characters Archives - Sacha Black

189 Creating Unforgettable Characters with TJ Klune

Sacha Black — Wed, 10 May 2023 04:00:00 +0000

Hello Rebels, welcome to episode 189 of The Rebel Author Podcast. Today, I’m talking to TJ Klune all about creating unforgettable characters.

In this episode we cover:

Character creation and personification
Writing elements to represent theme
Bringing stories full circle
Advice for writing dialogue
Incorporating mythology into stories

This week’s question is: What have you binged this year?

Recommendation of the week is: Worst Wedding Date by Pippa Grant

Amazon UK

Amazon USA

***this show uses affiliate links

Find out more about TJ:

In The Lives of Puppets

Ravensong (Green Creek book 2)

Instagram

Rebel of the Week is: Karla

If you’d like to be a Rebel of the week please do send in your story, it can be any kind of rebellion. You can email your rebel story to rebelauthorpodcast@gmail.com

1 new patron this week, welcome and thank you to Noreen Stone. A big thank you to my existing patrons as well. If you’d like to support the show, and get early access to all the episodes as well as bonus content you can from as little as $2 a month by visiting: www.patreon.com/sachablack

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043 Character Occupations and Details with Becca Puglisi

Sacha Black — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 08:00:15 +0000

Hello Rebels, welcome to The Rebel Author Podcast episode 43. Today, I’m talking to Becca Puglisi all about character occupations and details. It’s a fascinating nerd out about the details of writing and characterization.

Episode Show Notes

This week’s questions is:

What job does your character have?

Find out more about our guest Becca Puglisi:

The Occupation Thesaurus

One Stop for Writers

Writers Helping Writers blog

Don’t forget The Anatomy of Prose is now live, you can get it in ebook, paperback or hardback now.

Click the link here.

Order the Workbook here.

Book recommendation: Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

Get it on Kobo

Get it on Apple

Amazon UK

Amazon USA

Listener Rebel of the Week is Steve Moore

If you’d like to be a Rebel of the week please do send in your story, it can be any kind of rebellion. You can email your rebel story to rebelauthorpodcast@gmail.com or tweet me @rebelauthorpod

No new patrons this week but a huge thank you to all my current patrons for the ongoing support. If you’d like to support the show, and get access to all the bonus essays, posts and content, you can from as little as $2 a month by visiting: www.patreon.com/sachablack

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042 Character Psychology with Dr Alex Bryant

Sacha Black — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 08:00:47 +0000

Hello Rebels, welcome to The Rebel Author Podcast episode 42. Today, I’m talking to Dr Alex Bryant all about character psychology. We take a fascinating delve into madness and sanity and where the line between them is really drawn.

This week’s questions is:

What part of character creation do you find the hardest?

Book recommendation of the week is: The Occupation Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi

My blog review and lessons learned How to use character occupations to deepen your characterization

Grab The Occupation Thesaurus here.

I was delighted to be interviewed by AG Billig on her Self-Publishing Mastery talks channel. We had an amazing chat about adulting, parenting, creativity, routine and more. Watch here.

Find out more about today’s guest:

Website: www.alexbryantauthor.com

Read his books: https://books2read.com/theidentitythief

Instagram: @alexbryantauthor

Facebook: @alexbryantauthor

***

Rebel of the week this week is HB Lyne

If you’d like to be a Rebel of the week please do send in your story, it can be any kind of rebellion. You can email your rebel story to rebelauthorpodcast@gmail.com or tweet me @rebelauthorpod

***

Thank you to new patron Cari Buziak. Also a huge thank you to all my current patrons, you help not only to keep the podcast running. You make me feel like my potty mouth antics are worthwhile.

If you’d like to support the show, and get access to all the bonus essays, posts and content, you can from as little as $2 a month by visiting: www.patreon.com/sachablack

That’s sacha with a C not an S

THIS EPISODE WAS SPONSORED BY KOBO WRITING LIFE

Visit Kobo Writing Life here, read the Kobo Writing Life blog here, and listen to their podcast here.

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037 How to Build Universes and Write Transgender Characters

Sacha Black — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 08:00:21 +0000

Hello Rebels, welcome back to The Rebel Author Podcast episode 37. I’m talking to Malorie Cooper about how to build universes and write transgender characters. This week is a mixed topic, so I’ve put the timestamps for the start of each topic in the show notes.

Timestamps:

Transgender characters: 20.22
Universe and world building 49.40

Episode Show Notes

This week’s questions is:

Do you write series or standalone and why?

Book recommendation this week is The Necromancer’s Apprentice by Icy Sedgwick, purchase a copy here.

Find out more about our guest Mal Cooper on her website aeon14.com.

Find her on Facebook where she posts nearly daily cosplay/fashion pics.

Link to the YouTube video where she talks about what makes boys and girls.

Link to National Geographic article mentioned on gender.

Don’t forget The Anatomy of Prose is now live, you can get it in ebook, paperback or hardback now.

Click the link here.

Order the Workbook here.

Listener Rebel of the Week is Aime Sund

If you’d like to be a Rebel of the week please do send in your story, it can be any kind of rebellion. You can email your rebel story to rebelauthorpodcast@gmail.com or tweet me @rebelauthorpod

Thank you to all patrons for the support. If you’d like to support the show, and get access to all the bonus essays, posts and content, you can from as little as $2 a month by visiting: www.patreon.com/sachablack

This episode was sponsored by Kobo Writing Life

Visit Kobo Writing Life here, read the Kobo Writing Life blog here, and listen to their podcast here.

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035 How to Write Romance, Sex Scenes and Lesbian Characters with Clare Lydon

Sacha Black — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 08:00:59 +0000

Welcome to The Rebel Author Podcast episode 35. Today I’m talking to Clare Lydon all about how to write romance, sex scenes and lesbian characters.

Episode Show Notes

This week’s questions is:

What’s the best sex scene you ever read? Or watched?

***

Find out more about Clare Lydon

Clare’s website

Clare’s book recommendations

Visit her on Twitter

Visit her on Facebook

Links to 2 sex podcasts she mentioned:

Steampunk novel mentioned

Demon in the Machine – Lise Mactague

Clare’s book recommendations

And Playing The Role Of Herself by KE Lane

In At The Deep End by Kate Davies

Book recommendation this week is Collaboration for Authors by Daniel Willcocks

Grab your copy here.

Don’t forget The Anatomy of Prose is available now, you can get it in ebook, paperback or hardback now.

Click the link here.

Order the Workbook here.

Listener Rebel of the Week is Burninstories

If you’d like to be a Rebel of the week please do send in your story, it can be any kind of rebellion. You can email your rebel story to rebelauthorpodcast@gmail.com or tweet me @rebelauthorpod

Thank you to new rebel patron this week Steve Moore. If you’d like to support the show, and get access to all the bonus essays, posts and content, you can from as little as $2 a month by visiting: www.patreon.com/sachablack

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020 How to Create the Perfect Character with Damon Suede

Sacha Black — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 08:00:26 +0000

Hello Rebels, welcome back to The Rebel Author Podcast episode 20. Today’s podcast is all about how to create the perfect character with Damon Suede. He shows you how choosing and identifying a verb for your character helps you go deep with characterisation. We also touch on personal branding, story arcs and more.

This Week’s Question looks at the personal branding side of the interview today. So I’m interested in your personal verb.

What is your verb?

The book recommendation of the week is VERBALIZE by Damon Suede

Kobo

Amazon UK

Amazon USA

The Rebel of the week is Edwin Downward

If you’d like to be a Rebel of the week please do send in your story, it can be any kind of rebellion. You can email your rebel story to rebelauthorpodcast@gmail.com or tweet me @rebelauthorpod

No new Patrons today. Thank you so much to all my current patrons, who help to ensure that this podcast continues.

If you’d like to support the show, and get access to all the bonus essays, posts and content, you can from as little as $2 a month by visiting: www.patreon.com/sachablack

How to Create the Perfect Character

Craft Cracking Characters with Damon Suede @LiveWireGuides #indieauthor #selfpublishing #IARTG #ASMRG #writingcommunity
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Find out more about Damon on his:

Website: DamonSuede.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/damon.suede.author

Twitter: https://twitter.com/DamonSuede

Episode Transcript

Sacha Black
Hello and welcome back to The Rebel Author Podcast. Today I am with Damon suede. Damon grew up out and proud deep in the anus of right wing America and escaped as soon as it was legal. Beyond romance fiction, Damon has been writing for print stage and screen for almost three decades. He’s won some awards, but counts his blessings more often his amazing friends, his demented family, his beautiful husband, his loyal fans and his silly, stern, seductive Muse who keeps whispering in his ear year after year. Welcome.

Damon Suede
Well, thank you so much for having me on. I’m such a fan. I was so excited when you reached out because I read your books. I know you’re sort of articles. I’m always sort of following what you’re doing in the intertubes so it’s, it was an honor to be here.

Sacha Black
I just call when you messaged me back and said that I was like, but but you’re Damon… I’ve read all of your books and yeah, I have read both. Well, actually, I haven’t read activate because it’s more of a reference.

Damon Suede
Yeah, you’ve dipped into it. It would be weird to read it. Yeah.

Sacha Black
Yeah. Is it? Yeah, I mean, also it’s a weapon. It’s not a book. It’s a fucking weapon. It’s ginormous.

Damon Suede
It’s 2.2 pounds. That thing is a brick. That is my husband’s doing so this is probably part of the podcast, but as a sidebar. I originally was like, ebook only. It’s got 190,000 links in it, blah, blah, blah. And my husband was like, everybody wants reference books. And that was like it’s a resource… nobody wants. He was like, I promise they want in print. And it’s funny it is. I think it’s actually more popular in print than an ebook people. Yeah. all geared and flip through it and but yes, it’s 2.2 pounds. It’s quite hefty.

Sacha Black
That does not surprise me in the slightest because I actually went to buy it when it was still just an E book and I was furious with you. I was like, I want the paperbook. And then and then I think I heard somewhere that you were bringing the paperback. I was like, it’s fine. I forgive you. It’s fine. It’s fine.

Damon Suede
The funny thing is it actually that book started as a an appendix. It was originally 10. I was gonna do a 10,000 word small thesaurus of active transitive verbs in the back of verbalize. And so I started writing it. And then the 10,000 words became 11, and then 17. And then it was 25. And then I was like, Oh, I think this is a separate book, and it was 90 and then it was 120. It’s now 280,000 or 270,000 words long it and it grew. It just kind of grew on its own. And the more I dug into what, what were available in English as transitive verbs, when I started actually, I did these giant we can talk about all this later, but big word clouds talking about different genres and different types of character. And then once I dug in, I couldn’t stop it was like you don’t stop halfway through hell, you just go Virtual say when you’re going through hell keep going and going.

Sacha Black
Okay, well, we will dig into that more in a moment. But first of all, tell everyone a little bit about yourself, your career and your journey of how you got to where you are today.

Damon Suede
Well, I started out I was a child. I was originally a child singer. When I was very, very young. I had a freak voice. I had a four and a half octave range as a little boy. So I was like a soprano Alto. And then by the time I got to puberty, I was like, a, like an alto, Barotenor, very, I had a very wide range. And so I love musicals, and I’m very, very extroverted. And I was a dancer and I had been a gymnast. And so I was doing all this musical theater as a kid. And then of course, that led to acting in classics because if you can speak quickly, articulately and you have received pronunciation, you can essentially do anything on stage. And so I did a lot of Shakespeare a lot of restoration that brought me to London. Right after college. My My degree is actually religion and philosophy but I gone to New York originally to be in theater, I wanted to work in the arts.

And I came to London I was at a I went to the London Academy, I had a blast. I had an agent, a manager, I worked in London British theatre Actually, I toured a lot of Shakespeare a lot of restoration because I’m very pale and I had a big ass. So I Well, I look good in tights, you see, so I can always scream, cry and get naked. And like, my last, my last professional acting gig on stage with Howard Barker’s, the possibility, where I literally screamed, cried got molested naked on stage with all your cameras. And while I was doing that, a producer came up to me and said, Hey, I hear you’re a writer. And I said, Well, yeah, I write like, you know, skits for charity benefits when I get asked because I’ve done a lot of comedy. And he said, Well, I have a play. I have a theater. And the playwright that I was going to be doing in the fall just dropped out. And I’ve got this gap. And I said, and? And he said, Well, do you want to write a play, which by the way, never happens? Like no one would ever do this? And he said, Well, I just think you’re really telling And I’d love to see what you do. Why don’t you write and direct something? And since we had no time we had three months I wrote I art directed a photoshoot wrote a play to fit the advertising and then the place sold out.

And I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a moment in British theatre when sort of the pub theatres in London had exploded like the king’s head and the Almeda sort of grown up at this point, Sam Mindy’s had just started Donmar and so there was a lot of interest in kind of edgy, funky, small theater, in sort of outskirts of London and a partially a sort of Edinburgh had expanded so much nationally, and internationally. And so I sort of fell into the deep theater scene in London. And then this show did very well and I did a bunch of other shows. And then I started I decided I wanted to write full time. And so as I was saying, before we started recording that I tried to immigrate, I wanted to move to the UK and because of tax reasons I couldn’t. So I moved back to New York, and I wound up working with a bunch of really fancy people in theater As an assistant as an assistant director as a properties designer at the public, I did all sorts of weird jobs. But my rule I’d never worked in retail, I’d never worked as a waiter. And I’d never worked in an office. And my rule was, I will do any job in the arts as long as I can have time to write. And so I started writing full time from that point forward, and I was 21 at this point. And so I came back and it’s sort of like not at all what you’re supposed to do as an artist, I guess. But I guess nothing is ever what you’re supposed to do.

So I came back, I started writing full time I was working with all these companies. I did a lot of Off Broadway did a bunch on Broadway. I did a bunch of doctoring. And then a play of mine won a bunch of awards, and it got bought by Tribeca by Bob De Niro’s company for film. And then I started doing a lot of film work, and I was working with Fox animated features, and I did, I started doing a lot of doctoring. And what I got known for was you could hand me any script, and I could make it sexier in about two weeks. And so I mean, they when they hire you like as a hired gun, you get a rep for certain things. I was really good at Sort of into like witty banter, I was really good at physical comedy, I was really good sort of sexy tension. And so I did a lot of doctoring. And I did that for a long time. And there got to be this moment in about 2009 2010, where I was like, I hate everything I’m doing. The plays that I’m writing are winning a lot of awards, but they’re never going to get produced, because that’s not really actually how plays work anymore. They haven’t worked that way since the 1940s. I’m doing a lot of film and television, which is not really what I want to be doing. It’s great money. And a friend of mine, and I were on the phone. She was working on an erotic romance. This was in 2010. And she dared me. We were we were working on a story of hers, she was having trouble. And so my husband’s out of town working on a murder case. And so I he’s a forensic investigator,

Sacha Black
I was gonna say, good clarification there!

Damon Suede
So he is a forensic investigator. He was working on a case. And so she said to me, she was like, if you don’t write a romance, you’re the laziest asshole I’ve ever met. And I said, Okay, I’ve never written them. Book and she said, You read all the time you love the genre, why don’t you try it? And she said the worst thing you can say. She said, I dare you. And so I wrote, and I live, she literally dared me. And I wrote my first book in six weeks. I sold it in two days, and it was number one for six months. And it changed my life. hothead was literally a watershed moment for me. And I didn’t know what at the time, but it actually ended up being something of a watershed for LGBTQ romance. Because when I came in, up to that moment, what they called quote, M/M romance was very niche. And I said, fuck that. I don’t want to be niche. I do not want to live in a ghetto. I did not come out when I was 14. To come out all over again. Like I write gay romance. I’m proud.

And so I was like, I want this to the New York Times numbers and so I promoted like a crazy person, but I promoted the way you do in film and television. I treated it like a package and so I had very, very big success with that book and then with the other books, and then that led me into romance. I call my my legit agent and I was like, Ron, I’m not gonna To be working film anymore, he was like, Fuck you. And I were my quarterly and he was like, Don’t fuck you. I love that. I was that like, you know, it, it. It was such a change for me to be in a community where everyone wanted to help you. Like in film, everybody wants to like murder you and rape your corpse and then eat whatever’s left when they’re done. And in romance. Everybody kept saying, How can I help? What can I do? Can I introduce you to someone? Do you need any help? Can I beta read? And at first I was suspicious. I was like, hire all these people. So nice. This is really weird. And what I realized is no, the entire genre is predicated on the idea that relationships are more powerful than solitude. So everyone wants to help you because they can’t write fast enough to satisfy their fans and so they need other talented writers. And so the journey has been really crazy because again, I started out as a loud kid with rhythm. And here I am right like 30 whatever. plus years later, I’m a professional romance writer. And it says though, you raised me in a vat to do this job because I was raised by a feminist lesbian in Houston, Texas 10 blocks from where RWA was founded. I’m now president elect of rW a. I’m so randomly here I am like living out my little destiny. But it’s it’s been an amazing journey. I would not trade places with anybody. I feel so blessed to get to do this job to get paid to make up nice stories for people love it. I

Sacha Black
I am actually speechless, because that doesn’t happen very often. Let me tell you. I love everything about your journey and your story. And there were lots of echoes. So when I was a kid, I also acted not I stopped when I was 16. So I didn’t take the lead and TV show, but I was bullied so badly and then can’t be stopped. But I also have an agent and I did a lot of voiceover work and yeah, so lots of echoes of you know, throwback memories, but yeah. Oh my god, I love your story. I love your journey. Yeah. Amazing. Um, okay. So I have read and loved verbalize and I now have activate. So Well, I know what I’m talking about listeners might not. So could you tell everyone a little bit about the concept behind it verbalize and how it can impact character creation and your writing in general?

Damon Suede
Sure, sure, sure. So this is there’s actually I’ve sort of teed it up a little because the way this started when I came into fiction, I came with this weird set of tools from showbiz. And I had been working in showbiz for so many decades that the idea that a character was a hair color and a job and a skin color was anathema because I can write as I always say, like I could write an erotic thriller for ADSL, but it winds up a web cartoon starring Pauly Shore as a talk poodle, you have no idea what you’re going to get when you turn in your script. So all you can do is give actors something to act, they have to have something to do on stage. And so when I would talk to people about their books, and I would say, well, what’s it about? And they would say, Well, she’s blonde and she has hazel eyes. And I’d say, Okay, well, that’s nice and all but what what happens? Like what is the story? And I found it really weird that every character guide I read, kind of talked as if it was doing a personal ad like it was. It was as if you pick these things from an identikit as if you were in a police station identifying a perpetrator or you’re like, Oh, you know, she’s a humpback lesbian with an eyepatch. And she’s a kleptomaniac who’s also a Zionist like it. It doesn’t that’s not a character, right? It’s just, yeah,

Sacha Black
It’s a checklist

Damon Suede
Yeah it’s a checklist and I call them impersonal ads. Because the thing is, there are many redheads, there are many, there are many women, there are many people with AI patches. There are many people that are Muslim, like how does that characterize somebody? It’s a it’s a bunch of it’s sort of a pig pile of traits. Well, when I first started writing in romance, what I did was what I did first script which was I gave my characters actions. And by that I mean I literally for every character I write, I give them a single transitive verb, an action that defines everything they are because, again, the example I use with this is Severus Snape. Because if I tell you that Severus Snape has black hair, and he wears a cloak with bat like wings, and he’s a teacher, and he’s, he’s a here arrow, and he’s a martyr, and he’s a lover, and he’s a coward, and all these things are true. How do you write that? Like, you can’t actually do that on on page and I guarantee Alan Rickman did not look at a script and say, ooh, black hair, I’ll take it. No, he looked at the actions he is an actor. That’s why directors call action on set because you want them to do something. What he does is he looks at what the character does.

And Aristotle in the poetics he says the character use the word he uses for characters ethos, and ethos does not mean what we mean when we say character. ethos doesn’t mean like a role or function. ethos literally means habitual action is that which one does habitually and so when you say like the character Severus Snape, you’re not actually saying tall, dark hair greasy, cowardly, heroic, whatever that’s horseshit. That’s all worthless. What you’re actually saying is he does something that is Snape like right? And so for me, I believe the action of Severus Snape is Vex what Severus Snape does is he vexes people he bets as Harry effects as Dumbledore effects as Voldemort effects the Slytherin effects as Griffin door he Beck’s is Lily he acts as James he acts as indexes, indexes, and for people who disagree and they’re like, Oh no, he does all these other things. No, what he does he vexes and in the course of vexing, he has tactics that change as REactions to the things around him right. Here’s the ultimate proof. The word Snape literally means Vex, literally the synonym of Snape is Vex and his name means Vex you severely. And I’m not saying that JK Rowling agrees with me, but I’m telling you that the idea of Snape is tied up in vexation in the same way that Valmont is tied up in ruin. I believe that the Vicount Valmont, Les Liaisons dangereuses is ruin, I believe Celie Harris in The Color Purple is question.

And so I start from this idea that when you verbalize a character when you put a character on the page, what you’re actually doing is not piling up a bunch of adjectives that’s kind of worthless. What you do is you give them something to do, because once they are in action, there’s automatically conflict. There’s automatically emotion, there’s automatically drama. And then based on that one action in different scenes, I have what I call tactics and those are synonyms of the primary action. So for example, Lizzie Bennet in Pride and Prejudice her act No, I should say I should caveat here caveat. So I say Severus Snape is vex but let’s say Sacha that you wanted to write Severus Snape and you’re like no, I think that Severus Snape is seduce. Every time I see several Snape I want to make wet love to him. Maybe that is the way you imagined cyberspace. Great. You’re a writer word choices how we work All of us can have our own actions. That’s why we’re writers. It’s part of our voice. And so for me if I’m writing the character, I think Vex is how I see and how I would verbalize him. You might have it different. So there’s no like sort of ultimate truth the proud characters, although things get pretty explicit. So for example, in Lizzy written Lizzy Bennet’s case, if you read Pride and Prejudice, the word the action that is given to Lizzy over and over again, is provoke on so many levels throughout that novel Lizzy is always provoking everyone. Now in the course of provoking she does other things. She mocks, she godes, she spurs she ridicules, she’s scorns, she does all these other things. They are synonyms of her core action, which is to provoke. And so in each scene, she has a different tactic, but her arc is one a provocation. And so when I want to characterize someone, I have their action and then these sub actions these tactics are reactions to other characters. And by doing that, I then kind of get facets out of the character and dimension And I always know what they’re doing in a scene. And because the verbs themselves are words that you choose, your voice is the only thing that is required to motivate them. Because it’s all driven by their energy and what they make happen on the page, and how other characters react because of course, every character has an action, and every action produces a REaction. Does that make sense?

Sacha Black
It does. So, excuse me, let’s look at that. So in terms of the character arc, then they are obviously starting with their verb, and the body meant of that. So what happens at the end?

Damon Suede
So here’s the thing, what am I net, you’ll notice that when I talk about it, I always say action and tactic. Both of those are verbs. So they start with their core verb, which is their action, but then their secondary verbs are their tactics. So if you start with this core action, that action never changes. If you write a book with 30 titles, you write to series with 30 books in the series. That action will remain for that character. All the way through the series because the minute you change the action of a character, they stop acting like themselves. That’s why when you’re reading a series and you think like, oh, that character is not the same character it was. That’s because the action has changed, right? And so over the course of say one book, if you were writing a book, and you want to have you wanted to set up a character, you start with a transitive verb, an action, this character will embody for the entire book, their action is not going to change. They may change, but the things that will change are not their core action, but their secondary tactics. Does that make sense? And so over the course of the story, the way they react to other people will alter but at the end of Pride and Prejudice, Lizzy Bennet is still provoking. Severus Snape is so to Vex like Vex is what he is so much so that after he is dead, his tears Vex people. Vexation in human form. And so it’s not that like Oh, he’s dead now he’ll stop vexting people know his corpse vexes people, like everything he is is vexatious, and so that that friction that he produces by vexing people persists. And if he came back in a different book, he would still be vexing. He is vexing on every page of those seven novels, and everything around him is defined by his vexatious nature right? And so as you’re building the example I always use is Streetcar Named Desire. Do you know that play street car?

Sacha Black
A little bit. Stella? Isn’t the main character I think no,

Damon Suede
Stella? No. You’re thinking Blanche is the main. Yeah, it’s the main character is Blanche DuBois. I believe her action is to conceal, right? She always veils and drapes and costumes and makeup she’s always covering and hiding things right. But Stanley who’s her direct opposite penetrates, he breaks and bellows and thrusts and shatters. He’s always ripping and tearing and pushing everything penetrate, penetrate, penetrate, right and she’s conceal conceal. What’s the most horrible penetrate in the world? Rape and if into the story. And the last scene, we see Stanley attacking her. He rapes her. That is his tactic and that scene, the last time that we see Blanche DuBois she’s still concealed, but her tactic is to imprison, and she imprisoned herself in a lunatic asylum depending on the kindness of strangers. And so the unpacking of concealing and penetrate reach their pinnacle their climax in rape in prison. Does that make sense? And so by the same token, the word like the word climax in Greek literally means ladder. And so you can think of the action as the ladder they’re climbing. And each of the tactics as a rung leading to the top of that ladder, do you know what I mean? It gets them where they’re going. And so those become the steps that they take scene by scene as they march inexorably towards the ending, whatever the genre, right, because if it’s a romance, the genre is going to end with hope. If it’s horror, it’s going to end with despair. If it’s a Western, it’s going to end with civilization. And those things are driven by all those tactics. pushing forward.

Sacha Black
What I really like about this concept is that it not only gives you characterization, but it also gives you plot. Yeah. Because your characters, , if they are embodying their verb, then it also in a way gives you the outcome, because they have to still be that thing at the end.

Damon Suede
That’s right.

Sacha Black
Yeah, I love I love this so much funny.

Damon Suede
This started the way this whole journey started. I secretly believed everyone wrote this way. When I first came into fiction. I thought everyone was doing this and just not talking about it. So I thought it was like a secret club. And we all knew but we were wink wink, nudge nudge ignoring it. And so I was on Kristen Higgins and Fairer, Shawn and I were teaching a three way character class and each of us took 20 minutes, and so Fairer when Kristen went then Fairer when and then I went, and at the end, I’m doing my little bit and I’m like, 20 minutes and I’m like bladdy, bladdy, blah. verbalize, blah, blah, blah, action tactics, blah, blah, blah, trajectory. And Kristen at the end was like, What the fuck was that? I was like, everybody works this way. What are you talking about? And this room, it’s like, we’re packed standing room only. It’s like 400 people in a room that can hold 200. And people are agod. And I was like, you all do this? What are you talking about? And they were like, we’ve never heard this before. And I was like, it’s actions. You’re you all right this way. And they were like, they were like, maybe we do, but we’ve never thought of it that way. The truth is I think all writers work this way. They just don’t do it consciously. And so it’s not that I think like all this is the one true way it’s that I think it is the way and we will reach it in different directions. And so like, everyone uses words, that’s what words are. In fact, Fitzgerald even says like, the art of writing is always in the verbs. The verbs. That’s why we say the word verbalize when you verbalize something. It’s because verbs are the core of language. And so why wouldn’t you go to that?

