Writers in the Storm

By Ellen Buikema

A character bible is a document filled with all you need to know about your characters’ motivations, personalities, physical characteristics, and background story, including family.  Not everything in the character bible will find its way into your manuscript, but the information will be easily available for your reference when needed.

Several chapters into writing The Hobo Code, I found myself in “Look, there’s a squirrel” mode. This is never pretty. When I was able to regain focus, I realized I’d written the wrong physical description for one of my main characters. In order to fix this, I reviewed several chapters to find the information I needed to continue the story. At this point, I had not begun a character bible. That incident pushed me to get on that!

How To Make a Character Bible

There is no wrong way to make a character bible.

It can be composed using a notebook, yellow sticky notes on butcher paper, or as a three-ring binder full of loose-leaf paper separated by tabbed dividers in multiple colors. Whatever works best for the writer. This YouTube video shows how to put together a story bible in a binder and includes free templates.

Not everyone likes to use paper methods. Some prefer to use software. Thankfully there are many to choose from for organizing and storing character information.

• One Stop for Writers has a great Character building tool.
• This YouTube video gives a good overview.
• Other possibilities are Scrivener, Plot Factory, OneNote, EverNote, and Microsoft Excel.
• Some writers like to use a combination of software, using Scrivener for writing and OneNote or EverNote for the character bible.

However you put it together, the benefit is to have quick access to the details for all your characters, no matter how minor. In The Hobo Code, hobo Spooky Steve is in far fewer scenes than Jack Schmidt, the main protagonist, but I still need to know enough about Spooky to have a well-rounded, relatable character.

Tips for getting the most from your character bible:

Knowing the characters' quirks, fears, likes and dislikes will help deepen dialogue and conflict.

• List all of your characters:  More time will be spent on the main characters, but details for the minor ones will help you remember little things like exactly what kind of tattoo he has and where it’s located.
• Background information:  Details infuse your characters with life. Focus on the characters’ personalities. Do they play well with others? How do they act under pressure? What are their emotional triggers?
• Physical Details: Keep a list of each character’s physical traits. This will help as you sprinkle these details throughout the story. No data dumps! You don’t want to change eye color mid-story unless we’re using contact lenses or magical glamor.

Weird fun fact: People with multiple personality disorder may have differing visual acuities. One may need glasses, another not. People with light-colored eyes sometimes appear to have eye color changes depending upon mood and what they are wearing. This can be used in emotion-filled scenes.

• Mannerisms:  Specific habits and mannerisms make characters realistic and relatable. Walk in your characters’ shoes for a day. Do they have speech patterns or use special phrases? How do they act at the dining room table during a meal? Do they eat standing up? Belch with great gusto to approve of a good meal? Dab with a napkin? Use this role-playing activity for everyday activities of all kinds.
• Interpersonal Communication:  List the characters’ friends, family members, colleagues, and enemies. Do your characters like to gossip? Are they friendly in person but spiteful in reality? Trusting? Naive?
• Stress Response:  You will be hurling conflicts at your characters to create tension and interest. How do your characters respond to stress? Include responses to normal situations and put the characters in positions where their normal response won’t work.
• Backstory:  No one lives in a vacuum, neither do fictional characters. Incidences in their past will determine how and why characters do what they do, and say what they say.  Maybe  characters freak out or crumbles at the sound of enraged voices due to childhood trauma. Perhaps they have specific olfactic memories and the smell of gasoline reminds them of long car rides for summer family vacations. A character’s backstory defines their present behavior and guides their future.

What about a screenwriting bible?

This bible (often called the show bible or series bible) is a reference document used by screenwriters containing all the information on characters including backstories, settings, and various minutiae, such as a character’s food allergies, for the big and small screen.

Movie and television series use bibles. These bibles are continuously updated with anything that airs. This document helps keep the writing consistent within the series.

When a new writer joins a show she is given a copy of the series bible to best understand all aspects of the program.

To pitch a TV series you must have your series bible ready to go along with the plot. Producers want to know where the story is going and if it’s binge-worthy.

The tone of the series should be reflected in the bible.

Here is a portion of the bible for the BBC’s comedy series Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, based on the work of Douglas Adams.

“Hi, hello. Welcome. Bonvendu. I believe that’s how they say ‘enter peacefully’ in French,” the introduction starts. “Don’t check that. Don’t fact check that. You’re distracted, stop it, concentrate. My name is Dirk Gently. And you are reading the Series Bible for my television show, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. This show, of course, is the long-awaited follow-up series to HBO’s critically acclaimed No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, which — Oh, it isn’t? I’ve been informed that it isn’t. I should have googled this. I thought we were doing an Avengers thing.”

