I want readers judging my characters, I invite it. But, I’m also juuuust a little manipulative about it, and I do that intentionally as part of a designed reading experience. Like, moving between emotional states. Like, progression. That’s what I’m chasing. It’s not cozy & comfortable, but I don’t write cozy & comfortable books or tell comfortable stories, and if you don’t want to write those kinds of stories either, there’s some tolerance for judgment required.

The first thing I do, in pursuing that experience, is I give the reader some character behavior that is very easy to judge. Which is the fun part :)

We’ll use an example all the way through, so for this we’ll say a character’s father has just had a stroke. He is recovering, okay, he’s alive, but he cannot live alone for a while. His two daughters, his only children, are discussing what to do.

The older daughter, our character, says he can’t stay with her.

Her sister says why not.

Our character says because I don’t want him in my house.

Her sister points out that our character has a spare bedroom that no one is using and she doesn’t have a spare bedroom at all. Our character works from home. Her sister works forty minutes away, every day. More importantly, “that’s our father!”

Our character says nothing. It’s a clear NO for me, dawg.

Then I stop there. I do not explain her. I don’t resolve the scene with a nice little completion button. It might even be the case that I just stop there, I literally end the scene with “no”. A loop I opened remains open, uncomfortably. Because right now I want the reader to judge her.

Her father needs help. Our character could help. She is choosing not to. If giving the reader that experience makes you as the writer uncomfortable, this technique is not for you. This is for writers who want to write stories that reflect real human experience rather than protect the reader from it and I understand that makes a lot of people (also) uncomfortable.

Leaving that conflict unresolved is like leaving a wound untreated, everything in our being tells us to address it, disinfect it, and part of the discipline is leaving it alone.

If I immediately start explaining why she won’t take him in I am protecting her from the reader’s judgment. I don’t want to protect her yet. I want the reader to form a conclusion and feel very very confident in it. The reader might even feel morally superior, and that’s good :)

So I let that judgment settle, and then I move on to the next thing.

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I saw this person the other day at the gym.

He was wearing grey sweatpants and he had the darkest hair.

He had tattoos on his arms and on his neck, no color just that black/blue, and he had headphones and a phone in his pocket, I could see the bulge, the shape of it.

He was doing that machine where you sit and pull down a bar, I think it’s for shoulders but maybe back, too. I don’t know.

Someone, somewhere, was making these grunts and they would turn into shouts, and you could hear the weights clanking together, could hear sets of them banging across the machine rows.

Some shook the floor.

He had old dirty sneakers and the guy’s shirt was cutoff at the sleeves so when he was stretched and his arms were over his head and he was pulling the bar down his pits were clear in view. Black patches of hair, they were thick but they weren’t wild.

Hard to say if they were manicured but, I don’t know, I kept looking at them and I didn’t want him to catch me staring so I would only look when he wasn’t looking around.

The weight was probably heavy because during his reps he put his mouth in this weird shape and he was scrunching his eyes shut.

That’s when I’d look.

Those arm pits…

How I make something that happened to my character years ago keep generating conflict in scenes that have nothing to do with what happened…

All I ask of the character I’m working with is what it convinced them was true. Doesn’t even need to be what is objectively true, what I care about when I’m sitting at the keyboard is what this character feels is true based on what happened, even if that’s not the fact or the reality of the matter. It can also be an irrational thing, I’m okay with that, and I might even add that things might seem irrational to others (but are completely rational to the character) are things are highly interesting to me (and probably to a reader in terms of reading experience).

If my character had something happen to them ten years ago and all it gives me is a character who still, today, feels sad or guilty or angry about it, that’s useful. Sure, absolutely.

However, that emotion is a state. It doesn’t move. It’s stagnant. If all they do is sit around and think about it, imagine that reading experience.

Also, the other thing is it can’t tell me what they’re going to do today, other than tell me how they feel today. It’s not much more useful beyond that, so I have to find what I need for this character elsewhere.

Let’s say for example I’m writing a character whose father disappeared when she was twelve.

There was no warning for his departure, just one day he was there and the next he was gone and there was zero closure for our character.

We can reasonably assume she spent a good deal of her childhood believing he would come back but, unfortunately, he did not.

As the writer, I could use that to explain why abandonment is painful for her and why talking about her father is difficult for her and why she might avoid it, I could say that’s why certain memories still carry weight.

All of that is available to me and all of it matters. I cannot stress enough, it definitely matters.

What I want, though, I want that experience doing more work than that. To get it working FOR ME and for the story, I have to ask what did it convince her was true.

Maybe that was this: if someone I love is present with me, I know they’re not leaving me.

She believes that, whether it’s rational or irrational to me, the writer, that question is irrelevant. What’s important is that SHE believes that.

That one belief gives me plenty of information if I know how to use it (and I will show you right now).

I can use that to write scenes and those scenes won’t need to have anything about her father or her childhood, and if that sounds very foreign to you, I want to show you why these types of things get me so excited!

That belief doesn’t care what the scene is about.

That belief is ALWAYS running, under everything, ALL THE TIME.

We’ll say that years later she is in a relationship, because here’s the other thing, just because something bad happened to her, that doesn’t prevent her from wanting things people want, she still wants to be loved and she still wants connection. That belief changes how she approaches and operates within a relationship.

Watch what that belief does…

She wants to be around him all the time.

If she’s going grocery shopping or leaving the house for any little old thing, she asks if he wants to come.

If he’s watching TV or playing videos games or working in another room she brings whatever she’s doing in there and sits with him or around him.

If they both have a free Saturday she’s going to automatically assume they’re spending it together.

It’s important for you to remember, she is not consciously thinking if I let you out of my sight you’ll abandon me. This is just what closeness feels like to her. If I love you I want you near me. The belief has been running so long it doesn’t feel like a belief anymore. It feels like her personality or her reality so of course she’s not going to recognize it as harmful to a relationship’s success.

So we can play that out for a second, at first her boyfriend is probably going to love it. He feels wanted. They do everything together. One evening, though, maybe he says I’m going to stay home tonight.

You go out with your friends without me.

She says why.

He says I just want a night to myself.

Spending one night apart, to him, that has nothing to do whatsoever with how much he loves her. That is a completely ordinary request, but you have to remember, to her any kind of distance has become connected to loss and to abandonment.

With that understanding, space does not mean I need some time to myself. Space means something is wrong. Space is what happened right before her father disappeared.

Space feels like it’s going to happen again…

Her response, she is going to try to restore the closeness to relieve that discomfort and perceived threat. She might suggest, you know what, I’m not going out, let’s stay home together instead.

He says no.

She asks if something is wrong.

He says nothing is wrong.

But.

She doesn’t believe him.

If nothing is wrong why don’t you want to be with me?

When under threat, beliefs dig in harder, and she tries harder to stay close with him, to the point he starts feeling crowded. He asks for more space and the more space he asks for the more threatened she feels and the more threatened she feels the harder she tries to close the distance and the harder she tries the more crowded he feels.

So.

You can see how a person can unintentionally cause the thing they are most afraid of, she is suffocating him and driving him away because of what she believes about relationships, but what’s really cool about that (from a writing perspective) our conflict is generating more conflict without our interference, at all.

Their relationship is producing its own pressure without me having to manufacture anything from the outside like an affair or one person losing a job or someone getting terminally sick.

Everything that is happening between them is coming from the collision between what she believes and what the situation is doing to that belief, that pressure that’s bringing down on it.

Her father is not in any of these scenes.

I didn’t even mention her childhood in those scene parts.

She isn’t explaining her abandonment wound to him or defending it, she’s probably not aware how or why she’s doing what she’s doing, or is unable to see the connection between how she operates in a relationship and what she lost in her childhood. It is separated by years, and she can’t draw that line backward into her life.

The belief that formed when she was twelve is reaching forward from that painful past right into scenes that have nothing to do with what happened and, also, changing what happens inside them and after them

That’s how I make backstory become really useful to me. I don’t add it as a seasoning onto the story, I make it the base, I make it the protein the whole meal is built around.

This terrible, awful thing happened, therefore I believe this and because I believe this thing I do this behavior.

I don’t stop at how did this even hurt them, I ask what did this convince them was true. Again, not objectively true, just what feels true to this character.

Then I ask what will they do now, during the story, because they believe it.

I don’t want the past sitting there like something that’s got to be stewed on all the time in deep interiority or monologue.

I want it reaching into scenes.

If you want to build a character from belief outward, I put together 100 Story Engines Built from Belief, 100 beliefs you can use as the foundation for a character based on something from their past, then follow as they shape their choices, relationships, conflict, and ultimately the story itself.

Take one. Give it to a character. See what story it creates.

The link to that is here.

You are the person they call when something goes wrong.

You remember the appointment they would forget, and you talk them down when they’re spiraling, and you solve the problem with their landlord, you lend them the money, you pick them up from the airport, you know which medication they take, you know where they keep the spare key, and you know that change in their voice and their tone means tonight is going to be a bad night…

Over time you become important to the machinery of their life.

Their life works a little better because you are there, and there can be something comforting and concrete about knowing that.

You know what your place is in their life, and it is yours, it is no one else’s, and you don’t like anyone else even coming close to holding that place in their life.

You know what you contribute, and more importantly, you know why losing you would cost them something very valuable.

