Ten questions to ask your characters

As any Russian Formalist will tell you, defamiliarization is a good thing. But it's not only about presenting known things in a new way to an audience, sometimes you have to look at your work from a deliberately different angle to gain new insights and spot potential weaknesses before your readers do.

Here's a trick I learnt from a director currently working on a reading of one of my stage-plays. She told the actors to ask the following questions of their characters to help them develop the parts.

Initially I felt nervous reading these questions - they drill down to the core essential drama affecting characters and will consequently root out any dramatic weaknesses. Try asking them of your characters.

1. How is your character suffering?

2. What are they doing to resolve their suffering?

3. What do they want for themselves?

4. What do they want of others?

5. What do they DO (verbs/ actions ) in each scene?

6. What fundamentally changes/ has changed for them at the end of the story?

7. What do you see as the dominant idea / concept / theme underpinning the story?

8. What is your character's relationship to that idea?

9. Are there any particular events in the past (distant or recent) that shape the character?

10. What is your character’s picture of the future?

As authors governing an entire work and all it entails (plot, story, characters, setting, structure etc.) we rarely take the time to immerse ourselves entirely in one character's world (perhaps the MC if he/she is lucky). If you are looking for fully developed characters in dramatic circumstances then it might pay to do just that – for all your characters. You may see your story-world in a whole new light.

Are you writing for the right medium?

It's tough enough getting your writing noticed without making the wrong choice about how best to present your story. Are you so in love with the idea of yourself as a novelist that you're selling your stories short because they'd be better presented in a different format?

There's plenty of ways to tell stories and plenty of markets for them – video games, television, theatre, comic books to name a few – and some of these markets are booming. So how do you know if you've got the right format? How can you be sure that the medium you've chosen is the best showcase for your story and your talents? Here are some questions to ask yourself.

How do you imagine your story?

Do you invent visually? As internal monologue? Via scenes or dialogue? Do you conjure punchy and complete vignettes or meandering plots? Do you imagine deep and wide worlds, or closed domestic dramas?

All stories can be told in all mediums – but if you create your stories in the ways above, you should also consider the following mediums respectively: film or comic, novel, stage or screen play, short stories, novel, novel or videogame, stage play.

Where do your writing strengths lie?

Are you struggling through a single POV novel yet your crit group keeps telling you your prose is atrocious? Are you writing a stage-play where your descriptive stage-directions run for pages but the dialogue comes like blood from a stone? If your dialogue scintillates while your prose is abominable, you really should think about writing scripts – likewise, a novelistic play can work but perhaps you should think about writing prose.

What format would suit the story?

You may have planned a deeply internal character driven novel but the story you can't help writing is a highly visual action-hero epic. Is a novel really the best medium for your superhero? Wouldn't he fit better in a comic or a film?

Is your writing restricted by the format?

Is your chosen medium holding your writing back? Is it getting in the way of your story? A good way of telling if you're writing in the right format is if your story and your writing are liberated by the medium you're working within. If it keeps getting in the way then maybe you should try something else.

Would your vision be better developed collaboratively?

A lot of writing is a foundation for the final product – film, stage, tv, comics or games for example. While the god-like control of the story in a novel appeals to some, other writers thrive on the more collaborative forms of writing - or enjoy seeing where an actor, director or artist can further take their work. They may be spurred to greater heights as a writer in consequence.

If you've spend years studying and learning a particular format the thought of trying something else can be daunting – but if it really is the right format for you and your story, the going will be easy. At the very least it's good to mix things up, it will make a change, and will certainly make you a better writer.

Five things the writing experts won't tell you

You only have to spend a few minutes in the blogosphere to know there's a whole mountain of writing advice you could suffocate under. You could spend your whole life reading it. Perhaps you should. You'll certainly find some value there – you'll also find some nonsense. You'll even find the most blindingly insightful advice that just doesn't apply to you, your muse or your writing - and it may take you six novels following it before you realise that's the case. But amongst all that stuff there's five things the writing experts will never tell you – because if they did you might stop listening. Here they are:

The second draft can be shittier than the first

Particularly if it's your first work and you decide to follow all that advice everyone is falling over themselves to give you. It's not always the case, but it's possible. Just make sure you keep a copy of that first draft - the naïve and childlike and imaginative one you wrote before the over-worked Frankesteinian monstrosity you're currently wrestling with.

Following the rules can make your writing flat and formulaic

You can show rather than tell, start in media res, remove all exposition and backstory, strip all purpley description, give your characters goals and motivations and your scenes conflicts and it will still read like a rejected script for Eldorado. There's no trick to this – writing is not science, it's alchemy. And when you do finally turn that lead into gold, you'll probably have no bloody idea how you did it.

Revising can kill your originality

People know what they like, they know what they think is good writing - and it's not yours. It's the stuff that the establishment picked up on and the rest of the world followed. And your critique group are going to want to make you write like that. And if you follow all the advice they give you, you're going to end up with that Frankensteinian piece of shit that I mentioned earlier, with nothing of you and your originality left in it. Emulation is good, but there has to be a certain amount of 'fuck you' too. So when you revise, make sure it's your story you're revising, not somebody else's.

Flaws are like bad memories

You forget them and remember the good bits. If readers are swept away by the romance, the milieu or the story they won't care about too many adverbs or too much telling or backstory or whatever. No one says Tolkien has too much backstory; no one cares that Harry Potter is awash with adverbs, millions of readers don't give a toss that the Twilight series is one epic expert-writing fail. Do what you do and do it well.

You can't be taught, you have to learn

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the rules. I devour them – but I do it in order to know them in the hope that I can master them, and one day be free of them. I've nothing against writing experts – as long as their advice is truthful and born from experience and not just dogma they've garnered from other writing experts. One person's truth is, afterall, still truth, even if it's not yours.

But the fact remains - you can't tell between good or bad, relevant or irrelevant advice, until you know enough about writing – or more importantly your writing – to know the difference. And the only way you can do that is to keep writing and to keep making mistakes, because writing experts can't tell you, they can only show you the way. The creative responsibility is yours and yours alone.

But you won't believe me - and you shouldn't - until you've found out the hard way.

How to build a loyal Twitter following

Sure you can build up an audience by following 40,000 people for a percentage of follow-backs – but wouldn't you rather have people following you because they want to, not because they feel obliged?

What makes people follow and keeps them following?

Firstly, you have to provide great content, all the time. Secondly, you have to get people to notice your great content – then, because your content is great – they'll follow you. All you have to do then is keep serving up great content. Simple, right? Here are some ideas on how to do that.

It's not about you, it's about them

People follow you for their benefit, not yours. Remember that, and give them what they came for.

Tell 'em what they'll get

Unless you're famous, people aren't going to follow you because it's you. Use your biog to tell potential followers what to expect from your 'micro-blog'. It will head-off undesirables but also encourage those who will like the things you're going to say.

Tweet about what you know or what you care about

Only your Mum wants to know what you think about everything – and even that's debatable. Focus on topics that you understand or mean something to you. Knowledge conveys authority. Failing that, passion is always compelling. Tweeting about the colour of your carpet and what your dogs had for dinner isn't going to cut it.

Share relevant content

No matter how big your personality, extensive your wit, or colossal your brain, there really isn't that much you can say in 140 characters. Twitter provides a great entry-point for other web-content. If people get to know that you provide links to good stuff, they'll start to trust your recommendations and stick around.

Retweet intelligently

If someone posts a tweet or link that you dig, retweet it. You'll not only share that good content with your followers, you'll also get the attention of another player who shares your interests and may end up following you and RTing you back. It's a community, people.

Be yourself

Don't pretend to be someone else - nobody likes a fraud.

Don't block tweet #ff

One quick way to get yourself unfollowed - #ff everyone in the world to all your followers. Filling your followers streams with a list of usernames that have no context, meaning, relevance or reason why they should be followed will only end up with people unfollowing you in droves. If you really want to recommend people – pick a select few and explain why people should follow them. Spamming recommendations for everyone is pointless and annoying.

Remember followers aren't fans

And hence they don't want to read your epic chat exchanges with other people they don't know either. Twitter is not a chat service – respond and reply to provocative and interesting tweets – add to the debate by all means - but long, tedious and trivial noise between 'friends' you don't know just leads to unfollows.

Be interesting

People follow people for three reasons: they provide links to great content, they say great things, or the people themselves are great. Combine all three and you're onto a winner.

Anybody else got any Twitter turn-ons or turn-offs?