Category: Writing

Your journal can be your most important tool as a writer.

Neera

The impulse to write is natural to many people, yet the demands of many public forms of writing can be inhibiting or even crushing. Writing a journal, on the other hand, opens up possibilities.

Your journal is one place you can write anything, in any form and shape and it doesn’t matter. You can draw, make lists, copy quotes, write down what you heard of the nasty things someone said to you and you can’t get them out of your head. In your journal, you can sack your internal judge and explore your mood, emotions, views, feelings even anger and anxieties.

Journal writing is a supreme way to records your life’s journey; where you are at a point in life, where you want to be, what are your aspirations, how life derails you.

Many times, we feel we have not made any progress and our life has been a standstill, but when I read my journals from three years back or five years back, I realize how far I have come.

Writing in my journal in the time of confusion and indecision is my way I discover what matters to me and what would be the right choice. It is a place to explore and what and how I am thinking.

A journal is not only a great source of inner development but also a tool to become a fluent writer. Before I started a journal, my writing was clunky. I would struggle to put my thoughts and ideas into words. Journal writing helped me understand and crystalize my ideas and write them with clarity. My journal became a tool to capture gems that I could use in other writing.

Before long my journal became my most trusted companion that supported me through life’s trials. I could write anything without the fear of being judged. It became a place of discovery, of learning, of emotional relief and insights.

It also became a playground, where the everyday rules of writing, reflecting, problem-solving, goal-setting, production and planning no longer applied. It was a training ground to appreciate beauty, to describe scene and setting, to record dialogues, and to write in the moment.

Journal writing trained and honed my eye for beauty. It invited me to live in the present moment as well as allowing me to roam in my past.

It will let you re-experience awe and wonder. It will let you intensify your pleasure in events and situations that have gone well. It will support your recovery (and the gaining of wisdom) from the times you wish had never happened.

My journal is the place where I record the conversation between my many selves – my intuitive self, my everyday self, my dreamy self, my practical self, my uncertain self and my all-knowing self who know what needs to be done. This is the place where I can talk to my soul and can hear it talking to me. I can even talk to my parents who are no longer in this world. I sometimes say things to people that are too painful and difficult to say in person and hear their responses even without talking to them.

I discovered my voice in my journal. I would I explored the writing prompts, exercises from writing books and topics suggested in writing groups in my journal which helped develop the tone and rhythm of my writing.

When I started writing, I sounded self-conscious and stiff, or sometimes chatty and superficial. So I started experimenting. I tried writing in the third person, or in the second person. Rather than writing in past tense all the time, I beginner writers do all the time, I would try writing in the present tense. I wrote shabby poems and copied quotes and changed them to something different. I wrote letters to myself and to others which I never meant to post. I could take those risks because my journals are for my eyes only.

In A Writer’s Diary, Virginia Woolf asks herself what kind of a diary she’d like to write and answers:

“I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through.”

“Without looking them through,” is important. Your journal is the place where you shouldn’t try to censor yourself. Fill it in with your incomplete thoughts, your inner life, your first feelings. Include any pictures or clippings that spark your imagination, poems, and songs lyrics that move you. Write letters in it that you never mail.

Journal writing is a simple practice, yet it can make you the writer you want to become.

Keep a Swipe File

Neera
I have been keeping a swipe file even before I knew what a swipe file was.

A swipe file is a notebook or a folder where you keep all the fantastic ideas, inspiration, prompts, quotes and bits and pieces of information that you’ve come across over the years. Think of it as a professional scrapbook designed to inspire your writing.

My swipe file started with collections of quotes at the age of thirteen. I still have that tattered diary in immature handwriting (it still hasn’t improved much).

I filled it with ideas or words of other people. It kind of felt right to keep that ‘intellectual loot‘ somewhere where I can get back to it again and again. I started with notebooks and moved on to A4 size journals, A4 size diaries with pockets. Ring binders, clear-plastic sleaves, and zip-seal document cases housed newspaper and magazine clippings and as my collection of online articles grew so did my pile of thumb drives.

My swipe-files are my comfort food. Just like I reach for the cookies-jar when stressed, I go to my swipe-files when I am looking for comfort.

Not just that, they are the one I scan first when my mind is begging for stimulation. It reminds me of an idea or a piece of writing I read years ago and have forgotten about it. Reading again, it invokes different emotions and brings new insights.

The idea of a swipe file is nothing new. The creatives in every field have been using them to overcome almost any professional hurdle.

Keeps a swipe file. It’s just what it sound like – a file to keep track of the stuff you’ve swiped from others.

See something worth seatling? Put it in the swipe file. Need a little inspiration? Open up the swipe file.

Newspaper reports call this a “morgue file” – I like that nave even better. Your morgue file is where you keep the dead things that you’ll later reanimate in your work.

Austin Kleon in Steal Like an Artist

The more complete your swipe files are, the more powerful your resource will be.

How can a swipe file help you improve your writing skills?

If you want to grow as a writer, the easiest way to do that is to keep a swipe file.

Professional writers use swipe files as a learning method to improve their writing. They study other people’s content and create a collection with proven examples.

A swipe file helps you understand writing techniques as you can see how others write. It also provides templates for your own writing. A swipe file can even help you overcome writer’s block and save time, as it provides suggestions for sentence structure, dialogues, description of settings, facial features, mannerism, interesting anecdotes and much more.

If something catches your attention, the chances are that it will have the same effect on others.

For a long time, I kept on believing in the advice of reputed ‘writing gurus’ that if you read a lot and write a lot, and you’ll become a better writer. But it didn’t work. My writing was not improving fast enough. But when I started learning from other people’s writing, sometimes copying, other times imitating, yet another time structuring my sentences based on sentences that caught my attention, my skills improved at a much-exceeding rate.

Is that plagiarism?

The exact definition of plagiarism is – the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.

While the purpose of a swipe file is to study techniques and templates and get inspirations and ideas other people writing will invoke. Since you can’t keep all you read in your head, you have to have a place where can go to later when you need it.

You don’t copy other people’s writing, neither do you claim their ideas as your own. But you do use their prose to understand how to apply different writing techniques. Swiping is a legitimate and effective method to improve your writing skills, and to become a more persuasive and engaging writer.

How to organize your swipe file?

Although you might start in a haphazard way, you need to organize your swipe files in such a way that makes it easy to find the guidance you need when you need it most.

There are several ways to do that, and I have listed some below, but you need to select the ones which work best for you.

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  • A scrapbook. cut and paste things into it
  • Notebooks. Separate ones for separate categories such as metaphors, quotes, stories, etc.
  • Folders. Chuck clippings, photocopies in it and organize in clear plastics sleeves.
  • Reference cards. The writer Anne Lamott swears by it.
  • Mobile phone. Take pictures and sort by using albums.
  • Digital swipe files. I have started using Evernote which has an excellent search facility and easy to organize in categories
  • Pinterest. You can create boards with different categories and save hundred of pins other people are sharing freely.

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To make sure your ideas and inspirations don’t evaporate in thin air, have a trusted system for managing them. Swipe files are a great tool for that.

Take that little bit extra time at the end of each session (reading or writing) on filing so you can find what you need when you need it.

Besides, you will find that keeping swipe files is the most enjoyable activity you will engage in as a writer.

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The greatness lies in making those paragraphs great

Neera

Every time I start writing something new, I find myself asking these questions:

  • Can I write it? 
  • Can I write it well? 
  • What will people think if I can’t write it well? 
  • What kind of a writer will I be if I constantly can’t write well? 
  • Should I be writing at all?

I know it is not just me. All writers have these demons they constantly fight. You have to if you want to write. You have to grapple with these fears, put them out of your mind, and go for it. Some people can’t do it. For some people, it’s too paralyzing. 

Some writers constantly worry, “What if I can’t get published? What is the point of writing, then? How do I get published? 

They get so preoccupied with these questions that they never give themselves a chance to truly experience the art of what they’re doing. Which incidentally is the big payoff.

Writing itself is a payoff for all the work we do.

The great success as a writer isn’t getting published but is making those paragraphs sane. 

It’s in discovering ideas in yourself that you never thought were there. 

That’s where the greatness lies.

The greatness doesn’t lie in getting published or getting a great review in some newspaper or magazine. Or receiving lots of claps. They are nice, but the greatness has to do with the feeling you have in yourself that you’ve created something important and the sense of accomplishment you feel while creating it.

Every paragraph you write, every sentence you construct, in a way, is your creation — by design, by meditation, by argument, by wondering, by analysis. 

It is your artwork to convey whatever you want to say. 

Every paragraph is part of the story you are telling. 

Every sentence is a piece of one puzzle. 

If you concentrate on the sentences and paragraphs, make them so beautiful that your own soul gets immersed in their beauty, then no outer reward is going to matter.