I’ve been thinking about how different that is from simply being loved, because love is terrifyingly voluntary. Someone can love you and still leave.

They can love you and decide the relationship isn’t working.

They can meet somebody else, want a different life, change and outgrow you.

There is no amount of being wonderful that can completely eliminate that possibility from happening or preventing what you can lose.

Being needed appears to offer something much safer, a reason they have to stay and keep you around.

I don’t think most people consciously construct relationships this way. Very few of us walk into somebody’s life thinking, Excellent, I will now make myself indispensable so this person can never abandon me. I think on some level, human beings are rarely generous enough to explain our own motivations with that kind of clarity or, for that matter, frankness.

I think it’s much more likely we tell ourselves perfectly reasonable stories in our head. I’m a giving person. I like taking care of people. I’m good in a crisis. They need more support than I do. They’ve had a difficult life. It doesn’t bother me. I’m happy to help, really.

Perhaps every one of those things is true, but there can be another truth underneath them. If you need me, I know why you’ll keep choosing me and why you won’t leave me.

That is a very seductive kind of certainty.

Imagine two relationships.

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I finished The Hartleys by John Cheever on a plane to Salt Lake City a long time ago and had to reread the ending because I couldn’t believe what I thought I’d read.

I sat with it for a long time.

Then I read it again because I felt what I hadn’t felt before from a piece of fiction, it was a speechlessness, absolutely. The story had shown me a truth about people that nothing I’d read before had quite managed. I became desperate to recreate that feeling for my future readers.

I was desperate to do that because the story rewired what I thought fiction was capable of. I don’t mean what it was allowed to do, I mean exactly that, what it was capable of.

I know why people enter into fiction. Most of them are looking for relief. The world is difficult and stressful and relentless and a story offers a space where things are ordered differently and where people behave better than they do in life and where consequences are proportionate to a person’s actions and decisions, and where love is sustainable and change is possible and the ending arrives with justice or at least resolution.

I understand that. I don’t think it’s wrong.

It’s just not why I enter into a story.

I enter into a story because I want to see the world reflected. The broken people and the self-destructive people and the people who cannot help but make their lives worse despite their best intentions and their best efforts and their genuine desire to be different than they are.

I’m interested in fiction that gives me an honest view of them.

It makes a person feel seen. Validated. Less alone in what they have witnessed and survived and participated in. There is a relief that comes from having it named accurately, when you read something and think yes, that is what it is actually like, someone else saw it too, someone else thought it was worth writing down.

I have heard writers say they find it difficult to write a naive character. That they become uncomfortable inhabiting someone who believes something the writer finds credulous or foolish or easy to see through.

That tells me more about their range as a writer than anything else they could say.

The inability to inhabit a naive person without interfering or nudging them toward a less naive conclusion, without leaving small signs that underneath everything they already know better, that is a form of judgment. It is the writer’s own discomfort.

The writers whose work I find most compelling allow their characters to operate entirely under their own logic. The writer never course-corrects for their own comfort or for the market’s comfort. The characters are allowed to be exactly who they are and to do exactly what that makes them do and the story follows that wherever it goes without apology.

That is what The Hartleys did.

The characters operated honestly to who they were. The result was a story that felt more true.

There is a subset of readers who are loud and passionate in their hatred for this kind of fiction. Who actively advocate against stories that don’t idealize. They encounter a morally reprehensible character or a person who doesn’t make good choices or a person who doesn’t change or an ending that doesn’t resolve cleanly and experience it as a personal affront.

I’ve thought about what they’re protecting.

My best guess is a version of the world that doesn’t intersect with how ugly the world can actually be and how often it can be that. I don’t think these readers lack the capacity for empathy. But I think the fiction they’re defending against asks something of them that they’re not willing to give, which is a sustained, uncomfortable encounter with a version of human behavior that doesn’t confirm what they prefer to believe about people.

I simply choose not to look away from that. They prefer to. I don’t think either of us is wrong exactly.

But I know which kind of writer I am.

And.

I didn’t arrive here immediately.

When I started writing I wanted to write the same things everyone else was writing. Stories that don’t have much to say under the hood. Stories that exist for taking a reader from A to B without anything uncomfortable to consider, no larger question to be answered, just tight and formulaic stories that entertain and nothing more. I wrote a lot of that. I couldn’t finish most of it. I became bored of my own work, not bored of writing but bored of what I was writing toward.

There wasn’t a single project that turned me away. It was an accumulation of dissatisfaction with work I didn’t believe in and work I couldn’t finish because I didn’t care enough about what it was trying to do. At some point I started chasing something more that is harder and more honest.

What I found on the other side of that pivot was that the writing became more enjoyable, not less.

I am deeply in love with everything I create now. Even the work that is disliked by the people who enter it expecting something other than what I gave them.

Maybe especially that work.

I don’t think fiction’s job is to make us forgive the people it depicts. It shouldn’t be arguing for forgiveness at all. What a reader can or cannot forgive is their own business and the story that tries to manufacture that forgiveness is producing a different and lesser experience than the story that leaves it entirely up to the reader, in my own opinion.

The writer’s job is to present the character’s actions and perhaps their motivations with honesty and precision. The rest belongs to the reader. Anything beyond that leans toward excusal and preaching and I’m not interested in either.

I also don’t think every character needs to be understandable in the way that word usually gets thrown around. It usually sounds like relatable. Empathizable. Someone the reader can see themselves in.

You can be compelled by a character without agreeing with a single decision they make. Consistency is what produces that compulsion more than anything else, I think, a character whose behavior makes complete sense given what they believe, even when what they believe is something the reader would never believe. That coherence is what makes a character feel true.

I am fascinated by the character who doesn’t change.

I don’t think change is impossible.

But I do think lasting change, which is the sort of change people idealize and strive for, I think it is so rare that some people might go their entire lives without witnessing it. I think without daily, hourly diligence a return to who we are is inevitable. I think most people are not capable of that diligence indefinitely. They tire of the effort. They tire of the daily work that real change actually requires.

I’ve seen this in my life and childhood with love, too.

Love requires a person to deny impulses they cannot fully control.

To choose, again and again, against the grain of something that feels natural. Anger. Jealousy. Lust. It is very easy to give in to those impulses even in small ways. Even in ways that seem harmless. People tire of what love requires and descend, naturally, into the human behaviors that don’t agree with what love needs from them. The sustained effort of loving well and fully is, I believe, one of the hardest things a person can do and most of us are only intermittently capable of it.

That is not a cynical observation.

At least I don’t think so. I’m happy to be wrong.

But it is what I have witnessed. In my family. In the people around me.

In myself.

Fiction that pretends otherwise, that delivers the change that sustains the love, that rewards the effort with the outcome the effort deserves, I wouldn’t say it’s lying, not exactly. But it is leaving something out. Something true and worth depicting.

As a writer, I am just not interested in leaving it out.

I don’t know that I have a definitive philosophy of fiction. I have a set of convictions that have hardened over years of writing, the work that those convictions produced, and the deep satisfaction of loving what I make even when other people don’t.

What I believe, though, most fundamentally, is this:

Fiction is interesting to me because it allows us to understand and understand behavior we might otherwise condemn. That understanding, accumulated across enough books and enough characters and enough honest depictions of what people actually do when they are under pressure or in love or afraid or running out of options, that accumulation does something important to a person’s capacity for empathy and patience that I think the world desperately needs more of.

I’m not claiming fiction fixes any of those things.

Could you imagine???!!!

But I think it teaches you to look at a person and ask what they believe before you ask what they deserve.

That, I think, is worth spending a career on.

There is a 150-year-old literary movement built around a character-writing problem we still haven’t solved.

The problem is this: how much does your protagonist actually get to choose?

That is a very literal question and I will tell you why that is a question worth your time as a writer in just a moment, because we talk about characters as though they walk into a story with every possible decision available to them, as though the only thing determining what they do next in your story is their personality, their desire, or their will. Sometimes assuming a brave character and a cowardly character are separated by nothing more than the contents of their psychology.

If that’s what you believe as a writer that’s totally fine, but I’m afraid to say that’s just not true.

That's the true problem of the matter.

Writers were becoming fascinated by this exact problem in the late nineteenth century.

The movement became known as Naturalism. What it was, what it was responding to, what it was trying to do, and why it still matters is useful to contemporary writers and their fiction.

Naturalism emerged in France in the 1860s and 70s, through the work of Émile Zola, a novelist, and spread quickly to America through writers like Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris.

It was a reaction against the Romanticism that had dominated literary culture for decades, the idea that human beings were essentially free, essentially noble, essentially capable of transcending their circumstances through force of will or purity of spirit.

Very romantic notions, indeed.

But Naturalist writers were skeptical of that idea (as am I). Deeply skeptical.

They had been reading Darwin. They had been watching industrialization transform cities and create new forms of poverty and hazardous conditions that no amount of individual virtue could escape. They had been observing, with the precision and attention of scientists, what actually happened to people under specific social and economic conditions.

What they observed was that human behavior doesn’t happen in isolation.

To an extent, you already know this to be true.

Your environment matters. Social conditions matter. Material circumstances matter. Heredity matters.

For Naturalist writers these are more than interesting details surrounding a character, they are forces acting upon them, shaping what they could see, what they could want, what they could reach, and what they could survive.

And here is where that’s profoundly useful to a writer.

Zola described the novelist’s job as something close to a scientific experiment. You build a character with a specific psychology and place them inside a specifically designed environment. Then you observe what happens when those two things interact. The outcome is not invented by the writer. It is produced, to put it bluntly. The same sort of way that chemical reactions are inevitable, these specific conditions and compounds produces this specific result.

That idea created some of the most devastating fiction ever written.

Dreiser’s Carrie Meeber in Sister Carrie, moving through a world where her options are so constrained that every choice she makes is already half-made for her by the circumstances she arrived in.

Crane’s Maggie, a girl of the streets, who never had access to the life the novel’s more comfortable characters take for granted.

These characters are not passive, they want things, they try, they make decisions. But they make those decisions inside conditions that have already narrowed the field of possibility in ways they cannot always see and cannot always escape.

How does that apply to my fiction? You ask.

Well.

Watch this.

Imagine two women who both desperately want to leave the town they grew up in. Both have the same desire and want it with the same intensity. In both of them lives the same longing for something larger than what is available to them here, in this small town.

One has savings. A university degree. She has parents who have told her they will help if anything goes wrong. She has a friend with a spare room in another city who has already said the offer stands.

She leaves that small town.

The second woman has sixty dollars until payday. Her mother depends on her financially, concretely, every month, the rent, the medical bills, the groceries. She works for one of the only major employers in town and leaving means giving up the job that makes the rent and food and healthcare possible.

She has never lived anywhere else. She has no savings, no degree, no friend with a spare room, no safety net of any kind, and leaving means abandoning the person whose survival is partly her responsibility.

Does she leave?

No.

She stays.

Did I just give you a brave character and a cowardly character?

No.

I gave you two characters whose identical desire produced opposite outcomes because the conditions surrounding that desire were very different.

The first woman’s life had already opened a door.

The second woman’s life had already closed it. Neither of them truly, fully chose the conditions that made that difference.

That is the Naturalist insight, and it changes how you think about character.

Because if you only ask what does this character want, both women give you the same answer. If you ask what does this character choose, they give you opposite answers.

Underneath both questions is something much more interesting: what choices did their lives actually make available to them?

This does not mean your characters have no agency at all.

Naturalism is not fatalism.

The most interesting Naturalist characters are not passive recipients of their circumstances, the opposite in fact, they push against them, they try to escape them, they find small freedoms inside large constraints.

Some succeed. Some do not.

What Naturalism insists on is that agency exists inside conditions. That your protagonist is not just a personality making decisions, they are really a person who arrived on page one already embedded inside a life.

A family.

A body.

A social position.

An economic reality.

A particular place at a particular time.

A set of relationships that carry obligations.

All of those things have already opened some doors and closed others before the story even begins.

This is where contemporary writers, I think, leave so much on the table.

We know what our characters want and fear and believe. We construct their inner lives. Then we place them in conditions that are largely frictionless, conditions that don’t push back, that don’t narrow the available choices, that don’t force the character to make decisions they can afford rather than decisions they most want to make.

The result is characters who feel rich but are, more or less, socially weightless. Characters whose decisions are constrained by their personality, not by the material reality of the life they are living. Which means the choices they make feel less inevitable than they should.

Naturalist writers were building entire novels around the opposite problem. The conditions were as carefully constructed as the psychology. The environment was as much a character as the people moving through it.

Here is a set of Naturalist questions I think you should be stealing for your own manuscript.

What forces have already shaped the choices they have available?

What has their economic situation already decided for them before the scene begins?

What has their family history already foreclosed?

What does their social position make visible and what does it make invisible?

What can they imagine wanting and what is so far outside their available reality that it never even occurs to them as a possibility?

Your character doesn’t make decisions in a vacuum. They make them inside a life that has already been doing its work on them for years.

The more accurately you understand that life, not just the personality but also the conditions, the constraints before your story starts, the more inevitable your character’s decisions will feel.

Inevitability, it’s worth saying here, is not the same as predictability. Inevitable means it could only have happened this way for this specific person under these specific conditions.

Predictable means the reader saw it coming because they’ve seen it before.

Naturalist writers are after the first thing, that inevitability. That is still the problem. It was the problem 150 years ago and it is the problem now.

Writers who are solving it, with characters who feel like they exist inside a real world that pushes back against them, are doing something Zola would have recognized immediately.

You know that revision impulse to add one more sentence just to make absolutely sure the reader gets it? Check what's actually making you uncomfortable first.

The impulse often gets described as over-explaining or as not trusting the reader, or “telling” instead of “showing”. Sure. Yeah. Those descriptions are correct as far as they go, that’s fair to say.

But I don’t think they go far enough, because they identify the symptom without identifying what produces it.

What produces it is this: writers can struggle to distinguish between necessary clarity and their own anxiety that somebody won’t understand what they’ve written.

Why that is so so deadly is that those two things, clarity and anxiety, they feel the same to the person experiencing them. They both produce this irresistible urge to add more and more and to explain and to make absolutely sure the reader cannot misunderstand or misinterpret.

They are valid feelings.

They have good and great intention behind them.

But they are different problems and they require different responses, instead of simply dropping a revision nuke on all of it and calling it a day.

If you cannot tell them apart in the moment, if you cannot feel the difference between a reader genuinely missing something and you being uncomfortable because they don’t know the answer yet, you will keep making the same revision in the wrong direction. When you’re reading your own work back, you will notice the difference.

And I know all of that sounds incredibly large and abstract, so I’m going to show you what that looks like in practice.

We’ll say you are writing a woman at her father’s very special retirement dinner. Her brother stands and gives a speech and he talks about what an incredible father their dad was, and how much his dad sacrificed for him and his siblings, and he is standing there gloating about how lucky they were growing up with him as their dad.

Everyone laughs at the stories.

Her father gets emotional and he gives great applause.

Then somebody asks our character if she wants to stand and say a few words about her amazing dad.

She says no, I’m okay.

They ask again.

Are you sure?

She smiles. It’s a small smile.

Yeah. I’m sure.

Her answer gets some strange looks and a bit of silence. And that’s it.

Later, her brother finds her outside and he’s angry. He says you couldn’t say one nice thing about him?

Just one? It’s HIS day.

And she looks at him for a very long while, but she has nothing more to say about it.

Now, do you know exactly what happened between her and her father?

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Dearest writer, you are passing out lines in your group scenes because you want to make sure every character gets some face time.

You might be stressed about it, you probably feel like you’re showing your hand.

Then you finish the scene and it very much feels that way, that you made up lines just to have a character have a turn, and you go back to the dialogue and redistribute the lines and try again and it still feels ick.

I want to help you feel confident about those types of scenes.

I want to reframe this with you, because it takes off all the pressure: presence in a scene is not about who gets a line.

It is about who has a distinct psychological lens through which they are experiencing the moment. Sit with that for a second.

When every character in the room gets a line shoved on them to say or is running the same general human response to what just happened, when they are all surprised or all grieving or all tense in the same register, the scene will feel like one personality wearing different masks no matter how different you make the dialogue.

The problem is not the lines, the problem is what you gave your characters before they walked into that room.

Let me show you a quick example.

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I want you to imagine your entire cast works at the same company and, unfortunately, they have just watched a mass layoff take place.

Now your cast are all in the breakroom together.

The manager clawed his way up from entry level, he has been in this industry for twenty years and he has watched people who worked hard make it and people who didn’t fall away. His belief, the operating logic he has been running his entire career, is that hard work is what separates the people who survive from the people who don’t. The mass layoffs were a business decision. The right people were kept. This was necessary, he says, this was good for the company.

The veteran employee has been at this company for twenty years and has survived five rounds of layoffs. He has watched people who deserved to stay get cut and people who didn’t deserve to stay get promoted and he has long since stopped trying to find the logic in any of it. His belief is that the world is fundamentally unfair and there is nothing you can do about it. You just keep showing up. He is pouring coffee. He is not saying a word. To him, this is just another sad day.

The office coordinator spent the morning helping walk out people who got cut. She sat with them while they packed their things. She made sure they had water. She believes every person is worthy of dignity and safety and she has just watched twenty people lose both in the span of a morning. She is crying quietly in the corner and not listening to what anyone else is saying.

And then there is the one who just got cut himself. He believed the same thing as the manager, that hard work protects you, that if you show up and do the work and give the company what it needs the company will take care of you. He built his entire professional life around that belief. He is collecting his things from the fridge. He is not sad. He is violently quiet, and he is staring at the manager.

Just staring.

That is the same room.

Same moment.

Four completely different worlds.

Not one of those reactions required a single invented or forced line of dialogue. The belief each character holds handed each reaction to the writer before the scene even started (because not everyone reacts with dialogue; more on that in a second).

The manager’s belief told him this was correct. The veteran’s belief told him this was inevitable. The coordinator’s belief told her this was a human crisis. The cut employee’s belief told him he is looking at the man whose thoughts about the world just destroyed his.

That is voice. Not verbal tics. Not forced speech patterns. Not a character who says y’all and another who uses em dashes.

We are harnessing the unique psychological lens that shapes how a character experiences their world.

