A character who knows less than the reader tries their best to deal with a problem they don’t fully understand.
THE AUTHOR
Simon Rich is is an American humorist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has published two novels and three collections of humor pieces, several of which appeared in The New Yorker
His message to the StoryADay community: “God speed everyone. Let’s keep writing if we can.”
Read A Book, Support An Indie
This year’s StoryADay May official bookseller is Reads & Company, a privately-owned indie bookseller in Pennsylvania. Any purchase from the site this month supports Reads & Co.
Think about three different characters going into a situation who need three different things to happen in it. Now, all of these things will conflict with the other needs. Think about how they will ally with each other and thwart each other in conversation and subtly trying to influence each other. But only one character can get what they want. Now… go!
The Author
Born in the Caribbean, Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling author. His novels and over 50 short stories have been translated into 17 languages and he has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. He has a fabulous Patreon campaign where you get original stories once a month. He is also the author of one of my favorite new writing guides, It’s All Just A Draft, which I talked about in this podcast episode.
Read A Book, Support An Indie
This year’s StoryADay May official bookseller is Reads & Company, a privately-owned indie bookseller in Pennsylvania. Any purchase from the site this month supports Reads & Co.
We are one month away from StoryADay May, people! This is not a drill.
Actually, yes, it kind of is.
This is THE PERFECT TIME TO WARM UP your writing (take it from someone who didn’t, the very first year I ran this thing. I thought it would be smart to save all my ideas until May. Um, wrong!)
One of the easiest ways to get into the flow of writing is to minimize the amount of stuff you have to invent. So today I have two prompts for you, from the archives, which help you take that ‘write what you know’ thing and have a little more fun with it than if you were simply journaling.
The Prompt
Read through these two prompts from the archives and decide which one is most interesting to you.
Try to get to the end of the story today. Bonus points: write to the other prompt tomorrow!
Remember, if the story is getting away from you, to limit it only to the essential characters, settings and details. Just enough to paint a picture for yourself.
Also: don’t worry if this story is not ‘good’. It’s only a draft.
How did you get on yesterday? Did you write a story?
This is when the challenge gets really tough: the novelty has worn off and the end of the month seems a long time away. But keep going! If you keep writing through this week, you’ll still be writing at the end of the month and that is going to feel really good.
Lean on the support in the comments, to spur you on!
The Prompt
Write A story about yesterday’s character, all grown up
Yesterday I challenged you to write about an incident earlier in the life of a character you’d come back to, today.
Today I want you to bear in mind the inner struggle of that character, once they’ve had time to create some damaging behaviors based on the incident in yesterday’s story.
Now, pick an action, a physical act, that they can perform in this story. Make it significant to the character.
My example: in Die Hard, when John McClane picks up a photo of his family (back when they were a happy family), he winces, and it shows us everything we need to know about what this character wants, and what’s standing in his way (hint: it’s his own behavior).
Add a moment like that to your story today. No inner-monologue. No telling the reader why it’s significant. Just use all our senses to pull us into the moment.
Check back every day for more prompts, and don’t forget to come back and leave a comment to celebrate your writing successes, every day!
How did you get on yesterday? Did you write a story?
Remember, set your own rules, and stick to them. If you miss a day, don’t try to catch up. Just keep moving forward!
The Prompt
Write A story about the childhood damage of a character you’ll write about tomorrow
Today’s story owes a lot to Lisa Cron’s book Story Genius, in which she talks about how childhood beliefs can become problems for adult characters.
Behaviors that protected your character as a child (for example, an abandoned child’s tendency to keep people at a distance, or conversely to be too clingy, doesn’t serve them well as an adult.)
Every character needs an inner conflict, to make them interesting.
Today write a vivid story about something that happened early in life to a character you’ll come back to, tomorrow.
Check back every day for more prompts, and don’t forget to come back and leave a comment to celebrate your writing successes, every day!
