What To Do When You're Too Attached to a Character | Novel Writing Advice

hey guys it's Ellen Brock novel editor today we're gonna talk about loving your characters too much so in my experience writers tend to either fall on one side of this issue or the other they either completely understand and relate to the problem or this just isn't something that they experience at all I think that it comes down to why people write stories in the first place what compels people to be storytellers for some people I think it's about this story itself and I think for other people it's more about the character or maybe even conveying an emotional truth that they're experiencing as an individual so I'm not an expert in psychology so that could be completely wrong but I think that that's why you'll tend to see writers either completely on one side or completely on the other side of this issue so why does it matter if you love your character too much you might be thinking how could that even be possible how could you love a character to a point where it causes problems or weakens your novel the reason that it causes problems is because the more that you feel connected to a character the more real they feel to you the harder it is for you to make a distinction between what's in your head and what's actually on the page so you might be so familiar and so understanding with this character that when you go to write them down you can't really see them as an outsider you can't really say what if I actually put here on the page what are the words actually saying and what is just living in my mind so you might have all these idiosyncrasies and quirks and things about your character that you know really well and you're sort of not necessarily assuming that the reader will see that but you're seeing that whether or not it's on the page you're always going to read the character and the voice that you have for them and with the expressions that you know that they would create and so they live really vividly in your mind and that can be a really beautiful experience for a writer and it can make writing just feel so easy and rewarding but it can lead to problems with clarity so I want to go over first some signs that this might be happening with your novel and then some possible solutions or activities things you can do to try to address this problem and improve your novel so the first sign that you might be experiencing this excessive amount of love or it's not really excessive because it's not a it's not an inherently a problem it's just excessive in the sense that it can cause distance or problems I don't want to convey that you should feel bad or anything about feeling really loving towards your characters it's a beautiful thing but it's it's just not necessarily conducive to creating the necessary distance so the first sign is that you just know this is a character you think about all the time you hear the voice in your head you are always imagining what they're thinking and feeling or what they're saying maybe you draw them a lot or you look up pictures of people who kind of look like them I think that there's a lot of intuition here I think usually writers are pretty aware when they're really really really in love with a character so just think about it I suppose and one of the major signs I think is you just you just know you just know that you love this character um the second sign is that readers don't connect to your characters this could manifest in a lot of different ways beta readers might say they might say that they didn't like the character more likely they won't say they didn't like the character they may say they didn't understand to the character or the character didn't resonate with them they didn't really form an emotional connection or they just couldn't really engage agents will also sometimes say something similar that they didn't find the character as engaging as they wanted or they just couldn't really connect with them in a meaningful way so if people are saying that about your novel but you feel connected to the character it would be a different matter if you didn't if you also don't feel connected to your character then if the character is probably underdeveloped but if you feel connected to the character but other people are not there's a really good chance that you love this character so much that they live more vividly in your mind then actually on the page the third sign is that when you read through your scenes or your chapters that they don't resonate as much as you want them to you feel like something is missing maybe you're not really sure why but you just feel like there's a distance between the character in your mind and the character on the page not all writers will be aware of this because if this character lives so vividly in your mind you may always see their personality and hear their voice no matter what's on the page but for some writers they are able to tell that something isn't quite right the emotions aren't really quite there this might also manifest as you making little alterations or tweaks to the scene sort of every single time you read it that you're never really quite happy with how it turns out so you do a lot of fiddling and a lot of moving around if things are adding little like emotional bits and bobs or you might be adding more body language or more dialogue tags or just different things to try to amp up the emotional resonance of the scene so this may or may not resonate with you but if you are aware of this issue solving it will actually be easier for you because you'll be able to rely a little bit more on your own perception and intuition the fourth sign is that you over justify their flaws sometimes when writers love characters they don't put flaws in at all they just leave out flaws because they see this character is so perfect and wonderful in my experience that actually is a lot rarer I don't tend to see that come up very often what's more often the case is that the writer over justifies the flaw so for example perhaps you have a character who is bossy so let's say and so every time she does something that's bossy you add a paragraph to explain well she's only bossy because her mom was bossy and she doesn't really want to be bossy and she's really doing the best that she can and when you get into that / justification and / explanation for the character's name actions it can sometimes reflect on the character themselves and make it depends on the the depth of your narrative distance how close you are to the character if you're really close to the character it can make the character seem defensive it can also sometimes make the writer seem defensive of the character so it can actually make it a little bit too obvious that you feel an intense emotional attachment to this character I'm not in any way saying that there shouldn't be backstory or justification for your characters flaws because there definitely should be but just be careful that you're not including that justification or that backstory every single time the flaw is manifesting and that you're not going into too much detail or leaning towards seeming defensive instead of just providing the natural introspection or the thoughts and feelings that the character would be experiencing so if you find that you're really wanting to smooth the edges of your character or really justify why they act the way that they do to a degree that's beyond what's necessary to understand the scene that can sometimes be a sign that you feel over attached to the character you so now that we've gone over some of the signs let's go over some solutions some activities things you can do to strengthen your novel if this is something that you're running into so the first recommendation that I have is to ask specific questions of your beta readers it can be tempting to just allow your beta readers to say whatever they want and there's certainly benefit in that and it can also be tempting to ask leading questions of your beta readers for example you could ask what do you think about her flaw of being too bossy and then you're sort of coaxing a specific type of answer from your beta reader so I recommend that you ask your beta reader to answer questions that are open-ended but also fairly specific so you might ask your beta reader something like what do you think this character's flaw is or what do you think the most dominant personality trait of this character is or what's your favorite personality trait of this character you might even ask them is there something you don't like about this character those questions no matter what the answer is can reveal a lot about how the character is actually coming across to the reader and it can help you to get perspective and also to guide you in what direction you need to work on is the flaw just not coming across at all or is a trait that you thought was coming across clearly not not coming across so like there's this positive trait that really means a lot to you but no one is seeing it for example I had a writer that I worked with who had a character that was supposed to be guilty but he actually came across as sort of shady and distant and awkward and the writer was really surprised because that's not what she was going for and those types of questions can help to reveal things like that if a traits coming across completely different from what you expected or if the readers interpretation of the character just isn't at all what you meant my second recommendation is to pay attention to the emotional beats of a scene so if you don't know about scene structure or you're not familiar with scene structure I have several different videos that go over the specifics of same structures and I will try to link those in the description if I can remember but you should be able to find them pretty easily so if you do understand scene structure you might have the framework of the scene in place so the scene itself functions and works but you might be forgetting to include the emotional beats of the scene so one option is to go through each scene and make sure that those emotional beats are there and that they're clear so look for a specific sentence or two that conveys each emotional beat for example you probably want to look for in explanation of the motivation behind the goal of the scene so why the character wants what they want in this scene it's probably a good idea also to include an emotional reaction to the antagonist or the obstacle in the scene so how the character feels about going up against this obstacle or this antagonist it's also helpful to provide feelings or thoughts behind the pro action of the scene what the character does to react to the obstacle so this can give a sense of the reasoning behind their actions and why they're doing what they're doing and lastly it can be helpful to give a sense of how the character feels about the outcome of the scene or the resolution of the scene how do they feel about how things turned out or how everything wrapped up so going through and adding those beads can be extremely helpful in conveying your character it can be a little bit tedious to go through this process because you're going to be doing it in a very meticulous formulaic way but some of you might find that that's the only way that you can create enough distance that the only way that you can make sure that those things are there is to just sort of shoehorn them in and then soften the edges when you go to edit and work those things more seamlessly in to the scene as you're able to clarify strengthen and refine the scene as a whole so it's not the most fun method by any means and it can be really meticulous really tedious not really very fun to do but it may be the only method that works for some people the third way you can try to get some distance from your character is to add a flaw or a trait that you yourself don't relate to so sometimes the problem with being too close or loving a character too much can come from the character being too similar to the writer so if this is a character that feels like they're almost just exactly you or maybe you but even improved a little bit or with extra abilities or skills or things like that it can be hard to create that distance because you know how your brain works so you know how this characters brain works and you might be making assumptions that the reader is also seeing and interpreting the character in the same way so to prevent that and to improve the character it might be helpful to add a trait that you don't relate to this will work best if it's one of the major traits or one of the major elements of the character arc specifically the motivation or the flaw so if you can add a motivation that really isn't that important to you personally that can help you to create distance or you can add a flaw that you don't have or you can't even really connect with that easily and that forces you to think a little bit more critically about what exactly is this character is thinking and what exactly are they feeling and when you have to go through that process of interpreting and understanding the character it can make it a lot easier to put that process on the page and it can help to prevent the issue of making assumptions that the reader sees the character the same way you do if you can put yourself in more of the readers position where this character isn't as clear to you as yourself or a friend or someone that you might base a character on that you know really really well it can just really help you to to form that distance and then that distance will improve the way you write the character the fourth thing that you might try is to just fall in love with a different character I know this might seem like really strange advice but in the same way that you might have a rebound relationship or you might move on to a different friend if you have a fight or you break up with a friend of yours getting a new person in your life can help you to forget the previous person and the same thing goes for a character times to break that really tight bond that you have to a character the best way to do that is to just start working on something else so write your first draft and then put it aside and start working on another novel another character and then after a while you'll create a stronger bond to the new character and you'll weaken your bond a little bit to the old character you often see writing advice to put the book away for a while to get distance but distance alone might not be enough for people who have a really really close bond to their character they may still find that they just go right back into that headspace when they pick up the book to work on it again so to avoid that it's usually a good idea to just move on to another project get invested and involved in a different character and then go back once you have broken that bond a little bit the catch here is some writers feel like that connection to the character is what motivates them to write so you may lose your desire to return to the project so that is always a risk and at that point you really have to rely on your self discipline to force yourself to go back in and edit that novel now that you have distance even though it's not gonna be as fun as it was when you wrote the first rap and that's sort of just an unfortunate side effect of this method but it is a method that I've seen work for a lot of writers so if you think it might work for you I definitely think it's worth a try you so those are my tips I hope that you found it helpful if you have any suggestions for writers for how to overcome this issue or any other issues go ahead and put them in the comments I want to start including some viewer writing advice suggestions at the end of videos I think that would be really fun and I'm sure you guys have some really good writing advice and things that I never would have thought of so post your tips in the comments I also wanted to say that we're really really close to a hundred K subscribers which I cannot believe it's just crazy to me but please let me know how you want me to celebrate when we do reach 100k subscribers what kind of video or celebration would you like to have so thank you so much for watching next time I'm gonna be talking about the opposite problem what to do when you can't connect to characters so I hope that you will subscribe so you can see that video and I will see you all next time happy writing guys

Channel: Ellen Brock

Views: 13,735

Rating: 4.9809675 out of 5

Keywords: novel, writing, character, advice, tips, tricks, editing, writer, how to, ellen brock, brock, distance, create, help

Id: Z4GKdA9VnXs

Length: 17min 12sec (1032 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 15 2019