Author: MS Manz (Page 1 of 5)

First of all, let’s get something straight. If you have trouble sitting down to your writing, if you put it off, if you struggle to get words on the page when you do manage to sit down to write; it’s not entirely your fault. Let’s get something else straight as well, though. The meme of the tortured writer completely at the whims of “the muse”, only able to write in fractured moments, adrift in the ether… that’s bullshit. The fact of the matter is that human beings (all human beings – yes, even you) are creatures of habit. Most of us, having bought into the idea of “waiting for inspiration to strike” and that “writing is hard”, have formed a habit of avoiding the work and rationalizing our procrastination.

As every self-help book ever written will tell you, though, it is entirely possible to replace bad habits with good ones. Training yourself to sit down and do the work regularly, according to a schedule, is the one simple (simple in concept, not necessarily in practice) and sure-fire way to become more productive in your art than you could ever have dreamed you’d be.

No, really.

Why a Writing Routine Matters

In any creative endeavor there is momentum. It is easier to keep going than it is to get going. The more often you schedule a writing session and then sit down and write during that scheduled time, the easier it becomes to do the same thing the next time.

It is also the case that the more you do something (provided you are paying attention to what you are doing, what works, and what doesn’t work) the better you get at doing that thing. Part of the reason we have trouble getting down to the writing at first is because we aren’t very good at it yet and that makes it harder and scarier than it should be.

A third reason to establish a schedule and stick to it is that it reduces decision fatigue. Deciding to do some writing takes mental and emotional energy, often more than we have available after a long day at work or school or whatever. Deciding to write almost always takes more energy than the actual writing itself does. If you’ve already decided to do the writing at this time on this day, however, you don’t need to worry about that energy – it’s already been spent. Just follow through with what you’ve already decided.

Finally, the use of a writing routine creates a (mental? temporal?) space where creativity can flourish. You get used to thinking creatively at certain times and in certain contexts and your brain is more likely to slip into that mode the next time the same circumstances arise.

So, let’s look at the steps that are most likely to help you set up and maintain a regular writing routine.

First Step – Assess Your Current Schedule

Before anything else, it’s important to figure out where you are starting from and what resources you have at your disposal. By resources, of course, I’m speaking in terms of time and energy.

Block out your current non-negotiables on an empty calendar app such as Google calendar or similar. These are the things that have to happen every week whether you want them to or not – things like work or school, eating, and personal hygiene. You don’t have to get too granular here, just make sure you leave enough time to get done the things that need to get done.

Be realistic here. Don’t tell yourself you can finish your lunch in 15 minutes every day if it’s actually going to take you an hour. Likewise, make sure to check every week or two to make sure your estimates are accurate, and that you haven’t missed out something that really should be blocked in on the calendar.

Once you have your non-negotiable items blocked out, look for pockets of unallocated time where you can consistently write. Make sure to account for energy levels. Are you more alert and focused in the morning? Prioritize mornings. Do you have more brain power in the evening? That’s where you should be looking first, then. Also, don’t fall into the trap of insisting on big stretches of time. You might surprise yourself with how much you can accomplish in shorter chunks once you get used to settling in and getting down to business more efficiently.

Step Two – Set Clear Writing Goals

You should be setting both short and long term goals. Set daily or weekly word count goals (whatever makes sense for you) as well as longer project-based goals such as completing a novel or (x) number of short stories within a longer timeframe. For the longer-term goals make sure to allow a bit of wiggle room to account for circumstances beyond your control, but as long as you stick to your short-term goals you’ll usually find that the long-term ones more or less take care of themselves.

Standard advice for goal setting applies here as well. Set specific goals. “Write 500 words a day” is a much better way to phrase it than “work on my novel”. You should also work in some sort of accountability. Sharing your deadlines (and how well you followed them) with a writing partner or interested friend can go a long way towards keeping you accountable.

Step Three – Create a Dedicated Writing Space

Setting aside a place to write is arguably just as important as setting aside the time. Ideally you want a quiet, distraction-free space dedicated to writing and nothing else. Barring that, finding a less ideal space can also work, provided that you consistently use that space to write. This helps form the mental habit of getting writing done when you are in that space.

Once you’ve chosen the place where you’ll do the writing, it’s vital that you keep it organized. Keeping your writing tools organized and easily accessible helps reduce the inertia you feel when you are starting to write. The easier it is to get started, the more likely you are to do so.

