Now that I’m firmly back into writing a new draft of Toric, and have just wrapped up part 1, I wanted to discuss perhaps the most significant reason for why I needed to rework some things. Simply put, the beginning wasn’t working.

This revelation didn’t come as a surprise for me. Before I had my previous draft reviewed, one of the last things I did was redo the first ten pages, for what felt like the fifth or sixth time. Yet, when it came time for me to face the music, it was the same exact song and dance. I had to face the facts, my beginning was broken.

So, let’s take a step back and examine what the beginning of a book actually is. Your goal as an author is to capture your reader’s attention. You need to leave them wanting more. Well doesn’t that sound simple? If only things were so easy. I needed to go deeper to understand why my previous attempts at beginnings were falling flat. I needed to understand the mechanics behind what makes an effective starting point.

Before I go any further, I’d like to credit this episode from the writing excuses podcast with helping to put my thoughts in order as I planned this latest draft of my book. I’ve been a long time listener of the podcast, and I’m sure there are a number of episodes I’ve absorbed over the years about introductions, but this was one that stands out in particular.

Secondly, a quick disclaimer. There are any number of different ways to approach things like this. What works for one writer’s style may completely fall apart for another’s. I’ve attempted to make this as generic as possible, but don’t feel like this is a recipe you have to follow to the letter. These points are simple meant to get the creative juices flowing and help you to examine what might and might not be working well for you.

So, with that out of the way, let’s break down the key components of what I believe makes a good beginning into 5 concrete points.

1. Include appropriate promises to the reader
2. Ground the beginning in a compelling setting
3. Introduce interesting characters
4. Ensure there is a sense of dynamism throughout
5. Leave the reader with compelling questions that drive them to want to learn more

I’m planning to break this down into a few different posts, so I can properly dive into each of these points. In this post, I’m going to cover only point number 1. That of making promises. Promises are arguably the most important thing you need to be aware of when approaching a proper introduction.

What is a promise? In a nutshell, your promises are what you tell the reader they can expect from your book. This is both in a narrative sense and in a more meta/fourth-wall sense as well. If a romance fan picks up your book and sees page one of your book is about an intergalactic robot rebellion, well you are making a promise to them about what they can expect from the rest of your book, for better or for worse. If this is someone you want to grab, maybe because you are writing steamy robot erotica (not that I would know anything about that), make sure to make that clear right from page 1. 

You want to lead early on with what sort of book to expect. Don’t try to rug pull genres or anything else tricky like that. Perhaps if you are a well established author someday, then you might play around. But as a newer author, it’s best to be very up front about the type of book your reader has picked up.

From there we can get more specific with the nature of these promises. I have always been fascinated by heist stories, and I knew Toric would feature thief and rogue-like characters and that my climax would be a sort of heist job. It made all the sense in the world then to drop the reader into a heist in progress in chapter 1. This lets the reader see how I approach this kind of storytelling, and to see if the tone resonates with them.

Tone is a big one. I almost included it as one of the key points above, but ultimately rolled it into the promises point. Some readers may not want a heady and philosophical narrative, while others may crave it. Ensure you properly represent the different sort of tones up front as well, just like genre.

In the Writing Excuses podcast episode linked above, they discuss an author they knew who was struggling to pitch a middle grade book. The problem ended up being that the beginning was somewhat lighthearted about a goofy kid, but then the book gets into its actual story as a dark and brooding adventure novel. By doing this, the people who wanted that dark and brooding adventure never made it past your beginning, and the fans of the goofy beginning will feel somewhat betrayed as that’s not actually what the meat of the book is like. Setting the stage immediately with the proper tone is extremely important.

Lastly, you can make promises about topics within your book. Do you have magic? Find a way to show that. Is there interplanetary travel? Probably should be mentioned. Can animals talk in your world? Let us know this up front.

When I think about my previous versions of Toric’s beginning, and specifically the promises that were made but never fulfilled, and the promises that should have been made but weren’t, the reasons for my unhappiness with it start to come into focus. The old introduction told the very standard story of a group of thieves slipping into a city unnoticed to assassinate a king. It focused mostly on the characters, and had very little else in terms of promises. No wider world or plot relevant things were mentioned. It was a play by play of a scene straight out of every D&D campaign ever.

Now, that’s not necessarily a problem, if I was writing a D&D style group adventure story. But I’m not. Not really. The story I am trying to tell is one I hope that will be continent spanning, eventually. I plan to have lots of factions and races and powers pushing against each other, with my characters feeling a little like they are leaves caught in a hurricane at times. I’m planning on having a fantastical world full of interesting and eye catching magical spectacles. By focusing so narrowly on a few thieves for as many pages as I was, I wasn’t doing a good job of setting expectations for the story I wanted to tell. The first time I cut away to mysterious demi-gods plotting mysteriously, it must have been extremely jarring for a reader going in blind.

So how did I end up rethinking my promises with the beginning then? I looked at what I thought was the strongest part of my previous draft (the climactic heist job my characters end up attempting), and tried to think of ways I could get that same feeling across, in miniature, to craft an effective beginning. A teaser, if you will, for the great parts to come. I even crafted my beginning scenes in a small three act format, hoping to mirror the magic of the strong ending that it would eventually lead to.

I remember thinking in previous drafts that I needed to start simple, and slowly build up to the big reveals about the world and the conflicts facing it. But, I no longer believe that to be true. My opinion now, and the driving force behind this latest iteration of Toric’s beginning, is that I want to craft a spectacle using every tool in my toolbox that I possibly can. I want wild magic. I want incredibly powerful beings. I want to show off some of the coolest ideas I’ve had for weapons and combat. I want to blow the reader away with alien and otherworldly settings. Why hold these things in reserve? Lead with them. Show the reader that this is the kind of story you are dying to tell, and that they should be dying to read.

So, by the end of the beginning, the reader should fully understand exactly the type of book they have picked up. That doesn’t mean they understand all of the nuances of what is going on. We’ll talk more about effectively utilizing a sense of mystery and wonder to keep the reader guessing and wanting more in a future post, probably the one in this series that covers point 5 above about prompting compelling questions.

There’s a ton more I could say about promises. I think they are among the most important things you can keep in mind when crafting any one of your introductions. Whether that is the beginning of the book, or any other moment that fits the idea of an introduction (new characters, settings, subplots, etc…).

However, I’ll let this topic breathe for now. In the next post in this series I plan on covering character and setting, and once again discussing where my previous opening scenes for Toric failed, and what I have done to hopefully remedy those issues.

Until next time!

Well hello there. All of a sudden, it’s 2023. I realize that it has been over two years since the last blog post, and I think it’s finally time to address things here and talk about what’s been happening and what’s going to come next from this whole thing.

Fair warning, this is a long blog post that is mostly self-indulgent. I’m kind of putting things down here for posterity and to explain what I’ve been doing for the past two years. I don’t plan on doing posts like this often, but I felt this was as good a way as any to reinvigorate this place. Look for more posts about the mechanics of writing and storytelling in the future!

The story starts in late 2020. I had just completed my first draft of Toric. There were several stages that went into this milestone. I finished the first complete draft in the late summer, then spent the last 4-5 months of the year on long, arduous editing passes. I have learned a ton about editing since then and I think it will make for a great series of blog posts someday, but that’s not what I’m here for right now. By the beginning of the new year, 2021, I finally felt like the manuscript was in a solid enough place to share. So I did. I sent it out to a few beta readers and the initial feedback was very positive! So much so, that I figured that maybe this actually had a shot at publication.

I took that time in January 2021, while my beta readers were busy actually reading the thing, to put together the website that you are reading this blog post on now. There were two reasons for this. One, I’m a software engineer in my professional life, so this did end up being a fun and interesting challenge. But more importantly, this was yet another box to tick in that slow march towards potential publication. I read the articles, I followed the experts’ advice, and I knew that having a website and a social presence could only help me out. It was a somewhat cynical driving force. Here I was building this space, but I was unpublished and barely even starting my journey. The website as it stood, served no real purpose. I didn’t have dedicated fans. Even my close family and friends never once asked me when I was going to upload a new blog post.

So then, where was I? I had written a couple blogs, posted on twitter for a month or two semi-regularly, and had implemented some small changes and tweaks suggested by my beta readers. At that point, development and updates of my website and blog ceased. I moved on to researching potential agents that might be a fit for my shiny new draft of Toric, and then actually blasted out a series of submissions, tracking everything diligently in a Google sheet. Then, all I had to do was wait for those positive responses. So I waited. And waited…

Well, long story short, I didn’t get any bites from my initial query efforts. Thankfully, I knew not to press my luck and ceased my query submissions pretty quickly, not wanting to burn all my opportunities (many agents will only let you submit a particular manuscript to them once, so you better be confident that you’ve done everything you can on it). This took me back to the drawing board in a somewhat confused state. The wind had been taken out of my sails.

At this point I think it is important to discuss what was going on in the world. Let’s transport you back to spring 2021. Here I was, mentally exhausted from the mad dash to get the book ready in 2020, and for the first time in over a year, things were looking up in the world. The first vaccines were arriving, people were extremely excited to get out and do things again, and I got swept up in all of it. It wasn’t until summer that life started to feel normal again, and I sat back down and started to examine what I had with my manuscript and what needed to happen to get it back into a position that I could be happy with it.

The thing I quickly settled on was that I had to be 100% confident in my manuscript before beginning the query submission process again. I set myself a goal. I wanted to have the next version of my completed manuscript of Toric done before the end of the year. There were three things that went into this.

1. I needed a plan.
2. Once my plan was established, I had to actually do the rewrites and edits.
3. Once I was done, I decided I needed to hire a professional editor to actually give it to me straight. Again, I can only query an agent once. It is extremely valuable to me to properly understand whether my manuscript is even ready for that.

By fall 2021, I had my plan. This centered on three driving points.

1. From a mechanics perspective, I was being far too cavalier and amateurish with my perspectives. Third Person Limited is a limited perspective. I not only had sections of chapters where I swapped perspectives too often, but I found myself head hopping and dipping back to third person omniscient far more than I had realized at first. I had to tighten up everything.
2. The beginning had to be completely redone. I still had sections of chapters that were largely untouched from when I had first written them, almost a decade ago, and it was clear that they were not up to my current standards. The beginning is so important in grabbing a reader’s attention, that I felt like it was better just to get a fresh start.
3. Most importantly, the manuscript was simply too long.

Point number three was my biggest hurdle. My manuscript at its peak was approaching 190k words. Sure, compared to a Brandon Sanderson or George R. R. Martin novel, a sub 200k word count is child’s play. But, for an agent looking at a first time author’s submission, that number is a massive red flag. All it tells them is that I don’t know how to edit my work properly. Most novels for an adult audience come in at 120k words or so. Sure, the research I did mentioned that some genres would go longer, and fantasy, especially epic fantasy, was often cited as an example. But, they were talking about more like 150k words, not 200k+. So I set myself a target. I wanted to cut 30k words. Ideally, I’d be under that 150k cutoff.

So, for the remainder of 2021, and stretching into the first half of 2022, I worked diligently towards these objectives. I cleaned up my perspective issues, the new beginning was getting rave reviews, and most importantly, after a lot of painstaking work, I ended my quest for a slim word count around 153k words. My compromise was that I left in two backstory chapters that I was coming around to the idea of cutting, which would have saved me another 7-8k words. I decided to leave them in for the moment, just to see what the editor thought.

So, there I was in late spring 2022, ready to go for a second time. I found an editor who had actually worked as an agent as well, a perfect fit for me, and hired them to read my manuscript and then meet with me afterwards to discuss their thoughts. Many freelance editors offer editorial services, but I was laser focused on simply getting feedback about my readiness for querying.

I sent the manuscript off, extremely confident that this time I had nailed it. The manuscript had come together brilliantly. Feedback from a couple beta readers was great again. It had been tightened up significantly and felt like a roller coaster ride from start to end. I dreamed about how well the conversation was going to go and just how impressed the editor was going to be.  

Everything was great, right up until the day before the call. I was suddenly nervous. I didn’t know what the structure of the call was going to look like, and figured I should prepare some questions to ask them, just in case they mostly opened it to me to drive the conversation. The more I started to rack my brain about the questions I had about my manuscript, the more the doubts started to flow out of me that I had never consciously considered before. They must have been there all along, I just got great at ignoring them.

I eventually broke my questions up into 8 topics. I worried about whether I jumped around PoVs too liberally, especially in brief little sprints during action scenes. Conversely, I wondered if I was too focused on my main character, especially early on, and whether I should incorporate more looks at other characters in the first half of the book, rather than just brief asides before returning to my primary main character. I worried about chapter 1 again, was it too long before we got to the point? I worried about the final chapter, it felt like it should be a denouement, but it had a surprise action scene and I wondered if it felt too disjointed. I worried about the backstory chapters that rip the reader out of the current narrative. I worried about a cutaway I did for three or four pages to tell a folktale rendition of a local legend. I worried my ultimate antagonist for the climactic scenes was underwhelming and underdeveloped, thrown in way too late in the book. But mostly, I worried that the second half of the book, the part I slaved away on in 2020, no longer worked with the setup and promises of the first half that had been slowly cultivated over the decade prior.

