Title Details

Roz Morris has two decades of experience writing novels and helping floundering authors find their way. She is a senior book doctor for a major literary consultancy in London, writes fiction under her own name and has ghostwritten bestselling fiction for high-profile writers with major publishers, including Random House, Puffin and Mammoth.
Her websites are www.rozmorris.wordpress.com and www.nailyournovel.com

Introduction

1 Most commonly repeated advice: show not tell
Remind yourself to switch to showing
Resist the urge to steer the reader
For your toolbox

2 Why plots happen − motivation, need and conflict
Dramatic need
Conflict − a quick guide
A simple idea + emotional conflict = a story
Don’t forget supporting characters
For your toolbox

3 Fictional people are individuals
What the writer intended and what came out on the page
Character’s dramatic need is glossed over in generalisations
No internal life − empty or enigmatic?
Writer feels out of their depth with that character or situation
Males, females and culture
Characters have no life outside the plot
Too much trivial detail
Describing characters − too much physical detail
Please, not like a famous person
Looking in the mirror: awkward reasons for characters to ponder their appearance
A carnival of odd misfits − tics and physical characteristics are not character
Teenagers
What do they hide, even if they are ‘normal’? Rounded characters and the double life of Isobel
Narrator has stranglehold so characters never come alive on their own
Characters too similar to each other
Should you change to a new viewpoint character once the novel is well under way?
If you have a viewpoint character, who should it be?
Characters who are only symbols
Dystopia problem: characters are dummies to show off the world
Too many characters − problems with a huge cast
Send in the clowns − comic characters are jarringly obvious
Passive central characters
First-person narrator has no character of their own
Likability − and what makes characters interesting
Recognition and the universal − keep asking ‘why’
For your toolbox

4 Change
Catalyst characters
Characters who resist change
For your toolbox

5 Villains and antagonists: what goes wrong with wrong ’uns
Writer puts the bad character in solitary confinement
Narrator intrudes to tell us who will turn nasty: foreshadowing the bad deeds
Bad to the bone − only negatives
Weak motivation for villainy
The nebulous enemy: the trouble with battling ‘society’
For your toolbox

6 It’s all relationships: romances and significant others
Rules of attraction: relationships that fail to grab the reader
Don’t forget to show the moment it started
Romantic dialogue and discomfort with moments of intense emotion
Leaning on strong words instead of engaging with the characters
Where characters splurge their feelings
Startling confessions erupt out of nowhere
Sexual tension for bashful writers
Too coy about seductions
Lexicon of love: how to describe sex
Special friendships need glue
Special friendships must come to life
Relationships have their own landscape and language
Happy families
Relationships that end their journey too soon
For your toolbox

7 Supporting characters and walk-ons
What secondary characters talk about
Secondary characters need less screen time: use summary
Supporting or peripheral characters must contribute to the book
Walk-on characters in too much detail
For your toolbox

8 Dialogue - more than a transcript of speech
No dialogue
Beyond talking
Remember we see dialogue as well as hear it
Internal reactions too vague
Characters talk about distressing things without getting upset
Author interrupts too much and slows the pace
Look for inequalities
What else might be happening under the words? Subtext
Long speeches instead of conversations
Be informal
Dialogue used as information dump: exposition
Desperately avoiding the info-dump
Characters talk about events we have already seen
Most of the plot presented in dialogue
Thinking out loud, in quotes
Too may social niceties and nothing interesting
What vocabulary does your character use?
Going yokel
Characters all sound the same − funny voices part 2
All characters have the same sense of humour
Bossy dialogue tags
For your toolbox

9 Character design: questionnaires and other games
Be a creative vandal − a warm-up
Make your characters different from you − but still write with insight
Make your main characters different from each other
Fuel the story
Imagine you met the character
Playing favourites
Swap the career stereotypes
Supporting characters
Other character design games
For your toolbox

Appendix: Top 10 novice mistakes with characters
Good characters too saintly
Everybody likes them (so the reader must too)
Writer leaves scenes out in case they make us dislike the character
My lovely character hates everyone
My lovely character has to work with idiots
My lovely character is downtrodden but will grow
Characters too damaged at the start of the story
Main character too vulnerable and incapable
Can we spot which character is based on real life?
Character’s sudden emotional change has no consequences
For your toolbox
Afterword

One of the Best Books on Characterisation, September 12, 2013
By
Wendy Jones "wjones7423" (Dundee, Scotland) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Nail Your Novel: Bring Characters To Life (Paperback)
I have been following Roz Morris's writing blog and found it to be choc full of advice for writers. This led me to her books and this one in particular. What a find it turned out to be. This is a simple book but do not let this fool you that it is not good. I have read many books on writing and I would say this contains some of the best advice on writing characters. All characters are considered, both the main characters and the supporting cast. Every aspect of characterisation is covered. These are supported with examples from fictional writers. There is an excellent chapter on the mistakes that novice writers make. Each chapter ends with a section called for your toolbox. These are tips which re-emphasise the important points made in the chapter. The book concludes with some writing exercises, some of which are novel in the extreme. No pun intended. I certainly intend to try many of them out. If you want to lift your characters out of the humdrum and use them to give your book zing and tension then this is the book for you. I would consider this a recommended book in my arsenal.


Trevor Veale author of 2084 & the Letitia series on May 3, 2013
Format: Kindle Edition Amazon Verified Purchase
In his Foreword to the 40th Anniversary Edition of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury wrote: "...I had been writing short stories from the age of twelve...thinking that I might never dare to leap off a cliff into a novel. Here, then, was the beginning of my daring to jump, without parachute, into a new form."

Well, if you are about to take that clifftop leap into novel writing, fear not. Roz Morris has provided the parachute that will protect you from landing in a crumpled heap of uncrafted characters.

In her previous Nail Your Novel guide for fiction creators, Morris covered the groundwork of story telling, from starting a novel with confidence, through planning, drafting, rewriting to submission for publication. In her latest novel-writers' manual, Nail Your Novel: Bring Characters To Life, she tackles the big issue of how to make readers eager to lose themselves in the world your characters inhabit and the story they unfold.

Learning from the character techniques of masterworks such as Fahrenheit 451, Jane Eyre, Lolita, and the more recently celebrated Twilight and Hunger Games series, you'll be shown how to craft powerful protagonists, vivid villains and memorable minor characters. Sound principles of character crafting are given, in chapters detailing all the essentials, covering such items as viewpoint, narrative voice, catalyst characters (think James Bond, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who) and those trouble-makers: antagonists.

Whether your characters are savvy, vulnerable, embattled or just plain dystopian (the trials of Nineteen Eighty-Four's Winston Smith, forex), their chief features are given the Morris tune-up to ensure you keep the reader involved in their lives. From designing central characters, the key players around whom the cast members grow, to managing the number of 'extras' in your cast, every aspect of character creation is illumined. An added bonus: Morris's colloquial style frees the writer from being tangled up in technicalities.

With Roz Morris as your guide, your characters will carry your novel to a most happy landing. Now make that leap.