For writers, making up stories is the fun part — but there’s a lot of daylight between the fun, free-association process of being inspired with an idea for a story and then actually writing that story. There’s a lot of work involved in plotting it out, making sure the logic works, building a universe for it all to happen in — and crafting characters to populate that universe and perform the actions that move the plot along.

For some, characters are the hardest part, because people are unpredictable chaos machines. You can imagine a building, or a magic system, and they will follow some basic rules you can rely on. People don’t so that, and if you create characters that follow a blueprint they won’t feel particularly real; part of what makes people people is their inherent randomness, the way they do things that surprise and frustrate and amaze you. Capturing that vibe on the page is hard work.

But it can be easier than you think. Just try modeling.

Dammit, Jim

I spoke at a college writing class a few months ago, and one of the students asked me about figuring out their characters’ voice. I suggested they try this one weird trick:

1. Think of a celebrity with a distinctive communication style. William Shatner as Captain Kirk, or Jay-Z with that weirdly compelling coughing noise he uses to punctuate his lyrics.
2. Imagine your character is speaking in the same way as you write their dialogue.

To be clear, do not try to convey Captain Kirk’s oddball rhythms. This is something you do in your head, while you’re writing. What happens, though, is that your character’s lines subtly take on those rhythms. You shape the phrases to them. It all comes alive, and if you resist the urge to make it too explicit your dialogue will have a bit of dance to it that isn’t obvious.

If you match the voice you’re using as a model to the character as closely as possible, this will also help you ensure that your characters don’t all talk with the same rhythm and phrasing, which is one of those subtle problems that are easy to overlook right up until someone points it out to you.

Of course, you have to be careful not to slip over into parody — and you don’t have to use celebrities. Have a friend or family member with a distinctive speaking cadence? A character in the neighborhood with a recognizable style? That’ll work just as well — perhaps better, since there will be no chance of your model’s subject being recognized.

Me, I just model every character on myself, since I have a such a beautiful speaking voice. Which I know because of all the hours I’ve spent talking to myself.

Yeah, yeah: It’s write what you know time again. If you’re a writer who likes to talk shop, you can’t escape it — most of us probably startle out of bed at night screaming WRITE WHAT YOU KNOWWWWWWWWW at least five times a week. And the only thing more numerous than conversations about WWYK are opinions about WWYK. Which means that I, as a self-respecting literary superstar, have to generate new opinions about it on a regular basis or risk fading into obscurity.

My basic take on WWYK has always been that it’s a good guideline to remind yourself not to rely on bullshit, but it shouldn’t be taken too literally, or your work devolves into memoir. But recently I’ve been thinking about another way of looking at WWYK: Using what you know as a starting point.

Start Here

Worrying over writing what you know assumes that you’re supposed to be some sort of expert in everything you put into your story, which simply isn’t — or doesn’t have to be — true. But you do need some level of verisimilitude, of course. Write What You Know doesn’t mean you have to be an expert in what you’re writing, it means you should draw on something you are an expert in.

So, for example, let’s say you’re writing a story about a contract killer. You are not yourself a contract killer, nor have you ever been (I assume). So how can you write what you know? Well, you’ve had a job. You know what it’s like to work for someone else, doing something you’re variably good at. Start there.

Or maybe you’re writing a story about a couple getting a divorce, but you’ve never been married, or even had a bad breakup. You’ve probably had some sort of painful experience involving someone else, an argument, a fight, a decades-long prank war involving increasingly cruel and elaborate pranks that shatter lives and destabilize civilization, something. Start there.

These things don’t have to map 1:1 to the details of your fiction. You’re just looking for a starting point, a way to take your lived-in experience and extrapolate it into something you’ve never lived. That’s how you use WWYK — you take what you know and write it into your story. It’s a starting point.

So am I sitting here wondering how I can map a lifestyle that is 75% sitting in a comfortable chair and 25% drinking pleasant adult beverages and 19% Internet rabbit holes onto cyberpunk sci-fi stories about murderous cyborgs and the desperate professional killers that fight them? You know I am, hun.

Eventually we’ll look back on the pandemic lockdown a lot of office workers are going through and notice a) a baby boom; b) a divorce boom; or c) a manuscript boom. Heck, even when I did have to trek into an office every day for eight hours, I managed to do a lot of writing on the job. When I started working from home all bets were off, as I suspect a lot of aspiring novelists are discovering today. There’s something magical about being able to nip over to an open document and write three sentences in your WIP while waiting for everyone to get their shit together on yet another conference call.

There’s also something magical about doing those calls pantsless, and having beers for lunch.

But I digress! I came here not to make lame pandemic jokes or even lamer pantsless jokes, but to talk about how writing is a valuable skill.

Not Everyone Write Good

The first thing I ever published was a joke that appeared in an issue of Highlights for Children when I was, I dunno, eight? 10? Forty? Who can remember such things. The joke was terrible (and forgotten) but I showed that fucking Highlights to everyone. It was my first taste that writing can actually convey power.

As a freelance writer, I know how easy it is to think that no one values writing. We get offered pennies for our words, are often the last people brought into a project, and it sure isn’t uncommon to have someone heavily imply — if not outright state — that the writing part is something they could easily do themselves if only they had the time for something so trivial.

This, of course, is bullshit. If you’re someone who knows how to write, you’ve no doubt experienced the sort of semi-literate, incomprehensible emails that many people send on a daily basis as they do the work they have been paid to do. So, so, so many people out there — grown adults with degrees from prestigious institutions — have no fucking idea how to write clearly and effectively, despite the fact that this is a skill that can, in fact, be acquired.

And writing is foundational. Everything begins with writing. Behind every business idea or corporate project is an email, a memo, a report, a white paper. Behind every comic book, film, and TV show is a treatment, a script, a bible. Legislation, marketing, scientific and medical research — it all starts with writing, it all requires writing. More importantly, it all requires good writing.

Anyone can learn how to write competently, but based on the shit I receive via email every day, no one bothers. And I finally come to my damn point: The world needs us, kids. It needs writers. Never forget that.

It also needs whiskey, and a lot of it, these days. Stay safe, everyone.

Writing a story is easy. You create some characters with names and recognizable human traits, you give at least one of them a conflict, and then you explore how they do or don’t get past the conflict to get where they want to be. Easy!

Of course, it isn’t that easy, as anyone who’s ever tried with a modicum of objectivity about their work has discovered. And while any aspect of the storytelling process can befuddle and frustrate, the hardest is probably characterization. There’s a reason most non-writers who have a ‘surefire idea for a hit novel’ will give you an extremely plot-heavy pitch: Plot is often the easy part in the sense that cobbling together a bunch of plot points from other stories and hanging them on a plot arc isn’t so hard. But characters can be hard.

Or, more accurately: Good, believable characters can be hard. The secret to success is motivation.

Micro Motivation

The trick of it is, there are two kinds of motivation to worry about. One is the macro stuff, the big-ticket motivation that pushes your characters through the story — like, they want revenge on the bully who ruined their life, or they want to murder their next door neighbor, or they want to save their daughter from a serial killer. This is something most writers figure out early on, the need for their characters to have a reason to be in the story in the first place.

What a lot of writers don’t figure out is the necessity of micro motivation for all the other decisions your character makes. For example, let’s say you have a character named Chuck who has just been abducted by aliens, and your plot requires him to do a bizarre dance the aliens teach him. Now, you’re god in your own story, so all you have to do is write

Chuck thought about this bizarre dance and decided he would do it. To hell with dignity!

And mission accomplished. Except, of course, that you’ve given the reader no reason why he’s decided to do this. And that can be crucial, because readers can smell when something is done Because Plot. Characters shouldn’t do things simply because the plot doesn’t move forward unless they do it. There should be a reason behind their actions.

Does that mean you have to explicitly state that reason every single time?

Chuck chose to dance, because he suddenly remembered being in high school and never dancing at the school dances where all the other kids danced. His dying mother had said, I hope you dance, so now he would dance!

It does not. Your character’s motivation should be organic, a part of them, and preferably something that doesn’t require a block of exposition to explain. Sometimes the best way to explain motivation will in fact be some quick epiphany on your character’s part, of course, but that should probably be an exception.

Then again, what do I know. I spent the whole day wearing mis-matched socks, and my pants are three sizes too large.

FOR a man with the social skills of a small goldfish and the misanthropy of a much larger person, I’ve met a lot of fellow writers over the years. At conventions, book signings, and parole hearings, I’ve discussed writing a lot, with these conversations usually beginning with me insisting I don’t know anything and concluding with a four-hour presentation by me as I attempt to explain how I write novels despite clearly being an idiot.

What my fellow writers want from me largely depends on their level of experience. Older, more experienced writers usually want my secret moonshine recipe for making liquor out of old socks. Younger writers want surprisingly precise answers to questions like how many characters am I legally allowed to have in a novel or is ‘Randy’ an acceptable name for my sentient toaster detective character? Which means I have to expend energy explaining that there are no rules, really, which then leads to a subset of question regarding how to figure all this stuff out if there are no rules.

The answer to that, invariably, has two parts. First, read. Reading a lot of other people’s fiction inside and outside your comfort zone and sphere of interest will show you some pretty amazing things, and impress upon you that the only limitation to what you can do in a story is what you can sell to your audience.

The second part is, of course, to write. Write a lot. More importantly, challenge yourself when you write. If you dream of publishing dinosaur erotica, naturally you’ll write a lot of dinosaur erotica. But you shouldn’t write only dinosaur erotica. Just as with your reading, your writing should be varied and challenging.

One technique I’ve used a lot is to restrict myself to a specific tool, like dialog, or exposition. In other words, treat your writing practice like a gym workout and concentrate on specific aspects of the craft that need work.

Don’t Skip Leg Day

The word practice throws some people off, because writing is supposed to be an explosion of emotional truth, an artistic expression. And it sure is. But so is writing a song, but no one argues that you shouldn’t learn how to play and know something about music theory — and then work every day to master techniques. It’s really not that different with writing.

In music, you practice stuff like scales, training your fingers and hands to find notes in a pattern, training your ear to notice when you’re out of key, and stretching your muscles to learn new shapes. You can do something similar with your writing by trying to write a story using just one aspect of writing mechanics.

For example, many years ago I wrote a series of short stories that were entirely dialogue. I wanted to challenge myself and see if I could write a successful story without any exposition, or stage direction, or narration. If I could shape a character on the page just from their speech. If I could avoid confusing the reader without any tags. It was a lot of fun and some of those stories turned out really well, and I learned a lot about my tics when it came to dialogue, lessons I still use today.

It’s best to think of practice like this as experiments, because there is a very good chance the end result won’t be marketable; getting something that works as a story in general is a benefit, but not the goal. The goal is to get a sense of your own level of control, and to identify (or shore up) weak spots. Have trouble with characters? Write a story that is just a character study, an obsessive neighbor observing someone. Trouble with pacing? Write a story that has a new plot twist every paragraph, for the sense of control, like you’re shifting a car’s gears while driving through the mountains. Forget about balance and artistry and just do one thing for 5,000 words, like you’re doing musical scales.

Of course, this advice is free and you get what you pay for. And consider that the other thing I practice regularly is whiskey appreciation. So, you know, it’s always a 50/50 shot whether you’re getting real writerly brilliance or the incoherent ramblings of an inebriated man.