Cameron Montague Taylor

Fantasy Author & Fiction Editor

character development

Morning Pages: After Many Miles

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Welcome to Morning Pages — it’s time for a monthly roundup. I hope you have your pencils sharpened and ready to write. Want to join in on the fun? Pick a prompt, set your timer* and get ready to let the words flow. Feel free to post the results of your work in the comments below where we chat about writing and (if the mood strikes us) get a craft discussion going.

If you want critique from other commenters, use #YESTHANKS in your comment. Otherwise, you can tell us about your flash fic and the process you went through to write it. And of course, I’m always open to hear what you think about my excerpts!

*you can write for as long as you want, but most folks choose 15-30 minutes.

What I learned this month: Oh BOY have I learned about craft this month.

Throughout January, I’ve read a craft book called Story Genius by Lisa Cron. She uses a different method for structuring story and building character than I’ve ever seen, and working through her story-building guide has helped me hone the way I think about construction and character alike.

One of my favorite concepts from story genius: The story begins long before the first page of the novel. By page one, the protagonist has a complex history and relationship with themself and others. These preexisting story elements shaped the protagonist to be who they are, and therefore set them up to confront the story’s external problem head-on: a problem they’re uniquely ill-equipped to solve.

In order to build out the ‘first half’ of the story, or the part that happens before page one, Cron provides several exercises to assist with story concept, character backstory / development, and scene structure. This month, I tackled prompts for my upcoming novella, Deathmark. They helped me learn about Cyprian, the protagonist, and Jael, his love interest–and how their backstories and transformative memories intertwine to make them 1) ideal partners who will 2) have a terrible time solving the story’s external problem.

If you haven’t yet read Story Genius, I highly recommend it! Though Cron’s process can feel somewhat prescriptive, the prompts and exercises were generative enough that I was able to look past some of the book’s issues and appreciate the new perspective it gave me on craft.

The Prompts:

“The ocean is a sentient being–a trickster–who entertains itself by messing with people. What happens when it falls in love with a sailor?”

Sister Ocean was many years old when she first saw him.

“Self-destruct.”

Not all characters handle difficult backstories well. Jael Soti from Deathmark is most certainly in that category.

“After Many Miles” by the Ghost of Paul Revere

A song prompt in the Oceana ‘verse yielded a story about the long journey to the afterlife.

“Write a traumatic or otherwise pivotal event from your character’s childhood that impacted who they became as an adult.”

“Keri Lake:” Deathmark. Cyprian Cavish has always looked out for his little brother.

Picture Prompts

“The Watcher:” Have care with what you say in front of them, lest you disappear like the others.

Get Involved!

Answer the prompts or dive straight in and respond to others’ comments — let’s share our knowledge, our experience, and have a discussion we can all learn from! Don’t want to miss a post? Subscribe to the blog in the sidebar to get notified about new posts.

Today’s questions:

  • What’s your favorite craft of writing resource?
  • Why / what did it teach you?

Looking for more writing? Become a Patron!

In addition to flash fiction, my Patreon hosts full-length novels, artwork, behind-the-scenes worldbuilding, and more. Click below to check out the tiers I offer and support the blog!

Click to visit my patreon!

Morning Pages: Not My Problem

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Welcome to Morning Pages — it’s time for a monthly roundup. I hope you’ve got your pencils sharpened and ready to write. Wanna join in on the fun? Read the prompt, set your timer* and get ready to let the words flow. Feel free to post the results of your work in the comments below where we chat about writing and (if the mood strikes us) get a craft discussion going.

If you want critique from other commenters, use #YESTHANKS in your comment. Otherwise, you can tell us about the flash fic and the process you went through to write it. And of course, I’m always open to hear what you think about my excerpts!

*you can write for as long as you want, but most folks choose 15-30 minutes.

What I learned this month: Wow, getting into a brand new character’s head is difficult.

I’ve started a new novel called Tombs of Glass, which at the moment I suspect will turn into a duology. It has three (possibly four) POV characters and the protagonist, Indra, is the most taciturn of the lot. Even after multiple free writes, her voice remains difficult to pin down. Difficult and changeable! She’s sounded completely different every time I’ve gone to write her.

Complicating matters, she starts off the book having recently experienced a significant tragedy. Her recalcitrance has made it difficult for me to convey not only what she’s going through, but the stakes for failure to the reader. It wasn’t all that long ago that I was complaining about the wordiness of anxious characters, and I take it back! I no longer want this change of pace!

I say that, but I don’t mean it. Writing Indra will expand my narrative skills, and I’m absolutely looking forward to seeing how her voice develops over the coming weeks. The closest I’ve come so far is in “Not My Problem,” the piece this post is named after. It’s linked below and unlocked on my Patreon — check it out!

The Prompts:

“Switchblade + Candle.”

“Not My Problem“: Indra takes care of her flock and doesn’t give a damn about the rest of them.

“Why is there a magic portal in the bathtub?”

It’s bad enough he’s hung over — now he needs to wrangle the space-time continuum?

“Why do the townsfolk fear you?”
“Because I can do what they can’t.”
“Such as?”
“Mind my own business, for one.”

Ackernar isn’t popular with the townsfolk.

“Five ways Character X didn’t find out that Characters Y and Z were together… and one way they did.”

