Cameron Montague Taylor

Fantasy Author & Fiction Editor

craft of writing

Worldbuilder’s Disease: Intro

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Many Sci-fi/Fantasy (SFF) writers create their first worlds in childhood. They might spend years crafting epics in their heads before putting pen to paper. (I did it, too.) We build settings, characters, backstories, religions, environments, and systems of governance. Some of us have art, maps, maybe even notebooks full of details. Pinterest boards. Folders on our hard drives filled with inspo.

We know everything about our worlds. Clothing, food, trade systems, how sociopolitical factions conflict with one another. Some of us might have the scaffold for thousands of years of history already constructed. These worlds are real, are alive inside our heads.

…but we don’t have a draft of the novel.

In this three-part blog series on worldbuilder’s disease and its associated elements, I’ll tackle the following topics:

  1. What worldbuilder’s disease is and why getting trapped in the worldbuilding phase is dangerous
  2. Overcoming worldbuilder’s disease and getting our project started
  3. The pitfalls those with worldbuilder’s disease will likely encounter while drafting

I hope this serves as a useful reference for my fellow spec fic writers, whether or not you identify as a member of the worldbuilder’s disease club.

What is worldbuilder’s disease?

The defining characteristic of worldbuilder’s disease lies not in the vividness of the built world, but rather, in the sparseness of the writing. In other words: there isn’t any writing, even though we’ve spent years upon years cooking ideas in our heads.

Or, alternatively, there is writing – but not a complete story. Maybe we’ve started a bunch of different novels but never finished any of them. Maybe we keep rewriting the same opening chapters of one story over, and over, and over again.

Whatever the case may be, we have a head (or notebook) full of ideas and almost no narrative content in functional draft form.

Not all diseases are malignant.

Worldbuilder’s disease isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong with filling notebooks with new languages or alternate universes (Tolkien did it, too). Some worldbuilders are more interested in the building than the storytelling, and that’s fine. If you get joy from making character profiles but never want to craft the narrative itself, that’s cool and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. You don’t have to ‘use’ your world by putting it into a story.

That said, if your ultimate goal is to write a SFF epic someday, worldbuilder’s disease starts to look a little less benign.

Once we’ve spent years worldbuilding without writing, the act of worldbuilding becomes an impediment instead of an aid. This doesn’t apply if the project is backburnered in favor of drafting others, of course. Worldbuilder’s disease becomes a problem only when it prevents us from getting any words onto the page.

At that point, we’re faced not with a fun story-building pastime, but rather, elaborately crafted writer’s block. We trick ourselves into thinking we’re working on our work-in-progress (WIP) by doing everything but the writing itself and put months (years?) into the pre-production phase. In reality, once we’ve spent more than a few weeks on worldbuilding, we’re well past the point of diminishing returns.

Writers with worldbuilder’s disease tend to have one of two drafting roadblocks:

  • “I don’t know how to get started.” (Related: I’m not done fleshing out 10,000 years of history. I just can’t make myself pick up the pen. I’m afraid the reality won’t live up to what’s in my head. I have no idea how to make a story out of a bible’s worth of worldbuilding facts.)
  • “I don’t know where to start.” (Related: How do I fit 10,000 years of history into a single story? I’m not sure which characters to focus on. How the heck do you figure out where to start chapter one after you’ve crafted an entire space opera universe?)

If you have worldbuilder’s disease and are stuck in an inescapable rut, I have a spoonful of motivation to share with you: the same realization that helped me transition from building worlds in my head to putting them down on paper.

We don’t need to spend ten years getting a world down on paper. We don’t need to know everything about our worlds when we start writing.

Most importantly: our readers don’t need to know everything about our worlds, either.

Why?

No one cares about our worlds.

Yes, ouch, I know – believe me, I know.

You may be squinting at the screen and saying ‘No way, Cee. GRRM, Tolkien, etc. built words that people are obsessed with. There are wikis and merch and fanworks to prove it.’

And yes, you’d be right to say so. People are obsessed with the world of the Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, etc. I’m not immune to this obsession. Know what else all of those works have in common?

The authors already wrote the stories. People don’t read Tolkien’s notes for giggles. They read them because they fell in love with the story Tolkien told. Though Tolkien ostensibly wrote LotR to have somewhere to house his nerdy languages and eons of history, he wove all of that worldbuilding into the story via

  • Engaging characters, and
  • A compelling narrative tale.

If he hadn’t, the SFF community wouldn’t have spent years digging through every letter he wrote to trace the history of Middle-Earth.

(If Frodo hadn’t (mostly) cast the ring into the fires of Mount Doom, no one would care about the Dark Lord, his tower, or his ring.)

In other words, the bitter part of the medicine – no one cares about our worlds – is sweetened by this:

No one cares about our worlds until we tie them to plot and character.

Rest assured, it is possible to get readers to love the world we’ve built as much as we do – but the only way to get there is to write the story that goes with it.

When we worldbuild, we come up with some truly amazing, creative ideas. Rainbow wyverns who eat prismatic light and pelt attackers with gold. Desert wyrms who can split apart and multiply in-battle like the world’s most infuriating videogame boss.

Yet those amazing creations aren’t enough on their own. They only matter inasmuch as they have a direct impact upon the characters in our story.

These wyverns and wyrms won’t drive the reader to keep turning pages unless they come into direct conflict with characters the reader cares about. Until a rainbow wyvern lobs a nugget into the protagonist’s head, why should it matter to the reader that they turn light to gold? Until worldbuilding details interact with a character, they exist in a vacuum.

I’m going to distill this idea, because it’s vital to understanding how worldbuilding serves our writing: a setting’s importance to the reader is directly proportional to how much of an impact that setting has upon the characters. The more conflict the setting causes, the more interesting the setting becomes.

In order for our readers to care about the world we spent ten years crafting inside our minds, we have to write a story that takes them through that world, showcasing its most interesting bits through the events of the plot.

Think of the narrative like the tracks on an amusement park ride. The ride itself is meaningless from the outside – a potential experience that has yet to come to pass. The story (or the rail the ride’s car sits on) guides the reader through that world in a fun, engaging way. Readers might not notice every bit of machinery that makes the ride go. They may focus on one bit of the ride and ignore others. But the tracks you’ve built – or the story you craft – is what makes that ride accessible.

Otherwise, they’re standing on the other side of a gate, looking in at an overwhelming amount of information without any compelling reason to slog through any of it.

Worldbuilding isn’t writing

For those of us with worldbuilder’s disease, it’s imperative that we stop thinking about worldbuilding as time spent writing.

(Caveat: those of us who don’t have worldbuilder’s disease may find the opposite helpful. I have a friend who counts all of his worldbuilding words as ‘words written today’ to keep himself from skimping on the planning process.)

Until you have several completed drafts under your belt, counting planning words is a kiss of death. It gives you permission to avoid the difficult work: actually writing your story.

This is hard. Harder for those of us who’ve been worldbuilding for years and consider the worlds in our head a second home. So long as the setting remains intact in our minds, it’s perfect – the exact story we’ve always wanted to read. We can play it through our minds in its entirety – all ten thousand years of it – and don’t have to think about character arcs, killing darlings, or avoiding white-room syndrome.

As soon as our worlds hit the page, they’re beholden to two Big Scary Limitations:

  • The limits of narrative structure, and
  • The limits of our technical skill.

If we want to write our story, we must accept that imperfect words on a page are better than perfect words inside our head. We must let ourselves believe that, even though some of the richness of our world will invariably be lost in translation, we cannot transport anyone else to that world with us unless we make an attempt at translating. And even if the limits of narrative structure demand that we only tell a mere fraction of the full measure of the story in our heads, that mere fraction is more than what currently sits in our blank drafting document.

The first step of curing worldbuilder’s disease is getting started.

Stay tuned for next week’s post when I’ll write about mending our worldbuilding ways and getting words onto paper for the first time (or getting past whatever chapter keeps hanging you up!). Join me again on week three when I break down some of the biggest pitfalls those of us with worldbuilder’s disease encounter as soon as the words start flowing.

And if you’re looking for a way to get something – anything – on paper in the meantime, join me tomorrow (and Saturday, and Sunday, and Tuesday) for Morning Pages: short flash fiction prompts for SFF writers looking to jumpstart creativity and chat about craft.

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.

Welcome Aboard the AuthorShip

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Hello, hey, hi!

I’m Cameron Montague Taylor (call me Cee), lover of Dark Fantasy / LGBT+ Romance novels. By day I’m a professional sailor. By night, I’m a blogger and commercial fiction author stumbling toward publication. The AuthorShip is a place for reflection on the journey and growth along the way. Join me as I learn about fiction writing craft, fine-tune my process, and find my way in the commercial fiction industry.

Why this blog?

Having consumed some amazing craft of writing blogs and podcasts, I’ve realized that the most helpful advice out there (for me, at least!) comes when a writer documents the nuts and bolts of their own personal process. While that process might never work for me, I enjoy reading and learning from specifics far more than generalizations. I hope deep dives into craft, process, and journey can spark interesting conversations and help you with your own work.

The format:

For each post, I delve into an idea or theme that I find interesting (though I’ll certainly take requests). I’ll round up advice on the topic – or attempt to articulate some of my own – and try any corresponding writing exercises I can find. By trying out the tricks other writers use, I hope to see whether I can incorporate them into my system and give you an idea of how and whether they might work for you.

Morning pages:

Four times a week, I’ll do a fifteen-minute free-write to a prompt selected from my calendar. I call them Morning Pages: fun warm-ups to start a day of productivity. I’ll post the prompts on the blog along with wordcount, what I learned from writing that day, and any other interesting goodies. Write along in the comments, start a blog train, or save the prompts for your own personal use – it’s up to you!

On Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, I’ll also hold craft discussions in the comments. Each day, I’ll pick a discussion prompt based on a craft question that came up while I was answering the prompt. You can participate by posting snippets of your own pages, answering the questions, or responding to other commenters. I know I learn best by doing and discussing, so that’s where the focus will lie. I hope the blog can be a place where you can engage with and get to know fellow writers.

On Sunday Funday, I’ll post my Morning Page directly onto the blog. In proper Sunday spirit, I’ll invite everyone who reads the blog to follow the prompt and post in the comments. This isn’t necessarily a critique exchange, so don’t feel intimidated — we’re here to share, have fun, and support our fellow writers. Of course, you can ask for critique if you’d like it! Use the tag #YESTHANKS at the beginning of your post to let us know you’d like a read with a critical eye.

Interested in seeing more of my Morning Pages? Patrons at the Follower tier or higher get access to the stories I write on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, too!

Sound like fun?

Hit that subscribe widget in the sidebar for notifications when I post. You can also find me on twitter and Instagram – links in the menu.

I look forward to seeing you in the comments!

-Cee