It’s possible I hate your main character.

Now, that might be on me. The list below? Entirely personal. And, as always, in the hands of a master, none of this shit applies. A masterful storyteller can break all the rules and make the breaking of the rules seem like that should’ve been the rule all along. Your Mileage May Vary, but just the same I thought it an interesting exercise to list those things that make me want to punt your main character into a pterodactyl nest. Where he will be promptly ripped into ribbons and gobbets of man-meat.

1. No Agency: Reactive Over Active

The protagonist helps to shape the story through her actions. It’s just how she rolls. Only problem is when the reverse ends up being true: the story forever pushes the character. It’s like in a boxing match — some boxing matches are dreadfully one-sided, with one poor sod taking a limitless pummeling, his head looking like a Ziploc baggy full of ground bison. That’s not a good mode for your story. Your protagonist should not be constantly on the ropes. Sure, the inciting incident might demand reaction (“My daughter was kidnapped by angry polecats! To action!”), but the character must have or claim agency for herself. I despise characters who never grab the reins of the story, not even by the tale’s end.

2. Even Worse: Passive Over Active

Passive is worse than reactive. They’re not just ducking and guarding and feinting — these characters lay down on the ground and let the story defecate on their chest while the audience watches. The character is not a leaf in the stream that is your story. The character is not just a piece of fucking furniture.

3. Zero Redemptive Qualities

I don’t demand a “likable” character. I think likability is overstated. As I say, we need to be willing to live with the character for two hours or 300 pages, not be his best buddy. Just the same, I can’t abide a character who has zero likable or redemptive qualities. He can be selfish and shallow and doomed to his own tragic flaws as long as I have something to grab hold of to pull me out of the swampy mire of those most wretched character traits. “Oh, he’s a dick, but he loves kittens! He kills people for a living but he saves orphans!” Something. Anything. Please.

4. Punches Kids, Kick Pets, And Other Vile Acts

You can give a character as many redemptive qualities as he likes, but for me there is a line where a character crosses over and performs truly execrable acts that cannot be forgiven. I think of this as the Anakin Skywalker problem — I’m supposed to believe that Darth Vader is deserving of redemption by his hillbilly moppet of a son. “There’s still good in him.” Except then Lucas made the prequels and has Anakin murdering Jedi children, Force-choking his wife in a case of domestic abuse and, I dunno, probably setting up a brutal dog fighting ring on Tatooine. I can’t get past that. Ruins the whole thing for me.

5. The Ben Stiller Effect

I don’t want to feel a sense of unending embarrassment for your main character. Watching him, I shouldn’t be constantly wincing, crossing my legs, furrowing my brow. Do not let conflict be driven by the character’s ceaseless stupidity. Endless humiliating self-driven failure ceases to be interesting.

6. The Forrest Gump Problem

Reverse problem: your character’s success is driven by his stupidity. Every time Forrest Gump steps in pile of horse-shit it’s another unqualified success, somehow — “Oh, ha ha ha, Forrest Gump accidentally threw a Frisbee and broke the president’s nose and now we won Viet Nam and chocolate cake for everybody!” I can’t get behind a character whose rampant dipshittery is a cause for celebration.

7. Muddy Motivation

I need to know what your character wants and why he wants it. That is the bare minimum psychic investment I must possess for your character — motivation is the engine behind a character’s actions, and if I have no idea why the character does what he does, then I’m floundering about on the beach of your fiction like a dying porpoise. You can obfuscate a lot about your main character. But not that.

8. “I’m So Good I’m Perfect!”

“I’m a noble fireman and an astronaut and I can do no wrong and I’m made of adorable river otters and I help create the dreams of young girls with ponies in their hearts.” I hate your Goody Two-Shoes Never-Does-Nothing-Wrong character. Hate ’em. You’ve turned that character’s goodness into a shining dagger which you then plunged into my breast (tee hee, breast). Conflict dies in the hands of a perfect protagonist. We love characters for their imperfections. So allow them to be imperfect.

