Writing

Plot? Character? Both? Both. Pt. 2

February 16, 2025February 16, 2025 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

Last week in part 1, we talked about how to build characters in a way that makes it easier to build the rest of the story structure around their growth and change. I highly recommend reading that before reading part 2 if you haven’t yet.

A caveat before we begin is that I am using my writing process as a scaffold for this. Everyone has a different writing process and there is no one way to write a novel. My hope is that you will adapt my advice to what works best for you by taking what works and leaving what doesn’t. Also, this post will have very minor spoilers for The Reanimator’s Heart as I use it to show how I construct the basis for my characters/plot.

A few key reminders before we start

your main characters must change from the beginning to the end of the story (this can be positive or negative growth, but there has to be change)
if you’re writing a romance or a character driven story with more than one protagonist, you’ll need to have more than one character change, so they will all need a journey tied to the plot
if you are planning to write more than one book with the same characters, you will need to have them change incrementally across multiple books, usually by shifting different traits in each book
the hierarchy of building a story goes character > plot > world-building > everything else

Let’s ruin their lives

The big difference between a character driven story and a plot driven story to me is that character driven stories focus on the change in the character first and make the plot work toward that. Plot driven stories have the characters serve the plot, meaning you could hypothetically swap out the characters without changing the major beats of the journey. In real life, we might be going through a midlife crisis without something in our external life making it worse, but because this is fiction, we can make things far more convenient than reality in our character driven story. Think of the external plot as a trigger for the inner journey of your characters. They are already feeling this way, but the external plot has kicked off a lot of feelings and made things more complicated for your character. I think a lot of writers tend to think of the internal journey and external plot as being separate, but if they are intrinsically intertwined, you can really heighten the character’s turmoil and strengthen both the character development and the plot at the same time.

I’m not going to go into a specific beat sheet or structure, so if you’re a plotter, feel free to use whatever plot structure works best for you. Personally, I like Sarra Cannon’s beat structure, which you can find in her HeartBreathings channel on Youtube.

Last week, I mentioned that we need to figure out what your character needs most to be a happier or better person (or feel free to ruin them; it’s your book) in order to figure out the internal journey. For Oliver and Felipe in my book The Reanimator’s Heart, they both need to work on their issues with isolation in order to be happy. Oliver needs to step out of his bubble while Felipe needs to let Oliver into his. How they deal with their isolation and interact with each other will be informed by the past and personality we crafted earlier. As a reminder, Oliver is autistic and a necromancer, which has contributed to his isolation and getting stuck in a rut after years of pining after Felipe who also works at the Paranormal Society. Meanwhile, Felipe is seen at the society as almost a demigod. He is a self-healer, a hero, someone who takes the worst cases and can survive the harshest conditions. This has set him above and apart from the other investigators who like and respect him but also low key fear him. This along with his daughter going off to college has caused him to pull away from most people because they expect him to constantly be that untouchable hero.

My question to myself while constructing a plot is how can I ruin my characters’ lives in a fun and inventive way? This is why we want their issues to be similar, so that we can ruin their lives efficiently while plotting. Ultimately, since this is romance, we want Oliver and Felipe to get together by overcoming their loneliness together. Now, let’s combine this with a worst case scenario for them personally. Oliver is a necromancer, and Felipe is a hero with nearly supernatural abilities. What if Felipe gets killed, and Oliver reanimates him? That’s pretty messy. Oliver is also a rule follower by nature and going against the laws of nature by keeping people alive long after death is definitely against the rules, so if he were to reanimate Felipe, that would cause him some angst. Felipe is–was–nearly immortal, so the whole being dead thing would also cause angst and an identity crisis.

Note how all of this is picking at wounds or character traits/history that was already there. As you’re writing and brainstorming, it’s fine to tweak the backstory to make this work more smoothly. This is also why I think you should give yourself some vagueness or breathing room with a character’s history; it allows you to tweak things to better serve the character-plot symbiosis while plotting.

Constructing the plot

Now that we’ve ruined their lives, we’re probably at the end of act one in terms of plot structure. This life ruining should kick us into the story proper, which means the plot should unfold logically from there. Keep in mind as you go from the kick off to the finale that your characters need to grow or change by the end of the story. In Oliver and Felipe’s case, it’s overcoming their isolation. Since it’s a romance, we can assume that means they get together as a couple in a happily ever after. There needs to be a logical progression from lonely to together that builds over the course of the story.

As I said, I’m not going to go into too much detail regarding plot structures, but the four acts of a story should go as follows:

act 1 (0-25%)- introduce the issues (and if it’s a romance, entangle them)
act 2 (25-50%)- we’re exploring the new world and showing how these issues are a problem
act 3 (50-75%)- at the beginning there’s some moment of recognition of the flaw and they spend the rest of the act trying to rationalize it or shy away from fixing it all while being more conscious of it
act 4 (75-100%)- things come to a head and the character(s) are forced to confront their issues and finally overcome them, usually while overcoming the external plot

As you brainstorm the plot and overall external conflict of your story, you need to think of a plot that will poke at the wounds your character already has while still being interesting. This way you are constantly touching the internal journey rather than weaving it back and forth into the story as a subplot. With Oliver and Felipe, I decided that a way to intertwine the inner journey and outer plot was to have Felipe die by being murdered. This forces the characters to go solve his murder (along with another murder I grafted onto the plot for cohesion after this initial brainstorming). By solving his murder, they are forced to spend a lot of time together, look for clues, get to know each other, and do things that tackle their loneliness issues while complicating their relationship. If he had died naturally as opposed to being murdered, the two plots of the story wouldn’t be linked together as tightly.

Throughout the story, but especially in acts 2 and 3, you have the perfect opportunity to use plot points to deepen or explore the internal journey while they do things for the external plot. These can be large plot points like when Oliver is nearly killed, which reveals the true depth of Felipe’s feelings and some clues for the external plot, or they can be quieter plot points, like where the characters discuss the case while having dinner and by sharing a meal, they’re also no longer isolating. You want the majority of the major plot points to do double duty in serving the internal journey while also moving the external plot forward. This is also why I suggest having the main characters in a romance have the same issue in a different flavor (like loneliness). If they have opposing issues or ones that very different, figuring out how to riff off the main plot while balancing both may be difficult or come off as disjointed.

As you are writing your story, I want you to make sure that you don’t lose sight of the most important part: the characters. They are the key to making a compelling story or series that sucks your readers in. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the fun and games of the plot, but if you’re writing a character driven story, they need to be front and center in your mind and on the page from the opening to “the end.”

Plot? Character? Both? Both. Pt. 1

February 9, 2025February 9, 2025 Kara Jorgensen5 Comments

One of the most common arguments I remember hearing in my MFA program that I still online is whether genre fiction is character or plot focused. The answer is often both, especially if you write romance or something with a heavy emphasis on character development. A question I hear a lot when I’m teaching creative writing or with friends who want feedback on their books is how do I construct a plot that is character-centric but still fun and tightly structured? This week and next week’s blog posts will be about how to do create character driven novel that is heightened by an external plot.

How to build a character

I think the biggest piece of prework for writing a character-centric story with a plot that enhances the characters is knowing the characters really well. In order to create the plot of your story, you need to know where the characters are at the beginning and end of the story, aka how they change over time. The plot will help to move them toward that goal, but first, you need to figure out where your characters are before the story starts.

I’m a gardener (a loose-ish plotter), so I like to spend a lot of time before I start truly writing getting to know who my characters are. I do this by brainstorming, ruminating, making notes about what I think their backstory is, their personality, what they look like, etc. Let’s use Oliver from The Reanimator’s Heart as an example. I really wanted to write a character who is autistic, so I knew that was going to factor into his personality and overall design because your neurotype influences how you act and behave. I was inspired by the show Pushing Daisies, which had a main character who could raise the dead in order to solve murders, so it made sense that Oliver would then be a necromancer. Autistic + necromancer = Oliver, so what does that mean in terms of character traits? I decided that I wanted him to be an autistic who isn’t very good at masking or hiding his traits, so he’s quiet, a bit weird, not socially adept, and if necromancers are stigmatized in this magical world because it’s a rather morbid power that can cause very bad things, it would make sense that he either self-isolates or is isolated within the Paranormal Society (the setting of the story). I asked myself, does he have family? I decided that I didn’t want him to have living family members (upping the isolation), but he does have a really good friend that he’s close to, Gwen, who also works at the society. What job would make sense for a necromancer at the Paranormal Society? Being a coroner or medical examiner would meaning he can talk to the dead with little oversight as people typically avoid dead bodies. I researched medical examiners, and you need to be a doctor to be one, so now, Oliver has a medical degree.

Ultimately, I decided Oliver is an autistic necromancer who tends to self-isolate due to his social difficulties and his necromancy being stigmatized. His backstory is that he is without living family, has a medical degree but for some reason is no longer practicing medicine, and works as the medical examiner for the society’s investigative wing. This is where we find him right when the story starts. If you’ve read The Reanimator’s Heart, you know how all of this plays into the story line.

For me, physical attributes always come second as I use them to highlight or heighten the character traits rather than the other way around. I wanted Oliver to look dead, so I made him very pale (he’s white) and gave him dark hair to make the contrast even starker. He’s tall because autistic looming can make people uncomfortable. I also wanted him to be accidentally scary to people who don’t know him (his looks might also intimidate people who might try to mess with Gwen/his best friend). His grey eyes fit the monochromatic theme and gave him a little enigmatic flare because why not. This is a romance after all.

PS- make sure to write all of this sort of brainstorming somewhere you can find it again. Do not trust yourself to remember because you won’t.

Now, if you’re writing a romance or a multi-POV book with more than one protagonist, you will need to do this for two characters, and for romance, you will need to figure out a way to make them highlight or contrast with each other. The Reanimator’s Heart is a romance, so Oliver needs a love interest/romantic partner. That’s where Felipe comes in. If Oliver is a necromancer who works as the medical examiner and isn’t very social, who might he run into often at the society? An investigator. That’s how Felipe ended up with his job. From there, I decided he is going to be one of the best investigators, the kind who go on the longest, toughest missions. I hadn’t initially decided what his power is, but I knew his background had to be in monster hunting and fighting. I had toyed the year before with the idea of a character being Zorro adjacent, but the story idea fizzled out for many reasons. Ultimately, Felipe ended up being born from that spark of inspiration, so he ended up being a heroic monster hunter known for his fighting prowess who also comes from a family of monster hunters in California. To make him a foil for Oliver, Felipe would have to be sort of his opposite, which would make him more outgoing, social, and well-liked by the people at the society. Felipe ended up becoming a charming, more extroverted, levelheaded monster hunter/investigator. His physical traits had to fit someone of Mexican-American descent since he is from California, and I decided it would make sense for him to be Latinx. Felipe became a short king because I wanted a little size difference with Oliver and because heroes are tall way too often.

Even if Felipe is a foil for Oliver, they have to have something in common, and since Oliver is isolated and lonely due to his autism and powers, it would make sense for Felipe to also be dealing with loneliness of a different flavor. In a romance, a good way to have the main characters interlock and play off each other is to have them struggling with the same internal problem in different ways and have them make up for what the other lacks.

Where did you come from? Where did you go?

Something I want you to pay attention to in regards to the construction of characters mentioned above is that they were not constructed by squishing together a bunch of character traits. I’ve seen a lot of blog posts or videos that suggest focusing on traits, but I think it makes more sense to take a holistic approach and work backwards and forwards to figure out how a character acts and why they act this way. The why is the important part. If you want your characters to come off as real people, you have to think of the psychology and cause and effect behind their traits. Our personalities aren’t made in a vacuum, and neither should your characters be built in a vacuum.

Our pasts and upbringings inform our identities, so I think it’s important to figure out how you want your character to be at the beginning of the story. Once you have that, you have to ask why they behave this way? Some of it will boil down to things like neurotype, gender (and the societal expectations of that or the subversions), sexuality, class, trauma, religion, disabilities, the culture they were raised in, etc. All of these things have an effect on how we behave or interact with our world, so your character’s personality also will be affected by the world building in your story. By starting with the current person and working backwards, you are more likely to have a cohesive character who is more than a hodgepodge of traits, and when you need to figure out how they’ll react in your story, you can look back at that history for the answer. I suggest being flexible or loose with this past history in case you need to tweak or change something as you write the story, but knowing the basics and overall journey of how the character got to this point is helpful.

Next week we’re going to talk about making the plot work with the character development in more detail, but before we get into that, we need to figure out how the characters need to grow from the beginning to the end of the story. Keep in mind that if this is going to be a series with the same characters in multiple books, you should only fix one trait or problem at a time. I tend to see most writing “rules” as guidelines, but if you want to have a character-centered story, the character has to change or grow throughout the story. Before you start working on the overall plot, you need to figure out how you want them to change. That journey will be the scaffold upon which the rest of the plot is built.

A good way to figure this out is to think about what your character needs most to be a happier or better person. For Oliver and Felipe, they both need to work on their issues with isolation in order to be happy. Oliver needs to step out of his bubble while Felipe needs to let Oliver into his. How they deal with their isolation and interact with each other will be informed by the past and personality we crafted earlier.

Stop by next week to see how we integrate their internal growth with the external plot!

Writing

How I Develop Characters

February 12, 2023February 12, 2023 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

As I mentioned a few blog posts back, I asked around on Twitter if there was anything anyone wanted me to write about on my blog (PS- hit me up in the comments if you have ideas), and one of my Twitter peeps asked if I ever use character sheets and if so, how detailed are they. Today’s post will be about how I develop my main characters.

To answer the question very succinctly before I run headlong into segue-ville, no, I do not use character sheets.

The reason being is that I find them overwhelming. Back when I was in college and writing The Earl of Brass, I downloaded a bunch of DnD and roleplay-based character sheets because they were super detailed, which is great until detailed becomes overwhelming. The problem I found with most character sheets is that I found the most of the details to be inconsequential. Does it matter what my character’s favorite food is or when their birthday is exactly? Usually, no. Yes, favorite color can be symbolic or be used as a signature color (like Emmeline and purple in my books), but more often than not, the vast majority of the favorite x type questions did not actually inform who my characters are. I remember a Youtuber I watch mentioning character sheets and how if you put real people into them, the details don’t make sense. Her example was that her very prim and proper grandma loved a very macho movie. Just listing that didn’t explain anything; it was just sort of a weird quirk on an otherwise normal sheet. First and foremost, I think of my characters as real people and treat them as such throughout the generation process. They are not tropes, they are not cardboard cutouts, they are people with wants, needs, idiosyncrasies, anxieties, and a past that informs their present. A character sheet doesn’t get to the heart of who they are, so the question then is, how do we figure that out?

What comes first: the plot or the characters?

For me, often the characters do, which I think informs this process more than you would think. I’m not shoehorning characters into a situation but building the situation from the characters. I have a necromancer and his undead love (Oliver and Felipe from The Reanimator’s Heart). How did they end up here? Were they partnered up before the story takes place or during? I ask a lot of questions early on to figure out how we got to the point where the story will theoretically start (or the first point of no return/doorway in plot terms). This allows an organic plot to form out of who these people are. What happens for me when I work the opposite way with plot first, characters second is that I end up fudging who the characters are to fit into the idea I had. This leads to stiff, 2D characters who are trying to be something they’re not because they are hemmed in by the plot. I think this is often why detective fiction requires sort of flat, stagnant characters. They need to fit into the litany of mysteries they need to solve rather than having their stories fit/inform them. And that’s fine for that genre, but that isn’t what I write. When dealing with stories that are very emotion heavy, psychology driven, and character oriented, the characters need to come before the plot.

Kara’s #1 important character element for creating realistic characters

Okay, that is a bit of hyperbole, but there is one thing I tend to think about more than anything else when building my main characters and that is their background. The character’s history/background informs who they are when the story takes place. Years of life have left their marks on this character, for good or for bad, and these things show through in what they do daily, their internal monologue, their wounds, their goals, etc. Their world view is tainted by their past, and the clearer I can see that past, the easier it is to figure out how they would react to the current circumstances (especially in a way that makes sense to them). If all your characters seem to react the same way to everything, that’s probably because you aren’t paying attention to their psychology and you might be relying more on your experiences.

Some of you out there are like, “Kara, these aren’t real people. I shouldn’t apply psychology to them.” Well, we want our characters to be realistic, we want them to feel like real people, and real people are informed by their past history. People aren’t a blank slate on any given day, and your characters don’t spring forth on page one as a blank slate either.

I will say that I don’t sit down and outline everything in their lives so far. I like to leave room in case I need to add something as a book or series goes on. KJ Charles talked about this on her blog once, that for your own sanity as a writer, leave blanks and don’t tell readers everything to keep from repeatedly boxing yourself into a corner. You can know all these things, but your readers don’t have to until it’s absolutely necessary. When I build my characters, I usually play around with them a bit to get their general personality, then I start to think about how we got here. Here’s an example using Oliver from The Reanimator’s Heart:

Things that inform Oliver’s identity most from his life/past: orphaned fairly young and was raised by his grandma, the many misunderstandings in his life due to him being neurodivergent, break-ups due to ND traits, being gay in the 1800s, having to leave his job as a doctor due to *REDACTED SPOILER* reasons

Notice that I don’t have a whole laundry list of key events, just the few things that would impart some complexes/wounds on a person. Once we have those wounds, we can figure out the natural trajectory for complications and reactions. Social interactions go wrong a lot, so he avoids them. When he does have them, he tends to over-explain during or over-think after. Note the logical progression from past to wound to behavior. These wounds are things that can heal during the story, but they will still inform the character’s behavior. There will still be days when doubt or low self-esteem come creeping back to cause problems, just like in real people.

Now that we have the biggest chunk of who the character is, what else do we need?

The hierarchy of character building

This is less about what you should do first and more about what informs the things below it.

Psychology/backstory- see previous chunk for that
What do they want/need?- these are the things that drive this character in your story toward their internal and external goals. The internal goal is also usually informed by their psychology. Whether he knows it or not, Oliver really needs acceptance, which is caused by his past bad experiences.
Their personality- how this character behaves is informed by everything above. A character’s personality and likes/dislikes are obviously important because it differentiates them from everyone else, but it has to make sense with their psychology/backstory and what they want/need. This is also something that is easier to change based on those other two things.
Their appearance- typically, this is the least important aspect of a character’s being UNLESS it plays into the plot/conflict. Generally though, whether a character has brown v. black hair or curly v. wavy hair really doesn’t make a difference in the big scheme of things. The good thing is if you have all of the above aspects fleshed out, you can tailor your main character to fit even better into the story you’re creating. For example, Oliver is awkward and a necromancer, so to make him even more of a weird character, I gave him very stark coloring (very pale, very dark hair, very grey eyes) which highlights those dead and otherworldly ties.

Now that you’ve learned how I develop my characters, I hope you can take at least some of what you learned here and use it within your own work. As always, writing is a very individual process, and what works for me may not work for you. If you have any questions or would like to know more about a certain aspect, hit me up in the comments or on social media.