Mo Fanning - British writer and comic

Tips

16 ways for writers to create a rounded character

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Character research

One thing I’ve come to accept with writing is the absolute need for character research. And by this, I don’t mean heading over to Google to find out about the town in which you plan to set your story, or looking up how likely it might be to die from a well-aimed gun shot. The single most vital bit of research any writer does relates to the people who populate their pages. Not knowing enough about the characters in your story is the biggest cause of writer’s block.

The obvious objection here is to say: How can I research a character I made up?

Soap writers access huge detailed fact files built up on each and every on-screen face so nobody acts out of character. As a writer, you need to do the same.

Each time I get an idea for a new project, I write the first few chapters (secure in the knowledge not one sentence will make the final draft). This is where I stop.

By then, I’ve created a handful of characters – or in my case, it’s more like twenty or thirty. This is where the initial character cull needs to happen. At least half need to go (or find themselves relegated to bit part roles – often without names).

What you’re aiming for is one or two lead characters and perhaps two (or three at most) supporting ones.

Character 16-point checklist

When you’ve agreed with yourself who gets to live, this is where research starts. My target is to write 2-4 pages on each. This is where you dig into your imagination, but also Google to understand who the character is, what drives them and what has happened to them in their life, where they come from and what sights, sounds and smells they recall and carry with them.

For each character, think about:

  • Their age
  • Where they live when the story starts
  • Background
  • Physical description
  • Typical clothing (here I like to create 5-10 outfits to copy and paste later)
  • Current and former occupation
  • Key relationships
  • What motivates them?
  • Describe their personality
  • Do they follow any hobbies?
  • Do they have habits or twitches/tics?
  • Why is their role in the story?
  • Does anything scare them?
  • What drives them on?
  • Describe their biggest secret
  • What do other people see when they look at this character?

I’m not going to say you must complete every single one of these for each character. Lesser ones don’t merit this level of depth, but having a place to check back and make sure you gave them the correct eye colour or the right hairstyle will save you hours of flicking through chapters. And avoids that horrible day when an editor (or worse a reader posting an Amazon review) points out your glaring error.

As a bonus, nine times out of ten, doing this exercise prompts storyline twists; knowing I’ve created something to reveal about any character is a brilliant motivator.

How do you build your characters? Share your tips.

Photo by Russ Ward on Unsplash

Planner or pantser – what sort of writer are you?

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Writer who plans

There are two schools of thought for a writer working on a story – you either plan – and work out in advance what happens when. Or you don’t. You pants your writing – derived from the phrase ‘flying by the seat of your pants’.

After years of trying to be a don’t care writer, I’ve realised the only way I can ever finish a book is to plan. If I write and see where the characters take me – usually into a deserted parking lot where one of them pulls a gun and tells me to stop bothering them with my adverb-free prose.

That’s not to say there isn’t room for freestyling – especially when you first work on something fresh. In fact, playing things by ear is essential.

Brick walls

My creative process tends towards the same pattern each time I try to work on a new novel. I start off fine, loving everything about what’s clearly the best thing I’ve ever written. And then I run smack into a wall – usually around 15,000 words. The dreaded ‘writers’ block‘. If I climb over, I carry on, only to hit another somewhere between 30 and 35,000 words. It’s only when I’m safely past the 50,000 word mark that I feel sure the story will reach a logical conclusion and stand a chance of making it to a full first draft.

Why do these brick walls appear?

Often, this happens because I’ve taken the current characters as far as I can. Even if I’ve worked out roughly where the narrative should go next, I can’t find a road through. Sometimes, I realise I’ve grown bored with the story or the people telling it. Some might consider 15,000 words a lot to throw away, but I do this often. As a writer, I treat these initial meanderings as a passageway into writing. A chance to get familiar with my characters and their situation and work out who they need around them. Just like when you make a new acquaintance. You don’t know enough about them to determine if you want to spend six months of your life with them, or if they’ll fit with your other friends, or what to buy them on their birthday. Or even if they’re the kind of friend who makes your birthday present list. 15,000 words are usually ample for me to decide.

The same, but better

Even if every single word ends up in the trash, often the people who lived in those words survive. They might say different things or dress better (or worse) or have new homes and jobs and husbands or secret lovers, but when I start again, I understand them enough to clamber over that first brick wall. I’d say it makes me a better writer.

Next time I’ll talk about the second brick wall – because that’s where planning really counts.

Coming soon ‘Rebuilding Alexandra Small’ and if you’re up for reading advance chapters and special offers, please join my mailing list.

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Rebuilding Alexandra Small will be published in 2021. The Armchair Bride is now available now from all good websites and bookstores. If you’d like to support my work (and bag a FREE signed copy of any of my books), consider using Patreon.

Six ways for a writer to handle the Covid pandemic

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COVID-19

I can’t be the only writer unsure how (or if) to deal with an unpredictable global pandemic. COVID-19 didn’t exist when I started work on my upcoming novel – and given a whole chunk of the action hangs off events at a seaside cafe, I could have done without it hitting. I don’t mean to demean people who lost loved ones or suffered through lockdown, just for now, this is all about me.

There’s a sound argument that books are where the reader goes to escape. The world is ugly, so why drag misery to the table? I thought the same a few months ago.  Now, I watch films, drama, and comedy on TV, and flinch as characters get too close or hug greetings. The rational me knows this isn’t an issue, but I feel like I need to make my story resonate more and mirror the time in which it’s set. And that time is ‘tomorrow’ – the immediate tomorrow, not the sci-fi future.

After scrolling many a blog and social media site, it seems there are six ways for writers to handle Coronavirus.