Quirky series, quirky bible.

Do you use a character bible? Which works better for you, writing software or a paper method for notes? We'd love to hear, down in the comments, how you chose this method!

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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 Work In Progress, The Hobo Code, is YA historical fiction.

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

Top Image by Mystic Art Design from Pixabay

by Laurie Schnebly Campbell

Ever since Joseph Campbell observed that the world’s great legends all contain 12 steps a hero must take to grow and triumph, writers have enjoyed using that structure as a storytelling tool.

It’s a perfectly good structure for tales of adventure, and Christopher Vogler made it even more useful with The Hero’s Journey. But what happens when a character ISN’T going out to fight dragons, discover lost continents, or battle evil warlords?

What if their growth and triumph happen on a personal level?

That’s the question raised by a lot of authors writing about characters whose story doesn’t require daredevil action as a way of showing tremendous courage.

There’s something lacking in the 12-step structure if, for example, declining Aunt Martha’s offer to host a baby shower, or wearing the red-brimmed hat, or deciding to read that forbidden book DOESN’T equal heroic strength.

That’s why screenwriter Kim Hudson created a 13-step version which even Vogler said is a great parallel to the hero’s journey. It could be called the heroine’s journey, but since it works equally well for young men who haven’t yet experienced a great deal of what life has to offer, she called it The Virgin’s Promise.

Does it matter if you’re not writing about virgins?

Nope. What matters is that, if you’re writing about ANY character who’s going to follow a major internal journey (with possibly some external hurdles along the way), your story can be every bit as compelling as those full of swashbuckling adventure even though it stars a less swashbuckling type of person.

Often the greatest challenges faced by these characters -- let’s call ‘em heroines -- are the kind that real-life people (yes, like us!) face every day.

“My sister keeps joking that I married the wrong man.”

“My boss always says I need to widen my focus.”

“The kids don’t think my writing is important.”

“I’d love to branch out, but where would I ever find the time?”

We’ve all hidden our light, now and then. We’ve gotten used to putting others before ourselves. We’ve given in when we really wanted a different outcome. We’ve let somebody else determine how we behave.

So we understand what such characters might need to overcome, and we’d love to see them do it.

All they need is a path to follow.

A heroine embarking on the 13-step journey is going to emerge as a better, wiser, stronger, happier, and (due to the struggle) also a slightly more dented version of her original self.

She’s going to take risks that yield joyous rewards, and some that result in painful failures. She’s not always going to believe in herself.

Sometimes she’ll falter. Sometimes she’ll crumple. And sometimes she’ll shine.

She’ll inevitably run into barriers -- problems that come not so much from dragons or pirates or brigands as from her friends. Her neighbors. Her family.

They might care for her deeply and wish her all the best, but they’re not seeing her as the complete person she COULD be. All they see is what they want her to be, and if she isn’t living up to those expectations?

The results can be worse than a fire-breathing dragon.

What makes such a heroine all the more impressive is how she copes in the face of these setbacks. It’s hard to move past the dreams and desires of people she cares about, especially when that isn’t something she’s been taught to do throughout her life. Becoming her own best self is often a pretty solitary journey, and not one she undertakes with giddy optimism.

Even if she feels good about whatever journey she’s embarking on, of course she won’t triumph immediately -- otherwise we wouldn’t have much to read about. No, she has to go through trials different from the Hero’s Journey, with her 13 steps including:

• Paying the Price of Conformity
• Balancing her dependent and new Secret World
• Getting Caught Shining
• Seeing the Kingdom in Chaos
• Wandering in the Wilderness before
• choosing her Light and ultimately
• making sure the Kingdom is Brighter.

We see women brightening their kingdom all the time, whether or not they’re starring in a novel. Heck, you’ve probably done it yourself...

Having a wonderful meeting with a publisher and taking mental notes to share with your friend who wanted to be there. Or volunteering for a project that expands in scope but persevering all the way through completion. Or making sure to share credit with those who played a part in some triumph you’ve just achieved.

Women are great at such things.

Men can be wonderfully generous as well, as we’ve seen from many a hero, but women seem to have a more instinctive knack for noticing how other people feel about things and then seeing how they can make things better.

Which is why, all too often, real-life and fictional heroines do such a good job of caring for others that they neglect their own best interests, staying confined within the limits that society or family or friends have set for them. Until they recognize the down-side of such a situation...which is where their story begins.