Step Four – Choose the Right Tools for Your Writing

And speaking of writing tools, make sure you are using the right ones. Some people prefer to work digitally, some prefer an analog vibe. Myself, I use a blend of the two. I plan my writing with pen and paper, and then move everything to Scrivener for the actual prose. I find I think more creatively on paper, but my typing speed is many times faster than my handwriting, and I hate feeling slowed down when the prose is flowing.

If you want to work digitally, Scrivener is the defacto king of the hill for longform writers. If you work collaboratively or across multiple devices Google Docs might just be your huckleberry. If you have multiple projects on the go at once you may want to look at project management tools such as ClickUp (what I use), Asana, Trello, or Basecamp.

If you prefer an analog workflow, you’ll want to invest in some decent notebooks, pens (I recommend the uniball Eye 0.5 gel rollers – UB150), planners, and index cards (for scene arranging).

One tool many of us forget all about is something to track how much writing we are actually doing. Digitally that can be a simple spreadsheet with dates and word counts. Analog-ally, a writing journal or even just a desk or wall calendar where you write down how many words you managed to produce on a given day. You might find it helpful to include some contextual information about your mood or other factors that may have influenced your productivity for better or worse. Tracking helps you to identify what things help and what things hinder your ability to pump out the wordage.

Step Five – Build a Routine That Works for You

Now that you’re ready to start improving your consistency, it can be a very good idea to start small. It’s like if you were to start going to the gym. You wouldn’t walk into your local Planet Testosterone™ on day one expecting to “pound fat stacks” or whatever the kids are saying these days. You’d start with some light exercises, try out a few of the machines, and just see how it goes.

Same thing here.

Don’t sit down to your first day of consistent writing expecting to pump out half a novel in a morning, or to put in 12 hours of solid writing. You’ll pull a prose muscle and be finished before you’ve really begun.

All this is to say – start small. Plan to put in 10-15 minutes a day for the first few days and concentrate on showing up for those 10-15 minutes each and every day without fail. You want to build a writing habit and that means consistency. Don’t try to do too much at first, and don’t focus on quality, like at all. First drafts exist for a reason. The only thing that matters is that you actually sit down (or stand up if that’s your thing) and do the amount of writing you planned to do when you planned to do it.

While you are in this “feeling out” stage it might also be a good idea to experiment with different durations and different times of the day to find out when you are more productive and when less. If you find that 10-15 minutes isn’t working well, in particular if it takes you 9.5-14.5 minutes just to get going, try extending the duration. If your set timeframe is ending and you are still writing away, keep going. See how long feels right to you and start trying to schedule for that length of time.

Step Six – Overcome Common Writing Obstacles

I once got into an online argument (on Quora of all places) with a very well-known and successful fantasy writer who shall remain nameless, over the existence of “writer’s block”. Her claim was that there is no such thing as writer’s block and that what’s really happening is that you just don’t know your story well enough or something like that. My point was that it doesn’t matter what you call it, telling new writers that it doesn’t exist is less than helpful. She blocked me more or less immediately, thereby proving that at least one type of writer’s block certainly exists.

If you are dealing with a block – you sit down to write and nothing comes out – there are a few things you can try. Simply setting a time limit on your writing session can often help. You aren’t writing today, you are writing for the next 30 minutes.

Likewise, mentally reducing the scope of what you’re working on can be useful. Instead of writing a novel, you are writing a scene, or a bit of dialogue, or a description of that room, or whatever. Focusing down on a smaller piece of a bigger project can make it feel more manageable and help lower the stakes.

Also, try to identify (and, as far as possible, eliminate) distractions. Social media, and your smartphone in general, are the deadliest of poisons to creativity. Ban them from your writing sessions. If necessary, there are apps you can install on your computer and phone that will disable whatever things you want disabled for a certain length of time. Do whatever it takes.

And as I said before, focus on consistency rather than quality. Hemmingway’s comment that the first draft of anything is shit needs to be your mantra here. Of course it’s shit. It’s supposed to be. So sit down to write terrible prose for however long you decided to write. You can (and will) fix it later and make it lovely. Let your first draft be a first draft.

Step Seven – Maintain Flexibility and Adapt Your Routine

Life is unpredictable and, while it’s important to make and stick to a schedule, it’s also important to roll with the punches life throws your way. Consistency is vital, but so is adapting to changing circumstances. You planned to write for an hour this morning but something came up to prevent that? Reschedule to the afternoon or the evening and make sure to stick to the new schedule.

Also, don’t be afraid to change things up on purpose. Consistency is a necessary component of productivity, but variety is the spice of life. Getting into a rut does nobody any good, so think about consistently varying your schedule.

