One thing I tend to get praised for in my books is my characters. I seem to write characters that readers fall in love with and like spending time with. I have to admit that I like my own characters. I could spend time with most of them without them having to do anything (in fact, there are a lot of scenes that end up getting cut because they aren’t needed for the plot and are just the characters hanging out). I don’t have one particular process for creating characters, but there are a number of things I may do.

Sometimes a story idea starts with a character and I try to find a story to fit them into. Sophie in the Fairy Tale series was one of these. She’d been living in my head for a long time before I figured out where to put her. But most often, I come up with a story concept first and then figure out what characters I need to tell that story. Usually there’s a character who comes up first, who may or may not be the main character, and then the other characters build outward from there. In the book I’m currently developing, I knew something about who the main character would be, but they were pretty vague still. It was another character who came to life first, and then from there I was able to flesh out the main character, and as I developed the setting and the story more, other characters started coming into focus.

There are a few tools I use to find the characters. I’m fond of the Enneagram, which sorts people into personality types. Generally I can read through these and one will jump out as a good fit for a character, and then as I go through the descriptions, the character will start to come to life in my head. At that point, I start adding other details and usually don’t refer to the Enneagram again. I may also play with archetypes. At this point, I can do the usual character worksheets to get physical description, goals, needs, key things from the backstory, character traits and quirks, personality, likes and dislikes, etc. I try to throw in at least one thing that’s a bit unexpected so that the character isn’t a stereotype. Just one trait that’s the opposite of what you’d expect for that kind of person really brings a character to life and makes them feel more three-dimensional.

If a character hasn’t solidified during this process, I may “cast” the character, thinking of an actor who might be a good fit. Then I can usually start hearing their voice in my head, and once the character has come to life, I can ditch the casting.

A big thing about creating a character is what the character wants, and that comes in layers.

There’s the story goal, which is usually an external, concrete thing. You could write a movie scene (so no introspection) showing them getting this thing. It’s something that comes up during the story, mostly for the protagonist, but other characters may have their own goals for subplots, or they may support or oppose the protagonist’s goal.

Then there’s the personal goal. This is something the character already wants at the beginning of the story. In musicals and Disney movies, there’s often an “I Want” song at the beginning, and this tells you what the character’s personal goal is. Think “Part of Your World” in The Little Mermaid. She wants to be human at the beginning of the story, before she knows the prince even exists. It’s only later that she gets the story goal of getting the prince to kiss her so she can stay human. There may also/instead be a need, something the character needs in order to be their true self or be happy but that they don’t even know they need. They think the thing they want will make them happy or change their life, but the need is the thing that will really work. The personal goal may either conflict or dovetail with the story goal. The personal goal can be somewhat abstract, so you may not necessarily be able to write a movie scene of them getting it, but it will be clear that they have it.

Then there’s what I call the drive, the need deep down inside that causes the character to make the kinds of decisions they make. It’s a need that can never truly be met because they’ll always either need it or fear losing it. These drives are basic things like the need for love, security, power, control, etc. Yeah, everyone needs these things to some degree, but the drive is the one that powers the character, and it doesn’t change unless the character goes through a transformation so profound that they’re basically a different person.

Once I know these things about a character, I can develop a plot that forces them to change and grow and that will be driven by them making choices that are consistent with their character. But as I plot I may come up with ideas for the characters, so it tends to go back and forth. Characters drive the plot, which alters the characters.

I generally know a character is ready to write when I find myself imagining them in scenes that won’t be part of the plot, just them in normal life before the story begins, doing things like their job or hanging out with friends. I can see how they’d react to various events and what they do when there’s no crisis going on. Then I feel like I really know the character, so it’s time to throw them into the story.

I’m documenting my process as I start work on a new book, in part to give my readers a glimpse into how a book comes to life and in part to have as evidence in case anyone ever tries to accuse me of using AI (I don’t even know how to get to an AI to use it and have zero interest in learning).

I’m developing a story idea that isn’t ready to write yet. This one’s been on a long, strange journey. I remember the moment I first got the germ of the idea. I was making my bed (I actually have two ideas I came up with while making my bed — is that the new shower for idea generation?) when it struck me. I developed and wrote a whole book based on it, but it didn’t really work. I sent it to my agent, and she agreed that it didn’t work.

But then sometime last year (I think it was actually while I was making my bed) I came up with a different approach to the basic idea, aiming at a new audience and going in a very different direction. That was when things started coming together. I read some books and watched some movies and shows that were in roughly the same genre, mostly as a way of stimulating my brain along those lines. I thought about what I liked about those things and what didn’t work for me and what I would do differently, plus I knew what I needed to steer away from to make my take on it unique.

I also tried to find some real-world parallels to some of the things in the idea. Sometimes this is an excuse for me to read history, but I think using real events as a skeleton to a story idea gives it some degree of plausibility. It’s something that could happen because it has happened. This particular book has a bad king who’s a mix of a lot of bad kings from history — it’s interesting how many kings followed approximately the same pattern, and that pattern keeps repeating in other leaders. I think of this as the idea-generation research phase, as opposed to the fact-gathering research (how does this work, could this happen, etc.). It’s about sparking plot ideas. I give my brain a lot of input and then it breaks it up, mixes it together, and a story comes out.

At this point, I could have written the book description (the text that goes on the back cover of a paperback or that you see in Amazon listings), which makes it feel like I have the book all ready to write, but it’s still really vague. I only know the big-picture general things, but I don’t know what the world looks like or who the characters are as people, and though I know what the story goal and main conflict are, I don’t have a plot.

Over the years, I’ve put together a worksheet of things I need to know to create a character, and I’ve worked through those for the main characters. I’m starting to get a sense of who some of the secondary characters might be, but they aren’t really formed yet.

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to develop my world. I had a vague sense that part of it might be based on a place I’ve visited, but more to do with an area that feeds into that place. I found some videos about the region I was thinking of, which I haven’t visited, and that clicked things into place. I can suddenly picture the world, and some things about that gave me ideas of how the magic might work.

The looking for images is one of the weirder parts of my process. I find that it really helps me to find a reference image, to mentally “cast” the people and places. Once I have those concrete images from reality, the characters and places come to life for me, and then they immediately diverge from the real images and take on a life of their own so that if I could take a photo of what’s in my head it would no longer be recognizable from the source. I was looking through some files for an older book and found the pictures, and I didn’t even recognize what characters and places those pictures were supposed to be of, even though they inspired what was in the book that I wrote.

This whole process feels like I’ve got a lot of mist swirling around, and bits of it might start taking more concrete form so I can see images, and then it gets clearer and clearer as people appear and their setting becomes clear. I don’t think I’m yet ready to start working on the plot, though. When I try to work through the main plot beats, I don’t get any farther than the first act, so there’s a lot more work to do.

I do all this work by hand. I do have some character and setting sheets on Scrivener that I’ll fill out to have handy for checking details as I write, but my brainstorming is done by scribbling in composition books. Some of it may be formal, like going through my character worksheets or story beat sheets, but sometimes I’m just journaling as I think of ideas. I’ll start a page on a topic, like setting or villain, and then when I get an idea on that topic, I’ll add it to the page. I’ll ramble about magic systems or the history of the world. It’s all basically just capturing my thinking so I can remember all my ideas.

The issue of artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs, like Chat GPT) continues to cause turmoil in the writing and publishing world. There was recently a writer profiled in an article who claims to write hundreds of books a year, published under a variety of names, using AI, though it doesn’t seem as though any of them sell very well and the way she makes her money is by teaching other people how to generate books using AI and selling AI prompts and even complete AI books that the buyer can edit and customize. There have been authors caught leaving in the AI prompts, so it seems they used AI to write at least part of their books and just pasted in the result, and somehow no one actually proofed the final book to notice that the prompt was included in the pasted passage.

On the other hand, there seems to be a bit of an AI witch hunt going on among some reviewers, with hours-long YouTube videos analyzing books as to whether or not they may have been AI-generated or reviews calling out books for having hallmarks of AI — even though they were published before AI existed. Sometimes it’s more a case of AI imitating existing books and writers’ styles, since that’s what they were trained on. I have a number of my books included in one of the lawsuits against an AI company, since they trained their AI on pirated books. That means there’s a chance some AI writing could sound like me — and vice versa.

What some artists are doing to counter possible accusations of AI use is documenting their process. If they get accused of having used AI to generate a piece of art, they can show the pencil sketches and the various phases of the work. Authors are starting to do the same thing, documenting and discussing the process so that if someone accuses them of using AI, they can show how the book developed. The reviewers on the AI “witch hunt” do seem to check authors’ social media and other writings to see if there’s been any discussion of how the author feels about AI and of the process of creating a book. I suppose you could create AI prompts based on the kind of work authors can talk about, since we can’t really show the pencil sketches the way an artist can unless we publish every draft of a book, but showing that there was some thought that went into the writing can help counter some accusations, or at least shed doubt on them.

The tricky thing for me is that I don’t really like talking about a book while I’m writing it. A book in progress is a really fragile thing for me. To use a metaphor from my recent pottery class, it’s a lot like when you’re shaping something on the pottery wheel. If the thing you’re making gets jolted in any way, if your hands move in the wrong way, what you’re planning to be a vase may end up being a pitcher (true story). I’ve found that I can’t even talk in specifics to my agent. I thought it would save me a lot of time to hash out the idea with my agent before I start writing so that I know I’m on the right track, but when I did that and had an idea she approved of, I found that I couldn’t write the book. I didn’t care about that story anymore and when I tried writing it, it came out dull and lifeless. It wasn’t really my story anymore because someone else had been a part of shaping it. I may brainstorm with someone when I’m well into a book and need to work out a plot twist or an ending, but the book has to have taken shape by then. I can’t talk about it in the idea stage.

There’s also the issue of spoilers. If I talk too much about a book, I might give readers more info than they want before they get to read the book for themselves. Or it could make people think they’ve already read it. I could probably give more specifics in my newsletter because those are my most devoted fans who will be buying the book based on my name or the series. But if someone’s just scrolling through social media and sees something without registering who it is, there’s a chance that if they ever come across the book they might think it sounds familiar and figure they already read it.

And there’s what I think of as the Rogue One trailer effect. Between the time the first trailer for the movie Rogue One was released and the time the movie was released, the movie had been rewritten and in some cases even re-shot, so most of the scenes that were in the trailer weren’t in the final movie. There were even bits in the trailer that were never meant to be in the movie. The camera crew wanted to make the most of some of the locations they had for a limited time, so they shot things that weren’t in the script if they saw something that looked cool, and those cool bits were used in the trailer. The final movie was great, but the first time I saw it, it was disconcerting because I kept waiting for the trailer moments that never came. My books go through a lot of changes in the revision process, so there’s a good chance that if I talk about a scene I’m working on, that scene either won’t be in the final book or will be drastically different in the final book.

But I may try to document some of my process in a general sense without talking in specifics about the book. That can help readers know the kind of thought that goes into a book, and I hope that will show anyone wondering about AI use that my books are entirely artisan and organic. I’m in the development stage of a book so may have to catch up, but otherwise I’m starting at the beginning of a project.

For the record, I don’t knowingly use AI for anything. I feel like using AI to write would be like taking a forklift to the gym. Yeah, I could make it lift huge amounts of weight, but I wouldn’t get anything out of it, and it would probably cause damage to the gym. I write to get stories out of my head, and I can’t see how feeding a prompt to AI would do that for me. The story would still be in my head, and the result wouldn’t be the story in my head. I wouldn’t become a better writer by having a machine churn things out for me. I don’t trust it for research because it doesn’t give you facts. It gives you something that sounds like a report of facts, and the facts may or may not be true. I can’t imagine using it for brainstorming because it’s giving you the synthesis of what’s already been done. You’re going to get boring, generic ideas. And then there are the ethical issues. They were trained without permission on work stolen from other people (including me) and they have a huge environmental cost. The reason I say “knowingly” is because they keep trying to add AI to everything. I do use spellcheck, and while that technology has been around for a long time, they’ve started using AI for that (and making it worse). I’m not great at spotting AI art, so while I try to use artists and designers who avoid AI, people can lie and I might not know. I try to track images I use for promo that come from the image library of the applications I use back to the source to see if they were AI-generated, but it’s hard to tell sometimes and I may miss something.

My writing focus for February has been developing a new book concept. I’ve had an idea lurking for a long time, even tried writing it years ago but didn’t like the result, then recently came up with a new way to approach the concept that I think will work better (and be marketable), so I want to write it. And that means doing all the work to flesh out the concept so it starts looking more like a book. A concept is just a general idea — I had a vague sense of the main character and the plot and setting, but not much else.

As often happens, I felt like I had a full book ready to go until I started writing down what I know about it and realized how vague it was. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve developed the main characters and I have a lot of backstory, so I thought I was ready to work on plot, but then I realized that the world is really vague, and that will affect the plot. So now I need to figure out more about this world and society.

This kind of work is basically a cycle of fleshing out and sharpening what I have. I get a clearer character, which gives me more ideas for the plot, which gives me ideas for the world, which also affects the plot, and that then affects the characters. I guess it’s like sculpting, where you start with a block of marble roughly the size of the piece you’re making, and then you start taking off chunks until it’s sort of the right shape, and then from there you use different tools to get closer to the shape you want until you’re finally doing the fine detail and polishing it.

It’s been a few years since I last created an entirely new concept and new world, so I forgot how involved it can get, especially when the story deals with a big-picture world instead of one focused location. I tend to get impatient to start writing, but I’ve learned the hard way that the more thought I put in ahead of time, the better the book is. If the ideas are still vague when I start writing and I figure that I’ll get more specific as I go along, I seldom get specific enough and the book falls apart at the end.

I’d planned to start writing at the beginning of March to get enough of a very rough draft to see if the concept works, but I may have to delay that a bit. I have to remind myself that it’s better to get it right, and that will end up saving me time in the long run because I won’t spend months trying to figure out an ending after I’ve written the book. At the same time, this kind of brainstorming before I start writing is my favorite part of the writing process, so the temptation is to drag it out and put off the scary step of writing the first words, so I have to be honest with myself about which impulse is ruling me at the moment — is it the impatience to get going on a book that really isn’t ready, or am I lingering too long in my favorite phase? Or is the book truly ready to start?

Right now, I have no doubts. The book isn’t ready to start. I have a lot of work to do, and I don’t know if that will all happen in the next week.

Meanwhile, I saw yesterday that a big-name author has a book coming out with a similar concept. I think what I’m doing with it is going to be very, very different and even will be aimed at a different audience, but you could probably use the same sentence to describe the basic concept for both books. As wacky as publishing is, I don’t know how publishers would react (and I am hoping to at least make a go of traditional publishing with this). They could be in “this is hot, so we want lots more like it” mode so they’d welcome something that’s similar but still different. Or they could be at the point of “we’ve already done a book with that premise” even if the execution is very different.

I guess all I can do is write it and see what happens, and if a publisher doesn’t want it I can always publish it myself.

I’ve been playing with my “backburner” book for the past month or so. That’s a book I’ve been working on for ages that I’m still not happy with that I take out and work on when I don’t have another project going. It was a good project for while I’m getting settled and haven’t had full brainpower, especially since I didn’t have anything else ready to work on.

But this week I finally figured out a plot for Rydding Village book 4. I knew what the internal/relationship plot would be and even knew something about who the main characters would be, but I didn’t have a plot. That came to me, and now the book is coming together in my head. I’ve figured out some plot twists and backstories. So, since I need to get another book out, I’ll be getting to work on that. I’m planning to spend next week on plotting and outlining, and then start writing after the holiday weekend.

This weekend will be devoted to getting my house in order. I need to organize the basement so I can get some of the long-term storage stuff out of my office. I finally got the room-darkening drapes hung over the sliding glass doors in my den this week. They help block the afternoon sun to keep the house cool, and they block enough light that I can watch TV in the evenings without glare when it doesn’t get fully dark until after 9 p.m. I just have one more set of curtains to put up and then some general sorting and tidying, and then my house shouldn’t look like I just moved. I haven’t yet started hanging pictures, but I have to decide what I want to put up and where. Then I’m hoping I can settle down and focus on work and I’ll be starting the quarter in a new “normal.”

As for that other book, I need to think about it. I’ve found that I always tend to put it aside at about the same point in the story, which may be a sign that there’s something wrong there. It becomes less fun then. That is when things become more intense, which is supposed to happen at that point in the book, and maybe I’m just not up for that kind of intensity right now. Or maybe the last third of the book is wrong and that’s what I need to fix. I need to ponder that, but it’s something that can be a secondary project while the new book becomes the primary project.

Incidentally, though I often use the term “backburner” about projects, it’s never been something I’ve had literal experience with. But the stove in this house actually does have a back burner. There’s a burner that only offers very low temperatures, used for either things that require gentle heat, like melting butter, or keeping things warm. I can move a pan to that burner at the back of the stove to keep it warm while I work on something else, the same way I move a project to a lower priority while I focus on something else, but I keep it “warm” by thinking about it.

In addition to finding that I’d written my new next-door neighbor, name and all, into the book I’m revising more than two years before I met her, this review of the book has taught me a lot of things. One of them is that the advice to let a draft rest before you go back to work on it is really sound. You discover so many things when the book isn’t fresh in your mind, when you don’t remember why you wrote something a certain way.

One thing I’ve discovered because of this is the way that story elements can linger, even after you’ve removed them. In my earliest draft of this book, I’d given my hero a flaw, a fear that he’d have to overcome in order to prevail and achieve his goals. I ended up cutting this fear in later drafts because I never could come up with a way to make it relevant in the climax of the book. There were other things the hero learned, but this fear wasn’t an issue for him. I tried to keep this fear as just a character trait, a quirk like Indiana Jones and his fear of snakes — it doesn’t really affect the plot, and there’s never something he doesn’t manage to do because of snakes, but the fear raises the stakes because we know just how much he’s struggling. And then I realized I was devoting way too much time to something that ended up being less and less relevant as I worked through the story (he didn’t have to face his fear to get to the thing he wanted, unlike Indy finding that the Ark was surrounded by snakes).

But traces of it remained even when I cut the direct references. I’d structured the opening scene in a way that would ramp up the tension because of this fear, and that structure remained. Without the fear, I realized there was no point to this structure. It was only when I let the book rest for a while that this became obvious to me. When I didn’t remember why I did it that way, I was able to look at the structure objectively and wonder why I had that extra step in the scene that didn’t need to be there.

There are a few other parts in the book where the hero is reluctant to do the thing he used to fear. I’d deleted the reference to the fear, but I’d left in the reluctance and the internal conflict about it.

It was only through thinking about all this that I finally realized why I was never able to make the fear work in the climax of the story: He overcomes this fear in the opening scene. This is a fear he has to face down all the time, and he does the thing even though it’s unpleasant (again, like Indy and the snakes). There’s no suspense at the end whether he’ll be able to do that thing in the climax of the story. We know he can do it, even if he hates it. But there would have been no story at all if he hadn’t been able to overcome the fear in the opening scene. He wouldn’t even have been in the opening scene if he hadn’t overcome that fear previously.

I think it would have been a fun character quirk, but there were a lot of other things that were more important to incorporate into the story and it was already way too long, so I didn’t have room to weave in something that ended up not mattering, and there’s not even a critical moment where that fear raises the stakes for something the hero has to do, where his goal and his fear are in conflict and we know he’ll go for the goal, but it’s going to be unpleasant (like the snakes around the Ark).

The other thing letting something rest is good for is spotting jokes that don’t work. I’ll come across a line that makes no sense, and only after reading it a few times do I remember that I put that in as a joke. If I don’t get my own joke, it has to go.

My newest Shiny New Idea is really taking off. I seem to spend about half an hour in bed every morning after waking up, just thinking and processing all the ideas that are coming at me furiously. So far, I have an opening scene, a good sense of the two main characters, and lots of background for the world and the setup for the current situation.

I’m still devoting most of my working time to the proofreading I need to do, but having something more creative to work on helps keep me from burning out from doing the tedious work. The brainstorming and idea generating is pure creativity. I’m not worrying about putting things into words or pacing or plotting. I’m just playing what if. It’s like when I was a kid running around the neighborhood with my friends, declaring what characters we were and what we were doing as we did a sort of extended improv. Or acting out stories with my dolls or those little Fisher Price people. It’s daydreaming, only I write down the good stuff I come up with. This is my favorite part of the writing process, and it’s a good kind of work to do alongside something more tedious and less creative because it balances it all out.

The trick is getting out of bed, since that time between waking up and actually getting up seems to be the maximum creative time. Some of it is thinking about and processing things that came to me during the night, but then as I’m more conscious I start building on those ideas, and the more I think about it, the more I come up with. I had somewhere to be this morning, and I woke up well before my alarm, but that was when my brain kicked into high gear and I was afraid to get up until I’d processed all the thoughts and ideas well enough that I wouldn’t lose them as soon as I got up. I ended up lying there for about half an hour after I woke up, then I had to hurry and get ready to be at a morning meeting.

On the way back from the meeting, I stopped by the library to pick up some books for researching this idea. But first I need to do some proofreading. The new idea isn’t anywhere near ready to be written. I’ve learned from long experience that the longer I let an idea marinate, the better the book ends up being.

I’ve mentioned the perils of Shiny New Idea Syndrome before. That’s when you’re slogging away at a book, often in a phase that’s less than fun, like the middle of a first draft or proofreading, and then a brilliant new idea strikes you. This idea is a guaranteed bestseller that will make your career, and it’s a fully formed book. You need to drop everything to write it.

And then once you start writing it and you get past the beginning, it becomes hard, and another Shiny New Idea strikes, so you abandon the project and start on that.

This is why a lot of writers who have great ideas and spend a lot of time writing never manage to sell a book. They never actually finish one because they’re always chasing that Shiny New Idea. I started trying to write novels early in my teens, but I didn’t finish one until I was in my 20s because of this. Not only is the Shiny New Idea a distraction, but it’s usually not fully formed, so if you drop what you’re working on to write the Shiny New Idea, you’ll quickly run out of steam so that you’re tempted by the next idea that comes along.

I’ve learned over the years that the Shiny New Ideas are a good sign. Creativity breeds more creativity. The more you write, the more ideas you’ll have. If Shiny New Ideas are coming to you, that means you’re in a good creative space. But that doesn’t mean you should abandon your current project to pursue them. It also doesn’t mean ignoring them.

When I get struck by a new idea, I do a brain dump and write down everything I know about it. Sometimes in this process I’ll find myself making up even more. I just keep writing until I’ve got it all captured. Generally, even in ideas I think are fully formed, I’ll only end up with a page or two of information. That brilliant, fully formed book is really just a situation and a character, maybe an inciting incident. Once all that’s out of my head, I can get back to the current project and finish it. I can add to the new idea as things come to me, and by the time I finish the current project, that new idea may be developed enough that I can start doing serious work on it, like fleshing out the characters and working on a plot.

I have a current case study for that. I’m proofreading a book, which isn’t the most exciting work. I was chatting with my agent and mentioned this notion I had. It wasn’t even to the level of an idea. It was a kind of story in a kind of setting. She asked what the story would be, where the conflict would be, and I had no idea. That night, the story came to me and I felt like I had a good foundation for a story. When I wrote it all down, I had about three pages in a composition book. A lot of it was backstory and setting, with just a hint of what the plot would be. The plot part was essentially that two-sentence description like you might see about a movie on a streaming service.

Then last night the opening scene came to me. As I lay thinking about it after I woke up this morning, I felt like the whole book was coming together. I got out of bed and wrote down everything — and I had a page and a half in the composition book. I had a good opening line and some things that could happen in the first scene, which contains some of the worldbuilding. It always feels more fleshed out in my head than it is on the page. I do think this is a viable story idea, but it needs a lot more work before I’ll be ready to start writing it. In the meantime, I need to finish that proofreading.

I have had one instance since I started doing this for a living when I did drop the current project for the Shiny New Idea. I was working on the book that became A Fairy Tale and was really struggling with it. It just wasn’t coming together. Then I got the idea for Rebel Mechanics and started writing down what I knew about it — and ended up with a nearly complete synopsis. I decided it was worth putting the struggle book aside and working on the new idea. I did a lot of research to develop the world, then I had a proposal ready to go to my agent within a few months of getting the idea. That book sold to a publisher, and I ended up independently publishing A Fairy Tale, so it was probably a good call.

Now we’ll see how this new idea develops. I have most of March’s work planned, but when I get two projects off my plate I’ll be ready to start something new, and then I’ll see which project in development is closer to being ready to write.