Yes, this really happens. Writers do, occasionally and completely by accident, dismember their characters. There’s this quip about helicopters that is oddly relevant: “a helicopter is a large collection of parts all flying in formation.” Sometimes writers do that to their characters, with unfortunate results.

This happens when writers put a character’s parts in the forefront—feet, ears, eyes—instead of the character herself. It can happen with non-corporeal parts of a character too, particularly the senses. In paranormal and fantasy literature, it includes non-standard abilities as well, far-sight and the like. Here’s an example:

Susan’s worry rose, blocking out all other thought. Where’s Alex? He should be here by now. Her eyes scanned the theater lobby, the sidewalk outside, the parking lot, looking for him. But he was nowhere to be seen.

On the surface, it’s not literally true. Susan’s worry didn’t, itself, actually do anything. Susan is the one who did the worrying. Similarly, her eyes did not, in and of themselves, scan her surroundings. Susan scanned her surroundings, using her eyes.

This grammatical elevation of body parts to the subject position of a sentence may seem like a simple matter of style. After all, reasonable readers take the intended meaning just fine. They don’t automatically jump to the erroneous literal interpretation of those words. If that’s all it was, I wouldn’t be writing this post.

But under the surface, something much worse is going on. Every time you put one or more of a character’s composite parts in the subject position of the sentence, you rob the character of just a little bit of power. You take the whole character out of control, in favor of a mere portion of the character.

It may be a cliche that “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts” but in this case it’s absolutely true. A whole character, a whole person, creates much stronger resonance with the reader than the result of presenting the character’s parts one by one. Even if you include all the parts.

By putting a character’s parts to the fore, you make the overall character seem more passive, less action-oriented. Every time you do it, you send a subtle message that the character isn’t really in charge. That she, the whole person, is but a slave to her parts. When Susan’s senses reach out, when her parts act while, grammatically speaking, she sits idly by, it undermines the reader’s ability to believe in Susan as a strong agent of action in the story.

I suppose that this could work to great effect, if done well, in certain kinds of psychological dramas where a character suffers from some kind of dissociative mental problem. Or maybe in demonic possession stories. But for your ordinary sympathetic characters, it’s a problem.

There are some exceptions even for characters who aren’t mentally afflicted. Involuntary actions are chief among them. These are uncontrollable physiological responses to whatever’s happening in the story. When the heart quickens, it does so without our conscious bidding. When a sudden fright causes adrenaline to dump into our bloodstream, that’s automatic. Anything going on with a character’s body that is outside the character’s conscious control is fair game to put into the subject position of the sentence. In those circumstances, it’s really true that the character isn’t in control and therefore something else has to occupy the subject position.

The other notable exception is for the hands. Hands are so closely associated with the exercise of ordinary human will as to carve out their own exceptions. At least in English, it is almost idiomatic that hands stand in for our will. That is, this is perfectly fine:

John’s hand flew across the page as he penned the lines of a sonnet he was sure would win him the Frost Medal.

We all take John’s hand to be a tool in this usage.

Hands are so closely associated with the will that reversing this expectation creates a powerful effect. Horror fiction and movies, in fact, seem to delight in turning characters’ hands against them. It is a well-worn trope in horror to show demonic possession by making someone’s hands attack them. The character of Ash, from the Evil Dead movies, is the classic example: Ash had to resort to dismembering his own hand before it killed him.

Look at the reversal going on there, and how Ash’s response portrays him. Ash’s hand begins to attack him. It punches him. It tries to choke him. Ash is rightfully shocked. Ash is out of control of his own body. Part of him has become possessed. In order to reassert control and save himself, he fights back. He tries to pull the evil hand away from his neck using his unafflicted hand. But ultimately Ash must physically separate himself—willfully—from his own hand. It’s a powerful and dramatic action, and it utterly convinces the viewer that Ash is someone who will take action no matter how personally painful it might be.

Audiences root for him so strongly because even when his hand took the subject position, Ash remained the ultimate agent of action.

Obviously, that’s the exception. The rest of the time, in normal circumstances with normal characters, don’t dismember them by accident. Leave the whole person as the agent of action, and let the body parts remain tools of the will as they properly are.

Ah, sidekicks. Those indispensable minor characters who, if you do them right, can add life to a book or even threaten to steal the show. Sidekicks come in two basic forms: new friends and old friends. Each has different applications in story-craft.

Make new friends

Sidekicks are often new acquaintances for your main character. There is a lot to be said for these new friends. They give you many wonderful opportunities for showing your readers what your main character is all about. New friends can act as stand-ins for your reader. They learn about your protagonist at the same time your readers do. New friends also create opportunities for mystery and drama.

New friends mean new relationships. When a relationship starts, platonic or otherwise, both parties must share of themselves in order to build trust with the other. What they choose to share and how they share it speaks volumes. Is your main character warm and open with this new friend, inviting and generous with his or her time and attention? Or is your main character stand-offish, closed and guarded, seeming always to give the new sidekick the brush-off as quickly as possible? These types of personality traits, ones that have to do with how people treat one another, can be shown very clearly in watching a character develop a relationship with a new sidekick.

New friends are clueless. I don’t mean they’re stupid (and I hope they’re not), they’re simply not up to speed on your main character’s life. The sidekick hasn’t yet learned what the protagonist can do, what he knows, what he has been through, what practical and political realities matter to the protagonist’s life. This is wonderful, because it gives you natural opportunities to explain things to the reader while the protagonist is explaining it to the sidekick, without resorting to an infodump. If the reader truly needs to know that the bridge leading into town was built by a sleazy, lowball contractor, chances are the sidekick does too. And if the sidekick is a new friend from out of town, the protagonist has every reason in the world to explain it. It feels natural because, in that situation, it is.

But, as unknown as the new friend is to the protagonist, the reverse is also true. The protagonist starts out clueless about the sidekick. The sidekick must work to earn the protagonist’s trust and the reader’s trust as well. This gives you the delicious opportunity to create some drama and mystery, if that’s appropriate for your story, as the protagonist wonders whether the sidekick is on the up-and-up.

Especially in mysteries crime dramas, and other such mainstream genres, dangling the tantalizing possibility that a trusted sidekick might really be a spy, a mole, or a back-stabber can really ratchet up the drama in the book. In this situation, it is the protagonist who is the stand-in for the reader. That’s half the fun of reading an engaging novel, taking turns putting yourself into the shoes of different characters.

But keep the old

Old friends, sidekicks who are presumed to be well acquainted with the protagonist when the book starts, are tremendously useful but give you different options and challenges.

Old friends already have a rapport with your protagonist. They’ve been pals for a long time, so readers will naturally expect your protagonist to behave more openly and honestly with this type of sidekick. How your protagonist acts around his old friend—and how he interacts with that old friend—indicates his true personality. But be warned: it isn’t always easy to portray a well-established friendship because you, the writer, haven’t lived that particular relationship yourself. You have to invent and stay true to the myriad in-jokes and verbal shortcuts that old friends have with each other. Either that, or borrow these markers of deep friendship from your own life.

Old friends are also a smooth vehicle for revealing your protagonist’s backstory, because the old friend already knows it and can refer to it. Your old friends already know all your dirty laundry. Not only have they already seen the skeletons in your closet, they probably know how those bones got there. This means that in times when your protagonist is wrestling with a choice or trying to figure out how to proceed, the old friend can quite naturally bring up some relevant fact from the protagonist’s background. You can show this fact to the reader in the course of reminding the protagonist about it. Take care not to go overboard—the old friend will merely refer to this fact, he won’t recount the story in full detail. After all, the protagonist has his own memory of it. You need to keep the dialogue short and to the point; make it revealing without being overly explicit.

There is a danger with old friends, though: readers don’t know about them until you introduce them to the story. If you introduce a supposed old friend late in the story at a point where that friend’s influence or connections or resources are suddenly of critical importance to your protagonist, but the reader has never heard of this person before, it falls flat. It feels like a deus ex machina solution to a plot problem, rather than a character naturally calling on his network of friends and acquaintances in time of need.

Old friends can present a problem for writers, because on the one hand people do have old friends who they are very close to, but who they may only see on rare occasions. Never the less, these old friends still have strong connections to us through our past. The same is presumably true for any protagonist who is old enough to have a past.

For example, if I needed a piece of legal advice I could call up my friend Mike from High School, who I haven’t seen in quite some time. He’d probably take my call and help me out. But if an observer in the story of my life had no idea Mike existed, this would be a surprising and too-convenient thing for me to do. The observer—and your reader—will be much less surprised and much more likely to believe this had Mike been introduced earlier in the story.

It’s a fine line between introducing the friend early and often enough so as to be believable when the need for that friend’s help arises, while not giving that friend so much screen time throughout the story that you telegraph the friend’s ultimate importance. You have to be believable, without undermining the drama.

One is silver, and the other gold

The eyes may be the window to the soul, but relationships can be a big bay window to the personality. Use sidekicks, whether new friends or old, and the relationships they have to your protagonists to show readers what makes your protagonists tick.

When plotting out or revising your novel, it’s important to understand the difference between an epiphany and a character arc. Both are useful and important, but they serve very different roles in the narrative. Think of them like salt and sugar: They’re both dry, granular materials, both are very important in cooking, but the two are hardly interchangeable.

This is an epiphany. It’s a moment of revelation, when a character comes to understand something he couldn’t grasp before. I’m not talking about realizations that relate to the plot, as when someone comes to understand the key to a puzzle or finally figures out what missing thing they need in order to overcome some challenge. Those are great story moments, but they don’t have much to do with characterization.

I’m talking about moments when a character suddenly realizes something about himself. Those are moments of deep significance in your book because they foreshadow that the character will begin to think and act differently.

A lot of modern fiction trades in making protagonists into their own worst enemies. This has been true for some time in literary novels, which tend to be deeply driven by characters rather than plot. However, it is becoming increasingly true in mainstream and “plot monster” books too, as writers learn the power of characterization and character growth to more deeply involve the reader in the book.

Regardless of genre, many books have a setup in which a character flaw is the one thing that most prevents the protagonist from getting the job done. Only when he recognizes this—like when an alcoholic finally admits that his drinking is in fact a problem—can he begin to get out of his own way.

This is a character arc. Well, ok, that’s not strictly true. But graduation is a nice representation of a character arc: It’s where a character ends up after a series of epiphanies.

In school, students are faced with many challenges—classes, term papers, and exams—to overcome. They must experience many epiphanies—moments when they finally grasp their course material—in order to overcome these challenges. When they do, they finally succeed—they get an emotionally fulfilling moment of celebration, complete with cap, gown, and diploma.

It’s the same in a novel. Your character starts with some flaws. Throughout the plot, he’ll encounter many challenges, some of which he’ll fail at because of those flaws. After enough failures or after a failure with dire consequences, the he’ll have an epiphany and realize how he must change in order to succeed. After additional challenges, some inevitable setbacks, more epiphanies, and a lot of hard work, the character really does grow as a person. Finally, at the novel’s climax he can then tackle a problem that would surely have defeated him before.

The key difference

An epiphany is nothing more than a realization in the thread of your character’s personal growth. It is a plot point along the inner plot of the character’s personal journey. A character arc, then, is the whole journey.

The journey is not the destination

While graduation is a great metaphor for a character arc, don’t confuse the two. Graduation is not school, it is only the destination of a student’s journey through school. It’s an emotional, symbolic moment. Likewise, a character arc is not an emotional moment, but is the process leading up to a moment when the changes a character has undergone are finally recognized.

For the novelist, this means that while your book should work towards a “graduation moment” for your character, to provide an emotional payoff to the difficult journey of personal growth, you can’t skip the growth itself.

Here’s what doesn’t work: I’ve seen manuscripts from clients where they tried to add a character arc by inserting an epiphany scene into the beginning of the book, and a graduation moment at the end, but without touching anything in between. That’s like character sleeping through the entire four years of college but still receiving a diploma anyway. It falls flat.

To be meaningful, a character arc must affect the plot. It must affect the choices a character makes in the novel’s scenes. To be effective, a character arc must convince readers that the plot would have turned out differently without it because the character would have made different (worse) choices.

You need an epiphany moment to kick things off near the beginning, several smaller epiphany moments along the way as the character’s understanding grows, and the graduation moment at the end. This is why it is so difficult to paste a character arc on top of an existing story structure: Because to make it work, you have to go back and re-consider every choice the character makes in light of what the character learns in the epiphany moments.

Last night I was looking over an old report I’d written for a client. The manuscript in question had several issues that needed to be fixed, but the one that really jumped out at me was about disbelief: the reader’s disbelief, and the hero’s lack of it.

The book was a science-fiction epic. In the early chapters, the hero has a “matrix moment” wherein he learns that basically everything he thought about his world wasn’t true. The writer did this in a dialogue-heavy exposition scene where the character’s wise mentor explains what’s really going on, complete with alien monsters, spaceships, the whole bit.

The scene failed utterly to capture my interest. The conversation went something like this:

Hero: “Mentor! What’s going on here?”

Mentor: “Blah blah infodump, aliens, spaceships, blah blah, danger, danger, conspiracy plot.”

Hero: “Oh, ok.”

Not only did the scene fail to capture my interest, the scene completely destroyed the book. Why? Because the hero just went right along with it. He didn’t freak out. He didn’t suspect that his mentor had gone utterly mad. In fact, he didn’t express the slightest bit of skepticism at all, not even a “come on, you’re joking, right?” Nothing.

In failing to make use of stage 1 of the five stages of emotional response , the writer failed to make the scene real for the protagonist. The guy didn’t respond like a real human being would have. And in failing to make the scene emotionally real for the hero, the writer failed to make it intellectually real for me.

In other words, the writer made it impossible for me to suspend my disbelief. Game over.

Disbelief, denial, skepticism—these are all facets of the same incredibly important emotional response, that sensation of discomfort we encounter when we’re presented with information or experiences that clash with what we believe to be true. The core human response is to reject the new and cling to what we have inside.

This is as basic as breathing, and it happens in the blink of an eye.

When you confront a character with something that clashes with what they believe, you have to show some expression of disbelief. The greater the clash, the stronger the disbelief response should be. What is critical to realize is that in these moments, the character is a proxy for the reader. The reader knows how he or she would feel in that situation. The reader’s mind immediately fills with potential counter-arguments against the new information.

In that moment, the reader is waiting for the hero to express similar feelings and explore similar objections. That is, they’re waiting for the writer to prove to them that this unbelievable new information is really true, by overcoming the hero’s natural disbelief. Suspension of disbelief comes from first showing, and then overcoming, the character’s disbelief.

Obviously that won’t happen if you skip the character’s disbelief. What will happen instead are three really bad things:

It reflects badly on your characters. In the above example, it made the hero look like a moron. It made him look like the most gullible simpleton, the most clueless rube to ever survive the birthing process. I had to wonder how this guy manages to get himself dressed in the morning, or avoids poking himself in the eye when he eats with a fork.

It reflects badly on you. You leave readers with the unavoidable perception that you, the writer, are so out of touch with how human beings work that you have no business trying to portray humans on the page. You lose every shred of faith the reader might have had in your ability to tell a story with people in it. That being the case, consider switching to stories about robots and other characters who won’t be expected to act like humans. Give lemmings a try. I hear they’re quite gullible. If you don’t know how to write disbelief, I’ll bet you could write one hell of a lemming protagonist.

You lose the reader. Having destroyed the reader’s estimation of your hero, and having destroyed the reader’s faith in you, what’s left? Nothing at all. There’s nothing left that can drag the reader through another couple of hundred pages of utterly unbelievable fiction. At that point, I would gladly trade your book for a free one-dollar lottery ticket. Even at 147-million-to-one odds, I’d have more faith in that lottery ticket to deliver me something good than your book.

Writing compelling portrayals of emotional responses is obviously a lot more complicated than just adding some disbelief, but it’s a great first step. After all, you can’t stand over the reader’s shoulder and force them to turn pages. You need their cooperation. You need their suspension of disbelief, which you only get by overcoming your characters’ disbelief.

Ask yourself this question about your current work-in-progress: What character is in every scene and on every page? Don’t be so quick to say “none.” I don’t care what kind of book you’re writing. Even an omniscient POV book with tons of head-hopping has a character who is in every scene and on every page.

It’s you.

The writer is inescapably present in every novel. Readers will suspend disbelief about your book, but they never truly forget that they’re reading a story you wrote. Your name is even on the front of it!

This is obviously true for memoirs and novels where a writer intentionally inserts himself or herself into the story. I’m not talking about those. What I’m talking about are the vast majority of novels in which the writer does not intend to be in the story.

You are anyway.

The question then becomes, does your writing minimize your own presence on the page? Generally speaking, the better a writer is the more invisible he or she remains to the reader. When the reader becomes aware of you, you’ve pulled them out of the story. That’s never a good thing.

In working with my clients’ novels, I’ve put together a list of common and not-so-common ways that writers reveal themselves to readers. Strive to avoid these:

Author intrusion

So-called “author intrusion” is when a writer inserts something into the book which doesn’t feel like it fits. This can happen in narrative, or through dialogue. But usually it comes in the form of an opinion on an emotionally or politically charged subject that isn’t directly attributable to any character in the scene, and is often written in a style that seems directed toward the reader. For example:

The phone dropped from Susan’s hand, clattering on the kitchen floor. She gripped the countertop for support. John was dead, found hanging from a light fixture in his apartment. Suicide is a mortal sin. It’s wrong to kill yourself, and no one should ever do that. Susan squeezed her eyes shut, but tears leaked out anyway.

Here, the writer reveals his own opinions about suicide, reveals his religious beliefs, and tosses in a little morality lecture as a bonus. The reader may well agree with the sentiment, but it has no place in the story unless that thought belongs to one of the book’s actual characters. If it’s just your opinion, leave it out.

When readers run into something like this, it’s like you’re waving yourself in their face. “Yoo hoo, writer speaking! Here I am!” Furthermore, it’s impossible for the reader not to be aware of you trying to tell them what to think. Nobody likes that. Even if they agree with you it leaves them feeling negatively towards you.

Credibility issues

It is very easy to make mistakes in one’s story that undermine your own credibility as a writer, that sabotage the reader’s belief in you as a person who has any business writing a novel. If readers stop believing in you, they’ll stop caring about the story and probably stop reading. At the very least you make it much more difficult for them to continue suspending their disbelief. There are three main credibility issues I see in my clients’ work:

Plot holes. If the cops take a character’s gun away in chapter three, but then the character fires the gun in chapter 4 without first having gotten it back, that’s a plot hole. It’s a logical inconsistency within the structure of your story, and what it tells readers is that you don’t know your own story well enough to tell it right. That being the case, what confidence can a reader have that the rest of the story is going to be worth reading?

Factual errors. Similar to plot holes, when your characters make mistakes about verifiable facts it tells the reader that you are either lazy or ill-informed yourself. Again, it conveys the message that you haven’t any business writing a novel, or that you haven’t put as much work into the novel as you should have.

One or two of these, when they’re small and on facts that don’t matter much to the plot, can be tolerated. Nobody’s really going to care all that much if you, say, refer to the “nine graceful arcs atop the Chrysler Building,” when in fact there are only eight. As long as you’re not screwing up minor details all over the place, it’s tolerable.

What isn’t tolerable is to make mistakes about facts that matter to the plot, or which are well known and iconic in the culture at large. For example, misplacing the Hoover Dam from the Colorado River to the Mississippi, or accidentally referring to 1973 as “the year Kennedy was assassinated.”

Bad or missing emotional responses. In my opinion, these are the worst. These are when your characters fail to react in emotionally appropriate ways to the events they face, or when emotional responses that are in the book haven’t been well supported by the preceding narrative.

For example, if your main character receives a call in the middle of his high-stakes business negotiation informing him that his mother has died unexpectedly, yet he carries on with the negotiation as though nothing happened, readers aren’t going to believe that for a second. Similarly, romance sub-plots where a character seems to be madly attracted to another for no discernable reason just aren’t credible. That latter one is one I see way too much of, and for some reason it seems to be an especially common problem for writers of thrillers.

These mistakes undermines your credibility as a writer because they make readers believe that you just don’t understand how real people think, feel, and react. If that’s the case, you really don’t have any business writing a novel that has any people in it. If that’s the case, consider writing Sci-Fi about aliens with wholly different mentalities, for whom dispassion towards their mothers and unmotivated romance are the norm. Or about robots. Robots are good.

If you don’t understand people, you shouldn’t write about them. That’s why this is the worst thing you can do for your own credibility.

Plot holes and factual errors are relatively easy to fix. Any decent editor can help you catch those, as can your writing group or people on internet critique websites. But if your characters don’t act like real people, there’s not much that can be done except to write the whole thing over.

Portraying yourself as an unsavory person

To enjoy your book, readers have to like you. At the very least, they have to be indifferent to you. Their opinion of you, if any, will prejudice them towards or against your book. Thus, your book should avoid making readers feel you are a loathsome human being, or they’re going to have a hard time liking it. How do writers betray themselves like that? Here are two examples.

One client’s characterization of the female characters in his book consisted of, without exception, descriptions their physical assets. Especially their breasts. I could really tell he was a breast man. There wasn’t much else in terms of characterization for these women. As the book progressed, this pattern left me with the feeling that the client wasn’t merely a fan of the female bosom, but was in fact a male chauvinist. The men in his book had goals, aspirations, and even feelings. But the women were little more than glorified furniture. It didn’t leave me feeling good about the client as a person.

Another client had a main character who—and to avoid the threat of being sued for libel I’ll be particularly vague here—did some very, very bad things. However, the book was written with enough author intrusion that I couldn’t escape the suspicion that my client was writing from experience. A little bit of internet research only deepened that suspicion. I quit the project, tore up the client’s check, and I hope never to hear from that client again.

Think about that: I was being paid to read the book, and I couldn’t do it because of my opinion of the writer. The client showed enough of him/herself on the page that every fiber of my being was screaming “get away from this client!” So I did. I wanted nothing to do with any of it.

It’s one thing to “write what you know,” as the saying goes. But when what you know would make a person think you belong behind bars, consider writing about something else. I’m just saying.

You are in your book

Like it or not, you are a character in your book if for no other reason than readers never fully forget they’re reading a story that was written by a person. The best you can do is to keep yourself as invisible as possible by avoiding the mistakes I’ve described here.

It seems like you can’t swing a dead cat in a bookstore anymore without hitting a paranormal or horror book featuring zombies, vampires, werewolves, or even Victorian-era sea monsters.

When they’re done well, there’s nothing wrong with these books. But they tend to leave aspiring writers in these genres with a false impression about the genre: that you need some variety of monster to fill the role of scary villain. This is where things can go wrong, because honestly, monsters aren’t all that scary.

If your aim is to put real terror on the page, consider going with an ordinary human as your villain. The reason is simple:

Monsters don’t have any choice in the matter.

In classical formulations—which aspiring writers often gravitate towards in their early works—monsters are evil because they’re made that way. It’s in their nature. They have no particular choice about it, and consequently, they’re also often portrayed as not very intelligent either.

I can scarcely find a sufficient adjective to qualify the degree to which that saps their power as villains.

Just to pick one, let’s consider the zombie: a brain-hungry, mindless killing and eating machine, with the power to zombify the innocent with their purulent bite. Now I’m not saying zombies fail to register at all on the fear scale. The zombie’s utter relentlessness helps. The whole zombie horde thing does have a certain panache to it. They do constitute a threat, which gives some default amount of fear.

But that’s about it. Once your good guys figure out that they can outrun the zombie-shuffle basically forever, and that the classic shovel-to-the-neck move will save them in a tight spot, the fear is over.

Zombies have no choice about what they do, so they can’t respond to the protagonists in any meaningful way. They can’t change their tactics or even their goals. From a storytelling perspective, when you’re trying to build tension and suspense, that sucks. The same shovel-to-the-neck that saves somebody on page 20 will still work on page 200. Mindless zombies are entirely predictable. How boring is that?

It’s the same with other monsters. Werewolves have to bite because it’s what they do. No big deal: just lock yourself inside somewhere safe on the night of the full moon. There’s a strategy for dealing with werewolves, one for vampires (wooden stakes / crosses / holy water), and so forth.

Emphasis on the singular: A strategy. Monsters that lack free will do present a threat but it’s not enough to sustain genuine suspense, tension, and fear through a whole book. There’s just no tension when the same strategy keeps working, over and over, against the same threat. To get suspense, tension, and fear, your protagonists need to face a series of unpredictable challenges in overcoming the monsters.

Free will creates unpredictability

But what about ordinary humans? Humans have free will. They can and do make choices. This makes them unpredictable, and that’s what creates the fear. Remember, fear comes primarily from the unknown. Something that is unpredictable cannot be known or deeply understood, and thus remains scary.

You never know what a villain who has genuine free will—and the intelligence to use it—is going to do. Readers and protagonists alike have to stay on their toes, because the villain can (and should) spring unpleasant surprises on them.

There’s a second reason why free will creates scary villains. It’s more subtle, but much more powerful. Free will means that the villain, somewhere in his past, made a choice to be bad. Maybe it was all at once, maybe it was some kind of slippery-slope scenario, but somewhere that person decided to be evil.

Consider Hannibal Lecter. Somewhere along the line, he decided that satisfying his own twisted desires was in fact more important than the harm he was doing to others. Lecter is smart. He knows what he’s doing is wrong, he just doesn’t care. Somewhere in his past, he had a choice between good and evil, and he picked evil.

To me that implies a level of malice that is so far above the mindless, no-choice evil of ordinary monsters that it’s not even on the same scale. The unpredictability and malice of willful evil creates suspense and fear that trumps garden-variety monsters any day.

Have your brains and eat them too

Fortunately, this is one of those rare cases in life where it’s not that difficult to have it both ways. If you want to put monsters in the lead villain role, fine. Just step away from the classic formulations of them. Give us zombies that may be innately driven to eat the brains of the living, but make them crafty and cunning about it.

Whether living or undead, give your villains free will and the intelligence to use it. Keep them unpredictable and they’ll remain scary for the whole book.

If you’d have asked me a year ago whether I’d be doing a “best of” post to cap off my blog, I’d have said “What blog?”

What a difference a year makes. Without further ado, here are my top nine character development tips from the past year. Enjoy, and raise a glass to 2010. May all your characters come to life, and your books to unimagined success!

9. Do you know the right way to use backstory? Because a lot of writers don’t. It’s easy to get seduced by your excitement over the characters you’ve created, and in your zeal to share with the reader, dump a lot of plodding backstory into the novel in ways that kill the pacing and the intrigue. This article talks about using backstory to support and build your novel’s mysteries.

8. Drive a stake through your character’s heart. If you’re writing a vampire novel, you may or may not want to take that literally. In this article, I don’t mean it literally, but rather, I show a technique for raising the stakes in your novel by challenging a character’s assumptions about who they are: an identity crisis may suck in real life, but it can do wonders to elevate a novel.

7. Do you know an inner character arc from an outer one? The typical outer character arc is all about characters changing and growing by learning from the events of a novel. But there’s another kind of character arc, the inner kind, which stems from resolving differences in the perceptions that characters have about each other.

6. Do your characters’ flaws work on more than one level? The tragically flawed hero or heroine is a workhorse element of much fiction. As readers, we like to see characters who aren’t too perfect, because we can empathize with them better. But as a writer, are you taking advantage of your characters’ flaws to enhance the drama in your plot as well?

5. Don’t forget to revise your characters too After National Novel Writing Month wrapped up, I wrote about a series of techniques you can apply while revising your novel to strengthen your characters. This series covers everything from speech patterns and mannerisms to deep issues of motivation and goals. Characters are the soul of fiction, so it pays to make them as vivid and lifelike as you can.

4. Do you know the real reason not to use passive voice? Most of us have our first, formative writing experiences in school, where we learn to use the passive voice to put the emphasis on the facts we’re conveying rather than on ourselves. But when we begin to write fiction, passive voice becomes the kiss of death. Not because it hides the author from the reader, but because it hides your characters from the reader.

3. Are your characters falling through gaps in your writing? Nearly everything in a novel reflects in some way on the characters. In this article, I show how characters can be damaged quite unintentionally by the gaps between scenes and chapters in a novel, and teach you how to build bridges over those gaps for your characters to cross.

2. Hook ‘em with character Every novel needs a good hook. You have to grab the reader’s attention and get them interested in what happens next. Plot-oriented hooks can be quite effective, but they’re not the whole story. Character-oriented hooks are quite powerful as well. In this article, I explain how a great hook shows character through conflict.

1. The five stages of grief Number one for the year is this article about the five stages of grief model of emotional response. Nothing makes a character come across as wooden and unbelievable faster than when their emotional responses aren’t believable, and nothing kills a novel faster than when this happens at a moment of high drama. You can fix both by getting the emotions right, and in this article I show a template for creating believable, compelling emotional responses for the most dramatic moments in a novel: when bad things happen.

Happy new year, and I’ll see you all in 2010.

This is a book with a history that deserves some brief explanation, as it’s a great example of an author using social media technologies in an innovative way to both write and publish a book. You can read more on his website, but the short version is that Robin Sloan used the website Kickstarter both to raise money to support the writing of the book as well as to develop a pre-book-launch fan base and community around the book. This is brilliant, and at least in Sloan’s case, wildly successful.

It helps that Sloan is also a talented writer. Alas, no social media technology is going to help you with that. The book itself isn’t available at Barnes & Noble, but I don’t feel bad about reviewing it here because you can download it for yourself from Sloan’s website under a Creative Commons license.

The story itself is a funny, inventive adventure, a heady admixture of occult and cyberpunk themes. A strange combination, but Sloan makes it work. The result is what you might get if Neal Stephenson and Christopher Moore teamed up on a book. Sort of “Snow Crash meets Practical Demonkeeping.” I give it two and a half stars; I’d give it more, but it has some weaknesses that drag it down.

The book includes a number of glosses over existing technology and brand names, with Sloan giving roman a clefs to icons such as Google and World of Warcraft. And I have to say, he uses those very smoothly. I recently read Libba Bray’s new book Going Bovine which does the same thing. In Bray’s case they felt forced, almost as though her publisher was afraid of actually mentioning Star Wars and other pop-culture trademarks by name. They were awkward enough to impact the story, and they made me wonder if her publisher made her do that. In Sloan’s case he obviously re-branded those icons on his own initiative, and he makes them work very well. They felt integral to Annabel Scheme in a way that the renamings in Going Bovine didn’t.

The book does have some shortcomings. One, it’s short. It’s properly a novella, not a full novel, which kind of sucked because it was enough fun that I wanted it to be longer. Two, the writing is quite rough around the edges. So rough in a couple of places that it pulled me out of the story. This is a book that needed an editor, but didn’t get one. [Full disclosure: I know this because I thought the project was so cool I offered to edit this book in exchange for a credit. But c’est la vie, that never happened.] However, Despite the book’s shortcomings, the story and Sloan’s fast-paced style combine to overcome them and create a wildly entertaining result.

Still, this is Character Corner, so what about the book’s central actors?

Annabel Scheme

The book’s eponymous main character, Annabel Scheme, is a private investigator specializing in “digital and occult” investigations. Sloan uses the device of a secondary narrator character (see below) to keep the reader out of the main character’s head. This was a great choice because it helped build a deeper sense of mystery around the main character herself. We could be credibly surprised by her actions, because the narrator was also surprised by them.

Annabel Scheme definitely fits the Sherlock Holmes-ian model of an investigator as person with almost encyclopedic knowledge of all manner of things, with lots of skills and tricks of the trade that aren’t themselves magical but take on that aura to someone who has never been exposed to them before. Oh, and gadgets. She has a lot of very clever gadgets. It is a somewhat stereotyped concept for a private eye, but again, Sloan does a great job with it.

I have only two significant complaints about Scheme herself. First, she is perhaps too well connected. That is, she always knows who to go to for information, and they’re always happy to see her. She has extensive and very convenient history with some of the plot’s central figures. It’s fine to do that sort of thing here and there, but in this case it felt like too much to me. I felt like Sloan’s default choice when facing his protagonist with an obstacle or challenge was to reach into the grab-bag of “well, who can I have her be connected with that can tell her what she needs.”

It undermines her as a character because she isn’t so much overcoming obstacles herself as asking other people here and there to do it for her. There’s nothing wrong with bringing in other characters to help with things, but there’s a balance to it that I feel is missing here. It would have been nice, now and then, for one of her sources to stonewall her or something. Make her work harder for her victories.

My second complaint has to do with plausible motivation. There’s a point fairly early on in the book where one mystery is resolved, her client’s question has been answered, and the book by all rights and norms in the detective story game, ought to end. But, Scheme has this notion that something else is going on too, so she keeps investigating. Yes, that’s necessary for the plot to continue, but it had me scratching my head. Why is she doing this? At this point, nobody’s paying her. She’s diving headlong into various dangers, embroiling herself in some deep mire, for what reason?

You can’t read this book without concluding that Robin Sloan is a clever and very inventive guy. I know he could have come up with a genuine motivation for her to continue, or re-worked the original mystery to encompass the whole plot, but he didn’t, and it undermines both the character and the book.

Hugin-19

Hugin-19, or simply Hu, is the book’s narrator. I don’t feel like I’m spoiling anything by saying this, but Hu is a computer. You learn this in chapter 2. The picture Sloan paints, and that the reader works with, is very much like Hiro Protagonist’s AI sidekick from Snow Crash.

In that context, at many points Hu’s thoughts and attitudes felt overly human to me. His grasp of human emotion, intuitive leaps, and a variety of other things struck me as out of character.

However, there’s a twist in store about Hu, one I won’t reveal because that WOULD be a spoiler. The thing about this twist is that in many ways it retroactively justifies Hu’s overly-human thoughts and attitudes. It doesn’t leave the reader with the greatest feeling; it’s like I’ve gone through this whole book with this gripe about a central character, and then at the end I get this “oh, NOW you tell me?” moment.

I was immediately reminded of Justine Larbalestier’s book Liar, which includes a similar twist about the underlying nature of the narrator. However, in Liar’s case I didn’t wish I’d known the twist sooner.

They say you learn something from every book you read, and what I learned from the portrayal of Hu in Annabel Scheme is this: if you’re going to have some type of identity-based twist about a character, you need to construct that character’s thoughts, speech, attitudes, and actions in the pages before the twist is revealed very carefully. They must fit both with what the reader initially thinks about the character and with what the character actually turns out to be.

In Liar and Annabel Scheme alike, after the twist is revealed you can look back and say to yourself “oh, now I understand about why the character does such-and-such.” The difference is that in Liar, I wasn’t left feeling that those actions were out of character at the time they happened.

To Sum Up

Robin Sloan is a wickedly smart, inventive writer who will be great someday. He’s rough around the edges now (and I’m happy to make him that same offer on his next book), but he’ll get over that. He has a wonderful flair for inventive leaps that feel perfectly natural. I hope he continues writing in a similar cyber-punkish vein, because he has a great grasp on technology and what I feel are very incisive views on future-tech.

At the risk of dating myself, I am reminded of Max Headroom’s “20 minutes into the future” tagline, a feeling Sloan captures marvelously in this novella. And I cannot help but be amused to note that one of Max Headroom’s creator’s was also named Annabel.

All in all, despite its flaws I enjoyed Annabel Scheme immensely. Download it today and give it a read.

In the last part of my character revision series I made the case for why all your significant characters should have some kind of arc. That includes your villains.

Look at it from their perspective: The villain is the hero of his or her own story. Take Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction. Alex Forrest didn’t consider herself to be a bad person. She was a person who felt she had been wronged, and wasn’t going to take it lying down.

Just like a heroine, she had a goal in mind: Exact justice on Dan Gallagher (played by Michael Douglas). We’d call it revenge, but to her, it was justice. She had motivation driving her toward that goal, and obstacles to overcome in pursuit of it. So why shouldn’t she get a character arc too?

She should, and here are four good reasons why giving your villain a character arc helps your novel:

Believability and drama A villain who feels like a one-dimensional stereotype isn’t particularly believable. Real people are rarely so simple. If you’re doing a serial-killer thriller, say, but the whole of your villain’s development is contained in the two word phrase “serial-killer,” nobody’s going to put much faith in him as a real person. His actions and motivations will be all too predictable, and consequently, there is no drama.

A believable person is unpredictable. Unpredictability equals threat, which generates fear (both for the book’s hero and for the reader), which increases the whole book’s sense of drama.

Depth If adding one character arc for your hero gives your novel more depth, then surely adding a second arc for the villain will give your novel even greater depth, right? In fact, yes, and that’s really all there is to say about that.

Message and meaning Giving the villain an arc, with its attendant set of credible, carefully considered beliefs and motivations, gives you an opportunity to play with the similarities and differences between your hero and your villain. That, in turn, creates a perfect opportunity to give your book a deeper message and meaning beyond what’s in the plot. Sure, giving your villain any random character arc at all will still help your novel. But why be random when you can be smart?

If you’re clever about what arc you give the villain, you can a wonderful possibility for playing the two arcs off of each other. By relating both the hero’s and villain’s arcs to the same underlying facet of the human condition, you can examine that facet from multiple points of view. You allow the novel to present a nuanced consideration of tolerance or responsibility or suffering or whatever common element you choose.

Take suffering: perhaps both hero and villain are being driven by suffering from a previous emotional wound. But the hero works to overcome it, while the villain allows the suffering to drag him down into the darkness. This technique is great for giving your book a message and showing the complex, not black-and-white but gray nature of the world, without you ever having to point it out to the reader.

In this example, readers are likely to begin the book with a default attitude that suffering is bad. After all, nobody likes to suffer. We try to avoid it if we can. But by showing your hero emerge from suffering as a stronger person, while the villain succumbs to it and is ultimately defeated, you can show a more complex picture: Suffering itself is neither good nor bad, it’s all in how we choose to react to it. The best part is you never have to explain the message to the reader. It’s shown, right there in the two arcs.

Hope Boiled down to the barest essence, a character arc represents hope. It is a signal that some kind of change is coming, and if there can be change, there can be improvement. If your serial-killer villain has a character arc going on, then the reader can have hope that he may change and not, in fact, kill the victim he is presently stalking. A character arc offers the tantalizing possibility of redemption for even the blackest-hearted of villains.

Now, you don’t have to redeem the villain just because you gave him or her an arc. Absolutely not. But take care: If you’re doing it right, the arc will come with a pivotal moment somewhere in the plot, where the villain chooses the redemptive path or the path of condemnation. The serial-killer either chooses not to kill, or gives in to the bloodlust and does the victim in anyway.

Whichever you choose, that pivotal moment for the villain is also a pivotal moment for your book because the villain’s choice must be absolutely believable to the reader. You can’t just write up to that point then flip a coin to see what happens. Everything that has led up to that moment must, in the reader’s hindsight, support the choice the villain makes. Obviously you don’t want to telegraph the choice ahead of time and give away the ending, but the ending must fit what has come before like a glove.

Well, I guess you could flip a coin about it, as long as you’re willing to go back in revision to add support for the result. As novelist Michael Snyder said in an interview on Author Culture:

As a novelist, you want the reader to experience two conflicting yet simultaneous reactions [to your endings]. They should be saying “Wow, I never saw that coming” and “Of course, sure, yeah, it had to work that way, didn’t it?”

I spend a lot of time on this blog helping explain what writers can do to improve their characters. Today, I’m doing the opposite: talking about a mistake writers should not make in their scene transitions and chapter breaks because it can sabotage their characters.

If you’re wondering how scene transitions can sabotage a character, welcome to the club. I was quite shocked the first time I discovered this phenomenon because it’s so unexpected. Scene transitions are only gaps in the narrative, where you presumably skip over boring stuff the reader doesn’t need to see in order to move on to the next moment that’s meaningful to the plot. But “skipping the parts people don’t read,” as Elmore Leonard put it, is a good thing, right? How in the world can gaps reflect badly on your characters?

If you do them right, they don’t. But if you do them wrong, they can leave all sorts of impressions about your characters that you didn’t intend at all.

The Discovery

The first time I discovered this it was in a client’s manuscript where I felt that the main character was way too passive, which was weird because I could see him doing stuff at many points in the story. As I was writing my feedback for the client, I was asking myself why he seemed so passive. And then it hit me. The problem wasn’t in the writing, it was in the gaps between the writing.

The writer was ending a lot of scenes in typical cliffhanger fashion, thus motivating the reader to keep reading to see what the main character was going to do about that end-of-scene crisis. That’s a great technique. But then the next scene would pick up later, after the crisis was over. The writer presented enough recap so you knew how things ended up, but then moved on with the rest of the story. So while the main character certainly did a lot of things during the scenes of the book, I never actually got to see him respond to these cliffhanger crises. It left the impression that he didn’t do anything about them, and thus, that he was too passive.

The Theory

That’s just one example. But an awkward transition can create all manner of misconceptions about a character, depending on the context. It goes something like this.

At the end of a scene, readers have a picture in mind. They know who’s doing what, where they are, what their goals are, et cetera. The scene itself has built this picture for them. Further, at the end of the scene, your readers will have some kind of guess as to how the events may unfold.

But then the scene ends, so at the beginning of the next scene they have to build new mental pictures. If the second scene doesn’t sufficiently lay out the new picture while also linking back to the previous one, your characters can fall right through that gap. Let me see if I can create this effect for you in a short example.

Backstory: A husband and wife are having marital problems following the death of their first child, some five years prior. They’re dealing with the 5 stages of grief in their own ways and on their own timelines. He’s ready to move on and have another child, but she’s not and every time they talk about it they always end up in a fight.

Scene one: Having a pretty good day, the husband and wife decide to go for a walk. Without really paying attention to where they’re wandering, they find themselves atop on a wind-swept bluff overlooking the sea, their picturesque stone cottage in the background. Only, it’s the very same bluff from which their first child fell to his death. They both become silent and sullen. Neither can say anything, so in a moment of tenderness, they embrace, clinging to each other for support.

Scene two: Back in the cottage, the wife is in the kitchen sniffling and wiping away tears while preparing dinner. The husband, still seeming sullen, is stoking up a fire in the fireplace. Later, the doorbell rings and guests arrive for dinner. Husband and wife put on brave faces and attempt to entertain as best they can, although the evening is not a raging success.

Now ask yourself: why was the wife crying in scene two? What happened in between those two scenes? Don’t over-think it, just go with your gut. It’s probably telling you that back on the bluff, the husband must have brought up the subject of having another child again, resulting in another fight on the walk back to the cottage.

“But no,” screams the writer after it’s much too late to protest, “that isn’t what I meant at all! I only meant to show that she was chopping onions. It’s show, don’t tell, just some colorful detail in the kitchen scene. He didn’t bring up having another baby, and they didn’t fight!”

Ok fine, Mr. Writer Guy, but your rough and awkward scene transition reflects badly on the husband. It quite likely leaves readers thinking the guy is an insensitive jerk. They’ll be judging him for not recognizing that she’s still hurting, and critical of him for not giving her the time she needs to heal.

The scene break may be perfectly justified on structural grounds. That walk back to the cottage doesn’t, in fact, advance the story. There’s no conflict in it, so it has to go.

The problem occurs when a reader’s guess about what happens next is neither confirmed nor denied. The walk back to the cottage is the bridge from the first scene to the second. Even if you shouldn’t show it directly, you can’t leave it out entirely or the husband falls to his metaphorical death in the reader’s eyes.

The Solution

Two things need to happen at that scene transition in order for the husband not to come off looking like a cad, or more generally, for writers to avoid unintentionally showing something negative about their characters.

First, the scene break had better be in the right place. In the above example I’ve posited that it was, but that’s not always what writers do. Ending a scene too early is particularly dangerous, because you leave things very vague for the reader. The gap to the next scene can be too wide, leaving the reader with too many possible outcomes to consider. Don’t end the scene until you’ve given the reader a clear sense for exactly what you’re about to skip over. Don’t try to eliminate every possible incorrect guess that may be in the reader’s mind. You can’t build the whole bridge here. But that’s ok. A bridge has two ends, and this scene is just one of them.

Second, the following scene must establish its own mental picture quickly and clearly, in such a way that the reader can see how this scene logically follows from the previous one. Here is where you build the other end of the bridge by dealing with any remaining uncertainty left by the previous scene’s ending. Your job is to give the reader that brief moment of realizing “Ok, I see how we got from there to here.”

Build a Bridge

A scene transition is a gap. Always bear that in mind. Your job as the writer is to provide a bridge over that gap so your characters don’t plummet into the churning waters below.

A scene creates a mental picture for the reader, but it also leaves the reader having a guess as to what might happen next. If the following scene doesn’t clearly confirm their guess or lead them to a different understanding, then your bridge has a hole in the middle. Don’t make your readers guess at what happened. Let them imagine it, sure. But don’t make them guess.