As a reader, you can feel the difference between a rounded and a flat character pretty quickly, even if you’re not sure why. Rounded characters are the ones you can picture having a conversation with, or walking down the street. They’re the ones with the power to make you feel—you might love or hate them, but whether you’re thrilled by their successes or infuriated with the decisions they make, the elicit real emotion when you read them on the page.

As a writer, figuring out how to create that kind of fully-realized character on the page isn’t quite so easy. But it is imperative to figure out if you want to truly immerse readers in the stories you tell…at least, most of the time. Let’s take a closer look at what makes a character three-dimensional, how to build that into your characters, and when you need to.

I’ve been part of the same writing group for some ten years or so, now, and like many things in my life, I basically stumbled into it. I was at one of my usual bars, working on the novel I was writing at the time, and ran into a friend who’d just started a novel-writing workshop group. He asked if I wanted to join and the answer was—as ancient astronaut theorists would say—a resounding yes.

Obviously, there have been some changes since, as there are in any group that goes on for that long. We started off meeting every other Tuesday and every member would submit work for each workshop session. As people finished the manuscripts they’d started off writing, we started workshopping other things—short stories, poems, CNF, even some scripts and graphic narratives—and relaxed into a less rigorous submission schedule since not everybody had new stuff ready for every session. We had some new people join, other members who moved away. Eventually, we started hanging out on the Tuesdays we didn’t meet, too, which morphed into a weekly workshop. That changed into 3 monthly meetings once we started running the After Happy Hour journal, with 1-2 Tuesdays every month now devoted to editorial discussions, issue launches, and other journal-type things.

There are always stories all around us, waiting to be told. Finding those stories is often just a matter of looking at things in new ways, taking the time to uncover the narrative within them.

That’s the goal of the exercises below: unlocking the stories that are inside objects you see and use every day. You can use them to start a new story from things in your environment, or picture the objects in your characters’ environment in a work-in-progress when you’re stuck in a story and not sure where to take it.

I have a few manuscripts I’ve been shopping around to agents and presses: A linked short story collection, a speculative micro-fiction chapbook, a 200,000-word sci-fi novel—in short, not the types of projects most publishers are look for.

This has, naturally, gotten me thinking about self-publishing. Especially since I know a good number of people who have done it successfully: My partner self-published his novel, Hungry, through Amazon; a member of my writing group released his comic book series, Theme of Thieves, with funding from Kickstarter; another workshop colleague serialized his novel on the now-defunct platform JukePop, leading to its eventual publication by Spaceboy Books as Lars Breaxface: Werewolf in Space.

I’ve been cleaning up some relatively-new stories to submit to journals lately. I tend to overwrite on my first drafts, so this process of “cleaning up” usually consists mostly of cutting and condensing—sometimes removing entire characters and scenes that I realize I don’t need, other places removing words and sentences to give the voice the right rhythm and keep the story’s momentum pushing forward.

The ending is one place I consistently overwrite, especially when I’m writing a story that’s driven more by emotion or relationships than narrative. Even when it’s a plot-driven story, though, it’s not always obvious exactly where it should end, and just getting to the narrative conclusion doesn’t necessarily give it that satisfying sense of resolution that great short stories have. 

Dialogue is a powerful tool. It gives your readers a chance to hear the characters speaking, efficiently revealing aspects of their personality and inter-personal relationships that are difficult to show in narrative.

Something you quickly learn if you read and write fiction, though: realistic dialogue isn’t easy to write, and even great writers sometimes get it wrong. If you’re looking for ways to enhance your dialogue, here are some tips that can help.

In the simplest terms, point of view can be defined as the perspective through which a story is being told. A story’s POV identifies three things:

1. Who is telling the story

2. The relationship between the narrator and main character

3. The distance between the characters and readers

Those things are all critical to how a story comes across to the reader, and shifting the POV—even if it’s just from one 3rd-person close narrator to a different one—can have a huge impact on how the reader interprets the story (and how much they enjoy reading it).

I love a good writing prompt. Or even a not so good writing prompt. Honestly, anything that gets my creative mind going and takes it into a new place is a winner in my book. And starting from something that’s inherently entertaining, like a board game, can be especially valuable, in my opinion. It shifts your mind out of work-brain and into fun-brain, taking away some of the pressure of producing words and helping to silent the inner critic so you can just enjoy the process.

Because that’s what writing should be, even if you’re writing about a serious topic, even if you’re a capital-A Author who does it for a living: joyful. If you’re not engaged by your own writing, no reader is going to be, either. When the writer takes joy in the creation process, that comes through on the page.

I’m a sucker for a mailing list. Anytime I research new journals and presses to submit to, or go to a conference or bookfair, I end up subscribing to a plethora of new lists.

Of course, doing this, I’ve signed up for a bunch of newsletters that were…less than helpful. Inevitably, I’ll come to realize my inbox is getting inundated and embark on a purge. But there are newsletters I’m always excited to see pop up in my inbox, and a few I’ve come to anticipate, to the point I’ll go searching through my spam folder to double-check if I don’t see them.

There are times ideas spring into your brain faster than you can get them on paper, but even the most prolific writer sometimes feels the frustration of staring at a blank page waiting for words that don’t want to come.

I’ve read several short story advice books that give the mildly infurating solution to “just start writing,” which is kind of like telling a lost traveler how great the subway is but not how to find the station. If I knew how to just start writing, I would already be doing it.

To be fair, I get what these writers are saying. Once you start putting words down, they build on each other sentence after sentence until you find that flow that carries you through to the end. The question is how to unlock those crucial first words to open the door for the story you want to tell.