Oh, and when you are setting your schedule, don’t forget to add in some breaks. Celebrity neuroscientist (yes, that’s a thing now) Andrew Huberman will happily tell you that the average human capacity for deep mental work hovers at around 90 minutes, so if you are planning to write for longer than that, schedule in some breaks appropriately. If you start to feel burnt out, also take a break – even an unscheduled one. Burnout sucks and can set you back much farther than you might think when it comes to getting your writing done.

Step Eight – Celebrate Your Progress

Since you are tracking your progress anyway (you are tracking your progress, right?) remember to celebrate your milestones. You wrote every day for a week? For 2 weeks? For a month? Huzzah! Reward yourself in a way that works for you. You finished that chapter or, *gasp* an entire novel!? Give yourself a high five!

As time goes on and writing moves from work to habit to reflex, make sure to look back at your tracking and see how far you’ve come. Acknowledge your growth as a writer and as a productive, creative person.

You rock!

This hasn’t always been the case, but when it comes to modern fiction it’s an inviolable truth that its your characters who make or break your story. Readers are happy to forgive any number of unforgivable plot sins and will cheerfully overlook absurd consistency errors and even *gasp* second rate prose – just so long as you can get them to care about your characters.

If you can create characters that feel real and complex, characters that drive the story rather than characters that are driven, characters that resonate with your readers and allow them to form an emotional connection (be it love or hate), you are most of the way to a successful story.

To that end, here are 7 tips to help ensure that your characters jump off the page and into the hearts and minds of your readers.

1. Understand Your Character’s Core

There are three foundational elements to any character and, before you start faffing about deciding what sort of socks they wear, how they style their hair, or what their favorite hot dog toppings are, it’s pretty important that you figure these three elements out. They are, of course, what the character wants, what the character needs, and what stands in the way of the character achieving either or both of those things.

If you’ve read any of the approximately 1.7 buh-jillion books out there on character development you’ll likely be familiar with these things already, but that’s because they are so fundamental to the topic that you can’t discuss it without talking about them.

These three elements are so foundational in fact, that the very first thing you should do when starting a new story is to jot something down for each of them. For both your protagonist and your antagonist. You can change things later if necessary (i.e. if the story requires it) but just having something in mind for your main characters’ wants, needs, and obstacles will really help you hone in on what the story is about (and what it isn’t about).

2. Create a Multi-dimensional Personality

The goal in any story is to have characters who feel like real people, and real people are usually defined not by their consistencies but rather by their contradictions. A kind old man putting out food for the neighborhood cats doesn’t stand out. He’s a kind old man, of course he feeds the cats. Meh. A grumpy old man who seems to hate everyone but is seen putting out food for stray animals, though… now that is interesting.

A three dimensional character’s personality doesn’t point in one single direction. In the real world, personality is less compass needle and more tangled ball of yarn. By simply making sure that some of your character’s traits are inconsistent, bent back on themselves, or even tangled up a bit, you’ll be much more likely to write interesting and memorable characters.

I wanted to provide a counterexample – a story where the writer didn’t follow this advice and wrote about boring, one-dimensional characters – but I can’t. I’m certain that I’ve read hundreds such stories, but I can’t for the life of me remember any of them. Funny that.

3. Develop Their Backstory and History

In many ways, people are the sum of all their experiences. Who we are today is the direct result of all of the things that we have done and that have happened to us. Who your characters are and what they say and do in response to the events in your story is largely dependent on what they’ve already been through, so it’s important to understand what pivotal moments in their lives have shaped them into the people they are today.

Keep in mind that these events don’t have to be of cosmic importance to the world at large. They just have to have been important to your character at the time – positively or negatively. Being rejected by a romantic prospect, working hard towards a goal and achieving it (or failing to achieve it), being too afraid to take a chance and try something new, or being brave enough to try – all of these are good examples of the sorts of events that can really shape who a person (or a character) becomes.

One other thing to remember when it comes to character backstory… it’s important that you know what has shaped your characters, it isn’t necessarily important that your readers know. If it is important that they know, then it is almost always the case that this information should be provided naturally through dialogue or (maybe) a flashback. Avoid the temptation to info-dump on your readers with a whole bunch of exposition about where your characters have come from and what they’ve gone through. You want to tell a story, not explain a story.

4. Build Emotional Depth and Complexity

A character’s strengths should be aspirational for your readers – the sorts of things that most people want to be themselves. Their weaknesses should be relatable – the sorts of things that we all fall prey to from time to time. A good character has both strengths and weaknesses. That means that a strong character should stumble from time to time and screw things up. A weak character needs to have moments of strength, moments when they stop being a punching bag and start punching back. Or at least try to.