9. Though Maybe Cool It On The Imperfections

You can, of course, go too far with the imperfections, flaws and frailties though, can’t you? “He’s a heroin addict! And a compulsive liar! And gets off on autoerotic asphyxiation. He’s got one leg. And gambling debts! His kids hate him his wife left him he lost his job and his house and he’s allergic to bees and…” You hit a point where it’s equal parts pathetic and downright unbelievable. Hang your hat on a core set of weaknesses. Don’t hamstring the character with an egregious and endless menu of foibles.

10. Her Quirky Quirks Are So Heck-Darn Quirky!

Quirks can be cute. They can be fun. Michael Weston on Burn Notice always eats yogurt. Great. Fine. But don’t let them stand in for genuine character traits. You know the old saying: “Too many quirks poop in the soup.” I think that’s a saying? Whatever. Point is, it’s awfully easy to let a laundry list of quirks pretend to be the foundation of a good character. But quirks are hollow. Too many overwhelm with a disingenuous sense: quirks are a stand-in for authenticity. Doubly true when the quirks mount and become all too twee.

11. “Blah Blah Blah, Toshi Station!”

Whining is not an attractive quality in anybody. Including your characters.

12. Had It Too Good For Too Long

Characters can and should overcome conflict. It’s part of storytelling: characters encounter conflict and struggle to overcome said conflict. But it should never be easy. You remember that kid in school? Had lots of money, teachers loved him, always had everything handed to him on a silver plate by his robot butler? You hated that kid. You hate him in real life and you hate him in fiction. Characters should not slide through the story like a baby covered in bacon grease. Conflict shouldn’t just be speed-bumps or walls made of tissue paper. If a character has it too easy, then I find it equally too easy to quit reading your damn story.

13. The Shoddy Character Copy Machine

Oh! Look! It’s Superman! Buffy! James Bond! Bleargh. I don’t want to see a carbon copy of another character. If I want to read about that character, I’ll go read about that character.

14. “The Type”

I don’t want to read the story of any kind of “type.” I don’t want to read about an archetype or a stereotype or a… I dunno, a what’s a daguerreotype? That’s a thing, right? It’s a character who… is good with… daggers? WHAT AM I A WORDOLOGIST? (Okay, fine, before I get a fusillade of smug pedantic comments, I know what a daguerreotype is. It’s the French word for “penis.”) A “type” is just a piss-thin coat of paint to slather on a faceless mannequin to give the illusion of having a genuine character there somewhere. Create people who are real in the context of your world. Do not lean on the crutch of “type.”

15. The Everyman: Duller Than A Butt-Plug

I’m done with the Everyman. He’s just — ugh. He’s a cubicle wall. He’s a chewed up wad of cardboard. He’s a blank piece of notebook paper. Yes, yes, I get it — he’s meant to represent all of us and be the fictional representation of The Common Man but yeah, you know what? He mostly just comes across as boring. Few of us are truly as common as the phrase “Common Man” suggests, so, let’s divest ourselves of that dull-as-fucking-wallpaper notion and move on. Yes? Yes.

16. Those Angles Don’t Add Up

I don’t want a boring character, obviously, and yet I do demand some degree of internal consistency. The things she does need to add up. They need to come from a place inspired by her fears, her motivations, her past. If we know all along she’s got a lady-boner for revenge, then it’s a hard pill to swallow when she continues to perform actions against that revenge. But it falls to little things, too — she got shot in the leg but doesn’t limp, she’s from Philadelphia but doesn’t know what a cheesesteak is, she’s got black hair one minute and the next minute she’s a sentient recliner named “Dave.” You know. Little things.

17. The Inexplicable Cipher

Mystery is good. I like mystery. I like not having all the answers and feeling like I’m following a trail of your breadcrumbs and, hey, who knows, maybe there’s a pile of gold at the end or some kind of bear-shark-robot hybrid that wants my intestines to host its sharkbearbot progeny. What I don’t like is a character who’s basically just one big question mark: an unsolvable and unknowable puzzle. The character is our way through this thing. She is the lens that focuses our view of the story. If that lens is covered in bird foulings and other schmutz, then everything is muddied. Ciphers can end up as a cheap and lazy trick. Such artifice will earn you a Krav Maga crotch-kapow from yours truly.

