Plot or Character first?

Deciding whether to create a plot or a character first can be a challenge. Writing fiction can feel like going around in circles, constantly changing your mind about which element to focus on – plot or character.

There’s a short answer and a long answer. Here’s the short answer: character.

Now here’s the long answer:

Perhaps you’ve spent years on a story and you’re still not finished. You’re still editing. You know it’s still not right, yet you can’t find the work-arounds that will get the manuscript to feel ‘done’. It feels a bit empty, somehow. 

I hope this blog has found you before you’ve got that bogged down in it. I hope you’re still early (ish) in the writing process – ideally still on your first draft or beginning to revise it. It’s never too late to fix a story, but all writers want to take the most direct route, yes?

The problem of not being happy with your story is likely to be because you’ve had your focus too much on plot. You’ve probably been spending too much time thinking up new things that could happen to your character and not enough time considering what your character would do about it. 

Character -based plotting

By using a character-based plotting method, you move towards considering the character and what they would do and how they would think and feel in various situations. It doesn’t mean that you forget about plot entirely. There’s a very small readership out there for novels which are all about the depth of a character’s soul but in which nothing happens.

Character-based plotting means that you get to know your character so well that you know what they will do in whatever situation you throw at them in their story. It means that your readers will care about their suffering, their victories, their sacrifices and the strength they have developed by the end of the story.

It’s your characters that your readers really care about. Start there.

Perfectionism – why its not serving you as a writer

Perfectionism is a common trait amongst writers. It is especially true of fiction writers, who often spend hours worrying over their exact word choices and word order. They might lose half an hour deliberating over a comma. Does this sound like you?

If you recognise yourself in this, then know this. Perfectionism is not serving you. 

Spending forever trying to make a single story perfect does not serve you. Carving out your single novel over years does not serve you. Keeping your writing secret does not serve you. Not moving on does not serve you.

Writing one single piece of fiction keeps you stuck. And while you’re stuck, there are people putting out books that are not as good as yours. They’re writing blogs on the Internet. They’re sharing their imperfect stories. They’re making sales. They’re becoming known. 

Most importantly, they are becoming better writers.

How to Overcome Perfectionism

In the book Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland, the writers explain how this works. They tell the story of a ceramics teacher who split his class into two groups. The first group would be given a grade solely based on the quantity of work they produced. Their grade would have nothing to do with the quality. The second group of students was required to produce just one item, but in order to receive an A it had to be perfect.

Both groups worked away. The first group made piece after piece. They moved on quickly, not lingering on their work. The second group focused on a single piece, trying to find a way to make it flawless.

How to Overcome Perfectionism as a Writer

Yes, it can hurt to put out a story that someone might criticise for being less than perfect. But keeping your writing secret until you’ve crafted that one masterpiece will mean that masterpiece is never going to happen. You’ll have formed some great theories about how to write that perfect novel but you won’t have it there in reality.

Sticking to your one single novel, painfully carving out the words over years, is not the way to end up writing a great novel. The way to write great work is to write often and to write new stories and new scenes. 

Keep moving on. Form a writing habit. When you combine this with time spent learning the craft of writing fiction, you can’t help but improve in your storytelling, your structure and your style.

Advice for Writers: Show don’t Tell

The advice writers are most often given is ‘show don’t tell’. In Facebook writing groups, critique groups, writers’ circles, creative writing workshops, the mantra is ‘show don’t tell’.

What does it even mean? What are you supposed to achieve with that?

It sounds confusing. It sounds like you’re meant to draw pictures for your readers rather than write them a story.

Creating a world of story

I remember when I was a child visiting my grandparents. My grandfather was a reader of crime novels, war stories and spy thrillers. Every week, he would visit the public library and take out another two or three books. 

I watched him reading them. I would try to guess what exciting things must be happening in the story. I always knew when he was in the middle of a dangerous bit because of his physical reactions. His legs twitched and jumped as if he were running away from an enemy soldier or spy. His fingers ran along the edges of the pages almost like he was grabbing for a gun. 

He enjoyed the thrill of those stories. He felt the excitement as if the events were real. He felt it physically.

The writers he enjoyed most were those who drew pictures for him so that he could see, hear, feel, smell and even taste what the characters were experiencing. They didn’t go in for long descriptions of scenery or detailed character sketches. Those writers created a world of story and dumped my grandfather into that world unceremoniously.

