How to Build Awesome Characters

In this week's lesson, presented by Chrysanne, we discussed how to pack your characters full of awesome.

• Is there something you're interested in, that you know a lot about? Chances are, other people will find it interesting too. Make your character interested in that same thing, and use their knowledge and interest in your story.
• Give your character an interesting, unusual, and best of all, painful backstory.
• Personality quirks are always fun.
• Readers love a character with awesome skills.
• Interesting supernatural powers can also lend awesomeness to a character.
• Characters need weaknesses and fears too. Use a little imagination and come up with something interesting. Is your character afraid of peacocks? Maybe they always fall asleep during movies.
• Possessing an awesome object or weapon also adds awesome to your character.
• Interesting characters deserve interesting names. We'll have a lesson on naming characters alter in the year.
• What's your character's favorite animal? Food? Sport? Activity? Choose something unusual, interesting, and awesome. Sure, you could go with dog, pizza, soccer, and playing video games, but how about sea scorpions, tom kha gai, ski jumping, and kite surfing? Which character would you rather spend a whole story with?
• Give your character a unique response to situations. What does your character do under stress? When angry? When sad? Don't be afraid to make it something totally unique.
• When building a character, keep in mind that most people have a gap between the way they perceive themselves and the way that others see them. This discrepancy between internal self and external behavior can be the source of all sorts of awesome.

Now that you've built an awesome character, make their awesomeness important to your plot! Use their traits, skills, knowledge, and interests to move the story.

Next week's lesson: Irony

Plot Holes, and how to patch them

No matter what you do, every story you write will encounter a few plot holes. Your story's tires will bump over inconsistencies and impossibilities as it moves from beginning to end, and the more complex your plot is, the more likely your story will have to negotiate gaping, yawning pitfalls of logic.

So how do you deal with it?

That depends on what kind of plot holes you've got. Simple inconsistencies in descriptive detail are the easiest to fix. Does a character have blue eyes in one chapter and brown eyes in the next? Pick brown or blue and revise.

When a plot hole has to do with character motivations, that can be more difficult to patch up. Say your plot requires Bobby to murder dear old Uncle George in chapter three, but you never mention why Bobby would do such a thing. Depending on the outcome you want for your story, here are a few options:

1. Ignore the plot hole: This works best for minor things the reader is not likely to notice. If Uncle George's murder is a tiny sub-plot, maybe we don't need to go into Bobby's reasons. On the other hand, if the murder is the main story, you'd better not ignore the motive.
2. Patch the plot hole: If a plot hole is too big to ignore, add something to the story, like a piece of character history. Maybe Uncle George accidentally ran over Bobby's puppy when Bobby was a boy, and now Bobby wants revenge. But watch out! Make sure your patch fits with the rest of the story. And make sure your patch for one plot hole doesn't create other plot holes.
3. Dig up the plot and make a new one: If you can't find a good patch for a big plot hole, you may need to re-do the whole plot. Maybe it isn't Bobby who murders Uncle George after all. Maybe Uncle George doesn't get murdered. Think of new ways to plot your story and see if you can find one with fewer plot holes.
4. Point out the plot hole: If you just can't figure out why Bobby murdered Uncle George, have the whole family aghast. No one can figure out why Bobby would do such a thing. It's a mystery. That way the reader knows you're making this plot choice on purpose. It's not just a lazy mistake.
5. Distract the reader from the plot hole: Okay, so maybe we don't know why Bobby murdered Uncle George, but as cousin Emily investigates she uncovers Uncle George's secret life as a circus clown, which is so intriguing we forget to wonder why he got murdered. Once again, as with ignoring a plot hole, this only works for holes in minor plot lines.

A last piece of advice. Do not become obsessed with eliminating plot holes. Story is more important than plot, and if you can't tell the story you want to tell without a few little plot holes your reader will probably forgive you. On the other hand, a plot with minimal plot holes is a joy to ride. Do your best to keep the story running smoothly.

Happy Writing!

It's a PLOT!

Aloha young writers! Our lesson this week is on plot: what is it and how to create one.

First, I'd like to describe what I mean by plot by contrasting it with story. Although we sometimes use these words interchangeably, they aren't the same thing.

Story describes change. It focuses on character experience, on outcome. For example, in a "Cinderella story" some poor, downtrodden individual gets a lucky break and then all dreams come true. A typical love story consists of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl in the end. Or maybe girl meets boy, girl discovers boy is some kind of strange sparkly vampire, girl likes him anyways (go figure).

Plot, on the other hand, is in the details. How exactly does the narrative go from point A to point B? Stories can be recycled again and again by the infinite possibilities of plot. Who is our Cinderella? What is this person's dream? How does the lucky break come about? These questions are answered by the plot.

One of our club members said, "So story is like muscle and plot is like the bones." This is especially true in understanding how both need to be strong. You can have a perfectly plotted but weak story. It will just lie there and languish. On the other hand, without a sturdy plot, you've got a story blob.