For people to love your story, they need to love (or love to hate) your character.
The most beautiful writing in the world, the most exciting action sequence in history, neither of these will make people love your story.
But a compelling character will steal their heart, sneak into their memory, and make them come back to your writing over and over again.
Wouldn’t it be great to have raving fans?
How do you make your character compelling without spending too many words tracing their inner thoughts? How do you balance character growth with action?
Step 1: Know Your Character
None of us step out into the world in the morning as a fresh new creation.
We walk out of the door with hang ups and passions and prejudices and ingrained behaviors, all of which come from a lifetime of having experiences and reacting to them.
Lisa Cron, in her excellent book Story Genius, talks about this brilliantly:
You have to know your character’s childhood damage, she says, and the protective behaviors they created. If you can set your story at a point in their life when those behaviors no longer serve your character, you have automatic conflict built into your story (and conflict makes stuff happen!)
Top Tip: do some ‘discovery writing’ about your character before you ever try to write the actual story. It will make your first draft go soooo much faster.
In our quest to make readers love our protagonist, we can forget to give them flaws.
But how do you give them a flaw, without making them unlikeable?
The best resource I’ve come across came from the podcast Writing Excuses, where they talk about playing with three different characteristics as if they were sliders on a mixing board. Your character can be competent, proactive, and sympathetic, but they can’t be 100% (or 0%) of all three at the same time.
Contractors say, “You have have a job done well, fast, or cheap. Pick two.”
At any one moment in a story, a character can be extremely competent, extremely proactive, or extremely sympathetic. Pick two.
And then play with those levels throughout the story. (Think about how Hermoine Grainger changes over the course of the first Harry Potter book. At the start she is the most competent and proactive of the three friends, but nobody likes her. By the end, she has given up some of that proactivity and learned to lean on her friends. She acknowledges that Ron is more competent at wizard chess, and lets Harry be the one to face the last big challenge…and we like her a lot more, for it.)
Top Tip: Playing with character competencies is a great way to make them more or less sympathetic without having to give them a ‘tragic flaw’.
In critique groups I usually hear two opposing critiques of character, depending on the writer’s natural tendencies:
The writing’s beautiful but it’s a little…slow (translation: nothing happens!!) OR
It was very exciting…but I’m not sure why I’m supposed to care (translation: explosions and chases are great, but your character has no inner depth)
Whether you naturally write lots of action, or spend a lot of time dwelling on inner feelings, a good writer needs to be able to balance action and inner conflict, to create compelling characters.
One of the best ways to do this is to turn off the inner dialogue and show your character taking actions or interacting with physical objects that
Are symbolic of their inner struggle
Matter to this character for a specific reason (which you know, and can reveal to the reader)
Remind the reader of the stakes, without you having to spell it out.
For example, in the beginning of the movie Die Hard, a watch-word for action-based storytelling, John McClane picks up a picture of his happy family from a desk in his wife’s office…and winces.
In that moment (right before he gets embroiled in the explosions and flying bullets) the viewer remembers that this is not just a wise-cracking action hero. He’s a man who is losing his family and isn’t sure how far he’s willing to go, to put it back together.
That’s the question the rest of the film answers.
And it’s the reason we, as viewers, care.
Top Tip: Turn off the inner dialogue and give us a moment, filled with all five senses, where your character demonstrates their emotions, on the outside.
Resources
Die Hard (watch how the film makers slip in little actions that remind you of the inner journey of the main character, even as the bullets fly)
All of this kind of craft-based instruction is useful for developing your writing…but only if it doesn’t slow you down while you’re creating first drafts.
If you’re writing the first version of a story do not stop to worry about ‘showing not telling’ or whether your character is sufficiently proactive in this moment.
All of this can be fixed in the rewrite.
And one of the best ways to figure out what’s working and what still needs work in your story, is to show it to other readers.
Perhaps the idea of a critique group terrifies you. Or maybe you’ve been in groups in the past that were frustrating, or just ‘meh’.
If that’s you, I have a gift for you: a free guide to critique groups, including:
All the personality types you’ll encounter in a group
How best to interact with each
What you need to know to to give and receive great feedback
Don’t waste time being afraid of feedback, any longer. It’s the single most important thing you can do to get your writing closer to the point where you can really begin to delight readers and build a raving fanbase.
Short stories don’t have a lot of space for non-main characters, but if you’re going to include a best friend or comic relief, make sure they earn their word count!
The Prompt
Write A Story That Gives Your Secondary Characters Something To Do
For today’s Write on Wednesday writing prompt, I’m digging into the archives.
This writing prompt, from 2012, talks about how to use your character’s desires to power a story and contains important tips on how to keep your short story from become a barely-begun novel.
The Prompt
Write a Story In Which Your Character WAAAAAAANTS something
This month I’m giving you prompts that work in different ways to support your long-form fiction/novel writing. Today’s prompt digs deep into your protagonist’s past.
Write the story of the childhood event that scarred your character
Tips
If you haven’t already, get hold of a copy of Lisa Cron’s Story Genius and read all about character misbeliefs. Re-read it, if you own a copy!
Every character has to have a flaw. Maybe you decided that yours was commitment-phobic, or that she was overly-honest, or that she couldn’t hold down a job. There are lots of ways that could be fun in a novel, but a deeper question is: Why?
What happened to your main character at an earlier point in their life, that caused them to begin acting this way?
Once you know that, the subtle ways she reacts will change. She won’t just be commitment-phobic, she’ll get unreasonably angry when anyone promises to take her on vacation, because when she was nine her dad promised to take her on vacation but instead blew the money taking his new girlfriend to Vegas, and your main character never had a real relationship with him again after that.
In Story Genius Lisa Cron asserts that harmful adult behaviors originate in behaviors that were actually protective, at some point. So, by not trusting her Dad again, your main character protected herself from getting hurt by him. But that pattern of behavior stopped serving her at some point (probably right around the time your novel starts) and she has to learn to overcome it. Knowing what caused her to begin acting that way is extremely useful.
Digging into your character’s past gives you news ways to show their flaws in your novel.
When I was 12 years old and living in Scotland, I had a friend whose parents were English. We walked home from the bus stop together every night, chattering away in colorful local accents and colloquialisms. But as soon as my friend reached her front door, she would call out, “Hallo, Mummy, I’m home!” in the most pukka English accent you could ever hope to hear.
She didn’t even know she was doing it.
Maybe it’s because I have my parents staying with me at the moment, but I’ve been thinking about the ways our characters change, depending on who we’re with. My McCarroll tendencies come out while they’re visiting. I become more laid-back (or as my husband calls it ‘late’), and more spontaneous (or ‘disorganized and indecisive’). Even my accent gets more Scottish (see last week’s podcast).
I’m sure my parents are equally bemused by my ‘sudden’ need to know what everyone’s plans are for the day, since nobody in our family ever really had plans until the last minute (see? Spontaneous!).
So today I want you to explore that, with your character.
The Prompt
Write a story that shows you character in three different scenes, interacting with people who bring out different sides of their character.
Tips
Families are great for this. How we act around our parents and/or siblings is almost certainly different from how we act around our best friends. How we act with our spouse is probably different again.
How we act with a truly terrible lover who is all wrong for us, is a whole other category of behavior, especially when contrasted with interactions with people who really love us.
Stress is another great way to reveal a different side of a character. Some people are great under pressure. Some get angry. Some whine. Some cower. Some people turn into unexpected leaders in a crisis, while others who you’d expect to lead, become indecisive or cowardly.
Think about using cultural differences. For example, think about my friend who was Scottish on the street and English in the house. Think about how Barack Obama’s rhetorical style slipped along a spectrum from Harvard Intellectual to Southern Baptist Preacher depending on the crowd he was talking to (not that those two things are mutually exclusive, of course!). Think about how a hideously prejudiced old man can be genuinely sweet and generous to his own grandchild.
Knowing what a character wants, tells us what’s at stake in the story. Conflict between the character’s desire and their circumstances will keep your reader hooked.
The Prompt
Establish, within the first couple of sentences, your character’s desire. Put them in a situation that conflicts with that desire. Tell us how it works out.
Tips
It’s important for a reader to know what your character wants.
Once they know what your character wants, is afraid of, would never do, or desperately wants to do, the reader knows WHY they’re reading this story. That will keep them reading.
Keep it simple. In a short story, you can only examine one of your character’s desire.
Today’s prompt was inspired by an exercise in Donald Maass’s latest book The Emotional Craft of Fiction. You can find the whole exercise on p.22 of that book.
The Prompt
Write a story featuring two characters in the same location. Pick a detail that only your protagonist would notice and weave it into the story.
Continuing our series of prompts to help novelists as well as short story writers, today I encourage you to move forward a little in your protagonist’s timeline, but still stay before the main story.
The Prompt
Write a story about the days leading up to the beginning of your novel, or your story’s big incident. Alternatively, write a journal of those days from your protagonist’s point of view.
Tips
Use this story to ‘brain dump’ all the stuff that your reader doesn’t want to wade through before they get to the jumping-off-point for your story.
You can use this knowledge to season the story later, with a light hand.
Remember, you can recycle these stories are freebies and giveaways to help you promote your novel and build your audience.
Don’t forget to leave a comment to let us know how you got on.
This week I’m focusing on prompts that novelists can use. If you’re novelist, I don’t want you to feel like you’re wasting your time here at StoryADay May. While short story writers can easily use these prompts, too, you novelists will find much in them that enriches your work-in-progress.
Let’s dive in:
The Prompt
Write a story that investigates a turning point in your protagonist’s past.
Tips
Every interesting character has an internal struggle fighting with (or complementing) the external struggle of the plot. It usually stems from a character flaw/defect/protection mechanism they’ve been building for years. Use this prompt to write a story that captures the beginning of that character development.
If you don’t have a novel or work in progress, investigate a character from an earlier story you’ve written (or one you hope to write).
Lisa Cron’s Story Genius (referenced in the video) can be found here or requested through your local indie bookstore.
Today, Angela Ackerman invites us to think about our character’s past emotional trauma and how it affects them in the present.
This is a really useful exercise for deepening any character in any length of story. Use it for a character from a novel, or for the character in a short story. It can’t help but make your story more rich.
And remember: emotion is the key to a reader connecting with your story.
The Prompt
Emotional trauma is an experience, or set of experiences, that can change your character in fundamental ways, altering their personality, embedding fears in their minds, affecting their ability to connect and trust others, and steering their needs and desires during your story.
Write about a wounding experience from your character’s past that changed them into who they are today.
HINT: most wounding experiences involve someone close to the character as it is the people closest to us who are able to do the most psychological damage.
Angela Ackerman is a writing coach, international speaker, and co-author of The Emotion Thesaurus: a Writer’s Guide to Character Expression and four other bestselling writing guides. A proud indie author, her books are available in five languages, sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors and psychologists around the world.
Angela is also the co-founder of the popular site, Writers Helping Writers, as well as One Stop For Writers, an innovative online library built to help writers elevate their storytelling.
I’m steeped in (as well as 6th Grade homework) Lisa Cron’s fabulous latest book Story Genius, in which she makes the compelling point that you cannot begin to tell your character’s story until you know about their past.
It’s a delightfully obvious (and surprisingly overlooked) observation that ought to be front and center in every writing class. So here we go.
The Prompt
Interview a character from one of your stories. Find out as much as you can about their past and what formed the character they possess on Page One of their story.
One of the biggest problems in fiction is when a writer creates nice characters and then doesn’t want to hurt them. Today, let’s make it hurt!
The prompt
Torture your protagonist
Tips
This may come easily to some of you, so you don’t need to read any further. If you’re already good at torturing your protagonist. Just go and get writing!
For the rest of us, there’s a temptation to let our characters be funny and nice and lovable. We don’t want to make unsympathetic. However, if they’re too perfect, they’re not interesting.
Let’s think back to the earlier story, where I asked you to create a flawed protagonist. Wasn’t that fun? You can still have a sympathetic character by letting them be terrible at one thing, especially if they’re very, very good at a lot of other things.
You want the reader to root for your character and the won’t if she’s perfect.
Torturing your character doesn’t really mean doing terrible things to them. It just means separating them from their goals and desires.
Remember my story about the person who wants the chocolate cake? She’s witty and feisty and could be running around the world getting everything she wants, but the real story doesn’t start until she separated from her heart’s desire: the chocolate cake. I could write all day about my witty-and-feisty character and eventually you would stop reading, if I didn’t torture her little bit.
Think about your character’s desires their wants and needs. How can you separate them from the things they want, at least temporarily.
It can be their own internal demons that are keeping them from what they want. Or it can be an antagonistic force such as a natural disaster. Or it can be an antagonistic character such as an loving, but overbearing mother. Or it can be a straight-up villain.
Did you torture your character today? Leave a comment telling us what you did to your character and if it came naturally to you or if this is something new. If you are ignoring these prompts and writing your own stories, leave a comment and let us know how it’s going!
Today we’re taking your readers on an emotional ride!
The prompt
Write a story designed to elicit specific emotions in the reader
Tip
In looking back at your stories this month, have you noticed that you are better at eliciting certain emotions than others? Perhaps you’re good at scaring people. Perhaps you’re good at writing tearjerkers. Perhaps you good at making people laugh. Or making people feel the beauty of the situation or your words.
Even if you’re not sure what you’re best at, pick an emotion today that you would like to make your readers feel. This is your chance to go all “Stephen King”, or “50 Shades Of Gray”.
In order to elicit emotions in readers you’re going to have to make them care about your character. Then you have to put that character in peril.
Peril doesn’t necessarily mean dangling them off a cliff. Just remember to focus on what they really, really want…and then take it away from them.
The more you can keep the reader inside the heart of your character the stronger their reaction will be.
Leave a comment to let us know which emotion you went for today. And remember, if you’re enjoying these prompts, why not share them?
For the past two days we’ve played with protagonists and antagonists/villains. But these are not the only characters who appear in a story.
The Prompt
Write a story that includes a sidekick
Tips
secondary characters play a vital rule in a short story: they highlight characteristics of the main character
You must resist the temptation to give a secondary character/sidekick their own interesting story in this short story. This is not a novel.
I use the word “sidekick” in the title for this post for a reason. A sidekick is an almost cartoonish, two-dimensional character. Of course this character does have a life of their own. You’re just not telling that story in this story.
The entire purpose of a sidekick is to ask the difficult questions, to let the protagonist show off, and perhaps to be rescued.
Think of Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes, or any of the assistants in the 80s episodes of Doctor Who. Their main functions are to show Sherlock Holmes and The Doctor as the geniuses they are. The sidkicks mostly slow down the brilliant characters’ pace so the reader/viewer can keep up.
Sidekicks introduce complications (think of all those twisted ankles and all the times a sidekick blunders into a trap and has to be rescued).
Sidekicks ask the difficult questions questions (such as “why don’t we just got back in the TARDIS and fly away?”).
They can also point out your characters flaws something that the modern Doctor Who’s assistants do very nicely.
Write a story in which you give your sidekick who can show off the protagonists best features, draw attention to their flaws, and perhaps even cause complications in the story.
Leave a comment to let us know how you got on today. What kind of sidekick did you write? Or, if you’re using your own prompts, how’s the challenge going? What are you writing? What’s going well?
Today we’re moving on to another element of story: your protagonist
The Prompt
Write a story with the flawed protagonist
Tips
This is kind of a cheat because every protagonist should have a flaw, but today we’re going to focus on that.
Characters are interesting for many reasons. They can be interesting because we identify with them, because we don’t like them, because they’re better than us at something, because they have some special gift, many reasons. But they are not interesting if they are perfect.
Think about Luke Skywalker, the hero of the Star Wars original trilogy. He has a gift, but is really annoying at the beginning of the story. He’s whiny. He’s immature. He’s rash. He puts other people in danger, all because he’s bored. All of which means that he has an interesting character arc on which to travel.
In the Amelia Peabody mysteries Amelia is ahead of her time: a brilliant Egyptologist, she’s rich, she has a fabulous husband, she’s very confident… she’s also hysterically self delusional, and fails to admit any of her own faults, while pointing out those of everyone else, at all times. She is a fun character, not because of the stuff she’s good at, but because of the stuff she doesn’t even realize she’s bad at.
Who can you write about today? Write a list of their attractive qualities and then give them one big weakness. It doesn’t have to be a fatal, heroic flaw that’s going to cause their downfall, although it can be if that’s what you want to write. It could be something as simple as Hermione Granger, being a bit of a pain in the neck, even though she’s so clever. In the first Harry Potter book, that flaw isolates her from her friends at the very moment when she needs them.
Concoct a scenario for your character where they get to show off their good talents but where their flaw is going to cause them problems. Then, write your way out of it.
If you get stuck at any point simply start a new paragraph with the words “And because of that…” and continue writing. Do this at least three times, then resolve the situation and you’ll have a complete story.
Remember, use these tricks, and then clean them up in the rewrite. It’s not like you got anything else to do in the month of June, is it?
Leave a comment to tell us what flaw you chose for you protagonist. Got any tips on how to keep writing as we head in to the middle of the month? Share them here!
Write a story about a character as unlike you as you can manage
Tips
All those characteristics about yourself that you thought of yesterday? Age, gender, etc. Today were going to throw them out of the window and you’re going to write a story about a character who is diametrically opposed to all of those things.
If you wrote about a woman yesterday today, you write about a man. If you wrote about a middle-aged person yesterday, today you write but someone very young or very old.
When trying to get inside the head of this person, it can be useful to think of someone you actually know who is very different from you. Think of someone who does things that you would never do, that you despise, or that you secretly admire. Start with their external actions (what do they do when someone cuts them off in traffic that is so different from what you do, for example.) Backtracked from there to try to figure out what is going on in their head and their heart in that moment.
Put this character in a situation where there is conflict or stress and where their reactions are going to be really different from how you would react. Write the reactions, and as you’re doing so, unpack the story behind this person.
Don’t worry about trying to have a clever plot in this story. It can be something as simple as: this person gets cut off in traffic and how they react. The point of this exercise is to investigate the psyche of somebody very different from you. There’s a danger in always writing characters that are too sympathetic or similar to yourself.
Writing about somebody you dislike or someone unlike you can be very difficult. To make them more sympathetic, give them something there really, really good at. They might be charismatic. They might be really good engineering. But everyone has some areas where they are competent even if they are incompetent in every other sphere that matters to you!
This is not an exercise in writing a villain. This is an exercise in writing someone very different from yourself. It could be someone you admire.
Leave a comment, letting us know what you did with this prompt!
Think about the things that make you you: Gender, family roles, occupation, age, body type, religion, hobbies, outlook, genetic heritage. Are you curious, or cautious? Musical or tone deaf? Extroverted or introverted? Content or endlessly searching?
Put this character, who is both you and not you, into a situation that you might run across in your everyday life. Or put them into a situation you would like to find yourself in. For example, I am always dreaming up new business ideas. I don’t have the time or ability to pursue any of them, but I love to daydream about the businesses I could run if I had a thousand lifetimes. Take something that you care about — something that you daydream about anyway — and put your character into that situation
Now, you have to make something happen, so think about the ways that the situation could go spectacularly wrong. This can be funny, like Fawlty Towers, or serious like the TV show 24. It depends on your preferences and what you feel confident writing.
Again, you’re not writing a feature film or novel. We don’t have much space here. So don’t spend much time setting up the situation. You can start by having the character talk directly to the reader. Or you can plunge directly into the action. Or start with something cheesy like “it all started to go wrong when…”. Do whatever you need to do to get you into the story. It can all be fixed in the rewrite. (Or ignored for the rest of your life, this is a story just for you.)
Now that your character’s in trouble, how do they react? Do they react the same way you would? Do they react the way you wish you would if you weren’t so polite? Are they cooler than you? More skilled? More James Bond like? What are the consequences either way?
This is a really fun exercise. It captures all the best things about writing: What if…? The ability to live multiple lives in one life, is the gift of being a writer. It’s the ability to be better than you are, or worse than you are, without any of the consequences. Let loose with this exercise. Have some fun (and yes that does include doing terrible things to people if that’s how your story comes out. Don’t worry that you’re a psychopath. You have my permission to be bad.)
Go!
Leave a comment to know what you let your alter ego get up to, today!
A [adjective, unlike you] [noun, like you] decides to [action – something reasonable] except [something unreasonable]
It’s getting late in the month. Either you’re ticking along with no problems or you’re getting a little desperate by now. Either way, this fill-in-the-blanks prompt should help you come up with a story today.
The Prompt
A [adjective, unlike you] [noun, like you] decides to [action – something reasonable] except [something unreasonable]
Tips
Here’s my example: a fitness-obsessed 40-something woman decides to train for a marathon except her husband objects.
I’ll have to drill down into why her husband might object, what kind of woman is she, what she thinks running a marathon will do for her, what she will never do, what she needs to do, what the state of her marriage is now and will be if she ignores his objections, if that matters to each of them. Then I’ll have to decide on her voice, whether she is strident, aggressive, funny, charming, wheedling, whiney, a doormat. I’ll have to decide when to enter this story (when she tells him her plans, when she’s already half way through the race reflecting on how she got there, when she’s in divorce court, retelling the story…)
You can flip the ‘unlike me’ and ‘like me’ and the ‘reasonable/unreasonable’ tags if that makes the process more fun for you.
Even the most mundane of ideas can become something wonderful if you think hard enough about pieces and let the characters come alive.
Don’t over-write this. Think hard, then imply. Remember, if you’re telling a story to your best friend, you don’t give her much backstory, and you certainly don’t give her both sides of the story. Write this story that way.
This story will work best if you let one voice ring out strongly, with all the whitewashing and self-justification we do without noticing!
Resolve the Conflict In Your Story Based on Your Main Character’s Abilities
This is inspired by an idea shared on the Writing Excuses podcast. They did a wonderful series of shows about how to make a character more sympathetic without making them inhumanely good/evil. Check out the first of the shows.
Conflict can be “Oh no! The world’s about to end! How do we stop it/escape?” or it can be “Oh no, my mother-in-law’s coming for the holidays and she’s insufferable”, or it can be “I need to do something I really don’t want to do because…”
One way to create sympathy for a main character and keep the conflict in the story, is to use the character’s abilities (or lack thereof) to show how they are a good fit, a mediocre fit, or a terrible fit for the challenges they face.
The Prompt
Resolve the Conflict In Your Story Based on Your Main Character’s Abilities
Tips
Your character can be a good fit for the challenges but hindered by circumstances (Superman and his need to keep his true identity hidden).
Your character can be a poor fit for the challenge he faces, but willing to give it a shot (Bilbo, in The Hobbit. He is certainly not the Burglar Gandalf claims him to be, but he gives his best to the adventure, in spite of being a poor fit for the life).
Your character is a reluctant hero. He has the skills and the opportunity, but doesn’t particularly want to be a hero (Bruce Willis in The Fifth Element — in fact, Bruce Willis in a lot of roles!). What inner conflict is stopping him from helping resolve the outer conflict? What will change his/her mind?
What if your character is really, really good at one thing and is suddenly thrust into a world/situation where all their skills mean nothing…at first? Can they adapt? Can they find a way to use their skills? Can they partner up with someone whose skills compliment their own? Can you find a way to let them use their existing skills in the end, so they don’t seem like a pathetic character?
What if your character is the sweetheart who glues together an otherwise incompatible team of highly skilled, irascible experts?
Make us root for or against a character by showing how they employ their talents (or fail to).
Today we’re focusing on the heart of any story: the characters. We often refer to the protagonist as the ‘hero’ whether or not he/she is heroic. Today, however, we’re going to take that word literally:
The Prompt
Write A Story With A Heroic Protagonist
Tips
A hero is not necessarily someone with a cape and superpowers. A hero can be someone who is exceptionally talented in one or more areas and who uses those talents.
A hero can be great at one thing and ordinary (or clueless) in other areas: Adrian Monk is almost incapable of living a normal life, but his OCD and his fears make him an exceptional detective; Elizabeth Bennett is not rich or beautiful or titled, or any of the other things that mattered at the time, but Jane Austen’s famous heroine endures because she is witting and quick and funny; Slippery Jim in Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat is a rogue, but a charming rogue.
Think about characters you love from fiction. What is it that you like about them? Are they funny? Smart? Brave? Brooding? Tortured?
Think about characters you dislike. Why? Are they whiny? Angry? Glib? Uncaring?
What raises the feature you love about that character to the next level?
Think about people in your life that you love or abhor. What features and characteristics do they have that you envy/loathe?
How could you create a character that has a stand-out characteristic (one that you love) that shows the reader the best of humanity? That gives the reader something to aspire to?
What mannerisms will your character have? What expressions will they use? How will they talk?
What single adventure could this character have in a story that highlights their most heroic feature?
This is a great list of plot twists to avoid, found in the Writers’ Guidelines for an Australian magazine.
(The rest of the guidelines are good, too. I like the bit where they point out that too many characters and a story gets confusing. They recommend topping out at four.)
Although, it has to be said, the thrawn and perverse side of me is very tempted to write a series of stories in which one or all of these things happen, just to see if I could have fun with them. (Hey, the poison one worked for The Princess Bride…)
Following up on the recent theme of emotional writing prompts, here’s one that’s good for a laugh.
smile! by Lin Pernille Photography LLC, on Flickr
The Prompt
Write A Story That Features Laughter
Tips
Laughter can be cleansing, hysterical (in a bad way), nervous, comradely, cruel. Pick one, or cram as many as possible into one story.
Think about the physicality of laughter at the moment it happens.
Think about the emotions the memory of the laughter (happy or cruel) elicits later.
Use the moment of laughter as a plot device. It is the start or the end of something. It is some place/time/state your character wants to get back to or escape from.
If you’re showing laughter-following-a-joke, take a tip from Joss Whedon’s Firefly. He has a couple of scenes where he skips the joke and cuts straight to the characters laughing uproariously at whatever was said just off camera. That saves the audience from having to analyze the joke (“was it really that funny?”) and allows them to watch how the laughing characters react and interact. It allows for the sense of catharsis from the laughter without having to share the writer’s sense of humor. (Watch for the dinner scene in the episode Out Of Gas, around the 5:00 min mark).
Go!
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Born in the Caribbean, Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling author. His novels and over 50 short stories have been translated into 17 languages and he has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. 
Today’s prompt was inspired by an exercise in Donald Maass’s latest book 
Lisa Cron’s Story Genius (referenced in the video)