18. Atlas Pooped

A character is more than just his philosophies. We are not the sum total of our beliefs. We have friends and family. Hopes and dreams. Secret plans and bizarre sexual peccadilloes requiring an oil drum full of egg whites and Abe Vigoda in a too-tight wetsuit. If your character fails to possess those things and is just a mouthpiece for his (or worse, your) belief systems, then I will come to your house and beat you about the head, neck and butthole with a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

19. He Tells Me About Stupid Shit

The novel form is great in that it gives story and character room to breathe — but the novel form also offers authors enough rope with which to hang themselves and the whole audience. Just because a novel gives you room to talk doesn’t mean the character should sit there for page after page talking about completely inconsequential piffle. It has to relate back to the story in some way — if your character goes on for three pages about breakfast or toilet habits or animal husbandry and none of it reflects or relates to the story at hand, I am going to want to throttle that character for wasting my time. First draft is a great place to let characters off their leashes. Subsequent drafts should cage those unruly assholes.

20. Truly Fearless

Fearless characters don’t hold my interest. Oh, I like a character that seems fearless, that acts like she doesn’t have one scaredy-widdle-bone in her whole body. But just the same, real fears need to manifest — she must have things to lose, must have things she cannot abide, must have things that haunt her.

21. Not Actually The Main Character

I want the main character to be the protagonist. This doesn’t need to be true, technically, but fuck it, I like it and this list is all about me, nyah nyah boo boo. Sure, you can have a main character who is a witness to the protagonist’s journey and is an observer to the changing world and the unfolding tale, but you need to be really powerful talented to pull that off and get away with it. Let your main characters drive the story as protagonists. Don’t give us a main character who somehow remains secondary to the tale being told.

22. The Motherfucker Dies

Pet peeve time: kill off your main character and I get squirrely. Twitchy. Stabby. There’s an, erm, quite popular “vampire apocalypse” novel a few years back that did this and I had to put the book down. And stomp on it. And punch trees as I held them responsible for creating the paper on which the book was printed. You can maybe get away with this if your cast features an unholy host of “main” characters (I’m looking at you, GRRM), but it’ll still earn you the stinkeye.

23. Wait, Fellas, Come Back, Come Back!

I wanna spend time with your main character but then you run off, leaving me behind like a fat kid who just dropped his ice cream in the sand. I want to hang with great characters, I don’t want you to keep ditching me and having the action happen off-screen or off-page. Root me to the character. I want to be duct-taped to that sonofabitch. Don’t give me a kickass character and then abandon his perspective for half the story.

24. Stagnant As Swamp Water

The heroic mode allows main characters to not change but instead change the world. That’s totally viable. What burns me is when neither is true — the character doesn’t change, the world doesn’t change, nothing changes, it’s all one big status quo circle jerk. Something or someone must change.

25. There’s No There There

Worst case scenario: your character just has no substance. He has no soul. This isn’t a technical writing thing, and it isn’t even a thing you can stick with a push-pin and say, “Here, just give him dark hair, some Mommy issues, and a loyal sharkbearbot companion.” But for some reason the character fails to feel real, fails to allow the audience to transcend the page or the screen and see the character as a Real Boy rather than a Wooden Doll. It’s a sign, perhaps, that you just don’t understand the character you’ve written, that he is held at an arm’s length and you have not yet found that empathetic psychic bridge between the two of you. There’s no easy way to solve this conundrum, sadly — my only advice is to hunker down and figure out what it is you haven’t figured out about your main character.

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Fact is, a lot of writers work day-jobs unrelated to writing. And there is, obviously, nothing wrong with that. I did that for many years myself, and though it can be tricky, it guarantees stability.

For me, though, the dream was always to pack the cubicle farm walls with C4 and blow them sky-high. So, this is about that. This is about fulfilling the dream of working as a full-time writer.

Please to enjoy.

1. Best Get Mad Skills, Son

That might be “skillz,” with a ‘z.’ Sorry for any negligence on my part. The point remains the same regardless of spelling — you cannot survive as a full-time writer without the skills to back it up. You can’t just one day up and decide to make a living as a hard-workin’ trench-crawlin’ penmonkey if you cannot write well. Know your stuff. Get to a comfortable level. If you can’t play baseball, you don’t join the Phillies. You don’t join the CIA if you can’t fire a gun and spy on dudes. Don’t attempt full-time writing without first learning your craft. If you leap into the dark chasm, don’t forget to bring a flashlight.

2. The Slow Detachment

Most successful full-time writers don’t one day roll out of bed, brew a cuppa joe, then tell their day job boss to eat a bucket of whale dicks and then declare themselves the President of Writerland (capital: Inkopolis, population: one deluded penmonkey). Start by building a resume. Write part-time. Earn some cash. Then earn more. Gather clients and publishers while also writing some material for yourself. Build to it.

3. When To Punch The Eject Button

The best sign for when it’s time to take the leap? When your day-job is officially holding you back from earning out. When you’re able to say — based on evidence, not liquor-fueled guesswork — “Man, if I wasn’t working 40 hours at the Big Dan Don’s Nipple Clamps And Taintscratcher Half-Price Market, I’d start making some real coin at this inkslinger gig,” then you know it’s time to start pulling away from the day job.

4. Waggle Your Toes In Those Part-Time Waters

Diving into a cold pool or sliding into a hot jacuzzi, you ease in so as not to shock and/or scorch your privates into crawling back into your body. (Actually, I wouldn’t get into a jacuzzi. You ever check out the water jets on those things? It’s Hepatitis-City. All varieties: A, B, C, X, Z, Prime, v2.0, Exxxtreme Triple Nacho, etc.) Hepatitis aside, it helps to have steady income rolling in, even at reduced levels. Go part time with the day job (or pick up a new part time job). It reduces the financial shock, I assure you.

5. Your Own Personal Version Of The Hunger Games

Actually, these games are more like: “Am I still hungry? Did I eat all my Beefaroni? Did I lick the dust from the Ramen noodle flavor packet? I win! Or I lose! I’m so hungry I’m seeing angels!” Win or lose, expect to occasionally be hungry, both figuratively and literally. But that’s okay (as long as you don’t starve). Be hungry! Hunger to eat, hunger to pay rent, hunger to not die of exposure: all powerful motivators to force you to write. You learn a lot about things like “inspiration” and “writer’s block” when you’ll be kicked out of your apartment if you don’t put fingers to keyboards and start telling stories.

6. Like A Boss

It sounds great — “You’ll be your own boss!” You think, yeah, okay. I’ll get the executive toilet. I’ll get motherfucking foot massages. I’ll get a solid gold pen-holder that looks like a dude golfing and I stick the pen in his ass to make him putt (aka “The Putt Butt Pen Cup,” I just trademarked that shit, so, uhh, dibs). Thing is, being your own boss means you have to be your own hard-ass. Your own voice of dissent, your own chastising shadow. It means you have to be a little bit of a dick to yourself. “No Scotch before noon! No video games, and only a fifteen-minute masturbation break! Write, you little story-goblin, write!”

7. A Goal-Driven Life

Best way to be your own boss: set goals for yourself. Short-term and long-term. Set a word count goal for each day. Set aside portions of your time to hunt for jobs or seek places to submit your work. Plan to have the first draft of a novel written in three months, submitted to agents and editors or self-published by six. Plan for tomorrow, for next week, next year, and the next ten years. You can’t just wing this shit.

8. The Deadline Is The Lifeline

Deadlines you set for yourself or that are set for you by potential clients, agents, publishers, or the random jabbering machine-elves you see after you eat that moldy lunchmeat you keep finding in your fridge, will be your saving grace. Deadlines give you purpose, direction, clarity. They are a goal set externally. If someone doesn’t give you one and you’re, say, working on your own 10-book space opera cycle about Laser Moons and Star Dragons, set your own deadline. Put it on the calendar. Work toward it daily.

9. Tumble Outta Bed And Stumble To The Kitchen

…and pour yourself a cup of whisk… er, ambition! One thing, though: full-time writing isn’t a 9-to-5 job. It isn’t 40 hours a week. Sometimes it’s 30 hours a week. Sometimes it’s 60. Sometimes it means working on weekends. The luxury of being able to tell stories for a living means sacrificing some of that expected schedule. But hey, fuck it, you can nap on the job if you want and nobody’s going to fire you.

