#pov: you’re adelaide and can already clearly see what they still don’t

[lulu2992]

“It’s okay, he doesn’t punch as hard as you do…”

That one time Taylor, after finally confessing to some of her allies that, contrary to what the whole county believed, John hadn’t died in the crash of his plane, arranged a meeting between them at the 8-Bit Pizza Bar to determine the best course of action, and John made the mistake of approaching an angry Nick Rye who was trying to calm down outside. The pilot’s response was quick.

Shout-out to Adelaide for grabbing a cold can of Tana Cola from the nearby vending machine!

I still have “old” art to post so I’m posting it! This time, I decided not to draw a background because I wanted to try to use a screenshot instead. It was a fun experiment but I don’t know if I like the result... However, I did redraw the Tana Cola logo (included below)! Too bad it’s barely visible :’)

[cookinguptales]

feel free to ignore this question if its annoying or too time consuming or whatever, but I've just started uni and I'm doing a creative writing course but I don't think I'm particularly good. You're my favourite fic writer so I thought maybe you could explain your process? Your stories always have a way of making me connect and feel for the characters, but I don't know how to write like that or make people give a shit about whats happening in a story, or feel whatever emotion is relevant.

It’s not an annoying question, but I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to answer… I’ve never had any formal training or writing classes or anything lmao.

For me, I’ll usually think of an event or a concept that I’d like to have happen to the characters. Like, to make up some quick OCs, uhh… A & B. Let’s call them Adelaide and Bianca. To take an oldie but a goodie, Adelaide has a crush on her friend Bianca, but doesn’t want to tell her for Reasons.

Now, that’s a basic scenario. For me, the important step here is to really think about this character’s emotional core. What has their life been like? How does their personality reflect that? How do they deal with problems? What are Adelaide’s Reasons? Make sure your character’s decisions reflect their emotional core rather than the other way around. If you’re just bending a character’s personality to fit the story you want to tell, it’ll come off as a little false. If there’s a particular plot you want to tell, work backward. If you need a character to make a specific decision, think about what would bring them to that decision, and make sure that groundwork is laid in everything else this character says and does.

So I need Adelaide not to confess, which is a plot point I’m imposing on the character. I need to think about why this is a decision she’d make. Well, Adelaide’s parents can be dismissive of her sometimes, and she’s never really excelled in anything she’s tried before. So she’s scared to keep trying because she’s internalized this concept of her own inadequacy. To keep her likable, let’s say that she’s scared to try, but her own hopeless romanticism won’t let her give up.

So you’ve decided on a backstory and an emotional core. Now you have to apply this to the rest of the story. How has this personality affected her relationship with Bianca? Why are they friends and what is their relationship? How does Bianca change Adelaide’s thought process? What decisions will Adelaide make going forward based not only on her own emotional core, but on how the other characters affect that?

Adelaide, because she is too scared to say anything but has a big enough heart that she needs an emotional outlet, writes love letters in a diary that she assumes Bianca will never read. It is a way to indulge in her feelings without the stress of sharing them.

And what about Bianca? You can’t make the mistake of only thinking about the emotional core of your protagonist. That’ll make for a flat story. Bianca has a thirst for knowledge. She’s bright and intense and wants to know everything. This brightness is what attracts Adelaide, as she keeps her own light buried, but that is precisely what causes friction between the two of them. Think about how these two emotional cores might interact. Adelaide hides things, and Bianca is obsessed with uncovering them. Bianca must hate that her friend is closed off from her.

Clearly, Bianca is going to read Adelaide’s diary.

Now, you can make Adelaide a good writer or a bad writer based on your own conception of the character. I’ll say that she’s not the best writer, but that the genuineness of her feelings come through; after all, she thinks no one will read this, so she is able to let loose in this one portion of her life and nowhere else. It’s easy to become fascinated with genuine words like that, and a curious person like Bianca, who feels everything too strongly to hide any of it, will be a goner.

A writes a diary about her feelings for an unnamed person. B reads it because they’re nosy. This is really a very basic story, but you’ve already personalized it by getting into their heads. You don’t need to say what’s going on in both their heads; make sure you’re careful about point of view. Your POV character cannot know what is going on inside the other character’s head, so your narration can’t lay that out. But you know what’s going on in Bianca’s head, so make sure you write her with that in mind, and do your best to lay those clues for the audience through dialogue or body language. (Or Adelaide, if you go with Bianca as POV character.)

Now is when it will be most important to keep your characters’ emotional core in mind. You will have to think about where this basic story will go. What would your A do in this situation? Your B? Because Bianca is curious and attracted to these things, let’s say that she keeps going back to read Adelaide’s diary. She becomes addicted to her words. But she also feels guilt about snooping – gotta keep her likable. The more she reads, the more she becomes concerned about her friend… and the more jealous she becomes of whoever Adelaide’s interested in.

So now they’re in a bind. Adelaide has unrequited love. Bianca is worried about her friend, but knows she can’t say anything without blowing her cover. You can introduce a plot device here, but frankly, their own emotional cores make this situation untenable for long. They’ll explode eventually. Bianca will accidentally mention something in conversation she shouldn’t have known, or Adelaide will say something cryptic that Bianca won’t be able to let go of. Secrets will come out, as they must in fiction, and they will fight. Think about their emotions and their backgrounds to think about how they’ll fight. Offensively? Defensively? Will they shut down or will they cry or will they say things they don’t mean?

