He sat on my lap. “I’m writing a story!” he said. “I’m typing!”

And then he wrote:

 Nhdjyrttythjkj,./N

Qw23343dfgfghrtfghjbghnmhyjkrtyjg hmm,zAMNAMNB RTFGHBNKND FXGH JHGNMAZZVFGA

G  t aqthywqhg ab bv b

zTdxcdvxccv dcvcvvvcTQ nnz asm mz A

z tyj ybnhqdf3g3cvbv

And I assume he meant to finish with:

THEN THEY WERE ALL EATEN BY ZOMBIE CROCODILES

THE END.

Thought I’d preserve the boy’s first foray into fiction writing here on the blog. Now to spend the next 16 years convincing him that being a writer is a really, really horrible idea.

With a barrel-full of trouble and a chamber-full of attitude, charismatic but dangerous former Spitfire pilot Ack-Ack Macaque has gone into hiding, working as a pilot on a world-circling nuclear-powered Zeppelin. But when the cabin of one of his passengers is invaded by the passenger’s own dying doppelganger, our hirsute hero finds himself thrust into another race to save the world – this time from an aggressive hive mind, time-hopping saboteurs, and an army of homicidal Neanderthal assassins!

1. WRITING SEQUELS IS FUN

I had a blast writing Ack-Ack Macaque (Solaris Books 2013). It was a such a lot of fun to write that I was truly sorry to finish it. However, that sorrow quickly turned to delight when Solaris commissioned a sequel, and I was given the chance to step back into the world I’d created. I’d spent so much time in the heads of the main characters that coming back to them felt like meeting up with old friends. I knew them, and I already knew how they’d react in any given situation. All I had to do was drop them into the midst of a new plot and watch them fight their way out again. Sometimes you hear people say that a book “almost wrote itself”; I wouldn’t go that far – I worked damn hard on this book – but I can understand what they mean. The characters were so well established that sometimes, I felt almost as if they were with me, acting out the story while I took notes.

2. WRITING SEQUELS IS HARD

To pick up on the “I worked damn hard on this book” comment above: while the characters and their world were ready and waiting, the first challenge I found was coming up with a plot worthy of the first book, which had already received some stunning reviews. Somehow, I needed to stay true to the spirit of that first book, while simultaneously taking everything up a couple of notches.

Casting around for inspiration, I tried to come up with a list of sequels that were better than their original. I started with The Empire Strikes Back, of course, and Godfather 2; then I ran into trouble. Personally, I’ve always preferred Aliens to Alien, but I’m aware that isn’t a universally held opinion.

What I needed to do was to find a story that somehow built on the themes and action of Ack-Ack Macaque, which was largely concerned with the nature of reality and what it is that makes us human. It started as a murder mystery and then quickly broadened out as the investigation led to the discovery of a global conspiracy.

Looking to mirror this structure, I started Hive Monkey with another murder – but the investigation this time wouldn’t lead to a sinister plot for world domination; instead, it would take us somewhere far stranger…

The second challenge came when I started writing. I had to decide how much information from the first book to include in the second. Should I assume that everybody was familiar with the story so far, or include big chunks of explanation?

After much agonizing, I decided to do what I could to make Hive Monkey accessible to new readers without boring those who had already enjoyed the first installment. I didn’t want to reveal too much, and thereby bog the narrative down, so I compromised by including an early scene, in which a member of the paparazzi pesters our monkey hero. This allowed me to refer to previous events through dialogue, avoiding clunky expository passages, and revealing much about the way Ack-Ack felt about his newfound fame.

3. WRITING WHAT YOU KNOW CAN GROUND THE STORY

My previous novels – at least, the ones with scenes set on Earth – had most of their action take place in London or Paris. With Hive Monkey, I wanted to do something different. I wanted to set the book in my hometown.

Although the ‘macaque’ books take place in an alternate timeline, because that timeline only diverged from our own in the late 1950s, its still close enough to be recognizable, as it shares our history up until the beginning of the 1960s, and therefore contains most of the same buildings and locations as our world.

It’s always fun to set stories in your hometown, because you can use locations you know intimately and that familiarity can add an extra authenticity to your writing. You don’t have to imagine a setting because you can visit it and walk around in it. You can see the stage on which your characters will play out their scenes.

However, doing so can also cause problems. You can fall into the trap of assuming too much knowledge on behalf of your readers. If you set a story against a local landmark and they’ve never visited it, they might not get the significance you assume it’s bringing to your story. They might miss the details you take for granted. In your mind’s eye, you might be constructing the most dramatic scene you’ve ever imagined – but if the reader doesn’t know enough about the locale to picture it in their own mind, if you’re not describing it properly, all your hard work will be wasted. You have to take a step back and ensure you’re being fair to them, that you’re avoiding in-jokes and describing the scene the same way you would if you were describing one on Mars or Jupiter, and not letting your familiarity with the place blind you to the reader’s needs.