10. Hannibal, Mr. T, Face, And That Other Guy — Rorschach?

The full-time writer appears to undertake his mad crusade alone: out there on the bow of an empty ship, slicing stories into clouds with his épée. But you need a team. You might need a CPA to do your taxes, a lawyer to handle intellectual property issues, an agent to sell your rights, and further, self-published authors may need editors and cover artists and e-book designers, oh my. You can customize your team further: beta readers! Whiskey tasters! Ego-strokers! Frothing zealots! Choose your squad wisely. Full-time authoring is a gore-caked, blood-soaked, viscera-entangled battle for your very soul. Or at least for next month’s cable bill.

11. The Cup Should Rattle With Coins

Save up. Repeat: save up. Save your motherfucking money. Pile it in heaps and sit on it like a dragon nesting on his hoard. Money from writing will come, but it comes slow, unsteady, and inconsistent (insert crass joke about ejaculating). You don’t get a weekly check. You go into a full-time writing job with nary two pennies to rub together, you just dicked yourself hard. You’ll be eating your pets in no time.

12. “Is There A Line Item For Internet Porn?”

Also: learn to budget. Because the money you get comes in in fits and starts, you have to know you can pay your bills over the next many moons before the next check comes rolling in. Make sure you can pay your electric bill before you go buying some other fun-time bullshit. Pay ahead if you must. Pragmatism. Stability.

13. More Fun Financial Realities That Will Poke You With A Pointy Stick!

Taxes are going to be a knee to the groin. Some clients won’t pay on time and you have to turn into an asshole to get your money. Contracts will sometimes read like they were written in Aramaic, then translated to German, then mangled by an insane spam-bot. People will try to take advantage of you and your time. Financial institutions will barely consider you a human being. Stay out of debt because debt will shank you in the shower when you least expect it — credit card debt is in particular to be avoided. Credit cards are like little nasty Horcruxes or Sauron-infused Hobbit bait. So tempting to use. And a bad idea all around.

14. Critical Care For Your Lumpy Slugabed Body

Bold statement time: if you cannot afford health care — even bare bones bottom-dollar health care — then you may not be ready to go full-time with the writing gig. You need health care. If something happens to you — pneumonia! lung collapse! sucking chest wound! gored by a coked-up water buffalo! — and you don’t have health care, the debt you will take upon your shoulders will make Earth-wielding Atlas get the pee-shivers. It’s not nice, it’s not fair, but it is what it is: take not your health nor medical care for granted.

15. The Paradigm Shift Of Pay-For-Play

Ahh. The old day-job. When you could, conceivably, rise to the level of your own incompetence and sit around watching funny cat videos all day long and still get paid for it. Ha ha! Sucker. Those days are gone. You’ve now entered into a more pure relationship between effort and compensation, as in, the more effort you put into something, the more work you put out, which means the more money you earn. Fail to work? Fail to create? Then you fail to get paid. On the one hand, this is really cool: your every word matters. You can calculate how much you must write to buy coffee, pay for dinner, rent a van-load of strippers. On the other hand, it means you don’t get vacation days. You don’t get sick days. A day you don’t work is a day that accumulates nothing toward your needs. You’re the hunter, now. You don’t hunt? You don’t eat.

16. The Lie Of The Romantic Writer Life

Get shut of your illusions regarding a full-time writer’s life. Last week I told you about the Lies Writers Tell, but this is one I didn’t put on there — the writer’s life is needlessly romanticized. It’s not Parisian cafes and staring at clouds. It’s not wistful pondering and perfecting the Great Novel that we have within us. It’s pantsless and desperate and you grab lunch when you can and guzzle coffee because it’s there and you’re surrounded by papers and email feels like drowning and are those jizz tissues and why are my fingers blistered and bloody OH YEAH IT’S ALL THIS STORYMAKING. Nary a whiff of romance to it. But it’s still pretty bad-ass to do this for a living. So, stop complaining.

