same outfit, have an unusual physical attribute, or gesture wildly with their hands.
• Plainly defined traits help distinguish critical minor characters in your story.

3.   Have them impact the story

Consider their impact. Positive, negative, or neutral, this impact affects the reader’s perception and memory of a character.

• Even if a character only appears for a short time, their impact lives on, encouraging interest.
• Impact can be indirect or direct. A minor character can set events in motion that catch up to the protagonists, or they can directly interact with the protagonist.
• Whether wild and crazy or subtle and subdued, imbuing each character with their unique impact will cause the most minor of players to stand out.

4. Consider their relationship to the protagonist

Unless you plan to write a story using one character, your protagonist(s) will interact with many characters and represent all kinds of relationships: family, friends, lovers, colleagues, acquaintances, and strangers.

• Tying a minor character’s relationship to the main character reinforces their worth in the story, giving them meaning and adding to the tale.
• Once the relationship between a minor and major character is established, the reader becomes more invested in minor character.

5. Give them a personal dialogue style

As a fundamental element of character development, dialogue can help define and distinguish one character from the next.

Giving a minor character distinctive dialogue patterns distinguishes them from the others, making them memorable no matter how small their role is.

The way they speak provides insight into our character.

• Formal or informal
• Use of more than one language
• Slang
• Lively or mellow – how each character speaks adds depth to your story.

Think about the unique interests, traits, and background of each character. How old are they? Where are they from? What happened in their lives to develop their personalities?

Also, consider their voice and speech patterns.

One character may speak a mile a minute while another may speak with great care due to a stutter. One may blab on incessantly, while another may be a person of few words.

The next time you consider your cast of characters, see if any of the above tips helps in writing minor characters that matter.

What types of roles do your secondary characters have? How do you differentiate your characters? Do you have a favorite secondary character?

* * * * * *

About Ellen

Author, speaker, and former teacher, Ellen L. Buikema has written non-fiction for parents and a series of chapter books for children with stories encouraging the development of empathy—sprinkling humor wherever possible. Her Works In Progress are The Hobo Code, YA historical fiction and Crystal Memories, YA paranormal fantasy.

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

Top Image by Sam Williams from Pixabay

by Lynette M. Burrows

Are your characters two-dimensional? Do they all sound like you and only you? Tune in to the music of character voices, make them sound more like the different instruments of a band or orchestra. Make music with your character voices and your readers won’t be able to get enough of the stories you write.

Great Characters are the key to great fiction.

Donald Maass, Writing the Breakout Novel

What or Who Your Character Is

There are many things to consider when creating your story characters. Many how-to-write articles suggest creating a detailed profile of your characters. Delving into a character’s birth place, likes and dislikes, job, hair color, and using tools like spreadsheets and fill-in-the-blank questionnaires can be helpful, but characters are more than the details on a spreadsheet or form. Character are more than their story role, more than the point of view you choose for them, and more than what they do in the story. Your characters each need a voice, a unique voice. But how do you create that?

The Key to Understanding Characters

When a writer is told they’re too young or haven’t lived enough life to write about it, it’s often because of a lack of understand the basics of character or even life. A general understanding of psychological personality types will go a long way to helping you create varied and interesting characters. 

Learn about the fundamental personality types. Go deeper than Wikipedia, though it may give you an overview that is helpful. There are literally millions of sites on the internet that discuss variations on personality types. Choose one that’s reliable like psychcentral, psychology today, and The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

Psych Central has a helpful explanation of what is personality. Psychology Today discusses the basics of personality traits. NIMH has a great resource on personality disorders. Those three sites offer multiple articles on personality, personality traits, and personality disorders. 

Establish Your Characters’ Musical Pitch

The most significant part of any melody is pitch. It’s the part you remember, the part that you hum absentmindedly or sing with abandon.

When we read a story or watch a film, we connect with characters whose inner guidance system is most like ours. Choices the character makes, and the possibilities rejected by that character, fascinate us. The more we wonder, “would I have done that” and “what’s he going to do now,” the more we are hooked..

How do we create unique yet relatable characters? Go deeper in developing your characters. 

Most people have morals, values, or other belief systems that guide them in their choices. It’s the reason they choose B over A when A and B are equal. Call it an inner guidance system, their pitch. Thousands of religious belief systems and a non-religious belief systems in the world offer potential for story characters. 

Often we don’t think about our inner guidance system, it just is. It is significant because it is the belief that you could never do x, but y is okay. 

The five dominate religions in the world are Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. Develop a general understanding of each of them. Each belief system (religious or not) creates a different pitch. A person with deep beliefs in one of these systems will believe in different taboos and different words, actions, or events will trigger feelings of repulsion or guilt. 