Adelaide has low self-esteem, but she still has the capacity to get angry. However, because she’s often so angry with herself, those angers will probably meld together. She’ll yell about Bianca’s invasiveness but that will eventually devolve into anger at herself – it’s what she’s used to, after all – and she’ll say something bitter about the diary being trash or her love letters pointless. Because she’s trash and she’s pointless and nothing will ever come of them.

We have reached the emotional height of our story! (Make sure you have one!) The decisions your characters make now will be the most important ones of the entire story. Because you have raised the emotional level up so high, anything you write now, your readers will feel twice as hard. So it should be good!

Bianca, as we have seen throughout the story, doesn’t always make good decisions. But she genuinely cares about her friend. That’s part of her emotional core, and an important one. She has concern for her, so all these confessions disturb her. And that curiosity has finally been sated. Is it worth it? Think about how this fight will interact with every part of Bianca’s personality. In the end, it will come down to her love for her friend and the awe she felt while reading those letters. That will override any anger or hurt she feels during the fight.

She’ll say that the letters were beautiful. That anyone who wrote them is beautiful, too. That she hates seeing Adelaide angry with herself when she’s such a good person. And whoever is the recipient of those letters is very lucky.

This is what Adelaide needs to hear, but it’s also what Bianca needs to say. When these needs intersect like this, you’ll have an effective love story. It makes the characters seem like they genuinely fit together. If you’re not writing a love story, of course, they don’t really need to come together well. lmao. But make sure you keep their personalities and aims in mind when you show how they don’t come together. Show why they have friction, and show why they’ll never quite come together. Make sure your readers understand why they have such irreconcilable differences; it will make fights, hatred, and rivalries seem more well-founded and less like your characters are dicks. (I mean, unless you want them to be dicks.)

By this point in your story, your characters should be changing. A story where the emotional core of a character doesn’t see any evolution is a stagnant one, and it can be boring. Bianca has changed; she understands her own selfishness and is filled with concern for her friend. She’s also, coincidentally, in love with her and her words and the emotional core she read in those words. This here, though, is when Adelaide changes. Not all the way; no one changes that much in the course of one conversation. (That’s important.) But it can be enough for her to start questioning her own assumptions and maybe lend her a bit of the bravery she always wishes she’d had.

She tells Bianca who the letters were to, and Bianca is relieved, but also finds that a part of her really always knew. And everything after that is really cake.

What I’m trying to say here with this stupidly long example, is that you need to think about your character’s emotions first. You can’t simply have them react to whatever you throw at them. You need to think about what is driving your character at every single part of the story, and you need to know your character’s emotions intimately. It’s worth it to spend a long time thinking about what makes your characters tick. It’ll make everything after that easier.

When it comes to fanfic as opposed to origific, it’s easier in one way and harder in another. You won’t need to come up with the scenario, characters, setting, so you can zero right on in how the characters are feeling. You can jump right in. However, you’ll also need to spend time thinking about the characters dialogue and actions in canon so you can tease out their emotional core. If you can figure out why they made the decisions they did in canon, you can figure out what they’ll do in new situations. You need to start with that character’s, well, character before you can do anything else.

Finally, it can be hard to write emotions. I find that it’s usually not particularly useful if a story just says that a character’s sad. So think about what sadness is and what it inspires. How do people behave when they’re sad? How does it physically feel inside your body, what sort of things does it make you think, what lies at the heart of that feeling? Try to express that in your work. Talk about the lump in your character’s throat, or the way they feel like they’re buried in something intangible. Talk about the decisions they make because they’re sad. (This is also handy because it’s a good way to show the emotions of a non-POV character.)

Try not to go too over-the-top here or to rely too much on cliches. Think about what sadness means to this character, and how they’ve trained themselves to respond to it, and that will help make things feel more genuine. Adelaide responds to sadness by burying it inside her and only letting it out in her notebook. Bianca responds to sadness by externalizing part of it, but burying the rest of it in action. They’re very different responses to the same emotion, and when you write that, you’re showing your readers characterization and the characters’ mental state. One-two punch.

As for how to make it relatable… Well, like what happened with Bianca, readers respond to genuineness. If it feels like a fully-realized character with real emotions, readers will find those emotions relatable even if they don’t feel them themselves. Readers who understand where a character is coming from will accept their decisions, even if they aren’t the same decisions the reader would make. Try to speak to universal experiences and emotions, though. Fear of rejection. The excitement of a new discovery. The longing for something better paired with the wariness that things might just get worse if they change. People will respond to things they’ve felt before, even if the character isn’t feeling them quite the same way. Just gotta keep it in-character for the character in question. Utilize common emotions to make it relatable, but make those emotions specific to your character to make things feel real. We all feel the same things, but we feel them all differently. That’s what makes the world lovely and frustrating.

Anyway, I guess that was a real long way of saying that, to some degree, your characters’ emotions should drive the story instead of the other way around. It will make any story feel more immediate and more believable, and will make readers feel greater kinship with your characters. Again, I’m no professional. But you asked me how I do it and that’s how I do it. So uh, I hope this was helpful.