Ignore it

Pretend COVID never happened. Write the story you always aimed to write as if nothing in the world changed. Tell your story in a parallel universe. Most books reaching the shops were written long before the pandemic hit, so they make limited or no reference. They work. Why wouldn’t yours?

Predict how it might be

Soap operas have come back to UK TV screens. They’re filmed months in advance and handed the onerous job of having to appear current. The writers make their best guess at how things might be. And given our government’s hobby of confusing the Holy Bajesus out of everyone, that’s no straightforward task. Assuming your book comes out in six months, might there be a vaccine, might it be on ration, might more be dead, might there be an even bigger lockdown, or could everything go away … like Trump insists?

Sunny uplands

If you are as crazy as a coot and Trump’s predictions resonate, you could set your book in a time when the characters are ‘back to normal’ with the odd snippet of dialogue talking of how hard COVID life used to be. Things might be better. Lessons learnt by everybody. It might be a gentler world. I’m a natural cynic, so this isn’t the path I ever plan on taking. It sounds too much like science fiction.

Dark and desperate

I’m more prone to take this (total opposite) approach and force my characters to grapple with a post-COVID world where air is in limited supply and everybody lives in bubbles. There’s a place for this – and many TV commissioning editors are crying out for this kind of trite nonsense, but what if we move out of the shade in six months? It’s going to date your story – like that entire chapter I set in an Internet cafe in The Armchair Bride. That’s egg on my face.

Change your time

Most of us tell our stories in the here and now. With the here and now being just a tad weird, maybe we should change the timeline. If jumping into the future isn’t safe, why not skip back a year and set it in the recent past? To be fair, this is the safest bet. Although … if you gravitate towards present tense, a ‘find and replace’ exercise won’t change every ‘is’ into a ‘was’.

Write in the now

Perhaps the most straightforward way to write our stories is to react as if it’s unfolding now. Keep the references to lockdown light and universal. Stay out of places you know will be closed – don’t write scenes in nightclubs. Your characters can still meet in pubs or coffee shops by all means, but sit them at a table, not jostling for service at a bar. Romantic fiction suffers most here – how would two strangers overcome social distancing?

Whatever you choose, I wish you writing wonder.

Writer’s block – yet another writer with yet another tip

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Dealing with writer's block

Writer’s block is painful. Everyone gets a form of it at some point, and most writers have ways of dealing with it. A frequent fix is to ‘just write anything’ until the feeling of being blocked passes.

I recently stumbled upon a new tip for dealing with writer’s block, and it’s working like magic; not just to free up a brain jam, but also as a way to build an effective and engaging narrative dripping with that magic ingredient, conflict.

Write the last line first.

I’ll give that a moment to sink in.

When you start a new story or chapter or scene, write the final line of dialogue before you get going (or when the block sets in). This means you spend the rest of your writing time working towards that outcome, shaping actions and words around creating this natural outcome.

The last line should either tie everything up in a nice bow or deliver a cliff-hanging incentive to read on.

‘And that’s why we should never have done it’ was the example handed down in a recent script-writing workshop. We set off writing dialogue, not knowing our characters, but knowing where we needed to end up. Keeping the outcome in our heads and having it so clearly defined influenced so much of what came before. Lo and behold, the writer’s block lifts.

Choosing something that would make the reader want to turn the page when creating your final line chapter ends helps give your narrative force.  Think how you might write a scene or chapter in your work in progress that ends on any of the following:

  • ‘What now?’ she said. ‘How the hell do we make this right?’
  • ‘This is all your fault. I never want to see you again.’
  • ‘She’s going to hit the roof when she sees it.’

 

 

 

Writing: it’s my job to point things out

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Writing for writers

A frequently quoted ‘rule’ for writing is to write something every day. No matter if it’s good. No matter if it’s bad. Set yourself a window – anything from ten minutes to every waking moment – and sit in front of a screen or an empty piece of paper and write. The idea being if you do this each day, a habit forms and something good will come. As advice goes, it sits up there with ‘sometimes, even a blind squirrel finds a nut’.

Writing isn’t a natural thing for us as a species. For most of evolution, nobody wrote anything – fair enough there’s the odd cave drawing that historians insist are early attempts at storytelling. On that basis, bus-seat sharpie-penned pledges of Kazza luvs Jez carry equal value.

Writing for many years was the preserve of the elite. Even now, it remains a strange way to communicate.

When I stand on a stage and tell jokes, I see faces. The feedback is instant and I sense when an audience needs me to clarify or drop planned patter and jump to another topic. When I write a story, my words vanish into a void. Short of the occasional Amazon review, I don’t know who reads my books or how much they understand of the worlds I create.

Writing short set-ups

I try to find something interesting and point it out. I’ll ask you to look at someone or something and understand the flaws and persuade you that what I see is of interest. When learning the language of stand-up comedy, I picked up on how the shortest set-up works best. If a comic needs to explain the premise, chances are it’s unfamiliar.

It’s not the job of a writer or comedian to ram information into the brains of an audience.

The worst writing (and comedy) happens when those in charge abandon ‘joint attention‘ in favour of trying to sell their audience into an idea or world. It’s incredibly hard to do surreal comedy or writing and do it well.

Some of the worst writing advice is to create words for yourself and never consider the audience. For me, the audience comes first. I am part of the audience, but I’m also aware when what I find funny might be too personal. I’m not here to impress with clever plot twists or elaborate language and don’t care what you think about me. I’m not in the book. When I’m on stage telling jokes, you see a version of me.

What I aim to do is point out what’s there … if you look in the right places.

This is how we function as humans. Side-by-side we scan those around us, our landscape, the absurdity and improbability.

It’s my job to point things out.