Verne from the Oceana ‘verse is utterly oblivious.

“For the first time ever, he had the admiration of the one he most admired.”

“Admiration“: James doesn’t know what to do beneath the full focus of Maestro’s attention.

“I Remember You”

Indra from Tombs of Glass has a bone to pick.

“Watch”

In the most literal sense, sailors spend a lot of time watching their vessels.

“First Meetings”

Long-gone worldbuilding backstory from the Oceana ‘verse. Two legendary characters meet.

Picture Prompts

“Same Spirit Every Night“: Anya and El from Weaver meet a friendly ghost.

Get Involved!

Answer the prompts or dive straight in and respond to others’ comments — let’s share our knowledge, our experience, and have a discussion we can all learn from! Don’t want to miss a post? Subscribe to the blog in the sidebar to get notified about new posts.

Today’s questions:

  • How do you find your characters’ voices?
  • Are there any writing exercises in particular you like to do when you’re preparing to start writing?

Looking for more writing? Become a Patron!

In addition to extra flash fiction (at least once a week), my Patreon hosts my full-length novels, artwork, behind-the-scenes worldbuilding, and more. Click below to check out the tiers I offer and support the blog!

Click the image or visit http://www.patreon.com/ceemtaylor to become a patron!

Fantasy Naming Tricks

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This morning, I read an article called The 5 Finger Fantasy Rule: A Plea for Mercy from SFF Writers. The article writer delved into a worldbuilding and story craft issue many SFF writers struggle with: how to help readers learn the vocabulary of our worlds without setting their brains on fire.

As a SFF writer, I’ll readily admit the steep learning curve that comes with starting a new SFF novel. Our books tend to throw terminology at the reader fast and furious, including but not limited to:

  • Large casts of named characters, many of whom are called by multiple names
  • Second-world geography which adds a host of place-names
  • New political, economic, religious, and social structures which add descriptive names and titles
  • Stuff. Just a lot of magical, second-world stuff.

Vocabulary is part of what immerses readers in our stories. Good SFF writing can blend new vocabulary into storytelling in a way that’s seamless and easy-to-understand, allowing the reader to define each word (and cueing them to remember names) in context. That’s a serious skill to learn how to build, though, and new writers tend to overexplain their worlds as a result.

As we start to learn more about writing and worldbuilding, however, we end up swinging in the other direction. This is the battle I’m currently fighting with my writing: underexplaining definitions or not giving enough contextual clues or reminders to the reader to allow them to follow who does what/when/where. Sometimes, I throw too much information at the reader in rapid succession, asking them to absorb more than they can reasonably handle.

The first paragraph hit me in the face with a series of words I didn’t recognize. City name, person name, country name, rank, etc. I felt like I bounced right off the story. I couldn’t get a grip to get into the actual meaning of the words. I ended up having to read it almost phonetically to get through it. Soon, I got into the meat of the story, but it was a challenge to get started.

Ellis, The Five Finger Fantasy Rule

That learning curve is no joke. It’s hardest to handle in the early pages when we’re laying the most groundwork for worldbuilding and introducing the bulk of our cast. If we don’t work to mitigate its steepness, we run the risk of bouncing readers out of our story.

I’m not quite like Ellis in this case — I have an ultra-high tolerance for dense SFF jargon, and am willing to forge on for quite a while if the premise of the story or the protagonist is interesting enough to draw me in. But not all readers are or should be like me, and it’s important for me to recognize places where I’m making the learning curve so high that I suck all the enjoyment of reading away from a segment of my target audience. Though my primary audience comes from the high/epic fantasy segment and are used to getting thrown into the deep end of a new world, I want my writing to have broader appeal to newer SFF readers, too.

This is where the five-finger rule comes in.

The five-finger rule writing rule

The five-finger technique is most often used with children as they’re learning to read. Educators assess whether a book is a good fit for the child by having them read (aloud or to themselves) and put up a finger each time they come across a word they don’t know. If they hit five or more fingers before they’ve reached the end of the first page, that could be a sign that the book is too difficult for the child. While we want kids to challenge themselves, we don’t want the experience to be so infuriatingly difficult that they come to hate reading, so educators will pick a book at an easier reading level to start off with.

Here’s Ellis’ recommendation:

“Don’t introduce more than three new/world-specific words — or maximum four — on the first page of your novel, and that includes people and place names.“

Seems reasonable, right?

Of course, it’s not a hard and fast rule. There are going to be times when we have to break it out of necessity. Even calling it a rule gets my hackles up. I’m a “tools, not rules” type, so I’d rather think of this as a self-assessment tool than any kind of metric I’m meant to meet. As we’re writing, if we’re concerned the writing is too dense, we can check to see how many new words (or relatively new words) we’ve dropped per page. If we see that number climbing up towards the double-digits, it might indicate a readability issue.

The five-finger rule can help us with our vocabulary learning curve, but what about reader memory and retention? Especially for epic writers who may go hundreds of pages without seeing a particular character, setting, or concept, this is important. Once we’ve spent enough time away from a side character, seeing their name anew is functionally a reintroduction. Earlier on in a story, readers may also tend to confuse two characters (or words, or settings, or, or, or).

