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character-building

When Characters Talk To You

by | April 28, 2021 | | 10 Comments

How alive are your characters for you? Do you have conversations with them? Do they tell you what they want to do in a story, even if it’s not something you had in mind for them?

Do you hear your characters when they talk?

I recently read an article that talked about how many authors in fact do hear their characters speak to them. According to researchers at Durham University who teamed up with the Guardian and the Edinburgh international book festival, sixty-three per cent [of respondents] said they heard their characters speak while writing, with 61% reporting characters were capable of acting independently.”181 authors were interviewed.

This finding was of great interest to me since I hear my characters voices when they talk to me. Some are quiet while others are quite loud. As my readers know, I write sexy retellings of fairy tales. Tita, my Puss In Boots in my novella “Trouble In Thigh High Boots” has a deep, sonorous voice. She purrs. Obviously, she does. She’s a cat shifter. Rapunzel in my novella “Climbing Her Tower” has a higher, wispier voice. She also speaks quicker than Tita. Both of these characters have told me when they were unhappy with the direction of a plot. They also told me what turns them on the most so I could give them the best experiences. These two are very open, honest, and straightforward – qualities I admire.

I asked writers on Facebook their experiences with their characters voices. Everyone’s experience is different, but all have a camaraderie with their characters. Some fight. Some don’t. Some take the plot in a direction the author had not originally considered. Some play the “You should be writing” card. Here are a few responses.

Christiane Knight – “Mine talk to me and occasionally have taken the plot in very different directions than I’d planned.”

Terri Bruce – “LOL – I not only hear them, but it’s kind of like they take me over at times. I’ll be in the shower or driving and realize suddenly that I’m talking OUT LOUD, saying the dialog I’m picturing in my head (the scene starts playing like a little movie in my head but it’s always in first person – I’m the characters (lol all of them) in the scene/seeing the scene from their POV – rather than third person). My husband often catches me doing this (it’s happened in a restaurant while sitting across from him a few times) and he’s like “um, honey, your lips are moving. You’re talking to yourself. What is happening?????” LOLOLOL!”

Phoenix Johnson – “Some of mine are total arseholes lol they try to fight me, can be exhausting!”

Colleen Markley – “My protagonist is sitting on my newly cleaned counter now, swinging her feet against the cabinet. Her heels bang the wood. “You need to stop playing house and get serious,” she tells me. “You can’t finish a novel if you’re not serious. You’re just shy of 90,000 words and you still need to finish act two. Your pacing is off and you need to fix it.” She pauses her feet and stops speaking for a moment as she looks at me. “You’re so close.”

Jenise Aminoff – “My characters all have distinct voices, and some of them ARGUE with me.”

Jacques Gerard – ” Yes, I do hear my character’s voices and would love to be included in your blog. I just finished an erotic short story. It has a lady DJ doing a podcast. Her voice is low and velvety. Her male lover who calls into her show has a deep baritone voice and sounds like Barry White.”

So writers, do your characters talk to you? Boss you around? Plead with you? If so, know you’re not alone.

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Elizabeth Black writes in a wide variety of genres including erotica, erotic romance, horror, and dark fiction. She lives on the Massachusetts coast with her husband, son, and her two cats. Her LGBTQ paranormal erotic shifter romance novel “Full Moon Fever” is now available for purchase at Amazon and other book distributors. Her collection of erotic fairy tales, “Happily Ever After: Twisted Versions of Your Favorite Fairy Tales”, is also available at Amazon.

Web site: http://elizabethablack.blogspot.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elizabethablack

Twitter: http://twitter.com/ElizabethABlack

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/elizabethblack

Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/b76GWD

Character Voices

by | September 28, 2020 | | 3 Comments

A recent article from The Guardian noted something that many writers are already familiar with – most writers hear the voices of their own characters. I’ve been able to hear my character’s voices ever since I was a child. I had imaginary friends like many children, and they had distinctive voices and inflections. Those voices carried over to the characters I created in fiction.

Researchers from Durham University found that 63% of writers interviewed listen to their creations. 61% feel they have their own agency. 56% indicated visual or other sensory experiences of their characters when they are writing. 15% said they could even enter in dialogue with their characters.

How well do you know your characters? Do you have their voices, smells, and desires inside your head, or have you written down a detailed grid what makes your character tick? I’m sure many writers know their character’s favorite color or favorite food. Those kinds of exercises are good practice for getting to know your characters. Here are some examples of questions to ask yourself about your character:

  1. What do you look like?
  2. Do you have any tattoos?
  3. Do you like coffee or tea?
  4. Dark or milk chocolate? (or do you not eat sweets at all)
  5. What’s your favorite holiday and why
  6. What’s your least favorite color?
  7. What is your favorite season and why
  8. What is your least favorite season and why
  9. What is your greatest fear
  10. What do you think of the other characters in the book?

Those are only ten examples. Writing down the answers helps to gel the character properly developed in your mind. I get to know my characters as I create them, but creating lists like this one helps me learn more. I’d ask things I normally wouldn’t ask, and when I get answers the book becomes more real for me.

What do you do to make your characters seem more real to you? How do you flesh them out? While plot is important to a story, character is equally important. Whether your story is character-driven or plot-driven, the characters need to be fully rounded for the story to have proper impact. Don’t make your characters empty shells since that risks creating a stereotype or caricature rather than a fully-fleshed person. The better you know your character, the better you are to hear what that character is trying to convey to you. In the end, you get a good story. And that’s how it should be.

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Elizabeth Black writes in a wide variety of genres including erotica, erotic romance, horror, and dark fiction. She lives on the Massachusetts coast with her husband, son, and her three cats. Her LGBTQ paranormal erotic shifter romance novel “Full Moon Fever” is now available for purchase at Amazon and other book distributors. Her collection of erotic fairy tales, “Happily Ever After: Twisted Versions of Your Favorite Fairy Tales”, is also available at Amazon.

Web site: http://elizabethablack.blogspot.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elizabethablack

Twitter: http://twitter.com/ElizabethABlack

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/elizabethblack

Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/b76GWD

 

Obtuse Angles of Desire: Disorienting the Reader

by | May 13, 2015 | | 11 Comments

Photo: Alejandro Hernandez

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust

Writing erotica is something of a paradox. Unlike mystery, horror, or sci-fi, erotica seldom takes the reader to wholly alien places. Unless you’re writing extreme BDSM, or Queer erotica aimed at a hetero reader, the sexual core of a story is something the reader has usually already experienced. At the very least, it’s something they’ve fantasized about. In a way, this is why so many people who haven’t written fiction before opt for writing erotica. Desire is something we’re all pretty familiar with. That should make it easy to write. But for that very reason, it’s also why a lot of erotica can seem stale and recycled. How many new ways are there to get your characters into bed? And how extreme do you have to make the sex to come up with something that doesn’t read like a thousand other stories out there? At some point, it can feel like diminishing returns on your efforts – as a writer or as a reader.

I’d like to talk about voice and narrators. When we start off writing, we tend to pick narrators who are very familiar to us. Often they are, at least partly, us. I have ceased to read much erotica these days, and I think partly it is because I seldom come across startling narrators or fresh voices or invitations to look at the erotic in new ways. I thought it might be helpful to look at a few strategies writers have used to pick up a reader and set them down in a truly unfamiliar narrative space.

Despite all the criticisms of Fifty Shade of Grey’s main character Anna, I think one of the reasons the story was so successful is that she is, improbably, a 22 year old virgin who never masturbated, never orgasmed, and never owned a laptop. For all the suspension of disbelief that demanded off the reader, it did allow James to frame the protagonist’s experiences as wholly new. And, I suspect, for a lot of readers, it allowed them to revisit a kind of innocence most of us, at least in my generation, lost around the age of 16.

I recently finished a zombie apocalypse novel binge. I was trying to figure out what the allure of the meme was. By accident, I ran across an extraordinary novel called “The Reapers are the Angels.” It’s going to sound insane, but it’s a cross between William Faulkner and George A. Romero. Part horror novel, part mystical road-trip, part literary masterpiece, the book tells the story of a young woman who has spent all her life in the post-apocalyptic world. She’s had no formal education and is completely illiterate. This allows the reader, through her narrative, to interpret reality in an incredibly different way.  She is a strange mix of innocent savant and pragmatic brutalist. Consequently, what should be a very run of the mill zombie apocalypse novel is transformed into a poetic and deeply philosophical literary text that uses the genre to probe questions of history, memory, human relationships and guilt.

A narrator’s ignorance (hopefully more skillfully established than Anna Steele’s) offers the reader a new way in to familiar spaces. And crafting a unique and somewhat difficult voice with which to lead the reader in also helps to destabilize their assumptions.

Beloved is another breathtaking novel that presents the reader with a history they think they know, but purposefully uses disorienting narrative voices to force the reader to reconsider what they think they know. On the surface, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a horror story. It has ghosts and terrible secrets, supernatural events and eerie synchronicities. But beneath the clever structure and the lyrical language is a deeply serious examination of how we construct identity and how the tragedy of belonging to someone other than oneself puts all relationships under erasure. There are many narrators and many voices in Beloved, but they all have one thing in common. They are all haunted by the past. This fundamentally changes the way they read the present and, consequently forces the reader to also do the same.

It doesn’t matter whether you set your story in the past, the present or the future, as long as you create narrators who navigate the world differently to the way we normally do. Give them a believable reason to have to use a different interior map, and you create radically alien points of view. It gives you the opportunity to examine the familiar with new eyes, from strange tangents. To deconstruct commonly held assumptions of the way the world works – especially when it comes to experiences we believe we feel at home with like sex and desire – and offer them to your readers as almost unnatural experiences.

Language can also play a big role in disorienting your reader. It seems counter-intuitive – to make your writing harder to read – but when done well, it’s a devastatingly effective device for taking your reader to a familiar place and making it feel like somewhere new. Novels like Trainspotting, The Road and Beloved all use challenging dialects and really strange turns of phrase to immerse the reader in what feels like a new world.

Even something as simple as going through your text and consciously tweaking every adjective, adverb or metaphor into one you’ve never read or used before can have a radical effect. You might end up with jarring, uncomfortable language, but if your plot is strong enough, you can pull the reader through it. Much like stroking a cat backwards, you may not produce a comfortable piece for your reader, but I promise you, you’ll produce something different to anything you’ve written before and take your reader on an unexpected adventure.

Basing Characters On Real People

by | November 28, 2014 | | 11 Comments

Elizabeth Black writes in a wide variety of genres including erotica, erotic romance, and dark fiction. She lives on the Massachusetts coast with her husband, son, and four cats. Visit her web site, her Facebook page, and her Amazon Author Page.

* * *

Every writer on Facebook has seen a variation of this meme: “Be nice to me or I’ll put you in my book and kill you off”. Those same writers probably gave the meme a wry smile. I have based some of my characters on real people. Two professors in my Night Owl Top Pick erotic romance novel “Don’t Call Me Baby” are based on two professors I had flings with in college. Neither man knows I’ve done this. If they read the book, they’re probably recognize themselves. Why did I do this? Because I wanted to write a fictitious account of one summer during my college years, and those two men were a part of that summer. I’ve also based a few characters in some short stories on people I’ve met in real life. The depiction of one prof is not very flattering, but the other one is. I’ve even based my character Eric in my free “Tuesday’s Tales” short stories on my husband. He likes that. Those stories are available at my web site.

With the recent news that J. K. Rowling based her Harry Potter character Dolores Umbrage on a teacher she despised, you may wonder what other characters have been based on real people. Here are a few of the more famous ones:

Tintin – The Adventures of Tintin

Based on Palle Hude, a Danish boy scout who traveled around the world in 1928 as part of a competition set up by a Danish newspaper. He had to circumnavigate the world in 44 days, unaccompanied, and not set foot on a plane. Hude’s travels made newspapers all over the world, and it’s likely Tintin’s creator in Belgium would have read about him. 20,000 people greeted Hude at the end of his tour, not unlike the crowd that greeted TinTin at the end of his first album.

Ebenezer Scrooge – A Christmas Carol

Based on John Elwes. He was an 18th century politician who was a miser. Despite his wealth, he lived a sparse, hermit-like life. He’d eat rotting food rather than spend the money to buy fresh produce. Rather than part with his fortune, he chose to horde his money and live in squalor.

Severus Snape – Harry Potter novels

Based on John Nettleship. J. K. Rowling’s former chemistry teacher. He had no idea he was the basis for the character until after the movies came out. He, his wife, and kids figured it out as they saw Alan Rickman play Snape on the big screen.

Dolores Umbrage – Harry Potter novels

Based on an unnamed teacher J. K. Rowling “disliked immensely on sight”. This person had been Rowling’s teacher “long ago… in a certain skill or subject.” In her essay on Pottermore, Rowling wrote “The woman in question returned my antipathy with interest. Why we took against each other so instantly, heartily and (on my side, at least) irrationally, I honestly cannot say,” Rowling wrote. She was also struck by the woman’s “pronounced taste for twee accessories,” including “a tiny little plastic bow slide, pale lemon in color,” which Rowling felt was more “appropriate to a girl of three.”

Dorian Gray – The Picture of Dorian Gray

Based on John Gray, one of Oscar Wilde’s alleged lovers. Wilde gave the character the first name of Dorian in reference to the Dorians, an ancient Greek tribe that engaged in m/m sex. John Gray was mortified when the story came out since he could see it was based on him, and it caused a rift in his relationship with Wilde.

I interviewed several writers who based characters on people they know. They had plenty to say, including why they chose to do it.

Romance writer Jeanne Guzman: Years ago, while having lunch at my favorite lakeside restaurant, The Oasis on Joe Pool Lake in Grand Prairie, Texas, I said to myself “Self, this would make the perfect spot for a murder,” and so was born my novel, Bridge Over Troubled Waters.

With the enthusiasm of my waitress, my main character was born. The character of Misty was a combination of several of the waitresses on staff, but the name was a gift from the original Misty who sadly moved away and found other employment. From the manager, to the cook, and even the ladies I was having lunch with are mentioned in the book.

Keep in mind, I had to change the names, but once you read the book, you’ll be able to go to The Oasis and know who everyone is. Most important, you have to meet the matriarch who not only has inspired me, but is so love by those around her that the city named a street after her. (The book is dedicated to her, and all those who put up with me while I did my research and wrote the book sitting on the outside deck.)

My inspiration came from the servers and the managers at the Oasis, it’s my favorite place to go to relax and have a good time. The ones that were working there at the time knew of my book, and the fact that I was using them as models for my characters. They allowed me to take pictures and follow them around as they did their jobs. I had originally wanted to use the name “Oasis” as my setting, but when I talked to the owner, she said she didn’t feel right gaining publicity through my book, even though she, and the employees were cast in a positive light. I told her I would change the name and the location, but I would still dedicate the book to her. And I did. As for the employees that still work at the Oasis, they all have a copy of the book and even though I combined different aspects of them into the characters, they knew who I was talking about. They loved it.

Romance writer Lindsay Klug: My male leads are almost always, without fail, based on my husband. He’s everything I’ve ever wanted, so why not use his attributes? When he was military, the leads wore shaved heads and clean faces. Now that he’s got a beard, I can’t imagine a lead without one. Kind of weird, eh?

[As far as inspiration goes], [i]t just flowed naturally into my story lines. He doesn’t read what I’ve written but he knows he’s a part of it. Lol, I just couldn’t and still can’t picture anybody else for my leads. He always makes fun of the pictures I look at for inspiration, but he doesn’t know I’m seeing his face and character with them.

Romance writer Phoenix Johnson: So my only ‘based on real life’ character is Bailey. She’s the slightly-overweight, self-conscious, lacking self-esteem and confidence leading lady in my contemporary romance Acapello’s Lady. So far, she’s much like me. We’re also both on a weight-loss track to be happy with ourselves. I’m hoping that writing her story week either motivate me or shame me to keep at my own. However, unlike me, Bailey is single. She doesn’t feel deserving or needing of a guy right now. Until hunky escaped-con Joe shows up looking for somewhere to hide. He was doing time for someone else’s crime, and couldn’t stand it. Silly man. However, his heart was broken when his wife died so his actions aren’t the smartest right now. His attraction to Bailey, and their growing connection, however, reminds them both that it’s ok to love and that they do deserve happiness.

Writing Bailey is not just a way to try to motivate myself. I’m finding that she is freeing for me, and in writing that she deserves to be happy and to love herself, I’m frankly telling myself the same thing. Bailey, unintentionally, is my way of saying to myself “be happy, you deserve it. And love yourself; you’re allowed to, and it’s ok.” It’s actually something I want all readers to take from her when I finish Acapello’s Lady and get it released. (I haven’t intentionally based Joe on anyone but I think, with the lost-love, and escaped con elements, he could possibly be based on the potential I see in my fiance as well. Or he could also be a combination of the potential I see in both of us.)

[On why she chose to base her heroine on herself]: I was having a shower after a workout, and it started running through my head as a written scene. And it occurred to me that there aren’t enough heavier heroines, so I thought it was my turn, and loosely basing her on myself would hopefully be like a sounding board for healthy changes. It’s also therapeutic, in a way, when you’ve actually worn your heroines shoes.you know exactly what she’s thinking or feeling because it’s what you have or would think and feel.

Romance writer Jacques Gerard: Yes, I have written many short stories with one of the characters based on somebody I know. In those stories the heroine is based on a lady I use to be involved with. I don’t use the lady’s real name, but the heroine’s name begins with the same letter of that lady’s first name. Those short stories are based on a date that lead to us making love or what could have happened between us two in a certain scenario I dream up. I have never shared with a lady I knew that they were in my one of my stories. However, one lady I know had an idea I used her as a character and was flattered.

What inspired him to base his character on that particular woman? “She was a co-worker and we had a special chemistry.” He said. “She also read one of my stories and enjoyed it. We were talking at an office Christmas party and got on the subject of romantic Christmas getaways. It was funny because at the time I was thinking of writing a Christmas story for my website. I shared that with her and asked her opinion about a lounging dress for the female character in my story. She chuckled and asked if I was going to write about us. I replied that wasn’t a bad idea.  She also knew about my foot fetish and liked it as well.”

Horror writer Dave Gammon: Eric A. Shelman often does this and in fact has written myself in his runaway zombie hit series Dead Hunger. I come in at part 2 and part 5 is my actual POV and continue on until part 8.

There are many reasons writers may choose to base a character on a real person. Writers may even base characters on themselves. This inspiration has lead to the creation of some fine fiction. Without Palle Hude and John Gray, we may not have had the pleasure of enjoying Tintin and Durian Gray. It’s always interesting to learn who influenced certain characters. It’s sometimes flattering, and that spark helps bring characters to life.

* * *

You may find these authors at Amazon and other sites.

Jeanne Guzman – Amazon Author Page

Lindsay Klug – Amazon Author Page

Phoenix Johnson – Amazon Author Page

Jacques Gerard – Amazon Author Page

Dave Gammon: http://horrornews.net (regular contributor)

If you’re interested in reading my novel “Don’t Call Me Baby”, you may find more information at Amazon and other outlets.

Plausibility

by | May 26, 2014 | | 6 Comments

by Jean Roberta

My latest erotic story was written in response to a call for submissions, and it involves the kind of plot/situation that erotic editors often ask for: sex with a Bad Girl/vampire seductress/or Lone Wolf/outlaw dude. Exciting sex between a character with whom the (supposedly average) reader can identify and a mysterious, unsettling Other sounds like a marketable concept. Whether this plot is believable on any level depends on each reader’s level of skepticism.

Persuasive character development depends on convincing the reader that this character would actually do that thing. Some writers, especially those who write first-time erotica (innocent youngish character loses his/her virginity in some sense by doing some sexual thing for the first time) try to pre-empt the reader’s skepticism by putting extreme ambivalence into the character’s consciousness. (“OMG! Did I really just accept the handsome stranger’s invitation to let him take me to his chateau alone? I can’t believe I’m doing this!”) The virginal character’s attempts to hang onto a clean and cautious image of herself (and usually this character is a her) ring false after awhile. Either she will or she won’t go to the home of a strange man. While there, either she will or she won’t take off all her clothes for him and let him tie her up. If she goes “all the way” (as it used to be called) and has incredible orgasms, then clearly she is the “kind of girl” who does that kind of thing. She can no longer honestly claim to be a virgin. Of course, she could still be a good person who treats others as she would like to be treated (and who harms none), but in that case, she needs to reject a shallow definition of “goodness” as sexual ignorance.

Erotica is often about transformations and epiphanies. Doing new things involves acquiring new knowledge, especially knowledge about oneself. This is part of the reason why character-driven erotica is interesting to read. However, critics will criticize a change that looks unbelievably extreme, OR a series of sexual adventures that leave a central character absolutely unchanged on the inside.

Writing plausible erotica is harder than it looks, especially since different readers have different thresholds for the suspension of disbelief.

Crits and complaints in ERWA Storytime and elsewhere often focus on whether Character A would really be attracted to Character B, and what action, threat or proposition can or should be regarded as a deal-breaker. If Character B (the handsome stranger) says, “A pretty girl like you should be stripped naked and tied up,” and if Character A (the ingénue) then falls into his arms, some readers will complain that she is Too Stupid to Live, and others will say that in real life, she would rush out the door and resolve never to return to the bar – and for good measure, she would stop speaking to the mutual friend who introduced them.

Some readers will ask, “But why would Character A (law-abiding citizen) be attracted to Character B (rake, seductress, criminal, spy, visitor from another planet) when they are so different?” (Obviously, opposites never attract in the real world, even on the rare occasions when they cross paths.)

Sexual identity is actually a slippery thing, but some readers expect clarity: Lance is a gay-male porn star who was performing in the nude since birth. Bob is less flamboyant, but he knows he is attracted to men, and this is made clear to the reader from the outset, even if he won’t admit it aloud. Bob could possibly be seduced by Lance, but Bob wouldn’t make the first move. Bob couldn’t be married with children, and he could never enter Lance’s profession.

Some feminist critics have commented on the general acceptability of female/female sex scenes in sexually-explicit writing – but only if at least one of the characters finds Mr. Right or stays happily married, because she is not really a lesbian. (The real ones always wear labels, or strap-ons.)

During the period of suspense between sending a story to an editor and getting a response, I worry about all the possible reasons why the story might be rejected. A perceived lack of plausibility is high on the list, even if the call-for-submissions asked for vampires, werewolves, zombies, or a Romeo-and-Juliet romance between members of different supernatural species. (But would any self-respecting bloodsucker really . . . ?)

If and when I write my memoirs, I expect them to be rejected by the first 36 publishers on grounds that 1) the story lacks continuity, and 2) it lacks plausibility. For one thing, even if the author/narrator really lost her virginity in her teens, this can’t be stated in print without possible legal repercussions. And would she really have been attracted to the older brother of her Mormon friend? Why did the attraction not develop into a relationship? The plot trajectory needs editing.

I suspect that a certain incoherence is actually typical of real-life narratives, especially if written while the subject is still alive. A fictional version of the story is likely to be pared-down and simplified rather than expanded. Embarrassing, unlikely or seemingly irrelevant events and characters need to be weeded out to give a story the coherence which would give a comforting impression of logical cause-and-effect. I can imagine an editor’s comments on the complete, unexpurgated, five-volume version of my life-story to date: What is the theme here? Where are you going with this?

So I’m waiting to hear what an editor has to say about my story about a passionate encounter between mismatched acquaintances, one of whom needs to escape from the police as well as from a criminal gang, while the other wants to experience the “wild side” just for a night, without taking any big risks. A safe apartment, a safe job and a safe income look almost unbearably desirable to one who never had them, but the one who takes them for granted can’t see it.

What is realistic and what is not? The longer I live, the harder it seems to write fiction with the unmistakable flavour of life, especially if it is based on reality that is stranger than fiction.

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Hot Chilli Erotica

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