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

Say You Love Me

Our characters want what we want. 

I don't mean tons of money, to be good looking, to have a caring partner, lots of sex, a dream job, or to save or rule the world. They want to be justified through affirmation, to receive a pat on the head and welcomed into the assembly, and everything above is just a means to acquire it.

Desire is a very basic, neutral way to view motivations that are tempered by other forces like morality and ability, but understanding where a thing comes from gives you an insight into where it's going. This is super important, and we'll revisit this a bit in the next chapter--THIS one is about relationships.

All of the tension you create between two characters lies in the conflict generated by each of them seeking their own affirmation, whether it's complimentary or at odds. Lovers receive it from each other, and disruptions cause stress that is the fuel for any romance novel. Antagonists see each other as barriers to the thing (or status, or accomplishment) that justifies them and each seeks to remove it. Stick a pin in this and bear it in mind as we proceed.

Understanding how your character relates to others is critical to making them real, and incidentally, to writing B plots or subplots, which are, in their turn, critical to creating a rich and well-developed story, so you need to spend time understanding the tensions between those characters.

This is true no matter how many or how few characters are in your story. In the movie I Am Legend, you have just the one character, Robert Neville, right? NOPE! For most of the movie, Robert is alone, but you become KEENLY aware of his need for relationships. The dearth is felt not only by the protagonist, it becomes a key motivator for the plot. Initially, you have the dog, Sam, but the darkseekers are also a character, collectively at first as the film's primary antagonist, but they become summed up at the end in the captured female and her mate. Even mannequins become characters through the eyes of our hero, and we see this sort of thing replayed in other books and films, like Wilson in Castaway or Pee Wee Herman's bike.

The point is, since story is a fundamental means of establishing social connections, you can't craft a relatable story without them in some form.

One way I keep track of this is to mind map everyone in my book as they relate to the protagonist from the protagonist's perspective. Let me preface the following as one among many ways to make this work, and there's nothing wrong with keeping track of it in your head if you can. I tend to work on multiple stories at once and I often have large casts, so I lean partially on tools and methods to get me through it.

I begin with a circle representing the character, then add circles of people they encounter as part of the plot. The closer they are to the character, the closer I make them on the page. I tend to make the circles reflect the amount of time they spend in the story or how relevant they are to it. Then I add one word that best describes that relationship to the line connecting them. Like so.

As you develop the story you can branch relationships off the other circles and add more descriptions to their connections, but keep it simple because this is your baseline. Whenever you have a question about how a character will interact to another, this is your first stop, and then it's modified by extenuations.

It does NOT speak for any character except the one in the middle, and you might need to do this multiple times to get a useful map. It also doesn't account for change, so make sure you know where you are in your story when you refer to it, for example, half way through the story above the protagonist relationship with his sister may dramatically change. In longer, more complex works, like The Autumn Prince, I might (and do) have one of these for each act.

It doesn't need to include incidentals either. If a character is not moving the plot forward, meaning you can delete them without influencing the outcome, they don't need to be part of this map. Keep it simple.

Another good resource is a plot relationship chart, but for different reasons. I don't know where I first encountered this, but it's enormously helpful in helping you understand what makes your cast tick. It can be summed up thusly:

I would if I could but I can't so I shant, or more usefully, want, but, and so.

This can be written out, but it works better in a chart, like this one:

These help define those extenuations I mention a few paragraphs above. Extenuations suspend and modify relationship motivators, and they create free tension in any story, so don't neglect them, but don't just make them up either. If a character behaves in any way that isn't consistent with their idioms, your audience will pick up on it, especially if you've done a halfway decent job getting them to empathize.

We'll wrap up this section on characters in the next chapter by fleshing them out with plot important details once you've decided on who they are as individuals, and how they connect with other characters in your story. Realistically, these things seldom happen in any particular order, you just need to make sure you hit all the major points, and keep it consistent.