In part, this is a five-finger rule problem: the way we introduce these characters is important. If it’s a side character, linking that character to a particular title, item, physical attribute, or personality trait will help the reader remember them. They might not know who Alexandris is when he’s mentioned for the second time on page 342, but they’re more likely to remember the tall chancellor with the bulbous nose.

These are grounding techniques for the dissemination of worldbuilding information that are great tools to practice in our writing, but sometimes they’re not enough to save us. Why?

Because the very vocabulary we use — the names we chose! — are working against us.

Our minds work in funny ways…

If you’ve spent much time on the internet since, oh, about 2003, you’ve probably seen this image kicking around:

Or: According to research at Cambridge University, it doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without problem. This is because the human mind odes not read every letter by itself, but the word as a whole.

There are obvious caveats to this: learning disabilities, how many words are in a sentence, the relative complexity of words, etc. Newsletter headlines tend to be more difficult to read when scrambled because they cut out a lot of cue words (as, the, if, to, a) that help make a sentence decipherable to save on space.

Yet for most readers, the general principle holds true. The most important letters in a word for us are the first and last letters. What happens in the middle is a total jumble.

Now think about how this might apply to the second-world vocabulary in your SFF story.

When we write — especially if we’re using conlangs! — we tend to limit ourselves to a narrow subset of starting letters. In my series, my crutch letter was A. I have so many A-names (and A-words) my readers have noticed and make a running joke out of tallying them each time they show up. When I was writing, the words all looked different enough to me that I didn’t notice what I was doing at the time. Now, I realize that my readers can’t be asked to remember whether it was Arin or Arod who once sent his brother to his death. Not when I also have an Arden, an Armathia, an Aleksan…

…you get the picture.

Scrutinize your names. Do you have a Mario and a Macuro? Those are too structurally similar to be used in the same book! Or, do you have an Arauz and an Eras? Those might not look similar on paper, but try saying them out loud. Is there a difference in pronunciation? Sure. Is it different enough that someone listening to an ebook would have an easy time remembering who is who? Probably not.

This goes beyond names for people and crosses over with place names, spell names, title names, etc. I can’t name my capital city Nurisia and name a character Nausica; I’d drive my readers nuts.

That’s why, in the planning phase of my new novel, Tombs of Glass, I tried a simple trick that helped me avoid making the same repetitious naming mistakes I’d made in the Oceana Series. The trick is a simple: list-style chart that tracks names in different categories (people, places, things) to prevent me from tripling up on letters. I also created a (somewhat) alphabetized name pool for the first time before I started naming characters this time around — a cheat that I highly, highly recommend if you tend to fall into this trap.

Want to see how I did it? You can find the rest of this post on my Patreon, where I share pages of my writing notebook (and loads of other content) with supporters.

How do you avoid overloading your readers with a too-steep learning curve? Do you have any tips or tricks for making your character names (and other vocab) memorable? Tell me about it in the comments below!

Romance and the ‘Other’

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What makes a Romance?

There’s a difference between a story with romantic elements and a capital-R Romance. In Romance, the romantic arc finishes with a default happily-ever-after (HEA) or happily-for-now (HFN) ending. The HEA isn’t the only required element of a Romance, but it’s among the most important. These elements are part of a Romance’s DNA, and must be there in order for the story to fulfil the promises made to the reader when they pick up the book.

A romantic story can be a love story, but it doesn’t need to have a HEA, nor does it need to include all of the classic elements of a Romance. That gives the writer more flexibility, but also means they can’t bill their story as a capital-R Romance without making a false promise to the reader.

While these ironclad conventions can be found in just about every genre, Romance’s obligate HEA makes it a particularly difficult genre to write. Why? Because readers know how the book is going to end. If readers know the ending, how can it be exciting and compelling?

That’s the unique difficulty faced by Romance writers.

Romance is in the journey

Romance doesn’t spring from a vacuum. The romantic plotline must be tied:

1. to the character’s internal growth arc (ie: how they become a better person throughout the course of the book), and

2. to the external conflict (ie: your protagonist’s quest to defeat the Big Bad Werewolf. Or whatever).

If the romantic arc doesn’t have that depth, it’s going to lack power. Readers won’t connect with the relationship. They won’t see how it’s essential for those characters to end up together, and thus, they won’t ‘ship’ it.

We need our readers to fall in love not just with the romantic arc, but with our external plot, our world, and our characters. Only then will they begin to root for that happy ending.

The journey of the plot

Part of the lure of Romance is in the drama: in Love Overcoming the Forces of Evil (or, at least, love overcoming a super thorny obstacle). Not necessarily love itself, mind, but the characters who are in love. By the end of the book, each character must choose to put their partner and relationship first. They face the Big Bad together as a unit – and together, they can’t lose.

Naturally, this unity can’t come too easily or you won’t have a plot. Every good Romance needs repelling forces – something that pushes the couple apart.

This is what makes Romance interesting even though readers know the HEA is just around the corner. Romance isn’t about the surprise of the ending – it’s about how the writer builds up to and delivers the ending. That journey only becomes interesting when the reader can’t imagine how the characters are going to make it to the HEA.

There’s a saying about three-act (and most classic Romances are three-act): first, you get your character in a tree. Then, you throw rocks at the tree. Finally, you have to figure out how to get them out of the tree. This is the crux of a good Romance: the tree has to be so high, and the rocks so heavy, that your reader can’t see how your character can possibly win. When it all comes together in the end, though, it’s incredibly satisfying.

