Hello everyone! I am back! I’m so super sorry that this hiatus was waaaaay longer than I expected. I hit a giant wall of writer’s block that I have been struggling to find a way around. I haven’t written a single word of anything except some essays for school in about 8 months. (The irony is not lost on me that I literally wrote a post about Writer’s Block a couple weeks before this happened). But a couple weeks back I suddenly felt inspiration hit me in the face. Quite literally actually. I was working on cleaning out my room when a book on my bookshelf fell off and almost hit me in the face. It was a book I really enjoyed that I hadn’t read in a while. I went on a rereading spree and got some inspiration to start up again. So great.
So I am finally back with this post. I feel like I’ve also find decent and non-confusing ways to explain the next three topics. It took me the last couple weeks to really figure them out because 1) they are kind of hard concepts to explain without confusing your reader and 2) I have work and school so in-between times are all I get. 😊 I’m excited to finally come back. I really appreciated hearing from a couple from you asking when I was coming back and how I was doing. Some of you asked during the beginning of my hiatus, a couple in the middle and two near the end just when I was getting back into the groove. Thank you for all the support. It really helped me to come back and feel like this was worth coming back to.
Without further ado we have our first post in a while but not the first post in the series….
Small Skills: Yourself But Not Yourself
This topic is always one that I have struggled with. I’ve never been very good at writing a story where my character is not just me going on an adventure. Whenever someone would read my work and tell me that I needed my character to be more unique I didn’t understand what they meant. Even my side characters were based off of my friends or family. I wasn’t actually sure how to make the characters not me or not my friends and family. They were all the people I knew, how did I create whole new people.
For the longest time I struggled with it but I’ve come up with 2 solutions to this, one I feel is more satisfactory but I think that is due to the fact that the first is for more beginner writers and the second is for more advanced writers.
Before we get into that let me explain why the character needs to be YOU but NOT YOU at the same time. A character has two purposes in a story (in my opinion) to give you reader someone to relate to and to give your story someone to move around. The second is accomplished by having main characters. You just need a character to several characters to tale the story from and the second task is fulfilled. This is usually so simple that people don’t generally create a plot without coming up with basic character ideas first.
The first is a bit harder to do. Your character or characters are the people that your reader lives the story through. If your reader doesn’t relate with SOMETHING in them then they won’t want to keep reading your story. I can’t tell you how many books I’ve read where I got so mad at the main character for doing stupid things or not understanding why the character was doing things and so I just stopped reading the book. The best way I have found to make a character relatable is to make them more like regular people. The best way to do this is to make your character a little bit like yourself. You relate to them more because they become more human and most of the time your readers will relate to them more then because they are more human.
The real problem is when you make the character YOU to much. They need to be YOU but also NOT YOU. Your character is not you. You’re character is like you. If your character is only LIKE you then your character can be LIKE every reader. Maybe my character is mischievous like me. That’s fine. But if my character is also religious, sarcastic, superstitious, stubborn, understanding, opinionated, and is even named JM, then I might have a little bit of an issue. It’s too specific a person. It’s not its own relatable person. It’s me. In a book. Not the same.
So now we come to my two processes to overcoming this. The first method I’ve already mentioned a little bit. I used this method more often when I was a beginning writer (which I consider up until about 3 years ago even though I’ve been writing for 13 years. Haha.) I called it the Part Method. My character was only a part of myself. My character was only a small part of who I was. I took my stubborn side for example and made my character stubborn and along with my stubbornness I would add being opinionated. My character was a small part of me but not every part of me. Then I would fill in the rest of the characteristics of my character with whatever I wanted. I could add tactless, never thinks before she speaks and uneducated. Then I had the perfect character for my book Saviors of Danterra. This character was similar to me, enough that I could relate, but different enough that the character wasn’t me. She become more real and more relatable. That’s method number one.
Method number two is a method I’ve been trying to practice for the last couple years. I’ve been having kind of hard time with it. I call it the Change Method. Some people might actually find this method easier than the Part Method but I’ve really struggled with it. In this method your character starts as you (or what you consider the relatable version of you). This goes against a lot of writing norms but I think if you can still make your character relatable and human it’s fine to start the book with your character being you. The basis of this method is that your character shouldn’t STAY as you. I read this one a writers blog for an aspiring author named Nicole. She said, “Make something happen to them. It may be you telling the story for the first few chapters before that something actually happens, but when that something happens? It won’t be you telling the story. You’re character will change. They have to, because [it’s their] life.”
Essentially this story is about your character. Your character may start as you, but things happen to them that don’t happen to you. I don’t know about you but I don’t live in a post-apocalyptic zombie filled world or a kingdom full of elves and dragons or on a space station in deep space exploring a signal from an alien planet. Whatever happens to my character hasn’t happened to me. So because my character is human my character will change just like everyone does. As my character experiences things I haven’t and changes in relation to those events my character becomes less and less like me. They become more and more of someone of their own creation.
It’s kind of like writing your own choose your own adventure book about yourself. You start as you but as things happen the story changes and the character changes with the story. That’s how your readers can start to feel and grow with your characters, because they are relatable but they aren’t the author.
So that’s the two methods to making your character yourself and not yourself. I hope this wasn’t too confusing for anyone. If you have any comments about a time you’ve used these methods or any questions about this topic that I might need to clear up, either sign up as a member to be part of the forums or send me an email through the contact me page. Thanks for coming back to read after my long hiatus and I hope you all enjoyed this post. I have one last announcement. The posts for the next little while will be on Fridays instead of Saturday. So this will be the last Saturday post for a while. Hope you all enjoy. Thanks for tuning in and don’t forget to tune in next week for my post about Reveal, Don’t Describe. And remember…
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
ความคิดเห็น