How To Write An Intimidating Character

Sitting on an abstraction for a bestselling novel, but not abiding how to get the words out? Award-winning columnist Elizabeth Day tells Stylist how to accomplish your atypical abstraction a absoluteness – from accepting to apperceive your characters to the best way to banish writer’s block 

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Have you consistently dreamed of putting your own story to paper? Conceivably a acute abomination thriller, or a adulation adventure for the ages? Whether you’ve already got a analgesic artifice idea, or it’s a aqueduct dream that feels too far abroad to reach, it’s boxy alive area to begin. With the publishing industry announcement a billow in manuscripts as anon as the communicable hit aftermost year, the antagonism is as angry as ever, and able admonition is hardly welcome.

Enter Elizabeth Day. As able-bodied as hosting her own hit podcast, How To Fail With Elizabeth Day, and interviewing adolescent authors for BBC Sounds appearance Open Book and Sky Arts’ Book Club Live, Elizabeth has accounting bristles novels and two book books to accompany her podcast series. She started autograph her aboriginal novel, Scissors Cardboard Stone, age-old 29 while alive full-time as a affection biographer at The Observer. 

After added than a decade of autograph novels and alike best interviewing the best authors in the biz about their work, she has a lot of acumen to impart. Her fifth book – Magpie – is a twist-filled abstruseness centring about a adolescent couple, Jake and Marisa, their bedfellow Kate, and the advancing contest that disentangle aback Kate becomes complex in Marisa’s pregnancy. 

One of Elizabeth’s aims with Magpie was to accouterment the storytelling about motherhood in a way that hadn’t been told in a atypical before, cartoon on her own claimed adventures that she “passionately capital to see reflected in fiction”.

Her accord with books and atypical autograph has been claimed her absolute life, alpha with the “intimate bonding time” she aggregate with her mother, who accomplished her how to apprehend afore she started school. By the age of four, her appetite to become an columnist had taken root.

Really angular into the vulnerability of it – that’s area you coin the greatest affiliation with your readers

After spending best of her 20s grappling with “deep intimidation” about the anticipation of autograph a novel, Elizabeth credits the accommodation to “suspend my centralized critic” as the agitator for accepting started. Of course, that’s easier said than done – but the acceptable account is she’s accustomed Stylist her top tips for starting to put pen to paper. 

For her, atypical autograph at its amount is all about “helping you and your readers accept the world, and see it in a new way”. Here’s how to accomplish this, and more, aback you sit bottomward to address your book. 

Elizabeth stresses that planning can be added alarming than it needs to be, abnormally if you try to be actually specific about area you’re activity with every distinct chapter, appearance and plotline. “It can feel like accomplishing a afterlight timetable, so you put off the act of revising,” she says. “While it is accessible to accept some abstraction of area you’re activity to start, and area you’re activity to end up, it’s additionally important to acquiesce things to breeze as you write.”

If it feels like your artifice is acceptable too complicated for you to accumulate clue of while you write, or you’ve accounting the aboriginal abstract and appetite to bind things up, Elizabeth suggests aggravating article beheld to accumulate clue of things. “When I was autograph my fourth novel, The Party, I advised the adventure affiliate by affiliate on a big cycle of amber paper,” she says. “I had a filigree for anniversary chapter, and I colour coded what was accident to anniversary character. Seeing what was accident visually was actually helpful.”

You could alike actualize a affection lath for your novel, she says, to analyze how you’d like your characters and settings to look. 

When it comes to accepting started, Elizabeth says it doesn’t amount so abundant what you write, added that you are committing to writing itself and seeing what comes out. “When you address anything, there’s article of a natural, concrete unblocking that happens,” she says. In the beginning, the words you address “don’t alike charge to accomplish any sense. It doesn’t charge to accord to a atypical or be a actually formed idea.

“It can be a arcade list, or a account of things you feel accusable about, accumulate autograph to ameliorate yourself and until you accept words to assignment with,” she says.

A allotment of this process, she adds, is the time area you’re not autograph – and it’s important to not berate yourself for that time as that is aback your best account could be percolating. “If there’s article aural you that doesn’t appetite to write, it’s possibly because the abstraction is demography hold,” Elizabeth says. “And you can breeding that by actuality compassionate with yourself. A ample allotment of actuality an columnist is cerebration and creating a amplitude for those thoughts.”

Once these thoughts are on the page, you shouldn’t berate yourself if they don’t assume admirable or perfect, or actually what you appetite to say, Elizabeth says. What counts is starting, and this alpha point can be revisited, repurposed and re-angled during your alteration process. 

By Elizabeth’s logic, adorning your alteration adjustment and able yourself that you’re activity to trim aback – and sometimes repurpose – your autograph after will accord you abounding authorization to actually absolve all of your account after the burden of writer’s block, which is generally stemmed in the crippling charge to arise up with your best ones on the spot.

She adds that the alteration action is a huge allotment of autograph your novel, and works best if you’ve already accustomed yourself those dizzying stages of autograph (descriptive words and all). “Your account is a key allotment of your drafting action and is what leads you on to added thoughts and artifice points,” she says.

Once you’re accessible to edit, Elizabeth has a abundant top tip for accepting bottomward to the nitty-gritty.

Particularly for passages that accommodate a lot of description and adjectives, she suggests allurement yourself how anniversary book would apprehend if you took one adjective out – a asset of admonition that she was originally accustomed by biographer Sebastian Faulks.

“You don’t necessarily charge amaranthine paragraphs of aureate description,” she says. I consistently accumulate at the beginning of my apperception that aloof because I anticipate a chat is advantageous doesn’t necessarily beggarly that it makes the book added powerful.”

And she advises not to be abashed to “kill your darlings”. “I’ve learnt that annihilation is anytime wasted,” she says, abacus that account and passages that you cut from your atypical may additionally arise in your abutting allotment of work.   

A ablaze atypical starts with character

“For me, a ablaze atypical starts with character,” Elizabeth says. “I can apprehend a atypical that I will actually abatement in adulation with, and annihilation has happened, but the characters are so beautifully drawn.” She insists that characters are conceivably the best acute aspect of your plot, so it’s important to get them appropriate and altogether bright in your mind.

“It all starts with characters, and they acquaint the plot. I acquisition that the best novels are the ones that accept actually taken the time to get to apperceive the bodies that they’re writing.”

So how do you go about accepting to apperceive these characters? “Make a agenda of key details: ages, what colour their beard is, what their surnames are,” Elizabeth says, so you can body a archive of who this being is and actually footfall into their skin.

Then, footfall added into their accustomed routine. “Imagine what they ability accept in their handbag, or do they alike accept a handbag? I consistently dress bodies abnormally and accord them altered concrete appearances,” she says. “What clothes would they wear? I anticipate what addition chooses to abrasion says a lot about a person, and how they act.”

You charge to be able to apperceive how they would look, act and complete in any bearings as your artifice unfolds, and the best way to do this is to actually analyze and agenda the elements of your characters’ personalities.

As a beginning novelist, anticipate about what you can accompany from your own activity into your story. “Very generally what you anticipate of as your best claimed acquaintance or activity turns out to accept the best accepted resonance,” Elizabeth says.

When she was analytic for an abstraction afore autograph Magpie, she was told by her acquaintance – and Fleabag brilliant – Phoebe Waller-Bridge to actually anticipate carefully about what she was activity through in her life, and she encourages anyone attractive to actualize a appropriate affiliation with their readers to do the same. “I asked myself: what was accident in my activity appropriate now, what are my concerns? What am I cerebration about?”

Once you’ve unearthed these amount dreams or thoughts, you can use them to brainstorm what could appear in a fabulous universe. “Fiction is an absurd agent for truth,” Elizabeth adds, auspicious writers to “really angular into the vulnerability of it – that’s area you coin the greatest affiliation with your readers.”

And while attractive to added writers for afflatus is absolutely barefaced and can admonition with your autograph process, she encourages you to prioritise bringing “the character of your activity experience” to the table: “After all, no one has your voice.”  

Find added expert-led guides and tutorials on The Curiosity Academy Instagram folio (@TheCuriosityAcademy). 

Elizabeth Day is an award-winning author, broadcaster, announcer and host of the chart-topping podcast, How To Fail, which has featured guests including Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Gloria Steinem and Andrew Scott.

Her admission novel, Scissors, Paper, Stone, was appear in 2011 and won a Betty Trask Award. Her latest book, Failosophy: A Handbook For Aback Things Go Wrong, is out now. Her new novel, Magpie, is appear on 2 September by Fourth Estate. 

Images: Alex Cameron, Getty

How To Write An Intimidating Character – How To Write An Intimidating Character
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