This is very important because: We do not all interpret events the same way because we do not all believe the same things about how the world works, because we did not all grow up the same and have the same experiences.

This is what changes when you build your characters from belief before you write a single group scene.

What does this character believe and what does this moment mean to someone running that belief? If you have to ask yourself this question a dozen times, or a hundred times when working in a scene, that diligence is going to pay off by giving you a stellar f**king scene.

No two characters with different beliefs will experience the same moment identically. One sees threat. One sees opportunity. One sees humiliation. One sees nothing worth reacting to at all.

And, like I mentioned earlier, for some characters the reaction is not dialogue. It is action. It is silence. It is emotion. It is the thing they do with their hands or their body or their attention while everyone else is talking.

If a character never says one word in a group scene, that’s not an emergency to fix. Remember? You are not distributing lines anymore. You are not managing presence or making sure everyone gets face time. You are just watching a room full of people with different operating systems encounter the same moment.

The revision worth running on your own group scenes is this:

Pick one moment that every character in the scene experiences simultaneously.

Then remove every line of dialogue and ask what does each character do. Where does their attention go. What do they reach for. What do they ignore. What do they need to believe about what just happened in order to keep functioning.

If the answers are all variations of the same general human response, or what YOU would do, you do not yet know what your characters believe deeply enough to let them inform the character.

That is the work to do before you go back to the dialogue.

Dialogue that sits on top of a distinct belief sounds like a specific type of person. Dialogue that sits on top of nothing sounds like everyone else.

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best

AJ

It wasn’t too long ago that a woman got out of a rocky relationship.

To be fair, everyone around her, family and friends and coworkers, thought it had gone on longer than it should have.

They told her as much just about every chance they could.

After the split, the woman deleted him off everything. All of it. All social media, out of her phone, everywhere.

She made a clean break from all of him, and also went out of her way to make sure people in her life knew it was a clean break and that she was picking up the pieces of her life.

She redecorated her apartment. New furniture and photographs in the living room. New routine in the mornings. Journaling. Hobbies. She showed people the new version of her life with a very, very deliberate enthusiasm, saying she had processed everything and come out the other side a stronger person.

When his name came up, and it came up, because it always comes up, she was strangely generous. No bitterness. She said she understood why it didn’t work. She wished him well.

It seemed pretty clear to folks that the woman had evolved past wishing it had gone differently. Her family said they were proud of her and everyone who knew her watched her move through the end of that relationship with grace and composure.

But.

There was one problem.

Every night after work she drove twenty minutes out of her way to pass by his house.

Sometimes she stopped.

Parked across the street.

Watched his windows, watched the front door.

Sometimes she was there when a new girl arrived. Sometimes she waited to see if the girl would leave.

Sometimes the girl didn’t leave until morning.

But.

Still.

She waited in her car, watching anyway.

And, dear writers, the reader of that story now has a problem.

Read more

A husband and wife had a bad argument on Saturday night.

He found out she spent money she said she wouldn’t. It wasn’t a lot of money.

But.

It was enough.

And some distance had spread between them over the weekend.

By Monday night, he was still waiting for her to come back to him. Now, it wasn’t stubbornness. Not at all.

Inside his own internal logic there was nothing on his side that required repair or reconciliation because she was the one who had done the thing, and he simply had reacted to the thing. In his mind, you wait for the person who caused the problem to acknowledge it.

He had always operated in this way and she always came back around and he thought she would come back again.

On Tuesday, she started moving around him and the house rather carefully. Choosing her words before she said them. Asking him things and saying things in a register that was too neutral.

He noticed.

He logged it.

He felt she was managing him.

He had told her once how that made him feel. She had said she didn’t know what he meant. He had added that to the list too.

That growing list of resentments.

On Wednesday she tried to tell him something.

She said she felt like every time she raised something real, a concern or a problem or something the husband had done wrong, it became, instead, about something she had done wrong.

She said she wasn’t trying to attack him. She just wanted him to hear her.

But he only heard attack.

Because hearing her required accepting that he had a hand in causing a problem, a mistake. And that door was the one he could not, and would not, open. So what arrived to him as his wife trying to be heard, that was just more assault.

He added it, too, to the list.

The list of resentments.

By Friday he had, in his mind, been patient with her for six days. In his telling of the week to friends and family he had been generous and HE had been the victim, he told them. He didn’t make the mistake. She did. He had been restrained with her. He had given her room to come to terms with what she had done. Because, he told them, he never did anything wrong in their relationship. It was always HER.

It never even occurred to him that he had not once moved toward her, that distance had been allowed to grow rather than close.

And she had stopped trying by then.

And, also, the reader already knows she has probably been leaving for years.

She most likely ran out of the desire required to keep crossing the distance between them alone, and had run out of patience for being blamed, endlessly.

Eventually you stop crossing rooms and distance that your partner/lover/husband ever crosses back, and you stop accepting the burden of blame in a one-sided relationship.

The husband never once asked what he might have done to make coming back harder, and he never, not one time, accepted responsibility for his part in their problems.

Writers.

A coping mechanism is more than a character flaw.

It is not a villain trait or a dramatic device or something a character needs to overcome by the third act (although they can). It is something much simpler and much more durable than any of those things.

It is a behavior a person built after something painful, and they built, without their knowledge, to make sure that particular brand of pain never happened again. And it works, or at least it worked, once, in the environment that produced it.

The eventual problem is that the environment changes and the coping mechanism doesn’t. It keeps running the same logic in circumstances that no longer require it, and the by-product of that is that it keeps producing consequences its owner never intended and cannot fully see.

In that short little story, the husband’s coping mechanism is externalization. That is to say, the learned and automatic habit of locating the source of all pain and problems outside himself.

It is not dishonesty.

It is not intentional manipulation.

It is the only way he knows how to survive being in the wrong; by never being or admitting to being in the wrong.

Somewhere in his past, accepting responsibility for something meant something worse than the thing itself. And so he built a life around not accepting responsibility and accountability. And now it runs without him or his awareness. In every argument. Inside every moment his wife attempts to tell him something true or something he’s doing wrong about their dynamic and every time he hears threat instead of truth.

He is not doing this to her.

He is doing it because it is the only thing he knows how to do.

That distinction is everything for the writer.

Because here is what a coping mechanism does that no plot device can replicate: It generates conflict before anyone does anything wrong.

Writers, when they need tension in a scene, introduce something from the outside. Including but not limited to: an argument. A betrayal. A secret that comes to light. A rival. A deadline. These things work.

They produce friction and momentum and a reader who wants to know what happens next. But they are all external. They arrive from outside the character.

Which means the character is always responding to something rather than producing something. The conflict is situational. It can be resolved when the situation resolves, and when it resolves the character walks away essentially unchanged because the conflict was never really about them.

A coping mechanism produces conflict from the inside.

It doesn’t arrive, it was already there, hiding so very well, built into the character’s psychology before the story began, running automatically in every scene. The conflict it generates is not situational. It cannot be resolved when the situation resolves because the situation is not the source.

The character is the source.

And the character carries it into every room, every relationship, every attempt to get what they need.

That is, what I talk about all the time on my social media, identity conflict, and it is profoundly compelling in fiction.

This type of conflict is one of the biggest differences between a story that moves and a story that means something to a reader.

Situational conflict moves the plot. Identity conflict moves the character.

What a coping mechanism does for the writer specifically is remove the burden of manufacturing obstacles.

When you know your character’s coping mechanism you know exactly how they will pursue what they want and exactly why that pursuit will keep missing the target. You don’t have to invent reasons for things to go wrong. The coping mechanism invents them automatically, in ways that could only belong to this specific person running this specific internal logic.

The husband in that story wanted to repair things with his wife. The coping mechanism tells him to wait, it’s not your fault. It tells him to let her carry the repair because he holds no blame. And so he waits. And she gets further away. And his waiting, which he experiences as patience and superior, is the thing producing the distance he is hoping will resolve.

The writer didn’t manufacture that obstacle, the coping mechanism built it. Out of the character’s own psychology, the very thing he developed to protect himself.

That is the wonderful gift a coping mechanism gives you, that keeps on giving. The reader watches that conflict accumulate and thinks of course. Of course that is what he would do. Of course that is why it isn’t working. The reader never needs to be told why the story is going the way it is going, they can feel the logic of it because the logic belongs to the character and not to the plot.

Find the coping mechanism in your character. Not the wound, the behavior the wound produced that is designed to prevent another wound of the same kind. This is the automatic behavior they do to make sure that particular brand of pain never happens again.

Then ask what they need in this story that the coping mechanism will not let them have directly: That gap between what they need and what their psychology will allow them to ask for is where your conflict ignites.

Everything else follows from it.

The conflict builds itself.

The obstacles generate themselves.

Nobody in this story is intentionally cruel. Nobody is intentionally trying to cause harm. He loves her. But she is tired.

And the marriage is not falling apart because of the money or the argument or the week of silence that followed. It is being dismantled by the one thing the husband’s entire psychology is constructed to prevent him from doing.

That is not a plot problem.

