Writing Compelling Character Relationships | Writing Tips

hey guys it's shaylen and i'm here today with another writing video so today i'm really excited about this topic i think it's a really fun topic because it's the basis of so much good fiction and it's how to write character relationships this is a very broad topic but i kind of like broad topics and when it comes to writing obviously like you can do infinite things and writers are always doing new original things that are really exciting and so i think it's really fun to talk about these really broad general principles like how do i write character relationships because you can literally do infinite things by considering that so character relationships are a backbone of a solid majority of fiction unless you're writing something where the character is just like completely alone and completely isolated there are probably character relationships that have a deep impact on the story either they're central to the plot they're essential to the conflict they're central in some way a relationship might be something like a romantic relationship that develops throughout the story but it might be something like relationships with family members that cause conflict literally any relationship i'm not really talking about specific types of relationships because every relationship you write is going to be different so i just want to talk about character relationships and kind of how they function in a story and some things to consider i don't know this is just my little take on it for the day um so the first thing i'm going to say you already know what i'm gonna say take a moment please to leave a comment and tell me what i'm about to say and if you said specificity then congratulations you see me more than i see myself my first tip is to specify the relationships i'm sorry okay i do have a full video on specificity but it is the backbone of my writing philosophy i think it's so important i think vagueness is not that interesting i think specificity is inherently usually more compelling you know it's easy to class relationships these characters are siblings this is the main character's parent this is the main character's spouse whatever it's easy to generally define what a relationship is but there's nothing really that inherently interesting about that like many of us have siblings we all have parents whether we know them or like them or not i like mine to clarify since i know my mom is watching this she's great whether you have a romantic partner or not you probably know other people who do those things on their own they might be true about a relationship between two characters but they're not really inherently interesting which is why i think it helps to make it much more specific and understanding the specific parameters of the relationship so if we're working with let's say siblings let's say we have two sisters a very vague interpretation of the relationship would be to say like okay well they're sisters but what's interesting and specific about their relationship as sisters so let's think of the basics okay who's older let's say the protagonist is the younger one how much younger let's say not that much let's say like there's just a year between them so they were kind of raised together almost like twins but not entirely the older sister still does have that older sibling complex is there any difference in how they were treated by their parents what's their current relationship with each other do they talk often are they close i mean we could go on and on and on and on like even the things i'm saying right now are still pretty general we could get so much deeper into that relationship so that's my first tip is thinking of more specific character relationships especially when i'm writing short fiction this is really kind of where most of my short fiction ideas begin from especially if you're a short fiction writer i think that this can really help because you don't really have time to explore a vague relationship in a short story after all you've only got a couple thousand words you do have time to explore a very specific relationship so in one of my short stories that i know a lot of you guys have read because i get comments on it fairly often called i will never tell you this that story is about a language tutor and his student she's like 10. her dad is not in her life um and so he's teaching her the language that her father wanted to teach her and so it turns into this teacher-student but more so faux father-daughter kind of relationship um and kind of like the pain of wishing someone was your family but knowing that they never can be that's a very specific relationship and so in a short space especially for me as the writer it gave me a lot more to unpack than something really vague you know where do you even begin when you have something really vague but with something that specific it was really easy to know exactly what i had to do and exactly what i had to say about this relationship because it was so specific that was so much easier for me than something really vague like if i was just like i want to write a story about father and daughter that where do you even begin right infinite ways that that could go specifying down that relationship is gonna be really helpful for you as a writer it's just gonna make your life easier and it's also gonna make the story more interesting my second tip is that both characters need to exist fully outside the context of this relationship i think one of the biggest problems that can happen especially with important side characters you know those side characters who they're not the point of view character but they're really quite crucial to the story is when we don't have any understanding of this character outside the context of this relationship we don't have a sense for their life outside this relationship we don't have a sense of who they are outside of the relationship we only understand them in relation to the main character and in relation to their relationship with the main character now there may even be times where your character only understands someone else through their relationship to them but as the reader the reader should probably have a sense that this is a real person with a rich and complex life outside of this relationship and this is one of those iceberg type things if this character isn't a point of view character we're only ever going to see them in the context of this relationship because that's the only time we're ever going to see their interactions but we do have to get the sense that they have a full life outside of this they have desires outside of this relationship they have other relationships with other people that are fulfilling or cause conflict or etc etc etc i think it's good to remember that a good character relationship begins with two complex individuals who were interesting on their own it's hard to write a compelling character relationship if one or both characters are not compelling on their own making sure that your characters are interesting and therefore their relationship is also interesting rather than their relationship being interesting but the characters themselves not really being interesting this can often go both ways um and i have certainly done both before my writing especially with love interests this happens a lot where a lot of writers will lean to writing really interesting love interests who are really compelling characters but then the main character feels kind of bland and it's hard to interpret who the main character is on their own or in this relationship or the vice versa can also happen where the main character is very rich and we get a really strong sense of their inner life but then maybe the love interest feels a bit superficial and we don't get a sense for who they are outside this relationship they're not a character who stands on their own so that's really the good i think basis for any good character relationship is doing good character development for both your characters and that character development for you might take place in a planning phase in a brainstorming phase it might take place while you're writing the book for me it usually takes place while i'm writing the book but creating a complete rounded full picture of both characters especially in a novel where you have that space and you have the time to really dive into both characters bringing them both to life outside the context of their relationship again that will make your conflict a lot more interesting like if this is a relationship it's a source of conflict it's gonna be a much more complex source of conflict if both characters are interesting and we can understand both of their desires and why their desires clash but the same with a relationship that's meant to be like a positive force in the story you know again if you're writing a romance or if there's kind of like a found family kind of thing we love a found family romance is probably the most common but you know positive relationship arc could be platonic um reconnecting with a family member really anything having that full sense of both characters so that we're invested in their growth as a set of two people or three people or four people i don't know a character relationship isn't necessarily between two people but it is also always between two people like let's say there's a triangle three characters they have a full relationship all three of them but then each set of two characters also have their own unique relationship i've been saying acting like character relationships only exist between two characters up until this point because every larger group of characters has individual relationships with ann rightly one thing that i think is really helpful to ask in a novel and in a short story is what do your characters reveal about each other i talk a lot about character reveal because it is kind of the basis of how i see character writing is asking myself like what am i unpacking about this character here like what's being revealed about them i think of that more so than like how does the character change which is the way that a lot of people see character i think of it more as what is being revealed about them that's just a personal preference it's what makes sense to me but that can happen within the story between the characters what are these two characters revealing about each other circling information we already know about both characters or about the relationship as a whole is not really enough there needs to be a sense of revelation about the relationship and therefore about the characters these characters and the fact that they have a relationship whatever the nature of that relationship is should cause some kind of there's like some energy there and it's revealing things about both characters one thing that i find really helpful for plot development in general but in particular with character relationships is to really know the purpose that each scene dedicated to developing this relationship serves and don't repeat a purpose when i think back to i don't know several years ago maybe when i was like 18 i really underestimated what a scene could do and i always felt like i needed three or four scenes to accomplish a single purpose and so then what happened was i just had a bunch of redundant scenes every scene can serve its purpose and then you never need to repeat that so if you have a scene that raises the emotional stakes in a specific way you don't need another scene to then raise those stakes in that same way and then in another you can just do it in one scene identify the purpose of each of each scene in regards to the relationship and don't double down on that you know like if the purpose of a certain scene is for the two characters to kind of get past their initial bad first impression of each other and start to gain a bit of mutual respect you can do that in one scene you don't need three scenes when we catch up with the relationship again in the next scene there should be a new sense of movement to their relationship what's the next step then like what's what are we working towards and what's the next step towards that rather than repeating okay well in the last scene they started to gain some mutual respect so we'll continue to have them gain some mutual respect and then in the next scene they'll still be working on gaining some mutual respect at this point you're starting to lose the reader you're bogging down the book structurally more than it needs to um and so it's i find it's really helpful just like know what it's doing and then don't come back i mean this helps for structure in general but especially with character relationships i think that almost every relationship should cause some kind of conflict within the story there will certainly be exceptions to this i think as a general rule pretty much every relationship should be causing conflict of some type even if it's a positive relationship maybe it's pushing the character to confront something internal sometimes the conflict of relationship can be these characters get along they seem to have a a good vibe going but the main character is withholding something really important from them and so there's always that source of tension if you have a relationship where there's no conflict and you know that there's no conflict that's something that i would do with intention if you find a relationship like this ask yourself okay why do i want there to be no conflict and maybe there is conflict it's just a different type otherwise i think pretty much every relationship should be a source of conflict in different ways sometimes it might be really direct antagonistic sometimes it might be really really subtle one thing that i always found really helpful was i don't remember where i heard this i think it was from a professor but it was just that a character relationship is its own character viewing a relationship as a character in and of itself it kind of has like its own dynamic its own personality based on the relationship between these two people i just thought that that was super cool and it's always stayed in the back of my mind i don't really know how to explain it more than that it was not explained to me in more concrete terms than that so that's what i'm going to give you take that and run with it as you will so i just wanted to run through some questions that i think are helpful to ask let's say you want to do some deeper relationship development so what does this character and when i say this character i mostly mean the protagonist but you might have multiple protagonists so what does this character fear most in this relationship asking like what does the character fear in this relationship which is maybe otherwise a good thing that can start to create conflict what do they want most from it what aspects of themselves does this relationship make them present and what aspects does it make them hide what do these characters not understand about each other what do they understand about each other again this applies to any character relationship this may be more geared towards like a positive one how can this relationship present them with a contradiction so for example to have this relationship they have to face something in themselves that they don't like or they have to make a sacrifice again that's a great way to raise the emotional stakes increase the conflict and find conflict in this relationship who is this character with this person versus by themselves versus with anyone else you know we're all pretty multi-faceted people and we're not the same with every person and we're not the same with every person as we are with ourselves so what side of themself conscious unconscious better for worse because they want to hide it because it's being positively brought out are they with this person in this context um and how does this relationship change both characters oftentimes you'll find a setup where the main character is undergoing the most thorough arc and maybe the other character is a bit more static where one character is more grounded they're more an anchor they're solid and that's what allows the other character to grow or maybe both characters are undergoing their own character arc through knowing each other through the conflicts or the interactions that they have with each other so that's what i'm going to say on character relationships like i said in the beginning it's such a broad topic you can do literally anything there are infinite things that a character relationship could be because they're infinite things a character could be despite the kind of broadness of the topic i hope that this was helpful useful interesting i would love to know what your favorite type of character relationship to write is i really like writing sibling relationships messed up sibling relationships really are my favorite thing to write you think that i have a deep vendetta against my brother from writing reading my work but we're actually very close the first story that i ever handed into a fiction writing workshop was about twins who want to murder each other and right before we worked out my story we were on a break and um the prof was just asking the class like about our families and i mentioned that i had a brother and i told some i don't know a little anecdote about us and she goes all right well it's gonna be really weird workshopping this story now that i know that you have a brother thank you so much for watching um if you have any questions you can always send me ask on tumblr and i'll see you in another video [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: ShaelinWrites

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Keywords: writer, writing, author, novelist, creative writing, writetube, writetuber, writing advice, how to write a book, how to write a novel, writing vlog, creative writing degree, books, nanowrimo, authortube, writing tip, character relationships, writing character relationships, writing complex characters

Id: 0tRuKHWkb-A

Length: 16min 2sec (962 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021