That was the moment when it hit me. This was not going to be a victory lap. In fact, I didn’t even really need this editorial review. I already knew it wasn’t good enough and I already knew what I needed to do. Still, I went into it hopeful that maybe I was just being too harsh on myself. The end result was… eye opening in many ways.

First of all, the feedback they had for my plot and characters was almost a 100% point for point match to the issues I had detailed the day before. This was gratifying at least in a way. I could trust myself that I actually did know what I needed to do. I wasn’t a ship adrift at sea with no way of getting home.

Secondly, they praised the mechanical aspects of my manuscript. In fact, I was told it was one of the cleanest, most well edited manuscripts they had ever received. This was a huge weight off my shoulders, as I had long worried whether my writing style, and editing efforts, were actually up to the standards of professionals in the industry.

Lastly, they raised one extremely interesting point. It wasn’t just that my beginning was not making the right promises. I was told to consider whether my beginning was even starting in the right spot at all. This blew my mind. Up until this point, I had made tons of changes and edited the heck out of things. But, I had never actually reworked plot in this way before. I had never considered that maybe I should change the entire foundation of my characters, change the entire timeline, change who is present where and what the motivations are for kicking things off. It was mind boggling, and made every cent that went into this review worth it.

So now, we finally are closing in on current day. I was once again drained after this whole process, and took a few months off. But by fall 2022, I was back at it, outlining again. This took a lot longer than previous drafts, as I was rethinking a ton of foundational stuff that I had been building off of for the greater part of a decade. Eventually though, I felt confident enough to start, and by November, I was setting out to write a third edition of this manuscript. Starting with a brand new introduction, from a brand new character’s perspective.

I won’t go into things much more. I am currently four completed chapters into this effort. I will detail the changes between this draft and the last in another post, talking more about what I’ve learned. Some of the changes to my process now include bringing in beta readers early and often. I used to dump completed drafts on people without much warning. Now, I’m sending out one chapter at a time to get much more immediate feedback. If you read all the way to the bottom of this post, you are exactly the type of person I would love to work with. Please do reach out and let me know if you’d like to beta read this new draft.

So, where do we go from here? I’m immensely proud of the new beginning so far, and I’m excited, though also intimidated, by what will be required from here. It’s one thing to write a new part of a manuscript from scratch, but working in all these changes to sections that won’t be rewritten is almost more daunting. Lots and lots of small modifications and edits will be required. Keep an eye on the website. I do plan on finally utilizing my progress bars to update my progress as I go.

Lastly, do expect some additional blog posts from time to time. I have a lot of lessons that I’ve learned so far. I promise, not all of them will be this long. I’d love to talk about things I’ve learned about introductions. The three act structure. Book structure as a whole. Character writing and perspective. Foreshadowing and promises. All these sorts of interesting things. They won’t be every week, they might not even be every month. But, it certainly won’t be one post every two years anymore. I’m settling into the idea that this is how things will be for the long haul.

So, thanks for sticking with me. I know this has been a long journey, and I’m immensely grateful for the support of my friends and family during this process. I can’t wait until I can proudly say that I’ve moved beyond this initial stage of creation. Until then, however, I’ll detail the process here. I hope to see you then!

In lieu of a comments section, please feel free to tweet at me if you have any thoughts on this post. Normally I would link a specific tweet you could reply to pointing to this post, but given this is a more personal post, I'm not going to promote it directly from twitter this time.

When we talk about epic fantasy, it can pretty much be assumed that there are going to be multiple viewpoint characters in the story. After all, it’s hard to convey the grand scope of your world from just one character’s perspective. Usually there are multiple countries or races at play, and you typically want perspectives outside of your bog-standard human protagonist person. Of course, multiple viewpoints are not limited to epic fantasy, but it is the genre that I am writing in so that’s the lens through which I will write this post. (Credit is due to the Writing Excuses for their great information on viewpoints. Here’s one episode on this topic).

So, let’s talk about the different kinds of perspectives that we can offer. To me, this is defined by distance. You either have multiple viewpoints in close proximity to one another (think Six of Crows where our protagonists are on the same mission), or are too far away to interact or influence one another directly (like The Way of Kings where our various protagonists are spread throughout the world).

Each of these approaches offers different challenges and advantages, so let’s start with what it takes to do multiple viewpoints with characters who are in the same room, so to speak. I’ll leave the broader scope to a later post (link should be here when it’s done, feel free to bug me on twitter as long as you can read this!).

I’m pretty comfortable and familiar with multiple view points in close proximity. After all, this is a bit of what I juggle in Toric (though it’s a small degree compared to the aforementioned Six of Crows, with Skye only getting a few chapters, and a couple other characters just a section or two). I am sure later on in the series that the scope will grow, but for now we mostly have characters on the same mission together.

So, what are the challenges here? For one, distinctiveness is direly important. You can cheat on this a little bit when the characters are far apart and in very unique settings, but when you are switching between viewpoints in the same room, you have to worry about their voice a lot more. Whether you are doing first person or third person limited, you have to cloud each character’s observations in their background and personality.

My approach is to roleplay a bit. Given a situation, let’s say we’re in a bar and someone has just knocked over a table and drawn their weapon, I ask myself how would my viewpoint character react to this situation? Maybe I’m in my standard protagonist’s head, and I think, yeah, they’d probably spring up and be ready to intervene. Simple. So then, I think what would another character do in this situation. I’m not in their head for this scene, but if I can imagine how they would react in a different way, I can use this as a point of differentiation for my viewpoint character’s actions.

This admittedly works better if you have a character who is weaker or believes in themselves less, because if we are in their head then they can lament their lack of action or ability. It probably won’t sound quite right for a strong character to mentally congratulate themselves as they spring to defend a helpless bystander, so we need a different tack here.

That’s voice and personality. You have to let these things shine through. Again, we are in your viewpoint character’s head, they should be thinking about things through their unique lens. It may be that you haven’t yet identified exactly what sets this character apart from your others, so writing multiple viewpoints can be a good way to force yourself to work it out. I often actually write from viewpoints I don’t plan on including in my book just as a way to get inside of a particular character’s head, to write down their thoughts and let them come to life a bit more.

Well, given these challenges, why would you want to write a viewpoint character so close to another? What’s the benefit? Well, it can actually be very powerful to step outside of your main character to get an objective viewpoint of them. Maybe you’re working through some chapters that are dialogue heavy, and switching your perspective can help keep things fresh and maybe provide more insights to the reader about the current situation. I would hope that your different viewpoint characters would have different aspects of the current conflict or world that they would focus on, and if that isn’t the case, writing from their viewpoint is a fantastic way to force yourself to create that new perspective.

Another advantage of using multiple viewpoints like this is that it allows you to work around the limitations of your chosen perspective (first or third limited) in order to play around with information. When sticking to a single character, it’s almost impossible to present information in a way where your main character is unaware of it, after all we are seeing things mostly through that character’s eyes. But when you change perspective, you can make the reader aware of certain details and implications that the main character may not have realized yet.

The good folks over at the writing excuses podcast talk about this a number of times (one good episode is here). When both your main character and the reader don’t know what’s going on, then you have a mystery. When the reader knows what’s going on but the main character doesn’t then you have suspense. By providing an alternate viewpoint, then you can effectively hide information from your main protagonist and create suspense in ways that you never could with one perspective.

I can’t stress enough how careful you have to be when working through this though. I’m as guilty as anyone of writing an alternate perspective and just hearing the same narrator voice come through in the end. The viewpoint character needs to have a good thematic reason to take over and be that leading perspective, so I know that I have to constantly think about what such a character is bringing to the table that others are not.

As I said above, this is just the first of two planned entries on juggling multiple viewpoints, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this as I continue to write. For now, I hope you find some of this helpful or at least interesting. Please feel free to respond to my tweet below if you have some thoughts on challenges or benefits of this that I may not have covered! See ya!

Welcome to the first post in what I am hoping will be a series of blog posts about various writing subjects. Seeing as this is my first entry, I think it makes sense to begin with the topic of “Getting Started”. Essentially, I want to dive into how I approach fitting together the various pieces of a story when I am planning a new project.

So then, since this is the first post, I have to start with the one aspect of story creation that I consider absolutely foundational. That is, the characters. After all, think about some of the most universally beloved stories out there. When we talk about Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter, the average fan doesn’t typically get excited to discuss the politics of Coruscant or the implications of what a magic society might actually look like if anyone really could apparate anywhere at any time. No, instead we talk about how cool Vader or Gandalf are, or whether Sam was really the hero of middle earth. It’s through these characters that we form our personal connections with a work.

So, given that, I think it’s incredibly important to start any story planning from a character centric point of view. Sure, you do need a hint of a setting at least to ground your character decisions. I’m not advocating that just because you love your alien were-rabbit OC then it belongs in your next romance novel. Even still, you don’t need much more than a basic setting before you can get started here.

Given that, here are five things I think are most important when it comes to crafting strong, memorable characters.  