That is a character with a coping mechanism.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this article. If you enjoyed it and the work I do here, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the continued work here, it means so much to me :)

Also, if the core of this article resonated with you and it speaks to the types of stories and characters you wish to create, I have a tool that can help you get started and get over the hardest part about approaching these types of stories and characters, that is to say, the psychological work (lol). I pulled together 100 character-coping-mechanism-based starting points to help you get your writing-legs started, until you’ve practiced enough to start developing your own. If you want to start with one already built: belief, behavior, pressure and all, there are 100 of them at the link HERE.

Thank you for reading!

-AJ

A year ago, a husband cheated on his wife. He said it was a mistake. After some rocky times they reconciled. Or something close to it.

One night they were watching TV before bed, just the two of them sitting in TV noise and TV light, and the husband said, I’ve been thinking about private time. Time set aside each week. Just for me.

The wife said, private time?

He said, people say in relationships you need time for yourself. That it won’t set itself aside. That it’s healthy.

She said, we’re apart from each other all day.

He said, Wednesdays. I was thinking Wednesdays. Just Wednesday afternoons. Evenings. Something like that.

She said, every Wednesday?

He said, it’s perfectly normal and reasonable. It’s healthy for us. It’s only healthy, hon.

She said, who is telling you this? Who is telling you to ask for space?

He said, I was reading up about it.

She said, you read up about asking for space? What?

Read more

I fled the midwest while I was in my mid-twenties. I am now six months from 40, which in itself feels very strange to me.

That, without my permission, I am getting older.

My hometown is small, the sign outside of town correctly identifies it as a “Village”. Given its size, I think you’d agree. There are ~1800 souls who call it home, last I checked.

A lot of my fiction work circles a version of this little pocket of the Bible Belt, and it appears in a lot of my fiction as the town of “Larton”.

On a map, it’s called something else.

Before I packed my car and headed West, I had been suffering a good deal of restlessness.

In the area, there are three major employers, one of which was a health insurance company, one you’ve probably heard of, which gainfully employed a good chunk of families. If you got in, you had a career for life that allowed you to provide.

With some help and some luck, I was hired by that insurance company, and they paid me to examine and pay health insurance claims.

I remember feeling so fortunate. But. Six months in, there was a day where I was at my desk and I was looking at the older folks in the break room and at their cubicles, and I could not help but think about the gap between me and them, and about what would fill it.

A lifetime in that cubicle.

And my good fortune, over time, felt like a prison. I had no children (I still don’t). I had no significant other (I still don’t). No one depended on me (my only dependent now is my Husky). I certainly don’t intend to dismiss any of those things or ways we function for other people, kids and spouses.

There is honor, I think, in being that figure for others (perhaps to a healthy extent). I recognize my station is different.

Then and onward I had trouble sitting still and I had trouble controlling my day-dreaming and controlling my want for bigger things in life.

I had, in my private time and for much of my life, a meager habit of writing very poorly constructed stories, I will say. But it was a direction.

There came a day where I decided I cannot sit in that cubicle for the rest of my life. Not without having tried for something bigger.

A year later, I moved to Los Angeles.

Friends and family understood my, we’ll call it need, my need to leave. My mother was my biggest advocate, and for all of her life she was very good at it. As much as she wanted me home.

I think what was very telling, at least to me, was how easy it was for me to go. You say goodbye to so many people and things. But I never experienced any doubt in that.

I remember feeling electric when I pulled away from my mother’s home and just started driving.

Some days I think, if I had to do it over, I don’t know I would.

But some days I can very easily say I would make that same choice again.

I learned chasing something has a cost. Sometimes that price tag isn’t known to us until after the purchase.

I missed birthdays and family dinners and hardships. When my mother got sick, and before she passed, I had been making arrangements to temporarily move back to be near her.

But.

Again.

Things happen without our permission. Someone told me the gift and the curse is that life moves. Always.

The first place I lived in LA was a small studio apartment in Ktown. Near the Wiltern. The property manager was a flamboyant gentleman named Oracio. He was so lovely. And kind.

Always checking in on me.

But.

Falling in love with LA was tough.

There’s an abundance of friction and ugliness here. Vanity sits at the surface. Because it wants to be seen. Getting through it takes time and patience.

On the other side is where all the culture and community is hiding. It’s like the barrier to entry. The midwest has a similar barrier, but it’s not vanity. It’s politeness. Behind some of that is where their flavor of ugliness hides.

That can be said of most things, I suppose.

But I do miss the humility of the midwest. No one opens a conversation trying to impress you with what projects they’re in. What commercial they booked. Trying to see how you can further them.

I miss that, the “what you see is what you get”.

No navigation needed.

I met so many people my first few years here. I remember very few of them. Some are still around. True to that person who fled the midwest, I chased writing.

Some really cool opportunities came my way. This was a long time ago, the industry functioned a little differently back then. Like, more of an openness and willingness, maybe.

I was here only a few months before I got my first manager, and was spending every Saturday for a few months at Billy Ray Cyrus’s house, helping him write a film. He had this huge pedestal with an ornate bible right at his entry door. And he had the biggest dog I’ve ever seen.

I can’t remember the dog’s name.

That movie didn’t go anywhere (lol).

Many situations like that came my way, and even if they never went anywhere, I hold them with gratitude.

Whenever I go home, things are slightly different.

New stores, old ones gone. People are getting older. Some have changed, some haven’t. Some don’t want to.

But something else.

I don’t know, maybe I’ve been in LA too long. But.

It doesn’t feel like home anymore. In some ways. Like my spot is gone. My seats taken. Feels foreign to me. Now and then I’ll drive by the house my parents lived in. My high school. Little reminders and little connections to memories.

Sometimes a longing for those things again. At the other end of that longing is more longing. Then sadness.

I go back and forth on this. If LA is permanent or temporary. Depends on the day. If it’s not LA, I don’t think whatever happens next is the midwest, though.

I have fallen for Southern California. But. IDK.

It is funny, though. In conversations here, when people ask where you’re from and you say the midwest, there seems to be a fondness for our people here. There’s something about us that people enjoy.

Or crave.

I think it’s the humility.

The opposite of vanity.

A few months ago, a daughter mentioned to her mother that her uncle had called her. They were cleaning out the garage and were in the back, where all the boxes were stacked.

Her mother went very still. She was holding a box filled with cleaning bottles. She said don’t call him back.

The daughter said he seemed really nice.

Her mother said he always does.

They did a bit more organizing, then the daughter said he asked about you.

Her mother dropped a box and it spilled its innards and she got down on her knees to scoop them back in, and she said what did you tell him?

The daughter said I said you were fine.

Her mother made a noise, a rough noise, and lugged the box away.

The daughter said should I not have said that?

Her mother didn’t answer that. She said just don’t call him back.

But the daughter said he asked me to—

Don’t call him back!

And that was the end of it.

Now, I want to call your attention to something. Nobody in that exchange explained anything.

Nobody named a history or described a wound or told the other person, or the reader, what had happened between this woman and her brother or how long ago it happened or what it cost either of them or even the nature of it.

And yet you already know a few things about that history that, right now, doesn’t quite have a shape yet.

Read more

There was a person who grew up in a small farming community where the stated belief that everyone in town held as true was, really, quite simple.

You show up for people. That’s what neighbors do.

He grew up hearing it said at church and at dinner tables and at the feed store and at the community pool. It wasn’t just a value shared among the community, it was the identity of that small piece of land and the homes upon it. We take care of each other here, and he believed it and he believed it completely.

Without question.

And then.

He started watching what actually happened around him.

A family two properties over fell behind on their harvest. It had been a bad season, bad weather at a bad time, too dry, and there was equipment that broke down when they couldn’t afford for it. Neighbors had promised to help. The day came and went and most of them didn’t show up.

The ones who did left early.

The family lost a significant portion of what they’d worked all year to grow. Nobody talked about it much afterward, there was no reckoning, no acknowledgment, life just moved on.

He was twelve. He filed it somewhere in his brain without really knowing he was filing it away.

A few years later a kid his age got hurt, it was serious enough that the medical bills became a crisis for his family.

He watched the community’s response.

It wasn’t to organize, wasn’t to pass a jar at church or coordinate meals or show up with labor, although those things were attempted. But the attempt was short-lived and produced very little.

The biggest response from the community, well, it was to gossip.

To ask out loud and frequently how parents could be so stupid as to let something like that happen.

To make the family’s hardship into a cautionary tale about their own poor judgment rather than a reason to show up.

The family was struggling and the community’s primary response was to make sure everyone understood it was their fault.

He was fifteen. He filed that somewhere too.

The year he turned seventeen a woman down the road lost her husband very suddenly and very unexpectedly.

The community showed up for that one.

The casseroles arrived and people sat with her and held her hands and told her, honey, you’re not alone in this, okay? Okay?

He watched it happen and felt something restore itself in him, see, this is what the community actually is, this is the belief made real.

And then two weeks passed and the casseroles stopped and the visits stopped and the calls stopped and the woman was alone in the exact isolation they’d promised she wouldn’t be in. Because life had moved on and taken the people with it.

The grief had a window and the window closed and nobody seemed to notice they’d stopped showing up because they were already somewhere else.

He was seventeen. He filed that somewhere, too.

And then, through much difficulty and self-discovery, he came out of the closet. He was eighteen.

He’d waited until he felt ready. Until he thought he understood the community well enough to know what he was walking into.

But.

He didn’t know what he was walking into.

