This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

Preserving previous' tags because firelxdykatara also makes excellent additions in them

i'm AWARE this is a stupid hill to die on, but like. trope vs theme vs cliché vs motif vs archetype MATTERS. it matters to Me and i will die on this hill no matter how much others decide it's pointless. words mean things

trope: 1) the use of figurative language for artistic effect; includes allegories, analogies, hyperbole, & metaphors, among others. 2) commonly reoccurring literary devices, motifs, or clichés. Includes things like the medieval fantasy setting, the Dark Lord, enemies-to-lovers, and the Chosen One.

theme: the reoccurring idea or subject in a work of art. Death, life, rebirth, change, love, what it means to be human, the definition of family, the effects of war, etc.

cliché: an element of an artistic work that has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, even becoming annoying or irritating. (Most clichés are tropes but not all tropes are clichés.)

motif: a distinctive repeating feature or idea, such as the green light in The Great Gatsby. May overlap with tropes and is often used to further explore the theme.

archetype: a constantly-recurring symbol or motif; it refers to the recurrence of characters or ideas sharing similar traits throughout various, seemingly unrelated cases in classic storytelling. E.g. rags to riches, the wise old mentor. Again may overlap with tropes, clichés, and motifs, but they're not the exact same thing.

I think the best piece of character design advice I ever received was actually from a band leadership camp I attended in june of 2017. 

the speaker there gave lots of advice for leaders—obviously, it was a leadership camp—but his saying about personality flaws struck me as useful for writers too. 

he said to us all “your curses are your blessings and your blessings are your curses” and went on to explain how because he was such a great speaker, it made him a terrible listener. he could give speeches for hours on end and inspire thousands of people, but as soon as someone wanted to talk to him one on one or vent to him, he struggled with it. 

he had us write down our greatest weakness and relate it to our biggest strength (mine being that I am far too emotional, but I’m gentle with others because I can understand their emotions), and the whole time people are sharing theirs, my mind was running wild with all my characters and their flaws.

previously, I had added flaws as an after thought, as in “this character seems too perfect. how can I make them not-like-that?” but that’s not how people or personalities work. for every human alive, their flaws and their strengths are directly related to each other. you can’t have one without the other.

is your character strong-willed? that can easily turn into stubbornness. is your character compassionate? maybe they give too many chances. are they loyal? then they’ll destroy the world for the people they love.

it works the other way around too: maybe your villain only hates the protagonist’s people because they love their own and just have a twisted sense of how to protect them. maybe your antagonist is arrogant, but they’ll be confident in everything they do.

tl;dr “your curses are your blessings, and your blessings are your curses” there is no such thing as a character flaw, just a strength that has been stretched too far.

When you are writing a story and refer to a character by a physical trait, occupation, age, or any other attribute, rather than that character’s name, you are bringing the reader’s attention to that particular attribute. That can be used quite effectively to help your reader to focus on key details with just a few words. However, if the fact that the character is “the blond,” “the magician,” “the older woman,” etc. is not relevant to that moment in the story, this will only distract the reader from the purpose of the scene. 

If your only reason for referring to a character this way is to avoid using his or her name or a pronoun too much, don’t do it. You’re fixing a problem that actually isn’t one. Just go ahead and use the name or pronoun again. It’ll be good.

Someone finally spelled out the REASON for using epithets, and the reasons NOT to.

In addition to that:

If the character you are referring to in such a way is THE VIEWPOINT CHARACTER, likewise, don’t do it. I.e. if you’re writing in third person but the narration is through their eyes, or what is also called “third person deep POV”. If the narration is filtered through the character’s perception, then a very external, impersonal description will be jarring. It’s the same, and just as bad, as writing “My bright blue eyes returned his gaze” in first person.

Furthermore, 

if the story is actually told through the eyes of one particular viewpoint character even though it’s in the third person, and in their voice, as is very often the case, then you shouldn’t refer to the characters in ways that character wouldn’t.

In other words, if the third-person narrator is Harry Potter, when Dumbledore appears, it says “Dumbledore appears”, not “Albus appears”. Bucky Barnes would think of Steve Rogers as “Steve”, where another character might think of him as “Cap”. Chekov might think of Kirk as “the captain”, but Bones thinks of him as “Jim”. 

Now, there are real situations where you, I, or anybody might think of another person as “the other man”, “the taller man”, or “the doctor”: usually when you don’t know their names, like when there are two tap-dancers and a ballerina in a routine and one of the men lifts the ballerina and then she reaches out and grabs the other man’s hand; or when there was a group of people talking at the hospital and they all worked there, but the doctor was the one who told them what to do. These are all perfectly natural and normal. Similarly, sometimes I think of my GP as “the doctor” even though I know her name, or one of my coworkers as “the taller man” even though I know his. But I definitely never think of my long-term life partner as “the green-eyed woman” or one of my best friends as “the taller person” or anything like that. It’s not a sensible adjective for your brain to choose in that situation - it’s too impersonal for someone you’re so intimately acquainted with. Also, even if someone was having a one night stand or a drunken hookup with a stranger, they probably wouldn’t think of that person as “the other man”: you only think of ‘other’ when you’re distinguishing two things and you don’t have to go to any special effort to distinguish your partner from yourself to yourself.