On the other hand, it can be just as difficult to set stories in exotic or imaginary locales. You still have the same duty to describe the scene vividly, whether it’s Buenos Aires, Tokyo or the dark side of Moon.

One thing I’ve always enjoyed about the SF genre is the way it can transport you to some other time or place and fire your imagination so you feel you’ve been there and experienced something above and beyond your everyday routine. What you have to do as a writer is make sure you treat your local environment the same way – because it may well be exotic and mysterious to some of your readers.

In the case of Hive Monkey, I felt my familiarity with the setting helped ground the story and kept a fanciful narrative in touch with reality.

Bristol has always been at the edge of the civilized world – a city with a restless spirit. In 1497, John Cabot sailed from Bristol to discover the North American mainland. It was the departure point for expeditions of discovery, conquest and piracy; but also the home city of Paul Dirac, the jet engine, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

I was born in Bristol, in a little hospital a couple of hundred metres from Brunel’s famous Suspension Bridge, and I’ve spent most of my life in its environs. Choosing to set Hive Monkey on its streets was more than simply a case of “write what you know’, it was also a way to say something about the place that I call home.

4. WHEN WRITING A NON-HUMAN CHARACTER, YOU HAVE TO THINK LIKE A NON-HUMAN CHARACTER

When your main character is a monkey, you have to take care to make him more than simply a man in a hairy suit. You have to convincingly portray him for what he is – which means more than showing him eating the odd banana or going “Ook.”

When writing the character of Ack-Ack Macaque, I took pains to consider his needs and wants. As an uplifted monkey, his motivations would likely be different from those of a human. Certain behaviours and reactions would be hardwired into him. For instance, in some species, direct eye contact can be interpreted as a physical challenge – a reaction that makes it difficult for Ack-Ack to hold a civilized conversation with a human.

Above all, monkeys are social animals with hierarchical relationships, and Ack-Ack is alone, the only one of his kind. At the start of Hive Monkey, there are no other talking monkeys in the world, and so he is feeling lost and friendless, stranded on a planet of humans. How he overcomes those feelings and finds himself a ‘troupe’ supplies much of the story’s emotional core.

5. FACING THE FEAR

Although Hive Monkey is the first sequel I’ve written, it’s also my fourth novel, so this time around, I found I was starting to recognise certain parts of the process. For instance, after four books, I’ve come to accept that the first 20,000 words will be hard going. I’ve come to expect that difficulty and not let it intimidate me. I know that by the halfway point, the story will have taken on a life and momentum of its own, and that’s when everything will start to fly. A novel has its own inertia; if you put in enough work at the beginning, it will start to move.

However, the unique thing about this book for me was that it was a sequel. What if it wasn’t as good as the first book? Did I have enough left in the tank to do the characters and setting justice second time around? Did I still have something to say?

Fortunately, the answer to the last two questions turned out to be ‘yes’ – but that didn’t stop me lying awake worrying about it. Self-doubt and insecurity are the bane of a creative life. You are only as good as your last book. Every time a new one comes out with your name on the cover, people will use it to judge you and your worth as a writer. And frankly, that can be terrifying – especially if a fundamental part of your self-identity is tied around writing books. All you can do is to write the best damn book you can; and, with Hive Monkey, that’s hopefully exactly what I’ve done.

* * *

Gareth L. Powell is a novelist based in Bristol. He has written four novels and a collection of short stories. His books have been favourably reviewed in the Guardian, and he has written articles for The Irish Times and SFX, and an ‘Ack-Ack Macaque’ comic strip for 2000AD. 

Gareth L. Powell: Website | Twitter

Hive Monkey: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound

J.C. Daniels. Shiloh Walker. Herman Gurmanflarn. Okay, I made that last name up. Still! I love it when authors use different names to write different kind of books — and here is Shiloh “J.C. Daniels” Walker to talk about her newest, Broken Blade.

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I’m 37 years old and I’m still trying to figure that out… nah, not really.  I’ve answered this a bunch of times and in a nutshell, I wear a lot of hats…I write urban fantasy as J.C. Daniels, and romance as Shiloh Walker.  I’m a mom, a wife, a reader and a writer.  I married my high school sweetheart and we have three kids.

I’ve been hooked on stories for most of my life and started writing in elementary school.  I really got hooked on writing in middle school where I wrote this awful story in purple ink during my seventh grade history class.

