Entropic Truth

We all remember the ending of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Specifically, the final battle against Ozai.

Aang has been terrified of the confrontation and has decided with his friends, off-screen, to just wait until after Sozin's Comet passes to actually try and fight Ozai. Zuko is utterly taken aback by this, revealing to Aang that Ozai is going to burn down the Earth Kingdom under the power of the comet and if they wait too long, the world will be a wasteland.

Aang reveals that his fear is not necessarily that he cannot defeat Ozai, but that he doesn't know how to defeat him whout killing him, which Zuko further berates him for. Ozai must be stopped, and if that involved ending him, then so be it.

That night, Aang sleepwalks onto the back of a Lion-Turtle, who imparts on him the knowledge of energybending, which Aang ultimately uses in order to cut off Ozai's bending, rendering him helpless without having to kill him.

A lot of people have a problem with this.

The other day I listened to (or rather, finished listening to) KrimsonRogue's massive Age of Scorpius review.

Age of Scorpius is a book about which much has already been said, and having not actually read it myself I don't feel it would necessarily to be fair to pile on further. However, something did occur to me by the end of his summary. Age of Scorpius was lambasted mostly for its poor editing and pacing decisions, but less obviously for is structural issue, which are far more embedded and perhaps harder to distill when you can't pull a single bad sentence or paragraph.

The reason for this, I think, is that it is a book that was written based on beats rather than internal coherence.

Internal coherence is perhaps the most important structural aspect of any story-- you can have all manner of aesthetic decisions, throw in all kinds of kooky characters, indulge in the strange and the surreal, break reality itself, as long as the story makes internal sense.

This aspect of making internal sense -- or failing to -- is where a lot of individual structure problems in storytelling stem from.

A magic system that feels like it can do anything at any point because the author decided to? This isn't a consequence of a soft magic system run rampant, it means that the author didn't properly establish the internal coherence of the magic, making new revelations to the system feel like asspulls rather than natural extensions of known law.

A character making a spontaneous decision that completely changes the trajectory of the book? Their decision is being made based on the needs of the plot rather than the internal decision-making of the character. A character can certainly do something surprising (or upsetting) and have it all make sense, but when they take a sharp left turn to either solve a problem without build-up, or introduce drama because we're four chapters from the end and this is when the drama happens, it's not an exciting twist, it'a breach of coherence.

Throwing in a revelation and having a character react in a very specific, trope-dominant way because that's how this is supposed to go? Take, for instance, a story that reveals the villain is actually the hero's father. This works in Star Wars because it ties in to Luke's internal struggle and serves not as friction, but inflection-- we don't sit around for an entire movie while Luke bemoans his heritage, he gets over it and makes a decision to confront Darth Vader and save his soul. In a lesser work (and there are many that ape this plot point), this revelation shatters the protagonist and forces them to claw their way out of the identity mire that this has introduced... which is really weird because the vast majority of the time there were zero questions about their parentage and the fwork wasn't asking any questions about legacy and bloodline destiny. Why are they so upset by this news? Because the author wanted a dramatic beat instead of maintaining thematic coherence.

A plot hole is not a minor lapse in logic or an unexplained phenomenon-- it's a moment where the story breaks its own logic (stuctural, character, or thematic) in the process of introducing an element or event. It is a loss of internal coherence that we as the audience trip over (or, in some really nasty ones, fall right into) while otherwise just trying to engage with a work based on the rules it has already presented to us.

Loss of coherence can take the form of a structural issue (something that happens (or fails to happen) because if it did or did not then the narrative might get messier) or character issue (somebody making a decision they would not make just to force conflict or resolution) or even a thematic issue (introducing a thematic element that has never been relevant, oftentimes in exchange for dropping a thematic element that's been building since the beginning).

When you go to work on a novel, what you need to keep in mind above all else is internal coherence. As I said, this is not the same thing as hard logical adherence; your world can be whimsical, it can be magical, it can run on dubious science, it can be filled with mythical creature or alien beings or gods that bend the universe to their will or be about talking mice. The reader is approaching any piece of fiction with a certain level of suspension of disbelief, depending on the contract you as the author establish from the outset, and will grant you that suspension within the internal logic of your work. Your job, in return, is not to break that internal logic-- you can introduce new concepts, you can evolve old ones, you can make things complicated.

But you cannot take for granted that there are rules and expectations, because the moment you breach that contract and break that itnernal logic is when you've lost your audience.

This is why deus ex machinas are bad-- you violated coherence in order to save your characters. This is why magic system where Things Just Happen are intolerable-- you establish no rules so the audience has no reason to feel tension or concern. This is why chaotic tricksters can be so annoying-- a character who just does things for the sake of it isn't a delightful source of whimsy, if there's zero method to their madness they become a narrative thorn that the audience keeps snagging themselves on. And this is why it's aggravating to introduce a thematic revelation so late into the story without any kind of foreshadowing-- we thought we were supposed to care about one thing but now the endgame is asking us to care about something else that was irrelevant to even the characters until about ten minutes ago.

A while back I went to check the TV Tropes for Asexuality. This page used to be filled specifically with examples of canonically asexual characters. What I found intsead was the current state of the page-- a list of 'useful notes' for helping the prospective writer properly articulate an asexual character.

This is absolutely baffling to me because this is simply not what TV Tropes is for. It's for documenting occurrences of tropes in popular media.

I don't know why the page was collapsed this way. There's something extremely funny to me about a page that goes out of its way to talk about community ostracism having itself basically erased a point of reference to asexual characters and repalced it with a bunch of 'useful notes' that, frankly, are not very useful at all if you're actually trying to write an asexual character. All the page does is define the term and then basically give you instructions for how you can completely ignore the fundamentals of asexuality (read: not particularly caring for sex) and have a character who is romantically inclined and sexually active but calls themselves ace anyway.

I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty of the capacity of a sexuality -- ace people are fully functional and we'll leave it at that -- but what struck me on reflection about these 'useful notes' is that they are entirely rooted in defining a term and completely missing the most important part of actually writing a character-- that is, exploring their perspective and how they navigate through the world.

I have seen a few allegedly asexual characters as perspective characters in fiction-- not a lot, but a few-- and the problem that I almost inevitably see from these viewpoints is that you can tell me the character is asexual, but you certainly aren't showing me.

What does that entail, then? A scene where they decline a suitor? A scene where somebody offers to get them hooked up and they visibly recoil? A scene where they take another character aside and tell them point blank that they are asexula, or (perhaps a little more subtly) they have never experienced attraction ot another human being and simply shrug when a friend asks for clarification?

No.

This involves how they move through the world and how their narrative de-prioritizes physical attraction.

It is a very common tendency in fiction, broadly speaking, for a character to describe another character in very judgmental prose. This may not be intentional, but almost always when the beautiful woman enters the scene her beauty is emphasized in a very physically alluring way-- the blonde hair sweeping down to the nape of her back, her dress hugging her curves, the toned silhouette. Or a man with fierce eyes and a harshly cropped beard, whose shirt is pulling against his well-defined muscles. Or perhaps a bit less overt; maybe we're jsut discussing the gleam in her eyes when she turns to look at us, or the shivering baritone of his laughter, or the delicate way her fingers curl around a glass stem, or how his dark hair and dark eyes and full lips construct a portrait that might be considered handsome.

This is not how asexual people are navigating the world.

Don't get me wrong. There is a difference between being asexual and being blind. But the emotional pull of these moments lands completely different, in that they don't land at all. Let's take our tall, dark, and handsome figure, for instance: he may be described as towering, severe, well-muscled, with dark hair and dark eyes.

I've described the same man, but look at the tone between these two assessments. The first prioritizes how these attributes make the narrator feel; the second elminates the emotional judgment and presents to you, the reader, a fairly unornamental assessment. Might he still be identified as handsome? Sure. But the way the eyes have traveled across the body does not linger; here is a man, here is what he looks like.

This is a very common failure I see in people who are not themselves asexual trying to write an asexual perspective. Perhaps you will insist to me that they are disinterested, but the narrative focus tells me otherwise. There is often a fixation -- inadvertent, but omnipresent -- with making sure I understand that the character we are describing is desirable, despite the fact that the character through whom we are describing does not desire.

The same often happens when a character is being described. It's very common for female characters in particular to describe themselves (or be described in third person narration) relative to other women-- oftentimes this occurs in characters whoa re meant to be an everygirl, or a Not Like Other Girls. The intent is to emphasize how comparatively plain she is, or decentralize desirability, but pardoxically this kind of description still focuses on assessing the body from the lens of desirability. An asexual character may lament certain aspects of their apeprance -- who among us hasn't? -- but there is a difference between saying "I stood out among the other girls; my forehead was too high" and "I swiped at my bangs. I had never liked how high my forehead was."

This is perhaps the most prevalent aspect of writing an asexual character from their own perspective. It is not a lack of awareness, or an obliviousness to the hotness going on around them (tactics that I have also seen in an attempt to communicate asexuality; characters are describe din lavish, drooling detail, but the ace character goes about with a wide eyed, gormless expression on their face, caught entirely off-guard when somebody mentions somebody else is attractive). It is a self-possession that does not feel a need to objectify the form and judge based on attraction and desire.

The friction between a character how is told to us to be asexual but their own pespective quietly fixates on the physicality of others quietly undermine your entire point if you're trying to communicate an asexual character, and turn an honest attempt at a portrayl into a shallow performance. It's easy to have a character say "I'm asexual" and then turn around and come across in their narration as ogling other characters, making one question if they are asexual... or just repressed and in denial.

This demands a certain level of self-possession on your part as an author, too. It's become very standard in most stories (at least those that are not being a bit dry by nature) to describe characters in ways that either emphasize their flattering features or compare them to others in how UN-flattering those features are on them, and writing from the perspective of somebody who simply doesn't process that way can require a little more care than you might expect.

A common question that I imagine everybody goes through when they sit down to start a novel of any stripe is what needs to be established before they begin. What do they need to bring to the table before thsoe first words are put on the page? Do they need characters sheets? Do they need outlines? Do they need world history, metaphysics, magic systems, deep political machinations, an understanding of the local economy, geneologies, history books...

It can be daunting, especially if you're planning a long-form project. Even a single novel is going to take months or years of your life to develop, write, refine. You know this is a commitment and you want to be in the best palce you can possibly be to get that started. Maybe you've looked up a lot of writing advice. Maybe you've followed creators who will show you their beautiful outlines, their spreadsheets, their stacks of research and notes. But nobody ever really telsl you at what point all your prep work is allowed to stop and you can just sit down and start putting words on a page.

I'll tell you what you need:

Nothing.

Now, practically speaking, that's probably not true. You don't really just wake up one day and say, "I'm going to write a book!' and then sit down, head empty, expecting to just write a book. I mean, I'm sure somebody's done that, but it's fairly unlikely.

But you probably have an idea for a story. You were inspired by something -- whether watching or reading something else, or having something happen in y our life -- and you got to thinking, this is a story I want to tell.

And in telling that story, you probably figured out a protagonist or two, or five, or however many would faciltiate the story you want to tell. So you ahve that: you have a concept, you have a starter cast, you have a character (or characters) we're going to follow.

And this story probably takes place somewhere and you have a vague idea of where that somewhere is. At the least, you know that if you want to involve laser beams, it's probably sci-fi; if you have magic, it's probably fantasy; if you want to tell a cute slice-of-life drama, it's probably going to be in the real world. (Or maybe your slice-of-life drama involves laser beams and magic, in which case, good for you, that sounds like a good time.)

So when you sit down to write, you're bringing, at minimum, a concept, a few characters, and a place in space-time in which this is occurring.

You can start writing now.

When I say this, obviously, some people are going to want a more solid idea of what's happening. Some people will want to do the deep research, collect a lot of information, get the character sheets figured out, construct a solid outline. If that's how you prefer to work, then absolutely get everything together that's going to make your life easier.

But if that's not really how you work -- or if you don't actually know how you work yet -- do not feel a compulsion to do this. You absolutely do not need anything to start writing.

The thing that got me into writing was actually fanfiction. Not the allure of fanfiction, but the mind-blowing realization as I was browsing a much younger internet that people could just... sit down and write stories, and then other people could read them. Back in this era there was no concept of outlining, or researching, or character sheets. The very idea that I could open a word document and start spraying words and they might cohere into a continuous narrative was enough to get my tiny mind spinning.

Let me be clear: they were not good stories. But the simple act of realizing it was possible was enough to open a lifelong floodgate.

Obviously this is a mindset that needs to mature, but I feel that a lot of modern-day writing advice feels like an overwhelming imposition between the prospective author and their actaul opportunity write. You see the kind of footwork somebody who has already indie published eight books down for their next project and you are inclined to think, geez, that's a lot of work and I don't even know where to start with it. You can wind up discouraged before you've even set down your first word.

If you're going to feel discouraged, you can at least wait until you've written your first chapter.

That first chapter might be terrible. You might throw it out. You might set it aside for a month and then come back and then question all of your life decisions leading up to that point. You didn't have any idea where you were going, you dn't know who these characters are, this isn't going to yield anything.

But you wrote it, and having written it, you can write it again. Faster this time. Easier. Because you have the experience of putting words to page, and maybe it didn't work out, but now you know what you don't want to do. Maybe, more importantly, you even know what you do want to do.

I do not intend to dismiss things like outlines and character sheets and stacks of research notes, but not everybody's creative process actually benefits from having all of those things absolutely understood at the start. I would hazard to say that most people can't have everything figured out from the start because the creative act will reveal necessities and twists that you can't anticipate based on a broad-strokes outline.

And in an environment that keeps telling you you must have an outline, all successful novels need an outline, you must have done the research, you must know what your character's favorite color is, you can wind up thinking that you will never be ready to sit down and write your novel.

And yeah, maybe you aren't ready. Very few people are going to stare at that first blank page and know, without a shadow of a doubt, that this is the start of their magnum opus. Very few people are going to put those first words to a page and never see them change.

But you have to have words written on a page to know that you don't want to keep them.

Do not feel like there's a barrier for entry, like there's a sign that says you must have this much developmental documentation to write. If you can see that first scene in y our head, jot it down and worry about whether it works later. Just having something down gives you an anchor point -- whether it's the start, the end, the emotional climax, a dumb moment between two characters. More importantly, it gives you something tangible. That sequence of words, in that specific order? You put that together. And tthat means you can make more.

If you later find you need the developmental information, by all means, go put it together. Figure out what you need, and do what you need to do. Nobody's goingg to come by grading your progress. Nobody's going to judge your process.

If you're working on any kind of speculative fiction setting you've probably encountered the worldbuilding loop.

The worldbuilding loop is a tendency to lay a foundation for your setting's rules, but as you lay that foundation you realize you need to keep laying bricks about terminology, history, currency, individual cultures, different species, local plant life, cuisine, and so on until you turn around and that novel you were supposed to be writing has become a campaign guide.

Some people just really enjoy worldbuilding and making campaign settings, and that's awesome! But some people are also just trying to write a novel and unfortuantely get absorbed into this endless spiral of feeling a need to flesh out the whole universe before they can finally get around to telling their story.

But hark! There is a way out of this trap!

Write your novel.

Yeah I know bear with me.

First of all, ask yourself-- are you more interested in the story you want to tell, and the world is what facilitates that story, or are you more intersted in the world and the story is just a vehicle for that world? If it's the latter, be honest with yourself and make a campaign book or world field guide. I don't mean this dismissively in the slightly; if your universe is rich and awesome then absolutely lean into that potential and don't feel like you have to have a story attached to it if your heart isn't in that story. You can monetize field guides and campaign settings these days. You're in good hands.

If you want to tell a story and the richness of your world keeps dragging you in, then do yourself a favor, stop, and ask yourself--

What does the audience actually need to know?

You probably need to have at least a few broad strokes concepts established-- the name of your world, the magic system, the basic rules of society-- but once you have these figured out, stop. Sit down. Start writing your novel.

Does the audience need to know about your calendar cycle? Is it vital to the way your world operates? If no, don't worry about it. Nobody is going to get upset that you didn't rename the days of the week.

Does the audience need to know your currency exchange rate? Is it vital to the way your world operates? If no, don't worry about it. The audience will not squint at your characters exchanging a few silver marks for supplies and cross-reference to the time you mentioned them exchanging a gold coin instead. Well, maybe they will, but unless you do something particularly egregious or the finances of the characters actually are paramount in a really granular way, it's not going to break the story. At worst, people will say 'this is funny if you think about it!' and then move on. RPG economies are absolute nonsense and the worst you'll ever see is a goofy thinkpiece about how Bread costs the same as a Copper Shortsword so how does anybody afford to eat in this place?

Does your world have a war that occurred in the past? Cool. Does it matter exactly how long ago or how t hose campaign fronts shifted? Probably not. You can get away with saying Gilder won land from Floren and those outpost towns are still sore about. You don't need to say it was fifty-seven years ago precisely and these specific towns were caught up in the act if we are not visiting or interacting with those towns. If you have notes for reference, that's great, but unless the audience is getting a deep dive into these political machinations? You do not need to worry about it.

Are you spinning out the history of towns on the other side of the continent that we aren't even going to visit? You do not need to worry about it.

You know what you do need to worry about?

The hierarchical structure of the Knights that your main character is training as a squire to become part of. The way those Knights unwind after a long day of training. How do they travel from one town to the next? Does thier armor prioritize heavy defenses or is it lighter to allow better movement? What is the general opinion of the locals about their presence in the town? Do they put themselves up in private residences by order of the King due to wartime necessity? Is magic a limited resource only used by those who are naturally inclined to wield it, or can you train in magic, and how does magic interact with the Knights' ability to perform their duties?

If they happened into one of those border villages that Gilder claimed during the last warr, how do those people specifically feel about the situation? Do they consider it an occupation or do they generally accept the Knights and appreciate the protection even though they feel their culture is being slowly eroded by the transition?

This is just based on a nothing premise, but you're going to find, as you actually work on your novel, that you'll be doing a lot of necessary worldbuilding in accordance to what you need to know right now that is going to color your understanding of the world far more intimately that abstract spreadsheets and field notes ever will. It will also, almost certainly, cement itself more powerfully in your mind that you performed this problem solving not by pulling up World Anvil and filling out a questionnaire, but having your charcter actually walk into a town and smell the <local trade good>, or make their way down the <broad paved alleys which were built specifically to facilitate increased cargo movement>. Maybe in th emoment you will make a throaway statement that this town is famous for harvesting a particular fruit and instead of just writing that down in a Fun Fact infobox, you suddenly have to ask yourself-- now my character is navigating the town. How does that define their layout, their commerce movement? Perhaps the ways my character will have to interact with this town during a high tension scene or a bit of political maneuvering.

If it helsp you, when you encounter these moments, then absolutely put them into a worldbuilding sheet for future reference. You might wind up not even using that moment or deciding the town needs a different layout or has a different reason for why it's set up this way, in which case you can now hold on to these notes and go back to them at a later time and with a much more intimate understanding of what you wanted to accomplish in the first place.

If you enjoy just opening up a worldbuilding doc and filling in some information as a way of keeping yourself engaged with the world or unwinding, there's nothing wrong with that! But if you're in a state where you feel like you're spinning your wheels and feel like you need to establish more about the world before you start, just take a deep breath ask yourself--

What is necessary to the audience to understand my story?

And give them that.

---

On a related note, if you are in the middle of writing your novel and you find yourself sometimes getting mired in long explanations of your worldbuilding, I would offer the same advice.