Good writing holds its reader’s hand and leads her through the unfurling of itself, pointing back to the last step and forward to the next, showing her the map, reminding her of the destination. Good writing is a coherent journey back to the place where it began. It’s a circle. It’s a wall whose logic is implicit in every stone. In good writing, a reader finds it hard to get lost.

– Mark Tredinnick in The Little Red Writing Book

Are your paragraphs doing that?

Holding your reader’s hand and leading them back and through, out of the maze, in an effortless manner.

They don’t have to lead them straight out. There has to be some drama, some mystery, and a bit of uncertainty. In the hands of a good writer, readers enjoy all that. 

Because in the hands of a good writer, they feel safe. They know when it is all over, they will be happy that they took the journey.

“Make your prose as you might make a drystone wall. You are not bonding the pieces; they just have to fit. How will you chisel each stone, how will you turn it and set it down so that it sits comfortably with its neighbors and carries the wall forward? “ — Mark Tredinnick

Whenever I feel too distressed with my own writing, I pull out Mark Tredinnick’s The Little Red Writing Book and start reading randomly. This is what he writes on the last page.

I wrote this book because I long, and I don’t think I am alone, to read more sentences so well made, so perfectly uttered, they make one weep — in their form and rhyme, in their topography and amplitude and the truthful spaces onto which the open. Let plots take care of themselves; it’s time more writers spent more care shaping astonishing sentences. Elegant, shapely, heartbreaking — in the way a mountain range ora horse, a woman’s form, a child’s voice, the posture of a tree, the taste of a wine can be.

Most of us worry too much about getting published than writing elegant, clear, and lovely prose that sings. 

It is no small feat, hard to begin, and even harder to sustain. It is no good to be content with one or two good sentences. 

“A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art, should carry its justification in every line.” — Conrad

The struggle to improve our prose is the struggle to improve ourselves. Immerse yourself in that struggle and you will get your reward.

Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash

How to tell a personal story (without boring the readers)

Neera

It is cold, windy and dark. A few people are sitting around a fire. They are eating and drinking and talking when suddenly a young man gets up and speaks in a loud voice, “Do you know what happened to me today when I went hunting?” Everyone stop whatever they are doing and look at him. The young man doesn’t say till someone asks. “What? What happened to you?” Everyone is all ears wanting to know what happened.

Can you picture the scene in your mind?

It is happening 50,000 years ago, where a group of humans is sitting around a fire and a young man is about to tell a story and everyone wants to hear it.

The setting might be different, the people might be different but human desire to listen to stories hasn’t changed.

We, the humans, know how to tell a story since cave days. The art of telling a story is still the same since humans invented the language.

We all have the skill to tell stories. It is inbuilt in us.

The only problem is we have not been practicing them enough. That is because we don’t have campfires every night anymore.

But we have other means. We talk on phones, we interact on social media and we tell stories at the watercoolers and cafes. We are all proficient in telling stories orally.

Every time you are telling someone what happened when the fire came close to your property or how your son narrowly escaped a magpie attack, you are telling stories.

But when it comes to writing our stories, that we panic. We think we need special skills to write stories from our life.

The techniques of writing a good story are still the same as telling a good story and we learned it in the caves 50,000 years ago.

Let’s learn it from the young man in the cave who is going to tell a story.

1. Hook the audience

The first element of a good story is to hook the audience. If you are able to do that with your first sentence, you have them.

Let’s see what the young man did to hook his audience? He asked a question. Not just any question but a simple but clever question. His question was, “Do you know what happened to me today when I went hunting? ” In this question, he is promising two things – one I have a story to tell and it is going to be an interesting story because you can’t imagine what happened to me when I went hunting.

We, humans, are suckers for stories.

Of course, we want to hear your story, the cavemen must have felt, and it better be a good story now that you have our attention, young man.

So the first element is the hook the second element is the promise.

2. Make a promise

Very early in your story, you need to make a promise that your story is going to be worth their time. Even in cave days, the audience didn’t have time to listen to the worthless stories.

Imagine if the young man in the cave proceeded by telling them that he got lost and was tired, hungry and cold walking all the way back in the rain. Would anyone have kept listening?

Definitely not.

He is breaking the ‘implied’ promise he made in his first line. This is going to be an interesting story guys, better listen. And he uses a special oral technique to make that promise. He pauses.

A pause in oral storytelling evokes interest. It brings involvement. When another caveman asked ‘What?’ it showed he is interested.