I haven’t stopped since.  Most of my books are written under as Shiloh Walker and they are romances, but there aren’t a lot of picket fences…I usually have my couples all but dragging themselves over the finish line, because what good is a happy ever after if they don’t have to work for it?  I sorta branched out into urban fantasy in 2011 when a story dropped on my head like a sledgehammer.  The series is called the Colbana Files, and the first book is BLADE SONG.  My current release is the third book, BROKEN BLADE.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Meet Kit Colbana. She used to be a smart-ass with a sword. Now she scrapes by serving drinks in a bar, and hiding. She’s got reasons…really.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

It came because the end of book 2 kind of left me with nowhere else to go.  See, I left Kit in a really, really bad place and I couldn’t leave her there.  Even though all I did was write the story the way it played out in my head, I still have to drag her out of that hole.

HOW IS THIS A STORY ONLY YOU COULD’VE WRITTEN?

Again…that hole thing.  Since I’m the one who put her in there, I figure it was up to me to get her out.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING BROKEN BLADE?

The heroine was really, really broken when I started and I hate books where the main characters gets that ‘insta-fix’…ya know, where they go through something really awful but it doesn’t have much of an impact?  Kit had gone through something horrible, and I had to work with that and bring her through that, even though it’s hard, seeing your characters suffer.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING BROKEN BLADE?

I don’t know if it’s just with BROKEN BLADE, but more with this series as a whole.  Strength isn’t just a physical quality.  I set out to write this series because I wanted to try my hand at a character who wasn’t necessarily one of the strongest—and wasn’t going to ever be the strongest, not physically—but strength isn’t a physical thing and the more I write Kit, the more I get to explore what strength really is.  I’ve always liked writing messed up characters but I usually have to have them on the way to ‘almost okay’ by the end of the book.  Kit’s ‘almost okay’ is going to take longer than that, because she’s one of the most messed up I’ve ever taken on.  Her growth takes place over books, not chapters.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT BROKEN BLADE?

Revealing some secrets about one of the secondary characters…I’d been holding those cards close to my chest since the first book and I’m hoping the readers enjoy it just as much.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

With this book, probably not anything.  The fourth book, that’s a different story.  I’ve started and restarted that three times over now.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

“Next time I tell you there’s too much magic to trust to a charm, will you listen? You know blades. I know magic and—”

I put a hand on his arm.

Somebody was coming.

I could hear her.

Felt each footstep like an echo on my soul.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

Which one of me?  Ah… well, romance-me, Shiloh Walker has three e-novellas due out in the spring to launch my Secrets & Shadows series coming out from St. Martins.  And the UF-me, J.C. Daniels is working on two different projects…book 4 in the Colbana Files, which will follow up BROKEN BLADE, and I’m working on a prequel of sorts that tells how Kit got her start.

J.C. Daniels: Website | Twitter

Broken Blade: iBooks | BN | Amazon | Kobo

I’ve been talking to this fine upstanding deviant by the name of “Stephen Hood” (sounds like a criminal’s name to me) for some time about a little product that way back when didn’t even have a name, but has since evolved to become Storium, an online storytelling engine — a cross between playing a tabletop roleplaying game and controlling a novel from within its pages.

I’ve seen Storium go from something totally theoretical to a thing that’s now in an alpha state.

A thing you can actually use.

And I’ve seen the company behind Storium — Protagonist Labs — hire on a series of fascinating advisors. Talented creative folks I call friends, like Mur Lafferty, Will Hindmarch, J.C. Hutchins.

And I thought, “Well, somebody needs to get in there and lower the level of discourse. They need a smudgey dark mark against them — they need a little dirt on that chrome.”

So, I am now an official advisor to Storium.

AND SO I WILL DESTROY THEM FROM WITHIN.

I mean, “advise them” with all my “wisdom.”

Thanks to Stephen and the team for having me.

And if you wanna sign up to be notified of the Kickstarter (on track for next month):

Clicky-clicky.

Other News

THIS IS HORROR reviewed CORMORANT, and it’s a whopper of a review:

“Writing the blurb for a Chuck Wendig ‘Miriam Black’ book must be amongst the hardest tasks in publishing. Just how do you distill such an exhilarating, twisty narrative into a mere handful of words? Writing a review, even with a larger word count at our disposal, isn’t much easier. Giving consideration to the plot developments and surprises that the author peppers throughout The Cormorant, Miss Black’s third outing, without spoiling it is trickier than changing a person’s destiny.”

Adventures in Poor Taste gives the book an amazing review:

“Chuck Wendig and Miriam Black are at the top of their games with this one. You really can’t ask for a more entertaining and affecting work of supernatural fiction…or any type of fiction, for that matter.”

