Advice To Writers, part 1

Writing is hard. It's not just daydreaming about a character, or brief flashes of ideas that someone could turn into a great book...someday. There are probably as many different ways of writing, at least different processes and paths authors take, as there are writers. The final products, however, in many ways share some very central characteristics.

All good fiction begins with characters who are three dimensional. This requires thought, research, and planning. In some ways, all good writers are LARPers. You need to get in the mind of your characters, but if you don't know where they came from, who their first love was, what their home-life was as children, whether they hated their first boss, what their favorite type of food is, then it's harder to formulate interesting reactions to scents, sounds, events, and people in the present of the story. If their thoughts are limited to what takes place in the story, that is, if they don't have sense memory or impressions formed by experiences outside the scope of the book, then they lose depth. Basically, every action has to have a reason, an impulse or driving motive, behind it. You have to ask, "Why is character xxxx doing this? Why now? Why this way? In this place? With this other person? TO this person?"

Perhaps the hardest part about writing is figuring out how much is necessary for the story, how much the readers need to know in order to experience the action of the story first-hand. It's hard not to load things down with backstory, especially if you've gone to all the trouble of making an elaborate backstory, of doing the research, and planning things.

Good writers can take these three dimensional characters and, via the trials and obstacles they face in the course of the story, explore some aspects of the human experience, or of the human condition. The characters face questions, existential crises, and in looking for, and sometimes finding, answers to said questions, we as readers learn something about ourselves, too.

The final product has to engage the reader, pull them in for a first-hand experience, to make them think and feel, and wonder, and hope. When fiction's at its best, whether literary or genre fiction, it accomplishes this. The depth of the characters is essential to this.