Readers don’t care what authors think about their characters. They care about characters who care about other characters.

Storytelling is a dynamic process that should be full of moments that feel surprising yet inevitable.

Unfortunately, if you sit down to write stories that are full of moments that feel surprising yet inevitable, you will probably want to hit the bottle by 10am.

But that’s not the way to think about it.

Bring a character into the world, plonk them down on the page. Have them be a version of you. Walk this character down the street, thinking the kind of thoughts you always think. Depending on your opinion of yourself, these thoughts will be suffused with a sense of . . . self-regard, self-loathing, irony, whatever.

Whatever it is, it won’t be very interesting.

Things only get interesting when someone else comes along.

What does your character feel, in relation to that someone else?

This is the moment you can reach beyond the suffocating solipsism that is (admit it) the motivation most of us have for writing in the first place. But if it’s the solipsism that gets you to the page, it won’t keep you there unless you are really excellently self-centered.

What will keep you there is this sense of – potential. What could happen now this other thing has come along.

That’s the thing that will keep your reader there too.

Present and Noticing

A new series of my “creative writing classes with a difference” starts on 9th January, and runs for six weeks. You can find out more and buy a ticket here.

(Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash)