we Need more characters in media who are disabled just because their body did that. having disabled characters at all is so rare and usually they were injured in some disaster and they Should still exist but like !! as someone who slowly became disabled for no apparent reason. i want character like me, too
Some ways that difficulty with change / attachment to routine impacts me, an autistic person, that aren't keeping a strict daily or weekly routine:
Not every autistic person is the same, and what does or doesn't bother me has no real bearing on what does or doesn't bother other autistic people. One of the key things to note here, though, is that in basically all of these cases the issue is not that I dislike the change being made, it's that I struggle with the fact that a change is being made.
If these do bother you, one of the things that's helped me a lot is to force myself to go through the mental exercise of whether the issue is that I dislike/disagree with the change or whether my issue is just the fact that it's changing. Do I have a reason to want it to stay the same beyond the fact that I dislike change?
And sometimes the answer is yes. In the case of the first work example, there were suggestions that I fundamentally disagreed with and thought that our original plan was better, whether because of content or because of required level of effort in the time we had. But there were a lot of suggestions that I realized were right and doable. I could only distinguish those two because I forced myself to parse them out.
Sometimes you won't be able to work through this, whether because you don't have time or it's beyond your emotional regulation at that moment. That's okay! But figuring out why you're reacting can really help.
My redesign hot take is that if you’re aiming to “desexualize” a female character, don’t make her boobs smaller. You’re implying a lot here.
Instead of shrinking her boobs, try:
There are probably lots more options too! I’m not an artist! Just a person with a big chest and back pain!
To the point in this post, if you generally only writen men, I highly recommend trying to write from the point of view of some female characters on occasion. Not just to broadly diversify your writing, but because it will help you write non-point of view female character better as well.
Once you're writing from a character's point of view, it's a lot easier to feel connected to their motivations and their personality. I often see people say that they don't feel as connected to female characters' motivations or characterization, and that's part of what holds them back from writing female characters. Practicing writing from female characters' point of view (either specific side characters you have or random female OCs or other characters) will be helpful in sussing out what is this character versus what is something you're writing a character doing because that's how you think female characters "work".
This may sound like odd advice, but I think it's important to remember that your character does not need to be smart.
Because there's often a lot of focus on characters, especially protagonists, having agency and pushing the story forward, people often make their protagonist particularly smart--they come up with the right solution at the end, they surprise people with how smart they are, they are one of the best at whatever they do.
Often, it ends up reading like a power fantasy, where the author gets to write and the reader gets to experience being proven right, other people seeing just how smart they are after having been underestimated. There's nothing inherently wrong with that.
But smart is not a personality trait that every character or every protagonist needs to have. Your protagonist can have the wrong ideas. Your protagonist can (and should) get stuff wrong. They can be a worker bee, a Type-B personality, a doer rather than a thinker. They can be a solid B- student (or whatever the equivalent is in your story).
One way to build your writing skills--a way that I would argue is necessary if you ever want to write original fiction for publication--is to write from the point of view of, and with the focus on, a wide range of different characters.
it's really easy to fall into a rut when writing the same character or characters all the time, or even the same type of character all the time, where characterization tends to become muscle memory as much as anything else. You know what that character will do, so you know what characters of that type will do, so you know what characters will do, so that's what your characters do.
And when you don't have to think about it, you don't build--and can start to atrophy--those muscles required to do detailed, specific, engaging character building. What does it mean for this character, in this time, to do or experience this thing. What are the myriad of things that have built your character up to being who they are, and how do those things (individually and in aggregate) impact the choices that they make, the actions that they take, the reactions that they have, and the people that they engage with.
What can end up happening--and I see this all the time in published fiction--is that authors end up only being able to write 2-3 character types of each gender, and it all feels a bit samey.
Without opening a book by so many authors I have read, I can predict with a fair amount of accuracy what most of their characters will act like, because it's kind of the same across the board. Even when they start distinct, they end up drifting towards the same personality/character types like carcinization.
Writing from the point of view of/focusing on a range of characters (especially if they are different genders, of different backgrounds, with different wants and fears and habits and interests and personalities) forces you to actually be specific in your writing, if you want it to be any good.