Readers know the answer. The hook is all about how we lead them to it – and how good we are at getting them to root for the happy ending they know is coming.

The secret to a good HEA? Building attracting forces.

The journey of the characters

If we do a good job of character building, we’ll end up with a pair of puzzle pieces: two characters who uniquely complement one another. When they’re in their healthiest, most functional state, they push one another to grow positively towards the end of their character arc. This growth allows them to solve the external plot problem (and defeat the Big Bad) in a creative way.

That positive growth is a huge attracting force.

In a classic Romance, both MCs are POV characters. One of the two is always the primary protagonist. This character tends to be easier to flesh out. They start the story, they carry the primary growth arc, they drive the plot forward. It’s harder to create the love interest, though – even when we get the chance to dip into their head.

If we make our love interest (LI) as dynamic as the protag and successfully tie their arc to both the relationship conflict and the external conflict, we’ll end up with a compelling duo. These characters solve their problems by growing together, making it clear they’re better as a couple than they are apart. That’s half the battle to hook the reader won.

Yet there are plenty of Romances – and romantic stories – that fall well short of the mark.

Why?

Well, usually because the love interest has a personality as compelling as wet cardboard.

Where do wet-cardboard love interests come from?

The biggest mistake we can write when crafting a Romance is to create a love interest that exists only to fill a hole in the protagonist’s life. This lends itself to lazy writing – to falling back on shorthand and stereotypes in order to build a certain “kind” of character instead of a fully-realized person.

These stereotypes are the bane of every romance writer’s existence. They’re old, they’re stale, and they ruin our stories.

Male writers writing female characters: from scottbaiowulf on tumblr. Cassandra woke up to the rays of the sun streaming through the slats on her blinds, cascading over her naked chest. She stretched, he breasts lifting with her arms as she greeted the sun. She rolled out of bed and put on a shirt, her nipples prominently showing through the thin fabric. She breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards.

In romantic fiction, the wet-cardboard character stems, all too often, from what I call the “I can’t write men/women” problem.

For the past few weeks, I’ve listened to the Writing Excuses podcast while going for my afternoon walks. I started with the oldest episodes and am working my way forward in time, so take all of this with a grain of salt, because I believe the episode I’m about to mention is from 2009.

In it, the WE guys chat about writing Romance. Brandon Sanderson (who is, IMO, a great Fantasy author), mentioned that he wasn’t good at writing female protagonists. I pulled up short as I was walking to hear his advice to listeners:

In order to write good female characters, one must ensure they’re fully fleshed-out people with their own independent arcs.

This was lauded as Pretty Darn Good advice from the other guys on the podcast. In the most general way, yes – side-characters should always feel like the heroes of their own story. But the message I heard was this: I have trouble with female protagonists because it’s hard for me to write women as full fleshed-out people.

::deep breaths::

Again, remember – this is from 2009. A lot has changed in ten years.

Some things, though, remain the same. Men still get flack for writing women badly. Women, too, get flack for writing ‘unrealistic’ male characters (particularly in the Romance genre). As more time passes and the artifice of binary gender constructs becomes more apparent to the collective Western consciousness (–hi, yes, I’m queer – welcome to the blog–), this “men writing women badly, women writing men badly” problem becomes increasingly absurd.

Why is this so difficult? Why do people keep getting it wrong?

Because sometimes, we struggle to see beyond identity to the human being underneath.

If you let misogynistic/racist/homophobic/transphobic/ableist/ageist bias prevent you from seeing your character as a fully realized human being because of their identity, you’re going to end up with a half-baked stereotype instead of a compelling character.

We all have biases. We are all flawed humans raised in a flawed society. It is an exercise in empathy to see people who are different from us as complete, complex human beings. This goes doubly true when we’re talking about characters who aren’t the white/cis/hetero/male majority.

Minority characters have been relegated to reductive side-show roles for so long it’s difficult to bring them into the limelight – even when we identify with those characters. We treat the Other like an NPC in a video game. Simple. Derivative. Boring.

Please understand: I’m not trying to argue that we’re all the same regardless of identity. We (as humans) have had different lives and different experiences. Many of those experiences are colored by our unique identities. Experiences inform a huge part of who we are.

Yet while identity influences the character, identity does not make the character. If we rely entirely on an identity and the stereotypes surrounding that identity to inform characterization, we’ll end up with a cardboard amalgamation of lazy writing.

The love interest will, therefore, become a NPC in the video game that is the MC’s life: a red-shirt the reader never attaches to and doesn’t care about. It is impossible to write a compelling romance this way.

Don’t write from gender.

That is my single biggest piece of advice. If someone asks “how do I write a man? How do I write a woman?” I answer: start with a character, add gender later.

Look, I write queer fiction, so gender is a wibbly concept for me anyway. I do this naturally. I don’t always know the gender identity of my protagonists and love interests going into a story. (Writing is fun this way – you should try it!) But if you do have a concrete idea of your character’s gender identity – cool. Fine. Put it in a box in your head and set it aside.

Now create a person. A human character. Don’t think about their gender. Don’t start from their gender. Every time you hear yourself saying “well, he’s a man, so—” just stop.