This was such a hard lesson for me to get in the beginning. Cause you know, I could see my characters so clearly in my head and they were all so pretty or unique and I worked so hard on my character study checklist I wanted to mention those traits on the list over and over and I didn’t understand how jarring that can be or how certain words like names sort of fade naturally when you read so they are okay to continue to repeat.

But heeding this advice will honestly take your writing to the next level.

I have to thank @stephrc79 for pointing this out to me. Super conscious of it now.

I’ve actually thought of some friends as “the short one” or equivalent, because I found it so adorable and amusing that they were so short (155, 158) compared to me (175) and most people I knew. Especially because they were kind of cute with very long hair and such. This includes my best friend from when I was about 15 and one of my two best friends from when I was about 18.

I’ve also thought of some people I know as “the tall one” because it’s so strange to me when someone is a lot taller than I am. Like, I dated a guy for a bit who was something like 196 or 198 and it was so weird to me that it would have fit right in to have my mental dialogue refer to him as the tall one. Even now, there are a couple of people I meet at parties and events, one of whom I’ve known for many years, and still the first thing I think of when I stand close to them is “wow, he’s tall”. So, if the trait is something that would get the character’s attention for some reason, it is very likely that they would use it in their inner monologue.

In general, I’m a very visually-oriented person, so I totally would think of people as “the one with really long hair”, “the one with bright red hair”, “the one with curly hair”, “the one with the leather pants”, “the one with very blue eyes” or anything else that caught my attention, even when I know them and their names. Maybe not when it’s my closest friends, but with other people I am friendly with. There’s someone I still think of as “the girl with blue hair” though I know their name and it’s been a while since they had unusual-colored hair. And there’s a guy I think of as “the one who looks like an elf” or “the one with long blond hair” before I think of his name because that’s the thing that first made an impression on me about him. Granted, neither are close friends, but they are still people I have friendly conversations with.

Also, I can imagine someone thinking of someone as “the other man” or “the other woman” if it was new to them (never dated someone of their gender before or something like that) or they knew that the other person was not quite ok with their sexuality, or if the gender was otherwise relevant to the characters. Of course, it goes to the focus mentioned at the beginning.

Legit Tip #162

Having at the very least a basic understanding of psychology is critical to characterization. 

A lot of attempts to “explain away” certain character traits fail miserably because the character’s writers don’t really understand how psychology works. *coughChristianGreycough* 

Naturally, every individual’s past affects them in some way and influences the way they behave and the way they respond to events, situations, and people in the present. However, it’s not as cut-and-dried as people like to think. 

The problem with a character like Christian Grey - besides the fact that he’s gross and abusive - is that his history and the conditioned response to his history really do not make sense. Putting the BDSM aspect of his character aside, do remember that Christian literally says that he likes BDSM because he wants to “punish girls that look like his mother”. 

First of all - ew. Second of all, that’s not really how the human mind works. This approach to psychology (and characterization) is very Freudian at its core and, like most Freudian psychology, you can send it flying straight through the nearest window. 

It’s not that there isn’t some basis for this kind of A + B = C understanding of psychological development. It’s that its a very, very dumbed down, simplistic approach that for obvious reasons rings very, very false in readers. Even if it’s only instinctual, most people know better than that.

A much better approach when considering how events from a character’s past would affect their reactions/personality/etc., in the present is to think about the patterns that developed in their life because of it, the habits that they developed because of it, and ultimately the way this character has learned to respond to certain stimuli. 

For example - 

Let’s say we have a character named Clarissa. Clarissa was raised in a single parent home with her father and her older sister. Her father was a caring, loving man, but was forced to work a lot, and because of that was rarely home. Her sister was verbally abusive and blamed Clarissa for a lot of the problems their family had - a lack of money, a lack of stability, and even the death of their mother. 

Clarissa learns several things from these interactions:

However, if instead of avoiding her sister Clarissa had developed a more confrontational attitude and learned that, being the younger sibling, her father would take her side in these situations, the outcome could have been different. She may have instead learned that:

Clarissa #1 ends up being a very introverted, self-effacing individual. Clarissa #2 learns to play the “victim” to get what she wants. And Clarissa #3, who went to her father about the problem and had him step in to solve the issue between herself and her sister, learns to solve problems through open, honest dialogue. But how boring is that? (In fiction, anyway). 

Think a little more critically about what your characters actually learned because of their past. You’re not just connecting the dots between past and present. When you develop a character’s personality, you’re weaving a tapestry based on the accumulation of everything they’ve been through and everything they’ve learned.