026: A Common Character Mistake and How to Fix It
In this episode, I discuss a common character mistake I see in client manuscripts. I share why this is a mistake and give you an example of how to fix it.
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A Common Character Mistake and How to Fix It
Hi, friends, welcome to the podcast. I was gonna give, i meant to give a shout out last week because we hit our 25th episode, but I kind of forgot when I was recording that one. So this is episode 26. Am i saying am i doing that right For Yeah, yeah, this is Episode 26, which is really cool. Thank you to everyone for listening, I really have a lot of fun doing this podcast and always makes me smile to hear your feedback. And all the messages you send, reviews that you leave, it's very much appreciated. So okay, character mistakes, there are tons of character and character mistakes that you could make. But I want to talk about one in particular that came up in discussion with one of my coaching clients. This is something that we were talking about, we started working together and I was looking at some of her early pages, which were really great. It was like a really good foundation. But one thing that we talked about was this idea of the character's internal world and letting the reader see a bit of that. And that's something that I've noticed in a lot of, of clients that I've whose work I've edited, coaching clients, this is kind of a common thing, where characters just react to things in the sense that they they act, right? They talk, they move, they react physically, but we don't always have a good idea of what's going on in their head, how they're feeling about things. So that's kind of what I mean when I say their interior world, their thoughts, their feelings, their emotions, all of those things.
So some of this, before we get into to why this is a mistake and how to fix it. And I've even got an example for you of what I mean by this. But just know that some of this is stylistic. Some writers prefer to have a little bit of distance between themselves and the characters, they prefer to be a little bit more objective. There's even a point of view or perspective called third person objective, which is really rare. It's like, not common at all. I can think of like one well known short story that has third person objective, but I can't even think of a book that has it like a modern novel, because it's just, it's just the author telling us what's happening, we don't get into the characters heads at all. And that's, that's hard readers, you know, we want to know these characters, we want to know what's happening. So this is just know this is going to vary a little bit how much we see of the character's internal internal world, and how much distance you choose to have. There's no appropriate amount, some of its going to be stylistic. Like I said, some of its going to vary by genre, some of it will depend on the character, or there's a lot of factors that play into it. But this is just something that I've noticed. So really, the way to fix this is to think about not just how is the character responding to what's happening? And how are they moving through the world of your story? But how are they feeling about it? How are they thinking about it? This is a chance for you as the author as the writer to let us into the heads of these characters.
Now, this doesn't have to mean like a total, you just pause the action and write a page or a page and a half of only what the character is thinking and feeling. There's a way to sort of weave this in with the action. There's a way to do this in a line or two and then jump back into the action. Like think of a conversation between two characters. If you just have it be he said this, she said this, they said this and just go back and forth for a full two pages that can get kind of dry and kind of dull. Whereas if you have a couple of lines of dialogue and then your main character steps back and kind of processes what's happening and we get an insight into a thought that they're having about what the other person is saying. That's a way to show the interior world of the character without just stopping the conversation completely and then jumping to a full you know, couple of paragraphs or full page about this is everything, the character is thinking and feeling. So when I was talking with my coaching client about this and kind of talking about ways that she could do this, for one of her main characters, we talked about different methods, different ways that she could do this in her story. And one of the things I did is I gave her an example. So I was looking at my bookshelf, and I think I honestly spent like 15 seconds looking at my books, and I spotted a copy of Divine Secrets of The Ya Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca wells. And I was like, Oh, this is perfect.
So this is a book that was made into a movie. Not a very good movie, to be honest. I was I loved the book. So I was excited about the movie, and the movie was kind of a disappointment. But that's okay, that happens sometimes. So this came out in the 90s. It's old. It's about. It's about Southern women. And and what I love about this book so much is it it gives you such rich characters, both the characters that are the daughter, and then her mother. And then the mother's group of friends, her three other friends, they formed this sisterhood called the Yayas. They're such rich characters, and they are such, there's such a strong sense of place and time. It's just she does so many things well, and this is just such a rich book in so many ways. So I opened up the book, and it took me like maybe a minute to find a paragraph or two that really encapsulated this idea of letting the reader into the character's internal world.
So I'm going to read you about a paragraph, maybe two paragraphs. This is from chapter let me see. Chapter four. So Sidda is the main character we are. She's a playwright, she's, I think, like in her 30s, or maybe 40 or something. And she's, she's looking at all of this memorabilia from her mother's life. She's trying she has a really complicated relationship with her mother, her mother is this like, dynamic kind of theatrical, larger than life character and Sidda has a complicated relationship with her because of the way that she was when she was growing up. And she's looking at all this memorabilia, all this stuff from her mother's past trying to get a sense of who her mother was. So this is this is the example. "She found herself smiling automatically at the sight of her mother's smile. She wanted to devour the album to crawl into it like a hungry child and take everything she needed. This raw desire made her feel dizzy. It mixed with the excitement of the voyeur and the curiosity of a dramatist. Her hands all but shook at the sight of the Cornucopia that lay before her. Clues to her mother's life, evidence of her mother's life before children. This is ridiculous Sidda thought, calm down, act like an archaeologist sifting for clues among artifacts, and remember to breathe." So there's so much in those few lines, we see her physical reaction to this photo album of her mother's that's in front of her, it's making her dizzy with excitement. Her hands are almost shaking, so we can see her reacting to this, this, you know, stuff that's right in front of her. And then she thinks something to herself. She thinks this is ridiculous, calm down, act like an archeologist remember to breathe. She's having this little like pep talk with herself. Like stop being so dramatic. You have to be objective about this. You have to be rational about this. So we see those couple of moments of a pep talk. So after those lines, Sidda goes to take the photo album, and she moves over to a chair. So there's like a piece of action that happens right after that. So those two lines, you know, it wasn't very long. Right?
It wasn't like the whole scene stopped and we just got a dump of everything she's thinking and feeling. But Rebecca Well, sprinkles in these little moments, where we get to see how Sidda is feeling how she's responding to things physically. And those physical reactions tell us a lot about what's happening internally. Those physical reactions are like emotions manifesting in the body. So there's so much going on there. So start paying attention as you are reading, to how different writers do this, how they manage to show us the character's internal world in ways that are subtle or not so subtle or long or not very long, to see if you can spot how different writers approach this. And if this is something that you are listening to and you're thinking, Oh crap, I think I do this in I own work, I have a lot of distance for my character. It's very factual. I'm just reporting what's happening. This is a good, this is a good example. But I'm sure you can find tons in almost almost any book that you read of how to do this. And just a reminder, when you're looking at examples, only use them for inspiration. That's exactly what I told my coaching client when I was giving her this example. This is just one writers way of doing this. This is one character, one, you know, a couple of lines from one book, this is not the way to do it. So when you are looking at examples, just keep that in mind, use them as inspiration, not to copy.
So thinking about your character's internal world. In order for you to convey that to the reader, you as the writer have to understand what's going on with them, you have to understand how they're feeling, what they're thinking in different scenes. So some of this might require like a little bit more work to really understand your character, and understand how they react to something and why they react that way, which is fine. It's always a good idea to get a little bit deeper with our characters and really understand why they behave the way that they do. So that is this week's episode episode. Just a quick tip, just a quick thing to keep in mind as you're building your characters as you're sort of watching how they're behaving in your story.
Alright, see you next week. Thank you so much for tuning in.