Five do’s—and five don’ts—of writing the inner life of your characters

One of the unique and fantastic properties of fiction is how it allows us to travel inside our characters’ innermost thoughts, feelings, and sensations. 

It’s so Vulcan mind-meld! In real life, we often struggle to understand and be understood by others. In fiction, we can dissolve that boundary between me and you and dive right in there. It’s really a superpower.

But like any superpower, the ability to depict the inside of our character’s heads can be used for good or for ill. Writers soon encounter all kinds of pitfalls in figuring out how to manage this internal landscape of consciousness.

For example: We know we’re supposed to show not tell, but eavesdropping on the voice in someone’s head often feels like nothing but telling.

And we know what goes on inside our ...

What does your hero want?

This is the core question of storytelling, but writers don’t always find it easy to answer. 

What do any of us want? To be happy, or happier. To love and be loved. To achieve some particular goal that has meaning to us. (Whether this goal is an admirable one depends a bit on the person wanting, of course!)

Put it all together and we all basically seek to live a life that feels like it matters, to avoid suffering and to experience contentment, achievement, and connection along the way. 

So: If we all want some version of same things, what is it that makes our hero’s wants story-worthy? How do we use these wants to shape our plot, not only on a book-length level, but scene by scene?

What I want today is to talk about wants as they pertain to your storytelling! There are big wants and little wants, and they are (or should be) pulsing on every page you write. 

My dear storytellers, I hope you’re staying grounded during this tumultuous time.

As I write this, we’re a week in to a frightening ground war in Europe, prompted by Russia’s invasion of its neighbor Ukraine. The rest of the world has been rapidly swept in, moved to react both by the sudden, senseless brutality of the invasion, and the astonishing principled bravery of the Ukrainian people and their President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

As someone who’s thought long and hard about the transformative energetic qualities of the hero’s journey, watching the real-world manifestation of these foundational human patterns play out on a global stage is deeply emotional and deeply fascinating. 

In this week’s livestream, I’d like to talk about the power of the hero archetype in a particular context: We all know the hero should be actively driving the story forward, but won’t there be times in our story that the...

I was doing a little research into Stoic philosophy—like ya do!—and came across a quote from Seneca: 

“I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent—no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.”
—Seneca (4 B.C.E. — 65 C.E.)

To be thankful for one’s misfortunes is Stoic to the max. Leave it to a Roman to pull no punches!

But look at that second sentence: Without an opponent, “no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.”

For our hero to pass through a story without an opponent would make for a pretty dull tale. And yet, experience suggests that the single aspect of good storytelling that developing writers most want to punch in the face is the necessity of filling their pages with obstacles. 

I get it. No one wants obstacles in real life. We want smooth sailing, even if Seneca says...

My dear storyteller, I hope no one has said this to you, but if you’ve heard it, please console yourself with the knowledge that you’re not alone. Buckle up and let’s get it over with:

“I just didn’t care about your main character. You need to make her more likeable. More relatable!”

Bah, humbug! I had to say it. Yet how many earnest writers have heard this all-too-common bit of feedback, licked their wounds for a minute, and then bravely proceeded to revise their draft to remove every character defect, cross word, and unpleasant facial expression from the manuscript?

Then, after all traces of humanity have been stripped out, the poor writer who’s fallen into the “likeability trap” throws in a saving-kittens-from-the-floodwaters scene for good measure, and perhaps adds a charming dollop of self-doubt and dorkiness to amp up...

Writers who are new to studying story structure often struggle with the idea of the hero. 

The term “hero” has connotations, after all. Does it mean someone strong? Someone male? Someone who can leap tall buildings in a single bound? Questions that come up include:

“But what if my story has two (or more) main characters?”

“What if my hero is afraid?"

“What if my hero is kind of a jerk?" 

“What if my story is about a community?”

In this week’s livestream, I dig into these questions about the many possible permutations of the hero.  What kind of hero does your story rise from?

My weekly livestream happens on Wednesdays at 1 PM Pacific. Come live and participate! Or catch the replays here on the blog. You can leave your questions and comments below.

To watch live and ask questions, subscribe to the YouTube channel here.  

And you can join the Path of the Storyteller...

Remember Wilson the volleyball? What a performance! It turns out that even a story about a guy stranded alone on a desert island can have a cast of archetypal characters.

What do I mean by archetypal? That’s our topic this week. Some characters might populate the edges of a tale like extras in a movie, but archetypal characters help provide the energy that keeps your story humming along.

Story energy is a fascinating topic. It’s at the heart of how I think about good writing, and how I teach it in the Path of the Storyteller program, too. If you’ve ever wondered how to design and use your secondary cast of characters, I think you’ll like this episode!

My weekly livestream is on Wednesdays at 1 PM Pacific. Come live and participate! Or catch the replays here on the blog.

To watch live and ask questions, you can join the Path of the Storyteller Facebook group right here.

Or subscribe to the YouTube channel here. 

This is one of my favorite livestreams to date. Listen in as I unpack my not-so-guilty pleasure of watching makeover videos on YouTube. If you want to apply a soothing facial mask while you watch, all the better!

But here’s what we learn from it all: Story means change. Not just on the outside, but on the inside, too. Call it a spiritual makeover!

We readers (or viewers) come for that transformation. The bigger the change is, the better we like it. 

And we we’ll always root hardest for a hero who’s in most desperate need of a shift. 

My weekly livestream is on Wednesdays at 1 PM Pacific. Come live and participate! Or catch the replays here on the blog.

To watch live and ask questions, you can join the Path of the Storyteller Facebook group right here.

Or subscribe to the YouTube channel here. 

We writers need to keep our readers awake and engaged. And guess what? In fiction as in life, nothing wakes us up like a ringing clock!

Speaking as someone who recently had a birthday, I can tell you that the passage of time is always a powerful tool for focusing our attention.

If there aren’t some high-stakes deadlines lending urgency to your story, maybe it’s time (see what I did?) to add some.

Today we talk about the ways time plays out in a narrative, and the ways time can be an invaluable tool for us writers to raise stakes, add urgency, and put ever more pressure on our hero. 

My weekly livestream is on Wednesdays at 1 PM Pacific. Come live and participate! Or catch the replays here on the blog.

To watch live and ask questions, you can join the Path of the Storyteller Facebook group right here.

Or subscribe to the YouTube channel here. 

Few topics cause writers as much consternation as point of view. What is it, exactly? Which one should you use? How are they different? Do you have to pick only one? And why is it so easy to go so wrong?

To be fair, much of the confusion about point of view comes from writers being told a bunch of stuff about it that’s simply not true.  Point of view is not just about pronouns. It’s the magic carpet of consciousness that transports the story that’s in your head to its new, forever home inside your reader’s head.

Sound deep? It is! Join me for what I hope is an illuminating discussion of that most metaphysical of writing craft topics.

My weekly livestream is on Wednesdays at 1 PM Pacific. Come live and participate! Or catch the replays here on the blog.

To watch live, you can join the Path of the Storyteller Facebook group right here.

And subscribe to the YouTube channel here.