We'll explore that in more detail next month at my WriterUniv.com class on “The Hero's Journey, For Heroines,” but meanwhile I'd love to hear some real-life examples.

So here’s a prize-drawing question:

If you’ve ever managed to go beyond the limits that other people set for you, could you say what you did? Regardless of the courage involved, whether it involved a quick adjustment or a life-changing event, somebody who comments will win free registration to the September class!

About Laurie

After winning Romantic Times’ “Best Special Edition of the Year” over Nora Roberts, Laurie Schnebly Campbell discovered she loved teaching every bit as much as writing...if not more. Since then she’s taught online and live workshops for writers from London and Los Angeles to New Zealand and New York, and keeps a special section of her bookshelves for people who’ve developed that particular novel in her classes. With 48 titles there so far, she’s always hoping for more.

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Top Image by Foundry Co from Pixabay. 

by Tiffany Yates Martin

Probably the concern I hear most from authors these days is some variation of, “What do we do about coronavirus?” Not in real life (by now I hope we all know to WEAR MASKS, socially distance, and stay home as much as possible), but in their current works-in-progress.

Do authors acknowledge the virus, the pandemic, these relentless months of quarantine by setting stories before the cataclysm of 2020? If we try to avoid it by pushing stories forward into the not-too-distant future, how can we predict how the world may have changed by then—socially, economically, culturally? And even in that case, when unspooling a character’s backstory, how should we incorporate it? Do we reference these unprecedented events—working from home (or on the front lines, for essential workers), managing our kids’ virtual education, the personal and financial effects that will befall so many? How can we know the full extent of them yet? Will our stories even be relevant in a post-pandemic world (whenever we’re finally post-pandemic…)?

As writer and critic Lily Meyer says in this Atlantic article:

“No one has had time to truly refine their ideas about personal life in a state of widespread isolation and existential dread, and literature, even when political, is a fundamentally personal realm. It relies on the ability to channel inner experience outward, and because no inner experience of the coronavirus pandemic could plausibly be described as complete, prose that renders it static and comprehensible rings false. In the shaky realm of literature reacting quickly to a crisis in motion, mess and chaos are the forms that speak best to painful realities.”

That’s a literary way of saying what I think most of us already intuit: Who the #&*% knows?

But if anyone may have some guidance or insight, I thought it might be industry professionals who are more intimate with the market and its vagaries and responses to major world events—many current publishing professionals were around for 9/11’s effect on the industry, for instance. With that in mind, I asked a handful of colleagues—literary agents and editors at publishing houses—in the Age of COVID, what’s a poor storyteller to do?

What Writing Industry Professionals Are Saying

Their answers aligned along similar lines, and may offer some guideposts—and a breath of relief when it’s desperately needed.

1. Don’t overthink it.

Years ago I heard bestselling author Walter Mosley speak. Asked about research for his historical hard-boiled Easy Rawlins mystery series (Devil in a Blue Dress, et al), Mosley, the author of more than forty successful novels, laughed and said he made it all up. “It’s fiction,” he said simply.

Christine Witthohn, literary agent/licensing agent with Book Cents Literary Agency, is of this school of thought: “It's fiction, so they can write whatever they want. I haven't heard anybody (agents or editors) discussing that topic. I think those questions are writerly questions that cause a writer to spin their wheels and get hung up (i.e., worrying about issues that keep them from being productive).”

“To be honest, there hasn’t been a lot of conversation with editors about including the ‘new normal’ in manuscripts,” says Kim Lionetti, senior literary agent with BookEnds Literary Agency. “None of my recent sales have addressed quarantine, masks, or social distancing at all.  In most cases, I think editors just believe readers will go to fiction for escapism and don’t really need the new realities addressed…. I don’t think publishers are avoiding the topic, though. If it makes sense to an author’s story to include these new realities, then they should absolutely write about them.” 

Faith Black Ross, senior editor at Crooked Lane Books, has a similar take: “It seems to be a matter of personal preference, but for me, and most of the others I've talked to, unless it's germane to the plot I prefer to just ignore it. I think most people read fiction as a form of escapism and so reading about people wearing masks and worrying about the virus puts me right back into the realities of today that I would sometimes prefer to avoid thinking about, especially when I'm taking a much-needed break with a book.”

There’s also of risking your story quickly feeling anachronistic, Ross adds: “Having all of your characters wearing masks, etc., might date the book a bit and tie it extremely securely to this one point in time rather than letting the work be a bit more timeless.”

