How to Make an Unhappy Character "Likable"

By Janice Hardy

Novels don't always have a happy hero at the core—but that doesn't make the character any less "likable."

It's ironic that there are so many terms in writing that aren't clear exactly what they mean, or have multiple definitions or uses. "Likable" is one such term.

All the advice says we want a likable protagonist readers can root for, someone they'll want to hang out with for four hundred pages, and someone readers will connect with.

But likable isn't really the issue, and the word can be problematic.

Back in 2013, I received a question from a writer struggling to make her depressed character "likable." She also suffered from depression, and was worried readers wouldn't want to live in the head of a depressed character. It wasn't something "emotionally healthy folks are going to want to spend time with." I answered her question best I could.

10 Signs of a Great Protagonist

By Janice Hardy

At the heart of every story is a person with a problem, and the more compelling that person is, the better the story will be.

Imagine you’re having lunch one day when you overhear an animated group at a table, gossiping about a bunch of people with crazy lives. Some of them debate which hottie Jess should end up with, while others discuss the terrible behavior of Selene, and not one of them can agree on what Alastair is really up to.

You lean closer, curious about this wild group, and soon realize they’re not talking about life on the cul-de-sac, but their favorite novel—or more specifically—their favorite characters.

If you’re a writer (or a reader), discussing fictional people as if they really existed is normal. For writers, it’s even encouraged.

What’s the Emotional Core of Your Character?

By Janice Hardy

The guiding force at the center of a character. 

When we’re developing characters, there’s a lot to think about. We need to create names, backgrounds, personalities, likes, dislikes, flaws, strengths—the list can go on and on. But at the center of all those traits is a guiding force that influences them all.

The character’s emotional core.

Although people (and thus characters) can be complicated creatures, the emotional core is a simple thing.

It’s the primary driving emotion behind a character’s thoughts and behavior.

You're So Emotional: Describing a Character's Emotions in a First Person Point of View

By Janice Hardy

A first-person narrator has a unique set of challenges, and describing emotions is one of them. 

For many readers, emotion is a big reason why they picked up a particular novel. They want to feel connected to the characters, experience life through their eyes, escape into their worlds. Bringing those emotions to the surface is critical to bringing the story to life.

Except sometimes, we go overboard and shift from emotion to melodrama. Our protagonists are too whiny, too stuck in their heads, too self-aware of what they're feeling all the time and that draws attention away from the story.

This is particularly easy to do with a first person narrator, because everything is so deep in that character's point of view. If we go emotionally overboard, our characters don't feel like real people, because no one walks around fully aware of every little feeling they have and why they have it.

5 Ways to Make Your Characters Hate You (And Why You Should)

By Janice Hardy

To be a great writer, it helps to be a terrible parent (but only to your characters).

I have this philosophy for my characters—what doesn’t kill them makes them more interesting. It allows me to be as ruthless and mean to them as I want, because I know that in the end, all their suffering will make readers love them even more.

My characters aren’t happy about this, of course, but they understand the necessity.

One of my favorite “evil things” to do to them is force them to face horrible, if not impossible, choices. Choices that will tear them in two, make them question themselves and the path they took, and often leave them in dire situations with no hope in sight.

<cackles gleefully>

Open Up! Writing the Opening Scene

By Janice Hardy

The primary goal of an opening scene is to make readers want to read the next scene. 

You’d be surprised how often writers forget the whole point of an opening scene, because their focus is on establishing the setting, introducing the protagonist, and telling readers all about the cool story waiting for them. 

Don't get me wrong, these are all important things, but on their own they’re not going to do what an opening scene needs to do—grab readers and keep them reading.

And the best way to grab readers is to give them a puzzle they’ll want to know the answer to. 

An intriguing first line that poses a question (literal or metaphorical), an unusual situation, a mystery, a contradiction that doesn’t quite make sense. A great voice and character they want to get to know better is another way to hook readers. As long as it’s something or someone that makes them think, “I want to know more about X.”

3 Ways to Deepen Your Novel’s Premise

By Janice Hardy

The premise is the core of the novel. Make sure it's solid.

When I first started The Shifter (the first book in my trilogy), I didn’t know it was going to be part of a series. But as the story developed, I saw the bigger picture and where the problem facing my protagonist, Nya, could lead to.

As that story continued, I focused more and more on Nya’s journey, because stories are about characters in trouble. But by the time I got to book three, I’d forgotten something really important.

I was ignoring the broader implications of my original premise.

Nya was a “shifter,” someone who could heal by shifting pain from person to person. This included pain of her own, so anytime someone hurt her, she’d be able to shift it right back into them. Which made for some fun fight scenes.

In the first draft of book three, Nya was shifting pain almost without thinking, and while she struggled over the moral aspects of it, getting hurt was no longer an issue for her.