I always think of myself like what I’m teaching is like grammar punk. Like a lot of people are like, I hate grammar, grammar. sucks and I’m like, well when you’re 12 grammar sucks because you want to like cry and masturbate but like grammar is actually how you make money and grammar is actually how you make a better book and grammar is how you build a fan base and grammar is how you sell things. Here’s the cool thing once you verbalize your characters once you know what their actions and tactics are, that’s the way you sell the story too. That’s how you tell the story. That’s how you sell the story. Because newsflash, what is marketing language, active transitive verbs. If you go to a marketing copywriting class, they will tell you the language to focus on it’s not an adjective, it’s verbs. The verbs are where the cell is in your book. And when you’re pitching to an agent, they don’t want to know what color their hair is. They want to know what happens. They want to know what they do. And so by focusing on actions it as you say, like it’s character and plot, I secretly don’t think there’s any difference between character and plot they’re lenses that allow people to consider it. And so when people say like, I’m a character writer, I’m a plot writer. I’m like, okay, like you wear your underpants on the outside or you wear your like your glasses on your feet. Who cares? As long as you get words on the page and someone pays you to do it, you’re a writer. And so like, whatever the process is, it gets you there. But spoiler alert, you’re gonna get to verbs eventually. Because unless there is a verb, nothing happens on the page. And so why not start why not plug into the source, right? Like when I go right to the power?

Sacha Black
I completely agree, I don’t think there’s a difference either, because story arc is character arc. So it is just a nonsense like, you know, the plotting pantsing argument, who cares? As long as you get to the end.

Damon Suede
I always tell my students the difference between plotting and pantsing is when you do it, because a plotter is someone who sits down and they’re like, here’s what I’m gonna do. And the pants are someone’s like you. You’re not the boss of me. But then they write a big, ugly outline, they call their rough draft, and then they have to spend a million years revising it. It’s still gonna have an outline, because if you’re writing a romance, again, spoiler alert, it ends happily. Yeah, it’s a plot. Like it’s not that you don’t plot it’s really When you plot and if you like plotters are people who do it early. And Panthers are people who do it late. And the truth is we all pants too, because you can’t just follow a list. The stories aren’t cookie cutter, they’re not sort of widgets. But by the same token, you cannot drive in a hotwire car with no headlights and no gas and not go off cliffs occasionally. So you, you have to have both, I mean, you have to have plotting and pantsing

Sacha Black
Yeah, and I’ve I don’t know what your process is. But I found that my stories are very sentient, and they all have different personalities, and none of them necessarily follow the same method. And I swear this is probably because of the verbs of the characters, but some have very stroppy and what you know, will only give pieces to me and so they get written all over the fucking place, and then I have to piece them together at the end. And then others are incredibly, you know, straight laced, and come out logically, inherently chronologically, you know, and they can even be plotted it but you know, whatever. Yeah. So I think talk to you Enhancing and I was talking about this with Holly who has been on the podcast as well as she she also thinks that it’s a null conversation because different stories require different levels of plotting pantsing or you know, free writing or whatever. And okay, excuse me. So in your book, you also talk about you go down another level in terms of these verbs and you talk about how they are naturally create movement. And there are different types of movement direction. Yeah, sir, attached to these verbs. So, can you explain what you mean by that and how it impacts both sentences and character creation.

Damon Suede
Okay, so the way this the way to think of it is I it’s funny, I was down in Florida, and I was talking to Carol Carson, he writes category romance, and she had read the book and take some classes with me and she said, You know, I feel like I’ve been playing with dolls. And now I’m looking through the matrix. She said, I’m not picking up cliches stereotypes from other people in writing those. a verb has no race. a verb has no gender. a verb has an orientation. a verb has no politics. It is, in a way. It’s like catching lightning in a bottle, right? And so effectively what you’re doing when you’re verbalizing a story is you’re tracing where the energy goes, right? Well, the thing is, energy moves. There’s no such thing. I mean, even Static Energy is static, because it hasn’t been released into the environment, right? Even if it’s potential, the energy is waiting to be made kinetic. And so if it’s going to move, how it’s going to move, and when I was trying to, I was actually trying to figure out how to, how to verbalize how to vocalize the way I think about this. And I thought back again to shmackting of how you actually operate in space. And I was thinking what is the simplest way to explain to people who might be afraid of grammar or might be afraid of parts of speech, what a verb does, and so I broke it down in the most basic way I used Empedocles, actually, because I’m a classics nerd. Empedocles, whose the sort of route of the Aristotelian doctrine of the four elements, etc, etc. So this is pre Socratic Greek philosophy, which you never need to read about. But you can talk to me about anytime you want to at a bar. And so the idea is that effectively, there are four qualities and from these four qualities, we get the four elements. That’s a whole that’s another podcast we’ll do later when we’re drunk on whiskey.

Sacha Black
Gin darling, gin.

Damon Suede
I’m whiskey you’ll be gin great. I used to drink gin, I had a bad experience with gin when I was 14, no more.

Sacha Black
Ah, so also do tequila though. Happy to do tequila

Damon Suede
Yes please. sipping tequila. Okay, so next time I’m in London. So if you think about it this way, if you are a neutral character existing in space, and you do something, you have to ask yourself, Well, how am I, not how am I the doll or the the mannequin operating? But more important more? How do I flow in the space? And so I thought, okay, if I am the actor where does the energy go? And so I thought, here’s the simple Way to divide it, some energy moves away from us, some energy moves towards us. And that is push and pull. So there are times where we push forward into the world. And there are times we pull the world towards us, those are two basic directions right outward and inward. And this is again from emphatically is the idea that some energy moves out into the universe. And some energy moves in towards the operatives, the actant right, the person doing the thing. But then there are some things that happen outside of us that we don’t actually have a connection to directly, but they happen in the world and we observe them and those things can either be put together they can be joined, or they can be separated, they can be split apart. And the reason I started trying to divide the words this way is that when you look at a verb and look, I’ll give you an example.

The verb seduce, because seduce is pretty clear. If I say someone seduce someone you have a sense of what that is. Well, what is seduction actually energetically, right? And I don’t mean in a woowoo way. I mean, just literally, what are you doing when you seduce someone? Is it a push thing? Are you pushing towards them? Well, no What you’re trying to do is make them come closer to you. It’s a pole verb, do you see what I mean? And so many at core, seduce is a pole action, and not every action is clear. Like for example, I believe that teaching or educating is actually a join verb. Not because yes, you may push the thoughts from you out into the world. But what teaching actually does is it builds communities it brings things together outside of yourself. And so teach, educate mentor edify those are all join verbs in the same way that when you mutilate something, you are splitting it you’re tearing it apart, so anything that involves murder, torture, death, slaughter, annihilate, obliterate explode, all of these things are split verbs because what they do is they take something that is whole and they separate it. But then what about confusion? confusion is also a split verb, it confused is also a split verb, because what it does is, it muddies the connection between people And the world around them. It divides communities in the same way that join verbs create communities. Does that make sense? And what I discovered was and this actually happened, I started doing these word clouds as I was building act. So I wrote verbalize first. And then everyone kept saying do with the thesaurus through a thesaurus.

So I wrote Activate this big brick you were talking about. And when I was doing it, I thought, well, I don’t want to have just a big pig pile of alphabetical verbs. Because what are people going to do with that? First off, every because when I’m doing chemistry, the way you build chemistry between characters, you give them antonyms. It’s the simplest thing in the world. You have two lovers and you want them to love each other. You have one hide, and you have one seek or you have one pursue and you have one escape. And so those things create friction, automatically. All you have to do is have those actions. And then by extension, there’s songs tactics, work antonymically, but so if I’m going to do that, I had to start thinking about, well, what makes an antonym what creates a synonym? And so this is why I call it like grammar punk. I had to like get down in the greasy underbelly of the language. And so I started looking sounds so ridiculous. I started looking at the etymology of words. I started I’m looking at like, the indo European roots of some of these verbs like where they came from. But I also started looking at genre.

So I started building world word clouds because I wanted, as I said, not just alphabetical, I wanted to also divide the verbs based on genre, because there’s certain actions and tactics that are specific. And they don’t only occur in these genres, but they’re very, very native to it. So for example, when I teach a romance group, if I’m teaching an RWA chapter and I talk about romance heroes, there was one action that comes up over and over again for heroes. It’s uncanny actually, the first time I did like an eight day masterclass on characterization. I’m, like, 150 people, we’re out in New Jersey, I’m teaching this big ballroom, and I said, Okay, who’s got an action for their hero, and everybody raises their hand and I’m like, Okay, how many of you have the action protect, and 65% of the room had their hand up 65% of the romance authors in that room saw protect as the or action for heroes, right? In the same way for for the sort of love interest of that hero. So whether you’re doing Hero, Hero, heroine, heroine, hero, heroine, whatever the gender orientation combo, protect is a core also defy is another core action of romance. Because a lot of romance is about bringing down power structures, right.

And so what I started doing to figure out how this work is I did word clouds genres, I would go in, and I would pick, say, the 50 most popular genre novels in one area. So like, all thrillers, or all Gothic or all westerns, and I started looking at what the actions were the verbs in their blurbs in their opening chapters. And as I compiled all those, I started seeing trends. And so I built these big word clouds. I just literally took all the verbs that occurred and I built word clouds. And you could see, oh, these 15 verbs come up all the time and Regency romance when you’re writing a Regency. These are the verbs that everyone’s going to look at for actions and tactics. And so as I did that, I started digging, and then I was doing a class for RWA on tropes, and I started doing I just actually, I’ve got to write this book. I haven’t had time. But I did a whole thing with tropes, where I looked at like secret baby books, or friends to lovers books, or two dogs, one bone or the discovery of the body. Like they’re these tropes that occur in different places in fiction, and the actions and tactics shift over time, you can actually see the difference between say, a 1990s who done it, a 1960s who done it, and a 1930s who done it, the actions change. And so when you say like, the verbs make it happen 100% because what’s actually happening is when the readers go shopping, they’re not going and looking for redhead or, or a limp or or golden retriever. What they’re looking for is the actions. They see words like avenge or charm or court, or penetrate or arouse, and they know what the story is going to be about. Because the action tells you what the emotion is verb shapes, vibe, and that’s true for marketing copy. That’s true for the writing of the book. It’s true for everything. Because what do we want to know? What is it kids say to you when they want to hear a story? Tell me what happens. Tell me what happens. That’s a verb. Does that make sense?

Sacha Black
Yeah, absolutely. And I’m having some personal revelations over here.

Damon Suede
Well tell you, you know, you have a book on villains. This is one of my favorite books on villains actually. And I was thinking about this because I had a woman who wrote Gothic romance. And she said, Would you mind if I did a blog post? And I said, No, not at all. She did an entire blog post that is just about the actions the standard actions of Gothic heroes and how they change over time. Over time as the Gothic evolves from like traditional Gothic to Neo Gothic in the 1960s. to modern like, quote, domestic thrillers, what are the actions of the heroes do and that really made me think about your villain book? I was like, what are we talking about? When we talk about archetypes? we’re actually talking about what they do.

Sacha Black
Absolutely. And so one of the things that I think things really interesting is how you say that, that you can watch the verbs change. And I think that’s so true because I’ve been reading Young Adult since I was a young adult, which was quite some time ago now. But, and I’ve seen a change in the heroes of that genre. And we are I think we’re just about moving into something else now. But we’ve just come through this extremely large boom of very defiant and this is, this is because you use the word defy, and I was like, Oh my god, this is what every young, strong young adult female protagonists has been for like the last half a decade, if not a decade. And I was like, Oh, shit, I feel so called out, like, you know, the characters. And then I was like, Oh, I think I also might write romance. Like my, my young adult has, it’s a it’s really just a romance.

Damon Suede
Feelings. It should have feelings. Yeah, that’s a good, that’s wonderful.

Sacha Black
Um, yeah, I love this so much. I’m like, my brain cannot keep up because I’m just I’m thinking all of the thoughts and and I just, yeah, I’ve just this is an amazing I need to when I transcribe this I’m going to be writing so many notes.

Damon Suede
Okay, so I’m gonna throw another one out. I’m gonna throw I’m gonna throw an anecdote out, but it’s, hopefully we’ll make some sense. So I was doing an interview for CBS Sunday morning with Faith Sally. And she said something crazy to me. She said, Isn’t daymond suede a character? And I said, Oh, absolutely. And she said, Well, I mean, you’re in public, and you have people watching you and you do stuff on camera all the time and on radio, and she said, What’s your action? And I literally staggered me like I was I was, my brain blew up. I was like, Oh my God. I knew instantly. I know what my action is. My action is to energize everything daymond suede does is energized and then I looked at my tactics and I was like, What do I do? I stimulate, I educate, I activate I all of those things are part the tactics. They’re the synonymous tactics of energize. And so now when I’m going to a conference, what I asked myself is, how will this energize people? Or if I’m buying a bookmark, I think is that the energizing choice? If I’m picking out clothes, I’m like, which is the energized version? And so in a weird way, if you learn to verbalize yourself, if you come up with your own action, your own tactics, your own trajectory, you can accomplish anything.