Write a human character, fully-fleshed out, with all the faults and foibles of a person. Only when you get to the point that this person starts to feel real do you go back and say “ok, well – she’s like X, so how would that impact her life?”

She’s bisexual. How would that impact her life and experiences? She’s Asian. How would that impact her life and experiences? She’s hyper-intelligent. She has a messed-up relationship with her mother. She’s a woman.

Given her backstory, personality, and the world she lives in, how would that impact her life and experiences?

Gender is a tool, not a determining factor. It’s a prop through which you can filter a subset of predetermined experiences for your character. It’s not a governing force in that character’s whole personhood.

Resist the desire to attribute patterns of thought and action to gender.

“She’s obsessing over the possibility of a future relationship because she’s a woman.” NO. Stop. She’s obsessing because she’s the kind of person who obsesses. Because she’s an anxious thinker. Because she also obsesses about what her boss thinks, whether she did well in that meeting, whether she did something to offend the stranger who looked at her funny on the subway.

And if she isn’t an obsessive thinker – then why the heck is she obsessing over a possibility of a future relationship? Because that’s “what women do”? No, friend. That’s where we cross the line from behavioral justification to stereotype.

It’s the literary equivalent of saying a character likes pink, fashion, and painting her nails “because she’s a woman.”

We fall back upon these stereotypes – especially when we write other genders – because we’re told our whole lives that “men/women/NB folks are alien creatures we can never hope to understand.” Lack of empathy is lazy writing. It’s lazy living. If we do the work of figuring out who our characters are beyond the veneer of gender/race/sexual orientation/etc., we won’t need to rely on stereotypes to determine how they’d act or react in a given situation.

The question is never “well, what would a man do in this situation?” The question is: “well, what would Darius, the character I created with my brain, do in this situation?”

Writing from stereotypes is what not to do. It’s how to sink a romantic ‘ship before it sets sail.

So how do we write a convincing romantic partnership?

Character driven romance

If escaping tropey stereotypes is a struggle of yours (or if you’ve ever said “I’m not good at writing X gender”), here’s your road map:

  • Come up with two fully fleshed-out characters. Make one a romantic and one a realist. One a fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants type and one an overthinker. One an introvert and one an extravert. (And so on, and so on.) Don’t let gender determine which is which, because wtf does gender have to do with introversion? C’mon.
  • Give your characters heart. Give them unique backstories. Make their actions, reactions, and emotions internally consistent with their lived experiences. Figure out how to fit them together like two puzzle pieces who are stronger when working with one another than they are when they’re apart. What, besides physical attraction, pulls them together?
  • Determine their character growth arcs, and tie them to the external plot.
  • Create a relationship growth arc that also ties to the external plot.

Now figure out their genders.

If you’ve done a good job of developing your characters, weaving their arcs, and connecting them to the plot, you’ll end up with ‘real’ characters who can and will generate authentic romantic tension on the page. They’re primed to fall in love with one another from that very first meet-cute. It’s crystal clear why they can and should be together.

Most importantly, you’ve created characters the readers can fall in love with, too. This is the backbone of a Romance. It’s heckin’ hard to write, but completely worth it in the end. Creating a rich, romantic emotional experience for the reader is a truly magical skill.

It rests entirely on characterization work. We want to create people, not NPCs. We must let our characters’ identities inform but not define how we write them.

(And for the love of god, let’s stop sending our women off to breast boobily to the stairs.)

WWYCD Part Two

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What Would Your Character Do? Redux

In ‘WWYCD Part One’, I shared a tool for getting unstuck when character motivation and behavior has us struggling to main consistency in our work. This tool was a series of notecards (or drawings, or post-it notes, etc.) listing each character’s verb: a word or two that describes the character’s most essential nature through action.

Our characters may be protectors, seekers, caretakers, yearners – the list goes on. Knowing this default state of being is hugely helpful whenever we find ourselves stuck with inconsistent action/reaction cycles or cardboard side characters. It gives us a yardstick by which we can measure character growth (or consistency) and a framework for conflict generation and resolution.

Yet characters are complex animals tucked into a complex narrative framework (ie: a novel). Their single, overarching verb might not be quite enough to go by when we write on a smaller, more detail-oriented scale.

Working at the scene level

Every character in every scene has a goal.

Or at least, they’re supposed to – this is something I struggle with a lot as a writer. I’ve heard scene-sequences described as “try-fail cycles” before, in which your characters work towards a particular goal, try something new, fail, regroup, and try something else in a continuous spiral. Successes come with unintended consequences. Failures come with unexpected knowledge.

These try-fail cycles can vary in length. Some might take up several scenes – even several chapters. Others might be only a fraction of a scene in length. Each time, the character expresses agency by coming up with a plan, trying something new, and pushing past a roadblock to figure out what comes next.

I tend to struggle when my try-fail cycles stretch to include multiple scenes. That’s when the extras creep in: worldbuilding snippets I need in order for the story to make sense. Character interactions that are vital to the growth of a relationship arc. Books might be a series of try-fail cycles stitched together, but what happens within those cycles is what makes the story, and the story isn’t all external plot.

But hooboy, that balance isn’t easy to juggle.

Have you ever hit a scene that felt truly out of place within a story, or a character interaction that made no sense whatsoever given what had just happened a chapter earlier? I have. I’ve written those problems into my stories before. Why did I fall prey to them?

