On today’s episode we’re going to be talking about characters! These three authors I’ll be sharing insights from are absolute badasses when it comes to developing characters. And I’m going to share a piece of what they told me that I think you can use to develop your own stories. You’re going to love it.
Last week I talked about the rebrand that Writerly Lifestyle is going through. I’ll be exclusively focusing on thriller, mystery, suspense, and crime genres.
You’re not going to want to miss this!
As a quick update, the submissions I’ve been getting have been amazing! So if you’re just hearing this for the first time, the deadline is August 18th. Don’t miss it!
Liz Alterman is the author of a domestic suspense novel, the perfect neighborhood, a young adult thriller he’ll be waiting and a memoir, sad Sacked. Her work has appeared in the New York times, the Washington post McSweeney’s and other outlets as well. She shares about how she develops characters in her novels.
Liz Alterman: I get a million newsletters from, from people who are experts in the field. And I love when they’ll say like, you know, figure out what your character has for breakfast. What’s their favorite band? What are they wearing? I think that’s so valuable and like I love that. But again, I feel like I don’t really get to know them until I’m writing them.
And that’s another place where I feel like the workshops help a lot, you’ll be wanting to force a character one way. And then I’ll have a friend or a peer who’ll say like, well, I don’t think Cassidy would really do that. Or like, or Wouldn’t Cassidy feel like that? And I’m like, oh man, you’re right.
They would. And so I kind of then walk it back and look at like, okay, is this true to this person? How would she be feeling in this moment? And I kind of keep, as you’re saying, through the multiple revisions, try to build them out.
How great is this advice from Liz? Believability is so important when thinking about building character. I know I’ve fallen into the trap before of trying to mold a character to fit a plot point. It won’t work. Your readers will see through it. Go out and get someone’s advice. Get a critique partner to read your work, and make sure your characters are acting in a way that is consistent with them as a character.
Liz shared so many great insights in her episode. Definitely check out her full interview here.
Josh Stallings book Tricky was listed by library journal as one of the 10 best crime books of 2021. He was nominated for the Lefty and Anthony Awards.
He grew up and undiagnosed dyslexic and spent some time as a petty, criminal and failed actor before becoming a movie trailer editor.
Josh Stallings: I just read in this Steinbeck Notes book and it’s the next thing I’m gonna add to my arsenal, which is monsters think everyone else is a monster. That’s kind of how you get to be a monster is you feel I’ve been put down by all these monsters. So from their point of view, they are the victim. The world is full of monsters.
They need to fight. And so any way I can get my head into another character, one of the tricks I do, and I learned it on young Americans, which has two, it’s. It’s a seventies heist disco heist novel set against the world of glitter rock. But it’s got a lot of different characters. What I did is I went through and when I was done with the manuscript, I went through and read it, just one character at a time, all of their stuff, and made sure they tracked and they were real.
And then I took the next grader, cuz I get caught in the story. It’s easy to not track, are all the characters real? You don’t notice it, but you’ll feel it as a. But by reading, just, I would pull out all of one character, put them on a page. I’m just gonna read her today. And I would just read it with nothing else around it and go, Is this person real?
Do they have an arc? Does anything ring untrue? It’s a way that i’s just a technique I use to then in bigger books start to go. Oh, okay. Now everybody’s, Now everybody’s alive. Good.
This advice gets toward character motivations. You need to understand what motivates our characters. You don’t necessarily need to know what they have for breakfast or what their favorite subject was in high school. That’s great if you do know those things but what you really need to know is, in every scene, what do they want? What do they want in general and how is this scene going to be used for them to further those goals?
I also love this practical advice for multi-point of view novels. Have you gone through and read just that character’s story? Do they feel real?
Bianca Marais is the author of The Witches of Moonshyne Manor, Hum If You Don’t Know the Words, and If You Want to Make God Laugh, as well as the Audible Original, The Prynne Viper.
She taught at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies where she was awarded an Excellence in Teaching Award for Creative Writing in 2021.
She is the co-host of the popular podcast, The Shit No One Tells You About Writing, which is aimed at helping emerging writers become published.
Bianca Marais: the first thing I do when I come up with a character, because I’m terrible at making people up completely, I need, each of my characters tends to be a composite of, you know, people I know in my. Versus, you know, characters from TV shows, whatever the case may be is. So for example, somebody like Queenie, she’s the head witch, she’s a Capricorn, she’s a control freak.
She is. Very abrupt. She’s not all touchy-feely a lot of her is based on me, but I looked at other characters like people like Dorothy and the golden girls you know, there’s certain characters that are, are just like that. She, she just wants to get down to business. She’s like, what’s the bottom line with things.
Her psychological profile would be a driver. You know, you’ve got driver’s expressives, amiables analyticals. She’s very much a driver. Like what’s a task at hand and. Once I knew her personality and what she looked. That informed me the way in which she would communicate. She would make declarative sentences.
She wouldn’t make long rambling things. She would always be like, okay, what does that mean? Just summarize this for me. What’s the bottom line. And she’s gruff. And so that’s how she communicates
So for me, it’s very important when you’re approaching character to come up with a composite of them, not just how they look. You know, what is their personality? Like? What kind of text does that give them? Because Queenie’s so impatient, she’s always kind of shoving her wand in her hair and then she’s scatterbrained as well.
And then she forgets where the hell her wand is. And she says, damn a lot because she’s just everything irritated. Damn, this damn that. So, you know, that informed her speech patterns that informed the way she would communicate, it would inform the way she interacts with other characters. So, you know, these are the things that we need to look at when we approach character.
I love this advice from Bianca. How can you use things like psychological profiles or characters from televisions or movies, or even people you know in real life to make your characters feel real?
Because once you know some of these things, or have a sample to draw from, you can see how those insights work to inform things like sentence length, word choice, syntax. All of the things that make a character’s voice come to life.
So there you go!
Some quick advice on developing your characters from some of the best doing it right now. If you want to hear the full episodes with those guests, I’ve linked to each of their full interviews so you can check that out!