It’s like branding, with grammar, because all you’re doing is activating your own desire because aren’t we characters? Yes. Don’t we have goals motivations in complex? Yes. And so once you start thinking about what am I doing, not what am I being but what is the thing I must do to make something happen? And so then again, it becomes this sort of, I don’t know like a it’s a it’s a really wonderful mirror to look at yourself because you start thinking, what is the thing I do every day? That is in my nature, and I always tell people like when I’m doing I’m teaching a marketer. In class, I always say the most annoying thing about you is your superpower. Because if you well think about it, because if you could control it, you would stop it. So the thing that you so for me is energy, like my energy is so off the hook, it drives people insane. And so as I’ve learned to harness as I’ve gotten older, that is my fucking superpower. And so energize is not just something I do, it’s what I am. And so whenever I’m talking to authors, I’m like, What is the most annoying thing about you? Because whatever that is, whenever your kids are like, Oh, my God, or your, your partner is like, could you have to? The answer is yes, you do, because that is who you are. And then if we’re going to write the narrative, as a protagonist in your own narrative, you have to figure out how to harness that demon because that thing wants to be loose, and you’ve got to find a way to use it on behalf of you. So that like the magic is actually working magic for you, not against you. Right.

Sacha Black
So this is a perfect segue because my next question was about personal branding. And the fact that I think I’ve heard you mentioned this somewhere before that, in fact, it might have been on Joanna’s podcast, but that each of us has a verb. And, and so I’ve been I spent a long time thinking about what did you get? What was it? Well, ironically, I think it has to probably be rebel. Because it’s that is the thing about myself, that annoys me the most, because I will, if I try to implement any rule or set a deadline or make, you know, I will immediately have to do the opposite of that thing. And, you know, I was told not to cut my hair off, so I cut two feet off. Yeah. I i. So I have a very distinct memory at work, when I used to be in a day job, and they told me I didn’t dress corporately enough. So I went to work the next day in Converse trainers and leggings and I never stopped going to work in that.

Damon Suede
So no, can I ask you a question? Yeah, because rebel is an intransitive verb right? You can’t rebel. Something you rebel against, right? It’s a phrasal it takes a preposition. So the question is, do you resist? Do you challenge? Do you defy? Do you agitate? Do you alarm? What’s the thing that you do directly to them? Are you shocking them? Are you ready? I think so maybe? And which

Sacha Black
would make sense because that’s probably what I write as well, I think. So I write as a young adult, predominantly, although I am now moving into an adult fantasy, but yeah, I think it would be it’s also it’s the name of the podcast, and I didn’t really ever know. It was actually somebody else who identified that kind of branding. And I think, and this is the epiphany that you’re giving me is that if you embody that thing, it is the thing that you do the most. So it’s sort of just it was there so I think it probably is defy because

Damon Suede
it’s your superpower. That is your superpower.

Sacha Black
Yeah, it’s also my Achilles heel and

Damon Suede
But then think about it this way. Like I always say, if you know what your action is, then you go, you literally have activate, you can look it up, go and look up that action and look at all the synonyms because those synonyms are going to tell you what your options are in different situations. Because if defy is your action, look at all the things you have. I mean, you have things like debunk, confront, challenge, attack, agitate, battle, needle, vex, I mean, these are all things that you do, but then on top of it, who are the people that you’re going to be most attracted to? Then look at your antonyms and those are gonna be people that ameliorate, pacify, mend, heal, right? Those are the things you’ll be drawn to because that is the opposite of an opposites attract, right? And so we’re actions speak louder than words you’re going to find the things both that make you powerful, and the things that you need that you can’t do, right? Because I’m great at energizing. I am terrible at relaxing people. I’m terrible at calming people down. That does not work for me.

Sacha Black
This is so fascinating because So my Myers Briggs is an E N TJ and if you look at the, the description of one of these, it is a challenging, blunt, abrupt, you know, confrontational person. I’m like, Oh, fuck, this really is me. I feel so called out. I, you know,

Damon Suede
It’s good to know those things, right? You notice things, and I, for the record, I’m an ENFP. And I’m such an ENFP, that when I meet MBTI people, they’re like, oh, ENFP is when I, my husband and I were talking about this, you know, one of the things they have people do in the government is they do testing like personality testing. And he and I said to him, I was like, Oh, well, you’re obviously an ISTJ. And he’s like, how did you know that? And I said, That’s funny. It is the diametric opposite. Oh, yeah. Yeah. diametrically opposed. And so it’s, it’s, it’s not that and you know, I always say when it comes to sort of verbs when it comes to anything, it’s not that I’m saying like, you’re born under this line, and this line is your destiny. That’s something else. But what it does is it gives you a clear sense of where you are now, that right now in my life, energize is the thing that I do the thing that I am right. And so, over time, the way I react, right, my tactics are going to change. So it’s not that I’m caged by energize. It’s almost like a path. And this goes back to your question right about building the arc. It’s not that, oh, the character is limited, because we’re picking this one, this one action and this action is going to cage them. No, it’s not a cage. It’s a trellis. It’s like something that the roses grow on. And so you’re giving the character something to fill in with blossoms and thorns, right? And that’s true for us too. Because Listen, being if you are a defy, defy is incredibly powerful and revolutionary, and rebellious and all those things. But it’s also necessary for change because if there is no no one to defy, nothing ever alters nothing has ever moved forward. And so it’s it’s learning how to kind of surf the energy that is endemic to you, that’s native to you.

Sacha Black
Ah, I just thought… I’m just I’m always breathless here. So, the thing that I picked up is so I Oh, god, this is so personal but so when I was in the day job, psychologically, I was almost better off because I was I was writing and being defiant against, you know, the man and the corporation and having left I’ve not lost any of my creativity or my motivation, but I it is harder for me to focus almost because there is nothing to rebel against other than myself and this Oh, fuck, I’m just my head is exploding.

Damon Suede
Your question is, so Like if you know, I mean, the thing with defiance is defiance is inherently aggressive. And you need a recipient. I mean, this is something else I talked about in verbal I mean, I talked about this in all the books but is the idea that if you have a transitive verb, if you’re using a transitive verb, what makes it transitive is it takes an object grammatically, right? So subject, verb object, so I drink the water drink is transitive, not I drink like I am a drunk, that’s a state of being, but I drink the water is an action, I’m doing something to something. And so if you defy, you can’t just stand in the middle of a room and defy this is actually what happens to a lot of crappy writing is people say, Oh, my character broods and I say, how do you brewed something? I mean, unless you’re a chicken and you’re sitting on it, how do you actually brewed as like a sexy dude in a why a novel? And the answer is you can’t, it’s intransitive. And so you’re just being a mood. And that’s a boring character because they never interact with the world. And so for you, you’re never going to be bored because you’ll always find something to fight just like I will always find something to energize The thing is, I’m not going to try to energize people who are already energized. What’s the fun in that? I’m gonna go find the Find the quiet people, the still places and then run electricity through. That’s what I always want to do blow shit up.

Sacha Black
Yeah. Yeah, and I always I’m not trying to pick a fight or anything. I just want to do the thing you don’t want me to do? Yes. Oh my goodness me I am I needed a gin right now. Wow I feel like I’m just I have not been a great podcast host right now.

Damon Suede
Wonderful podcast, I feel very welcomed.

Sacha Black
Okay, I’m gonna I’m going to come back to my questions because my brain is racing at 10,000 miles per hour. Um, what mistakes Do you see authors making with verbs?

Damon Suede
Um, there’s actually I’ll tell you there there are a couple of really key ones but the biggest one, the one that I see more than anything else is but the big one is negatives. When I’m teaching baby writers, especially writers that have just started or writers that have like, read a bunch of books, and they want to try, or they watch some television, they have an idea for whatever. The thing that they do is they say things I’ll say, what does your character do? And they’ll say, they avoid, or they ignore, or they neglect, or they forget, the problem with a character that avoids for an entire book is that they can only react to other people, they don’t do anything. In the same way that if you just ignore things for whole book, like, what are you actually, and it’s not that you can’t use those actions, it’s that you have to be incredibly skilled and deft to make it specific enough for someone to give a shit because nobody wants to watch an entire book about a character who ignores everything around them, right, or avoids or escapes or whatever.

And so like if you look at a character like Emma, and one of her tactics in in Jane Austen’s novel, is to ignore things or to disregard things right? That is a negative tactic, but her actual action is very positive her action is to claim. And that’s what the claim instance of live, but it’s also claiming a sense of pursue. And it’s also claim instance of steel. And so she’s actually quite active. But the impulse like a baby writer would take that character and they would say, No, no, what she does is she ignores and so I would always caution writers against looking at negative actions, because we live in a culture that sees passivity as a virtue. It’s why passive voice creeps into so much writing, because what they’ll say is, mistakes were made, instead of he made mistakes, right? And so because of that urge towards passivity, we are very apt and In television does this to us too. We are apt to allow characters to Bob along passively affected by everything else without doing anything. And so my baseline what I always say is do something to something, what is the thing you’re doing? What is the thing or the person you’re doing it to and if your interest Or like women’s fiction or YA or romance where it’s all about the people in the personalities, make sure the object of that sentence is another person. Because if they’re only doing things two things, you wind up with what they used to call boys genres, right? Where you blow shit up and things fall down and the shirt comes off. Those kind of objectifying genres love characters that do things to things. But if you’re in a personal genre that loves the inside the inner landscape of emotion, always look for your object to be a person and don’t avoid them get wrapped up in their face, man, figure out the thing you’re going to do that’s going to get you where you’re going, whatever your objective is for the whole book. Do you see what I mean?

Sacha Black
Yeah, absolutely. So I do developmental editing. And I often see a lot of very passive heroes, and it’s usually because they’re not taking action upon things. They are either letting things happen to them or not. So I always think there’s this difficulty where writers work As a character to be meek at the start, and then you know grow into their leadership and their heroism, but the problem is you even when you have a protagonist who is shy, retiring, whatever, they still need to be driving the plot forward and taking action. And I think, yeah, so that makes an awful lot of sense to me.

Damon Suede
It’s um, it’s funny. That’s actually I think some of that comes from Chris burglars misreading of Joseph Campbell. It’s one of my big beefs with Vogler is writers journey and the idea of the quote unquote, heroic monomyth. Like the, you know, the hero’s journey as a plotting model is that a it’s not Joseph Campbell and a lot of it’s kind of folderol, but on top of it, it is based in the idea that a character is essentially interchangeable, that one character could be moved into any story. And so it doesn’t matter whether you’re Harry Potter, or you’re Frodo or your Katniss Everdeen, you could really be anybody in any novel and just move grunt. That’s manifestly bullshit. Because if you put Katniss Everdeen in the Harry Potter series, that series would be over in chapter two, she just kill everybody. By the same token, if you stuck Harry Potter in the Hunger Games, mofo would be dead mofo would be dead instantly. The point is, you cannot move them because their actions are intrinsic to the story. And so this idea that there’s this interchangeable like, now I’m an orphan, now I’m a martyr now I’m a wanderer horse shit. Nobody, people are not cookie cutter interchangeable chess pieces, right? We’re not it’s not a, it’s not inert blobs like gingerbread people. And so whenever people do that sort of routine, I always think to myself, like, well, you’re going to write a totally forgettable book that will read because there’s so blank, even Bella Swan, one of the most neutral characters ever. People invested so deeply because she was always acting. She took action. She was a very passive character, but she was active in her passivity. That also had a bunch of other things going for it sort of like Zeitgeist do things going on board, but those books are active, whatever else you say about the quality of the writing of the world building and all the rest of it. There is action on every page. And I think that’s what drives them. When people say it’s not good writing, but it’s a good story. What they’re talking about is the action. Always

Sacha Black
Out of selfish curiosity. What is Katniss is verb.

Damon Suede
Oh, that’s easy. That’s hunt. Okay, honey. I actually I’ll go step further. You want it? So I was talking about antonyms? Right? We’re talking about how antonyms work. So Katniss is absolutely hunt. She hunts in every moment of every scene about series, she’s always hunting. But if you look at the two love interest right at Peta, and it Gail, I knew, unlike page 40, who she was going to end up with at the end of the trilogy, and the reason is Gail is consumed. What he does is burn everything around him. He devours everything around him. And what I thought was, Oh, yeah, it’s hard to be with the one who eats you up. One you’re gonna stay with is the one who feeds you and that, of course, is Peta’s, action, actually peace. In every scene feeds her. And so you look at feed consume feed hunt is an opposition that is an antonymic relationship. Fi consume hunt is an antagonistic relationship, feed, consume and antonymic relationship. That’s why it’s such a perfectly balanced love triangle, because each of them has an antonym in the other person. And so there’s tons of friction between them, which makes for a really good storytelling, right? It makes really good. I don’t know, I that’s one of my things that I love. It’s one of my things that I love is to take a book that I love and figure out why, like, figure out how it works. And so this is a game that Geoffrey and I play all the time of read a book, we watch a movie where I was like, Okay, what are the actions? really fun to do? Because it’s just verbs, right? Just makes writing better.

Sacha Black
Oh, yeah. I have an obsession for deconstructing books down to a forensic level. And I, I commit sacrilege and underline things in all of the books that I read and then I take them all at the end and look at them and Look at the patterns, and then look at how they’ve, you know, so one author might be very good at characterization or another author might be exceptional at description. And then I’ll go down to the sentence level and look at the patterns and look at how they are creating the, you know, Lauren Oliver, for example is very good at description. And so I deconstructed how she she describes and yeah, I just yeah, I fully geek at this level too.

