rinseandrepeatzero-deactivated2 asked: Oh hey, sorry to bother you again but do you have any tips on how to write good stories/characters? Your writing seriously inspired me.
Thank you!
There are so many different ways to write good stories - style, theme, content, all that jazz - that really the only advice I can give you is, write what you feel. But as for writing good characters - that, I think, is a bit more specific. For me, I think there are two important aspects to writing good characters: knowing what to say, and knowing when to say it. Real characters, just like real people, will have more going on at any given moment than is strictly necessary to the plot. As a writer, you should know at least some of those extra details, but you should also know when to include them in the story, and when to hold back. Adding a personalising detail can be a nice grace note to the characterisation, but if you drop in too much stuff that the reader doesn’t need to know, or doesn’t need to know right then, you can bog the story down unnecessarily. And I think this is really important, because I’ve seen about a millionty writing prompts over the years that involve what are, essentially, character generation sheets, where you list what you think their favourite colour would be, and their earliest memory, and a heap of other random crap, but nowhere have I seen anyone say that, having invented all these details, you don’t always need to include them in the story itself, and that sometimes, the extra details you most need to know about your character won’t be the ones on the prompt sheet. I can’t think of many times that I’ve needed to know what a character’s favourite colour is, but I often find myself wondering: what makes them laugh inappropriately?
When you meet someone new, you don’t ever meet them all at once - it takes time to learn how they tuck their elbows in when they’re eating noodles, their habit of swinging themselves through doorways and hopping up stairs like a sparrow, the nervous tic of twisting their rings, the fact that they hate the word clatter but think bauble is hilarious; how they secretly want a pet ferret, love jigsaw puzzles and collect bird figurines. Nobody ever just comes up to you and tells you all the mundane details of their life, because that would be weird and awkward and, in all probability, boring - so when you introduce a character, use the same rules. Don’t tell the reader everything at once. Let them learn the character like they would a new friend, over time, as the book progresses; and never let them learn everything, because who do we really know that well, ever? Keep some secrets back for yourself, is what I’m saying, and then, when the time is right, divulge only some of them.
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