Because I didn’t track the relationship between my character’s verb and their current location within a try-fail cycle.

Lemme unpack that.

Verbs and try-fail cycles

Let’s break the try-fail cycle down into its four major components.

(A/N: this is how I break the cycle down in my head – I make no claims that you have to do it this way, too!)

1. Planning
2. Execution
3. Conflict
4. Consequence
1. (Planning)

In other words:

1. We’re going on a quest to find the Thing – here’s how we’re gonna do it!
2. Wooo, we’re on a quest to find the Thing – omg, we found the thing!
3. Oh no, a dragon!
4. The DRAGON STOLE THE THING—
1. (What do we do now?)

Now let’s imagine a character – say a knight. A gruff, middle-aged knight who has spent her whole career protecting the kingdom and her loved ones. She’s the tank in a merry band of heroes – friends who she loves in spite of their tomfoolery, and though she’s reluctant to join the quest, she recognizes the necessity of obtaining the Thing for king and country.

Her Verb – big verb – is probably protecting.

How does that break down into each of the stages of the try-fail cycle?

Protecting during the planning phase might make her come off overprotective, overly cautious, or restrictive while the merry band talks through their options. Perhaps she’s snappish, even chafing at the bit because talk isn’t her strong suit.

We could even pick a secondary verb to help us interpret protecting as it relates to the scenes around the planning phase. Controlling, perhaps – for trying to control risk, which she might express by attempting to control the behavior and choices of others, or the nature of the plan they concoct.

During the execution phase, the knight will be at her best. She’ll be watchful and vigilant, looking out for threats. And though the duty of care towards the merry band may rest heavily on her shoulders, here, she’s in her element. When danger is low and things are going well, we might even see her crack a joke or take a member of the merry band under her wing. She’s protecting still, but she could be teaching or connecting, too – elements that deepen but don’t contradict her essential nature, and feel authentic given the situation.

The conflict phase brings out even more of the knight’s essential nature. Here, there’s no dissonance between the external plot and her internal wiring: the dragon is a threat, and she must protect against it. Yet we can still use her nature to force her to make a terrible choice—

Which leads to the consequence. Perhaps, at some point, the knight must choose between 1) saving the life of a member of the merry band and letting the dragon run off with the Thing, or 2) saving the kingdom by winning the Thing and dooming her friend. Protect the kingdom, or protect her friend? Whichever she chooses, there will be consequences – and the best consequences in try-fail cycles come from choices our character makes. Especially when these choices are authentic ones that are consistent with their nature.

(IMO, these consequences are all the sweeter when that character made the best possible choice they could, given the knowledge they had – and paid terribly for it anyway.)

Now we’re back to square one: planning phase again. Except this time, the way our knight expresses her verb, protecting, will be colored by the experiences of the last try-fail cycle.

Each part of the try-fail cycle – and each successive cycle – will challenge her verb differently. When is she at her best? When is she at her most constrained? Those are the questions we want to ask of our characters, and their verb should help us find the answer.

Differences in expression and change over time

The best part about these verbs – and possibly the trickiest part about them – is how mutable they are. Verbs aren’t static. Their expression changes based on the plot, environment, and growth arc of the character.

It makes them more difficult to think about from the outset, but more useful in the long run. They’re active descriptions that help us weave characterization into the fabric of our story.

A knight who is protecting is going to show that attribute in a variety of different ways throughout the story, exposing all the different facets of her personality. Yet so long as we stay true to a logical expression of her verb given external stimuli, her characterization should make sense to the reader.

Now, a caveat – the above example certainly isn’t the only way to write a character with a protecting verb in that particular try-fail cycle. Depending on how they express that verb, the sequence and their participation in it could go differently. Most importantly, characters will change how they express their verbs from the beginning of the novel to the end of it – so the way they reacted in Act I should be different from how they react during the climax.

Perhaps at the start of the journey, the knight’s protecting reads as overprotective. She must be in control, she cracks no jokes, she stifles those under her command with the need to keep them safe.

By the end, she might express protecting in a healthier way – by teaching her merry band the skills they need to be safe and trusting their competence to learn how.

Verbs and scene-level conflict

These shifts in verb expression also help us maximize conflict throughout our stories.

For example:

If one of your characters is seeking, find a character who is defending or hiding in that try-fail cycle to stonewall them. If your character is protecting but, in that particular scene, overprotecting because of the pace of his arc, put him with a character who is provoking and see if sparks fly. Use your notecards to find the right character matches for these scenes – or, if you’re locked into a particular cast for a given scene, use the cards to work out which of your preexisting choices have the best chance at propelling the conflict forward without breaking character.

Your notecards are there to help you manage complex character interactions, especially in group settings, by tracing the cascading impacts when each character applies their essential verb in a specific way. If we stay within the boundaries of these verbs for our character, their actions will always have a thread of internal logic – even when they’re being utter idiots!

Let’s get physical

But wait! There’s more!

What does your character look like when they’re Doing Their Verb?

Does our knight, when her protecting is stymied by endless rounds of talking and discussion, none of which are going her way, pace around the room? Does she fidget? Does she pinch the bridge of her nose?

When things are going well and she’s in her protective element, how does she carry her body? Relaxed, with head high?