Damon Suede
But the thing is, is I think it makes us better writers, but I think it also makes the genres better. I think the, you know, the genres aren’t static, they’re always evolving. I’m always weirded out. When I talk to people. They say, Oh, I don’t read. I don’t I don’t read. How do you change like, how do you grow? Because everything is shifting, or contemporary romance with a navy seal in 2019 is a different book than it would have been 2009 or 1999 or 1959. Those are all different. And so the idea that you just sort of, you just say like, Oh, she’s She works on a ranch, she’s, you know, she’s a ranch hand and any ranch and at any time no, because ranches in the 1960s different ranches, the 1980s are different than ranches in 2010. And so like Martha Graham, I always quote this, Martha Graham have used this quote, she said, No artist is ahead of their time, the artist is the time. That’s what art is. Art is always a snapshot of where you are in space and time how your consciousness interacts, your heart interacts with the world around you. And I think that’s why people read as they want our voices, kind of giving them a door into a world that they’re never going to inhabit because we’re not going to get to slay dragons. And we all don’t get to go to Mordor and throw the ring into Mount Doom. And we don’t all get to hunt down people in the Hunger Games, but we can read about it, we can feel it and that’s why again, I always go back to the actions because what we want is the doing we want to do stuff.

Sacha Black
It’s so funny that you say that I literally heard I was listening to writing excuses today, which is another… The were talking about how they are all okay with their, you know, their early books because they were snapshots in time of who they were as an artist at that point. And so I think that Yeah, I completely agree. And I think I think it’s also very, very important to read because, you know, I can, I know just from sticking with my young adult genre that it’s now okay to have sex in young adult books. It was not okay to have sex in a young adult book, you know, 5-10 years ago. Now. I mean, Jesus, you need to look at Sarah J mass. It’s basically like, teen porn, you know, um,

Damon Suede
But the thing is that the ecosystem is always shifting. And if you don’t, the thing is if you don’t evolve, you will die. Like if you if you dig, if you walk in the same path over and over again, you’re gonna dig a grave with your feet, and you might as well just get in the dirt and pull it over you and your career can never go anywhere.

Sacha Black
Oh, I completely agree. I it’s gone out of my head now but my dad says something along those lines of if you’re not moving, you’re dying or something. Okay sentence level at any quick tips or tricks to create better characters with these verbs?

Damon Suede
Yes, absolutely. So on a sentence level, literally just writing craft the simplest thing in the world. I have a friend who wrote a beautiful way. It was a wild fantasy. bordering on steampunk, like, bordering on Gaslight fantasy, beautiful world building beautiful everything and I realized I was like, there’s something with this book, it just bugged me. And I realized that on every page is was were has, everything was a passive verb. Everything was a verb that was a state of being. So at the simplest level, if you go through any page of your manuscripts look for every time you’re telling someone, either is something was something or a group of people were something or they have something. These are all states of being their moods. Right. And so the minute you can replace that with them doing something actively transitively your story comes to life in a different way. Even if it’s a feeling, even if it’s something related to the world building or the scene setting or the POV, by activating the language, literally activating the language, you bring your characters to life in a different way. Because then every sentence is actually characterizing your people. It’s actually driving the narrative instead of relying on sort of nouns and adjectives, which are kind of sexy, but concrete like they’re just lie. They’re like bricks.

Sacha Black
Amazing. Okay, this is the last official question. always my favorite question, for obvious reasons given this conversation, but this is The Rebel Author Podcast. So tell me about a time you unleash your inner rebel. I can’t even get to the end of that sentence anymore without laughing.

Damon Suede
I can’t really imagine a time that I wasn’t doing that. I mean, every business I’ve ever been But when I came into romance First off, I’m a man in romance. That’s weird. I write gay romance. That’s weird. I write gay romance, which does New York Times numbers. That’s weird. And so like, I’m sort of, I’m an anomaly on so many levels, but at the same time, like I have a deep respect for tradition. I love tradition. But I love it because I want to know how it’s going to blow up and mutate and become sort of a zombie death princess like I want to. I want everything to change and transform. And so for me, I feel like everything every day, I’m always sort of blowing things up on an ongoing basis, like my life is nitroglycerin. But specifically, I would say specific if you ask me for a specific moment, I my first ever romance conference, I went to a big romance conference, I should say I’ve been to one small one. My first ever big romance conference. I walked in the room and I it was like 8:30 in the morning and there were 3000 women eating cheesecake with their hands off of plates in the middle of tables.

I walked in and I, I bent down and I got under the table and I called my husband on my cell phone and I was like, get me out of here. Something horrible is going to happen. They’re gonna kill me. They’re gonna hurt me. I was like, I’m this weird, sweaty, pale, Queen frights. Like, what on earth am I doing here? Get me out. And he was like, why are they being mean? I was like, no, they’re all really nice, but I think they want to hurt you want to kill me. And the truth was, they only wanted to help. And within an hour, I actually at that event met some of people who were my closest allies and colleagues and friends in the industry. And so the thing that I did that day is I decided rather than treating the sort of professional arena of it as as a neutral landscape, I decided to treat it as a treasure hunt as if every conversation had something secret buried in it if I could just crack the pin yada. And so for a whole day I went around and I was just like, okay, what’s the candy in this pin? yada what’s the candy in this pin yada and I went around basically like shocking people and doing weird thing. And taking my pants off and showing my ass and wearing things on my head. And I mean, I was always doing this crazy shit and, and what’s funny is I did it for this day and at the end of the day Geoffrey was like, well, how’d it go? And I said, Well, I think some people were shocked. And there’s some pictures you’re gonna hate. But the truth is, I think I now know what I’m supposed to be doing every day in this genre. I’m supposed to be rattling cages and shocking people and loosening things up and asking impossible questions and saying the weird thing. And so that’s what I’ve done.

I mean, that’s sort of become my model for writing. genre fiction is how do I make people uncomfortable in pleasant ways, right? And so in a way I feel like my entire life is lighting fires in heaven and pouring waters on hell. I’m always looking for a way to kind of burn down paradise and and rebuild it as something more beautiful and more weird and more exciting and more inclusive because I think all genre is stronger because people Coming together, create the world right? They make up the world. I’m always quoting this book by Lynne hunt called inventing human rights and her argument she’s a historian. She argues that the reason we have modern democracy The reason we have a vote, the reason that torture has been outlawed and that dungeoneering is no longer used is because of popular romance novels that you can actually track as popular romance novels gained in popularity. As they grew, their audience grew that little by little a group, the group of literate people, educated, wealthy people reading them said things like, I think my wife might be a person. I think that black man is a human. I think that people have ideas and thoughts. I think that child might actually have a future. And little by little romance novels taught people how to empathize in much the same way that science taught people to look at the stars and look at the future and look at technology in much the same way that westerns taught people to look at savage landscapes and think about what law look like right what civilization look like, in the same way that fantasy helps us. Look. Look at the past and unpack history in ways that maybe aren’t literally true, but they’re emotionally true, right? And so for me, I feel like all of us just by participating in genre are rebels. That’s the nature of genre. Genre as a name as a word means general. It is a category right? But all we’re ever trying to do and we’re like birds inside a giant burning cage. We’re all in this cage thing. Here we are together. How do we tear it apart? Right. How do we reinvent it and what is more punk then that? Right?

Sacha Black
Amazing. I I am going to need a very long lie down

Damon Suede
listen the next time I’m in London, I’m taking you out. That’s amazing. Amazing.

Sacha Black
Okay, tell listeners where they can find out more about you and your books.

Damon Suede
Alright, so I’m pretty much like mold. You can find me anywhere. My name is Damon suede da mo n su e d I’m at Damonsuede.com. My Twitter handle is Damon suede. Facebook Damon suede. Literally if you type in Damon suede I come up all over the place. I’m also the income the president elect currently of romance Writers of America. And so my contact information is all over the RWA site. And I’ll be president next year And so again, I’m always fine with your art anyway. But I’m everywhere man. I’m on Goodreads. I’m on Amazon. I’m on NPR. I’m always doing stuff. I’m always around and about.

Sacha Black
So I know that you teach but do you? Have you done like online courses yet around?

Damon Suede
I’ve done a few. I have to tell you I always prefer in person because I think the sounds too wacky, but the energy is different. And so I could do an online class actually reads the record. If I had asked me to do a class for read z, which I’m going to I’m going to do a class about verbalizing for branding like an intro class. I just haven’t had time to finalize it. But I do I teach. If you go to my website, I have a class page and I travel two to three weeks a month I’m on the road. So I’m always traveling on like three different continents. So I’m like I was just in Bristol. I’ll be in Miami. I’ll be in Ohio like I’m always sort of traveling around. So I’m probably coming to a city near you as we speak because I’m I have a little bit of wanderlust and I also just I love I’m an extrovert and so I love interfacing with people and talking shop and I learned more from them and they learn from me.

Sacha Black
Well, next time you teach in the UK, I need to know because I am coming

Damon Suede
They Incidentally, they’re talking about founding an article a chapter in the UK, they’re working on that. You’re interested. Let me know. I’ll send you the info.

Sacha Black
Yeah, okay. Fabulous. All right. Well, thank you very much to all of The Rebel Author podcast patrons. If you would like to get early access to all of the episodes, as well as bonus patron only content you can use there by going to www.patreon.com/Sachablack, that is Sacha with a C. Thank you very much to everybody listening and thank you for the amazing Damon,

Damon Suede
well thank you so much for having me on and thank you for anyone listening. It’s been really wonderful to hang out today.

Sacha Black
I’m Sacha Black. You are listening to Damon Suede and this was The Rebel Author Podcast.

The post 020 How to Create the Perfect Character with Damon Suede appeared first on Sacha Black.

013 How to Write Diverse Characters with Joan Dempsey

Sacha Black — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 08:00:21 +0000

Hello and welcome back to The Rebel Author Podcast EPISODE 13. Today I am speaking to Joan Dempsey all about how to write diverse characters.

This week’s question is:

Who is your favorite diverse character or what is your favorite diverse book?

Mine is this week’s book recommendation: Dreadnought by April Daniels

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I’m on the AmWritingFantasy Podcast this week talking heroes, villains and conspiracies, if you’d like to listen, catch the podcast here: https://podcast.amwritingfantasy.com/e/the-amwritingfantasy-podcast-episode-57-–-how-to-write-compelling-heroes-and-villains-with-sacha-black/

Listener Rebel of the Week is Simon Farnell

If you’d like to be a Rebel of the week please send in your story to rebelauthorpodcast@gmail.com or tweet me @rebelauthorpod

If you’d like to support the show, and get access to all the bonus essays, posts and content, you can support the show by visiting: www.patreon.com/sachablack

How to Write Diverse Characters

Joan Dempsey

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Episode Transcript

Learn how to create diversity in fiction with @literaryliving #indieauthor #selfpublishing #IARTG #ASMRG #writingcommunity
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Sacha Black
Hello and welcome back to The Rebel Author Podcast. Today I am joined by Joan Dempsey winner of the 2017 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, and named by Poets & Writers magazine as one of “5 more over 50” writers to watch, Joan Dempsey is the author of the novel, This Is How It Begins, which won the bronze 2018 Independent Publisher Book Award for literary fiction. The novel was also a finalist for a 2018 Lambda Literary Award, 2017 Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award and 2018 Sarton Women’s Book Award. Joan received her MFA degree and teaching certificate in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Welcome Joan.

Joan Dempsey
Hey, Sacha and everybody really glad to be here.

Sacha Black
Thank you so much for joining us. Joan is absolutely amazing. And I’ve known her for quite a long time now. And Joane was one of the very first people who gave me official critique, editing, feedback and what’s the word objective feedback on my writing and I learned absolutely loads from her. So thank you for that you really set off my writing career on the right journey. So So glad about that.

So can you can you tell me a little bit about your own journey? You’ve been full time writing now for a while. So tell me how you got there. And also about your absolutely amazing what a gazillion award winning book as well.

Joan Dempsey
Yeah, well, thanks for asking and I’m not quite writing full time but I am writing regularly which is fantastic and the not quite writing full time is just because I have to make a living, of course, as we all do. And so one of the things I love to do is work with other writers. So really my entire working life revolves around writing either my own stuff or working with others who are writing. So all of that is fantastic. And you know, really, I started writing fairly late in life, I would say, although I don’t know why because I read books of, you know, a bazillion books as a kid, it was my favorite thing to do. But I took my first writing workshop at Grubs Street Writers in Boston, which is a wonderful organization and they were just getting started at the same time I was getting started. And in the first class in the first workshop, I took character just appeared to me on the page when we were doing a writing exercise and I fell in love with writing fiction. And I really honestly knew in that precise moment that that’s what I wanted to do with my life and

I’ve done lots of other things in my life. My Life and I had been bumping around from this and that, but I knew then that, that that’s where I wanted to focus. So the novel, interestingly, This is How it Begins has been out for two years now, which is sort of shocking for me to see, but, but it’s been going great, you know, great guns for that for that entire two years. In fact, I just did a gig at a library last week and had a whole bunch of women there from this book group that were, you know, thrilled to talk with me about the book. So that’s just really, really gratifying. And I’ve had lots of great feedback from readers and it’s, you know, it’s a, it’s a kick to get a book out into the world and it really is, you know, out of my hands and takes on a life of its own in the hands of readers. So it’s, it’s a total joy.

Sacha Black
I love the character that made it into your novel. Appeared to you in your very first writing session, I think that’s like crazy where the characters come from and that she stayed with you the entire time.

Joan Dempsey
Well, actually, it was a different character that appeared to me. Yeah, it was just that magic of having the character appear which I you know, I used to hear writers talk about that, you know, the magic of that and I thought, Oh, that’s you know, that’s bullshit because you’re in total control and you know, writers write and then I realized, Oh, it’s actually not bullshit it does happen the characters come to you and say, Hey, write my story. And that’s definitely what happened with This is How it Begins the main character really took over that book.

