Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories

by Charlie Jane Anders

smells are awesome.

We tend to deflect their emotions in other ways, too. Someone might be really pissed that their bae ditched them at a nightclub to go snort coke in a graveyard, but might only complain about the way their bae slurps their soup. Or they might not be able to express the scope of their gratitude or love for another person, so they might just lavish way too much praise on that person’s shoes. You can use the awkwardness of expressing real-life emotion to offset a lot of the awkwardness of capturing emotion in fiction.

I enjoy putting two characters together and just deepening the content, and the subtext, of their interactions, until I (and hopefully any eventual readers) want to see what’s going to happen with them. A random scene of two people debating grapefruits versus tangerines can deepen my investment in their dynamic, if their personalities are on display.

Padalecki’s performance in that scene is heartrending, and even elicited an unplanned tear from Jensen Ackles. So when you’re trying to bring a lot of emotion to a scene, borrow a trick from Sam Winchester and imagine (or remember) something intense in your own life.

When I’m revising, I’ll often do a “feels” pass, in which I go through scene by scene, and think about the emotion that I’m trying to convey.

But when a character has had a strong internal monologue, or a lot of self-awareness, then hearing their inner voice saying, “This sucks,” or “This isn’t fair,” or “I didn’t think I could ever be this happy,” packs a surprising amount of power.

So when I go back and add more intensity to the emotions in a scene during revisions, I’ll think about the psychological and physiological stuff. I’ll also try to see past my own hang-ups. I love my characters and want them to have a smooth ride, so I’ll often make them nicer to each other, and calmer in the face of extreme shit, than they realistically should be. I also fail to think about what the characters know, what they believe, and what they’re hoping and fearing at this point in the story.

And don’t be afraid to show people being sappy and shmoopy and even cutesy.

Likewise, joy is an essential part of your emotional palette.

I try to find rewards that are fun (so I associate writing with fun activities) and can help loosen me up, to avoid the dreaded stiff-neck syndrome.

Cheat like a husband in a Dolly Parton song.

Nothing has done more to improve my writing than getting feedback from other writers, and watching people’s faces while I was reading my work to them.

Anything you can do to separate your writing time from your grout-scraping time, or your paying-the-bills time, is useful.

I can’t make good wordstuff unless I’m feeding my brain some excellent words from other people.

Even if you only ever want to write epic fantasy, your writing will benefit tremendously from reading every other genre, from romances to literary fiction to murder mysteries. Every genre has its own strengths that you can learn from, and you can stay connected to the thrill of writing by exposing yourself to the endless variety of word-bombs out there.

Reread something you wrote in the past that you’re still happy with

If you’re in a rut, sometimes it’s worth throwing out your routine and writing in a whole other way.

If there’s a part of the story you’re excited to write, write it NOW.

Just write some moments, even if you’re not sure where they go, or if they’ll fit

everything I’ve written down is temporary, up for grabs.

Give yourself permission to feel crappy about your writing

I treat bad feelings like a diagnostic instrument. Including

Hurting yourself in the name of momentum is not fun.

Writing should be your happy place—and hopefully the above tips will help you to make it that way.

WRITING EXERCISE: TAKE A TROPE (OR ALLEGORY) AND MESS IT UP

HOW TO MAKE MINOR CHARACTERS JUMP OFF THE PAGE

I’ll try lots of tricks to make different people speak differently—like having some characters speak mostly in sentence fragments while others speak in long run-on sentences. Or having some characters use more words with Greek and Latin roots, while others use more Germanic words. Or putting more em dashes into a character’s speech (even if I take them out eventually). One character might always blurt out what they’re feeling, while another might keep circling around the truth. I might also have one character who makes lots of definitive statements, while another speaks in hesitant questions. It’s totally okay to give a supporting player a catch phrase, or a few unusual words that they’re wont to use.

An imaginary city will always consist mostly of dummy buildings, with no walls or floors—but if you build it right, people will believe that they could walk through any front door and find something inside. The same applies to your supporting cast: you’ll never be able to develop most of them, but you can leave people believing they’re all the heroes of their own private stories.

If I have to write a moment involving more than two or three characters, I break out in hives. So the more I can do to establish a community through more intimate conversations, and individual relationships within the whole, the happier I tend to be.

Communities don’t just make world-building richer. They also provide allies, and motivation, in the struggle to make things fairer. They’re what we fight for, and how we fight for it.

The world-building really never stops, even if—god, I wish—I’m happy with every word on the printed page.

Patterns create meaning—so the more clearly drawn and vivid the patterns in a work of fiction, the more meaningful it’ll feel.

people argue about ideas and ideals.

Because a work of fiction is not an essay, I try hard to figure out what the emotional core of the story is—the source of the zappiest zaps of feeling and connection—and then I keep coming back to that core as much as possible.

The moments that make you cry, lead to your cast of characters doing something reckless and unexpected, or bond you to your heroes in a deeper fashion come out of the emotional core. The person or place or object that people will risk everything for, that’s enshrined in the craggiest corner of their souls—that’s what keeps a story humming with life. If you know what you’re obsessing about and what your characters care about more than anything, then you’re on your way to creating something that will shatter a lot of hearts and minds.

Satire is cool.

WRITING EXERCISE: CREATING BELIEVABLE PEOPLE IN UNBELIEVABLE SITUATIONS

To utterly misquote Hunter S. Thompson, when the going gets weird, the weird become paladins.

SENTENCES ARE FULL OF POTHOLES

WRITING EXERCISE: SAME MOMENT, DIFFERENT TONES

Most people I know read for feels, as much as for clever plot twists or awesome fight scenes. And these things all make each other more interesting and punchy, so to speak.

With a first-person narrator, everything hangs on how well you capture their voice and infuse every word with the intensity of their anxieties and dreams. With a third-person narrator, it’s all about capturing someone’s internal monologue with as little filter as possible.

Irony can be incredibly lazy

So my final piece of advice is: write the book that only you could have written.

Don’t write what you hope will be popular, or what other people think is cool. Don’t try and follow some formula that someone else said is the perfect storytelling Mad Libs, where X always happens on page 31. Don’t chase trends. Or try to jump on someone else’s success, unless you’re like, “Wow, I always wished I could write that, and now there’s a market for it.”