Decide which inner guidance system each of your characters follows. The more significant your character, the deeper you want to dive into their belief system and how it creates tension with or conflict between the others in your story. 

Discover the Texture of Each Character’s Melody

Musical texture is a complex concept. The easiest way to understand it is to consider two or more versions of the same piece of music. One instrument plays one version. Two or three instruments play the next version. A full orchestra and a vocalist create a third version. Each of those versions has a different texture.

Characters play certain roles in stories: protagonist, hero, villain, antagonist, sidekick, etc. These roles define their story purpose. Story purpose is important, but don’t make the characters relatable or interesting or part of a symphony, orchestra, band, or even a song.

There is a spark in most people. It lights them up and spreads the joy or enthusiasm they have. Some people’s spark is a shining beacon. In others, it’s a tiny spark that keeps them going no matter how badly life piles it on.

This spark may look identical to all the characters in your story, but make sure it is unique to each individual character. The spark influences the way they see the world. It influences the way they interpret people, places, and events. They also gravitate toward people with similar sparks and away from those with extremely different sparks. 

Your characters could all wish to be writers, but the thing that sparks their joy is different. One writer could be all about writing historical nonfiction, another lives and breathes fantasy, and a third writes contemporary women’s fiction. That means each of them will find different ways to interpret story events. Witnessing a historical event thrills a historical nonfiction writer. The fantasy lover may see the event as a unique way to introduce elves or vampires to a similar situation. And a contemporary women’s fiction writer might see it as a struggle a contemporary woman must overcome to be empowered.

Consider what sparks joy in each of your characters and how those sparks are different. How each character interacts with and interprets events around them will be different based on their view of the world. Who do they gravitate toward and who do they avoid?

Mimic the Rhythm of Music

In real life, people move and talk rhythmically in a way that is differs from other people. It may be similar within a family or between twins, but there are always variations. 

Most people from the U.S. will assume that Southerners have a slower way of speaking. Consider the distinct speech patterns and word choices a midwestern farmer and an east coast Ivy School graduate use. Or the daily life rhythms of a suburban mom with the rhythms of an urban single woman. Is your character a native to the story’s locale or a visitor or an immigrant? You wouldn’t expect any of these people to dress, move or speak the same. They may have similarities, but their differences make them interesting. Create your characters with their own cadences of speech, body language, and movement. 

The inner lives of people, the rhythms of movement and speech they use make ordinary characters extraordinary. 

Cacophony or Symphony?

Is all this character development necessary? Writers could spend an eternity developing all the traits, practices, beliefs, emotions, history and all the things that create the music of a particular character. Some readers of specific genres don’t want to get all squishy about characters. Know your genre. Know how deeply you want to dive into your characters and if your readers will appreciate the music of character voices. 

Developing all the pieces of your characters’ voices may create a cacophony that will confuse or distract your reader. Choose to develop the melodic parts of your characters that strengthen your story, your genre, your voice. 

Need More Help?

You don't have a natural ear for making your characters behave and talk like real people? There are ways you can work on achieving deeper characterizations.

If your critique partner say your characters all sound the same, read your dialogue aloud. Only the dialogue. Does it all sound the same? If it doesn’t sound the same to you, record yourself reading the dialogue. What inflections and tones do you add that aren’t reflected on the page? (Don’t worry, we all leave things off the page and think our readers can sense it.)

Some Resources

If you need forms or spreadsheets, check out Angela Ackerman's post about Character Builder software on the One Stop for Writers site. There are many more available, experiment with them. And remember to go beyond the spreadsheets and forms.

Lori Freeland's post explains that characters are people too and gives suggestions you may find helpful.

Become a people watcher. Go to a public space — a mall, a public park, the airport — anywhere people gather. Listen to the voices surrounding you, watch the body language, the clothing, attitudes. Ask yourself questions. What musical theme do the two people holding hands make? What makes those two people different from one another? How does the language and behavior of that family of four make them different? Even a child mimicking their parent has unique traits. 

Deliberately create voices that are not yours. Research different personality types, different backgrounds and give your characters ones you don’t have. Go to festivals or international fairs and listen to the music of their voices and conversations. You might also learn interesting tidbits about their cultural background.

Make Your Story’s Music

Like all aspects of writing, it takes practice to become good at making the music of character voices work for you. You are the conductor and creator. You can do this.

The music of character voices in your story will strengthen your reader’s connection to your story. And the sweet melody of success will be yours when a writing partner or reader comments about how each of your character has their own theme song. 

What's your best tip or most difficult struggle for giving story characters distinct voices (theme music)?