Spent time last night on character work for my squad timeline in new #wip. “Using my difficulties” from work – smashing together personalities, reimagining petty squabbles. I know at least one author who turned tumultuous day job-inspired drama and team dynamics into a bestseller. So why not?
I think this round gets me to the point where I have enough interpersonal drama to start building the main plot around it. Squad dynamics in my books are one of the most fun things to do, and the books don’t really come alive until I know where those emotional conflicts are between characters.
God’s War books with Nyx and her team was first time I intentionally sat down and designed who the characters were based on max drama. “Character x is from here. Character y hates people from there. Character v is super religious. Character u thinks religious people are deluded.” Etc.
It’s basically casting reality TV show. “How do I smash together these people who would never have otherwise had anything to do with each other and make them work together?” is extremely relatable human story that we always find captivating, because we have to negotiate that every day (most of us).
Every scene then becomes a negotiation between characters, one based not only on what each person WANTS (which every writing book tells you to do) but ALSO on their personal traumas (the “mortal wound” as I often refer to it) and resulting fault lines (“triggers” may also be good way to put this).
One book (the Emotional Wound Thesaurus maybe??) described this emotional journey as a character who starts the book seeing the world in a broken or false way based on trauma and in the course of story learns to see it in a different way and alter or even correct it (or doesn’t, and that’s tragedy).
Character flaw for MC in last book was that she unquestioningly followed orders, because she wanted her mother/Lord to love her and be seen as a good girl. So every scene she’s in, she’s battling this desperate urge to be “good” with her own desires (and in fact trying to figure out what those are).
Once I knew that, it made it easier to come up with conflicts that inflicted maximum drama, where she’s fighting desperate desire to be loved and good, esp when people she wants to be loved by want different things. But without that, every scene is just a scene, an event happening; it has no MEANING.
This has always been my biggest struggle in writing, and something not many plot workshops explicitly address. We talk about rising action and falling action and conflict, but how do you CHOOSE what those conflicts are? I would send carts off cliffs all the time. That’s conflict and suspense, right?
What I’ve discovered is that if a scene is falling flat, 99% of the time it’s because that scene has no emotional meaning whatsoever to my protagonist (or anyone else in the scene). It’s just… Stuff happening. And humans are meaning-making MACHINES. Shit that just happens needs MEANING for us.
In truth, world is a bundle of fucking chaos. But study after study shows that people who are religious, who give events meaning, who have robust stories about their lives and purpose, live longer. It’s why it’s baked into us. It’s a survival mechanism. Storytelling in most basic form is just this.
So when “shit just happens” I focus on the STORY that characters are telling themselves about what just happened. The best is when two people have an argument or experience an event and interpret that interaction/event in totally different ways. ::gestures at world:: THAT’S where conflict is.
As a teen I had these “plot” cards that were literally just event cards – characters have an argument. Get into a car crash. Steal something. What was never made explicit was that those prompts are meant to give your characters an opportunity for their realities and traumas and needs to clash.
And if I DON’T KNOW WHAT THOSE THINGS ARE then those events are useless to me. Sure, I may FIND those fault lines by writing the scene (maaaaybe), but it helps to have some basic fault lines already set up ahead of time as a guidepost or rough map. That makes the whole process more exciting up front.
So now I’ve got basic info for both squad timelines roughed in enough that hopefully today I can get in some meaningful wordage. If you’re interested in exploring characters’ mortal wounds (this was huge key for me) this is a fun starter kit.
