You do such a wonderful job describing people so that we can almost visually see them, the little details that just make a person come alive in our imaginations.  How do you keep from everyone blending together?  Do you search for images? Do you just imagine that person?  Do you people watch and think, that person looks like a __?  You are more subtle than white hat good guy, black hat bad guy, but you are still able to get that across or not as the case may be, when it’s a character we go back and forth on, is he/she a good guy, a bad guy, a neutral guy etc.

The problem with describing people is that if you just stick to the physical descriptions, many of them will sound the same. There are only so many hair and eye colors and skin tones to go around. Augustine and Declan Camarine both are tall, blond, and green/blue eyed. So is Arland. To make the characters distinct, we have to reach past the physical descriptions.

Augustine:

Augustine nodded, his stunning face a picture of businesslike politeness. He was inhumanly beautiful. A prince, with his blond hair perfectly styled to complement his flawless features, elegant, confident, just a hair away from absolute perfection. She saw it for exactly what it was – armor.

Declan:

She stopped just before the ring of wards and looked at his face. Her heart skipped a beat. His features were carved with breathtaking precision, combining into an overwhelmingly masculine yet refined face. He had a tall forehead and a long straight nose. His mouth was wide, with hard narrow lips, his jaw square and bulky, yet crisply cut. It wasn’t a face whose owner smiled often. His eyes under thick golden eyebrows froze the air in her lungs. Dark grass green, they smoldered with raw power. She suspected that if she stepped over the stones and touched his face, he’d spark.

(Declan is from ON THE EDGE.)

Most of us have a protective figure in our lives. Maybe it’s a parent, or a spouse, or a sibling. Someone who loves us and protects us. Think about that person. Chances are, what you are remembering isn’t just a set of features but a feeling that person creates.

Writing characters is kind of like that. You are trying to evoke a feeling in the reader, and if you are successful, they will fill in the blanks.

Imagine a medieval setting, a city drenched with rain, and a long bridge.

Today after four pm a man called Lecke would cross the Estret Bridge. He was a scummy, sniveling prick, the kind of character that makes you wait an entire book for a rock to fall on his head and crush his skull.

You’ve pictured something. Zero physical description, but most likely there is something happening.

He was a slight man, with reddish hair and sharp features, and something about the unsure way he held himself reminded me of a possum. I had a feeling that if someone set off a firecracker next to us, he’d fall on the ground and pretend to be dead to avoid the danger.

If you tag the way the character makes the protagonist feel, it will go a long way toward keeping the characters distinct.

He was a slight man, with reddish hair and sharp features, and something about the sure way he held himself reminded me of a mongoose. I had a feeling that if a line-backer-sized attacker lunged at us with a knife, he would take them down with a single kick, take the knife away, and end up on top of them, pressing the blade to their throat.

Same description, different people.

They reached his office, where Lina sat at a pristine desk, presenting the last line of defense to the visitors. The desk was crafted from polished metal with a single white orchid growing from a simple pot. His secretary chose to match the orchid today. A white dress hugged her body, perfectly tailored and form-fitting, yet elegant. Her deep emerald hair, wrapped in a trendy twist, shimmered with peridot highlights. Her eyebrows were black and shaped with laser precision, and she had selected green and black to accent her eyes and mauve to tint her lips. As always, the effect was stunning.

Lina looks like a white orchid. We associate white orchids with elegant settings and often professional environment.

As far as the actual physical description, yes, image searches are your friend. Find an actor or a stock image of a person you would like to portray and write down the vibes. Less is often more. Most of the time authors tag age, hair color, skin tone, possibly build. But not always. There is a reason why Tall, Dark, and Handsome exists. Most people will picture someone when given that description.

Without an emotional connection, Bear is just a German Shepherd. With it, she is the Best Girl Ever.

What if I cannot picture images in my head?

You might have aphantasia. That’s what the image search is for. I probably don’t have it, since I have no problem recalling images of people I’ve seen or picturing random objects with life-like clarity. Nor do I have problems recognizing people and I’m often able to correctly identify two similar looking actors. But if you ask me to imagine a character from scratch, I will end up with a smudge instead of a face. It’s just not something that I can do without reference. It hasn’t hampered me any.

Your supporting/side characters are always awesome and have raised my expectations of how clear and unique the side characters can be. I read another book recently where the main characters were distinct and well-developed but I kept getting the side characters mixed up because they were all alike and vague. For HA, what goes into developing side characters alongside (or compared to) your main characters?

We are all the main characters of our own story. Let’s take Barabas. In his own story, Kate is a side character. She is a friend and an ally, but his goals might conflict with hers. He has his own storyline.

This is a double-edged sword sometimes. The main character is our compass. We perceive their world through their eyes, and when our perspective changes, we are often overly protective of the view point character.

One of the interesting examples of this is Nick Feldman. Imagine the story from his point of view. You idolize your father and turn yourself inside out trying to get Greg to notice you, but no matter how hard you try, your father remains distant. And then your father shatters the family so he can go and take care of the daughter of some woman he apparently has been in love with for a decade and everything you know is a lie.

But you keep going. You follow in your father’s footsteps, despite his disinterest and abandonment. You join the Order, just like he did, and you excel. And then you find out that the woman he chose to guard is a monster with enough power to enslave an entire city. And her father is a bigger monster.

You confront Greg and ask him why, and he tells you that it is his duty. And then he dies, the bastard, leaving this mess unfinished and you holding the severed ends of your pitiful little feelings. Only later you understand that he was trying to influence this woman to keep her from becoming a living Armageddon that would cost thousands of lives. And you wonder, wouldn’t it have been easier and safer to just slit her throat and take out her and her father in the same blow? Why, it would be public service. If she gets a wild hair up her butt, she might enslave the entire country and there won’t be much anyone can do about it. Except that you are a knight and you have principles, but you do wonder.

Now she has a son. She wants to be friends. She says you are her brother and her kid calls you Uncle. Fuck this shit.

That is a completely different plot line. And you have to feel for Nick, who at one point was a little boy desperately wanting his father’s approval, but right now some of you are wanting to explain how none of this is Kate’s fault and Nick just doesn’t understand.

Hehe. My evil work is done here for the day.

The post Characters: Stories and Descriptions first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

Thank you for all the blog prompts. I wanted to answer this one sent to us by an aspiring author:

Since I started writing, I hate everything I read. Reading used to be an escape. It makes me feel like I’ve lost a part of myself.

I think I’ve talked about it before, but coincidentally, Grace Draven and I chatted about this very issue this morning, so I thought I would go over it one more time, while it’s still fresh.

There is no one way to become a writer. There are as many roads to publication as there are authors. But for a lot of people, the evolution of writing follows the general pattern outlined below.

Voracious Reader Stage

We begin as readers. We devour books in a high volume. When I went to the library as a child, I would come out with bags of books, the maximum I could check out. When I took my children to a bookstore, we approached the counter with stacks of novels and manga. Books are inhaled.

People don’t often acknowledge it, but reading is a creative experience. The reader imagines, feels, speculates. All of this is a creative endeavor. It enriches our inner world. The majority of people stop here.

Selective Reader Stage

At this stage, we figure out the specific genre or the type of story that we like and we actively look for it. Because we’ve now read a lot of stories, there is some impatience when the story is too familiar or doesn’t handle certain things well.

‘I Can Do Better’ Stage

The frustration with not finding the exact story we want to read mounts. We’ve found some near misses, where the story comes close to what we want to read, but they still fall short of the mark. It occurs to us that we can just write our own story and make it exactly the way we want it to be.

This is the first writer stage. At this point the work produced is often derivative. We are rehashing what we’ve read and trying to improve on it.

‘I Hate Everything’ Stage

We’ve made our first clumsy attempts at a narrative and showed it to people, and we have some constructive feedback. The feedback hurts. We begin to actively focus on improving our writing, because pain is an excellent teacher and we are trying to avoid it. This is the point where we learn things like “show, don’t tell” and “passive voice” and so on.

Writers are hypercritical of themselves. We also tend to obsess. At this stage, once we see some technical flaw, we focus on it like a laser. We literally cannot unsee it.

For a lot of people, this is the stage where we experience repeated rejections if we are submitting our work to traditional publishers or primarily negative reviews and low sales if self-publishing.

It’s very easy for all of this frustration to turn inward and create a volatile mix of being insecure about your work and at the same time angry about not finding an audience. We are still in the critical/improving our writing stage, so when we look at other published works, especially bestsellers, we mostly see flaws.

You’ve all probably seen reviews that rage about how this dreck could possibly be published when the reviewer’s work is so much better. There is no reviewer more vicious than a writer at this stage.

This is a normal step in writer development. Most commercially or critically successful authors move out of this stage, but some stay here for the duration of their career. It is a very stressful place to be.

Finding What Works Stage

This is the stage where our perspective on the narrative changes. Instead of focusing on what is wrong in the current bestseller, we focus instead on what is right.

This makes logical sense. If a book reached bestseller status or achieved critical acclaim, then its pros outweigh its cons. It is serving something to the readers that is working for them. We need to figure out what it is and apply it to our own writing. Yes, this other novel has flaws. But what is it that this book does right? How can we make it our own?

A writer in this stage finds a balance. We now know what magic we are trying to bottle, we apply it to our writing, and a lot of times, it works. Suddenly we have readers who are asking for more. This is a period of professional growth. Sometimes it can be explosive, sometimes slow, but for the majority of writers who reach this stage, it is lifelong.

We can now read and enjoy fiction again. We develop some confidence in our own craft and give ourselves permission to be proud of the things we wrote because we achieved whatever it was we set out to do with the story. By focusing on the most important elements, we can give ourselves and others some grace regarding small things like overuse of a particular word or funky dialogue tags that previously would have derailed our enjoyment.

If you are stuck in the hatred stage, it is normal. You can get out of it by figuring out what you like about books, finding novels that explore that, and making a conscious decision to focus on how they pull it off.

Hang in there. This too shall pass.

Example:

If I like the subordinate/boss romance trope, I’m going to read a bunch of stories with that trope. I can spend my time picking apart clumsy sentences or ridiculous plot devices, but what I really need to focus on is the power dynamics and the emotion of the relationship. That’s what makes the trope work.

So what are the things that these types of books have in common? Well, the subordinate must be underappreciated. Or perhaps they are appreciated as a professional but are invisible as a person.

Something then causes that subordinate to leave. (This is the change in status quo and this is where we would start our story.)

Perhaps someone else comes in and is held up as their replacement. Or the subordinate has been quietly in love with their boss, but now a clear romantic interest appears on the boss’ horizon, and the subordinate gives up. They feel like they are stuck and staying is torture.

The subordinate attempts to separate and exit the boss’ orbit.

The boss suddenly realizes that there is a gaping hole in their life. It gives them a new perspective, so they pursue the subordinate, at first in a professional and then in the emotional sense.

Why does this construct work? Because there is an inherent injustice here. A lot of us feel underappreciated. To make this plotline successful, we must use that and convince the reader to sympathize with the subordinate. At some point, the readers need to pound their couch armrest with their fist and yell, “That jerk! It’s not fair!”

We then derive pleasure as readers from watching this emotional injustice being corrected. The boss cannot live without this person. They realize they are a jerk. They must atone. Bring on the grovel.

A lot of pack romances use this trope: he is the alpha, she is his sort-of-mate for political reasons, oh but wait, he is bringing in a different woman who is much more badass and the previous political relationship is set aside. But now she will get emotional revenge by leaving so he can struggle.

Your challenge, should you accept it, is to list books that use this storyline in the comments and let us know why you liked them. Please be kind. We are looking to move away from criticism here toward things that bring you enjoyment as you read.

Editor Point of View: Rossana Sasso, Developmental Editor

“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”
Jodi Picoult

Ilona took us on the lover’s journey between an author and their storytelling craft. First comes the passionate stage. Desire and obsession sweep us up, and we ignore everything but their flutter. Then come the growing pains of settling down, when the lover moves in and things aren’t always rosy. They disrupt our routine. We hate how smelly their favourite snack is. We get fixated on winning every squabble and dig our heels in over where the coffee mugs should live. Eventually, mature love arrives and we learn to be a team. Respect, trust, and collaboration help us fall into a mutual rhythm. Every day together is a little better than everything that came before.

I see the editor’s role as the relationship therapist in this equation. As long as the author and the story still have something to say to each other, it will all work out.

Perfection isn’t the goal, or what makes the journey worthwhile. Writers play their fictional worlds into existence. It’s a ludic urge, a heartbeat that will be preserved at the core of the story and convince the reader to keep reading. Passion and inspiration join together with an idea and shape the narrative organically.

Trying to write in widgets, or by a process of reverse-engineering an artificial arrangement impervious to criticism, will usually lead to writer’s block and burnout—a slog to the finish line and many weeks spent on my editorial couch. Stakes won’t feel high enough, calls to action will be repeatedly refused and underwritten, genre promises broken by darlings that refuse to die, and readers’ expectations shrivelled, unmet and unclarified. And I’ll be able to tell when my couple is just moving furniture around, rather than addressing the structural issues.

The lessons and friction of the I Hate Everything stage are bitter, but they’re necessary and proof that you’re levelling up. Just as a happy marriage isn’t achieved by mechanically ticking a list of bullet points every day, storytelling isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being true to yourself.

The magic isn’t gone. You’re just learning how the spell is cast.

The post The Two Sides of the Reading Coin first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.