Sacha Black
It’s so funny because I think when you really embrace your creativity, these muses or whatever really do just appear to you I am. So I’m, I’m, well, the next fiction book that I write once I complete this bastard third novel that I’m actually on for about 18 months. Is is a project called The Scent of Death. And it literally now I I cannot explain this to you, but I walked past A lamp post and the entire plot the the all of the characters fell into my head literally in an instant bolt. I cannot explain it. And this thing haunts me. And I’ve now I mentioned this on Instagram once and I absolutely love that people are sending me lamp posts from all over the world. It’s over 100 lamp posts now, but and I even brought a little Lego lamp post which sits on my desk now. It’s like my mascot for this book. But it’s just crazy where these stories come from. Anyway, so nice to see the cat. The the opening of the book is this character leaning leaning against this lamppost. So whenever you launch I’m gonna have to go back there and have a photo with it. But yeah, I love where these stories and these characters come from. It’s crazy.

Joan Dempsey
It is crazy. It’s crazy that that’s, that’s what’s fun about fiction, right? It’s just so exciting.

Sacha Black
And then also when you can then get your readers involved because they You know, there’s some random, what’s the word and I don’t I can’t think of the word. It’s far too late in the evening. But you know, there’s, there’s like a thing, a hook in place, and then, you know, all of a sudden all of these people are completely engaged and sending me really cool pictures. And I’ve got to stop waffling about lamp posts. What is this podcast again?

Okay, right. So we are really here to talk about diversity. And I think in the last well, probably the last couple of years, but perhaps slightly more than that there’s been a huge surge in diverse books. And I particularly write Young Adult and I know that in my genre, I’ve seen an absolute explosion, and and particularly in in diverse books that are getting worldwide acclaim so it just off the top of my head, I can think of Angie Thomas, who wrote The Hate You Give which was an award winning it’s been a movie. It’s been all kinds of things Then also, Adam silvera has also done several LGBT books. So why, why do you think that both LGBT and also, other forms of diverse books are suddenly on the rise? And do you think it’s a trend that’s going to continue?

Joan Dempsey
Yeah, great question. And, you know, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and talking with other writer writers about it. And part of what I wonder about is if there’s really a surge now of these books, or if these books have been there, all along, and they’re surging now because of what’s happening in in the culture around the world. I mean, obviously, with social media, social movements have a much bigger platform than they ever used to have. So you know, civil rights, social justice causes really have a way to get out there. And I think I think that people know that and so they’re looking for books that reflect that, you know, we’ve got the the media Hashtag and Black Lives Matter matter hashtag and certainly gay marriage has been a huge deal in the in the last years now legal here in the states in in every in every state.

So I think that it’s I think it’s in zeitgeist, if you will, and I do think it’s going to continue. I don’t you know, most social movements, take a few steps forward a few steps back a few more steps forward, but we’re really, really moving forward on a lot of fronts in a lot of different issues. So I really do think that it will continue. You know, it’s interesting, I heard somebody say the other day that Well, I hope we reach a day where, you know, the characters in books are super diverse, and that’s really common place. And what’s interesting to me about that, is that part of what I think is really compelling about books like The Hate You Give, that you mentioned and other books that are like that is that it It allows was us to explore what it means to be a different kind of person. So the idea of it being common place, almost seems to me like, you know, like, I wonder what will lose if that’s the case. I understand, you know, let’s get rid of bias and bigotry, but certainly not let’s not get rid of diversity and difference because that’s what you know, that’s what makes life rich is to have people who are different from ourselves.

Sacha Black
So interesting. I feel like my mind just imploded thinking about that because nobody’s ever said that to me. And that’s fascinating because I am one of those people that says, You know, I would really love to get to the point in literature where whatever the diverse characteristic is, it is just the part of the character it is it is not the thing in the story. So you know, with Angie Thomas’s The Hate You Give I would love for us to be in a in a world where they were just characters and it wasn’t about necessarily their skin color or their sexuality or that was just part of their characteristic. And but to normalize that, obviously, you’re right. Would we let them lose something because we are we are you know, there is a place for these voices now and that is so magical and powerful and absolutely needed. But yeah, I hadn’t ever really thought about it like that. And there was something else I wanted to pick up but it’s now left my brain. Nevermind.

Joan Dempsey
Well, I will jump in because I think the I would actually agree that it’d be great if we have all kinds of diverse characters who are in stories and that they’re just living their lives. It’s not about the diversity per se. So that I do like so commonplace in that way i think is is terrific. But diversity and difference between people, whoever they are is kind of what what the richness is in life. So

Sacha Black
Yeah that’s the reason I travel because I actually want to learn about the other cultures and the other societies and how they may be, what their festivals are or what their what they eat. And you know, that is part of the fascination of, of traveling and meeting wonderful people from different places and all of that, and I suppose you would lose something. If it was so normalized that I’m just that is so fascinating. I’m going to be thinking about that for days now. It’s almost a philosophical question, you know, where, what, can you go too far in the other in the other direction? I remembered my other point now, that one of the things I was going to say is, I think social media has both made the world very, very small in that, you know, you are probably four and a half thousand miles away from me right now. And yet we are still able to have a conversation. And, and, and also very, very large. In that it has opened up all of these opportunities where anybody, you know, you and I, or somebody in Africa or somebody in China or somebody in Brazil can create their own platform. And that has given everybody the opportunity to have a voice, which I think is so powerful and that is why we’re getting all of these wonderful stories from such diverse, different backgrounds. And so yeah, I although I social media is quite literally a thorn in my side when it comes to procrastination. It is wonderful for what it is, you know, the opportunities that it has created.

Joan Dempsey
Absolutely.

Sacha Black
So you write diverse characters. So could you tell me a little bit about how you approach creating a diverse character? What do you think is an important to ensure that they are realistic as characters?

Joan Dempsey
Yeah, I’d love that question. And You know, as we’re talking about earlier, characters often show up and they show up, not fully formed necessarily, although some do, but they show up and and then I kind of take it from there. So as a for instance, in This is How it Begins, as the book began to unfold, I realized that I was going to be writing to some extent about the Holocaust. And I had frankly steered clear of that because I have no family history of, you know, anything related to the Holocaust. And I kind of had that question about who will Who am I to write about this, but the characters persisted, and I decided to go with that, you know, similarly, my main character is an elderly Polish woman, and I’m not polish and I have no background in that area. And you know, when you write fiction, you’re constantly writing characters who are different from you.

So the way I really approach it is Is this the same for every character and that is I really try very hard to embody my characters I and discovering what makes them tick is really the thing that that drives me to write fiction. It’s really what I love about it. I mean, the the work that I’m working on right now, for instance, I have opportunities to be a firefighter and play hockey, you know, both things I have never done. I have an opportunity to be walking out of prison after having spent 14 years there. As a wrongfully incarcerated person, I have opportunity to be male, female, brown skinned, white skinned. You know, it’s, it’s just fascinating. And what I really do mostly, is try to get inside the body of these characters heart, mind, soul body completely. And in order to do that, I have to do an awful lot of research a lot of times and I have to get outside of myself so that I am not bringing any of my own stuff to the character. One thing I see a lot because I read a lot of manuscripts I see I can tell almost instantly if a character is really the author in disguise. And I can usually tell that because the characters tend to be sort of flat and almost strained and they don’t have a life of their own. And what I’m often advising people is write this character until this character is not anything like you and, and I don’t just mean change the hair color or the gender I mean, they are a living, breathing creature that is separate from yourself. So, embodying characters to me is the key. The other thing I see a lot is that writers often they, they’re seeing their characters more from the outside than from the inside. So I want to experience characters through all of their senses. I want to know what it feels Like in their body, I want to know what they’re smelling, what they’re seeing, etc. And that to me is the way to really bring characters to life.

Sacha Black
Fascinating because I just today I was writing a section about what really is author voice. And I think a lot of the time when we say author voice, we really mean character voice. Because characters were, you know, as you were saying, when when they truly come alive, they have their own voice. And it’s funny because I certainly can still see aspects of myself in in my protagonist in my first series, and actually I’ve kind of come to terms with it, because it was the very first series you know, and most authors do that and find it that is the series that I learned how to write with, but this this, and actually, I was putting this anecdote in the book, I’m writing Now, which was when I go back and I look at the chapters that I’ve written for The Sent of Death, it’s like reading somebody else’s work. I don’t recognize the voice or the words and it’s so detached from me and yet so completely part of me because I, you know, obviously I have written it and as soon as I go to the page, the characters just, you know, write. But it’s in such a way that’s so different from anything that I’ve ever written before. And yet it’s this bizarre phenomenon to look at something that you’ve written and not be able to see yourself but obviously is just a step and at a point in writing, development and also creating real characters I suppose.

Joan Dempsey
And I think you know, that the thing that’s okay, I was just going to jump in and say the that that whole sort of journey man story is very common, where people are writing those first novels and, and really working a lot of stuff out of the out of their system. And you know, the other thing is as a writer you do forget too. You forget what you put on the page. I remember I think I think it was Philip Roth I heard an interview with him and he said something about just don’t ask me about one of his early books. I forgot what he said because that was 50 years ago. I don’t remember if it when I was at this library gig the other night, somebody asked me a question about a really minor character. And I was thinking, Oh, who is that again? And it’s only been two years. I was like, Oh, right, right. I remember.

Sacha Black
I have to reread my prequels before I write the next book. And I I’ve had quite a few people take the piss out of me because if you could see the number of sticky tabs I have in my own book is ridiculous because I just remember fucking thing. I have a 36 page book-bible where I put all of my you know, key names, dates, all of my linguistic things capitalizations, characters, descriptions, the whole works. Do you think I can’t remember any of it? But remembering aside this is feels very different the phenomenon of looking at something and not recognizing it not because I don’t recall writing it just because it just sounds so different. But anyway. And the other thing that I was just going to pick up on is about the universality of emotion. And how irrelevant of, you know, your character’s gender, or your character’s mental health status, or their sexuality or their race or ethnicity, the thing that connects all characters to readers is the emotional journey they go on. And I think that’s, you know, that’s one of the things that makes us human.

Joan Dempsey
Yep, absolutely.

Sacha Black
And so I often hear from writers and I think you’ve alluded to this already a little bit. But from writers who are from less diverse backgrounds, who are desperate to perhaps write or include a diverse character in their story, but they’re afraid of getting it wrong, what would you say to them?

Joan Dempsey
Yeah, you know, that’s that’s such a such an interesting question. I think that I think that people are afraid sometimes to write characters who are different. I think they have heard that old trope, write what you know, which I hate. Because I always feel like sure, I mean, right. Well, you know, but right Wait, you don’t know. I mean, that’s what makes fiction fun. And I believe that as fiction writers, we actually have a responsibility to reveal truth through fiction, no matter what genre you’re writing in. I mean, the the whole the whole thing about fiction is to reveal the human condition and, and I feel like we should be fearless in that, and we should write whatever characters we want to write. As long as we get it right. And what I mean by that is that it’s so important to do your research both primary and secondary. So that if you’re writing a character who is utterly different from you in whatever way that is, that you don’t unwittingly, in search bias that you don’t even know you have. And that’s, that can be pretty easy to do, if you’re not diligent in doing your research. So I really think it’s important that we that do the work and body our characters and you know, in that, in that case, just go for it right, whoever you want to write. I think that’s I think that’s our work as fiction writers is to get inside the hearts and minds of other people.

Sacha Black
And, you know, if we don’t start being brave, we are not going to see this step change, continue and see, you know, this, what’s the word? This this explosion of normalizing diversity, it’s not it’s not going to happen we have to be brave we have to collectively as a author community, and you know, continue to be brave and try things that were afraid of I was on a podcast the other day talking about fear and how there’s different types of fear and some fear you have to lean into and some is awful fear and, and, and but also more than anything that I have this really bad habit or whatever, I’m afraid or something I have to absolutely do it just to prove to myself that I can. To any author out there who is afraid of writing a character but you have a fascinating character who’s from a diverse background, just do it. Listen to both of us and and, you know, hear us roar. Go away and writecha character. What do you think about sensitivity readers? So I haven’t ever used one. But I do know that they’re becoming more and more popular. So I’d be curious as to what you think about them.

Joan Dempsey
Yeah, definitely. And it’s a it’s actually a perfect segue from what we’re just talking about, and really gets to the heart of me saying, you know, do the research and get get it right. Because what we don’t want to do is get it wrong. And we do, whether we know it or not, we all carry around unconscious bias, about whatever it might be, that is unknown to us, whatever person or thing you know, we just, we just do, it’s part of the human condition. And the idea of having a sensitivity reader is to bring someone in who can tell you if that unconscious bias has shown up on the page. It’s interesting. I have a Facebook group that I raised this year question in just recently asking if people have used sensitivity readers and what was fascinating to me is that there were a lot of people who immediately assume that a sensitivity reader was to come in and say you must be politically correct on whatever, you know, issue was arising and the writing. And that really isn’t what it’s about what it’s about is not not being politically correct. But making sure that what you are portraying from a character’s point of view is what that character in the real world would actually be doing. So it really is looking for those, those unconscious biases that that might end up on the page that you don’t know are there. So I personally I’m excited about the fact that sensitivity sensitivity readers have come on the scene. I think it’s fairly recent phenomenon at least I’d only I’ve only heard about it for the last couple of years and I am absolutely planning to use at least one if not several sensitivity readers. When my when the book I’m working on now is is finished. You know the even before thinking about a sensitivity reader writers have readers who read their work. And the reason we do that is because we don’t see everything that’s on the page. And as a for instance, in my last book, there was a fair amount of pretty complex psychology with the characters. And I had a friend who is also a writer and also a psychologist read the book through that lens. So sensitive sensitivity reader is the same sort of person, you know, you want somebody who can read your work with a certain kind of lens and tell you if you’re getting it right. So I think it’s terrific.

Sacha Black
And I think the only other thing that I would just add to that is that I know you said you might use one you might use several but I think using several is almost sensible in a way because, you know, I am a technically a lesbian woman, I’m married to a woman, but my experience and, and my biases and you know experience of being a gay woman will be very different to anybody else’s experience. So where I may pick up on things that are culturally incorrect or offensive. There might be a something that isn’t so one of the things that is very interesting. I have a friend who is, I think 25 years older than me, and she is also a gay woman. And for her, the use of the word dyke is very commonplace. It’s a word that you know, back when she was like younger, was, you know, prolifically used and they embraced it and they owned the word whereas for somebody my generation, it’s slightly more offensive. So I think that you were we know whether you are writing African American characters, whether you’re writing Chinese characters, whether you’re writing transgender characters, I think it’s important to get, you know, a couple of sensitivity readers at least from from the same background, but with different experiences and different you know, life well life experiences, I suppose, because there’s always a balance somewhere in the middle isn’t there to find what is what is not saying the truth? No, that doesn’t make sense. You know, there’s a balance between being too overly correct, and trying not to offend anybody, and then offending everybody because you’re not bringing a truth to the page. Does that make sense?

Joan Dempsey
Yes, it does make sense and, you know, certainly we should in fiction, I believe the character is the character and if the character is offensive, then so be it. And, again, getting it right for whichever writing is is really key. And, you know, I think one of the things, I totally agree with you by the way that getting more than one sensitivity reader is a good idea. And it’s interesting because there are people out there who are, who are specifically sensitivity readers, that’s what they do, and they’re trained to look for certain things. So, I would be looking for somebody who’s more professionally involved, if you will, with the issues of diversity than just a lay reader who belongs to a certain category. You know, I would hate it if somebody came to me and said, would you read this and give me your gay perspective? I would probably say, uh, probably not. I don’t think I would do that. You know, you have to you have to find the right readers.

Sacha Black
And if you ever find sensitivity readers, please let me know. Because I have been hunting. There was a website dedicated to sensitivity readers and it seems to have gone, the website being shut down now. You’re right. There are people out there who are trained specifically to do that, but I have no idea how to find them. And I’ve it’s actually been a question in one of my Facebook groups recently. So yeah, if you find them, let me know.

Joan Dempsey
Okay, well do.

Sacha Black
Okay, let’s segue for a moment into dialogue. And we’re both editors, and you also run online courses and first of all would you like to tell us about your courses?

Joan Dempsey
Yeah, well, you know, it’s interesting. I do have I have been running online courses for years. There are two running right now. One is both master classes. One is writing great dialogue and the other one is self editing for writers. And I’m actually beginning to move away from that because I have been doing it for so long. But I love absolutely love, love, love dialogue. It’s my my favorite thing. Well, I mean, there’s so many favorite things, but it’s one of the things that I absolutely love about it and the dialogue class and probably that’s why of all the classes I’ve ever taught the dialogue class seems to be the, the most popular one and I think my, my love for dialogue really shows through that.

Sacha Black
I have grown to love dialgoue. Well I’ve grown to love it. Now. I’m more or less there with my understanding of the punctuation which is just… my grammar anyway, no, this is all about grammar. Okay, so I know from having done a lot of editing that and also just talking to writers, that dialogue tends to be a bit of a sticking point. What are the common mistakes that you you see with dialogue and what quick tips and tricks do you have for authors to write better dialogue?

Joan Dempsey
Yeah, well, there are, there are, I would say a number of common mistakes that I see pretty routinely. So I I’ll share those with you. The first one is that people tend to use too many dialogue tags and a dialogue tag is simply you know, the said he should he said, she said, so I see people using far too many tags when they’re not necessarily necessary. A dialogue tag really should only be used. If it’s the only way for the reader to understand who it is who’s speaking if, if the reader can understand who’s speaking without that tag, then absolutely don’t use it. The other thing that’s related to that is that and this is a style thing. We are living in a time where the style is to be used tags as minimally as possible. Don’t stray beyond said and asked that you know that’s that’s kind of the the thing right now is is the minimal look but of course in in earlier days there were all kinds of flowery words that you could use as a dialogue tag and so I typically tend to steer people clear of those and also not to use tags of things like hello he laughed or Hello he hissed you know or Hello he groaned. These are not these are not ways to speak so those are actually called said book isms. I don’t know where that comes from, but that’s what they’re called. And those should be avoided at all costs. So too many dialogue tags and using using non speech tags is one of the one of the common mistakes I see.

Another one on the flip side is and it seems to vary from writer to writer some people don’t give enough tags. And again, the same, the same idea applies, which is that as long as the reader can tell what’s being said without a tag go without a tag. But if you’re reading a string of dialogue, and you think I have no idea who said that, then that means you’re not doing enough tagging.

And the final thing that I see with dialogue, a fair amount, especially with newer writers is that characters voices all sound the same, that there is, there’s no differentiation between them. The dialogue is sort of flat and dull and boring. And that’s really the depth now when it comes to fiction. So much like I was saying before about embodying your character in order to get that character right. That’s really my best tip for for dialogue as well embody those characters, get to know them fully, so that you can begin to hear their voices. Research comes into play here, you know, where’s your character from research? Get online. Listen to people who talk, you know who are in that same place and listen to them talk. And the final thing I would say is always read your stuff out loud, read it out loud to yourself, read the dialogue out loud, you can hear more than you can see. reading out loud is is really key for getting dialogue, right.

Sacha Black
Yeah, so many amazing tips that I’m like, which one do I talk about, but I gotta be selfish and talk about my pet hate first. I know, we’ve spoken about this before but I have a deep seated hatred of one particular method of dialogue tagging, so I don’t know if you have a preference but do you tend to use said Sally or Sally said

Joan Dempsey
yeah, I do remember talking about this before? You were very adamant about one way or the other and and you know, honestly, for me, for me I would never limit myself to Sally said or said Sally. I typically if I’m, if I am trying to figure out which one I should do, that’s where reading out loud comes in handy. I’ll read it aloud and sometimes Sally said sounds perfectly right and sometimes said Sally says perfectly right. There isn’t a rule about doing it one way or the other.

Sacha Black
There’s no rule but one way is wrong.

Joan Dempsey
There is no rule but Sasha says,

Sacha Black
Joking everybody I’ll only hunt you down if you do it wrong. No I am joking, there isn’t a rule. And No, and I think you make a really good point that actually it is about the flow of the sentence and you aren’t quite right sometimes, you know, either if the other way is fine. However, my justification calm myself. My justification for preparing Sally said is because the purpose of a dialogue tag is to identify the reader. And the fastest way you identify the reader, TUT the speaker, and the fastest way you identify the speaker is by identifying them first, which is to use their name first. So for me, I think a lot logic dictates that it should be that way around. But you are right, and you know, sometimes it does just sound naturally better. The other way around, and, and yeah, and

Joan Dempsey
so one thing a reader can probably get through the word said to get through, he was speaking. And second of all, I would say that one thing I do see fairly often is an awfully long paragraph of dialogue and then the comma at the end, said, Sally said at the end and that does not work. That’s when I would say yeah, put the speakers up in that first line, instead of going an entire paragraph and then putting the tag at the very end, because nobody knows who’s saying what, until the very end. So people know very quickly who’s speaking.

Sacha Black
Yeah, and I think it. I mean, you don’t want to long chunks of dialogue anyway, because naturally people interrupt each other and so you know it. Anyway, that’s a whole nother conversation, right? The differentiation was something I was going to pick up on. And, you know, for for those of you who are struggling to think of how you would differentiate one I just wanted to give one very quick, easy example is contractions. And so for somebody, let’s say you have a very posh British person, you know, from 100 years ago, they are much more likely to say things like, Oh, I cannot abide going to the shops today or something, you know, whereas somebody today might They can’t go to the shops today, you know?

Joan Dempsey
Right. Right, right.

Sacha Black
One very quick way to differentiate instead of saying I cannot you say, I can’t. Yeah. Ooh, I’m getting all voice overy here, I’m about to embody some characters. So, contractions is one easy way, but just you know, create a character bucket and for words that your character might say more often than somebody else. Do they use loads of flowery metaphors, or do they always interrupt themselves or are they do they go on tangents or there are lots of ways to create differentiation. The last thing that I was going to say is about you were talking about the trying not to use anything other than said or asked, and, and, if you write dialogue with enough clarity then the tone of what you’re saying should be clear anyway clear enough that you then don’t need to say she chortled or.

Joan Dempsey
Right. Right, exactly.

Sacha Black
Okay, so you also have a course on self-editing. So this same question really quick tips or tricks do you have for writers on self editing? Or what are the most common mistakes you see?

Joan Dempsey
Sure. One of the things that I see fairly often is, writers will come to me and they tend to have this idea that once their first draft is done, they’re done. It’s always fascinating to me to hear people say, Oh, I thought I was done when I did that first draft. And you hear that a fair amount after November and NaNoWriMo. When people have cranked out it cranked out a draft. So So I guess I would just say know that your first draft will never be your final draft. It just doesn’t work that way. The other thing I see an awful lot is that and this is kind of in the same same frame is is people believing that they have to write a shitty first draft that they have to just crank something out from start to finish and that it’s not okay to revise or edit as you go along. And when I tell people you know what if it works for you to revise or edit as you go, then by all means, do that I personally write that way. I revise like crazy. So by the time I get to the end of my, you know, suppose it first draft, it’s really more like an 11th or 12th draft. So when I tell people you can do that, that I often hear people say, Oh, I’m so relieved to hear that I thought that there was something wrong with me that I couldn’t write a shitty first draft. So I’m a big proponent of what works for you, works for you, and you should do that.

So other things that I see more specific things is that in the macro realm, and the big picture realm, what I see an awful lot is that people forget to put in settings like specific settings and the time when something is happening, readers really need to be grounded in time and space. When they are reading fiction, they need to feel like they’re there at home. Like they’re grounded, like they can be comfortable. And if you don’t put the characters in a specific setting, and you have no idea what time it is, readers tend to get lost. And it’s just like a bunch of talking heads on the page. So, so it’s fascinating to me how many people do not write actual scenes and put their characters in actual scenes, they just have them talking to each other. So that one is huge settings and also getting the time right, you know, really just simple time of day, that that kind of stuff really helps readers.

Sacha Black
I love that you mentioned that because that was one of the sections that I write today because I’m right so I’m right A book called the anatomy of prose. That was one of the things that I read about today, I actually add a third thing into that. And I always say point of view. So for those who are writing multiple viewpoint stories, I think it’s time space and head to anchor a scene and I had to, so I took an excerpt from the beginning the opening of one of my chapters, and then I had to write it unanchored. It was so hard.

It was like, I literally spent about 40 minutes trying to anchor this chapter. Like oh my god. Once you know how to do it. This is the thing with many I always find with these, like writing craft development leads once you know how to do something, you forget how not to do it, so to speak. So you taught me about filtering, and so I now don’t know how to not… No, wait, you know what I mean?

Joan Dempsey
I do.

Sacha Black
I do know I do it. When I was explaining what filtering was in the book, I was like, how do I go back and do this again? So it’s Yeah, I think Yeah. Anyway, it’s it’s amazing this journey that we that we go on and all that, you just never stopped learning I can’t believe.

Joan Dempsey
Right, right,

Sacha Black
I can’t believe how you can become a master something and still be a complete beginner.

Joan Dempsey
Well that’s you know, that’s another thing that I absolutely love about writing is that it is a lifelong learning journey. You know, all you have to do is read the body of work of somebody who’s been writing for years and years and you can see how that writing changes over time and, and that continual learning and just perfecting the craft and, you know, writing really is all about the journey, right? There’s never any getting there. It’s just about enjoying the learning and the mastery along the way. That’s that’s what makes it fabulous. Yeah,

Sacha Black
yeah. Okay. This is my favorite question. This is The Rebel Author podcast. So tell me about the time you unleash your inner rebel.

Joan Dempsey
Yes. Good one. Well, I think the I would say I’ve done that numerous times in my life. I am somebody who likes to mix things up. And if things get a little too comfortable or boring, then it’s time to make change. So, but the one that’s most related to writing that’s most recent is probably, I don’t know, maybe four or five years ago, it might be longer. I’m not sure now, but I decided to quit my job basically, and insist on embracing my writer self. This was very controversial in my, in my family and my primary relationship, it really rocked the boat. And, and I knew that I had to do it anyway. I mean, I knew it would rock the boat. I knew my partner would be afraid and have some some fears around me quitting my job, my income producing job in order to really focus on writing. But I also knew that if I didn’t do it, I would regret it probably for the rest of my life. So I decided no, I’m going to take the leap. I’m going to go for it, arrange for me to do that for a year and see how it flew. And we’ve never looked back. So totally.

Sacha Black
I recently hit six months of having left my job. And I think before I left I had one type of fear that I would never be able to leave and it’s a deep seated What if I’m poor? What if I’m right if I fail, what if and it’s such a crushing fear? But yes, left the field changes, so on I am no longer afraid of, you know, what if I don’t have any money because I can just do something else to money. And but that is such a different mindset. And it I can’t, I don’t really know I and I’m trying really because I want to record and preserve this journey that I’m on and the mindset shifts that I’m going through. But it’s so. So it is life changing, there is no way to express it explain the shift in mindset, from before to after. It’s almost like, you know, people tell you what being a parent is going to be like, nobody can tell you what being a parent is going to be like until you have a child like it is that level of radical brain chemistry change. Yes, in so it’s so fascinating that you know, so many of us, actually never look back. And that is the one fear that we all hold before we leave. What if I leave my job and I can’t afford to live or I have to go back? And actually, you don’t go back? Because you find other ways? Because going back would be a fate worse than death.

Joan Dempsey
That’s right. Well, you know, it’s really true that that I love the saying what you focus on grows, what you think about expands and what you dwell on determines your destiny. And it’s really true. So if you make a switch and you put your mind to something new, then that’s what happens. You develop you, you you determine your own destiny instead of letting fear keep you in a place that you don’t want to be.

Sacha Black
And I think that first jump that first leap of faith on leaving your job is the hardest leap to do a number of leaps. Since the Leaving all in a rapid, six month period I’ve had to do very what felt like as significant jumps. But mentally they were that much easier because I’ve made the first leap. Oh, I don’t know if you can hear. But we have fireworks this evening. I know. Everybody’s blowing up fireworks. Don’t you know we’re recording a podcast. I don’t even know what I was saying. Yes, no. So I think that first leap of faith is is the hardest one. And then after that, you you know, it’s like, it’s like training. It’s like developing it writing. It gets easier to make the leaps of faith, the more you do them.

Joan Dempsey
Absolutely. I totally agree.

Sacha Black
And okay, I think that fireworks are going to continue. That’s a wrap it up here. And where can listeners find out more about you?

Joan Dempsey
I can be found at www.joandempsey.com and when you get there, take a look for a tab that says giveaway because every month I do a giveaway of my novel. This is how it begins plus a $20, Amazon gift card and or $20 cheque to buy even more books. So take a look for the giveaway tab at Joandempsey.com.

Sacha Black
Amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much for your

Joan Dempsey
time today. Oh, my pleasure.

Sacha Black
And thank you to everybody supporting the show on Patreon. If you would like to get early access to all of the episodes as well as bonus material, you can do so by visiting www.patreon.com/SachaBlack and that is Sacha with a C. So thank you very much to everybody listening. I am Sacha Black. You are listening to Joan Dempsey, and this was The Rebel Author Podcast

The post 013 How to Write Diverse Characters with Joan Dempsey appeared first on Sacha Black.

How to Convey Emotion in Your Story – The Emotion Thesaurus 2nd Ed #amwriting @angelaackerman

Sacha Black — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 08:00:00 +0000

This blog post is about three and a half months overdue. Sigh. Bad Sacha. Actually no, obscenely busy Sacha. But that’s no excuse.

Today, I’m ~~talking~~, no, raving about a particular writing craft book that I’ve adored for the entirety of my writing career. I love it so much I’ve decided to run a giveaway for it. Read on to find out how you could win a digital copy of:

The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi.

Why am I raving about this book again? Because they released a second (bumper) edition earlier this year; it’s back and it’s bigger and better than ever. You can see my rave review (and subsequent slew of epiphanies) from their emotional wounds book here.

Grab yourselves a copy of the second expanded edition of The Emotion Thesaurus here:

Amazon UK

Amazon USA

Why do I love this book so much? For one, stories are about change. That change is embodied in the characters you write about and the way you convey the change is through the emotional journey your characters go on.

Writing emotions badly is easy. You just state the emotion thereby ‘telling’ the reader what the character feels. Conveying those emotions well is a whole other kettle of fish; the art lies in not actually telling the reader anything at all.

This book taught me how to write emotions well. It showed me how to ‘show’ the reader what the character is feeling rather than telling your audience. The Emotion Thesaurus has instructional content at the start of the book as well as 130 different emotions. Their instructional content goes into detail teaching you the key ways you can show emotion: dialogue, vocal cues, body language, thoughts and visceral reactions, as well as a plethora of other lessons.

In each emotion’s section they go into significant detail teaching you the:

Physical signals and behaviours a person feeling that emotion will do
The internal sensations they feel
Mental responses
Acute or long term responses
Signs the emotion is suppressed
Emotions it might escalate to
Word related suggestions
Writing tips

My Review

“Writing is such a nuanced beast. No two voices are the same which is why it’s so rare to find a writing craft book that is universally useful. But that is exactly what The Emotion Thesaurus is. An exceptional writing craft reference and textbook that defies genres and niches and drives right to the core of what a writer needs: emotional characters their readers can connect to. I’ve loved The Emotion Thesaurus since its first incarnation. But the second edition is bigger and better than ever before. Whether you’re a new writer or seasoned pro, this book serves as a tutor for hooking into a reader’s feelings and sucker punching the heart-wrench of a delicious plot. If you want to learn how to ‘show’ emotions, create depth to your characters and make your readers weep, you need this book.”

Sacha’s top tips for writing emotion

Of course I don’t want to tell you all of the juicy delightful things I’ve learned. But here are some quick fire tips I’ve learned:

Number 1: The Action

Along with number two, understanding that emotion is best served with action is key to portraying realistic emotions. It’s like Apple Pie without Ice Cream *and if any of you try and tell me it should be with custard, don’t. I’ll slay you in your sleep. Heathen.*

Emotion is tangible. Think about when you’re angry, it’s almost weighty. It’s all fiery and tingly. When you’re angry, you tend to react in one of two ways, red hot anger is full of movement, throwing you’re weight around and stomping or slamming doors (both actions). White hot angry is one step higher, it’s seething and burns like the sun. This anger is devoid of movement; it’s so violent it’s still. Stillness is an action as much as movement is.

Number 2: The Classic

Show, don’t tell. While there’s a time and place for telling, for the most part, avoid it where possible. What is telling? Telling is naming the emotion your character feels for example:

Sarah was angry that Paul had booked dinner with their neighbours, she’d explicitly told him she didn’t want to go.

To show the emotion, remove the named word and insert an action to ‘show’ the reader what Sarah does when she’s angry. For example:

Sarah’s lips pressed into a thin line, the back of her neck tingled with hot prickles. She’d made a point of reminding Paul three times not to book dinner with the neighbours. Silence fell over them. Paul swallowed hard, as if the silence had lodged in his throat. Sarah left without saying a word. The only noise was the smash of a china rabbit falling off the fireplace and the slam of the door behind her.

Here the emotion is implicit. We (both writers and readers) know what the sensation of anger feels like. So we don’t need to be told a character is angry. The action of pressing lips into thin lines combined with hot prickles is something we can all recognise and associate with anger. Likewise, I doubt there’s a person reading this who can’t confess to the occasional door-tickling slam.

Number 3: Silence

Writers are – and rightly so – obsessive over words. But here’s the thing, sometimes less is more. And by that, I don’t mean literally slotting an occasional blank page into your novel because all that will do is earn you some stiff emails and a trickle of lonely starred reviews. What I do mean is that silence is golden.

Not all emotions need to be explosively obvious. Sometimes the lack of a character commenting or speaking shows the reader more than door slams and shouty outbursts.

It also means the reader has to keep reading because the argument is unresolved. Using this sort of tactic at the end of a chapter is especially devilish because your poor reader has no choice but to read on if they want to know what happens.

Okay, that’s it from me. If you want to learn more about crafting authentic emotions GO.BUY.THE.DAMN.BOOK.

Those links one more time:

Amazon UK

Amazon USA

a Rafflecopter giveaway

If you want awesome writing tips, you can grab a copy of my book 13 Steps To Evil – How to Craft Superbad Villains. Click this link and tap the logo of your reading device or regular bookshop and it will take you to the right page. You can also get a FREE villains cheatsheet by joining my mailing list just click here.

You can also find me on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Goodreads

The post How to Convey Emotion in Your Story – The Emotion Thesaurus 2nd Ed #amwriting @angelaackerman appeared first on Sacha Black.

Happy VILLaintines – Why your villain needs a heart #amwriting #ValentinesDay

Sacha Black — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 16:27:39 +0000

At festive periods, there’s usually a slew of charitable adverts and campaigns to encourage our altruistic sides, (something I believe we should do more of).

But today, for Valentines, I’m proposing a rather more alternative form of giving. To appease my villainous rants, I need y’all to be a doll and give your damn villain a heart.

Don’t screw up your latest villainous scribbles just yet. Indulge me, and I’ll explain why your villain needs a heart.

Oh, and should you want more detail, this is a topic I cover in my book 13 Steps To Evil – How To Craft A Superbad Villain.

Everybody Loves To Hate A Villain

Readers love to hate villains, it’s a fact of life in the same way my need for caffeine the instant I peel my eyes open in the morning is. They want to swim into your story-net and throw themselves onto your hook and all so they can fall in love with their badassery and then be horrified when they realize he’s so cruel and nefarious they couldn’t possibly have sympathized with him. Only we know they did because we designed our villain that way.

Your job as a writer is to:

Make the reader feel for your villain
Make the reader agree with their insane ideas for a nano second

OUT NOW in all good retailers

Why? So you can bitch-slap them back to reality with a side salad of villain crazy.

Making your reader empathize with your villain before they do something awful to your hero makes the emotional turmoil the reader feels that much more compelling.

The point? Getting your audience to ‘love to hate’ your villain is VITAL. It’s reader-crack, which also means it’s winner winner chicken dinner for your KDP Sales dashboard!

But how do you get them to fall for your villain in the first place?

Include at least one positive trait.

Rookie mistake number #1 when creating a villain is to have a ‘bad dude hell bent on ending the world with no fucking idea why he wants to do it.

No children. Just no.

To make a villain realistic, you gots to include at least one positive trait or redeeming quality. I know, I can feel your scrunched up faces from here. “But Sacha, villains are evil, they can’t have a heart.”

Yes, yes, they can. Why? Because even a villain has mommy.

Look, if you don’t give your villain at least one positive trait, they’ll turn out to be one track minded, hell bent on destroying the world (and your hero) but without any substance behind them. What does that lead to? A flat villain. And a flat villain = flat conflict. And THAT is tantamount to story death.

Out NOW in all good bookstores

But you also need them to have a positive trait because no one is pure evil. Giving them a positive trait makes them far moe realistic as a character. You go from flat pancake to chubby panda.

Nobody Likes To Be Cheated

There’s a danger when getting your readers to like your villain that they get lulled into a false sense of security. They end up liking your villain a bit TOO much. Don’t do that, cause you’ll cheat your readers. Cheating readers is bad. BAD-BAD. Like turd burger bad. Okay, you get the point.

If you set your villain up to make the reader empathize with him early on, be sure to plant a seed of doubt in their mind about his or her ‘goodness’.

So there you have it. Be loving this VILLaintines and give your bad guy a heart.

Who’s your fave villain with a heart? Let me know in the comments.

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If you liked this post, why not get even more awesome writing tips in the book 13 Steps To Evil – How to Craft Superbad Villains. Click this link and just tap the logo of your device or regular bookshop and it will take you to the right page. You can also get a FREE villains cheatsheet by joining my mailing list just click here.

Read Keepers, the first book in my Young Adult fantasy series now. Or to hear more about the release of the sequels as well as get regular CogMail updates you can do so here.

You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Goodreads

The post Happy VILLaintines – Why your villain needs a heart #amwriting #ValentinesDay appeared first on Sacha Black.

13 Steps To Evil Is Coming… ARC & Street Team Request

Sacha Black — Mon, 15 May 2017 08:00:44 +0000

I’ve been absent sometime now; I burnt out. Which I am sure, for anyone that knows me, is not a surprise. Am I back? Yes, and also no. But that’s for another blog post. Today I have something exciting to announce.

In typical Sacha fashion, despite burning out and sleeping A LOT, I continued getting 13 Steps To Evil – How To Craft A Superbad Villain ready for publication.

Well, guess what?

It’s ready.

That’s right, FINALLY, after a 5-year long road, that’s been bumpier than the Himalayas, 2017 marks the year I release the first of hopefully many books.

I can’t believe I am really going to say this, but:

13 Steps To Evil is coming to you on the 30^th May 2017.

So, because I’m launching in just a couple weeks, I’d love your help with two things:

I’m looking for advance readers, who would be willing to leave an honest review on Amazon and or Goodreads.

The second thing is help with the launch. If you’re willing, I’d be grateful for help spreading the word on social media come launch month. I’ll be setting up a file with info/images/shareables that I can send to anyone willing to help.

What will you get for helping?

My undying gratitude obvs. And a big fat hug when we meet.

For everyone willing to review 13 Steps to Evil, of course, I’ll give you the eBook for free.

For everyone that joins my street team, I’ll be running a street team only competition to win a free signed paperback as well as a 1000 word (or first chapter) critique from me (open internationally).

If you’re willing to help let me know in the comments, drop me an email, or ping me on social media (links below)

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Want to know a little more about 13 Steps To Evil?

13 Steps to Evil has been carefully designed to give writers like you, a detailed guide to creating the most kick ass villain you can.

Are you fed up of drowning in two-dimensional villains? Frustrated with creating clichés? And failing to get your reader to root for your villain?

In the book you’ll learn all kinds of awesome stuff like,

How to develop a villain mindset
The step-by-step guide to creating your villain from the ground up
Why getting to the core of your villain’s personality is essential to make them credible and believable
What evil pitfalls and clichés to avoid as well as the tropes your story needs

Finally, there’s a comprehensive writing guide to help you create Superbad villains. I’ve spent hundreds of hours researching and interviewing writers to make sure 13 Steps To Evil is tailored to your exact needs.

Whether you’re just starting out or a seasoned writer, this book will help power up your bad guy and give them that extra edge. It will also help you master the perfect balance of good and evil as well as strengthening your villain to give your story the tension and punch it needs.

You’ll get the same dark humour, you find in these blog posts and I use a ton of well-known examples to help explain the steps.

Want to write the best villain you can? 13 Steps To Evil is your book.

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As part of the publication, I’ll also be launching a short villains companion course and a free checklist. If you’d like those sign up to my mailing list and I’ll give you all the info shortly.

You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest

The post 13 Steps To Evil Is Coming… ARC & Street Team Request appeared first on Sacha Black.