How To Write Good: A Lightly Salted Guide to Stepping Up Your Wattpad Game.

Creating Life

I've been putting this off, I admit it. It's a huge concept, and cramming what I want to say into fewer than 1,000 words feels like an abomination because hundreds of thousands of them would still fall short.

But what the hell, let's do this.

This is as simple as I can put it. Your characters need life. They need the power to make you write them doing or saying things even when you don't want to, that's how real they have to be.

I'm not being esoteric or metaphysical, I am deadly serious.

When you develop a character, you're committing to their individuality, the traits and idioms that make them who they are, and that commitment goes straight to the heart of the reader. If you've done your job, developed empathy, given them the ability to form relationships within and outside the story that are consistent and believable, they no longer belong solely to you; they also belong to the audience, and because of that, you have a responsibility to them, to your characters, to your story, and yourself to avoid lobotomizing them because you're too lazy to work at it.

Aubretia the flower nymph is a sommelier who lives next door to Clench, a cute and loveable ice troll. Trolls in this story are cute and loveable, if you don't like it write your own. Anyway, I've just spent 10,000 words establishing Aubretia as being a kind soul, obsessed with nectar in every shade and flavor. She and Clench enter a contest to win one thousand pennyweight of gourmet nectars and she's super excited about it, but her neighbor takes the prize instead. This is important later in the story, don't ask for spoilers. Clench invites her over for dinner so she can sample his collection because it's the kind of thing a cute and loveable troll would do. She kindly refuses in order to attend a rally for legalizing poppies downtown that evening, which is where I'm planning for her to meet her love interest.

Dude.

You see the problem here, but I run into it all the time. It isn't always this subtle either. You can't shoehorn your characters into acting against their own interests if you want readers to believe in them. Once you've made your characters subordinate to the story, or worse, your social status, you've doomed them.

You can write your characters any frickin way you want, but if you REALLY need Aubretia to meet her intended at a rally, your B-plot needs to be something other than the thing that drives her passions, or you have to change it so it doesn't divert her from the A-plot. Or maybe the character needs to be overhauled. Now she grows poppies on the side to pay for her mother's gambling debts and has a stake in the cause.

     But... you don't understand! I LOVE Aubretia! Totally to death! I can't change her!

Fine, then change the meetup.

     But... but... her future lover, Pyrophilius, is a social activist and I need to show that he's passionate about it when they meet!

Fine, then change the subplot, or remove the whole Clench thing.

     But Clench is so CUTE and LOVEABLE and people LOVE him and his adorable CUTENESS and I just CAN'T!

Okay, this is what you do. Take your keyboard, toss it in a blender, and turn it to puree. If you create a character and refuse to allow them agency, you'll undo all the work you put into establishing them, even after you've become successful. 

You can have all kinds of reasons for writing whatever it is you're writing and they may sound great in your head, but if you want it to matter to anyone, you have to give up some of that control and put your effort into planning and plotting so it all makes sense to the reader. That's what makes writing hard, and why few people are successful at it. 

Think of it this way: when you drive a car, you turn left, the car goes left. You hit the brakes, and it stops. That's what it's like writing emails to your boss. When you write characters, it's more like riding a horse. Horses are more than half a ton of meat and muscle. If it REALLY wants to run THAT way, it will and there's not a dang thing you can do to stop it. You're a passenger. If you want to have a say in where you end up, you have to RIDE it. Learn its language. Give it a reason to go there.

This doesn't mean you're at their mercy, it just means that you put telling the story first. Once you establish something as a fact it's your responsibility to work within the limitations those facts create. We're at the end of this chapter so let me try to simplify this to an absurd degree.

Agency = desire + facility - morality.

First, let me clarify that this doesn't mean morality is negative, it's just a limiting agent. It's what stops us from swinging a baseball bat at that lady walking toward us so we can take her shoes.

All this formula says is that in order to determine what choices a character makes, you take their desires - we talked about that a couple of chapters ago - and add the power they have to bring those desires within reach (money, skill, influence), then subtract any barriers to their actions defined by morality, whether civil, social, or personal. This defines choice only. What other obstacles you put in their way is up to you. I know it's an oversimplification, but if you've done the legwork to round out a character, applying this formula as a practical, mental exercise while you're writing really works until they're dynamic enough that you no longer need it.

If you want me to talk more about character development, I'd be happy to, but it's too much to try and cover everything in a small space. Let me know what you're interested in and at the very least I promise to have an opinion on it.