If you have to sacrifice one for the other, then go with story. Bones are great, but you can do without them. Think about what an octopus does with muscle alone.

So, back to plot. You, the author, are a story travel agent. A story walks into your head and says, "I want to go from Seattle to New Orleans." Now it is your job to create an itinerary. Drive to the airport, hop on a plane? Go by bus? Go by train? Stop in Denver, Salt Lake, Dallas, or Oklahoma City? The how, when, and where of the journey is the plot.

There are two main ways to create a plot. You as the story travel agent may say to the story, "Get in, I'll take you there!" and you hop in the car in Seattle and drive in a general south-east direction. Eventually you'll hit the Gulf Coast... hopefully... and then you can drive around a bit until you get to New Orleans. You and your story can have a thrilling adventure.You never know what you may discover along the way. You may end up in Galveston instead and your story could decide that Galveston is where it really wanted to be all along.

On the other hand, you can get out the maps, schedules, and brochures, and carefully plan a route. See Yellowstone park on the way. Pick out every road, hotel, diner, and rest-stop. This way, you know exactly where your story will go and what it will take to get there.

Most writers find a balance between these two methods. I usually have a general destination in mind, with major plot points planned along the way, but I love to take my story on scenic routes. If I see a roadside state park, I'll turn off the highway, get out of the car, peel off my shoes and socks, and go wading in the nearest stream. I like to stop in the desert in the middle of the night, get out, and stare at the stars. These moments of exploration and wonder are what I write for, moments of unexpected revelation, when the story can tell me what it's really about.

Now, to finish up, a few words on basic plot structure:

A plot begins with an exposition. This establishes the starting point of the story. What state is the character in at the beginning of the journey? At some point there's an inciting action, which prompts the character to begin a process of change. After that comes the rising action, where the character meets mounting resistance to the needed change. Things get worse and worse until it appears that all is lost, and then something happens to turn it all around, and clear the way for the character to achieve change. This turn-around point is the climax. After that comes resolution, as the character actually steps into the new order of things, and the denouement, where the character's new resting state is established, or at least hinted at.

Happy plotting! Keep writing!

How to Begin?

Because first impressions are so important, the opening pages of your book have got to really shine. Some readers only read the first sentence before deciding whether to put a book down or keep going! You have a paragraph at most to catch a reader's attention, and you may lose that attention any time in the first few pages. How do you keep readers going until they're hooked? Read on:


1. Start where the story begins. If you want to start two weeks before the story begins and write chapters and chapters of nothing happening, go right ahead. You'll learn a lot about your characters and the world they live in. But then get out your axe when it comes time to revise. CHOP! Your readers don't care about what your characters have been doing for the last two weeks. They want the story.
2. What makes your story really interesting? Be sure it shows up in the first few pages.
3. Your beginning sets the tone for the rest of the book. Choose an opening scene that promises the reader whatever the story will deliver.
4. Draw the reader into your fictional world. You can do this with a strong character voice, a clear and powerful image, an intriguing idea, or in many other ways.
5. Don't be afraid to go down deep and get at the heart of your story right away.

Because beginnings are so important, many writers save the beginning for the end. You have to start writing a story somewhere, but don't feel like your first draft needs a brilliant beginning. It may not be until you've written the end of your book that you will know what the beginning should be.

When to be Original

No one likes to see the same old same old, especially when it comes to entertainment. We're all searching for something new and exciting. And when we create stories, we want them to be fresh and original.

But on the other hand, you don't want to be so way out there that no one can connect with your story.

This really smart professor guy named Joseph Campbell studied myths and legends all over the world and discovered that a lot of great stories have pretty much the same plot. He wrote about it in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (click to read the Wikipedia article). Modern storytellers, like George Lucas paid attention, and have made a lot of money creating their own versions of this basic myth. It works because it taps into universal human experience. It feels right.

We'll talk about what exactly this most epic plot is in another lesson.

So if George Lucas used the same storytelling elements that have been used since cavemen swapped tales over the campfire, how come Star Wars seemed like something we'd never seen before?

It was all in the setting. And the light sabers. Yeah, those are cool.

The constant pattern of human life, of all life in fact, is that we are all born, we grow, we live, and then we die. The same story over and over. What makes each life unique is the time and place in which we are born, the people we associate with, the minor details of our life events.

So one way to make your story seem different from every other story, even if you choose to tell a story that's been told a million times, is to have that story play out in a new setting. A setting you invent, or one you research, or one you've lived in yourself.

It's not good to mess with basic plot structure, especially for the beginning writer. Learn as much as you can about the kinds of stories that work and master those forms before you try and get inventive. But you can always, always put your stories in settings that are fresh and original.

Most writers start out imitating their favorite kinds of stories, and then eventually move into their own. Don't worry too much about being original. There's no one else like you in the whole world, and if you write what's truly inside you, your story will be something wonderful that no one has ever seen before.