Which was all wrong.

5 Ways to Find the Backstory Readers Want to Know

By Janice Hardy

Readers don’t mind backstory—as long as it’s something they want to hear about.

The first novel I ever wrote was fantasy, so naturally, it had a lot of backstory. Every character had huge histories and shady pasts, and I couldn’t wait to share every last detail with my readers.

And it turned out about how you’d imagine.

Boring pages, no action, flashbacks that nobody but me cared about. It was a mess.

A person’s past is part of life, and everybody has one—especially fictional characters. But that past isn't always relevant, even if it is interesting. Stopping to explain a character's history tends to bog a novel down.

How Could You Do This to Me? When Characters Betray Other Characters

By Janice Hardy

Betrayal can come in many forms, and most of them make for great stories.

The "unexpected betrayal" has always been a popular trope, but there was a time when it was everywhere, especially in young adult novels. 

The "trusted mentor suddenly turning on you" was the most common, but betrayals were coming from all quarters. Close friends, random people, family. They started to feel a bit deus ex machina to me. It was like yanking off the mask at the end of Scooby-Doo and seeing Old Man Withers.

So instead of a betrayal surprising me, I was playing the “I wonder which one of these allies will turn on the hero in the third act?” game. I knew it was coming, and more times than not, the same old "Aha! I was secretly working for the villain" was the big twist. 

The problem here...

The Practical Guide to Using Character Archetypes in Your Novel

By Janice Hardy

Character archetypes are a useful tool in creating characters for a novel.

At some point in your writing journey, you’ve probably come across the term "archetype." This has no doubt led you to articles quoting Carl Jung (the father of psychology) and his twelve character types. Pursuing that further, has likely led to multiple articles about the variations of those and the common archetypes used in fiction.

And then your head likely started spinning and you wondered how the heck any of that was going to help you write a better novel.

But there’s a difference between Jungian archetypes and fictional archetypes. 

Jung’s focus was on defining the human psyche, not telling a grand tale, so his list tends be more thematic in nature. Which is great if you’re writing literary fiction with Deep and Meaningful Themes, but not so great for the rest of us.

5 Ways to Turn Off Your Inner Editor and Get More Writing Done

By Janice Hardy

Our inner editor is an enemy to our muse—here’s how to shut it up.

I think writers would get a lot more written if there was a "first draft keyboard" without a delete or backspace key. 

Sure, those first drafts would be a mess, but we’d be free to just type and let the words flow without the ability to fix them—so there’d be no inner editor telling us to go back and tweak them.

It’s only natural to want to write the best draft possible, but sometimes the creative process needs to be set free to get anywhere. 

Constantly stopping to tweak or fix a word can sap our creative energy and lower our productivity.

You Get One Page to Hook a Reader. Yes, Really.

By Janice Hardy

Many readers decide before the end of the first page if they’re going to keep reading.

A lot of pressure is put on the opening page of a novel, and for good reason. It’s the first impression the reader gets, and if that reader isn’t hooked in some way, they won’t move on to the second page. 

As unfair as it seems, 250 words (roughly one page) are often all you get to convince readers to stay with your story and read your book. It might be tempting to pack the entire story into that first page, but that's absolutely the wrong approach.  

All you have to do is give readers something that promises them that your novel will be worth reading. 

Which is much easier to do than you might think.

First Look at a First Draft: How to Revise Your Manuscript

By Janice Hardy

A first draft is a wonderful thing, but it always needs more work.

There's something exciting and rewarding about a first draft. The story that's been in our heads is finally down on paper, and we can see how it developed. Sometimes it unfolded exactly how we pictured, but more often we encountered snags here and there and discovered fun twists and plots as we wrote. The draft might even be, shall we say, a little messy.

And that's okay, because first drafts are often messy and filled with holes.

It's what you do with it from there that really matters. As the adage goes...writing is rewriting. Often, a lot of rewriting (sigh).

This is why taking an objective first look at your first draft is so important. 

You're taking stock of what you have and looking for what's working, what's not working, and what could use a little more work to get it right. It's much easier to do the heavier rewrites in draft form before the story becomes mentally "set in stone." First drafts are supposed to be messed with. 

The Hidden Danger Backstory Poses for Writers (And It’s Not the One You Think)

By Janice Hardy

Uncovering backstory isn’t the same as plot, and focusing too much on the story’s past can hurt your novel’s future.

One of the very first outlines for my urban fantasy novel, Blood Ties, focused on revealing the twist and secrets of the novel. It was mostly about how readers were going to learn all the cool things I’d created and less about a character struggling with a problem. Which was an actual problem, since struggling with problems is what makes a novel a novel.

Weak as that early outline was, writing it was worth it, since it helped me figure out those backstories and secrets. It also made it obvious that I’d outlined a novel that didn’t truly have a plot. Sure, my protagonist had goals and she acted to achieve them and did all the things a good protagonist is supposed to do, but if I’d written the story to that first outline, it would have been terrible.

Alternative Ways to Describe Character Reactions

By Janice Hardy

Human emotion is universal, but you don't want to use the same descriptions all the time. Here are ways to keep your emotional descriptions fresh. 

I frequently receive questions about finding good alternative ways to use common reaction/emotion words. He smiled. She gulped. He frowned. She cringed. (Actually, that’s a story right there, isn’t it? He sounds like a stalker to me.) Anyway…

These words get used a lot because they’re good words and get the point we're trying to make across. They convey meaning quickly and clearly—smiling shows happiness, frowning shows displeasure, gulping shows fear. But after a while, characters reacting to the same emotions the same way over and over feels repetitive.

However, trying to make every emotional description original can lead to overwriting. 

If a character never smiles, but beams, smirks, grins, curls a lip, the corners of the mouth rise, and all the other various ways we write to say "smile," it can feel awkward. Like "said," "smiled" and the like are fairly invisible, so while readers do notice them, they don't tend to stick out unless they are too many of them.

The Difference Between a First Page that Hooks and a Novel that Hooks

By Janice Hardy

Do you really need to hook a reader on the first page?

Common writing advice says to hook your reader from the first page. I've stopped reading many a book when that first page didn't click with me, or worse, turned me off the story.

But I've also kept reading past so-so first pages when the cover copy was intriguing enough that I was willing to see how the first chapter panned out. If it kept me reading, I stayed with the book.

So, does the first page need to hook if the novel’s premise hooks?

Which is a really loaded question.

What to Do When You Really Don’t Want to Write That Scene

By Janice Hardy

Some scenes are hard to write, and others fight you every word. Does that mean something is wrong with it?

In every first draft I’ve ever written, I reached a point where I forced myself to finish a scene that didn’t want to be written. It fought me for every word and took days to write, and I just wanted it done and over with. When it was really bad, it threw me right out of my writing groove.

But my outline said to do it, my daily plan said to write it, so I did. And it was terrible. It didn't matter what scene or which book it was in, it always turned out the same.

Eventually, I realized this was a huge red flag that something was wrong with the scene. 

If I didn’t want to write it, what made me think someone would want to read it?

5 Ways to Develop Character Voices

By Janice Hardy

If you want memorable characters, don't forget to give them unique voices. 

One of my earliest experiences with how voice affected fiction was in seventh grade, when my English teacher played us a record (yes, record, I'm dating myself here) of Harlan Ellison reading his short story, "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktock Man. Not only was I blown away by the story, but the way Ellison crafted the narrative was mind-blowing. The voice was unique.

It wasn't until years later that I learned there was a difference between author voice and character voice, but the lesson on "strong voice = strong story" had been stamped into my brain. 

A well-crafted character steps off the page and into readers' hearts, and a big part of that is their voice. 

Readers can hear personality in the words a character uses, from the thoughts they think to the things they choose to say—or not say. How they sound reflects who they are.

Goals, Conflicts, & Stakes: Why Plots Need All Three

By Janice Hardy

A strong plot is built on strong structure. 

Goal - Conflict - Stakes. They're the engine in every scene and the backbone of every novel. When something feels “off” in a story, when the middle sags, when scenes feel random, when tension fizzles, it’s almost always because one of these three pieces is weak, vague, or missing.

All three exist no matter what genre you’re writing:

• The protagonist wants something (goal).
• Something stands in the way (conflict).
• Something bad will happen if they fail (stakes).

What trips up many writers, is that each of these can be used in multiple ways. 

There are story goals and scene goals. Internal conflict and external conflict. Personal stakes and larger story stakes. If you don’t know which aspect you’re working with, it’s easy to stall around page 100, wondering why your “great idea” suddenly has nowhere to go.

Let’s break all this down.

A Common Reason Novels Fail

By Janice Hardy

Discovering your novel doesn’t work is heartbreaking, but there are things you can do to fix it.

Story ideas are wonderful things, because they hold so much potential. Every spark of inspiration has the ability to become the next Great Novel and make a writer’s whole career. Or at least lead to a solid book readers might want to buy.

Not all ideas lead to good books, though.

Sometimes it’s the idea itself that’s the problem, but frequently, it’s the execution—but not in a “badly written” kind of way. The reason the idea (and the novel) falls flat is this:

It doesn’t tell a story, it explains a situation.

The “situation novel” isn’t about characters trying to solve problems, but scene after scene that tells readers how a situation occurs, offers a flat play-by-play of how something came to be, or even examples of why this idea is so cool.