1.       Main characters need to have a defined role

This is especially important early in the story when the reader is trying to figure out who is who. It gives them something simple to grasp on to. It also gives the reader some base assumptions about the character that you can either lean into or subvert. I’m not necessarily talking about roles like “the smart one” or “the funny one”, but more so what they actually do within the context of your story.

Let’s say for example that you want to tell a medieval fantasy story. One simple way to look at character roles is to examine what they will be doing during action scenes. This might push you towards having a character who is a strong hand to hand fighter, while another of your characters focuses more on magic. Additionally, you might find additional roles like a sneaky thief, an artillery expert, or a smooth-talking spy. Of course, you don’t have to look at it from an action perspective. You could just as easily examine the political structure of the entity you are working with. Whether that’s a country or a small company, you will have people on top who are in charge, and those working for or against them in manners that could range from direct to indirect.

One important thing to note is that a character role should not define who a character is, but it should at least inform your character in some sense. While a role gives your character a reason to exist in the story, their personality should become their reason why they exist in your story. Defining this up front can help you to understand where a character fits into the larger narrative as you start to form it around them.

When crafting main characters, you need to be careful about this.

2.       Your character’s personality needs to be grounded

I find that some characters are more believable and convincing than others in stories. That’s not unusual, but the question I’ve had is why? What makes me connect more with one particular character over another?

I usually get attached to characters that feel the most real to me. This means that their personality cannot be a caricature or cliché. Instead, you need to think more deeply. All characters should have some kind of nuance to them.

The trap here is when your characters are too simple, then they become boring. I should have a decent idea how they will respond to various situations they find themselves in, but I shouldn’t feel like I can predict all of their thoughts and actions before they occur. Real people are more complicated than that, and you should embrace that when you are creating your characters.

Back to our generic fantasy example from the point above. Let’s say you wanted to move ahead with creating your hand-to-hand fighter character. The first thing to do is give them a few different personality traits. Let’s just pick a few at random. Talented, subordinate, kind of lazy, loud. From there, we can take these traits and begin molding them into the outlines of a character’s personality.

Maybe this is someone who fights with the sword. They have been gifted with magic power, but in this universe, it takes extensive practice to even be considered a beginner mage, and this character never followed through with their training. So, while they know a lot about magic, and can sense it around them, they primarily fight with their sword and are deployed in battle as a counter against enemy mages. They’re also brash and take risks both on and off the battlefield. They’re a bit rough around the edges, but at the end of the day they will stand by their companions.

There, that’s a basic outline grounded in your world. Notice I haven’t talked about gender yet. I don’t believe in defining that up front if I can help it. I find that as the outline of my character takes shape, the character’s gender just asserts itself in my mind. I am lucky in the regard that I naturally tend to have a pretty even split of character genders. I believe that if you are writing things like fantasy or science fiction, there’s no reason why you can’t have an even gender split, and you should strive for that if you find yourself with an imbalance.

3.       “But” is your strongest tool

As you start to get an outline of your character, you can make things more compelling by constantly using the word “but” to dig deeper. The word “but” can lead you to discover things that are hidden beneath the surfaces of your character’s personality. It exposes contradictions or dichotomies that feel organic and can lead to a more well-rounded character.

This is where you start iterating. Let’s again take our swords(wo)man from above and see what we can discover about them. One thing that stands out is they are lazy. So, let’s ask “but why?” Maybe this character is very naturally talented. They mastered the sword at a young age and grew up surrounded by praise. When confronted with something they couldn’t easily master, in magic, they instead gave up on it. They never learned how to work hard; things always came easily to them.

“But if that’s true, then what? How did they react when things didn’t come easy?” Well, maybe they blame that challenge itself for their hardships. This character takes great satisfaction in fighting against and beating powerful mages, since perhaps they see magic as a whole as the challenge they couldn’t surmount. They also can’t escape the deep-seated shame that they feel for themselves, knowing they had the capacity to master this skill but instead have let themselves down, leading to an outspoken brashness about them to cover up any form of weakness. This all leads to them regularly throwing caution to the wind and exposing themselves recklessly to danger at times, as they don’t believe deep down, they are worthy of what they have.

In order for this character to be part of your story, as we have defined them, they will probably need support from your other characters. They would need someone else to keep them in check, to remind them of their good parts. They are a bit of a wildcard.

I feel like we have a good outline now, but you can keep this exercise going for as long as you’d like. Asking yourself “but if it is true that they take dangerous risks, what does that mean for their personal life? For their interpersonal connections? For their ambitions or future plans?”

4.       Where did your character come from?

We’ve already touched a bit on that above, but if you haven’t thought about this yet, this is definitely the time to do so. Characters don’t just spring into being the first time you write a line of dialogue for them in your story. They have their entire lives behind them, and where they come from can be a great way of rounding them out.

Think about their childhood. Maybe it was relatively normal. They grew up with a middle-class family and were trained to inherit the family business, or left to learn a trade. Maybe they were well educated from an early age. Maybe they struggled, and went through periods of homelessness or hardship on the streets. These are just some examples of how we can help build out their past.

If you get stuck, just like the “but” exercise above, there are questions you can ask yourself that can help guide you. For instance: “Did they grow up with both their parents? Just one? Or did extended family or some other institution take them in? What were their friends like? Did they have any dreams? What are their goals, short term and long term? When they are introduced in your story, are they happy with where they are at in life?”

All of these questions can help to give depth to your characters, and make them feel more real. You, as an author, are in a constant fight to get buy in from your readers. If you are writing something fantastical like fantasy or sci-fi, that task becomes even more difficult. One way you can fight back is by having relatable, complex characters that your reader can latch onto and identify with.

One thing you might have realized is that the deeper we dive into the past, the more there seems to be a limit to what we can do without a plot or developed setting to guide us. When we define the backstory of our characters, we are also somewhat defining the backstory of our world, which should in turn inform our plot.

I’ll be returning more to this point in a later blog post as I examine how plot and character can influence each other.

5.       Identify the fun

The last, and probably most important point. You have to personally enjoy the characters you are writing. If they are boring or annoying to you, that feeling will definitely come across to the reader. I’m not saying you can’t write characters who are annoying, just that you should be at least somewhat excited about them.

If you are struggling to write one of your characters, often times the best way I’ve found to break through is to really dig deep into what about them is compelling. When I do this, I find that characters I’m tired of are usually missing something fundamental. They don’t have that spark that makes them more than a cardboard cutout.

Hopefully if you’ve started with the first four points above, then you have a pretty well-rounded character. But sometimes for whatever reason it just doesn’t work. If you’ve lost the fun of the character, then it might be time to return to the drawing board and reimagine who they are and their place in the story.

It’s a scary concept, rethinking a character who you may have already written in, but I’ve done it more than once and I’m always happier in the end. Go with your gut. Your characters are the most important connection you make with your reader. If you don’t believe in them yourself, then how is the reader supposed to?

Well, there you have it. Five things to keep in mind when constructing characters for your stories. I don’t always go point by point like a checklist when brainstorming characters, but these things can help me when I’m stuck or looking for inspiration, and hopefully it can do the same for you.

This won’t be the last time I discuss character by a long shot, but I’ll be leaving this topic behind to discuss getting started with plotting next week. Hopefully you’ll join me then! See ya!

Well, I didn't expect to be sitting here, writing this, when the year 2020 began. There are times in one’s life that feel a bit like defining moments, and in a lot of ways, this past year has been that to me. Sure, there were the lows. Early on, March, April, and May felt tense and draining. I was constantly bombarded by defeatist, negative news. Refreshing websites every ten minutes just to see the latest frenzied half-truth repeated ad nauseam. It was stressful, draining, and well, just made it hard to get out of bed some days.

Nothing better exemplified this than a more than one-minute-long video I took of myself, alone in my apartment, spinning around and zooming in and out nonsensically on things like a bottle of Purell, a glass of water, a cut up t-shirt improvised into a mask, my wireless mouse, and any other things I kept on my desk. All this, while singing my heart out along to the Wahaha song. I do regret a bit that this video no longer exists. Nothing could summarize quite as well this strange, strange mental space we had all found ourselves in.  

By May I knew this couldn’t continue for me. I removed Twitter from my phone. I unsubscribed from any subreddit even tangentially related to news. I turned off the tv during the day. Within a week, I felt like myself again. My anxiety disappeared. Stress related heartburn and stomach problems also vanished. I was sleeping well; my back wasn’t hurting. I felt like I could live again.

With all this suddenly free time, I turned my attention to my writing (Well, and some video games I’d been meaning to catch up on, but then my 3DS broke…). I had been noodling on one particular fantasy story, that would eventually become Toric, casually since college. I’d find myself going to Starbucks to write for three or four hours on a lazy Sunday occasionally, or getting some motivation to put in a few hours after work here or there. It was just for me. Something fun to do without much of a plan at all.

It was at some point around 2015 or 2016 that I started to take this whole thing a bit more seriously. I sat down and outlined for several weeks. I solidified characters, cities, countries, races, worlds, and came up with a plan. I threw out the 100+ pages I’d written and started from scratch.