Those writers focused on the experience of the characters in the story, how it made them feel, and what they were struggling to achieve, and made it become real.

Writers who ‘show don’t tell’

That’s what writers who ‘show don’t tell’ are trying to achieve. A good writer will get out of their own way and stop dictating facts to their readers. They won’t tell their readers what they are supposed to think. Not directly. A good writer will show their readers the world from the point of view of their characters. Then they let their readers experience the events along with the characters.

It’s like living another person’s life. Even sat in your armchair in front of the fire, just like my grandfather did, you can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone. You can be James Bond. You can catch that spy and hunt down the criminal mastermind.

As a reader, you know that. You’ve had that experience yourself, whatever genre you read. As a writer, it’s your job to give that gift to your own readers.

I can help you start doing that exact thing. Access my FREE workbook to help you learn the difference between showing and telling in your writing…

Write a story that will make someone cry

Many writers wish they knew how to write a story that will make someone cry. They want to know how to make their readers feel such strong emotion that they sob while reading about fictional characters. Many such writers get part of the answer on their own: they understand that to make people cry they need to have characters in their stories who feel strong emotions themselves. However, they are often still missing a key part of the characterisation process. That key part is character resilience. 

Once you’ve created this character we admire, give them something to struggle with. Give them an event that’s really hard for them to cope with, because it challenges the thing they care most about. If they care most about their young family, threaten that family. If they care most about getting a promotion that they’ve worked for since forever, introduce a character who’s even better qualified.

OK. You’ve challenged your character and they’ve answered the challenge. What next? Your character now needs to encounter hardship and difficulties on their journey to solving the problem. Things have to be hard. You have to give them something that’s difficult to achieve. You also have to make the obstacles in their way tougher and tougher to overcome. Their emotions need to be stretched tighter and tighter as they start to crack under the pressure.
They might feel a great temptation to give up and let the bad guy get what he wants. They must sink into a pit of despair. And there must be a terrible loss. To make someone cry when they read your story, you must put your character through an event that is too much for anyone to realistically bear. But even that is not enough.

You must go a step beyond this. What will make your reader cry is not so much the fact that something awful has happened. What brings your reader to tears is your character’s reaction to this event. There will be the immediate despair, of course. But then he or she must show their true mettle. They must pick themselves up, look their defeat in the face, and face it anyway. They must be defiant and resilient even though it is surely impossible that they will overcome.

Again, The Hunger Games offers us a great example of defiance and resilience. Katniss loses a friend and ally. She initially despairs but then shows her true courage and is defiant in the face of the enemy.

It is the resilience of the human spirit that makes a reader cry, not the sight of a character crumbling.

Will your character finally overcome the obstacles to their happiness and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat?

Maybe. That’s up to you. You’re the writer. In a sad story with a tragic ending, certainly your character won’t. But they’ll go down fighting. The key to making your readers cry when they read your story is always your character’s resilience. 

The One Thing that Makes a Good Story..

What makes a story a good one?

Ask one person and he will say, “Action, and lots of it.”

Ask another and she will say, “I want to get to know the characters and what makes them tick.”

Ask a third and you will get the answer, “I want to feel like I know the world where the story is set.”

These three people have very different ideas about what they want in a story, right? So how can we pin down what makes a good story to just one element?

The clue is right there, staring us in the face. We just have to take a step back to see it.

What wisdom can you take away from this blog?

This.

You have to know who you are writing for. Know your audience. What sort of person are they?

Then consider this. What are they looking for when they read your story? What kind of beginning, middle and end will satisfy them? What kind of point do they want your story to make?

Because that is ultimately what makes a good story… a story that satisfies the desires of the audience. So get to know your audience. Knowing your audience leads you into the style to suit them.

Want to learn how to transform the impact you have with your stories? Find out about my membership community for writers, Storytellers Elite.
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Is nobody reading your stories? You’re probably doing THIS wrong…

You write a story, put it out there… and nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Nobody (apart from your mum) seems to care. It’s a powerful story, one which had an impact on you when you lived or imagined it. Why doesn’t anyone comment on it or share it? The wind has been taken completely out of your sails. What went wrong?

Is it because what you have to say is worthless? Definitely not.

Rather, it is because people haven’t seen the value in what you have to say… which is a different matter.

And that is because (brace yourself for the honest feedback) you haven’t provided them with the story in a way that is of value to them. This is totally a problem you can do something about.

Creating an emotional connection with your readers

Go back to the time when you were living a story that you have tried to tell. It doesn’t matter if it’s a true story and you lived it for real, or if it’s a story that only happened in your head. How did you experience it? Or at least, how do you remember experiencing it? You might remember the colours, shapes, light, movements and other visual aspects of the experience. For example, do you remember the way that cloud sped across the sky and turned the ground grey?

Perhaps you recall the sounds more than the sights. The way the school children were shouting in their yard a quarter of a mile away; the way the back door slammed and cut off the noise from outside. Maybe you remember the characteristic rhythm of a clock.

It could be that you remember the feelings in your muscles, joints and ‘guts’ more than the sights or sounds. The way a person shrank in utter defeat or misery; the way you tapped and fiddled with a pen in your nervousness. The way people behaved physically – and changed their behaviour as the story moved on – is a third way you might have experienced the story.

These three ways of experiencing a story (sights, sounds and kinaesthetic sensations) are likely to be the main ways in which YOU experienced that story. The balance between the three ways varies from person to person, but you can be pretty sure that those three types of stimulus were present in your experience of the story.

Now let’s move on to how this can help you tell your story in a way that will help you form an emotional connection with your ideal audience…

Four things you should never say to a writer…

There are some awful things you might have said to a friend who loves writing. You probably said them in all innocence. Allow me to explain why you should never, ever repeat them, since your friend is unlikely to tell you him or herself.

I am a writer. I work with writers. I help people become writers. I know that when a group of writers congregate in a room and one of them tells the others something a well-meaning friend has said, everyone else will wince in shared sympathy and empathy.

That’s because the individuals in that room ‘get’ it. Whatever their ages, genders, races, nationalities, they get it. Even regardless of the genre each of them prefers to write in – which is a far, far greater divide than racial groupings or generations could ever be – they get it.

What should you never, EVER say to a writer? Read on:

2. “What did I think of your story? It was really nice.”

Did you give the story anything more than a quick scan? Did you look at it at all? If not, just say so. If your friend is serious about writing, she wants REAL feedback NOT a platitude. She wants to know what you liked about it, and she wants to know what you didn’t like – what was confusing, what was boring, that kind of thing.
You could actually cause damage to your writer-type friend’s confidence by saying it was ‘nice’. ‘Nice’ is a word we use to describe a gift we think is a bit dull but we don’t want to hurt the person’s feelings. Please, offer a real emotional reaction to that story. Perhaps you were angered or disgusted by something in it: that is better than saying it is ‘nice’.
What if your friend gets offended by you saying this? If she is serious about being a writer, she won’t be. If she is offended… well, she asked… and you won’t have her bothering you for an opinion in the future.

4. “I really liked that one. It reminded me of… you know, that book…”

Please… go and check your facts first. Is your friend’s work really reminiscent of ‘that book’ or is it just that a particular word or character’s name set you thinking of something else you’ve read? Unless there really are glaring similarities, do NOT say this to your friend. It will not be taken as a compliment, even if you’ve compared the text to Pride and Prejudice or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It will be taken by your friend as a sign that he has been wasting his time. What is the point of writing something that has already been written? What publisher will take his book on if it is a rip-off of something else?
What if your friend really has lifted a plot wholesale (even unconsciously) from somewhere else? If you’re sure about it and you’ve double-checked your facts, it would be kindest in the long run to tell him. Do it gently and privately – it will be very bad news, but if he is a good friend he won’t shoot the messenger. (Unless he turns you into a character in a new story and has you murdered in a brutally imaginative fashion. If this happens, you’ve done him a favour by providing him the inspiration for something original.)

So now you know the truth, dear friend-to-a-writer.

Be kind to your writer-type friend, even if to do so you must be cruel. Above all, be honest. Otherwise, you may well recognise yourself in a future story meeting a very sticky end.

Could you really write a book?

It seems that every other person these days has a book in them, whether it’s a book to tell their own story, a novel, or a book to complement their business. Do you recognise yourself in this?

How many of those people actually write their book? I don’t mean start writing it and leave off a thousand words in, or get an outline put together and do a bit of research about CreateSpace… I mean actually write an entire book. I don’t mean writing a first draft and then leaving it to gather dust in a drawer, either.