Sean Ferguson reviews the second Miriam book, MOCKINGBIRD:

“If this book series isn’t even on your radar yet, I implore you to make swift changes to make it so. These books have a little bit of everything: action and horror, love and suspense, sex and mayhem. Moments of unadulterated horror are punctuated with tongue-in-cheek comedy, as Wendig’s foul-mouthed Miriam wanders the highways and byways of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.”

Plus, some folks have been finding BLACKBIRDS, still, which is exciting!

From Serial Distractions:

“Here Wendig really flexes his writing muscles. In Miriam, he’s created a wonderfully flawed, but redeemable, character. The pacing, as usual, is relentless and the dialogue crisp and natural. Further, Wendig plays with a lot of serious issues here–death, redemption, fate–and does so in an entertaining, but no less thoughtful, way. It’s a road-trip novel that’s several layers deep, succeeding in being literary without sacrificing its pulp roots. It’s simply a great read.”

Skyla Dawn re-reviews the book, too:

“Wendig has written a better rounded, more realistic heroine than a number of female writers I can think of; the man knows what he’s doing and he gets his character. Miriam is abrasive and damaged and cut with sharp edges, but you can be damn sure I know a fuck-ton of women who are just like that. Some of them say ‘fuck-ton.'”

Let’s see. What else?

CORMORANT is eligible for this year’s Hugos, not next year’s, FYI.

I’ll also be launching CORMORANT locally at the Doylestown Book Shop on Saturday, February 15th — signing, a talk, a Q&A! 2pm. Details here.

Oh! The CORMORANT photo contest ends Friday! Get in now, win books, maybe a Chemex and some coffee. Already got some neat entries so far — jump in, get a camera, try your hand.

Gonna be at Phoenix ComicCon, for those that didn’t know. Along with a handful of megamazing authors: Kevin Hearne, Pat Rothfuss, Delilah Dawson, Stephen Blackmoore, Myke Cole, Sam Sykes, the syzygy that is James S.A. Corey, Jason Hough, Jaye Wells (NEMESIS), Brian McClellan, Charlaine Harris. JOIN US. We have such sights to show you.

Here, then, a guest post by my alpha clone, Dan O’Shea, whose newest thriller, Greed, is out now. You should check it out. Or I’ll send dogs to eat you.

Chuck was kind enough to lend me his blog again to pitch my new book, GREED. I’d already done Chuck’s Ten Questions thing for my debut novel, PENANCE. Didn’t seem to make sense to answer the same questions again. I can give you the elevator pitch – it’s a thriller, set in Chicago. It’s got blood diamonds and coke dealers and mafia dons and terrorists and mysterious three-letter agency types and regular cops and refugees and someone who’s not quite a nun.

But that’s not much of a blog post. So I thought I’d pontificate a bit, offer you young punks some life lessons.

There’s this line I use when in my author bio: Dan O’Shea has been a business and financial writer for more than 30 years. Three decades of writing about the tax code have driven him to write about killing people.

True enough as far as it goes, but lessons were learned.

See, here’s the thing. For a guy with only his second book out, I’m an old fart – in my fifties, and never mind how far in you little shits. I’ve done the confessional posts already, how I wasted way too many years writing for a living without writing what I really wanted to write. You want one lesson you can take to the bank? You want to be a writer, just write. Is that all there is to it? No. Talent’s involved. You can learn, sure, but there has to be some kind of base there, an aptitude for language, some intuition about storytelling. But you’re born with all the talent you’re going to get. Once they’ve wiped off the afterbirth, the rest of it’s on you. Every minute you spend with your ass in the chair and your fingers on the keyboard is a minute you’re getting better. Every minute you don’t is a minute you aren’t. No guarantees, of course. Doesn’t mean you’re getting published, doesn’t mean you’re getting famous, doesn’t mean you’re getting rich. Just means you’re getting better.

And I’ve had my ass in the chair and my fingers on the keyboard since before a lot of you were born. OK, most of that time I was writing about how transfer pricing issues and repatriated income concerns should shape tax strategies for businesses with off-shore operations. Or about how companies that don’t leverage cost accounting and their ERP systems to develop a metrics dashboard for KPIs aren’t getting the most from their IT investment. Exciting shit like that.

But what I said about getting better? It still applied. Here’s how.

I learned that everything is a story. There should always be a narrative arc. That shit about transfer pricing and repatriated income? You could just recite the facts – corporate rates in country A are X and in country B are Y and blah blah blah. Or you can make give your reader a protagonist to cheer for. A scrappy US manufacturer is getting pummeled by multi-national Goliaths using bottom-feeding labor costs to gut them on prices. But the company strikes out on the great adventure of off-shoring to fight back, relying on its wits and on the reflexes that transform its size from a weakness into a competitive advantage. It works with its tax sensi to pick the right locations, evolve the best structures, to become a nimble business ninja running rings around its lumbering foes. Sure, the need for a narrative arc is way more obvious when you’re writing fiction. You’re not trying to position some existing facts, you’re making up a story. But your big story has lots of moving parts, little stories that add up to the whole. That subplot you just ginned up to bridge a gap in your narrative? That’s got to stand on its own or it will read like a verbal Band-Aid, become the storytelling equivalent of reciting the tax rates for countries A and B.

I learned that motivation matters. Something would change, a tax law maybe. And my clients would want a story on it. I’d make them tell me why. If their readers just want the facts, then there are a dozen business wire services that have already beat my clients to the punch. They have to get past their readers’ brains and down into their guts. Was this change an opportunity or a threat? Do we play on the readers’ fears or on their greed? We all like to think we’re rational, and maybe our brains are at the helm most of the time. But our emotions are the fire in the boiler. Without them, the ship ain’t going anywhere. Do you know what your characters are burning for fuel? Nothing turns me off quicker than cardboard cutout characters that are just there to shoot guns and drive cars and move the plot. Get past their brains and past your outline and wallow around in their guts awhile. Know the way before you start telling me the what.

I learned how to string words together. I don’t have any new secret style sauce to offer – I have yet to read any advice on the craft of writing that The Elements of Style didn’t say first and better. But the longer your ass is in the chair, the easier it is to hammer out the copy and the better the copy is when you’re done. Really doesn’t matter what you’re writing about, the act of writing is still your gym time. I know writers who are afraid of starting a novel because the prospect of having to crank out 100K words just seems too daunting. Means they haven’t done the training yet. When I finally got serious about fiction, I’d already done my cardio, done my time in the weight room.100K words didn’t seem like that big a deal because I already had a few million words under my belt.

I learned that people would pay me to write shit. I still remember the first time I got a check for putting words on paper. Been a shit-ton of checks since then. Truth be told, the business writing pays way better than the fiction writing. Not if you’re Stephen King, of course. But on average? It’s no contest. Confidence matters. Sure, motivation has to start within – you have to believe in yourself. But sell something to somebody. I don’t care what or to whom. All the online zines and other outlets that run shit for free, those are great, but their proliferation has created a giant content vacuum that will suck up almost anything.  Some of them are better than others, so aim high. But keep pitching the people who pay. Once you get someone to open their wallet, then you really know you’ve spent enough time in the gym. And yeah, I know you can skip this step now. I know we’re living in the sunlit utopia of the great self-publishing revolution and that the oppressive gatekeepers of the literary industrial complex have been thrown to the curb by the Democratic People’s Republic of Everybody. You can just toss your shit up on Amazon now and wait for the money to roll in. Well, do what you want, but if nobody nowhere has ever paid you a cent for anything you’ve written, what makes you think and anybody anywhere is going to start now? Once I’d written a novel, I didn’t have any qualms about pitching agents. I knew when something was done and when it wasn’t. I knew when something sucked and when it didn’t. I had a few decades of checks from Fortune 500 clients that told me so.

So go buy my damn book. You can get better than 400 pages of my copy for fast-food money, better than 100K words. That’s a steal. My day-job clients would have to pay me six figures for that. C’mon, I need the scratch for my Metamucil habit.

Dan O’Shea: Website | Twitter

Greed: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound

(Related: The Zero-Fuckery Guide To Kick-Ass Characters)

1. A Personality

This seems rather obvious, sure — in a way it’s like saying, “What makes a really good tree is that it has an essential treeness” — but just the same, it bears mentioning. Because some characters read like cardboard. They’re like white crayon on white paper. Sure, the characters run around and they do shit and say shit but none of it has anything to do with character and has everything to do with plot — as if the characters are just another mechanism to get to the next action sequence, the next plot point, the next frazza wazza wuzza buzza whatever. Point is: your character needs a personality, and the rest of this list should help you get there.

2. Agency

The character should run an advertising agency. *is handed a note* Oh! Oh. I mean, The character should belong to the FBI and– *gets another note* JESUS CHRIST WITH THE NOTES, PEOPLE. But fine, yes, okay, I get it now. Agency means that the character is active, not passive. The character makes decisions and is attempting to control her own destiny as an independent operator within the story. She is not a leaf in the stream but rather the rock that breaks the river. *receives one more note* Oh, thank you, what a wonderful note! I do agree my beard is sexy, yes. I know! So rich! So full! So shiny. I oil it with secretions from squeezed ermine scent glands which also lends it that musky zing that sort of… crawls up your nose. *flicks beard sweat at you*

3. Motivation

Characters want things. They need things. They are motivated by these desires and requirements and they spend an entire story trying to fulfill them. That’s one of the base level components of a story: a character acts in service to his motivations but obstacles (frequently other characters) stand in his way. We need to know what impels a character. What are her motives? If we don’t know or cannot parse those motivations, her role in the story is alien to us.

