Tag: Character development

W is for What’s Your Damage

Erin Penn 8 Comments

Meme created by Erin Penn

Today is the last of the SAGA Professional Writer’s Conference memes. If any of them sparked interest in SAGA, you can find out more about the annual conference at: sagaconference.com. The next one is scheduled for Winston-Salem in July 2024.

The full list is:
1. Enter Late, Leave Early
2. Give Your Characters Trouble
3. Better Verbs Make Better Writing
4. Everything you want is on the other side of fear
5. What’s Your Damage?

These were supported by other memes I’ve made: Don’t walk through doors; You are my Favorite character, I’m going to hurt you the most; Write with Style; Don’t get it right, get it written; The secret to writing fiction is always tell the truth.

What’s your damage? is a question you need to ask your hero. What is the shard of glass, the dagger in their belly, that makes them make wrong, or at least less than optimal, decisions? What makes them not perfect?

The damage which makes a person depend only on themselves, so doesn’t ask for help even when they should, because as a child they couldn’t trust their parents. The damage of a trick knee, so they can’t run, but they insist on coming to fight the monster anyway.

In Honestly, my hero has injuries making him weaker than pictures himself, and my heroine is still living with her last (ex-) relationship in her head. I really should have played with their damages a bit more, but the novelette is my first completed work. I learned a lot writing it.

You might not need to ask the point-of-view character What’s Your Damage until the first draft is done. Then you go back and hone the story, sprinkling the emotional journey throughout. Do they learn something that will heal their Damage? Do they learn a workaround to bandage the Damage for now?

The Damage is important. It makes the hero not-perfect. It makes them real. The Damage is what makes a story of Dragons and Wizards, of Spaceships and Blasters, of Love-at-first-sight and Billionaire-loving-Waitresses real. Damage pulls genre into reality.

Meme created by Erin Penn

G is for Give Your Characters Trouble

Erin Penn 6 Comments

Meme created by Erin Penn

During several of the Craft of Writing courses at the SAGA Writer’s Conference (sagaconference.com next one scheduled for July 2024), the Faculty describe many things to give your characters: a solid background, emotions, friends and enemies, goals. But most of all, Trouble.

When things slow down, blow up their lives. Physical and emotional bombs – mix and match appropriately to genre. “I’m pregnant.” changes everything as much as a car explosion, especially when the character saying it is male. Explosions. Obstacles. A child who is sick at school and needs to be picked up ASAP, while the hero needs to stop a vampire coven before they wake at nightfall.

Every three chapters or so stop and brainstorm five to ten things of “What is the worst thing that can happen?” Pick one or two things from the list. And give your characters a gift that keeps on giving.

Below is a previous meme I made when I was offering advice to a young writer. Since all writing is in the author’s head, making problems can be difficult for young authors. It’s like they are attacking their alter egos. Until you can distant yourself from your characters, Giving Trouble can be challenging. But Giving Trouble is absolutely necessary.

Meme created by Erin Penn

Writing Exercise: Conflicting Wants

Erin Penn

Photo 16115879 © Olaf Speier | Dreamstime.com
Anyone still have their New Year resolution in place to lose weight, or has the joy of fat, sugar, and salt won the year, yet again? One of the basic conflicting wants – eat healthy & be healthy vs joy of eating and joy in life.
Your characters have these conflicts too. Two mutually exclusive, yet base level things. Defining these wants can really help bring a character to life.
Edmund Schubert made an amazing Magical Word post on May 28, 2011, “What Else Does Your Character Want?”
We are going to do his challenge as a writing exercise, so be sure to read the whole thing. Don’t look at the comments yet, but after the exercise, go over them to help you think about this. Again, the URL is:
WRITING EXERCISE: Take a major character from one of your present WIP (work-in-progress) and define two conflicting “wants” the character has, and tell us in the comments below how those wants impact your story.
My Attempt: I’m presently working on expanding the Quest for True Love. The unnamed main character loves gaming and wants to win the game, especially having defined the goal “To find my true love.” BUT they also want to escape the game and get back to the real world. 

Other Cool Blogs: ProWritingAid

Erin Penn

Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash

ProWritingAid blog provides many good hints about how to write better, with a wide variety of authors and editors providing content. Krystal N. Craiker wrote “Fantasy Characters: 4 Common Traits and Ideas on Creating Them” (August 31, 2022).

While she focused on Fantasy Characters, these traits apply to all character development.

  1. Creating Character Motivations
  2. Personality Flaws Make Characters Relatable
  3. Add Depth with Emotional Wounds and Secrets
  4. Express Their Emotions and Emotional Responses

Found out how she expands on these traits here: https://prowritingaid.com/fantasy-characters

 

Editing Rant: Romantic Diabetes

Erin Penn


ID 1399397 © Photoeuphoria | Dreamstime.com

“Isn’t s/he the sweetest thing?”

First off, show, don’t tell us the character is sweet. Two, vary the admiration beyond being candy kisses and Hershey hugs. We don’t need Romantic Diabetes.

While the book contained slow-paced well-developed romance between a-beauty-and-a-beast where both the main romantic characters mature during the story, my toleration of the romance dwindled as I was thrown out of the story several times from the Mary Sue / Gary Stu moments. (See my Mary Sue post if you don’t understand the term.)

I didn’t mind the female character, a princess, being an ALL POWERFUL wizard unsure of her abilities because of her youth, or having battle-worthy skills, or perfect beauty. It is a romance after all. Romantic leads tend toward perfection in all things. Some amount of Mary Sue/Gary Stu is expected. (Not too much – “tend toward perfection”, but not BE perfection. Come on, now, tone this back.)

It is the stuff where she (and he) does something that I expect of royalty – and the romantic partner stops the story – just in case I missed reading what happened in the last sentence and go “they are the sweetest thing.” M.u.l.t.i.p.l.e times.

Most of the powerful things done weren’t “sweet” but noble. Very different.

Each time full-stop of the story the author was calling out to the reader “See, this is why you MUST love my characters – because they are cute/spunky/sweet”. Sorry author, you don’t get to tell me I have to love characters. You got to work for it.

And showing them doing something then telling immediately following the action is NOT TRUSTING your reader. Trust your reader.