Quick Tips for Character Development

Welcome to the Author Wheel podcast. I'm Megan Haskell, award-winning fantasy author of the Senare Chronicles and the Rise of Lilith series.

And I'm Greta Boris, usa Today bestselling author of the Mortician Murders and the soon-to-be-released Almost True Crime series. Together we are the Author Wheel. Our goal is to help you overcome your writing roadblocks so you can keep your stories rolling. This month we've decided to go back to our roots and discuss craft. You know it's a topic that often gets ignored in the larger discussions of marketing and the business of selling books, which you know we all get obsessed about from time to time. But honestly, if you advertise a bad book you might get some sales, but the chances of selling another book are you've just kind of shot yourself in the foot. So craft, in its own way, is a part of marketing. It's super, super important. It's kind of the foundation for everything.

Yeah, I think in the in the modern publishing landscape, you know we you have have to start like it's a given that you have to start with a good book. You can't publish just, you know, your first draft up to Amazon anymore and have it gain traction. It has to be, has to be good. So we should be talking about craft just as much as the business side of things. So each week in May we'll be giving you two of our favorite tips on the craft topics that people ask us about the most, and this week we're starting with characters. How do you create memorable and believable characters that readers want to visit again and again?

Well, my first tip is use the Enneagram. Tip is use the Enneagram. The Enneagram, if you haven't heard of it, is an ancient personality typing system that has kind of come back into vogue in recent years. Psychologists and professionals use it to help people understand themselves, you know, live a better, more productive life. There's podcasts on the Enneagram. There's a website. The website we use is the Enneagram. There's website. The website we use is the Enneagram Institute.

Yeah, enneagraminstitutecom. But I was also going to suggest too that that you go check out Claire Taylor's work if you're interested in Enneagram. She does. She's more on the author side of things, but she does have quite a bit of work on Enneagram for character development as well.

Yes.

But she's kind of, she's kind of the Enneagram expert within the indie author community.

Yes, she is, and we've had her on the podcast and we should probably put a link to that episode in the show notes as well. So if you're using the Enneagram for the creation of character, we don't need to go as deep as you know the psychology people go. But just looking at the nine personality types outlined in the Enneagram are a very quick way to choose or check that the character you've created or planning to create is cohesive and realistic. So what you'll find if you go to the Enneagram Institute is that you can use it to determine your character's greatest motivation and their greatest fear.

It's also a great tool to figure out how different personality types get along with each other or don't. So you might not want to create a love interest, for instance, for one personality type that you know according to the typing system you'll discover oh no, they wouldn't get along at all, they would just fight. Or you might want to do it so that you could have them fight and those are the kind of fights they would have. So you can see things like that also great for villains, you know, finding the personality types that clash. Or I often like to do my main character and my villain the same personality type, but you know, my main character will be on the healthier end of that character type, whereas the villain will be on the very unhealthy end. So, and you can see that in the Enneagram Institute, you'll see how different personality types react to different kinds of stressors and so on, and that will influence the plot.

And that leads us to our next tip, which is so tip number two is to give your main character a flaw or a twerk. So quirks make characters be real. We all have them, right, we all are eccentric in some way. It might be small, but it's there. It can be a dialogue quirk, it can be a physical twitch. It can be an object they always carry or play with, like a wish stone or worry stone or a paperclip in the pocket right. Different people have these sort of talismans that they carry.

You can do that for your characters. It could also be a dark thought or a belief that they have, but whatever it is, it should also be pertinent to their character arc or character development over the course of the book or series. So in my case, lil is blunt to the point of offense at times. In the Rise of Lilith series she has to learn how to be a little bit more diplomatic and more of a leader rather than pushing people away. And in the Senyari Chronicles, rie's thumb twitches when she's nervous or feeling uncomfortable. So as she grows in her own internal strength and confidence, that twitch fades away and you don't notice it as much. So those are just a couple of examples of ways that you can, you know, show through action or through thought, dialogue, your character's development in a very subtle way that actually really improves that relatability.

Yeah, and when I wrote my original Seven Deadly Sins series, my editor and I kind of and publisher, we kind of decided that each main character and each villain had this struggle with the title sin. So writing those books kind of forced me to think about character flaws, like my main character in Envy the one I'm working on was Envy. You know that had to be a flaw, like that had to be something that she struggled with and it really ended up creating helping me create Red Herring and another character that she particularly was envious of. It really informed the plot a lot and so that was interesting. You know, having to do that seven times was very good for me.

I always say, like writing that series is kind of like, you know, writing my thesis or something for college and also you want to do it in a way like you said, megan, and more subtle. You don't want to do it in such a way that is like super predictable. So in Lust, none of my characters well, a little bit, but mostly it isn't sexual lust, mostly it's other kinds of lust because they thought, well, you know, that's just so obvious. So you know, looking at doing things in a different way is always fun.

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