We tend to emphasize the importance of first impressions. When going to a job interview or the first day of a class, we might present ourselves a certain way in order to convey both our identity and professionalism. We might mention a certain TV show or movie we like to a person who we’re meeting for the first time and find that, because they share our interests, they have judged us as someone to keep talking to. First impressions are key to figuring out a general idea of someone you’ve just met.

 

The central idea is the same for introducing characters. When you introduce characters to an audience for the first time, you want to make an impression. This is especially true if you’re introducing a main character. This is the person, or at least one of the people, who you want to draw your audience into the story. It is vital that you introduce your character in a meaningful way that a) gives a general idea of who that character is, b) is attention-grabbing, and c) gets your audience invested in your story. Here I’ll give some advice as to how to best accomplish this.

 

Confirm that your character is the best one to tell this story.

 

Before you even start to introduce a character, you absolutely need to make sure that they should be the one telling the story in the first place. Is the story about something this character does? If the story is about an experience that a lot of people go through or a historical event, does this outside occurrence truly make an impact on your character? Is there someone better who the audience could follow as the story unwinds?

 

Once you’ve determined that your character is the best choice for your story, then you can start to introduce them.

 

Make sure the moment that your character is introduced is well picked.

 

In the world of writing, nothing is better than another chance to show instead of tell. This goes for introductions as well. The setting in which a character is introduced can do a lot more than just telling your audience what their qualities are. Setting up a character introduction in the middle of an important action can be so much more satisfying to read about than to be told about it later. For instance, say you’re writing a story about a girl who loves playing softball. You might have her introduced in the middle of a softball game, maybe even when she’s up to bat and the bases are loaded. Perhaps she’s down to her last chance to hit. This creates tension, shows what is important to the character, and creates room for more details about the character to be shown. For instance, if the story is from her perspective, her thoughts as she steps up to the plate could be revealed, allowing for the possibility of foreshadowing and or sharing more details about the character. Any or all of this is much more engaging and interesting than “Katie was an athletic girl who loved to play softball. She’s good at the sport and won the game for her team.”

 

Another good way to introduce a character via situation is by demonstrating something the character does in their everyday life. Take the introduction of the character Aladdin from the 1992 film of the same.

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VdZewCFyfg

 

 

In this scene, Aladdin is introduced mid-chase from the royal guard as they attempt to apprehend him for stealing a loaf of bread. This scene tells you all that you need to know about Aladdin going into this story: he’s clever, resourceful, a thief, and he lives in poverty. The scene also illustrates his relationship with his monkey sidekick, Abu, as well as features his interactions with the townspeople, who help demonstrate to audiences that, for Aladdin, evading the law is just a typical Tuesday.

 

Overall, the way you introduce your characters should be interesting and provide the information audiences need to know going into the story. While in real life, you may have a second chance at a first impression, this isn’t the case for written works. You only get one shot at giving your audience a good first impression of a character, so make it count!

World-building is an essential part of any story. Most people assume that world-building is the same as establishing the setting of a story or a scene in the story. This is a common misconception. True, setting does play a large role in a number of stories, especially in genres like high fantasy, sci-fi, and historical fiction, but world-building is so much more than just naming and describing a place.

 

 

Consider the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. In terms of world-building, I think it’s safe to say that Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are some of the highest regarded examples. Having created multiple languages for his stories and developing the cultures for multiple different fantasy races, the bar set by Tolkien is intimidating. While Tolkien’s work is incredibly popular and beloved by many, the extent of his world-building isn’t the general standard.

 

 

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien features elaborate and solid world-building.

 

 

While you can write fifteen different languages and study abroad in a different country for years on end in order to observe customs and attitudes similar to those of a society in your story, you don’t have to. What you do need is the perseverance to create a full and immersive world. In order to do this, you need to make sure that your world can be self-sufficient. Here are some tips:

 

 

Make sure that you have explanations prepared for all unique aspects of your world.

 

Say you’re writing a sci-fi novel and time travel is a new technology that’s relevant to the plot. You need to be prepared to know how your method of time travel works. When you create new ideas with your writing, you need to know all their ins and outs. That being said, you don’t need to include your ins and outs for everything if they are unnecessary and distract from the story, but if a new idea for a scene pops into your head involving an idea you invented for the story, fully understanding what you have created can lend itself to help you so you don’t have to make up the information as you go along and risk having errors with consistency. Fully and completely understanding any concepts you have created can also help you evaluate how much information is necessary for audiences to know. If a beta-reader is confused by a new concept or feels that you gave little in-story explanation for it, having that information on hand makes the revision process easier.

 

Make sure that you know the rules of your world.

 

I’ll keep this section brief because I know that I’ve discussed this topic at least once before on this blog, but it is vital that you establish the rules of your world. Even if you are writing with the intention of making the setting average and mundane, it is your responsibility as a writer to establish that the world you are writing is meant to be exactly like our own. In less-realistic fiction, knowing and establishing the rules of a world is just as important. Failing to do so often comes off as lazy writing and breaks the suspension of disbelief of your audience.

 

Research and Draw Inspiration from Real Life

 

If you look closely into many aspects of life, you’ll notice that there is a reason for most things being as they are. Ancient Egyptians didn’t wear kohl around their eyes just because they were into eye-liner; it helped them to protect their eyes from the sun. Nomadic groups don’t tend to live in tents or easily deconstructed huts because they like camping; moving around is their way of life. Even on a molecular level, the structure of molecules are the way they are because it allows them to perform very specific functions. When creating societies and cultures, draw inspiration from the way real people live. If you are writing a story about a fictional civilization that lives in the tropics, look at real-life societies for inspiration regarding architecture, clothing choices, lifestyles, etc. There isn’t a better way to write realistically than by looking to the real world.

 

 

These are just a few tips to help get you started in building a world for your story that can stand on its own. While there is a lot of advice out there on how to properly world-build, the only to get hone this skill, much like a lot of other skills, is to practice with patience and perseverance.

The use of tropes is often given a lot of flack. Many people, especially writers, compare the use of tropes to that of the dreaded cliché, viewing both as products of lazy and or amature writing. Still, I feel that there should be more nuiance to the dicussion surrounding whether or not the use of tropes is inherently detrimental to otherwise good writing. My own personal opinions on tropes are less clear clut than my opinions on clichés (click here to read about them).

 

I think this has a lot to do with how broad the definition is for what is considered a trope. Generally speaking, tropes are different structures and themes that are seen repeatedly across multiple works and mediums of fictions. Some of the most common are probably the group of three, the chosen one, and the love triangle. Here, I’m going to break down two of these tropes and discuss their usage.

 

The Group of Three

 

 

(from left to right) Sam, Carly and Freddy from the TV show, iCarly

 

 

(from left to right) Ron, Harry, and Hermione from the Harry Potter movies

 

 

(from left to right) Emma, Cleo, and Rikki from the TV show H2O: Just Add Water

 

 

Common Characteristics of This Trope: 

• Three best friends brought together by an especially unique experience
• Occasionally joined by a fourth character who isn’t given as much background and/or presence in the story as the main three (usually because this character has not undergone the same unique experience as the other three)
• Two of the three become romantically involved
• Two of the three were already good friends while the third member joins the friend group by means of the unique exeprience
• Each of the three will roughly fit these descriptions: the hot-headed direct one; the good responsible one; and the neutral one. The ‘neutral one’ can be distinguished from the ‘good responsible one’ because they often serve as a peace-maker between the ‘good responsible one’ and the ‘hot-headed direct one.’

 

 

My Thoughts: To a degree, I feel that this trope’s use is pretty unavoidable. In real life, a lot of people have friend groups and it’s pretty likely that at least a few of these friend groups comprise of exactly three best friends. Still, in a lot of works that use this trope, a lot of the organic aspects are thrown away. I’ve met some of my best friends by pretty ordinary means. Two of my best friends I met in middle school under perfectly normal circumstances and after we became friends, we weren’t bound by anything other than the fact that we were able to see each other each day and that we enjoyed each other’s company. I didn’t save them from a troll, start a viral webcast with them, or steal a boat for a joyride in shark infested waters only to fall into a magic hole and inadventently become a mythical fish woman. Another issue with this trope in particular is that some writers feel as though they need to create a trio of leads for their work, so much so that that takes precedent over the actual characters themselves. For instance, the third season of H2O literally replaces the character, Emma, after her actress left the show and replaced Emma with Bella, a character who in terms of powers and personality pretty much matches Emma’s. Instead of completley replacing a character, the writers instead decided to use the template of the group of three trope to create a character that in all meaningful ways was virtually identical to the original.

 

 

Conclusion: Having a team of three characters serve as protagonists can be an interesting dynamic to follow, but only if the characters and their interactions are driving the friendships. Otherwise, the use of this trope feels lazy and purposeless.

 

 

The Chosen One

 

 

 

 

Common Characteristics of This Trope:

• An ordinary person, usually one who has suffered a lot, finds out they are special
• Chosen One excells at whatever the plot needs them to excell at
• Other characters are aware of how the chosen one is special before the Chosen One themselves is aware

 

 

My Thoughts: The purpose of writing a story is usually to highlight something or someone of interest. No one wants to read about an unnotable person in an unnotable place doing an unnotable thing. At least the action, character, or setting of a story should be captivating (ideally all three). The issue I have with Chosen Ones is that the idea of a character being special overshadows who the character actually is. I once heard someone say that whenever you ask someone who their favorite Harry Potter character is, no one ever says Harry. And to be honest, I can see why. Harry’s personality is pretty typical of most protagonists: he’s adventurous, brave, and loves his friends. A lot of the things that make him notable throughout the series are due to things he can’t control. Still, this is acknowledged within the books themselves, as Harry finds out that his fate, bestowed upon him by Voldemort, could have been given to another boy his age. This information lessens the idea of Harry’s seemingly innate specialness, but at the same time, Harry still kills a Basilisk as a 12 year old and is able to effortlessly fly a broomstick the first time he sees one.

 

 

Conclusion: The point picking the characters that the story will follow is often because there is something special about them, and specifically making it cannon in writing that they are uniquely special compared to others, in most situations, feels ridiculous and utterly unnatural.

 

Now this would be the part where I’d talk about love triangles, but to be completely honest, I usually don’t like romance novels and so I don’t feel I am a reputable source for analyzing and judging the value of this trope. As for the other two, I feel confident in saying that these tropes can work, but only if they are used as very basic outlines as opposed to exact directions to be followed. All tropes were, at one point, an original idea that others began to use because they saw that it worked. Tropes are best used when they are used as rough sketches of the final product. That way, you can use what has worked in other works while also adding your own ideas to it, finding the perfect balance between old ideas and ingenuity.

Write what you know.

 

 

If I had a dollar for every time I heard these four words passed around creative writing circles, I’d probably have $20, which if I’m smart, I’d spend on either jumper cables or a family field trip, apparently (source).

 

 

An artistic rendering of me off to spend my purely hypothetical wealth the ‘smart’ way (original)

 

 

The point is is that a) this advice is pretty common and b) I tend to avoid writing communities that live by the mantra of “write what you know.” There’s something that has always not been appealing to me about this advice, something that doesn’t sit right with me about it that I’ve never been quite able to pinpoint. I think it might be because I’m a lover of fiction. The further removed from reality as we know it, the more I’ll typically enjoy a work. I enjoy supernatural horror, fantasy epics, and action-packed sci-fi novels. And like many writers, I tend to dabble in writing stories that are similar in genre to that of works I enjoy.

 

 

When I look at the projects that I have taken on over the course of the past four or five years, most if not all of them can apply to the idea of writing what I know. One is a story about fictional world politics and the impacts of colonialism in a world of fictional humanoid species that have mind powers and rigid religious and nationalist systems. Another is a story about a young necromancer in a medievalesque world trying to stop the rapture mid-apocalypse with the help of a psychic medium and an assassin-in-training. Even the only project set on Earth as we know it is set in New England in the 1830s.

 

 

In the specific cases of these stories, I cannot “write what I know” simply because I don’t have personal experience with a lot of these things. I cannot personally attest to being an astral-projecting reptilian-humanoid who is a powerless figurehead within a totalitarian government. Nor can I claim to know what it’s like to be a necromancer on a quest to save the Earth from demons when the rest of the world believes I’m the one causing the rapture in the first place. And again, I definitely don’t know what it’s like to be a gold-digging midwestern young man in search of a young heiress to marry so I don’t have to work on my family farm. All of these are surface-level descriptions of main characters I have outlined for projects of mine that definitely don’t constitute as things I know first-hand.

 

 

Still, the advice of only writing what you know could be interpreted as understanding people in general. Most books, movies, and T.V. shows center around people. When these forms of fiction portray people in a way that just doesn’t feel natural, it shows. If writing what you know is actually meant to be interpreted to mean understanding that people are complex, have motivations, and are influenced by their pasts and the people around them, I would change my approach toward the advice mildly. With enough experience with and observation of social interactions in different social settings and reading how life-like people are translated to the page, anyone can write characters that feel human. Because of this, I argue that there isn’t a real purpose to this advice if this is the intended takeaway. Most people, I feel, are familiar enough with other people that they can create new fictional ones with an air of verisimilitude.

 

 

Even if the things a writer chooses to write about are real and grounded within a contemporary setting, I still argue that they should not be limited to what they already know. Research is always a helpful tool to use in the pre-writing/planning stage of any writing project. If a character has a medical condition or lives in a different country than its writer originated from or has lived in, then a lack of research is not only unprofessional, but also has the possibility of being unrealistic and/or insensitive. Encouraging writers to learn more about different subjects that they are interested in writing in only leads to the writer and their audiences becoming more informed. Research can also always be done at a subjective level. A writer who is writing a character who has a near-death experience may want to consult people who have had a near-death experience or to find sources in which someone who has had a near-death experience has written about it and their life after the fact.

 

 

No matter how much research you do, you should also make sure to have plenty of beta-readers to look over your work after you have finished your draft. A beta-reader is someone who readers over an unpublished or unfinished piece of fiction and makes notes about what does and doesn’t work about the draft. If you write about an experience that you personally have not had, it is extremely helpful to have at least one or two beta-readers who have personally had similar experiences to the ones you’ve written about. This can especially help to make sure that your portrayal is accurate.

 

 

I suppose the reason that “write what you know” has never appealed to me because of how restrictive it feels. I think some better advice is to a) do thorough and comprehensive research and b) write the stories you want to read. Sure, these pieces of advice together are three times as long as “write what you know,” but that’s a small cost in consideration of the freedoms offered by the alternative.