Your 15-year-old B-student who really wants to spend their time playing rugby shouldn't sound like your 45-year-old businessman with a penchant for collecting Star Trek action figures who is trying to plan the perfect anniversary for his wife and neither of them should sound like the 23-year-old who spends their time going out at nightclubs and showing up a little bit hungover at work and worrying about finding a job that will let them move out of the apartment they're sharing with three other people.
Practice, and then practice some part, and then keep practicing. Write different characters, ask yourself if you're writing a character a certain way because you think they would be that way or because it's just habit, and be specific.
Unironically if you want to write a character who is a good decision maker (by which I mean a character whose character trait is Good Decision Maker, not just a character who happens to make good decisions) you should check out page 14 of the FEMA Decision-Making and Problem-Solving course.
It lays out the key elements of effective decision making, which are:
People can't actually make effective decisions based just on intuition or vibes, and characters shouldn't be able to either.
I think one of the most fundamental plot failures I see across a lot of books is that the person chosen to solve a problem is not a person who it makes sense to choose to solve this problem.
This ends up being true for a lot of YA books where the teenager is the chosen solution to a problem because they need to be for plot reasons, but there is no actual logical reason why anyone would be relying on them to solve this problem (or often even letting them get close to this problem). No, this kid can't work for the FBI or the Secret Service. No, this twelve-year-old won't be a more accomplished soldier than a fully-trained servicemember. No, this kid isn't allowed to practice medicine.
And you can work around this by presenting a reason for them to be involved despite being less qualified--usually that they put themselves in a situation, despite the adults around them, but also that there is something else that makes them suited to a job/role despite their other lack of qualifications (we need someone who can blend in, etc.).
But it's also true for a lot of adult books. I'm reading a book where the ER doctor/medical professor First Gentleman is going to lead the response to a plane full of people who potentially have Marburg virus, and even ignoring the fact that he wouldn't be allowed within a thousand feet of that plane by the Secret Service, that also fundamentally just does not make sense with how U.S. pandemic and quarantine response work (or even how medicine works--an ER doctor is generally not an infecious disease specialist). It's waved away for plot reasons--but it also represents a failure of the plot as a whole.
Why is your character the one who is trying to solve this problem? Is it their job? If it's not their job, what does it mean for the story for them to be trying to solve a problem that they aren't qualified for, may not have access to, and/or aren't allowed to deal with?
If your only answer is "it works because it needs to work for plot reasons" then it doesn't work at all.
This is a huge problem in Middle Grade - I just read a lovely book that would not have a plot if any of the adults actually acted like adults - but you've gotta play a wiggle room game when it comes to writing fiction for young people. A 12-year-old kid shouldn't be the one to defeat the dragon, but sometimes kids need books where someone their age is defeating dragons.
That said, "every adult in the room has the plot-stupids" does frequently stop a good book from being great. A YA power fantasy is fine, but if you can dig down and really nail home why this particular main character is the only one who can save the day, you wind up with something way better than a paint-by-the-numbers plot.
One of the great things with YA and MG is that "kids are nosy and want to try to fix things" is often a great way around this. You also can have stories where the adults are the problem, or you can have stories where there is something they need a kid for (because they're small, because you have to be under 18 to access something, because they're The Chosen One, etc.).
Another option that you can consider is that you can write stories where the main character isn't necessarily the only one who can save the day--they're just the only one who is saving the day. When I think about Protector of the Small by Tamora Pierce, one of the main things about Kel is that she is determined to fix things to the point of hurting her, and so other people could (and sometimes do) fix things, but she's often the one fixing things because she's the one who says "i'm going to fix this" and then works until she does.
And sometimes the answer is that the kid is a bandaid. It can be "we have no other options so we're stuck with this kid." It can be "we need five people and the fifth person is a half-trained twelve-year-old so here we go I guess." It can be "our previous option died so I guess we're stuck with their apprentice."
What works the least well is when people who would be a better option (or who have access to a better option) go with the unqualified main character not because of a believable reason (they want them to fail, they're a scapegoat, they're a sacrifice, nepotism) but simply because the plot demands it happens.
While I agree with these posts in broad strokes (it does help for your protagonist to have plot-relevant skills!) I do have two things I want to add to the conversation.
