In Today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* In an Email
* Becoming the Character
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quote of the Day
“Bobby has an invisible process. He becomes the character.” Sissy Spacek on Robert Duvall (Sound familiar?)
In an Email
One accomplished writer said she
“just finished listening to Fahrenheit 451 on Audible. Wow. I’ve read it several times but probably the most recent was 10 years ago. What I listened to was the 60th anniversary edition. At the end of the audible version they included an afterword and coda of his. Both are gems. I found the paperback at Bookman’s yesterday so I can reread them.”
Just thought I’d pass that along.
I found and ordered the 60th anniversary paperback at Amazon so I can read Bradbury’s afterword and coda myself.
Hey, when someone like Ray Bradbury speaks, I listen.
Becoming the Character
A few posts back I mentioned a writer who was concerned that a character seemed to be taking on too many of her own personality traits. Should she be worried about that?
The short answer is No.
The medium answer is No, of course not.
The long answer is more detailed but it has the same outcome: your authentic writer’s voice conveying the authentic story of your character.
Every compulsion to worry about who or what your characters are comes from the conscious, critical mind, and in every case that compulsion is only an attempt to slow or stop you from writing.
That’s why I’ve always held that it’s better not to “think” (conscious mind) about the characters at all.
But if you can’t do that—if you want or need the safety net of “thinking” about a character or characters—try this:
Instead of wondering Who is the character? and doing an interview with him or having a conversation with him or whipping up a character sketch, think What is my relationship to the character?
Because you and the characters ARE related. In fact, that’s one reason you don’t have to think about them at all.
That a character will take on some of your own physical and emotional traits is completely natural, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with it.
That you and your character are similar in some ways is even unavoidable unless you specifically force (conscious mind) differences on the character to separate yourself.
And why would you ever do that? You share most of your personality traits with others in your personal, extended, and cultural family anyway. So at best, separating your characters out is an impossible task.
That’s the source of the old rule about “well-rounded” characters: You know, that even the cleanest, most pristine characters have some unsavory personality traits, and even the meanest, nastiest characters have some redeeming traits.
Your characters are part of who you are. That isn’t a bad thing and it certainly isn’t unique to you.
Lee Child’s thriller character Jack Reacher had both physical stature and a no-BS attitude in common with Lee who is very tall and used to throw elbows in neighborhood fights.
Most if not all of Hemingway’s characters came directly from who he was in real life.
Dean Wesley Smith’s fantasy Poker Boy was a sly poker player. Dean himself paid for much of his college by winning at poker.
- Dean also spent much of his life in Idaho, the setting for many (if not all) of his Thunder Mountain suspense series.
- Dean (and his characters) also time-traveled through a jukebox he first encountered when he was a bartender.
I’m not a personal fan of James Scott Bell, but his Mike Romeo character is only an extension of himself.
It’s no accident that so many lawyers write legal thrillers, or that doctors write medical thrillers, or that cops, retired cops, would-be cops, reporters, and puzzle-lovers write mysteries and suspense and crime novels. And on and on.
Wes Crowley—in both stature and attitude—is basically who I wish I’d been had I lived a different life beginning in the 1880’s Texas Panhandle and drawing to a close around 70 years later deep in Mexico in the state of Guerrero. I was born and raised in New Mexico, and spent a lot of time in West Texas and in Amarillo.
Your characters, like your children and other relatives, are part and parcel of you, both nature and nurture. But they’re still separate of you. They’re still different individuals leading different lives.
- When you’re writing memoir, you’re telling events of your life story as you remember them.
- When you’re writing fiction, you’re telling the events of your characters’ story as it unfolds in real time all around you.
So don’t fret over silly, negative critic-minded aspects like whether you have “too much” or “too little” description or dialogue or whatever else, including whether the character (or characters) display “too many” of your personality traits. All of that is a trap of the conscious, critical mind.
For one thing, your characters are part of you, so of course they will display some of your traits. For another, whether anything is “too much” or “too little” is a judgement call, and judgement calls are up to the critic or the reader.
Of course, every literary critic is a reader, and to a lesser degree, every reader is a critic.
Your job is only to give them something to judge.
So stop worrying about characters and trying to control with your critical mind things you shouldn’t want to control in the first place. Instead, just run with your characters and have fun.
Of Interest
Setting the Stage with Powerful Description
Celebrating the Magic of… Robert Duvall
Learn Publishing from the Master — Kevin J. Anderson (Video, not quite an hour)
The Numbers
The Journal………………….. 950
Mentorship Words…………….. 0
Total Nonfiction…………………. 950
Writing of
Day 1…… XXXX words. To date………… XXXXX
Fiction for February………………………. XXXX
Fiction for 2026…………………………… XXXX
Nonfiction for February.…………………. 18830
Nonfiction for 2026………………..……… 38420
2026 consumable words………………… 38420
2026 Novels to Date……………………… 0
2026 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2026 Short Stories to Date……………… 0
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 123
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 310
Short story collections……………………. 29