4. Fear

Everybody’s afraid of something. Death. Taxes. Bees. Dogs. Love. Carnival workers. Ocelots. (I am afraid of the number 34 and the color “puce.”) Characters \ suffer from their own personal fears relevant to the story at hand. Characters without fear are basically robots who use their pneumatic doom-claws to puncture any sense of engagement and belief we have in the story you’ve created. The great thing about being a storyteller isn’t just giving characters fear — it’s ensuring that that their fears will arise and be present in the tale at hand. You shall be cruel. This cruelty shall be great fun and a veritable giggle-fest because storytellers are dicks.

5. Internal Conflict

“I am in love with Steve, but I also love my job as a diplomat to the Raccoon People of the Hollow Earth. But Steve is allergic to raccoons! But I may be the only person who can stop the Raccoon People from invading Canada! BY THE GODS WHAT SHALL I DO?” Great characters suffer from internal conflict. They don’t know what they want. Or how to get all the things they want. Position your characters between the Scylla and Charybdis of hard choices: choices that compete with one another. Giving characters these emotional, intellectual, soul-testing conundrums is sweet meat for the audience — the meat of conflict, the meat of drama. Further, it allows us to relate to these characters (as we all have to make hard choices) and gives us a reason to keep reading (because we want to know the character’s choices in the face of these inner conflicts).

6. External Conflict

Hey, external conflict is pretty cool, too. If the character is plagued by an old war wound, a damaged spaceship, a mysterious old villain who shows up to perform surgical karate on the character, all good. Doubly good if the external conflict matches or speaks to the internal conflict in some way. Say, for instance, an author who is addicted to slathering his beard with illicit ermine scent glands is also pursued by a very angry ermine scent gland dealer named Vito who would apparently like his money. Just an example. With no basis in reality. *runs*

7. Connections To Other Characters

That “lone-wolf ronin-without-clan” shit gets tiresome pretty quick. Characters need connections to other characters. These don’t need to be desired connections. They can be connections that the character is actively trying to deny. But they need to be there. They help make the character who she is and continue to push and pull on her as the story unfolds. Friends. Family. Acquaintances. Work buddies. Foes. Neighbors. Drug dealers. Enslaved Pokemon. Sentient snowglobes. Sex androids. Microscopic beard civilizations. You know. The usual.

8. Connections To Us, The Audience

We respond well to those characters who contain a little bit of us. We want to relate to them. The best characters are a broken mirror: we want to see ourselves reflected back, if in a distorted, unexpected way. We want to connect with them using that weird empathic psychic tendon where we tie together our shared traits or universal life experiences like we’re those humanoid blue goat-cat motherfuckers from Avatar. Young adult fiction is written with teenage protagonists experiencing teenage protagonist problems because it’s written for that audience. (And it’s why adults still can read those books comfortably — because adults remember being a teenager.) The reader wants a new story, but she wants an old story, too: her own.

9. Nuance And Complexity

Shitty one-note characters are a Taco Bell product: manufactured unfrozen gray-meat red-sauce in a proportioned somewhat-maybe-kinda-tortilla. They’re good for a quick bite and a hard purge (remember: you do not buy Taco Bell, you rent Taco Bell and then return it to its ecosystem with a couple flushes). Great characters are a nuanced meal: from an aperitif to the amuse-bouche to the first and second course, all the way through to the monkey course and the molecular gastronomy course, to coffee, dessert, and then ritual suicide. Each bite has complexity. Like sipping a fine wine or a great cup of coffee, you taste things that aren’t expected, that go beyond that word coffee or wine. (“I taste figs and fireplace ash, and a little after-hint of the tears from a griefstruck slow loris.”) A good character is complex because that means they are like — gasp! — real people. Real people who are not easily summed up or predicted. Real people with layers and surprises and who are a little bit good and a little bit bad and a whole lotta interesting.

10. Strengths: To Be Good At Something

Characters who have absolutely zero MAD SKILLZ are dull as a sack of frozen poached hippo meat. We like to read about characters who are good at something. “I’m the best damn werewolf veterinarian you ever did see.” “You need a speech pathologist for velociraptors, then you need me.” “I’m a cop who is also a robot and they call me OFFICERBOT wait that doesn’t sound cool.” You want characters who are capable or even exceptional: Sherlock isn’t a mediocre detective. Buffy isn’t just some half-ass vampire-puncher — she’s the goddamn Slayer. RANGER RICK ISN’T JUST SOME FUCKING RACCOON, MAN. This doesn’t have to be limited to actual skills or talents, mind — a character’s strength can be internal. It can be intellectual or emotional. Or it can be that she can knock a dude’s head off his shoulders with one fast punch.