The harassment was immediate. The vandalism was profanity-laced and personal and appeared on the home he and his family had lived in forever. It was left there by people who had sat at his family’s table and who had borrowed equipment and shared harvests and shaken his father’s hand at church every Sunday for as long as he could remember.

Standing in front of what they’d written on his family’s home, the nastiness of it, something uncomfortable settled in him that had been forming for years without his knowing it.

The community had never believed what it said it believed.

We take care of each other here had always meant we take care of each other when it costs us absolutely nothing.

When it makes us look good.

When the person needing care is the right kind of person having the right kind of problem in the right kind of way at the right kind of time.

He hadn’t made that conclusion consciously, he hadn’t sat down one day and decided the community was a lie.

Life had been writing it in him, in the dark, for years, the harvest, and the medical bills, and the widow and her casseroles and then her silence; every moment where the stated belief and the actual behavior had failed to match.

He’d filed each one without knowing what file he was building. And standing there at eighteen he was holding a quiet conclusion.

You, the writer, your life is full of these.

Most arrived the same way his did, as accumulations. A friend who flirted with the guy you said you liked, and then again, until you stopped being friends. A workplace where the person who kissed the most feet kept getting the thing you’d earned, until you understood something about how institutions actually work that nobody had told you and nobody needed to.

A family member who lied to your face and then again and then again until you arrived, without deciding to, at a different understanding of what you could count on from them.

No single moment changed you.

But somewhere along the way without ever consciously deciding it you stopped expecting something you used to expect without thinking, and the world argued you out of a belief you’d held without knowing you were holding it, so by the time you noticed the conclusion it felt like something you simply knew as truth.

That shift, that conclusion is the most powerful story material you will ever have, that change in perspective.

Those quiet conclusions came from your specific experience of being alive. They were written in you by things that happened to you specifically in the specific way they did. The particular way you now see the world because of what it cost you to see it, belongs only to you.

Every other source of story material is available to every other writer. The news. The history. The what if question in the shower. Any writer can find those. Any writer can use them.

Nobody else has your quiet conclusions and nobody else arrived to them from the unique patterns that led you there. We might share similarities, but none of us are identical in that way.

And.

Here’s where it gets interesting for fiction.

The quiet conclusion is yours. But the character you will feel most alive creating doesn’t share it.

You don’t write a character who knows what you know. You write the character who still believes what you used to believe, before life argued you out of it.

Take their conclusion. The community doesn’t actually show up for people when it costs them something real. Now write the character who still believes the opposite. Who takes that belief, we take care of each other here, into a situation where reality is about to disagree with it in ways they haven’t anticipated.

Maybe they move back to a small town after years away. They’ve been living in cities where people are anonymous and transactional and they’ve decided they want something different. They want the version of community they grew up believing in. So they show up for people. Brings meals. Helps with harvests. Sits with people who are grieving. They invest in the belief completely.

And then something happens to them.

Something that requires the community to show up.

And you already know what happens.

You know it as someone who has lived inside that conclusion. You know which moment will be hardest for them to explain away.

You know how the belief will try to protect itself, maybe they didn’t ask clearly enough, maybe they caught them at a bad time, maybe if they just keep showing up for others they’ll eventually show up back.

You know the texture of what it feels like to hold onto something after the evidence has started making its argument.

That’s not craft knowledge. That’s lived knowledge. And it produces something on the page that no amount of plot invention ever could, the feeling that whoever wrote this has actually been somewhere. Has actually learned something. Is writing from the inside of an experience rather than the outside.

So before you look anywhere else for your next story ask yourself one question.

What do I know now that I wish younger me never had to learn?

Whatever sentence comes to mind, there’s a character somewhere who still believes the opposite. Who is about to walk into a version of the world that is going to argue with that belief.

Start there.

Give that character the belief. Give reality permission to disagree with it. And then follow what happens when someone can’t accept what the evidence is telling them, because accepting it means accepting a conclusion about the world they aren’t ready to live inside yet.

That’s where powerful stories begin. In the collision between what someone believes and what keeps happening anyway.

If you want a step by step process for taking those quiet conclusions from your own life and turning them into character psychology, conflict, dialogue, and complete story engines, that’s exactly what my guide “Trauma as Engine” is built to do. With the belief you have lived, it helps you generate conflict, dialogue, plot, behavior, and your story’s engine.

It helps you separate the belief from the autobiographical event. So you’re not writing your life.

You’re writing the psychology life left behind.

You can find that here.

The experience of doing everything correctly in your novel and still feeling emptiness in something you’ve lovingly written is devastating.

In my google drive rests a graveyard of novels that, although they may be emotionally very loud, they are also emotionally empty. I think it’s devastating to be in that spot because it feels like the problem exists where you cannot find it.

The emptiness you’re feeling isn’t coming from the plot. It is never coming from the plot.

I’ll say that again.

That emptiness is NEVER coming from the plot.

Below are at least four reasons and four places that I know of that can make a story feel emotionally empty.

The good news is that these are all correctable. The bad news is that some of these can cause the other reasons and vice versa.

Read more

Every time a reader encounters a character, a relationship, a mystery, or a moment of tension in your story, they’re doing something you may not have accounted for.

They’re concluding things.

Readers can be incredibly impatient in that most are not waiting to form opinions and predictions. Most are not holding back judgment until the narration explains what’s happening (which if you’ve been following my social media and my other substack posts, you’ll know I am STAUNCHLY averse to using narration to explain anything at all).

Readers are always subconsciously (and sometimes consciously), actively assembling evidence, drawing inferences, predicting, and forming interpretations, sometimes before you’ve finished giving them the information to do it with.

Please hear me when I say this, because I see this in my comment sections from writers who are horribly afraid ALL. THE. TIME.

Readers will form a wrong conclusion.

This is not a problem.

It’s not.

Sit with that for a moment, because a reader coming to the wrong conclusion about something in your story is not an emergency that needs to be corrected.

And it might feel counter intuitive when I say this, but it can be a very, very powerful mechanism available to a writer. There is a caveat to this, however, and the question I have for you, the writer, is whether you’re using it deliberately or leaving it entirely to chance.

Writers spend a good chunk of time thinking about what they want the reader to know. Fewer think about what they want the reader to conclude. And those are completely different creative decisions and reading experiences.

Telling the reader something is a transfer of information.

Engineering a conclusion is something more sophisticated, it’s about building a pattern of evidence that is distinct enough that the reader arrives at a particular interpretation on their own, one you wanted them to reach, without the narration ever having to name it.

The reason you want this is because when a reader arrives at a conclusion on their own, it lands differently than when they’re told. It feels like discovery rather than instruction because to them it feels earned. It feels, on some level, like the truth because they found it themselves.

That’s the mechanism. And it works in two directions.

The first direction is deliberate misdirection. A.K.A. plot twists.

You build a pattern that leads the reader toward a specific conclusion and then you reveal that the conclusion was wrong. You did not hide information or cheat the reader, the evidence you gave them was real and complete and genuinely pointed in a direction that turned out not to be the right one.

This is how some of the best plot twists in fiction work. Through engineering, instead of hiding information you’re calling the reader’s attention to something else. The writer built a pattern so convincing that the reader committed to an interpretation on their own, and then the writer introduced new information that reorganized everything the reader thought they understood.

The reader doesn’t feel deceived. They feel the pleasure of having been led somewhere by evidence that was always in plain sight. And that pleasure, the retroactive recognition that all the pieces were there, is one of the most satisfying experiences fiction can produce. Think of the Sixth Sense. Everything was in plain sight, but the audience was happy to arrive at an incorrect conclusion.

But misdirection is only one application. The more fundamental one is this.

You can engineer a conclusion about anything.

A character’s hidden motivation. The true state of a relationship. What someone is capable of that they haven’t yet shown. What a character secretly believes about themselves or someone they love. And you can do it entirely through pattern without the narration ever explaining it. Without a character ever naming it out loud.

Here’s what that looks like.

A woman’s best friend shows up one day with a new laptop. High end. Costs more than a month’s rent and our character knows this friend has money problems. So our character asks about it. The friend changes the subject.

A few weeks later the friend is wearing a gold necklace. Real gold. And a new diamond ring. They’ve never been able to afford jewelry like this. But our character also notices the friend has bruises on their face and hands and they are complaining about pain in their back. They say they fell. Our character offers to take them to the doctor but the friend stubbornly refuses.

One day, let’s say our character and the friend are out and about shopping and notice police are canvasing a certain area and the friend suddenly feels “ill and needs to rush home”. Our character expresses concern and the friend hurries off without a goodbye.

Then, we later learn the friend was arrested for mugging and stealing from people.

No narration explained what was happening. No character named it.

The reader assembles a conclusion about the friend from three data points: the laptop, the jewelry and the bruises, and the sudden aversion to being around police; the perceptive reader arrives at the conclusion before the arrest confirms it.

And when the arrest comes, the reader doesn’t feel surprised. They feel the satisfaction of having known.

That’s a pattern doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Now here’s the more intimate version of the same mechanic.

You want the reader to understand that a character’s best friend secretly resents them. Not dislikes. Resents. This is resentment that lives underneath false warmth and performs as loyalty while wanting the other person to fail.

You could have the narration tell the reader this. You could have a scene where someone warns the character about their friend. You could have the friend slip and say something revealing.

Or you could build a pattern.

Evidence in objects and space:
The friend handles the character’s things with carelessness. This looks like returning books with cracked spines. Helping them cook and “oh, no, I accidentally broke your favorite spatula I’m so so so so sorry”. They sit in the character’s favorite chair and won’t move.

Evidence in the body:
The friend’s physical responses betray what their words don’t. So their smile doesn’t reach their eyes in our character’s presence. When the character shares good news, there’s a beat, a hesitation before the response where the friend’s face shows elation because they feel that resentment before they can force joy. When our character is struggling, the friend relaxes slightly.

Evidence in action:
The friend does things that are technically supportive but are actually and functionally undermining. So they share, on purpose, the character’s work or accomplishments in contexts where it won’t land well at all. They might introduce our character to people using descriptions that are accurate but unflattering. Or they share feedback or gossip with our character that was never meant to be passed along.

In any of those patterns, no narration named the resentment. No character accused the friend. The reader built the conclusion from the patterns. And the moment it crystallizes, the moment the reader thinks wait, does that friend actually want our character to fail, the story has done something the narration cannot.

It made the reader feel like they discovered something true.

Information delivered through narration is received. Information delivered through pattern is discovered. And discovered information produces a completely different reading experience, where the reader feels like an active participant in the story rather than a passenger being transported through it.

The writer’s job isn’t just to decide what the reader knows. It’s to decide what the reader concludes. And then to engineer the pattern of evidence that leads them there, without ever having to explain it.

So the question worth asking of every significant revelation in your story, every truth about a character, a relationship, a hidden motivation, a secret, is this:

Have I built a pattern that lets them discover it?

Consider what three or four specific, observable, un-narrated data points would lead a careful reader to conclude.

Because the reader who concludes something on their own will believe it more than the reader who was told.

The reader who is wrong, who followed your pattern to a conclusion they were all too happy to arrive at, will feel the correction not as a trick but as a revelation, that makes them want to go back and read the whole thing again.

That’s not a side effect of good pattern work. That’s the point of it.

What your reader concludes about your story is your responsibility and most writers leave it to chance.

You don’t have to.

If you found this post helpful, please consider subscribing or becoming a paid subscriber to help support this publication and its ongoing ability to provide these craft lessons :)

-AJ

A version of vulnerability appears in a lot of fiction on bookshelves these days that looks like the real thing but isn’t quite there when you start poking at it and asking questions of it.

It has the right ingredients, it has a character saying something true, something personal they’ve been carrying, but when the scene ends the reader has felt or witnessed the emotion without feeling the weight of it that the writer, most probably, intended the reader to feel.

Essentially, something passed through the scene that should have changed it and didn’t.

I want to talk about why that happens. Because I think it’s a very commonly misunderstood problem and it often goes undiagnosed in emotional writing. The fix isn’t what most writers reach for, if they even get as far as catching it.

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You can give a character thirty years of trauma, five formative wounds, a complicated relationship with their parents, and still, having done all that work, end up with a character who has an absence of complexity.

A lot of writers get stuck scratching their heads when they have a character who feels simple and predictable. A writer’s automatic response usually leans toward going deeper into the past. Give them more, darker history, more wounds, more formative moments that explain who they became. Figure out what happened when they were seven, what their mother withheld from them, which friendship first taught them not to trust people, what humiliation they still remember twenty-some years later.

By the by, I’m not dismissing that work at all. I do an enormous amount of it myself when I’m sitting with a character. But sometimes you do all of that, come back to the page, put the character under pressure, and they’re still completely predictable and uninteresting to you or to your readers.

This looks like: The brave character choosing bravery. The loyal character choosing loyalty. The ambitious character choosing ambition.

You can admire them, root for them, understand exactly why they became this way, and still never feel genuinely uncertain about what they’re going to do next. Our aim is creating unpredictability and therefore curiosity. Because those are things readers sink their teeth into.

No matter how complicated a character’s history is, every decision still points in one direction.

So what actually makes a reader uncertain about what a character will do?

Let’s build someone and find out.

Imagine a first-generation college student who wants to graduate at the top of her class. Not just pass, not just get through, she wants to be the very best (like no one ever was!) ;)

Maybe she’s spent her entire life being told, directly or indirectly, what people from her background can or should expect from the world, and now every grade, every paper, every opportunity that lands on her lap has become evidence in an argument she’s been making for years: where I came from does not determine where I can go.

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So she works harder than everyone around her. She takes on more than she can comfortably carry, stays up later, prepares longer, and never loses a step.

We understand her. We know what she wants. And that’s exactly the problem.

Because if we know what she wants, we also know what she’ll do. She’ll work harder. She’ll persist. She’ll sacrifice. When the choice comes, she’ll choose the grade. That’s a goal. It’s not yet complexity.

We are going to solve this in the simplest, most accessible way.

We give her something else she wants. But it must be a specific want that does a specific thing, which I will explain, but let’s keep going for the moment.

She wants everyone around her to believe she already belongs there.

She doesn’t want anyone to see the distance between where she came from and where she’s standing now. She doesn’t want to look like she’s catching up, doesn’t want a professor to notice the gaps in her preparation, doesn’t want her classmates to realize that while they’re casually referencing books and ideas they’ve known since high school, she’s quietly writing them down so she can look them up later.

She wants to be the best, but she also wants nobody to see her trying to become the best.

And, in introducing that 2nd want (which is designed as a specific mechanism) now we have a problem.

Because getting to the top of her class requires asking for help when she’s lost. Success requires going to office hours and admitting confusion, letting professors see what she doesn’t know so they can help her learn it. It requires being a student visibly and genuinely, without apology.

But appearing as though she already belongs requires the exact opposite.

So what does she do when she’s sitting in a lecture and realizes she doesn’t understand something fundamental?

Does she raise her hand? If she does, she serves the first want and betrays the second. If she stays silent, she protects the second and jeopardizes the first. She can’t look incompetent.

And suddenly, I don’t know what she’s going to do.

More importantly, neither choice is free. Each choice has a cost associated to it. That’s complexity. That’s it.

Not bigger feelings. Not a more devastating childhood. Not three additional pages of interiority explaining how conflicted she feels.

Just two things she genuinely wants, both completely understandable, and moments that refuse to let her have both.

Now imagine she starts falling behind. A professor notices and offers to meet with her privately. He could help, and she knows he could help. She smiles and says she’s fine, walks away, and fails the next exam.

And now the reader gets to experience one of my favorite things a character can do: working against the very thing they want most because something else they want has become more important in that particular moment.

The story didn’t become more emotional. It became more complicated.

And here’s where this gets interesting, because competing wants don’t always announce themselves this clearly. Sometimes a character doesn’t know about the second one at all.

Imagine a mother who genuinely wants to raise an independent daughter.

She believes in it. She talks about it. She’s built an entire parenting philosophy around it and, perhaps, argued for it with her husband. She wants her daughter to be capable of navigating the world without needing to be rescued, so she holds back when her instinct is to intervene. She lets her daughter have small failures and resists smoothing every surface because she understands that friction is how resilience gets built.

That’s what she wants.

Except she also wants her daughter to need her.

She’d never say it like that, and she may not even consciously know it’s true or that it’s something she wants, (but it would definitely be something she feels) but she also measures love partly by how often she’s called or texted by her daughter. She feels something unnamed when her daughter solves a problem alone that she once would have brought to her. She wants to raise an independent adult and is at the same time terrified of becoming unnecessary in the process.

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Now watch what those wants do to each other.

She holds back, and then she doesn’t. She gives advice that wasn’t asked for in moments it wasn’t necessarily needed. She offers help in ways that make the help difficult to refuse. She frames intervention as concern because concern is so much easier to admit than fear.

And I want to be clear about something here: neither want is fake. She genuinely wants her daughter to be independent, and she genuinely wants to remain needed. That’s why the conflict works and escalates.

If one of those wants is merely a lie covering the “real” desire underneath, you haven’t necessarily created competing wants. You’ve created a mask and something behind it. Competing wants become powerful and vivid when both are true, when satisfying one creates a cost for the other, and when the character keeps having to negotiate between them, sometimes consciously and sometimes without understanding what they’re doing at all.

But we can even take this one step further.

Imagine a man who tells his partner he wants complete honesty in their relationship, and he means it. He values transparency as a principle. He’s told the person he loves that he’d rather hear something difficult than be protected from it, and he sincerely believes he’s the kind of person who can handle the truth.

Then his partner tells him something hard.

Really hard…

Our character, in the moment, responds beautifully. He’s gracious, thanks her for telling him, doesn’t raise his voice, and, rather reasonably, he doesn’t make the conversation about himself.

Then, for the next three days, he’s slightly less warm. Slightly less available. A little quieter than usual. We won’t say it’s a punishment, per se. In fact, he’d probably resist that framing completely or deny it outright when approached. He would probably, instead, say he just needs some space. He’s processing. He’s tired. He’s had a long week.

Every individual act is small enough to be deniable, but his partner feels it. And the reader DEFINITELY feels it.

She told him the truth because he asked for honesty, and the honesty cost her anyway.

Why?

Because he had another want.

He wanted to be seen by the person he loved as stable, as someone who didn’t need reassurance, as the kind of partner who could hold difficulty without making it about himself. So when she told him something painful, he couldn’t say, That hurt me. I feel insecure. I need you to reassure me right now.

Because admitting those things would threaten the person he wanted her to believe he was. So he performed graciousness, and the feelings came out somewhere else: in the silence, the distance, the slight withdrawal of warmth.

He asked for honesty. He got it. And the second want made it cost her (and it eventually it will cost him) anyway.

The reader can now see both wants operating simultaneously, which means the reader may understand this character more fully than he understands himself.

And I think that’s where genuinely complicated characters start to emerge. When more than one thing is true at the same time.

The brave character also wants safety or comfort. The loyal character sometimes wants freedom. The fiercely independent person wants, just once, for someone else to carry them. The ambitious person wants success and wants everyone to believe that success comes effortlessly. The honest person wants the truth and also wants never to hear anything that threatens how they see themselves.

Real people aren’t singular.

We want things that undermine other things we want. We believe in principles that become much harder to maintain when they cost us something. We want freedom until freedom feels like we are being abandoned. We want honesty until we hear the truth that leaves scars. We want independence for the people we love until they stop needing us.

That’s not necessarily hypocrisy, although it absolutely can be, humans are known for being monstrous hypocrites. But that’s what it is to want things while also being human.

And this gives you a much faster diagnostic when a character feels thin or simple or boring or predictable. Don’t immediately ask what else happened to them in their past (although those can be indicators pointing to the origin of that 2nd want), but ask what else do they want that contradicts them?

Then make those wants collide.

Because a character can want bravery and safety without becoming complicated if the story never forces them to choose between the two. The mother can want her daughter’s independence and still want to be needed, but the complexity only becomes visible when her daughter stops calling, when that second want feels a hint of pressure. The student can want to be the best and want to appear as though she already belongs, but the conflict only becomes visible when she desperately needs help. The partner can want honesty and want to appear emotionally invulnerable, but we only see the collision when the truth hurts.

The pressure matters because pressure makes coexistence impossible. It turns two abstract desires into one costly decision.

So here’s an incredibly simple exercise worth running on your current characters, it is the MOST DIRECT ROUTE to finding that complexity.

Ask yourself two questions:

What does this character want when life is going well?

And:

What do they want when everything starts falling apart?

Don’t rush the answers, because if they’re essentially the same, if the character wants control when they’re safe and even more control when they’re terrified, you still have one want wearing two different outfits.

If the answers diverge, if the character who wants freedom when they’re safe suddenly wants someone to rescue them when they’re terrified, now there’s something to work with.

And once you’ve found those two wants, don’t just write them into the character profile and move on. Make them compete for the same moment. This requires forethought, it requires a bit of brainstorming, but that pre-work will PAY OFF! I promise!

The brave character can tell the truth or stay safe. The loyal character can protect the person they love or finally choose something for themselves. The mother can let her daughter solve the crisis alone or step in and preserve her place as the person her daughter still needs.

Don’t let them have both.

The moment a character can satisfy every part of themselves simultaneously, the decision becomes easy again, and easy decisions reveal very little.

The reader leans in when either choice costs something. When we genuinely don’t know which part of them is going to win, that’s when we are magnetized to them. Uncertainty is one of the most accessible forms of character complexity you can create.

So if your character feels bland on paper, you can absolutely go deeper into their past. Find the wound. Build the history. Understand what happened to them. That work matters. But before you spend another week excavating their childhood, try something faster.

Give them something they want, and then give them something else they want that makes the first thing harder to have. Find the moment where they can’t keep both.

Make them choose.

Because complexity doesn’t live in how much a character has survived. It lives in the gap between what they want and what they also want.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my efforts with this publication.

Thank you for reading! :)

Something about authorial voice has never sat quite right with me. But being almost chronically online, it’s also not something I see talked about often, either, and I’m very shocked for its absence.

I would wager every writer has more than likely heard the advice at some point or another, or has just come to understand in their own intuition that you’ll find your voice eventually. Read enough and you’ll understand what voice looks like or keep writing and one day your voice will simply emerge.

The major problem I have is that none of those things really explain what voice is. I dislike how they describe it as though it’s something waiting to be discovered, because they rarely go that extra step and explain to newer or intermediate writers where it’s hiding.

Discussions about it drift toward prose. We start talking about things like varying sentence rhythms, vocabulary, metaphors, description, and all the little stylistic fingerprints that make one writer sound different from another.

Those things absolutely matter, and they never stop mattering to the writer. I just don’t think they’re where voice can be found, and I have a few good reasons why.

Here’s what keeps pulling me away from that explanation:

Imagine two writers beginning with exactly the same premise.

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I suspect every writer has experienced this at least once, where you finish a scene, read it back, and something isn’t quite satisfying to you. I talk, sometimes, about the little compass every writer has that points them toward their intention, pointing where to go, and it’s not always clear to the writer which direction it’s pointing, especially in those moments where something isn’t clicking for you.

Your scene most likely has one or all of these: dialogue is more or less fine, the prose isn’t embarrassing, the characters are saying things that make sense, the emotion is there.

But something still is nagging at you, somewhere in your head.

When we find ourselves there, most of us instinctively: add more. More dialogue. More interiority. More emotion.

And the line of thinking, which I won’t disparage because I am guilty of it, too, is something like, if myself or the reader weren’t feeling enough, surely I just hadn’t given them enough.

I think, when you reach for that solution, the solution of “more”, you’re trying to solve the wrong problem.

I want you to imagine a woman whose fiancé has just ended their engagement. A perfectly reasonable version of that scene might continue like this:

She couldn’t believe what had just happened. Everything she’d imagined for the future, the children they talked about having, all of it had disappeared in a single conversation. She wondered how she’d ever trust anyone again. She thought about the years they’d spent together, the wedding they’d planned, the house they were supposed to buy. It felt as though someone had erased the life she’d been building.

There isn’t anything incorrect about that. In fact, I’d argue in the writer’s favor that it’s emotionally accurate. She probably would think all of those things.

But if I’m being honest with you, I don’t really want to keep reading that version.

The problem is that I already knew almost all of it the moment her partner ended the engagement, because of course her future feels uncertain, and of course she’s questioning everything, and of course she’s grieving. The breakup already gave me that information (without giving it to me).

Now imagine the same breakup ending a little differently.

Her fiancé leaves and she stands in the hallway of their shared apartment for a while after the front door closes. Just standing still in the dark. Then she walks into the spare bedroom. She pulls the box of wedding invitations out of the closet. She sits on the floor and opens the box. She picks up a pen and starts addressing envelopes.

One after another. To guests who are never going to receive them.

I don’t know about you, but that’s the version where I start leaning forward. It carries the same emotion but, actually, it explains far less. And suddenly I have questions. Why is she doing that? Is she in denial? Is this grief?

Is she trying to hold onto something that’s already gone?

These are discovery questions. They are open curiosity loops created for the reader which draws their investment, because they are curious questions. Whatever the answers are, I feel like the story has taken me somewhere I couldn’t have predicted, and I am genuinely invested in learning their answers.

Let’s try a completely different example.

Imagine a surgeon loses a patient during an operation because of someone else’s negligence. Again, it would make perfect sense to spend the next page deep inside his thoughts and his grief. He could probably question every decision he made during the procedure. He probably wonders whether he missed something obvious or feels his confidence disappearing.

He isn’t sure he’ll ever trust himself again.

Again...Nothing there is wrong. I’d probably think all of those things if I were him, too.

But the failed operation already told me his confidence would be shaken and the death already told me he’d question himself. The narration is confirming, in repetition, something I already understand.

Now imagine this instead.

Following the death, the next morning he arrives at the hospital three hours early for his next procedure. He walks into the operating room before anyone else and checks every instrument himself. When his resident arrives, scrubbed and ready to assist, the doctor says,

“I’ve got this one.”

The resident hesitates.

“I can help.”

“No.”

That’s all he says. The resident leaves and the doctor performs the operation alone, relying only on himself.

Again, I find myself leaning forward, because I didn’t know that’s where this was going. The patient’s death didn’t automatically tell me he’d stop trusting the people around him. It didn’t tell me he’d become controlling. Or isolated.

Or convinced that the only safe pair of hands left were his own.

Those are consequences. And, at least to me, they feel like movement, and I don’t actually think most scenes that feel off suffer from a lack of emotion, or explanation, or conflict.

I think they suffer from a lack of movement. They’re circling instead of extending, and I wonder if this is also why pacing gets talked about in a way that has never quite satisfied me.

People often describe pacing as though it’s simply a question of how much happens, but I’ve read books where something dramatic happens every few pages and the pacing is still clunky.

I’ve also read scenes where two people sit in a kitchen talking over coffee and I can’t stop turning pages.

Every time the story simply confirms what we already know, we’re standing in the same place, but every time the story extends the consequences of what just happened in a way that wasn’t predicted, we move, and movement feels like momentum.

When I hit a scene that feels strangely heavy, I try to resist the urge to immediately add to it. Instead, I ask myself a different question.

Not:

“What else does the reader need to know?”

But:

“Have I actually taken them somewhere they couldn’t have gone on their own?”

Maybe the scene is just asking to move.