In written stories, it is achieved in the same way by arousing the questions in the reader’s mind. Look at some of the opening lines I picked randomly from the books around me.

Recently my twenty-two-year-old daughter asked me what message I would give to my own twenty-two-years old self if I could travel back in time. – Anna Quindlen – Lots of Candles Plenty of Cake

The beach is not the place to work; to read, write or think. – Anne Morro Lindbergh – Gift From the Sea

In the country where I now live, there is no word for home. – Isabel Huggan in Belonging

Once you have made the promise you have to keep it. But you keep it in such a way that it keeps your audience interest. You do that by creating suspense.

3. Create Suspense

Suspense is the third element of a good story.

Let’s see how the young caveman achieved it.

I was standing behind a tree, ready with my bow and arrow, looking towards the river, at the point where the animals come to drink water when something towards me. You wouldn’t believe what it was?

Okay, you want to know what he saw. The caveman has used three techniques to create that suspense – by giving details (tree, river, bow, arrow), by adding in the wait factor ( standing behind a tree, ready) and by leaving it hanging (you wouldn’t believe what it was).

The suspense keeps readers wanting more. A story with suspense is never boring. Suspense takes the readers right inside the story and now they are ready for the journey.

4. Take them on a journey

That is right. Good storytelling is about taking your audience on a journey. They need to see what you are seeing. They need to smell what you are smelling. They need to be in the conflict with you and experience your

I couldn’t make out what it was. It was of the size and shape of a dear but its color was of the sun at mid-day and my eyes dazzled with its glow. I straightened my bow and pointed the arrow at him. He saw me. He knew I was hiding behind the tree. He looked straight at me but he wasn’t afraid. Instead, he signaled me with his head as if asking me to follow him. He then ran in the direction of the forest. I pushed my bow on my back and ran after him.

Now the rest of the cavemen are on the journey with the young guy. They are in the story anticipating what is going to unfold.

5. Give it a satisfactory ending

Nothing disappoints readers more than an unsatisfactory ending.

An unsatisfactory ending can make a good story go flat while a satisfactory ending can make a story memorable.

What is a satisfactory ending? One the deliver the promise you made at the beginning of the story. If you promised a suspenseful tale then a satisfactory ending would be that suspense is resolved. If you promised a romantic tale than then relationship issues are resolved and a happy state is reached. If you have promised an entertaining tale then humor is well-knitted in the story and the punch line delivers the surprise.

He disappeared in the forest. I couldn’t find him. But I found myself in a meadow full of lush grass where a lot of animals were grazing in the open. I took out my bow and aimed at a chamois. It lay dead at my feet. You are eating him right now. Fellow cavemen, I think I know how to get to that meadow. We don’t have to worry about food for years to come.

When we are writing stories from our life we are taking events from our lives and combining them with our thoughts, feelings, and reactions. Then we tell them in such a way that it evokes readers’ interest, entertains or educates them, and delivers the intended message.

It is as simple as the caveman’s story.

Find some story from your life and try telling it to a friend incorporating all these rules. Don’t get disturbed if it doesn’t come out well in the first go. Most of the storytellers practice their craft over time. Keep in mind that a comedian tells the same joke multiple times before he perfects the timing, delivery and punch line.

Why we write?

Neera

It is almost midday, and I am sitting in the bed, notebook in hand, staring out of the window. My heart is filled with gloom. I have an article to write but nothing comes out. I have become dependent on pouring out my heart at times like these but writing for my blog is another matter.

Sometimes we forget why we write.

We write for the same reasons we read. C.S. Lewis said,“We read to know that we are not alone.”

When in despair or in doubt, I often reach for books to find answers. Invariably I get then. The same happened today. I picked up a book by my bedside and randomly opened a page. Following words spring up. 

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it……Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself.” 

— Joan Didion, A Year of Magical Thinking

As I read these words my heart filled with gratitude. 

Thank you Joan Didion for writing these words. You have put into words what I was feeling. Your words not only provided me comfort but helped me understand what I was going through. A grief of my own.

Here is a list of reasons why we write. 

We write to find comfort.

Life is hard and written words provide relief. Some of us discover very early in our lives that books can provide solace at times when nothing else can. There comes the time when just reading can’t carry us through, and it is then we discover writing.

When Isabel Allende’s daughter died after being in a coma for several months, she couldn’t handle the grief. For months, she started in a vacuum not knowing how to come out of this hole. Until her mother gave her a pen, a pad, and an ultimatum.

My daughter, Paula. died on December 6, 1992. On January 7, 1993, my mother said, “Tomorrow is January eight. If you don’t write, you’re going to die.”

She gave me the 180 letters I’d written to her while Paula was in a coma, and then she went to Macy’s. When my mother came back six hours later, I was in a pool of tears, but I’d written the first pages of Paula.

— Isabel Allende in Why We Write?

We write because it is who we are.

Everyone sees the world differently. Writers see the world in words. Many writers claim they can’t survive if they don’t write.

David Baldacci said, “If writing were illegal, I’d be in prison. I can’t not write. It is a compulsion.”

For me too, writing has become a compulsion. I have to write each day. My day starts with writing and ends with writing. If I can’t write any day it feels like a wasted day.

What is it about writing that makes it — for some of us — as necessary as breathing?

It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive.

Time slips away. The body becomes irrelevant. We are as close to consciousness itself as we will ever be.

This begins in the darkness. Beneath the frozen ground, buried deep below anything we can see, something may be taking root.

Stay there, if you can. Don’t resist. Don’t force it, but don’t run away.

Endure.

Be patient. The rewards cannot be measured. Not now. But whatever happens, any writer will tell you: This is the best part.

— Dani Shapiro in Still Writing

We write because we want to make a difference.

How many times have you heard people exclaiming, this book changed my life. You yourself might have felt the same way. Not just the books but — articles, personal stories, observations, insights — all have the power to make a difference in other people’s lives.

Even though we may not intentionally set out to make a difference, our words have profound power. Just think the Greta Thunberg’s speech on climate change or Amanda Gorman’s speech on the inauguration day. Did they make a difference?

Sometimes it is just a tiny little difference.

When my parents were still alive I started collecting their stories and stories of their parents. Recently I compiled them, put them in a private blog, and gave the link to my children, nephews, and nieces. Migrated to Australia as kids they were losing connection with the land where their grandparents lived all their lives. Stories I compile gave them their roots.

I write memoirs because I have a passionate desire to be of even the tiniest bit of help.

I like to write about the process of healing, of developing, of growing up, of becoming who we were born to be instead of who we always agreed to be.

It’s sort of a missionary thing, to describe one person’s interior, and to say we’re probably raised not to think this or say it, but actually, all of us feel it and have gone through it, and we all struggle with it.

I feel like it’s a gift I have to offer to people, to say, “This is what it’s like for me, who you seem to like or trust.

We’re all like this. We’re all ruined. We’re all loved. We all feel like victims, we all feel better than.”

— Anne Lamott in Why We Write About Ourselves

We write to be heard.

There is a common perception that writers write to make money. To make a name for themselves. Nothing can be far from the truth. We write because we want to be heard.

We write the thing that we can’t say. We write to express feelings that are hard to say verbally. We write to tell our stories. And of those whose stories must be told.

I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t.

— Audre Lorde, author poet.

We write so that we can live.

Writing is a way to cope with the atrocities of life. The more life got harder, the more the heartache and pain became unbearable, the more I write.

It was some of my greatest, deepest writing. I reflected on life, relationships, and letting go. I honestly don’t think I would have survived this last week if I had not been writing. I wrote for myself.

We write to make sense of this world.

Sometimes this world we live in doesn’t make sense at all. When ugly things happen, writing becomes a tool to make sense of it. 

To understand the world, we first need to understand ourselves. We need to bare our souls to tell the story we want to tell. 

Writing about trauma is more than simply documenting experience — it’s about illuminating life on earth. It’s about transforming tragedy into art, and hoping that somehow that piece of art may help someone else who’s gone through something unbearable and who doesn’t yet see that there truly is a light at the end of the dark tunnel.

— Tracy Strauss

We write to find beauty.

Writing helps us go deep. And like gold, you got to move several tons of earth to find the nuggets. 

Writers are philosophers in making, always trying to figure out the meaning in everyday happenings. Our role is to hold the magnifying glass and enlarge whatever we are focusing on. 

Our job is to find hope where there is none, to find meaning where it doesn’t make sense, to find beauty where ugliness surrounds us.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened, and its deepest mystery probed? … Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaning, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?

— Anne Dillard in The Writing Life

We write to give a gift.

When we write our stories with honesty and generosity about our lives and meticulous care for our craft, we are giving the world a gift. We’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing.

We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best as we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story… And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or conflict. And that is why we write.