11. Flaws: To Be Bad At Something

Sherlock is an amazing detective, and a terrible human. Buffy’s a bonafide bad-ass, but she’s also a glib, impulsive teenage girl. Ranger Rick the raccoon can ranger like a motherfucker, but he’s also got a bad addiction to Meow-Meow and a penchant for losing all his ranger paycheck at the Indian casino. Characters can be good at things but they can’t be too good — you need balance. If they’re the best at something, they should also be the worst at something. Conflict lives here; the space between Sherlock being the best detective and the worst human is so taut with tension the potential story might snap and take out someone’s eye. Plus, on a practical level, someone who is good at everything, bad at nothing is boring and unbelievable.

12. A Voice

I don’t mean this in a literal sense — “NO DEAF-MUTES ALLOWED” — I mean that, your character has to sound like your character. A unique voice, a combination of how she speaks and what she says when she does. When you write her dialogue, we should have no doubt who is speaking, even if the dialogue tags were eaten by some kind of bibliovore creature. What kinds of things does she say? Why does she say them? What does she sound like? Does her way of speaking reflect where she grew up or reflect her trying to get away from where she grew up? Is her mother’s voice in there somewhere? Her father’s? Is she brash and bold — or hesitant, reserved? How do all these things reflect who she actually is?

13. A Look

Put me in the camp where characters should look like someone or something. Some writing advice suggests that an author let her characters act as physical ciphers — zero description so that, jeez, I dunno, we can all imprint upon them or imagine them as whoever we want them to be. Fuck that shit, George. I’m not saying we need to hear about every chipped fingernail, eyelash, or skin tag — but pick a few stark details and make the character stand out. And let those details reveal to us something about the character, too. The perfect suit but the dirty shoes. The hair buzzed so flat you could land a chopper on top of it. The rime of blood under his nails. Whatever. What’s the character’s look, and what can it tell us about him?

14. Emotions

A character without emotion is a soulless automaton. They don’t need to reveal those emotions to the world around them, but they should reveal them to you as author and to the reader, as well. Characters feel things! They feel sorrow. And shame. And bliss. They feel itchy and hungry and confused and so angry they could crumple a vending machine like it’s a can of soda. They run the gamut like, oh, I dunno, real people. And the thing is, you can use these emotional responses to highlight for us who the characters are. They encounter something that should make them happy but it makes them sad instead — that’s a telling moment for the character. Why does this thing that would make everyone else happy make him want to cry and punch a cabinet instead?

15. Mysteries

Questions drive narrative. We continue reading sometimes just to answer questions. Who killed Mrs. Pennytickle? Who stole the Shih-Tzu of Darkness and for what nefarious purpose? What happens next? The audience is driven in part by the need to answer mysteries. Thing is, the audience and the characters have a kind of narrative quantum entanglement; the same things that draw us through a story are the same things that urge a character forward, too. We want to solve the murder same as the cantankerous detective does. Give the character questions that are unanswered — variables in her equation that she is driven to complete.

16. Secrets

It goes the other way, too. Just as a character has questions, he also has answers — answers that he never wants to share with anyone, answers that would be otherwise known as secrets. Heroic secrets. Dark secrets. Sexy secrets. Weird secrets. Underpants secrets. The character knows things that he doesn’t want revealed (creating complexity for the character and tension for the reader).

17. Humongous Genitals

The character’s vagina should be large enough to wolf down a small motorcycle. The character’s penis should be large enough to fell ancient trees with one hefty hip pivot. Characters must possess both sets of enormous genitals OKAY JUST SEEING IF YOU’RE PAYING ATTENTION.

17. The Ability To Surprise

The moment a character loses the ability to surprise us, they might as well be a dead body floating down a slow moving river. That’s not to say a character should be unpredictable on every page — “I killed a man! Now I’m starting a churro shop! Now I own a parrot! Now I’m gonna eat the parrot and jump into this howling chasm and die! EEEEeeeeeeeee.” But a character should always be able to still do something that makes us double-take and pump our fists in triumph or drop our jaws in shock. And it’s not just about action, either: it’s about showing surprising depths of emotion, or cleverness, or capability. It’s about the character being so much more than what we expect: a secret forest hidden beneath the cloud cover.