Elizabeth Gilbert (she’s the one who wrote Eat Pray Love) in her fabulous book Big Magic, which is about living a creative life, tells us about her idea for a book that got away. She started working on it, then for one reason and another she abandoned it. The idea left her and found someone else to write it. Someone else wrote the book instead of her.

Chances are, seeing as you’re reading this article, you’ve got an idea for a book. It could be a book you’ve been looking for but haven’t found anywhere. It could be a book which will motivate and help a particular group of people – people who really need to hear what you’ve got to say.

Here’s the thing. If you don’t write it, they’ll never hear it, unless they hear it from someone else. 

So why don’t YOU write it?

Excuse number one you might be making… “I don’t have time…” or “I’ll do it when I’ve got more time…” Let me ask you this: WHEN do you imagine you are going to have more time? When the kids are older? When they move out? When you win the lottery? When you’re in a residential home for the elderly?

How do you think those people who HAVE written books managed to do so, or at least when they were writing their first book? Few of us have a writing hut we can escape to for hours on end. What you do – what we ALL have to do – is fit your writing into the cracks in your life. That half hour when the kids are at their swimming lesson. That lunch break. That time between dinner and bed. If scrolling on social media is more important to you, carry on. If that soap opera is so vital, don’t let me stop you. Crack on. Someone else can write your book instead of you.

If you really want to write your book, you will. If you want to find excuses, you will. 

Excuse number two you might be making… “It’s too hard.” Writing a book IS hard – at least, writing a book worth reading is hard. There are various promotions out there which promise that you can be published thirty days from now. You could be, indeed. That doesn’t mean what you’ll have written will be any good.

It was Ernest Hemingway, apparently, who wrote, “The first draft of anything is sh*t.” In thirty days, you could possibly write a first draft of something. Or anything. Would you be happy with that as your legacy, though?

Writing a book is hard work. Some people call it practice. Effort. There’s no getting around it. Does that mean it’s too hard for you? It depends…

If you want to put in the work, you will. If you want to decide it’s too hard, you will.

Found this article useful? Try this one… https://bestbookyoucan.com/writing-business-book-know-start/

Three myths about good writing

There are many myths about what makes good writing. Here I debunk three of them…

1. Good writing needs to be grammatically correct.

Not always. Controversial? Not particularly – just common sense. Take another look at those three sentences you’ve just read. Every textbook of English grammar states that a sentence needs to contain a main verb, yet those sentences do not have a single verb amongst them (main or otherwise). Did that stop you understanding them? I doubt it. I am not saying that we should throw the rules of our language out of the window and burn them all on the bonfire while we dance around it wearing bear skins. As a general rule, standard English is the way to go.

But (and how dare I start a sentence or a paragraph with a conjunction!) there are times when we can bend or ignore the rules. There is indeed wonderful beauty in the standard English rhythm of Dickens’ “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” (A Tale of Two Cities) but there is also beauty in the truth of the words, “I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I’m here.” (The Color Purple, Alice Walker). Celie’s voice couldn’t talk to us in standard English – it wouldn’t be true. So that is writing myth #1.

3. I need to use lots of unusual words and long sentences so that it doesn’t sound simplistic.

There’s a world of difference between simplistic and simple. Simplistic is bad. Simple is good. Avoiding swallowing a combined edition dictionary and thesaurus does not make your writing simplistic. Treating your reader as if s/he is stupid makes it simplistic (see the above note about too much detail). Simple is beautiful. Simple doesn’t tangle your reader in sentences which use three different types of subordinate clauses plus an embedded clause (and no, it’s not desperately important whether you know what they are or not). Simple doesn’t leave your reader baffled because you’ve used three words in a row s/he doesn’t know. Simple writing lets your reader read it without drawing attention to itself. Your reader is free to enjoy the story. Simple! Writing myth #3.

So what am I really telling you?

Good writing serves the reader, not the writer. How can you engage your reader in the story? How can you make your characters come alive and dance for their audience? Anticipate what the reader will want, then give it to them (though tease them now and again by making them wait a while for answers). The reader isn’t thinking ‘How can I admire this writer?’ but ‘Am I enjoying this story?’ That, dear reader, is the crux of it – write so that your reader enjoys the story.