When things are going poorly and she stresses over keeping her party from harm, does she hold herself tight? Does she compulsively check and re-check the straps on her equipment?

When she’s actively protecting her party, does she put herself bodily between them and harm? Does she throw herself into the fray, guns blazing?

On your notecard, draw yourself a square with a cross in the center (ie: four boxes. Or four columns – I’m not picky.)

Now think about what your character looks like when:

  • They’re in their element (ie: the situation allows them to positively express their verb) and in the middle of the action;
  • They’re in their element, but there’s a lull in the action;
  • They’re out of their element and in the middle of the action;
  • They’re out of their element during a lull.

Let’s take our knight as an example again:

Positive/Active
+Fights like a beast
+Confident, guns
blazing, command
voices		Positive/Passive
+Head held high
+Smiles
+Sings old war
songs
Negative/Active
-Physically on edge
-Weapon in hand
-Puts herself in harm’s
way to protect others		Negative/Passive
-Serious and with-
drawn
-Snaps at jokes
-Paces

Now, not only do I have a blueprint for what my knight is like in action/reaction cycles, I also have a blueprint for what she looks like and what she habitually does in most situations. By the end of the book, even the reader should be able to pick up on her mindset when she starts pacing.

Knowing our character’s physical tics – and breaking them down by verb expression – helps not just with consistency of their physical habits, but helps us

  1. Vary that habit so we aren’t having the character pinch the bridge of their nose in every single situation, and
  2. Red-flag certain habits by linking them to particular mindsets and emotional states for those characters.

All of this helps with deep characterization and gives the reader the impression that our characters are real people.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it

Now go back to a scene that’s giving you trouble and pull out your character cards. Answer the following questions:

  • What are their essential verbs?
  • Where are they in the try-fail cycle?
  • Will that change how their essential verbs are expressed?
  • Are there any secondary verbs for your characters in these scenes?
  • Which characters are present? Do any of their verbs conflict, given the group dynamic and the external plot for the scene?
  • Is there enough conflict in this scene? If not, which characters can you push together in order to generate conflict? What would that look like, given the circumstances and their individual verbs?
  • Or – is there too much going on in this scene? Do we need a breather after a big try-fail sequence?
  • What state are your characters in? Positive (the situation complements their verb) or negative (they experience discomfort because the situation conflicts with their verb)? Is the scene active (conflict is actively happening) or passive (we’ve reached a break between try-fail cycles or major scenes)?
  • What do your characters look like (ie: what physical tics are they expressing)?

I hope looking at verbs helps you pick your way through whatever thorny narrative problem you may have found yourself in! Otherwise, I hope these notecards serve as a guideline while you’re writing to make characterization richer, easier, and more natural for you. I know the tips certainly helped me, and I plan on using these notecards on the corkboard above my desk for all of my future projects.

For those of you who follow me on Patreon, I’ll post the cards for the casts of Wicked Waters and Potionmaster as I start heading into my revision sequences.

Thanks for reading, and I’d love to hear what you think below in the comments.

What Would Your Character Do?

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Have you ever…

…gotten to a scene were two of your characters are in conflict and second-guessed how one of them would react?

…tried to put action beats into dialogue and ended up with three guys debating the zombie apocalypse while repeatedly rubbing the backs of their necks?

…received feedback from a beta that they didn’t find your character’s response to a situation authentic or in-character enough?

…been told that your side characters all sound the same?

I sure have. Multiple times.

There’s no secret recipe to avoiding these issues. Like everything in writing, all we have are tools and aides that, if structured properly, help us draft (or self-edit) our way through our most common problems.

The most popular tool for the above is the character sheet: an accumulation of facts and backstory that gives the full scope of who our character is and why. Some of us swear by character sheets, some of us have never made a single one. I’m somewhere in the middle. The information makes it into my writing notebook, but never on a single page.

(For the record, this is why I use disc binders as writing notebooks. It’s much easier to create order out of chaos when you can move your pages around.)

The problem with character sheets?

They’re so long.

I’m an easily derailed drafter. If I’m getting stuck on a bit of dialogue, a reaction, or a tic, I’ll slip back into my character notes to help. Instead of helping, though, I often lose myself in the weeds of a character sheet. Next thing I know, I’m down a rabbit hole about what happened to their pet cat when they were eight, an hour has passed, and no new words have hit the drafting page.

Distraction aside, character sheets are so complex and all-encompassing that they don’t often answer the question I have, which boils down to: “what is this character going to do?”

So how do we distill pages worth of character notes into brief, actionable shorthand that helps us answer our drafting questions?

I tried a new tip the other day that I really enjoyed and want to share with you.

Character Notecards

For those of you who (like me), hate index cards thanks to a subliminal association with vocabulary tests, hear me out. These don’t need to be notecards. They can be post-its, stickers, magnets, a beautifully illustrated flowchart—

Point is, you need something that’s:

  1. small
  2. easy to glance over with a single eye-sweep
  3. posted to the wall over your desk (or inside the cover of your notebook, or pinned as a note on your desktop – the world’s your oyster).

I’m going to keep calling them ‘notecards’ for the sake of simplicity, but understand that this refers only to whatever base unit of whatever system you’ve devised.