First, I want to bring in the idea of desire lines and the role they play in Western storytelling. It isn’t wrong to see plot as a problem for the protagonist to solve, but it’s not exactly complete either. Protagonists in the Western storytelling tradition often have some kind of desire that drives the plot of a story, and that desire is introduced at the story’s beginning. For instance, Katniss wants to keep her sister Prim safe, and that’s why she ends up volunteering as tribute for the Hunger Games. If we’re introduced to a character’s desire early on and we see the way it connects to the things a character has to do and the obstacles they have to overcome, we’re more likely to buy into the idea that this character should be the protagonist. On the other hand, if your character doesn’t have a believable desire that aligns with the things they do in the story, it’s probably a good sign that this particular character shouldn’t be the protagonist.
Second, I want to challenge the notion that kids and teens doing big things is inherently unbelievable. Claudette Colvin and Ruby Bridges and the Little Rock Nine played roles in the Civil Rights Movement. The Newsboy Strike of 1899 was a youth-led movement and IIRC there were many teenage workers in garment workers’ strikes. Even nowadays, we have examples of activists who started their activism as teenagers—Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg, the Parkland kids, etc. Even outside of the obvious high profile activists, there have been kids who are active in their local governments, kids who help their parents at work or have their own jobs, kids who start their own businesses, kids who write editorials to their local papers, and so on and so forth. Heck, when I was a teenager I was part of a local youth council that read grant proposals written by other teenagers who needed funding for service projects they wanted to do. Our job was to decide which projects got funding.
If an author wants to write a child or teen protagonist with agency, then there’s actually lots of different examples of real life kids and teens doing real things they can research, which can then lead to them having plot-relevant skills and connections. And why not leverage that for the story you want to tell?
The thing is that I think you're getting the cause and effect backwards in the point I was making. My point was not "characters need the required skills to do things in the plot" or even "characters can't choose to do things that they don't have qualifications for" but "stories fail when characters are chosen to solve a problem when it doesn't make any sense for them to be chosen."
Kids do things! Adults do things! Adults even do things that they're not qualified for!
But, like in the book I was describing, sometimes the MC is chosen in the book by other characters to solve a problem or take an action, but in the context of the book itself, it doesn't make any sense for those secondary characters to have chosen the MC because they are unqualified to solve that problem or take that action.
If the US Army sends a 7-year-old to fight in a war, it doesn't make any sense. If a 7-year-old gets involved in something they shouldn't, that can make sense.
One of my favourite questions for figuring out a character’s motivations is which qualities they most fear being assigned to them. Are they afraid (consciously or unconsciously) of being seen as stupid? Ungrateful? Weak? Incompetent? Lazy? Cowardly? Intimidating? Like they actually care? etc.
It’s such a fun way to explore into who they are, why they do what they do, what they don’t do out of fear, and how they might be affected by the events of the story. And I love when characters have negative motivations—trying to avoid something (in this case, being seen a particular way) as much as they’re trying to achieve a goal.
I should be working and instead keep having worldbuilding / characterization thoughts, so I will simply leave you with this characterization question:
Who/where does your character learn their skills from?
My original thought behind this was actually about how whenever I watch cooking shows or fashion competitions or things like that, there are always at least a couple people who talk about learning from their grandparents (usually their grandmother). And it got me thinking about how many skills are passed down generationally, and also what happens when that isn't possible or just doesn't happen.
I functionally grew up without grandparents--my last biological grandparent died when I was a teenager, and my dad's step-mom lived pretty far away. The only grandparent I did know in any meaningful sense wasn't the sort to teach me how to sew.
This is partly because my parents had kids late and so did their parents. The only living grandparent that I knew was 78 when I was born. My parents' grandparents were similarly old when they were born.
All of that is to say that I never learned any of these classic generational skills from my grandparents, and I think largely my parents didn't either. So how are these skills (many of which involve the preservation of cultural history) passed along?
In some cases, from parents rather than grandparents--but in a lot of other cases, it's either from external (non-cultural) sources (e.g., school, the internet) or from nowhere at all.
Did your characters learn their skills from their parents? Their grandparents? Their broader extended family? Their older siblings? Other caretakers or community members around them (from their neighborhood, house of worship, etc)? Religious classes? Camps/scout programs? Private classes? Specific cultural schools? Public/day school? Trade school? University? An apprenticeship? Volunteer work? Their job?
I should be working and instead keep having worldbuilding / characterization thoughts, so I will simply leave you with this characterization question:
Who/where does your character learn their skills from?