If your characters are approaching a city built on the lake, what the audience needs to know is the rough layout, maybe the lock system, enough to get a real feel for what it's like to live here. What they don't need to know is that the lake was dredged at such an angle that the silt deposits from the feeding rivers tend to accumulate on the northern bed and so a system of irrigation currents was set up to help distribute the collection and prevent the silt buildup from becoming a navigation and environemtanl complication.

Yes, I have seen that. No, it did not turn out that the silt deposits were a plot point.

I will say that you, as the author, should know more about your world than the audience does. That may seem contradictory to the above point about worldbuilding, but it's not. If you were to encounter this lake port city and start researching silt deposits while you are scene setting, you can still make a note and set that aside and maybe you'll be able to incorporate it later. You can set aside the reason for a particular geographical or architectural decision that simply exists in the world instead of feeling a need to explain the history of why it's here.

I'll give you an example that I recognized from one of my own earlier treatments-- light bulbs.

My magic system was such that it created a modern-futurism fantasy world where magicians were basically the equivalent of electricians. Magic satured every aspect of life, and I found myself explaining how a person could touch a small activator stone, which would send a signal to a light-concentrating cantrip to activate and release the held illumination in order to form a light bubble.

This is the equivalent of writing a modern-day novel and explaining that when she turned the switch on a lamp, an interior bridge flipped into place to complete the electrical circuit and allow the current to flow into the lightbuilt, which then activated across the copper tubing in its heart and superheated the fillament inside a glass vacuum, creating a source of concentrated illumination.

Or I can say 'she turned on the light'.

When I was working on the original treatment for my novel, I had a setup involving a vast conspiracy regarding the magic system and the religion upon which society was founded. Groundbreaking stuff, I know.

I had an elaborate origin story, a thousand years of manipulated history, twisted genealogies, all supporting the final reality that the world was being set up to usher in the birth of its new god. The Chosen One was chosen because of genetic and psychological compatibility, sent on a quest to restore the 'god' by sacrificing their soul to it so it could be ushered into the physical plane through their body.

By nature, this meant that they were not the first Chosen One. Others had gone before and been killed on the journey. Inevitably, this group would succeed, and in doing so unravel the manipulations tht had guided the world for a millennium.

But as I sat down to write, one question nagged at me that I could not, regardless of how much I twisted the logic or explained it to myself, resolve.

WHY THEM?

And the answer could not be 'because they're main characters'. These characters were raised in this environment. Nobody had understood the structure of the conspiracy in hundreds of years; the machine had been turning without conscious enforcement for centuries. The forces that were against the revival of the god would obviously know something was up, so why didn't they just, like... explain themselves, instead of killing people to keep stopping it? Killing people doesn't endear them your cause and it just ensures that you're going to have to keep doing it because the other side is blissfully unaware that they're ushering in the end of the world. I could have had somebody just explain it, but then we ruin the big reveal that the whole story was heading toward.

Maybe nobody can explain it? Maybe the world just fell into this pattern and there's no malicious conspiracy at all?

Then why are Chosens being killed on the way?

Bad luck? Monster attacks?

Why aren't they better guarded if we know the system?

Maybe this is the first Chosen expedition, nobody else has been properly 'calibrated'?

But then we loop back to why they don't have a better guard arrangement if this is supposed to save the world, or usher it into a new era.

Maybe they're attacked on the way and the Chosen and their closest entourage only barely survive?

They why don't they go back and get more guards?

Well maybe--

But at some point I've exhausted my explanations, and the answer to my problems winds up destroying the whole premise of the plot, the whole thing I was building up toward.

Ultimately I realized this particular tack simply wasn't going to work, and I did have to destroy the whole premise of the plot. Things have been working out much better now that I no longer consider this big twist to be so precious to me.

Having lived through such a harrowing experience it made me, unfortunately, much more aware of how often similar story structures fail to answer this fundmanetal question-- why is it that this one person, or small group of people, somehow uncover the ancient conspiracy and fight against it when you have decades or centuries of other people living under the exact same condition?

This question can come up in a lot of story structures-- why is this person the chosen one and who does the choosing? Why does the vampire call in love with this particular girl? Why does this bakery owner somehow figure out all the clues the police could not? It's not an issue with every structure -- sometimes the lead is already hypercompetent, sometimes they find themselves a the only person who could, somtimes it's just a story about two people falling in love and we don't even need to circle the concept -- but The Societal Conspiracy has become very popular within recent memory, especially in YA circles, and I just can't help but ask--

Why this person?

Why does this person, more than the dozens or hundreds or thousands who have come before them, somehow change the entire world in their wake?

And truth be told, I rarely get an answer, or else that answer sadly boils down to 'main character'. There's something innately special about them that separates them from the rest of society. They somehow knew the world was wrong. They are captured by the resistance and instantly believe everything they are told, and also somehow their presence changes the tide of the battle (usually because of some factor of magic or fate beyond their control). And that can be fine, but when the character is also supposed to feel like an everyman just learning about their elevated nature, it feels like the answer is less because of their particular capabilities and more because the author decided this is the person we're going to follow, ergo they are the one who changes the world.

It is, of course, a good thought to have regardless of genre. What circumstances led this person to being the one best suited to our attention? What do they bring into the mix that nobody else is capable of? What makes them worth our attention that isn't just errant circumstance or cool powers? If you had slotted somebody else in this role, what would have changed?

I have three axes that I keep in mind when writing-- world, character, and plot.

Plot is in reference to the current character goal. Even if the characters are not advancing the main plot, every scene should be moving toward an immediate goal which the characters are working toward.

Character is the characters themselves. While most of your scenes are, presumably, going to contain a character, what character mans in this context is advancing our understanding of them, or their relationship with other characters.

World can mean our understanding of the world, or even a physical location. A scene may not be building up on the worldbuilding in an overt way, but remembering that characters can move between locations -- even as simple as rooms in a house -- can keep a scene from feeling stagnant.

When I sit down to write a scene, I ask myself-- is this advancing any of the three vectors?

If the answer is no, then the scene either needs severe reworking, or needs to be cut entirely.

The length of the scene (or chapter) determines how many of them I'm shooting for. Broadly speaking, I try to have every chapter advance two of three in earnest. Sometimes I may only want to focus on one, if it's a major piece of information or character beat; sometimes I may want all three, although this can result in a dilution of focus, so trying to advance all three substantially is usually something reserved for very heavy or dense chapters.

When it comes to a scene-by-scene level, I must be advancing at least one of these vectors, and that is non-negotiable. Something must be different about our understanding of the story by the end of a scene.

This includes scenes where a conflict is introduced and then immediately resolved by the end of the scene. I see this fairly commonly in a lot of fanfiction or serialized work, where two characters will have some kind of argument or misunderstanding, then come to an emotional catharsis, then return to pretty much the same relational state they had before the argument. It might be a really impactful, meaningful scene, but if the chapter before it and the chapter after it are completely unchanged emotionally by this scene, then you probably didn't need to include it.

('But what if it comes back later, just not in the next chapter?' Then the scene HAS served a purpose because something in the world or the characters HAS changed, even if we don't recognize the implications of that for a while.)

My mind keeps wanting to go to a particular scene in Eragon, where the winds are so severe that Saphira has difficulty closing her wings so Eragon helps her hold them closed. This scene does nothing to advance the plot. It tells us nothing about the characters. It says nothing about the world. This isn't setting up a moment later when Eragon needs to help Saphira stabilize in a heavy wind. It happens, we move on, and all that's been accomplished is a waste of the reader's time.

I think also, to take a more common punching bag, about Twilight, and it's many scenes of Bella obseving Edward, and Edward being mysterious and then Bella observed Edward, and Edward is mysterious, and then Bella observes Edward, and Edward is mysterious, and then eventually they go into the woods to talk, and then they go into the wood to talk, and then they go to a restaurant to talk. Their relationship isn't advancing, our understanding of them as people isn't advancing, our understanding of the laws of the world isn't advancing. We're just running in circles around the same scene, over and over again, waiting for the evil vampires to show up because then we would at least have forward momentum.

I emphasize that 'forward momentum' does not need to be in strict plot advancement. While it generally helps -- at the very least to advance a character's immediate goals -- it's certainly not necessary to feel a sense of narrative momentum. If the audience has learned something about the characters and how they behave, if they have confronted a personal conflict, if they have advanced or deteriorated a relationship with another character, this can all be narrative advancement.

There used to be an adage that the word 'said' should be avoided in dialogue tags.

I feel like it's become more common in the present day -- or at least outside of high school creative writing -- to acknowledge that the word 'said' is not only perfectly competent but oftentimes preferable to just about any other dialogue tag if you don't need to expound on exactly how a character is saying a line. 'Said' is considered an 'invisible word', like many articles, and a reader will oftentimes understand what's being communicated (that is, a character is speaking) and then move on without any issue.

Neither of these are quite correct.

While it is generally better to default to 'said' if you don't need to elaborate on how a line was delivered -- eg: shouted, hissed, whispered -- it's equally a bad idea to only use said as your dialogue tag. It's less visible than more pompous dialogue tags, and less likely to be misused (the English language is a beautiful monster and it's important to realize that even though two words mean the same thing they don't mean the same thing-- 'said' and 'orated' might mean the same thing but they have very different connotations on page), but you've also probably heard the advice to avoid using the same word too many times too close to itself.

The same happens with 'said'. I did have the pleasure once of reading a dialogue exchange where every dialogue was tagged with 'said' and it was a nightmare. I found myself begging for My Immortal-levels of silly dialogue tag attribution; at least that would be funny. This was staccato, unpleasantly repetitive, and made it very clear that 'said' is not invisible, it is simply more tolerable.

This can, of course, be weaponized if this sort of droning cadence is what you're going for-- there are absolutely in art, if you work with intent. But in this context I was not meant to be zoning out on the conversation.

The solution, however, is not to pull up your thesaurus and start having a character ask, reply, expound, pontificate, dialogue, murmur, opine, verbalize, and ejaculate. The solution is to incorporate action into dialogue tags.

Generally speaking, if you're having a back and forth between two characters, only need to establish up-front who is speaking when and only occasionally clarify going forward to make sure the reader isn't getting lost in a long dialogue. If there are relatively short exchanges or quick thoughts, it's best to just let the dialogue play out for a while until it feels like you may be losing the reader. There's no science on when to intercut a new 'he said/she said' tag; it depends on your style, depends on the rhythm of the conversation, depends on how distinct the two character's voice are.

But generally speaking, when two people are talking, they also aren't just talking. Somebody might be nervously playing with a pencil or drumming their fingers; their eyes are shifting to different parts of the room; they may be hesitating, pausing to think, sighing, mumbling under their breath. If you really want to get crazy they might even be doing something like pacing.

And herein lies the real secret to a dialogue exchange that keeps the reader from zoning out into a conversation or getting fatigues by repeatedly reading the word 'said'. Break up the dialogue with action tags. This gives the reader a break, helps re-ground the scene in physical space rather than reducing it to two talking heads in a void, and allows you to remind the reader of who is talking on what line without even needing a dialogue tag.

Compare:

“I thought you understood,” she said. “I did,” he said. “Then why did you do it?” she said. He said, “Because you asked me not to.”

Or:

“I thought you understood,” she expostulated ponderously. “I did,” he ejaculated. “Then why did you do it?” she queried inquisitively. “Because you asked me not to,” he articulated aloud.

To:

She bit her lip. "I thought you understood." "I did," he said. Her eyes snapped to his and held. "Then why did you do it?" He faltered. His hand clenched into a fist; his voice fell. "Because you asked me not to."

I'm a connoisseur of bad fiction, and there's something I notice in a lot of bad fiction -- not all, but quite a lot -- that, no matter how decent the overall writing is, will almost certainly tank a story.

There is a strange tendency for protagonists to not do things.

They are certainly involved in the plot. They may even be vital to saving the world. But when it comes to actually attempting to do something? Somebody else is usually instrumental in actually moving the plot forward. They are the recipient of events, not the instigator.

This should not be mistaken for a reactive protagonist. A reactive protagonist is somebody to whom events happen, but who still has to take it into their own hands to survive or overcome those events. A reactive protagonist can be just as compelling as a proactive protagonist (one who chooses to instigate the plot).

What I mean is a character who doesn't actually do anything, but manages to bumble their way through the plot because everybody else is actually making way for them. Let's take (of all things) TekWar into consideration-- Jake Cardigan is an ace detective, framed and sent into cryo-sleep for fifteen years but awakened after seven because his brilliant deductive mind is needed to track down a missing woman who may be connected to one of the local tek lords (tek here being a cyberpunk drug, basically). Over the course of TekWar, Jake:

Is told by other characters where to go and what to investigate

Is saved by his friend Gomez from a kamikaze android (which does exactly what it sounds like)

Is kidnapped by Inspector Winterguild, who is also looking into the tek lord, and then let go without any further incident

Listens to a lot of meetings about Sonny Hokori, the tek lord

Is saved from a group of mechanical bulls by an android simulacrum of the woman he's looking for

Is saved from another kamikaze android by the same lady-droid, who is destroyed in the process

Finally finds Sonny Hokori only to have Winterguild burst through the wall in a hail of gunfire and slaughter Hokori and his men in the course of paragraph

At no point in this novel was Jake Cardigan actually necessary. He did not contribute to the investigation. He mostly got other characters injured or killed in service of saving him. By the the end, he himself didn't even find Hokori so much as be invited to see him, and the final conflict is resolved within three pages by a completely separate character who only appeared once. Any of these other characters would have been a more compelling story, but instead we're following Jake Cardigan, a blank-slate nobody who serves the equivalent role of a cameraman.

Obviously you can make this work -- the protagonist of The Great Gatsby is more or less just a witness to the debauchery -- but if your lead is meant to be the hero, you have to be sure, at the bare minimum, they are trying to enact some change in the plot.

They don't have to be the most competent person in the reason. They don't have to be the most capable. But they should be contributing something to the proceedings, even if they're a diplomat bringing together stronger allies. A character who can hold together a group is just as important as the group being held together, but if you're going to follow that kind of character they have to be taking some initiative to that end.

Having a hero (and now I'm using the specific word hero rather than protagonist, to distinguish a main character who is meant to be active in that role) who mostly stands around while other people feed them information, give them special items, and pave the way for them to succeed is not compelling. We could be following any of those other characters along their own journeys to learn this information, or procure these special items. If the hero is just a paper doll on which everybody else hangs the components of The Prophecy, they are not a compelling viewpoint character, they are a plate for everybody else's success.

As with anything you can make this work, if that's your intent, but very often I'll encounter a story that clearly doesn't realize they've set up a nothing of a protagonist who expresses no agency and just has success handed them, oftentimes literally, only to be praised for the heroic work that everybody else has accomplished around them.

And as I said, this doesn't require the lead to necessarily succeed or be singular in these pursuits. If the character can't succeed without somebody else's information, or a special item, then don't just have them stand around until somebody else provides them-- have them look, have them seek, have them brave the trials, have them do the research.

When I say 'balancing a character' in context of a novel, I mean making a character with strengths and weaknesses that will facilitate an ongoing tension. A character needs both strengths and flaws-- even the simplest of characters requires some kind of balance between these two aspects. The most powerful of characters still has a flaw; the slimiest of monsters still has something that makes them admirable.

I actually want to point to Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow as a good example of what happens when you strip a character of this internal tension. Bonzo Madrid is introduced in Ender's Game as being handsome and charismatic. He's a middling Commander, but in a school of geniuses where only so many kids can be promoted, this still puts him in the upper echelon of the students. He is prideful, which causes him to view Ender's dissent within his army as a personal slight and eventually drives him to a homicidal rage when Ender defeats him handily in the Battle Room multiple times (the last time being a humiliation he cannot abide by). But his pride also means that when he confronts Ender in the showers with intent o hurt him, he agrees to a fight on even terms-- leading his henchman at the door, stripping naked as Ender himself already is. He is an antagonist, but Ender still expresses some amount of admiration (and pity) for him; when he first joins Salamander Army he even thinks to himself, "This is a Commander I would follow into battle." We don't like Bonzo, but we understand him.

Hop over to Ender's Shadow, and when Bean meets Bonzo he's clearly already read Ender's Game, because he instantly decides that Bonzo is dumb, not worth his time, and must have only been promoted to show other kids how to function under an incompetent Commander. Every time he encounter Bonzo, Bonzo is nothing but an incompetent bully, and Bean easily outpaces and outsmarts him every time, even being the one responsible for Bonzo trying to murder Ender in the bathrooms. In Shadow, Bonzo is a bully, flat and simple, a profoundly uninteresting. An argument could be made that this because Bean's perspective limits out exposure to Bonzo, and Bean himself is marked as being kind of bad with people (until it turns out he's actually just as good with people as Ender is).

If you read Shadow without reading Game, I doubt Bonzo would register as much of a character at all, because he's just some jackass in the background who Ender kills in an offscreen fight. This isn't just because he's Ender's enemy rather than Bean's (Bean actually earns his ire as well), but because Bonzo is lacking that tension that he had with Ender-- somebody who Ender wanted to look up to, who could have been a good Commander if he had let go of his pride, and whose downfall consequently feels earned but tragic. In Shadow, it's just... well I guess that happened.

When you're building a character, you want to build this tension into them-- strengths and weaknesses alike. This is a fairly well-trod piece of advice, but I find that it's a fairly common issue that, when people go to make those strengths and weaknesses, they'll throw in a sequence of descriptive words without really considering how those words correlate.

A character's strengths and weaknesses are not dissociated. In fact, they are intimately related.

I'll use the most obvious example-- think of a character creator. Now think of the kind of character you want to make-- let's say a Warrior. You want to crank up their Strength, but when you do that, you have to take points from other fields. You may decide that, since they're a martial class, you're going to tank their magic stats, so you reduce their Magic and Magic Defense (or whatever stats drive those) and put those points instead into Strength and Defense (or Constitution, or whatever it is in this system). Maybe you allocate a few extra to Speed. Whatever the case, what you wind up with is a character who excels in martial combat, but can't use any magic attacks -- or at least can't use them to any efficacy -- and who is weak to magic damage.

In story terms, this mirrors a warrior who has dedicated their life to the blade. They are excellent in martial combat, a master of their weapon of choice and competent with a handful of others, but because they have spent that time on weaponry they have NOT spent that time on spellwork. The character may be very intelligent, but they've not had a chance to study magic in any competency, which may prove difficult in certain kinds of combat and may prove equally difficult when it comes to untangling the arcane. You can take this even further in this example; perhaps they are a master of the blade, and competent with swords, but if you hand them an axe they won't know how to wield it properly. They'll be better than pulling a guy off the street, sure, but an axe is a completely different weapon than a sword.

Maybe you want a jack of all trades. So again, consider the spread-- if you don't specialize in anything, you are at best competent at everything, able to slot in to any party configuration, able to fulfill any role... but not well. This too is a strength and weakness tradeoff-- significant adaptability, in exchange for not being exemplary at any one thing.

Now we can apply this to character who aren't necessarily fit for a DnD campaign. Let's go back to Bonzo. He is handsome, charismatic, and intelligent, but his pride prevents him from being able to allow others to use their own gifts and he demands they adhere to his strategies or else they will be punished, as Ender was. If he had been able to confront this pride and learn some humility, he might have been an excellent Commander rather than a middling one. At the least, he wouldn't be dead.

Since I'm on Card, let's also look at Bean, another character who, frankly, was ruined by his own book. Bean is introduced in Ender's Game as being extremely clever -- at least as smart as Ender -- but by the final games he is noted as being excellent with a small group, able to command an elite force like a scalpel but unable to work with a full army. This is very fair. Meanwhile, over in Shadow, Bean is actually smarter than Ender, and even younger, and actually just as good with people but he just chooses to lose all of his battles in Battle School. During the final games, he not only figures out what's actually going on through a completely random comment that he somehow spins out into realizing they have faster-than-light communication (when the kids have been told they are going to launch WITH the ships so of course the time-lag won't be a problem?), but when he confronts the adults about what they're doing he's told that they are intentionally giving Ender bad information about Bean and that's why Ender comes to his bad conclusions about his abilities. Bean never had a weakness, he just wasn't allowed to show off his strength!

This flattens Bean. He was a scrappy underdog in Game; now, in Shadow, he's the best and most clever and everybody loves him and his only 'flaw' is that he's underdeveloped, which gets blown out the window in the sequels anyway. Bean is no longer an interesting side character with his own texture and utility and attendant flaws, he's an ubermensch who basically never has any real obstacles to overcome, and I don't like him.

A character's strengths and weaknesses should intermingle and inform each other. What a character has dedicated themselves to mastering is going to tell you the things they had to forgo to reach that mastery. The aforementioned warrior, for instance? A lot of interpretations will generally have this character be brutish or dumb, but he might well be very clever, he just never had a chance to study books so that cleverness turns instead to combat mechanics.

We can actually look at Sokka, from The Last Airbender, for a great example of this. His weakness, within the universe itself, is that he's a normal in a world where all of his friends and enemies can basically perform magic. This is an external problem, but it festers into internal complications-- he has an inferiority complex, and trying to prove himself can get him into trouble. But it also forces him into adaptation, and by the end of the series he has proven that his own intelligence -- previously turned to a defensive humor and sarcasm -- can be routed to martial strategy that Aang, Katara, and Toph are simply unable to match.

Your strengths and weaknesses should feed and inform each other. They should not exist in a vacuum.

Similarly, they should comport with the character's actual lived experience.

I'll go back to Sokka. Why is he the way he is?

Because his dad left.

Because his dad left and took all of the men of his village, leaving him -- no older than twelve at the time -- as the oldest male in the village, responsible for keeping the village while the men went off to a war they couldn't be certain they would return from. In this environment, Sokka had to learn to be quick and clever, had to rise to a station he had no business stepping up to at such a young age. This gave him a protective streak that both proves to be vital and also a little damaging.

You remember how Sokka was also kind of sexist until the Kyoshi Warriors put him in his place? This wasn't a random flaw of his personality; it was because he had been tasked with so much responsibility as the village protector, the last man of the tribe who was going to protect the women and children. This was a responsibility he had shoved on his shoulders far too young, and had no male role models to teach him the right way to channel his masculinity.

This is his core wound; the defining event of his life that informs his decisions and character going forward. Sokka's flaws and weaknesses can largely be traced back to this moment of unfair responsibility. He had to learn to take responsibility, to be brave, to be strong, that he was the only thing between invaders and everybody left in the village was relying on him.

(Bear in mind that when it comes to development, there's no right order; as I've said before, I tend to make characters who fit into the needs of the narrative and then determine what kind of person would wind up in this situation. My development tends to ping-pong in this way; what do I need them for, where does that mean they've come from, what else does that inform about them in the present day? And of course, nothing needs to be set in stone, if you prefer not to work that way; some people like to have their whole backstory and trait list laid out for them, but I personally prefer to know who they are and then fill in as necessary. Traits I might not have expected will emerge from situations I don't expect, which may inform an event I didn't think of, which will have an impact on another current-day issue that I hadn't anticipated. A recent revelation I had was that I made a particular character infertile due to Circumstances; this was just a consequence of cosmology, but once I started digging I realized that this had substantially broader implications to his psyche than I had anticipated, which was quite a fun discovery.)

To break this down again: because Sokka was left with so much responsibility, he had to learn to be brave but also clever, calculating acceptable risks. He taught himself how to lead by trying to teach the younger kids how to fight; it didn't work out very well but it endowed in him the eventual skills he would need to command disparate armies on the Day of Black Sun. He became a protector because he was the eldest male in the village, which taught him that it's a man's job to defend women, a fine enough ideal that curdled into benign misogyny because it was also fused with his inferiority complex, developed both by having to live up to his father's example and that his sister developed waterbending while he just throws boomerangs. A sister whom he was also tasked with protecting, because their father had left and his mother was dead, causing him to be overprotective of her until he saw how well she could handle herself, and thus shifted from protective instinct to trust. And this inferiority complex further informed his humor, which he weaponized into sarcasm and a defensive mask, and which itself masked the underlying cunning and intelligence that would eventually bloom into his strategic abilities. All of Sokka's core traits can be traced back to his wound, and then interlocked with each other, creating a well-rounded, complex, and endearing character from an archetype who seems at first to just be comic relief.

It's important to note as well that these flaws are not shaped by society. Sokka's virtues and failings were augmented and sharpened by his wound, but this is always who was as a person. I see too often that an author will give a character a 'flaw', but that flaw is actually an imposition by the circumstances of their life or the society they're in rather than a true, internal conflict. Maybe a character is nasty and closed off to everybody they meet; this would normally be a flaw in any social situation, but then the author reveals their tragic past and abusive parents and suddenly their nastiness isn't their fault, it was Society.

This isn't interesting. This isn't going to give us ongoing internal tension; this is just priming us for an endless cavalcade of a character being constantly forgiven or excused for their behavior or failings because external factors keep them down. And this isn't even to say that external factors won't keep somebody down, but how somebody responds to adversity is just as important as that adversity. Sokka could have begged his dad not to leave, we would have even understood if he had, that's very reasonable. But he didn't. Instead we respect him for trying to live up to those expectations even though he absolutely knows he cannot. This tells us just about everything we need to know about Sokka in one fell swoop.

I touched on this before but I'd like to drill down a little harder on this as something for the prospective writer to consider.

If you're wanting to write a character who is chronically ill or disabled, it's easy to fall into a trap of replicating what you see in popular media.

Don't.

Media likes to portray a lot of things in simplified archetypes. And to be fair, if you want an archetype -- if that's the kind of emotional reverberation that's going to work in your story -- then go for it. Let's not pretend it's not done for a reason, that it's not effective, and that maybe the Littlest Cancer Patient is exactly what you want. There's a place for everything.

But if you want to portray a character in a more honest way, then... don't.

One of the most important things to remember about any illness or disability is that it's going to affect every person differently, there's no One Size Fits All answer to being able to portray a character with perfect accuracy because there is no way you're going to portray everybody's experience with perfect accuracy in a single person, or even a dozen people.

But there are some things you can keep in mind that will help you to capture this character's experience.

We'll talk exclusively in terms of psychology, as a character's relationship with their illness or disability can inform, or be informed by, their overall perspective on the world. One of the most important questions to ask is: how did they respond when they were diagnosed?

The reaction is going to define a lot about them as a person, and maybe even things that they didn't realize about themselves-- it's the kind of life-redefining moment were people are forced to reconsider a lot about themselves and their place in the world.

Let's take a character who's been diagnosed specifically with a significant chronic medical condition. It will kill them if they don't start management, and that management is going to involve a lot of work on their part. This has been and will continue to affect them physically and temporally (that is, a lot of time and energy is going to go into keeping them from dying).

Are they afraid? Are they angry? Are they apprehensive, are they in denial, are they numb? Do they debate whether it's worth treatment, and if they do, what is it that motivates them to seek that treatment-- something personally unfulfilled, a fear of death, a refusal to leave others behind until they have no choice? How long does it take them to come to grips? Do they take their treatment into their own hands and seek information, or glide along with what the doctors say and put their trust in their care team?

What's the thing that scares them the most going forward-- the idea that it might not work and they'll die anyway, or the way their life is going to have to change, or how hard this is going to be financially and what they can do to make ends meet anyway? Or are they more scared about the way the people they love will handle this-- are they more concerned about the impact on themselves, or the demands this might place on the people around them?

Perhaps, even, do they feel relief-- not necessarily at the idea that they're going to die, but at the idea that at least they know what's wrong with them, and that having that information is empowering?

For a character diagnosed with a disability, we can ask something similar (although generally less morbid); how did they react? Is this something that they feared would happen, something they were hoping to avoid, or a revelation that actually allows them to breathe because once they have a name for it they're able to confront it properly? Perhaps there is a relief in this, too, that now that something is understood it can be addressed.

How do they approach their own limitations? Illness and disability by necessity come with new challenges. Does this frustrate them? Do they feel like something is missing from their life, or they're being denied? Do they get angry at themselves for not being able to do what they could before, or what comes so naturally to everybody else? Or does this knowledge actually help them overcome their personal frustrations and forgive themselves?

Are they open about it? How willing are they to talk to other people, prompted or unprompted? Are they self-conscious and uncomfortable, or are they kind of person who handles it with humor? Do they internalize or externalize their fears? Who do they tell, if anybody, and how do they broach the conversation?

If it's severe enough to warrant this question, do they go back to work, or do they want to go back to work if it's preventing them from doing so?

If you're dealing with a character with a chronic illness specifically, they oftentimes have to have medical regimens-- pills, at least, but sometimes careful dietary timing or scheduled treatments. Are they good about this? Are they resentful about the time and energy this demands from them? Are they neurotic, constantly checking their watch, timing out dosages to the minute, counting and re-counting the pockets of their pill dispenser to make sure everything is in order?

How has this changed their perspective of life itself? Do they have a great appreciation for every day they have, or is there a low-burning resentment for what they feel they've lost or been denied? Are some days better than others? Are they kinder and more patient, or do they snap and lash out more often?

Do they have their own rituals for self-management-- not necessarily the medication or the treatments or what the doctors recommend, but just some placed that they go to relax or regain perspective if things get frustrating or bad? Who do they trust when they have a particularly bad day and just need to talk? Is there anybody they trust, or do they prefer to go somewhere alone? Do they bottle or do they vent? More broadly, how vulnerable do they allow themselves to be, and do they accept help or do they stubbornly attempt to do everything on their own and resent it when people make to assist without being asked first?

This isn't comprehensive, but I think this is a decent start for consideration, and you can also see how this would reflect not just in relation to their illness or disability but act as a microcosm for them as characters at large.

When I finally got to work writing on my novel, no advice helped me more than this: write what you actually want to write.

This might sound a little silly, or even self-indulgent, but what I mean is-- if you've been having problems being able to pull a narrative together, no matter how much prep work or plotting or certainty about your vision that you have, take a step back. Asses what you're actually doing versus what you think you're doing.

To use myself as an example (because that's the one I have), I spent my whole life thinking I wanted to write fantasy stories. I used to read them voraciously as a kid, and really love indulging in conversations about metaphysics and fantastical logistics. I spent over a decade circling a fantasy universe -- magic system, creatures, cultures, fantastical geography -- in service to a story that's been percolating in my head for even longer.

But every time I sat down and tried to actually write, something would fall apart, and I couldn't quite figure out why. I had false start upon false start, sometimes making some decent headway but always the ground would collapse from under me. It wasn't an issue with the characters, or the plot, or the setting-- everything worked, everything was internally coherent, but for some reason the piece simply refused to click.

It wasn't an easy fix, either, because when I went in to really drill down on the issue it was an innate dissonance, a feeling of everything coming apart at the seams even though everything should have worked. I took an extended break from that work, went about my regular adult life, and then finally came back to this project with a new eye-- not for what I wanted to do, but what I had been doing.

And that was when I realized my problem. This entire time, I had been trying to stretch a high fantasy epic over writing that longed to be a horror story.

Which was always where the narrative collapsed, one way or another, under its own weight-- the big fantasy setpiece was a cosmic horror fever dream, the characters were wrestling with existential dread more than they were monsters, the whole quest was building up to a reality-warping outer god. Of course it was a horror story, but my dumb ass was so deep in wanting to live up to all those fantasy books that had so inspired me I had completely missed my own genre drift.

Once I recognized that and pivoted into that narrative, everything fell into place. Needed some amount of its own development, but so much of the structure was already there, it just needed to understand its true shape.

If you've been struggling with a story despite having done everything right-- if something about it is just failing to come together and no matter how much plot analysis or character reworking you do it never seems like it's enough-- it might be that you're fighting your own instincts and what you think you want to write isn't necessarily what you want to write.

There's no easy fix for this except trying to step back and assess it from a third-party perspective. Try showing somebody you're work and asking them what genre they think you're writing for, without telling them what you're going for. It can be a little frustrating to realize this dissonance, especially if you really felt like you were dedicated to this idea. But it can also be freeing, and nothing feels quite as good as being able to feel that friction finally melt away and make way for what you actually want to do.

I imagine anybody starting a story has grappled with the difficulties of introducing a new character, whether it's an OC for a fanfic or a new story entirely. We can discuss the art of introductions on the whole, but what I want to focus on is entirely related to the prose, and specifically to the description.

I encounter an issue fairly often where a newly introduced character will wind up grinding the story to a dead halt in order to explain what they look like, and part and parcel with this occurrence is the inevitability that, despite how lovingly rendered this character was when they first appeared on page, I will absolutely forget about what they're supposed to look like within paragraphs.

Possibly a me problem, but I've seen this happen plenty, where you think you've given a good, thorough description only to find that somehow nobody you're talking t o has retained what you thought were important, pertinent details about their appearance.

Let's talk about human memory.

Human memory is not like looking for a file on a computer-- we don't sort and call up a specific 'memory' like a complete file. That memory is formed from a whole network of association; that's why we can recall something we haven't thought of it in years based on an errant comment, why you might find yourself drifting into tangents during a conversation, why it's easier to remember events by remembering the happenstance surrounding them. Memories are not created or access in a vacuum, and it's the same for reading a text.

When a reader is given an info dump, it's a piece of information expressed in a vacuum. Maybe they'll try to commit it to active memory, but unless they have something to hold on to, it's just a floating data point without any further connection or association; possible to find, with sufficient coaxing, but still difficult to access.

So when you dump a character's description without anything to tie it to, you've basically made a cascading wall of words and letters that don't really mean anything and oftentimes just encourage the reader to keep skimming until they see an action verb or the next piece of dialogue. You may have the most glorious, gorgeous character to have ever been put to page, but if the reader isn't encouraged to retain that information, they're going to be however the reader imagines them without assistance.

This can be fortunate, depending your style; it's impossible to introduce a character into such a vacuum that the reader hasn't established any preconceptions about them, and if their appearance isn't particularly important it may actually be acceptable to just give them a few key features and then leave it to the reader. When it doubt, it is better to under describe than over-describe. The reader will not be imagining a formless blob, I assure you.

Unless the character is a formless blob, in which case, I like you. Let's talk.

However, if you want something to stick -- from an outfit to a tiny detail -- give it meaning.

Because memories are linked by association, a description should in turn be built with association. It doesn't have to be anything major, but instead of:

She had raven dark hair, and wore a long black dress,

try something like:

She selected the dress-- a dark thing of rich fabric that matched both the hue and flow of her own hair.

Simple associations that are going to bolster one another; now, instead of these details existing in a void, they're going to link to one another and help build the fabric (which is probably chiffon); when the reader thinks about her dress they will also, quietly, think about her hair. If they think about her hair, they will think about her dress.

And you can do better:

She lingered on the slim black dress shunted and all but forgotten in the corner of the closet. It was something that she bought years ago in anticipation of another party she never got attend because that was the weekend she got the call from the hospital. It always made her think of her husband-- he had been the one to tell her it matched her hair and brought out her eyes. She had never been able to wear it; to look in its direction churned her stomach with grief and guilt. Even now she could taste the burning her throat, and blinked to clear her vision. He had never gotten to see her wear it.

In a word: contradiction.

In more words: I've read a lot, and watched a lot, and a lot of stories. I have my gripes and my grievances and my happy places. If the overall experience is strong enough I can forgive a fairly significant number of oddities because the experience in totality is so worthwhile, or the characters are so compelling, or the themes just resonate with me in a meaningful way. I can get through a lot of stories I'm not necessarily super into as long as they're entertaining enough, or there's something I can care about to take me to the end.

Usually even with a bad story, I push to the end to give it a fair shake, or at least be able to properly articulate why I'm upset. But there's one thing above all else that will cause me to tap out early, and that's contradiction.

I don't mean a character being contradictory-- humans are ridiculous, a good character should struggle with their own contradictions. Or even contradictions in the story, although if the plot hole is deep enough I will stumble into it and never get out. The kind of contradiction I'm talking about is narrative contradiction-- when you are reading something on the page, but the author is trying to convince you of something else entirely.

Have you ever watched a character who, frankly, nobody should sympathize with-- who is selfish and cruel, who always puts themselves ahead of others, who constantly makes poor decisions and blames others for their faults-- and yet the narrative treats them like a hero? Every other character is constantly comforting and bolstering them, reassuring them of how great and wonderful they are?

But you're watching the events unfold and you know better.

And it's not a case of other characters being tricked, or missing the details, no. They're present, they're watching the same as the audience, but instead of ever holding this jackass to account they just coddle them and reassure them, or even worse, try to recontextualize them as an unfettered hero.

This is narrative contradiction-- when you've written one set of events but are trying to convince the audience that the implications are something else entirely.

This is oftentimes the core of some of the most aggravating characters; people who are, frankly, terrible human beings, but who for some reason are forgiven or even rewarded for every failure while t he author tries to insist that they are in fact somebody worth rooting for. (Sometimes you even get it the other way around; a character who is blatantly doing the right thing but the narrative tries to convince you they're actually the villain.)

When you encounter this contradiction in a story, it immediately shatters an audience's immersion; they are no longer experiencing the narrative and coming to their own conclusions, they are fully aware that you, as the author, are trying to lead them to specific conclusions without having actually done the work to earn those conclusions.

I'll use an easy punching bag-- Twilight. We are told constantly that Edward is the epitome of a gentleman, straight for another time, the most gorgeous sand fascinating creature on the planet, and if you happen to think Robert Pattinson is hot I guess that works out for you. But a lot of people came away thinking that Edward was a deeply creepy (and shockingly dull) stalker, and this causes a narrative contradiction; we not only fail to get invested in the story, we chafe under the idea that it's trying to convince us to believe something against the evidence of our own eyes.

This is also why a certain type of antihero is so difficult to appreciate; the kind that regularly kills enemies, kicks puppies, sets houses on fire, but then turns around and gives you their sob story and demands your sympathy while never actually changing their ways. (The latter point is crucial; a redemption arc can make this premise work, but if you just have a character who's a right bastard but the other characters try to tell you to like him because he had a rough childhood while he himself does nothing to confront his actions is a different beast entirely. Watching somebody struggle and overcome their contradictions is compelling; watching people tell you to feel bad for a guy who clearly has no moral compunctions about his evil is something else entirely.)

One way to avoid this is to have your characters always be perfect and never wrong so any time they're glazed by the supporting cast or narrator they can't be lying. But that's its own problem.

My actual advice is twofold, depending on your needs. One thing that any story can do is just balance the conversation; some characters aren't going to like each other, or disagree with one another's decisions. This includes the good ones and the bad ones; you can absolutely have a selfish, cowardly character who somebody does try to bolster and reassure, as long as the rest of the cast treats them appropriately for their actions, and a character who does the right thing but in a way that somebody else doesn't approve of. These inter-character arguments are a natural way for people to interact. You can also make it clear that the specific relationship between two characters is inclined to function this way, as long as the narrative itself doesn't imply this is necessarily a good thing.

This is the second factor: don't use any subjective or judgmental exposition. This is much trickier if you happen to be telling a first-person story, where the narrator's perspective is bleeding directly into the prose, although you can use this to your advantage if you want to build up the narrator as unreliable or emphasize their own personal justifications in intentional contrast to the reader's awareness (just make sure you've properly communicated this intention). In a third person story, however, it's quite easy to pull back from judgmental language or exposition and just let a scene play out and leave it to the audience to come to their own conclusion.

"How do you write a compelling character?" is a common question that comes up in writing circles. I see a lot of advice out there, and a lot of exercises, and a lot of character sheets, and I've tried quite a few tactics myself, but there's something fundamental that I always find myself gravitating back toward when it comes time to create a develop a character.

Figure out what role they're fulfilling in the story.

And you're done. Thanks for reading!

...let me elaborate.

First, everybody's process is different, and this is probably more ideal for those of us who have difficulty adhering to outlines. I personally need breathing room to explore a character and a scenario; once I understand them, I understand them, but I have difficulty understanding that character in a vacuum, or oftentimes knowing that I'll even need or want one for a particular situation. If you have a process that works for you, awesome! Keep it up!

For people who struggle with this question or find themselves filling out character sheets and then not really knowing what to do with them, this is for you.

While there are always going to be outliers in any kind of creative or artistic pursuit, by and large, if you're writing a standard story with a linear plot and characters, the most important thing you MUST know it what role you need them to fulfill within the framework of your story.

A plot doesn't happen without its characters (broadly speaking). Those characters are not of interest without the plot into which they are written. Thus, these two aspects will constantly feed into each other in development and active writing, to varying levels and at varying needs. You need to answer two intertwined questions:

What is your character purpose in your story?

What kind of person finds themselves there?

Okay. You're done.

That's it.

You're going to flesh out from here, but these are the most basic question that you need to answer, and this can be used for every character you need in your novel-- your protagonist, your supporting cast, your tertiary cast, the bartender. Every single one of them-- what is there purpose to your story, and what kind of person finds themselves there?

Let's use a fairly easy example-- Aang, from The Last Airbender.

What's his purpose in the story? To bring peace to the Four Nations as the Avatar.

What kind of person finds themselves in that situation? A Chosen One.

Simple enough, but that's going to engender a specific follow-up; what kind of Chosen One is he? We jump back to the plot: Aang is an incomplete Chosen One and must learn to bend all four elements to embody the true force of the Avatar. So, what kind of person finds themselves in that situation? Somebody who's still young and training. And now we can ask another question: how would a child react to that level of responsibility? Not well, which feeds back into the plot, and into Aang's internal conflict: being young and unprepared to take on the responsibilities of the Avatar.

And you can see where that's going to inform forward, into a lot of episode-by-episode conflicts, building into the ongoing narrative. And once you start doing that, you need to populate with more characters, so we introduce Katar and Sokka and we start with the same question: what's their purpose? To join Aang on this question: Sokka as a grounding comic relief, Katara as a fellow bender-in-training. What kind of circumstances led them to this situation, to wanting to join Aang? Their village was attacked by the Fire Nation, which resulted in all of their village men being sent off to war and their benders being long since kidnapped and slaughtered, including their mother.

Why does Katara join Aang? So she can master her own skills, which in turn tells us she's independent and driven. Why does Sokka go with Katara and Aang despite his responsibilities with the village? Because he's protective of his sister, so now we know that he's loyal, and he's capable because he was the oldest male left in the village when the men set of to war. We can instantly see how these factors may define their history, and will define them as they go forward.

Then we take Zuko, who we want to be dangerous and driven but also not competent enough to actually succeed, so he's a young hothead with a chip on his shoulder. We know that he's going to eventually become an ally, so we need to give him a sympathetic edge, so his anger is largely inward-facing but expressed outwardly because he's not good with emotions due to... family issues. We also give him a mitigating presence in Iroh, and nowe we ask, what's Iroh's role, and what kind of person finds themselves in that situation?

And so on, so on.

From here, you can elaborate as much as you need to with a character, but remember also that most people? Don't need to know all of the information that you see on a character sheet. Who's their favorite band? What's their favorite color? What was their average high school GPA? Maybe some of those details are necessary, if you're writing about an overwhelmed 5.0 student (they took a lot of AP classes) who finds themselves struggling for the first time in college; maybe you decide they're an English major so they tend to overthink symbolism while their engineer friend is a pragmatist.

But by and large, if you don't need this information, do not stress about it, because this basic framework is going to answer all of those questions as they arise.

I'll give you a personal example for a character I conceived of very late into my development, and who turned out to be vital to my story. I'm working on an isekai fantasy that takes a turn into cosmic horror. My protagonist is somebody I built this framework for, but when I sat down to write for real, I found a series fo questions unfolding before me.

I had decided some time ago that she had a severe heart condition. This story was originally straight fantasy so some of the more fun aspects of medical drama were waved away with magic, but once I switched to an isekai she -- and her condition -- became more grounded and realistic, and somebody in her state cannot live independently. So I needed to make a character.

She needs a caretaker, so that helps define the relationship that this new character is going to have with her. I decided I wanted him to be male, for the base reason that it makes pronouns easier to track when it's just the two of them in a scene, but this necessitated consideration for what kind of man a woman would be willing to trust when she's at her most vulnerable. I didn't want to do anything romantic, so that ruled out boyfriend/fiancee/husband; I wanted them to be contemporaneous, so not a father. A close friend? But that's a massive imposition to ask for a friend, especially an opposite sex friend, which funneled me to realizing that this character that hadn't existed ten minutes ago is her brother.

And that immediately opened up a completely different world. In a single word I suddenly understood the depth of their dynamic, the extent of their history, and no small part of the way these two would inevitably play off of each other going forward, because according to the plot he's not just her brother, he's a brother who's been watching his sister slowly die for nearly two years, and that's not going to be a small impact on how they relate to each other.

As I wrote that first chapter I gave him a placeholder of Alice in Wonderland while I figured out what kind of book he would actually be reading; by the end of the chapter I realized yeah, he'd be reading Alice, because he works a boring IT job and throws himself into fantasy books, and now he's not just a protective brother but also a folklorist with a long memory for stories and fantasy and an implied hunger for the world they're going to find themselves in. My magic system is based on soul resonance, so knowing all of this information also informed me of the shape of his spells, which in turn informs me of his role in that other world, and which defines even more about their relationship, which is already spinning out in my head into inevitable story beats and internal conflicts and suddenly he's the deuteragonist of this story when all I thought I needed was a driver.

And this will work for you for every role you decide you need fulfilled, if you ingrain this as an instinct. This can help you instantly determine a unique voice for just about any character who might otherwise only have a brief walk-on role; what kind of person becomes a bartender in the capital? What kind of person is selling weird herbs in the back alley? What kind of person is going to the salon and gossiping while your protagonist is getting her hair done? And if you wind up deciding to linger on them a little bit longer, or wind up with an interaction you might not have had planned, then you've already got a jumping point if you want to give them a little more backstory or define what they may or may not know if your protagonist has to ask them a question.

I'm working on a story where the lead character is chronically ill-- she's recovering from invasive cardiac surgery following a long period of heart failure. This is a minor complication when the work itself is an isekai and the world transition does not come with healing.

Naturally I've done a lot of thinking about how to present this on the page, and a lot of thinking about how... not... to present this on the page. Because I've also seen a number of works that feature a chronically ill or disabled character (the two are not synonymous but there can be significant overlap) and... I have thoughts. Most of this is, specifically, if you are writing a major viewpoint character from this perspective. Obviously some of this advice doesn't really count if you have a secondary or supporting character whose head we aren't living in (although even then you should probably bear this mind from a secondhand perspective).

Commit This is general advice when you choose any kind of trait for a character, but you have to commit to the bit. The easiest failing for almost trait is a lack of commitment; to slap on a label for whatever purpose you have metatextually but then only allude to it when it comes to actually write that character. Chronic illness is not a cute costume that you can put on and take off at will. If your character is chronically ill, we as the audience have to be able to feel it in our bones, same as they feel it in theirs.

Live in It By this I obviously mean saw off your own leg so you can accurately depict what it's like to have a prosthetic. Or just talk to people. Find stories on Reddit. If you've never been truly ill in your life don't make assumptions about what you've seen on television or movies, they are almost always prettied up for ease of consumption and maximum sympathetic points. Look into the actual symptoms. Read about people's lived experiences. Remember that one time you had a really bad flu and you felt like you were drowning in your own body because your lungs were so full of mucus? Draw from that experience. You might not fully understand what it's like but you can get into that emotional range. And if you do fully understand what it's like? Use it. If you're writing a chronic illness in part because you want people to understand what it's really like to live inside of that, don't shy away from the nastiness. There are so many tiny things that a healthy person never has to think about but are a constant calculation in your own mind, even if they become second nature. You might have to manage your meds; you might have dietary or fluid restriction; you might approach a building and do calculations about the height of the staircase because you know after five steps you're going to feel winded so you're planning your optimal approach. You know how your joints crack. You know how your calves burn when you've been walking too long. You know the prep work you have to do in the morning to be ready for a day that, for anybody else, just starts with rolling out of bed and brushing their teeth (hopefully). This is where a lot of illness fails in a character narrative; it's done not even through secondhand knowledge, but through fictionalized recitation, a copy of a copy of a copy. If you want to show a major character with an illness, be honest about it, not aesthetic.

Being sick sucks And it's okay to admit it. There is a belief in fiction that the sick either must be the sympathetic victim, a wilting flower to be mourned over even while still alive, or a stoic survivor who is clearly struggling but refuses to let anything get in the way of their ideals, overcoming the limitations that ~society~ has placed on them and proving that they're still capable and strong. Both of these are pretty. Neither of them are true. Being sick sucks. It does leave you in pain. It does leave you weak. It does leave you dependent-- on routine, on management, on meds, on others, on the struggling or failing system that is your own body. It. Sucks. There is a tendency in fiction to try and ameliorate pain and temper reality. This is fine, to an extent and depending on what your intent is, but if your goal is to portray somebody who's navigating their illness the best thing you can do -- for your character and your audience -- is be honest. You can decide how gritty you really want to get, depending on your goals, but if you're really interested in telling a story about somebody who's living in illness you do no favors by ignoring the less savory aspects or trying to pretty it up. Do the research. See if you can learn firsthand from people who are living through it. Be honest.

That doesn't mean LIFE sucks On the opposite end, you also get narratives that really, really dwell in how much this sucks, how the character is constantly thinking about mortality or deciding that their life can never be what it was, succumbing to their sickness as they slowly (or abruptly) fade. And that's not fair, either, because the chronically ill and disabled absolutely lead full, fulfilling lives. They just have trouble with stairs. There is a balance to strive for if you want a character who is living with an illness, not struggling with one. I won't say that feeling sorry for yourself doesn't happen, that there aren't people who give in to the negativity, that some conditions are so consuming and frightening that it's not natural to do so. There's a place for everything in fiction. But if you're going to have a major, primary character -- especially a lead -- be ill, then don't consider the illness from the perspective of the outsider, the woe-is-me submission; consider the illness from the perspective of the survivor, the person who hears their diagnosis and decides well, okay, that sucks. Tell me how to live. This is not the same as stoicism, or willful ignorance. Management within the condition is about finding a balance between continuing ot live your life while accepting the limitations that are now on you. It probably sounds shitty from the outsider perspective, but there is something liberating about recognizing what you can and can't do, physically, and learning to navigate within that space rather than getting angry at the world (or yourself) for being denied.

Don't forget it's there This goes back to commitment, but I need to stress this; chronic illness is chronic. I have seen too many works that will introduce the idea that a character is ill but then more or less ignore the symptoms and ramifications until dramatically convenient (or will give just enough suggestion that they're going to honor the premise and then, when that premise is dramatically inconvenient, just forget that the character is sick). Doing this winds up reading not as a real exploration of illness, but as an aestheticization. You're using illness as flavor or color without recognizing how it really impacts a person's life. If you're going to have a major viewpoint character with an illness, it's not something that can be swept under the rug when it turns out that writing somebody with a joint disorder is tricky when your story is an action-fantasy, or something that you put in the first paragraph for quick 'poor baby' points and then barely comes up again until we need to be reminded that we're supposed to feel bad for them.

And don't magic it away Unless, of course, your story is about magicking it away, or the consequences of having done so. In real life, chronic illness can be mitigated and managed, but rarely cured; more often, it simply demands a different, less invasive kind of treatment. A cancer patient can go into remission but they still have dietary suggestions to minimize the risk of it coming back, and still have regular follow-up appointments to check for any anomalies so it can caught early if it returns. A transplant patient no longer has a failing organ, but they now have a harsh anti-rejection schedule that comes with its own bevy of considerations due to the side effects of immunosuppressants. Chronic conditions don't get to be spirited away; the management changes, but it still requires management. It also just begs the question of why you introduced an illness if your intent was to get rid of it without consequence (and I emphasize, without consequences). If this was the culmination of a quest or some kind of mystic or divine reward, fair enough, but don't introduce a character who's supposed to be chronically ill and then just give them a Potion of Not Ill No More and carry on. At the least that experience had an impact on their life and perspective and the ramifications of that should carry forward.

These characters still have agency Sickness winds up defining a lot about a person's life-- routines have to change, symptoms have to be managed, special considerations and accommodations may have to be made. This does not innately reduce them to being a victim, and it does not innately destroy their agency. In fact, managing a chronic condition is a form of agency in itself. If you've given a character a terminal illness -- cancer, organ failure, whatever -- there is already a decision that has been made; do I enter palliative management and die with dignity, or do I try to fight it despite the difficulty and imposition on my why of life? If it isn't terminal, what kind of accommodations do they seek? How far are they willing to go? This decision for your character is going to go a long way to defining them in the broader narrative, even if that narrative isn't necessarily about their sickness. There's a gulf of difference between the kind of person who gets diagnosed with cancer and effectively writes off the rest of their life and the kind of person who says, what can I do? (Obviously this is a very broad topic with a lot of different issues involved -- cancer in particular depends on the nature of the cancer and its aggression and when it was caught, a person who might say 'let's try' with early ovarian cancer might be less positive if they have an inoperable brain tumor. But maybe they try anyway.)

A little while ago, I read Lindsay Ellis' third Noumena book, Apostles of Mercy. It wasn't very good.

There are a number of reasons I could go into about why, but one of the fundamental issues that really struck with me was a baffling decision regarding one of the viewpoint characters. (Actually, in retrospect, the decision isn't that baffling, I know why she did it, but somebody really should have tapped her on the shoulder and worked on a better way to communicate this information.)

Apostles of Mercy bounces viewpoint between the primary protagonist Cora and the secondary characters of Paris Wells (quickly her girlfriend) and Sol Kaplan (an FBI agent who's been investigating the alien presence since the first book). Cora and Sol wind up on a bit of a globetrotting adventure; meanwhile, Paris is kidnapped by the malicious alien race, who drag her off to Cambodia and throw her in a pit.

She proceeds to stay in the pit for approximately half the runtime of the book, doing sweet fuck all for the length of the entire narrative.

It is interminable.

I said I understand why this decision was made, because the book doesn't do very much to obfuscate the intent-- Paris had to be captured so we could have a viewpoint character reporting back to the audience on what the aliens are doing. Paris herself is worthless-- she sits in a pit, she mopes in a pit, she whines about how much she hopes Cora will save her. She's pulled out of the pit so the aliens can prod her and study her only to be put back in the pit, where she once again proceeds to do nothing but complain about how she's stuck in a pit.

This is not compelling cinema.

I happened, while I was reading this book, to encounter two other narratives that also saw fit to throw their characters in a pit, to precisely the same ends; while those characters were in a pit, they were reduced to moping, whining, and waiting for somebody to get them out of the pit.

The problem, of course, is not the pit.

The pit is a microcosm, a symbol, a circumstance. It's not really about throwing characters in a pit. It's about throwing characters in a pit and then just leaving them to whine about how they're in a pit.

I also re-watched LOST pretty recently, where in one of the episodes a group of characters is also thrown into a pit, but I didn't find this an insufferable development because while those characters were in the pit, even though they couldn't get themselves out of it, they were still active. They were calculating how to escape. They were talking about digging through the side of the pit, they digging for roots they could use to pull themselves up, they were contemplating a 'sick prisoner' scam, they were plotting how to knock out one of their captors.

The difference is agency.

Characters need some amount of agency to keep the audience invested in what's happening to them. Nothing loses my sympathy more quickly than a character giving up when circumstances get the least bit inconvenient.

And this is not to say that characters must always be in control.

I was looking over something I had written some time ago. A character was captured by a mad scientist, hopefully overpowered and outgunned. There was no way she could get herself out of the situation, and I was aware of that (because I wrote, so I kind of spoiled myself). But going back over it I found the scene not only compelling, but my appreciate for the character was exponentially greater because even though she was an impossible situation, she kept fighting.

She tried to talk her way out. She tried to assess the situation and think about exits. She tied to get as much information as she could about the facility in the event that she could get out of her containment room. She gave just enough compliance to avoid punishment in hopes that she would be able to finagle some kind of small advantage or opening. When the villain revealed he was three steps ahead and just watching her because it was funny, it was a devastating blow because I'd seen this girl try. Her failure wasn't because she gave up, it was because she didn't stand a chance.

And even at that moment, she still didn't give up. When things got even worse, she refused cooperation. She plotted how to get the guards to kill her just to escape. When she was dying under his knife, she had just enough wherewithal to tell him he'd fucked up-- one last spit in the eye just to prove he didn't control her.

I don't need characters that can overcome any obstacle, or characters that refuse to acknowledge their limitations, particularly in a more grounded setting. But I do need characters who don't just curl up and die as soon as they're in a bad spot.

Paris Wells, for instance. Maybe that pit was inescapable, but you know what you do instead? You show her testing the walls, searching for roots, determining that she can't do anything more and then prioritizing keeping herself alive. Collecting rainwater, as best she can; keeping out of the sun as it moves. Observing the aliens not because they're so weird and quirky, but looking for weaknesses or openings, trying to communicate with the small ones that are clearly intrigued by her to see if maybe she could coerce them to let her out, or find a way to trap one in the pit with her.

Think, for instance, of Silence of the Lambs. When Catharine Martin is captured by Buffalo Bill, she's thrown in a pit so she can be starved out of her own skin. Instead of giving in to helplessness, she finds a way to drag down Bill's dog and tries to use him for leverage. It doesn't work, ultimately, but by God she tried and you can feel it. She's not just rolling over because she's scared and the situation is hopeless, she's still thinking, still surviving. We want her to live not just because she's a hapless victim, but because we can see that she will do what she needs to do to live, and we as the audience have something real to hold on to and cheer for.

Paris does eventually get taken out of the pit, but it just emphasizes the problem with the character and the circumstances as a whole. She didn't fight back on the way to the pit; she didn't fight on the way out of the pit; when she tries to escape the space ship they take her two, a different character entirely is the one that actually gets them out; and once she's on the ground, she's been infected with super-ebola (that is not a joke, that is what it's called) and decides to just lay in a field until she dies of hemorrhagic fever and, yes, somebody else saves her. She spends the entire narrative helpless, listless, and waiting for somebody to save her. She isn't physically in a pit, but for all she impacts the world around her, she might as well be.

Fundamentally, character agency is one of the most important things you can give to any character. This is not to say that they must always be able to affect their circumstances, or always have the power to overcome, or always be able to win. But, whenever possible, they should at least be seeking a way forward, seeking a solution, seeking survival.

Obviously there are exceptions; if this is a major flaw of theirs then it should be understood this is not a good thing. If they've reached a breaking point and they just can't continue, spiritually or mentally, then this is a tragedy, not just a failure of agency. Sometimes you just want a distressed damsel, although in that case you really shouldn't make her the viewpoint character. But by and large, and almost always, we as the audience will be more invested in any character who has proven that they are willing to fight even after circumstances have beaten them down.