Characters are a key element in every book. Join our discussion about techniques to build characters that make a great story.
Tea and Tales
S1:E14 NaNoWriMo Character Building for Novels
people who aren't readers really don't understand how absorbed you get when you read. Like I honestly like if I'm reading it's like a horse that has one of those flaps around their eyes. Yes. So I'm like once I read I'm like shut down I'm like in my zone. If I'm listening to you while I'm trying to read it means the story's not engaging or I'm probably going to drop that book. Like if it's an engaging story I am not paying attention to you. There you go. Exactly. You need to either say my name and be like I want to talk to you right now and then I'm going to be like okay what's up? Otherwise it's not going to happen. Sorry. It's one of those things. No. This this story has taken over my life and thoughts and feelings and and everything and everything. Okay. I have my comfort tea today. My Roibos tea. I have just plain apple juice but I also have these like I show you these cookies. Did you make them? Yes. These are my dad's recipe of chocolate chip cookies that are specially designed to stay soft and my friend turned us on to putting some cinnamon and nutmeg in them and oh my goodness they're the best, most amazing chocolate chip cookies I have ever had in my entire life and I'm never going back. I know. I feel you have to share with everyone. Yes. Maybe I'll put the recipe up. I don't know. That sounds delicious. That looks delicious. Let's get this going. [Music] Hello everyone and welcome to Tea and Tangles. I'm No. And I'm Sarah. We want to give thank you to everyone who has shared commented and liked all of our posts or watched our videos. We appreciate you all very much. We especially want to give a shout out to Vanessa Jay and Laura Matney. Thank you so much for joining us. Today's episode is our second in the Nano Rymos series. I'm excited about this one because it's character creation and I love character creation so much. What is a story without a character? Even if you're a plot driven, if your characters are not engaging in fun, if you don't know who your character is, the story is gonna not go anywhere. So in our last episode we got a little bit of insight into Ariana's process where she has a very complicated character creation process. It is amazing. If you miss that, go back to that episode. She talks about how she plans everything out. I don't do that and Mel doesn't do that. I literally get to know my characters as I write them. That's how I do it. Me too. I find that there's really good support for that method as well, especially because we've had people like editor Brenda Copeland talk about discover your character as you write. So let's talk about some of these ways that you can discover as you write. Some of the things you may run into for character creation and you know just some general tools for creating your character and how useful we feel like they are. You're welcome to disagree with us obviously. What do you need to know about your character to write your character? So for me, and this is just me personally, I'm an actor as well. I love being someone that I'm not because I'm always gonna be me. I'm always gonna have my personality. I'm always gonna have my life story. I always loved doing productions where I get to portray a different character because I get to walk someone else's shoes and I get to discover different personalities in different ways to handle different scenarios and different personalities. Even though each character I create has a little part of myself in them, I love to write characters who's nothing like me because I get to listen to them. So for example, I'm not a sporty person at all. The only reason I will go on a hike is if I have a donut at the end of that hike. Or you know if my friends like we want to go on a hike and I'm like well I want to hang out with my friends so I guess I'm gonna go on a hike. That's kind of the only reason I would kind of do those things. So I'm not an outdoorsy person. I'm not an active person. I like to be in my room and read a book. So then I write a character who's like super active and likes to go jogging and do marathons and stuff like that and I'm like oh my gosh just writing yikes, but you know what, it's fun. And what happens is I would have this character in mind, like the one that I'm currently working on. She is like a hair and makeup artist and she is very active and she gets to the gym every day. I do not know those things. She eats carrots, I eat cinnamon buns. As I'm writing her story, I learn new things about her. Like oh she likes to drink apple cider and then as a storyline continues I'm like hmm okay does she like to drive a car or does she like to walk? And so it's those little things that kind of bulge your character and graze your character and that helps me as a writer to get to know my character and also that I have found with my previous novel that I wrote that I'm currently editing. I love it when beta readers are stern in the scenes that they would be like okay why do your character do this? And I'm like because and they're like no no no why did your character do that? And so then I actually have to go sit down and I have to go put myself in my character's mind and I'm like okay why does she make that choice? And if that choice isn't strong enough or convincing enough, I'm like okay well either I have to figure out her more or I have to find a beta reason for her doing what she is doing or what he is doing. Or you can discover that the character is self-conflicted like is it on purpose now that they will make certain decisions in one situation different from another situation or am I being too inconsistent and I need to drop one so that my character arc is smooth and consistent. We need to know what the person is like in their day-to-day life. We need to know how how they interact with the world and how they make decisions and not things like what's your favorite color. Honestly, I've only written one character who I actually know her favorite color and it was a part of her big personality and backstory and that's why I knew it. Not because I just need to know all this frivolous detail about a character. I feel like some people get too bogged down in knowing everything about a character as opposed to knowing how your character makes decisions. I took a interesting course on writing romance. A course. Yeah, thank you. I feel proud. But she talked a lot about knowing your character's core reason for acting. Their core reason why they're going to react to things because every instance in the novel where they have to make a decision goes back to that core reason. That's a lot of backstory and a lot of things that may not ever make it into the story why they have that core reason. But when you know that, you can write a consistent character. As a very discovery writer, I may not know it until chapter four or five but then I make sure I go back and edit so that it's all consistent to that. I think in every novel that you read, the character has a depressing, traumatic backstory. Like the mother was an alcoholic or the father would abandon them. But you do need to realize, okay, you give them a reason for why they are the way they are. But you have to go back to that reason because otherwise it wouldn't make sense. Though, can I just say side note, people do not believe writers when they say that characters have a mind of their own, okay? They view. It is a hundred percent fact because I would have this character in mind. She is an environmentalist. She enjoys picking up leaves. I don't know. But I have this specific little details I know about my character. And then as I'm writing all of a sudden, I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. How did we end up in the middle of a dumpster? I'm like, what's happening here right now? I did not plan this. This is not part of your personality. So they literally have a mind of their own. It's not even funny. Like this is serious, serious business and people don't believe it but it's a fact of life. You have this straight and narrow line for them that they have to follow with the obstacles that have to overcome. And then they are like, let's want to read writing food. And they're like, whoa, a budget line. I'm like, no, no, no, come back. No, there's a butterfly further along. They leave this one alone. And they're like, no, but that one has blue dots on it. Their motives all change. They're just everything can and will change if the character feels like it. And that makes the editing process so much more important, but also difficult. I stopped worrying about that so much. When we had a call with Brenda Copeland, and I wish that a lot of people could see it, but it was in the private writer group, she was talking about backstory and the importance of having backstory. So your character makes sense. But she went on a tangent about, I hate when people use the interview process or therapist process to discover their character. Do you remember this? Yay. And she said, because it's not organic, because the questions you're going to have on those kinds of questionnaires don't get to the core of their backstory, the core of their reasons. And then she talked about the therapist process and how it doesn't work well either, because people who go to their therapist don't always open up about everything. And so you don't get to know your character as deeply with some of those things. I know some people swear by those things. They love those things. And if it works for you to get writing, absolutely go for it, but don't restrict yourself to those things. Those aren't knowing your character deep enough for you to know, because they like blue, how are they going to respond to a bomb going off in their house? It doesn't give you those answers. Yeah. It's very funny you say this, because this immediately makes me think of online dating. Do you like coffee? Do you like tea? Like, I can't one time think of a conversation where I still start off and be like, do you think that the Netherlands were the cause of South Africa being overwhelmed by, I don't know, unicorns? What? They were deleted. I think that would be the immediate answer. You definitely don't immediately go into those deep questions, which sometimes I honestly just want to go to those deep questions, because then I'm thinking to myself, you're wasting my time by asking me this nitty-le-gritty, pretty questions, where you could be asking me, you know what, are you for abortion or against abortion? And then you kind of know where someone stands with something and whether you would like to continue a conversation, which I think is the same with your characters. If you go deep with them and you ask, okay, do you believe that feeling storming children is a good thing? And the person's like, nope. Then you already have a good idea of what type of character you have and what type of thought process they have. Don't have small talk with your characters. So basically, Sarah, you're telling me like, my OKCupid profile from now, I'm going to be like, Sarah told me I'm not allowed to not be deep. So here it goes. You need to know those sort of things so you know how they're going to react and how they're going to speak, how they're going to interact with other people. And that's what makes the story a story. We've talked about some ways not to. The way I like to do this is I will think of my character during the day while I'm doing stuff. And I will put them in a situation that I am either watching or in myself. So I'll be like, OK, so I'm making bread. Does this character like making this bread? Or is this character upset that they're being forced to do this? And why are they being forced to do this? Who's behind that? Or would they not even look at that bread and be like, oh, you want bread? I'm going to the store. And so now they're going to the store instead. And I get to know how the characters going to interact in their daily life so that when something big happens in my story, I know their core feelings, their core ethics, their core beliefs. And sometimes I'll come up with random stressful situations that maybe I'm not in, but I've heard about or experienced in the past and be like, how would you have reacted to this stressful situation? I have never done that before with any of my characters, because I only put them in situations I've graftable with. And I'm like, OK, now I feel I have to go do that this week. I think that is my mission for this week is to go and take my poo poo poo lovely characters and go put them in a dumpster fire. This is why I have thousands and thousands of words of exploratory writing and character development writing that will never make it into novel because I do that. And then I think it's too fun. So then I have to put it on the paper. But sometimes it ends up in a novel. I'm like, yeah, that just happened. This is too good to not be in the novel. Very true. But I think it all goes back to the third episode we had where we talked about, can you do it without singing? There we go. Episode three, we will talk about, you know, you have to know your story backwards in front to be able to win different scenarios, come up when different plot holes come up when different situations come up. You're able to be like, OK, I know my story well enough to know how to handle the situation and how to fix this plot hole, but help with the rest of the novel. And I think that is the same for your characters. You really have to know your characters front to back in and out, up and down, to be able to win someone takes them and places them in any scenario. You're able to be like, OK, this is how my character is feeling when they're in this situation. This is how my character would react when in this situation. I think that that's part of getting into their mindset. When, when A.K. McBride was here and she was talking about how she had such a difficult time with writing one of her books because her characters were quiet. And I thought, yeah, if you can't get into that mindset, it becomes so hard to write. If your character is not talking to you, you could know everything about them. But if they're not talking to you, you can't write them. You have to be able to get into that mindset for the character to write them as if it's them, not you. Yeah. And that takes me back again to characters have a mind of their own, OK? They can decide that the date you actually want to write about them. They're like, Nope, you know, I feel like I'm going to the beach today. Bye. See you. You're like ice cream. Like come back. Come to the dark side. We have cookies. There's one character that I have a really easy time getting in her mindset because she likes to cook. And so every time I'm cooking, I think of her and her mindset. And then it's really easy to write her. And I have another character who's a unicorn trainer and I love horses. And so I just, you know, if I can go somewhere with horses, just to see horses or watch videos of horses, I can get into her mindset really easily. So are there ways that you have found that you've gotten into a character's mindset? I have been visiting a friend's house very frequently and something about that environment, about the route we walk like every now and then flipped a switch in me and like had me this new story idea. So every time that I walk that route, like my story kind of continues to develop and my character continues to develop, going to a place where I created my character kind of fuels my character's personality. It makes me think what about the people themselves? Like if you have a character whose personality is a lot like someone you know, interacting with that person can help you to feel like you can write somebody like them. But also sometimes just a majority of times, the characters are inspiration from actors, people, and then what I do is I would put a picture of that person on my wall. And so I would look at them the whole time. And then from that, I also kind of draw the inspiration and the personality. So for example, I had this novel that I'm writing, which is about like a baking show. And I got my inspiration from the Great British Bake Off Show. So by watching the Great British Bake Off Show the whole time, I kind of had the inspiration continuously around me the whole time. So that'll cause how can happen. I think those moments of inspiration are key not just to keep the story going, but to keep a consistency. When I was in school, if I was sitting and starting for a specific subject, and I would be sitting there and I would be eating, let's say, tic-tac. And then I would be going through my work. Literally, if I go to the exam hall, or I would be sitting and doing my exam and I eat a tic-tac, I'm taken back to when I was sitting and studying. So I kind of feel it's the same with my characters. So let's say for example, I was busy making a lasagna, and I was busy grating the cheese. And this character kind of popped into my head. Every time that I grade cheese, they will pop into my head. I love those psychological hacks to being able to go into their brain. I'd not thought about those sorts of things. We hope that our discussion today has helped you in understanding the importance of character creation. And whether you create your characters all before you write or create them as you write, I hope that you have a better grounding and excitement in getting to know those characters. And if you want to share, any of your ideas or thought processes while developing your characters, please go to that purple icon and go give us five stars and comments on there. Go comments on any of the platforms that we are on. We would love emails from you to share your journeys and your methods. So you can go to Instagram and Facebook and find us at Tintail's podcast, or you can go to tic-tac and twitter/x at podcast, ttail and followers. Thank you so much for joining us today. Happy writing. Bye! [Music]