It was character backstories first. I spent a year writing intricate and detailed vignettes of each of my main characters in scenes that fell years earlier in my timeline than my planned chapter 1. I thought that if I didn’t understand where my characters came from, how could I hope to write them in the present? Well, it worked. Kind of. I was excited now for the story, and while my pace of work improved, all kinds of barriers sprung up as well. I was traveling every week for work at this point, and most nights all I wanted to do was throw something on to watch or just crawl into bed at whichever hotel I found myself at.

I chipped away at the thing though. Eventually making it about halfway through the story before 2020 derailed everything.

Well, after regaining my sense of normalcy in May, or as close to it as I could find given the current situation, I decided I wanted to do something to take back my agency from the world. So I wrote. It wasn’t nonstop (until the final week or so that is), but I set aside a good amount of time in my evenings and weekends to actually, finally, dedicate to this project.

It’s surprising how much you can accomplish even in a relatively small amount of time. Even though I was limited to just time in the evening after work, I was flying through the story compared to my earlier efforts. By October, only four months and change later, I found I had matched my output from the previous four years combined. By November, the story was finished, revised, and sent out to beta readers for feedback.

I don’t know what I was expecting. Up to that point I had received zero feedback from anyone on my work. I told myself to prepare for the worst. I roleplayed conversations while I lay awake at night, imagining how I could best accept negative feedback. I started brainstorming ideas for other books in other worlds once it became clear this one was a bust. Oh sure, I also dreamed about doing huge book signings with legions of fans lined up (who doesn’t?), but this was about as fulfilling for me as dreaming about winning the lottery. Fun, but ultimately just a pointless diversion and far from a realistic outcome. 

But, as initial feedback came in, it was actually, shockingly… pretty positive. I couldn’t believe it. I went into my first beta reader review sessions armed with several plans I could roll out when I was told that the book inevitably needed to be rethought. I could cut 1/3 to 1/2 of what I had written and turn the book into just part one of a larger book. I felt like I was teasing a lot of things, but not answering enough questions, and worried endlessly that the work as it was would feel unsatisfying on its own. I was also prepared to pitch another idea about writing a concurrent narrative from an alternative character’s point of view that could run simultaneously alongside what I had already written. I also had a long list of scenes that I thought I could cut or rework to slim down the story and keep it more gripping. I was prepared to take an axe to the thing.

Well, my early readers were horrified at the thought. One even said “That would be a tragedy” when I proposed cutting a large swath of material. There were minor nits, but overall, they liked it. Overall, they said it was good. Overall, they wanted more.

Well, for the first time in my life, I found I was not just doing this for myself. It’s a scary thought, but also one that excites me like no other. By January 2021, I was researching agents, query letters, and all manner of publishing related topics. All of that culminated in the existence of this blog post you are reading now, on this new website that has become the first technical side project I’ve ever actually fully completed.

If you are reading this then I assume it is probably long past the day when I actually first posted this blog. I can't even pretend to know what life will hold for me in your now. Maybe this website is sitting abandoned in some forgotten corner of the internet while I just can’t bring myself to pull the plug out of nostalgia. Maybe I did actually manage to make it happen with Toric. Maybe it was years later with another book. All I know is that through all the chaos and pain that was this past year of 2020, I was able to do something pretty dang cool for myself. So, here’s to that! 

Thanks for reading to the end. This probably wasn't the most interesting blog for you, but it felt right to me for a beginning. I don’t have too many firm plans for my blog at the moment, but I do expect to update regularly on Wednesdays to start out. I think I’ll be focusing half on the craft of writing and half on more personal topics. I want to discuss my thoughts on topics like characters, settings, plot, and so on. I also am a regular listener to the Writing Excuses Podcast, which is a great resource for fiction writers of all kinds, so maybe I’ll post some of my thoughts when an episode really captures my interest.

Things aren’t going to be too serious here all the time though. If I watch or play a particularly good game, anime, tv show, movie, or something, then I probably am going to want to discuss it, at least from a writing and character perspective. I’ll try to keep my sports rants to a minimum, but no promises there.

And who knows, maybe when this so-called Backstreet Boys Reunion Tour comes to an end, I might actually have interesting and new things happening in my day-to-day life to write about. Don't let your memes be dreams!

Well, there comes my website, right on cue, telling me an exception was encountered as I went to save this blog post. I guess the whole website thing is still somewhat a work in progress. Please excuse me while I debug this thing when I really should be just heading to bed. See ya!