In writing, epithets ("the taller man"/"the blonde"/etc) are inherently dehumanizing, in that they remove a character's name and identity, and instead focus on this other quality.
Which can be an extremely effective device within narration!
But these only work if the epithet used is how the narrator primarily identifies that character. Which is why it's so jarring to see a lot of common epithets in intimate moments-- because it conveys that the main character is primarily thinking of their lover/best friend/etc in terms of their height or age or hair color.
Writing question: how to avoid making self-insert characters? Not that it's bad per se, but if one wants to avoid it?
I think that there are two parts here:
Part one is, in some ways, easier to avoid. There are times when it becomes pretty obvious that the character is based off of the author or is an author fantasy in terms of physical characteristics (Stephenie Meyer and Laurell K. Hamilton are two examples I often think of), but it's not necessarily a problem for the character to look like you or share some similar characteristics with you. The main character in my current novel shares some characteristics with me, which are partly because I started writing it more as a "what the hell" story than a "let's try to get this published" story, but she's clearly not me.
If you find the character shares most physical characteristcs and personality characteristics and biographical characteristics with you, you might be ending up with a self-insert character.
The second part is both a little harder and more of what, in my opinion, makes a character a self-insert character. There is a temptation when you're writing to make the character do what you would do in that situation. It's the "right" answer, a lot of times, because it's your answer.
But the character isn't you, and they should be making decisions that fit their own background, personality, and background rather than yours.
If you find yourself thinking "what is the right response to this situation" to guide your character's decision making, you're at more of a risk of having a self-insert character.
Quick characterization exercise: what is your character's relationship with their grandparents?
There's an idea I see a lot that's basically like, it's important to humanize fascists when we write about them so people understand that regular people can be fascists and that it's not just an amorphous evil, etc.
And I always have this knee-jerk negative reaction to seeing that. And it's not because I don't want people to understand fascism or people who commit right-wing violence or whatever (literally part of my field of study), but that it always seems to sort of be prioritizing the wrong thing.
I've written about this some before on my substack, but it keeps eating at my brain and I am incapable of letting go of stuff, so here we are.
The thing about fascism and about right-wing (esp far-right) ideologies in general is that one of the core tenants of them is that there are inate hierarchies of people, and at the extremes, it's essentially that the people at the top (white cis/het Christian men, in American/European right-wing ideology) are the most human, and the people at the bottom (Black people, in a lot of American right-wing ideology) are the least human.
And we as a society have no trouble humanizing white cis/het Christian men, by whatever definition we're using of humanize. And you need to look no further than how mainstream news organizations cover politics to see that this is true--it's almost a trope at this point that they will cover the opinion of every individual Trump voter at a gas station in Ohio before they talk to anyone else. News organizations show family photos of white murderers and mugshots of Black murder victims. People care about what every sobbing white woman thinks about POC she finds scary but often don't care about getting the other side of the story.
We know that (cis/het not-disabled Christian male) white people are human, because that has basically never been in question in the history of the world (or at least the history of the U.S.), and you can write someone as human without humanizing them--because humanizing is not just about literally writing someone as human (as opposed to, say, a squid), but about showing their individuality in a way that makes them more sympathetic.
Spending your time and energy worrying about humanizing fascists is a little bit like the AP announcing recently that their style guide now says to avoid the term TERF and to focus instead on the specific objections. What you'll end up with is not objectively incorrect, but it gives the microphone to the people who least need or deserve it.
The whole goal of fascists is to dehumanize other people--so if you're so opposed to the fascist ideology, why don't you focus your attention on humanizing those people? Give us the viewpoints and intricacies and individual meaningful human lives of your Black characters, your indigenous characters, your Jewish characters, your Muslim characters, your characters of color, your queer characters, your disabled characters, your female characters.
And this isn't to say that fascists should be presented as amorphous blobs, because that's silly and meaningless. But in a story, you only have limited space and reader attention to spend on building characters out. Why do you want to spend that on the fascists?
So my problem with most ‘get to know your character’ questioneers is that they’re full of questions that just aren’t that important (what color eyes do they have) too hard to answer right away (what is their greatest fear) or are just impossible to answer (what is their favorite movie.) Like no one has one single favorite movie. And even if they do the answer changes.
If I’m doing this exercise, I want 7-10 questions to get the character feeling real in my head. So I thought I’d share the ones that get me (and my students) good results:
