Examine the friendships in your own life

Writing friendships that feel real is an incredibly difficult thing to do. It’s very easy for them to feel too perfect or basic or manufactured and then they won’t be an important factor in your story. One way to begin to figure out how to make those relationships feel real is to examine your own friendships. Make a list of all of your closest friends- what’re each of their qualities that make them unique? What do they give you as a friend? What do you feel that you give them? How did you meet/decide to become friends? What are some inside jokes you have? What do each of your friends do that maybe gets on your nerves from time to time? Looking at this list will allow you to examine some very real friendships and you can pull some of these details or similar ones into your own story to make it feel more realistic.

Create the characters as individuals first

You may already know that you want these two or more characters to be best friends, but you need to work on figuring out who they are as individuals first. If you work backwards and focus on their friendship first, you risk making them too much of a perfect pair to be believable. Their characteristics shouldn’t feel perfectly catered to one another’s personalities because that’s not how life or friendship really works. It’s about two completely different people with different lives meeting and building a friendship from there. So focus on the character work first, figure out where each of these characters are from, how they grew up, what their relationships with their families are like and what their views are on the world, people, and themselves.

Establish the relationship

Now, this can go one of two ways. Either the friendship you’re establishing is a large part of the plot of the book in which case you’ll likely be introducing them to each other on the page or it’ll be an already established friendship. If you’re going with the former option, go back and look at your list of friends and your meetings. You don’t have to create this perfect meet-cute moment for the friendship to be established, simply think about how you became friends with some of your friends and create a scene that feels real and establishes their separate personalities.

If you’re going with the second option, this scenario may not even make it into your book. But write it anyways. In order to truly make the relationship feel real and established, you need to know what age they were when they met, how they became friends, and how their friendship has evolved over time up until the point where your book begins.

Give the relationship layers

What are their inside jokes? Favorite things to do together? What are their favorite qualities in one another? What do each of them do that annoys the other? Friendships are imperfect and incredibly specific things and in order for this one to feel real you need to establish all of the eccentricities that make it unique.

What is at stake for their friendship in your story?

Even if the friendship is sort of a side plot to your story, there needs to be something at stake in order for the friendship to feel purposeful and necessary to the story. You can’t just add a friend character in order to be supportive and to relay information to us about the protagonist because then the character will feel completely unnecessary. You likely already know what your story’s protagonist wants/desires throughout the story, but also think about their friend’s needs. Do they want different things? Do they want the same thing, but want to go about it differently? Are they competing for the same thing? How does this affect their friendship?

The post How to Write Iconic Friendships appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

Dialogue is an area where a lot of writers struggle. It can be difficult to separate your own voice from your character’s voice. If you’re writing a line and thinking, “Ooh, this will sound clever,” you’re most likely doing it wrong. You have to think solely about your characters- where they came from, how they grew up, what their family was like, what experiences they’ve gone through and then ask yourself: how would this person talk? It’s not about sounding good or poetic, it’s about staying true to your characters. If your character is a really simple-minded person and then all of a sudden they’re spewing incredibly poetic speech, it’s just going to leave your readers scratching their heads.

One of the best ways to get better at separating your own voice from your characters is to start paying attention to how people around you talk. Notice how different people talk when they’re from different age groups, ethnicities, genders, backgrounds, and personality types. Take notes on different nuances and oddities in their language and apply them to similar characters in your book. This will make your characters feel more real. And, for additional practice, try these exercises:

For both exercises, use the setting and characters outlined below:

Setting: A small dive bar, midday on a Sunday afternoon. The bar is scarce, just a few patrons. There are two younger guys who seem to know each other, but it appears everyone else came alone. Most of them are older men, in their early 50’s. The bartender is a relatively handsome young man in his early twenties.

Character One: A young man in his mid-twenties. He loves classic rock and country music, just graduated from a nearby college with a degree in Creative Writing, and he grew up in Texas.

Character Two: A young woman in her early twenties, currently attending a nearby college and aiming to graduate a semester early. She’s double-majoring in business and communications and her favorite shows are House of Cards and Grey’s Anatomy.

Character Three: A middle-aged man with a military history. He has a wife and two kids, grew up in the south, loves watching Sons of Anarchy and The Sopranos and he’s currently trying to quit smoking.

1) Use characters one and two to construct a scene solely using dialogue. Find what the two characters have in common and allow a conversation to ensue.

Ex. Characters One and Two are sitting near each other at the bar. Character one notices Character Two and decides to buy her a drink.

2) Use characters One and Three and do the same as previous exercise. Hint: How do Character One’s demeanor and level of comfort change when he’s around Character Two vs. Character Three? Show this through his dialogue.

Ex. Characters One and Three are sitting near each other at the bar. Character Three is accidentally served the drink that Character One ordered.

For both exercises, focus on making the two characters in each scene sound different from one another. How would a man in his twenties talk vs. a middle-aged man? How would their voices differ?

The post Writing Exercises: Dialogue appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.