2. Sidestep, for now.

Escapism is a theme that came up repeatedly with most of the industry pros I spoke with—that readers may not be eager to deal with the same weighted issues that consume so much of everyone’s daily realities at the moment in the stories they turn to for relief and release.

“There are so many unknowns with the pandemic, and the situation is changing daily, so attempting to address it even tangentially is tricky,” says Chris Werner, senior editor at Lake Union Publishing. “I believe many readers are eager to escape into stories that are set pre-COVID,” the unpleasant realities of which have “shifted nearly every aspect of our daily lives. For example, making mention of masks would mean having to entirely reframe how characters interact in their home or workspace.

“For that reason, I’ve been advising authors that I work with to set their manuscripts pre-2020. This makes for a far less complicated writing/editing experience because it allows authors to focus on the core story rather than trying to incorporate ever-changing details. I have some authors who have written author’s notes explaining their decision to set the story before the pandemic, which is an effective way to help ease readers into the world…. The risk of a story appearing dated seems lower than speculating about what the future looks like and getting it wrong.”

“Literature is not journalism,” adds Courtney Miller-Callihan, literary agent/founder of Handspun Literary Agency. “There are incredible novels to be written about the coronavirus, but to be a little flippant about it, we don't know how that story ends yet; maybe it's not yet time for someone to write the Great Coronavirus Novel. Meanwhile, I've been encouraging writers struggling with this question to think about whether ignoring COVID-19 feels dishonest to their story, or whether including the pandemic would actively thwart the reader's experience of escapism. A sizable percentage of my own work is on romance novels, which are about as escapist as it gets (in a good way!), and the industry consensus thus far seems to be that romance exists in an alternate dimension where coronavirus never happened.” 

Cindy Hwang, executive editor with Penguin Group USA also favors this approach until we have more perspective on the current global crisis: “Honestly, if I had to give a writer advice right now, I'd say sidestep the virus and keep your dates vague. That won't work long-term or for every book, but until this is over we just won't know!”

3. Look to the future—eventually.

At some point, just as with 9/11, this global experience of pandemic is going to become a part of the collective culture that will undoubtedly be reflected in our literature. But just as many stories now make little specific reference to the Trade Towers falling and the radical shift in our society that followed, COVID-19 and quarantine may simply become part of the fabric of our fictional worlds—a thread in the tapestry, rather than a discrete swath of patchwork quilt.

It’s already showing signs of happening, according to Kim Lionetti: “Recently I did have an editor suggest that it should be incorporated into a manuscript in a small way (e.g., there’s scenes in a gym, and they suggested including some of the cleaning and distancing considerations being added). That’s the first time I’d ever heard it raised, though, and I’ve had quite a few sales since March. Generally, I just recommend doing whatever feels right to the story. If the new reality adds some integral dynamics, then go for it.  But don’t feel obligated to shoehorn it in.”

“On the flip side,” adds Chris Werner, “I’ve been seeing deal announcements for books that are themed around quarantining and the situation as it stands now. There is certainly a lot of material to tap into in this regard, and more writers may see the pandemic as an opportunity to explore new terrain.”

That concern and confusion you may be feeling as a writer amid this unprecedented disruption of society isn’t baseless—and you’re far from alone in wrestling with these issues. But as with every other major crisis in history, this too shall pass—and when it does, it will as always be art and artists that help society process, understand, and heal from our collective wounds.

“One day (God willing) we will come out the other side of all of this,” says Faith Black Ross. “Like so much of publishing, it's all really maddeningly subjective. It's all still very up in the air and unknown, but for now I like my fiction like I like the rest of my life, without any coronavirus in it.”

“Honestly, I would tell writers to write the stories they want to write!” says Christine Witthohn. “Don't get hung up on things that will only cause them to procrastinate or block their creativity. That's what editing is for. Everyone has enough to worry about right now.” 

About Tiffany

Tiffany Yates Martin has spent nearly thirty years as an editor in the publishing industry, working with major publishers and bestselling and award-winning authors as well as indie and newer authors, and is the author of the Amazon bestseller Intuitive Editing: A Creative and Practical Guide to Revising Your Writing. She's led workshops and seminars for conferences and writers' groups across the country and is a frequent contributor to writers' sites and publications.

Under the pen name Phoebe Fox, she's the author of the Breakup Doctor series and her most recent release, A Little Bit of Grace (August 11, Berkley).

Visit her at www.foxprinteditorial.com or www.phoebefoxauthor.com.