— Neil Gaiman

We write so that we can listen.

Writing is a way to listen better. Every time, I transcribe a podcast or a video I discover things I had missed while listening to it. 

I have a weird habit. I write down things people say to me. Those little snippets carry a different meaning on paper than they did verbally. The act of writing those words makes connections and brings out related stories. Even the hidden meanings.

I write because it is while I’m writing that I feel most connected to why we’re here. I write because silence is a heavyweight to carry. I write to remember. I write to heal. I write to let the air in. I write as a practice of listening.

— Andrea Gibson

We write to create order out of chaos.

When I wasn’t writing, I was reading. And when I wasn’t writing or reading, I was staring out the window, lost in thought. Life was elsewhere — I was sure of it — and writing was what took me there. In my notebooks, I escaped an unhappy and lonely childhood. I tried to make sense of myself. I had no intention of becoming a writer. I didn’t know that becoming a writer was possible. Still, writing was what saved me. It presented me with a window into the infinite. It allowed me to create order out of chaos.

— Dani Shapiro in Still Writing

Photo by Tessa Wilson on Unsplash

How to make your character come alive

Neera

For the past few days, I have been working on the character development of my novel. There are a few techniques I have learned which I am going to share with you in this post.

Figure out how your character looks like.

Knowing how your characters look physically before starting writing about them makes them come alive. The tool I have used to find their physical appearance is Google images. I would go to the images section of Google and do some random searches. More than usual I will find a picture that matches the character I have in mind.

There could the eye color you might be looking for or a jawline or maybe the hair color. The only thing I knew about my protagonist was that she has long black hair. When I searched the term ‘long back hair’, I found a picture of a girl who I knew instinctively was my protagonist.   

Find pictures not only for the protagonist but also of the antagonist and all major characters. Once you know how they look like, it will be very easy to write about them. Keep in mind you will have to describe their physical features to your readers so they can also picture them in their minds. The best way I have seen it done is by tagging them.

J. K. Rowling goes to a lot of trouble to create characters with very distinct physical tags. Harry Potter has green eyes, lightening-shaped scar, glasses, and messy hair. Ron Weasley can be very easily pictured with red hair, freckles, and long nose, so is Hagrid from his size shaggy hair and a bushy long beard.

You don’t have to go to a lot of lengths to describe your characters. You can use very short descriptions when you first introduce them and tags are a great way to do them.  

Tags can include physical features, body marks, clothing, hairstyles, characteristic mannerisms, facial expressions, manner of speaking, jargon, noises the character makes, or even odor – anything, in fact, that a person interacting with the character would notice about him.

Do a Personality test for each of your main characters.

To save your characters from falling flat, give them rich personalities. Figure out what they like and dislike, what that think, say and how they react. You can give them behavior traits like real people and the best way to access a vast majority of data on people’s behavior is through personality tests.

The Myers Briggs Test was the first one of its kind (compiled by Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers-Briggs) based on psychologist C. G. Jung’s work. Since then several others have come into play. The one I used is called 16 Personalities because it is free and it also has a vast database based on millions of real-life people.

When you take the test, you get access to both the positive and negative traits of that personality type. The trick is to answer the questions as you think your character would have answered them.

You will get about twenty pages of information. You can use whatever you like and discard the rest. You don’t have to stick with it completely, can add other things on top of what you got. The outcome will be a close to life, three-dimensional character.

Interview your character.

Interviewing is a great way of finding the voice and also the mannerism of your character and I find it very easy to do.

Settle at a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed for some time, close your eyes and invite your character to come and sit with you. See him standing across from you. He will be reluctant initially but if you are kind and show compassion, his resistance will break and he will accept your invitation.

Start with easy questions. Have a conversation with him. How are you? Thanks for coming today. I am sorry I have been ignoring you, but I am here now and want to know you better.

Tell me how have you been lately. Tell him the bits you already know about him. I know you have been upset when your father spoke so badly to you, why do you think he does that? You will find he will start talking. Note his mannerisms and start writing (or typing).

You can open your eyes now. You will find the conversation very easily move from your mind on to paper. Write everything you see or hear. Keep asking easy questions keeping the hard one for the last. You may find that he doesn’t answer the hard question and leaves the interview. That is fine. He will tell you next time when there is more trust between the two of you.

Then he will tell you everything, even the things you haven’t imagined for him.

That is when he will come alive.

Photo by Duncan Shaffer on Unsplash