17. “But They Shall Not Take. . . My Wristwatch”

Working on your own there is a propensity to let time fritter away, whether by your own hand or at the behest of others (“Well, you’re at home, can’t you grout the bathroom?”). You will sometimes need to defend your time with sword and shield, with tooth and nail, with mecha-grizzly and cyborg-puma.

18. A Horse Of Every Color

The name of the game is diversity. It is no longer easy to survive as a full-time writer splashing around in only one pool. It’s hard to be Just A Novelist. Hard to be Only A Screenwriter. See this hat rack? WEAR THEM ALL OR STARVE. You’ll write blogs and articles and books and movies and games and secret vampire erotica and recipes and — well, whatever it takes to keep doing what you do. This is part of the “freelance penmonkey” moniker I assume — I’m ink-for-hire, man, I’m a rogue word-merc out on the fringe. And this diversity is what helps me survive.

19. The Slow-But-Steady Burn Of Self-Publishing

Self-publish. Do it. Seriously. Don’t do only it, but do it. Here’s why: first, while there’s no advance, you get a great return on the per book (especially if you also sell direct). Second, it’s steady money. Traditional publishing has a lot of value (and you should do it, too), but it’s freakishly slow sometimes. Write a book, edit, agent, publisher, pub edits, and on the schedule a year down the line. Self-pub starts to pay out slow and steady right from the beginning. Having it as part of your arsenal of penmonkey weapons speaks to that “diversity” thing I was just talking about. (Related: “25 Things About Self-Publishing“)

20. Kickstarter My Heart

If you’ve got fans, you could try Kickstarter. I’ll do a post on Kickstarter eventually but for now it’s worth mentioning that it is not and should not be treated as a Gold Rush or as easy money or as a guarantee. But it is an option for a penmonkey with some fans and an ability to throw together an interesting campaign on a story that might not otherwise exist without audience intervention.

21. Know The Many Faces Of Your Income

Know how royalties work? Or advances? Or per/word work-for-hire? How about rights? Or how Amazon pays out via KDP? You’ve got many options to earn out with writing, and it helps to have those options sliced and diced like an autopsy victim on your authorial desk. You also might earn some coin with speaking engagements, teaching opportunities, consulting gigs, hobo hand-jobs, feats of drunken heroism, etc.

22. Know The Value Of Your Work

That value is not “zero.” That value is not “cheap.” You know what’s cheap? Taco Bell. You know what’s free? Titty twisters. Chalupa diarrhea and nipple pain does not a writer career make. That’s not to say free and cheap can’t be part of your overall strategy. They can. But they are not the sum total of said strategy. Also: don’t write for exposure. There’s a reason getting caught outside and perishing is called “dying from exposure.” I mean, it’s probably a different reason, but shut up, it works metaphorically.

23. Shakespeare Got To Get Paid, Son

Nothing else needs to be said on that one.

24. Didn’t I Mention Wearing Lots Of Hats?

Diversity also means taking on other tasks as a writer: you are no longer just penmonkey; now you’re in marketing and advertising and publishing and editing and all that shit. Gone are the days when an author writes one book a year, sends it off to his publisher, and lets them carry the burden while he rolls around on a bean-bag stuffed fat with cash. Sad and perhaps not fair, but if you were waiting around for life to be fair, you might as well also wish on a star for a leprechaun to come and tickle your perineum with a dodo feather. Assemble many talents. Be like the Swiss Army Knife.

25. ABW

PUT THAT COFFEE DOWN. Coffee is for writers only. Ahem. Sorry. ABW: Always Be Writing. It’s easy to lose that in the full-time writing career — easy to fall prey to emails, to agent-hunting and marketing your books and doing book tours or whatever it is you need to do. The thing to remember is all must be subservient to the content. Be generative. Create. All else is slave to that; your writing is not slave to anything. The most important hat you wear, the most bad-ass motherfucking weapon in your authorial arsenal, is your work. Your stories are your world; they’re what help you do this thing that you love.

Like this post? Want more just like it? Try these books:

The newest: 500 MORE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

The original: 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Only a buck: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING —

$0.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

The biggun: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY–

$4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY —

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF