by Ally Carter
Holly Black was the person who first taught me about OPEN WORLD FANTASY versus CLOSED WORLD FANTASY, and I think, even if you’re writing realistic fiction, you need to keep these concepts in mind.
In an open world fantasy, the fantasy elements are pretty much out in the open. A lot of comic books and superhero stories fall into this category. After all, everyone in the Marvel universe knows that Tony Stark is Iron Man and that there’s a government organization called SHIELD.
Closed world fantasies, on the other hand, exist behind a kind of curtain. Harry Potter might be the best example of this. In Harry’s world, there’s a whole parallel universe, complete with governments and banks and hospitals—everything we have in this world—but with magic. It exists right beneath our noses and no one has a clue.
In a way, all contemporary authors are writing closed world fantasies. We’re all writing the ordinary, regular world, but we’re taking our readers behind a curtain into a part of it they’ve never experienced for themselves.
After all, nobody knows that the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women is really a school for spies. Nobody knows that a network of amazing art thieves and con artists is being run by a teenage girl out of a brownstone in Brooklyn. Nobody knows that the ruling family of a (fictional) European country is actually embroiled with a powerful secret society and one teenage girl has the power to bring them both down.
This is what I write. And this is how I write it—by asking these questions:
What are the things that are true for everyone in the world?
What are the things that are true for just my characters?
And what are the things that are secret—that only my characters know?
So no matter whether you’re writing witches or mean girls, remember that writing realistic fiction doesn’t mean that everything has to be 100 percent realistic. It’s still a story. It’s still fiction. And it’s your job to think about what’s going to make it feel vibrant. What’s going to make it feel real—not just in the sense of “this is a place I know” but also in the sense of “this is a place I want to know”?
What’s a world that is going to result in the most interesting characters?
Because if you change the world, you will change the characters …
And we’re going to talk about that next.
What’s the best writing advice you ever got?
Dhonielle Clayton To make sure what I’m writing is always true! Find some sort of truth, and lean into that.
For a lot of writers, world building is the fun part. And by all means, have fun! Create your world. Figure out your magic. Name your dragons. But remember …
1.World building isn’t just for fantasy and sci-fi writers—it’s for everyone.
2.Nothing happens in a vacuum. Whatever the elements of your world might be, make sure that those elements impact the characters and plot.
3.World building lives to support interesting characters and plots—it’s never a substitute for them.
The key to great characters is writing characters who we care about. Who we root for (or against). Who make us laugh or cry or just … feel. Because it doesn’t matter how great your plot is if we don’t care about the people involved. It doesn’t matter how rich your world is; if we don’t care about the people who live there, then we have nothing at stake.
Characters are our portals into those rich worlds. They’re how we see ourselves battling dragons or saving the day or falling in love. Characters are how we—the reader—feel like we, personally, have something at stake in this story. They’re why we cry when a beloved character dies or why our hearts race when our characters are in danger.
So what makes a good character?
Well, you’re going to get a lot of different opinions on this, but I always go back to the age-old question of nature versus nurture.
Are we products of our environments? If you take the same person and plop them down in a different sort of neighborhood or with a different kind of family, would that person grow up to be vastly different?
Or are we products of our DNA? Are some characteristics or traits just naturally ingrained in us, and it doesn’t matter if we’re raised by the richest people in town or if we grow up struggling to get by? Will we still like a certain kind of peanut butter and have the same favorite song either way?
When thinking about characters, I think it’s important for authors to consider both nature and nurture. What kind of person is that character just wired to be? And what kind of person has their world turned them into?
And then you have to show how all of that manifests itself—both the good and the bad. Is she someone who gets cranky when she hasn’t eaten? Is he someone who always remembers to buy a birthday card? Do group situations make them nervous? Or are they more comfortable when they’re lost in a crowd?
These little touches are how you make your characters feel real. And making your characters feel real is how you’re going to make people care about them.
Always.
DEAR STEPHANIE PERKINS,
How do you write a compelling hero or heroine?
I write about people who I’d like to know in real life. I give them compelling passions and interests—things that interest me, personally—and I balance them out with genuine flaws and mistakes that make me feel less alone in the world. Perfect people are boring. And irritating. I like characters who have room for growth.
The first thing I want to say about backstory is simple: Everybody has one.
Unless you’re going to start your book with your hero’s birth and follow their entire life (which I do not recommend), then there’s going to be stuff that happened before we showed up to watch. And that’s good. That’s essential. (Even for supporting characters. Especially for villains.)
Something had to make your characters the way they are when the book begins.
The stuff that goes on during the book? That’s going to make them another way.
I think a lot of new writers think about backstories and world building as a kind of checklist they can go down, giving characters dead parents or bad childhoods, terrible accidents or tragic health scares. (With maybe a few debilitating romantic encounters thrown in for good measure.)
But not all backstories are tragic or sad. Frodo Baggins had a pretty easy life until the day he had to leave home to go destroy the most powerful and dangerous ring in the world. Nothing in his backstory had turned him into the obvious person for that job. Which, by the way, is what made him the most interesting person for that job!
Still, most of us naturally gravitate toward that checklist:
What kind of stuff has your character had to endure?
But that checklist is only part of the picture, and it’s almost worthless without the second part:
What kind of coping mechanism did they develop to endure it?
Sometimes those mechanisms translate to the dark sides of a character’s personality. Think about Bruce Wayne, who saw his parents murdered and, as a result, focused all his energy on finding their killer. He grew up so intent on vengeance that he became Batman.
Sometimes those mechanisms come through in the good aspects of your character’s personality. Steve Rogers was bullied so badly as a kid that, after he became Captain America, he became obsessed with fighting for the little guy.
Whatever the case, backstory isn’t the stuff that happened to your characters. Backstory is the stuff that turned your characters into who they are right now.
So don’t tell us what the character’s backstory is right from the start. Don’t go down that checklist. Instead, show us interesting, flawed, and compelling characters and then give them a heck of a good reason for being that way.
DEAR DAVID LEVITHAN,
Do you have any tips or tricks for getting to know your characters?
I am definitely a fan of asking the questions What does your character have? and What does your character want? in tandem. It can also be helpful if you don’
t feel you know the character yet to open a blank document and freewrite in that character’s voice. Ask the questions—What’s your darkest secret? Who’s the most important person in your life and why? Do you like where you live? What have you been listening to lately? What’s something about you that everyone else gets wrong? Then see how your character answers. It’s all coming from your writing mind, of course—but sometimes a character won’t divulge everything in the course of a story. Sometimes a character needs to be asked.
In a way, I think all characters start out as archetypes. Or stereotypes. Or maybe just types.
You have the hero or heroine. The best friend. The rival. You have the queen bee and the wannabe, the musician and the Goth, the slob and the snob. But whether you’re writing a bookworm or a jock, truly great characters happen when we go beyond the type.
When the jock writes poetry. When the homecoming queen secretly writes fanfiction. When the macho guy from the wrong side of the tracks is a piano prodigy and the music buff is tone-deaf.
Great characters—and personalities—happen when our characters are more than what we have come to expect.
When I first started writing Not If I Save You First, there was a stretch of time where I was really worried about the book. I couldn’t quite figure out what tone I wanted it to have, and I didn’t quite know who these characters were (because I did know at that point that the book would have only two or three characters through most of it … and that’s a lot of book for just a couple of people to carry).
I knew I wanted to write a girl who had survived almost all alone in the Alaskan wilderness for years. I knew she was going to be tough and strong and really, really smart. But I also knew I wanted her to be funny and not the most obvious person to save the day. In short, I needed her to be someone the world might underestimate.
I thought about it for a long time. Maybe she should be a beauty queen? A pop star? A reality TV celebrity?
And then it hit me: yes. I needed her to be underestimated by the world, and to do that all she had to be was … a girl.
So I decided to make her the girliest girl to ever cut wood and gut fish and use a hunting rifle. I needed her to be the kind of girl who has her own hatchet. And I needed that hatchet to be bedazzled.
That was when I knew not just the type of character my heroine was going to be, but the ways she was going to go against type as well. That was when I knew her backstory (girl raised in rural Alaska, fighting for survival) and her personality (girl who refuses to let her circumstances beat the sparkle and life out of her).
How about supporting characters? Well, I always start by asking, Who is my main character and what are her weaknesses? What are his strengths? And then I go about the business of making sure they’re surrounded by people who will challenge and help them. I build a cast of personalities that will make my heroines and heroes—and my books—stronger.
As you start your book, you might want to also think about types of characters that you, the author, are going to need.
Are you going to need a computer genius or someone who’s good in a fight? Will the plot require someone who is fluent in a bunch of languages … or just the language of talking to the opposite sex?
And don’t forget when you’re thinking about your character’s strengths to think about their weaknesses as well. Superman is only interesting in a world in which kryptonite exists. Otherwise, he’d win every fight every time and that would never be in question—there would never be any conflict.
So it’s not enough to give us characters who are amazing. Give us characters who have room to grow and improve and change as well.
What’s the best writing advice you ever got?
Jesse Andrews Don’t stop yourself from making mistakes before you make them. Because some aren’t mistakes at all.
When and how characters are introduced is one of those things that no one will notice if you get it right—but people will notice if you get it wrong. And you might very well get it wrong on the first draft. But, hey—isn’t that what second drafts are for? Or third? Or tenth?
So many of the rules about introducing characters aren’t even really rules for writers. They’re rules for readers. And they’re rules that we don’t even know we know—we’ve just encoded them after reading books and watching movies and being told stories all of our lives. They’re the things that we’ve been trained to expect.
For example, I read a historical romance novel a while back that opened with a handsome young man sneaking out of a house in the middle of the night. The next scene showed a young woman. A lifetime of reading told me that those two people were our hero and our heroine. Except … no. Actually, the guy was the heroine’s brother. We didn’t meet the real hero for twenty more pages, and I didn’t even know he was the hero at the time because he was just one of a whole bunch of people we were meeting—and one of a whole bunch of points of view we were in.
When I was approximately fifty pages into the book, I had to go read the book’s description to figure out who the hero and the heroine were. There were just so many POV characters—and we were meeting characters in such a random order—that I couldn’t even start to get my bearings.
Authors have an unwritten contract with readers—things that readers will expect just because they’ve seen them done that way so often. Especially when meeting characters for the first time.
For example, readers have been conditioned to believe that any character with a point of view (especially early in the book) is an important character. Probably a main character! But what if they aren’t? Well, then you might want to kill them off as soon as we meet them (à la Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows) or show in some other way that this is a person who won’t be sticking around.
Most of us have also come to expect that the boy we meet first is probably the hero and/or love interest. (I have a theory that a lot of YA love-triangles-that-aren’t-really-love-triangles came about because readers were introduced to the not-love-interest first and so they encoded him as a “love interest” even when he wasn’t. Example: Gale and Katniss.)
Can you break these rules? Absolutely! Amazing authors do it all the time to great effect. But you need to have a good reason.
Setting aside the unwritten contract that authors and readers have, there are some practical tips that I find make introducing characters a little bit easier.
First, the easiest way to introduce people, places, and things is to have them all be new to your POV character as well.
It’s just about a billion times easier to explain stuff to the reader when someone also has to explain it to the hero or heroine. Can you imagine how confusing Harry Potter would have been if Harry had been brought up within the wizarding world? But he wasn’t. So we got to hear Hagrid explain about Diagon Alley and Gringotts and exactly what that letter from Hogwarts really meant.
If your POV character(s) aren’t new to the world, then you’ll need to carefully introduce people in a way that tells the reader something about who they are and the role they’ll fill in the story (best friend, love interest, enemy, frenemy) without rehashing old information.
Now, be careful! You’re going to be tempted to include a lot of information in dialogue where the characters tell each other things they both already know. Resist this temptation! Why? Because if your characters have a history, then they need to act like it. And they need to talk like it. They should have inside jokes and old grudges. They need to make your heroine gasp and hug them or maybe jump behind a potted plant and hide. You need to write as if they were alive long before the story started. You need to make your reader believe that’s true.
Another really easy rule of thumb is that, if you have a large cast, it’s probably going to be easier to have the characters trickle in.
Have you ever gone someplace and suddenly been introduced to a big group of people all at the same time? Did you find it hard to remember everyone’s names and which of the people were siblings and who was married to wh
om and which person was the computer genius and which one was going to college on a soccer scholarship?
It’s just hard to take in a lot of new people at once in real life. Meeting fictional people is like that, too.
So when I’m writing a big cast, I try to make sure everyone gets their own moment of introduction when possible. It doesn’t have to be long or complicated. It doesn’t even need its own scene. But I’d avoid mass introductions, if possible. I think your reader will thank you.
Another tip is to give everyone in the group different physical characteristics (or markers). This can make it a lot easier for your reader to differentiate between the guy with the dark hair and the guy with the tattoos and the girl with the braids, etc.
Finally, I should point out that, in some cases, some characters can (and should) be introduced long before they walk into the room. Villains, especially, are often referenced long before we meet them. So you don’t always have to meet the important characters early on in your novel, but if you want to “hold” that character’s place in your reader’s mind, you would do well to hint or reference them early on just to plant that seed.
As I said in the section before this, I think it’s important to work a few key physical characteristics in early on, largely because once a reader mentally “casts” a character, then it’s hard to change that impression. For example, if your character is a very tall, very thin brunette, then you don’t want your reader mentally casting her as a petite blond. You may never break that first mental picture. Especially if a character has physical characteristics that matter (like Harry Potter’s scar).
It’s doubly important that you let your reader know what your characters’ ethnicities are or if they have any physical features that really shape their personalities. For example, in my Gallagher Girls series, one of the characters is very petite and incredibly clumsy—two things that can pose a challenge at spy school! Another of the girls is black and is the first British student the school has ever had. So I made sure to work those facts in when we first met each of them.