18. Consistency

And yet at the same time, those surprises shouldn’t also come out of left-field, either. Think of it like the reveal of a murderer in a murder-mystery story. You want that murderer to be revealed in a way where the story outsmarted you and yet, it still makes sense, right? You don’t want it to be, “Oh, and the murderer was actually Doctor Piotr Dongwick, the pharmacologist who you’ve never met or heard of and are just meeting now and this is basically the narrative equivalent of ROCKS FALL EVERYBODY DIES.” Characters are that way, too. When they reveal something about themselves or surprise us, it should be a thing that has us nodding our head — not scratching it like a confused chimp. We should be saying “wow!” now “wut?”

19. Small Quirks

I’m not saying every character needs to be a variant of Zooey Deschanel — besides, she is the quirkiest little quirk that ever did quirk and you cannot beat her at her own game. SHE EATS TOMATO SOUP IN THE RAIN WITH FOUR BABY GOATS ALL NAMED “OLIVER.” Whatever. Quirks can be an amateurish way of giving your character depth — in part because it’s artifice that doesn’t create any depth at all. Still, while quirks are no substitute for actual character traits, they are useful in small doses when a) letting the character stand out in our mind and b) lending some depth of character through a seemingly shallow expression. A character who always fidgets with, say, a coin or a pen or a pair of dice may seem like a one-off blah-blah detail, but later it can be revealed that this single, simple act is bound up to some tragic event in the character’s life (“MY MOTHER WAS KILLED BY A PAIR OF DICE” okay maybe not that, but you get the idea).

20. History

Your character didn’t just come karate-punching her way out of some storytelling womb. She wasn’t born pale and featureless like a grub only to grow her wings and limbs halfway through the tale. The character’s been around. Whether she’s 17 or 70, she has history. She has life. Stories. Things that happened to her and things that she did. First kiss! First breakup! First sexual experience! First drunk, first hangover, first AA meeting, first BDSM orgy, first spaceflight. That time Billy Grosbeak tried to grab her boob and she broke his nose. The other time she got fired from her coffeehouse counter-monkey job for spitting in some chode’s caramel macchiato. That time she did the thing with the girl at that place. What we see of a character in a story is just the tippy-top of the iceberg, just a nipple poking out of the water while the rest of the body remains submerged. Don’t let your characters be tabula rasa — some blank slate devoid of history.

21. The Right Name

This may seem a shallow point, but boy does a character’s name matter. You don’t just pick it out of a hat — it has to be the right name, in the same way that you want the right name for a child, or a dog, or that mole on your inner thigh (mine is “Benedict Arnold”). Like, “Bob Stevens” is not the name of a steampunk secret agent. “Miss Permelia Graceyfeather” is not the name of a motel maid from Tucson. You’ve got to find the right name. And, also of importance, a name that doesn’t sound like the name of another character in your book. You don’t want readers confused, nor do you want them conjuring a character from a whole other book or movie when reading yours.

22. Room to Grow

Characters grow and change. Okay, fine — not all of them do, an in certain modes of storytelling a stagnant flatlining character arc is sadly a feature and not a bug. But just the same, the most interesting characters are the ones who at least have the capability of change, who are part of an unfulfilled arc that is unseen but keenly felt. Readers want to go on that journey with a character. They want to go along for the ride: breakups and marriages and babies and revenge and redemption and resurrection. Some animals grow only as big as their cages — so give your character room to move around, yeah? Give them scope! Envision for them an (incomplete) arc!

23. Livability

I am fond of saying that what matters about a character isn’t that we like them but that we can live with them — meaning, if we’re gonna be hunkering down with that character for 400 pages of a book, or two hours of a movie, or a year’s worth of comic books, that character has to be someone we are willing and able to spend time with. They don’t have to be our pal. We’re not asking them for a ride to the airport or help moving into our new apartment. They have to be someone we can — and want! — to spend our time with in the narrative sense. How do you accomplish this? Well…

24. Gravity

You do this by giving them gravity. Making them as big and as interesting as can be so they draw us to them — like moths to a flame, like meteors to the earth, like cat hair to a new sweater. The greatest crime you can commit against your character and your reader is making them boring.

25. You

A good character needs you. You’re the champion, here. You’re the motherfucking engine of creation that will bring this character to life with the eye-watering boozy muse-breath of your drunken imagination. You are a very special ingredient indeed, young captain. See, the idea goes that no story is original, and maybe that translates to character, too. But you are an original. And the way you do things — the way you arrange old elements of story and character — is something wholly your own, provided you let yourself off the leash, provided you’re willing to smear your guts all over the page. You can bring something fucking amazing to every character you write: yourself. The character doesn’t exist without you. You are the puppeteer. You are parent and deity. So go, create. Give them life. Give them soul. Give them character. And then kick their ass.

* * *

Out now: