“Write what you know” is one of the most common and misleading pieces of advice given to writers. It is often taken to mean that your writing should stick close to your own life and first-hand experiences. It sounds like good common sense – a way to avoid making and idiot of yourself and bring realism to your work. But, in the words of Admiral Akbar, it’s a trap.
Writing what you know is intended to make your writing believable. You were a police officer, so your story about a police officer will ring true. Straying too far from what you know threatens inauthenticity, and readers disengaging because what you are writing isn’t true.
Unfortunately, this interpretation of “write what you know” misses an essential fact about all good writing. Good writing is about discovery and imagination. If you only write what you know, your stories will be flat, sad, and uninteresting – because you have discovered nothing and underused your imagination. So, what do we do if we can’t just write what we know?
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Cassie Beebe, author of fascinating, moral complex, compelling romance novels, kindly agreed to help me out with a guest post while I deal with Macron’s declaration that we can all work from home and educate our children at the same time because we are French!!! Happily, not only did Cassie step into the breach, she wrote an article chock full of new ideas for how to create characters that I intend to immediately steal – I suggest you do the same. Cassie’s latest novel, Moving On, is available on amazon by clicking this link.
Without further ado, here is Cassie herself. I’m off to 16personalities.com (you’ll know what I mean in a minute)
So you want to write rich, captivating characters, eh? Well, boy, have I got some tips for you!
Characters have always been an aspect of storytelling that has come naturally to me. They live in my mind, roaming free, living their lives and being themselves, and my job is simply to reflect that accurately on the page. But for my most recent novel, Moving On, things were different.
When I first began the writing process of this book, I had a surprisingly difficult time. The words weren’t flowing as naturally as they had in previous works, and I knew that the source of my mental block was the simple fact that I didn’t know these characters. They hadn’t become full, deep individuals in my head yet, and given that that usually happens naturally for me, I had no idea how to force them to develop. So I did something I had never done before: I made in-depth character sheets for each of my main characters and prominent side characters. I learned a lot through this process, and I’d love to share some of my discoveries with you. Hopefully these tips can help enrich your characters as well.
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Good stories don’t happen by accident.
I have the privilege of reading a great many original scripts, as well as beta reading novels, and have seen far too many writers who blither ahead with half an idea and not much thought until they run out of words and stop. You can write a novel like this (and you can write a successful novel like this), but unless you’ve been incredibly lucky your editorial process is going to be a total nightmare.
Instead of trying to write a good novel by accident, it is essential that you include an element of analysis to help you get from beginning to end: from question to answer, essentialy. You have to earn your ending.
Wow, that was a posh opening. Let’s try again.
Ever got to the end of a story and thought “bouf”, then instantly forgotten the book. There’s a reason why this happens. In this article I’m going to explain why.
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This guest article is from Claire Peacey, who made the covers for Vile and the recently released Dead Moon, both available on Amazon. Claire is a fantastic professional artist working in book covers and RPG Art – not only does she produce wonderful work but she is a pleasure to work with. In this article, she talks about her process for designing the cover of Dead Moon, with examples of drawings during the process to the final product. After taking a look, check out her website at https://cpeacey.wixsite.com/autumnsky.
Having had a load of fun with producing the cover for ‘Vile’ it was fantastic to hear back from Keith about some new work – in a totally different direction. As before, the provision of a detailed description and some thumbnail sketches really helped with being able to establish a few different ideas for the work and get a feel for the sort of world Keith had created.
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In this article I am going to give a brief outline of some the conclusions of Peter Stockwell’s work in his book Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading, Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh:2009) pp134-144. Please do not be afraid. We will be comfortably in layman’s terms.
Specifically, we will talk about how we use “mind-modelling” to create an idea of how other people exist as independent to ourselves – a process as true in real life as in literature. Then we will explore two approaches, a “universal” approach that focuses on archetypes and a “cognitive” approach that focus on objectives and strategies.
I will argue that taking a cognitive approach to creating characters will result in greater empathy and a more enjoyable reading experience. Essentially, if you focus on the what, why and how of a character rather than an arbitrary “who”, you will write better books. This article, with a lot of help from Peter Stockwell’s research, explains why.
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