by Jason Black

February 2014

This article is the last in a series exploring the five stages of surprise, as a writer’s adaptation of the familiar “five stages of grief” emotional cycle. Last month dealt with depression. This month, we’ll look at acceptance.

Acceptance is when your characters finally integrate the reality of their past experiences, either good or bad, into their understanding of their own lives. Strictly speaking, acceptance is a moment in time. The importance of this moment cannot be underestimated, either for characters or for real human beings.

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by Jason Black

January 2014

This article is part five in a series exploring the five stages of surprise, as a writer’s adaptation of the familiar “five stages of grief” emotional cycle. Last month dealt with bargaining. This month, we’ll look at depression.

Depression marks the beginnings of acceptance. The three prior stages—denial, anger, and bargaining—were all about rejecting the reality or the consequences of an unexpected event. When all of those forms of rejection fail, one is forced to accept the reality of a situation.

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by Jason Black

November 2013

This article is part three in a series exploring the five stages of surprise as a writer's adaptation of the familiar five stages of grief emotional cycle. Last month, we dealt with denial. This month, we'll look at what happens next: frustration and the surface emotion of anger that comes with it. And while the frustration stage is never pleasant to experience, it can certainly be one of the most fun stages for authors to subject our characters to.

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by Jason Black

October 2013

Why Do We Deny?

What's behind the human instinct to deny surprising news? Google it and you'll find lots of answers.

Some are facile: denial is easier than facing difficult truths. Maybe in the short term. But in the long run, denial just makes problems harder and consequences worse. That's not easier.

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by Jason Black

September 2013

Readers judge the believability of your characters on two key factors: how they behave, and how they react. Behaviors are believable when a choice makes sense given everything we know about a character in some situation. But reactions are believable based on the emotions the character displays. This is where writers often fall down.

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by Jason Black

August 2013

You know what I remember most about writing my first manuscript? Writing the ending. I’d had such a wonderful time writing that whole manuscript. I loved those characters. When I wrote what I knew was the last scene, I became so choked up the lump in my throat literally hurt.

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by Jason Black

July 2013

I've heard lots of writers and writing experts preach the gospel of failure—that is, letting your characters fail at their endeavors—saying it creates drama. There are many reasons why, but the best ones relate to what failure teaches readers about your characters.

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by Jason Black

June 2013

Readers are quick to decide whether they like, loathe, admire, or pity a new character. Those first impressions are vital because the success of a story often rides on whether a reader’s perception matches what the author intended.

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by Jason Black

May 2013

Sci-fi, fantasy, and historical fiction share something in common: a strong need for a well-established setting. A well-developed setting gives readers a clear intuition about how characters will behave. Without that, readers can’t tell what makes sense for the characters to do, which ultimately ruins the reader’s suspension of disbelief.

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by Jason Black

First you need a fresh concept for the character, right? Sure. You don’t want to be giving us the same cliché, central-casting characters we’ve seen a million times. Then they have to be admirable in some way that helps readers root for them. That is, they don’t have to be likeable or nice, but there has to be something about them we can respect. And we can’t forget to give the character some flaws, too, so the character can experience personal growth through the story. Naturally not.

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by Jason Black

Readers are notoriously sensitive to dialogue that feels wrong. That is, dialogue that doesn’t match their expectations of how real people talk. As well they might be: after all, every reader you’ll ever have has spent his or her entire life practicing the skill of dialogue with other people, each and every day.

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by Jason Black

In a more polite take on a rather coarse old saw, we might say points of view are like opinions: everybody has one. But what do literary types mean when they talk about points of view? Usually, they mean the grammatical side of point of view (hereafter, just “POV”), which has person, tense, and informational aspects. This conception of POV covers the manner in which the writer chooses to present the story’s narrative text. Dialogue and inner monologue are different beasts, and obeys their own rules; this article relates solely to narrative.

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by Jason Black

We writers spend a lot of effort making sure our characters act smart. After all, a certain intelligence and cleverness goes hand-in-hand with being a protagonist. Exceptions (Forrest Gump) are rare. This goes double for antagonists; a dumb antagonist is too easy to defeat, and where’s the drama in that?

Except sometimes we need our characters to make mistakes. Perfect characters are boring to read. Mistakes tend to make a character’s situation worse, which heightens the drama and tension in your story. A sudden mistake can make readers gasp in alarm.

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by Jason Black

We all want our readers to be sympathetic towards our protagonists and their supporting players. That is, we want readers to have a generally positive opinion of them. This, in turn, requires that readers believe positive things about our characters.

Sadly, we cannot simply assert nice things about our characters and expect readers to actually believe them. Readers’ beliefs about our characters stem almost entirely from the behaviors we show our characters doing, not what personality traits we tell the readers our characters have.

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by Jason Black

In an interesting story, unexpected things happen. That’s pretty much a given. Without the unexpected, there’s no drama. So we pack out stories with surprises, calamities, mysteries, and twists.

But the mysteries and twists can get you into trouble. Inherently, mysteries and twists present situations that don’t make sense right away. That’s the whole point of them. When a reader encounters such a situation, they’re faced with an implicit question: why doesn’t it make sense? The danger is that there are two possible answers to that question.

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by Jason Black

“Let’s hang on,” Frankie sings, “to what we’ve got.” Percy Sledge observes that, “When a man loves a woman, he’ll trade the world for the good thing he’s found.” About a million other torch song crooners have their own take on it. So many songwriters explore this idea, there must be something to it. Indeed there is, and it is simply this: gain is not the same as loss.

As a rule, people will put much more effort into keeping what they have than in obtaining something they don’t have. Intuitively, we understand this.

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by Jason Black

Some novels call out for an inspirational leader, either as a protagonist or as someone your protagonists can admire (think Gandhi or Martin Luther King), or vilify (Jim Jones). But writing a convincing inspirational leader is not an easy thing. Fortunately, we can study examples like these to learn what they did to inspire their followers.

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by Jason Black

Two months ago I wrote about the fundamental double standard, wherein we misjudge people because we can’t see deeply enough into their lives and minds. Given that we can’t do this, you’d think we would intuitively understand that other people can’t read us very well, either. Yet, in all our flawed glory, we engage in another doozy of misapprehension.

Psychologists call it the “illusion of transparency,” and for once, the name is apt. The idea is that we go through our lives believing that our feelings, our motivations, and our desires are as transparently obvious to others as they are to ourselves.

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by Jason Black

We normally think of a novel’s denouement as a chance to wrap up loose ends from the story before typing “The End.” We don’t normally think of them as being essential to the portrayal of our characters. After all, the story’s over; how can the denouement matter much? But it does. If you mess up the denouement you’ll murder the characters.

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by Jason Black

There is a double-standard so common in the way we judge people that it is almost invisible. Everybody does it. I do it. I’ll bet you do it. And if you’re clever, the characters in your books will do it too.

The double-standard is in how we view mistakes: we interpret our own failings as the result of circumstance, but use the failings of others as evidence of obvious and tragic character flaws within them. For example, if I’m late it’s because of traffic lights and a little old lady in the car ahead of me who didn’t understand how to work her gas pedal.

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