“But Cee,” you might say, “aren’t notecards just a different format for the same set of information?”

Not necessarily.

The questions at the top of this post point to an action/reaction problem. We might know exactly who our characters are after doing pages upon pages of diligent personality profiles. We might hold the blueprint to their being in our heads. (Or we’re shoot-from-the-hip pantsers learning character as we go – in which case I say: you are brave, friends. Very brave.) Yet none of that tells us what our character is going to do. It tells us only why our character is who they are.

The problem with expansive, general frameworks? It’s very easy to get bogged down in them. If our issue is figuring out a concrete, authentic action/reaction for our character to take, then we need to start at action’s very root:

Verbs.

Pick a Verb, any Verb…

Grab your first notecard. Write your protagonist’s name on top.

Now, below their name, write one verb that describes that character’s most essential nature.

You might be saying “Cee, don’t you mean adjective?” Nope. I mean a verb: only an action word for your action/reaction problem.

What is your character always doing? What are they driving towards? What role do they assume in pivotal scenes? What character do they play in group settings, in conflict, at parties?

For example: Samwise Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings is a loyal bean who spends the entirety of the series looking after Frodo. Great – now let’s rephrase that into verb form.

Sam is protecting. If I used a second verb, I’d pick caretaking.

(LotR fans might argue about the order here, but let me off the hook for a second – I’m just tryna provide an example.)

What is your character always driving towards? What are their primary motivating verbs? This isn’t meant to encompass the sum total of their character, but you do want to make an attempt to strike at their core.

Once you have 1-3 verbs written down, prop the card next to your writing station. Take a moment and look at it.

Now think about the scene you’re having trouble with. Is your character acting / speaking in line with those action verbs? If not, what would bring them more in line with your chosen verbs? Or: if they must act this way for the sake of the story, have you done a good enough job setting up a scenario that forces them to act contrary to their nature?

Again, this isn’t a cure-all, but I find it to be a helpful tool. Whenever I’m writing, I have actionable words describing my character’s most essential nature sitting right in front of me. If their action/reaction cycles get muddy, I can refer back to what they should be doing, based on their core being at any point in time.

That goes doubly true when that character gets thrown into the mix with another.

We could say Frodo is sacrificing, or that Pippin is taking risks, perhaps – both actions that come into direct conflict with Sam’s protecting, caretaking. If all of those characters stay true to their essential natures within a given scene, the friction between them will become immediately evident as soon as a catalyst enters the picture and throws their equilibrium off-kilter.

External plot prompts Pippin to take a silly risk? Frodo (sacrificing – no conflict) is a lot more likely to forgive, while Sam (protecting – big conflict) will be substantially more upset.

On side-characters:

Side-characters often boil down to a single verb – especially if they play only one concrete role in the story. The crux of creating fleshed-out side-characters lies in allowing that verb to throw them into conflict with the protagonist.

Make sure your side-characters hold to their verb, even when (especially when) it’s inconvenient.

When our betas accuse our side-characters of being one-dimensional, conflict – or lack thereof – is often the culprit. Instead of relying on an internally consistent set of motivations that drive action, they become props to aid (or thwart) the protagonist in all of their endeavors. Allowing them to flip from aid to neutral force to impediment based on their motivating verb will make for much stronger side-characters. Only then will they feel like the protagonists of their own stories (even if we don’t get to read those stories).

It’s also a great tool for helping us add authentic conflict at the scene level when the major antagonist is absent!

Notecards and character growth:

One of my favorite things about these notecards is how they help track character growth.

Some of our characters start off as one verb, but transition to another by the end of the story. This isn’t a necessary aspect of character growth, mind. A protag can have an immense growth arc even within a verb (protecting, protecting) but change how they approach that essential aspect of their nature.

Yet when the verb changes, it’s huge (provoking to peacemaking, for example). Thinking about this shift – and where the character is on their journey from one verb to the other – can help us plan authentic character growth arcs.

Like everything else in fiction, it’s easier to write the beginning and end of these growth arcs than it is to write the middle. I approach the muddy middle by creating a sliding scale like this:

<—provoking ——– ch. 5 ——– ch. 10 ——– ch . 15 ——– peacemaking—>

It’s not fancy, but it helps me visually identify where the character is in their transition. That helps me pick a verb to calibrate their character’s response accordingly.

This is especially (massively!) helpful when writing an antagonist’s heel-faced turn.

Your mission, should you choose to accept:

Make notecards for all characters with a significant role in your plot, including side-characters. Answer the following questions for yourself – and feel free to share your answers in the comments!

Do your characters keep the same verb for the whole story? If so, does the way they express that verb change?

If your character’s verb changes, when does that change happen? Can you make a scale like the example above?

Pin your notecards to your wall / desk / Scrivener file / whatever. Have a look at all of them together. What conflicts jump out at you from first glance? Which characters are more likely to form alliances based on their internal motivations and tendencies?

Think about the major catalysts in your plot. How will those determine the way each of your character’s verbs are expressed?

Can you identify any areas in your current story where your character arcs counter the verb on the card? Was it intentional? Do those scenes work, or will they need alteration?

Now go back to the scene that started all of this trouble to begin with. Does having this verb list help you with your block?

If not, stay tuned for my next post where I’ll detail a few other quick and dirty tricks you can include on your notecards.