Not only that, but their strengths and weaknesses should change somewhat over the course of the story. That’s not to say then need to be completely different people at the end of the story than they were at the start, but they do need to grow and change (more on that in tip 7) or at least have their strengths and weaknesses re-contextualized in light of the events of the story. What initially seemed to be a weakness turns out to be a strength in the right situation, for example.

One of the best ways to show the complexity of your character’s personality is to make sure that they face a combination of internal and external conflicts. An example of this in action would be a character who finds that the man she loves is exactly what is standing in the way of her biggest goal. Having the characters want (from tip 1) interfere with their need (also from tip 1) is a great way to set up a very natural sort of complexity. What we want in life (chocolate cake) is frequently not what we need (to lose weight). What we want, more often than not, gets in the way of what we need (stupid cake). These are the kinds of conflicts that most readers can relate to and sympathize with and they make your characters feel more real.

5. Make Their Relationships Matter

So far we’ve discussed characters in isolation, but isolation is not a character’s natural habitat. When we present our characters to our readers it’s in the context of a story, where they are bumping into and interacting with all sorts of other characters. The way your characters interact with other people is the most powerful way of showing your readers who those characters are and what they value. What does your character want out of their relationships? How do they go about getting it? How successful or unsuccessful are they?

It’s also worth pointing out that relationships aren’t always smooth and uncomplicated. In fact, in a story they should really not be. A story without conflict isn’t a story at all. Story is conflict. This should be reflected (to a certain extent) in your characters relationships with the people around them.

6. Give Them a Distinct Voice and Mannerisms

Your characters should have their own unique voices. The way they express themselves, from word choice to pronunciation to when they do and don’t say something at all is a big part of who they are and should derive naturally from their personality, their background, and their emotional state in the moment. Do they speak formally, casually, or colloquially? Are they terse or long-winded? Do they have any little quirks, mannerisms, or particular phrases they use that are noteworthy? Do they have an accent?

All of these elements can help your character to stand out and feel more real, but use them judiciously and go light on the gas when depicting them to your reader – especially with accents. The more you lean into a dialect or accent in your text, the harder it will be for your reader to actually read your story. Think of it like seasoning for a dish you’re cooking. You should use as little as you can in order to get the effect you want.

One very important aspect to this that I don’t see written about nearly enough is that your character’s voice should be distinct not just from the other characters in the story, but also from your own. It is very common for beginning writers to treat their characters as mouthpieces for their own views and ideas. The things your characters say and do should be true to who they are, not to who you are.

7. Allow for Growth and Change

As mentioned briefly before, compelling characters (with some notable exceptions**) need to change in some meaningful way from the beginning of the story to the end. If the events of the story are important than they should have some impact on the people who experienced them. If there’s no impact then how meaningful can the events really be? If nothing else, the climax of the story should involve some resolution, either positive or negative, of the character’s quest to achieve their want and/or need (tip 1). If they achieve or permanently fail to achieve that goal, they can’t help but be changed, if only in that they must now have a new goal.

More interesting, though, is to have your characters confront their flaws, fears, and desires more consciously. If you re-contextualize their strengths or weaknesses, how does that change how they see and interact with the world around them? If they have some trait that holds them back (internal conflict), do they manage to overcome it or does it cause their downfall in the end? As readers we find meaning in a story by how it changes the people who live the story. Characters who never change render a story meaningless.

** the exceptions to this are almost exclusively recurring characters in episodic stories – Sherlock Holmes for example. Sherlock never really changes as a result of his adventures, but the people around him do (Watson, for example). Detective fiction is one of the few examples of a modern story form that is largely plot driven rather than character driven and what works there is unlikely to work elsewhere.

Conclusion

Strong, memorable characters are multi-dimensional, emotionally complex, and have a clear arc that drives the story forward. Don’t be afraid to experiment and revise. Character development is an ongoing process that can, and should evolve as you write. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and compelling, three-dimensional characters are seldom born in the first draft.

As with everything else in your story, try things out and don’t be afraid to try something else if the first thing isn’t working. The tips above should give you a good start towards finding something that works for you.

If you found this useful or interesting, don’t forget to subscribe. You’ll get a weekly email digest of whatever I’ve posted that week so you don’t miss any other entertainingly useful stuff. In the meantime, happy writing, may the words flow freely, and may some of them be the right ones.