In this week’s episode, JP and Crys continue their Author’s Tarot Journey, this time using The Lover to guide their discussion. They discuss the different tips and tricks they use to create believable relationships between their characters, whether that’s love, friendship or animosity.
Question of the week: How do you write believable characters relationships? Share your answer here.
Show Notes
Transcript
JP: Hello friends. This is episode number 92 of the Write Away Podcast, and it is the 21st of April 2022 as we are recording. I’m JP Rindfleisch with my cohost…
Crys: Crys Cain.
JP: Hi Crys. How’s your writing week been?
Crys: I feel like I haven’t done anything, even though I know that’s not true. I know I did a bunch of client work this week. I did some non-fiction stuff, but I didn’t do a lot of fiction stuff. And that always feels like a nothing week to me, even when it’s not. How about you?
JP: Good. So I sent the short story off to my co-writer, and then that one we’ll probably send it like a proofreader or something like that. And yesterday I got through 40 pages of edits for the copy edits of book one. So I think that means I’m like a fourth of the way through, and I only have four days to do it. But yeah, I have that and hopefully that I can get out of the way. And then I have some client work and other things that I need to do. Also, I’m minorly subdued because I’m in a hotel and it’s early.
Crys: I’ll be honest. For the romance, there’s the couple editors that we use that I will just like skim through to see if there’s anything I disagree with and then I hit accept all.
JP: So I went through it in two phases. One, there was the inline track changes, I accepted like 99% of all of that. But the comments, it’s like, hmm, this doesn’t work here or this is weird. And I’m like, okay, fine. Luckily at this point nothing’s like major structural. It’s just, is this one line believable? And it’s like, mm, no, let’s fix it.
Crys: Yeah. That makes sense.
Okay. So this week for our guiding card for our question I believe we have The Lovers. Would you mind giving us that description?
JP: Absolutely. So keywords for the lovers upright is: love, harmony, relationships, aligning values and choices. Reversed it would be a more internalized so: self-love, or it could be disharmony and balance, et cetera.
The image that’s generally presented in the older versions is a naked man and woman standing beneath an angel. And it really just means this kind of unity between the male and female energies and then this like divine connection. So yeah, that’s what I’m going to leave off with.
Crys: And the question that you’ve generated, and you generated a couple and we chose this one, was: how do you create believable relationships between characters? And I think with this, that we’re not talking just about like romantic relationships, but all relationships.
JP: Yeah, definitely. I think the lovers card, the key to me is like unity. And that comes in many different forms, it’s not just romantic relationships.
Crys: Yeah. I think for me, one of the things that I look for with characters who get along, characters who have more of a positive relationship with each other, is what is it that each of them has that the other is missing that they appreciate?
JP: Yeah.
Crys: How about you?
JP: My big thing is study everyone around you. Because whenever we want to create the ideal of a relationship on the page, that’s never the way that the relationships are in our real lives. So for me, it’s figuring out how people have been in these long-term relationships and how they communicate to each other. Because to me, the best way to convey it is through dialogue, through people either finishing each other’s sentences, knowing the direction that they’re going, maybe having some type of an inside joke, but something that connects the two of those characters in a way that’s strong in their dialogue.
Crys: Yeah. Sitting here thinking of a couple of characters who are known to be reticent. They don’t talk a lot, whether it’s out of grumpiness or whether it’s out of shyness, and how they’re almost always paired with a character who talks a lot.
JP: Yeah. Cause it’s all about the facets or the mirrors of whichever character you’re representing, how do they reflect each other, either poorly or positively? And how do they bring out aspects that others may not, or that others may suppress? Cause that’s how relationships grow, is basically you find the people that let you express yourself the way you want to.
Crys: Now, how about negative relationships or antagonistic relationships? How do you create believable frameworks for those?
JP: I think, like I just said in relationships where it lets you foster the aspects you like, negative relationships suppress those aspects. They push down, make you be someone that you don’t want to be. So I guess one way that I would think about it is like with The Dialogue Doctor, you have the baseline and then you have the trailing edges where your character may change in different emotional states. In this case, it would be in the negative state. So what is the reflection of who they are when they’re not allowed to do the things they want to do? And that’s how those relationships foster is: how are they getting suppressed? How are they reacting around these people? What aren’t they saying because they feel like they can’t?
Crys: I really like that. Along the lines of where the holes they fill that I use for positive relationships, with negative relationships I look at how are they similar and how does that rub them the wrong way? Or like, how do they use those differently for different goals or whatever?
So you have two charismatic characters, and one uses it for selfish gains and one uses it for the fancy word that means unselfish. It’s 5 47 in the morning. I don’t have the word bank yet. And those often are how I start out framing that relationship, looking for those overlaps.
JP: Yeah. It’s funny because in the series that Abe and I was doing, like one, we wanted really strong friendship relationships. And we ended up making our character being new to this world. And then she comes in and she basically finds like her “Hermione and Ron”. Our female character represents like our main character as if she were like at her strongest or her most hard-headed. And then we have the meeker male character Who is more intelligent and tries to bring out like the critical thinking aspect.
But in that sense, like we’ve created this dynamic. We have one brute force character. We have one that has critical thinking. And then we have our main character who has to sit in the middle of that and figure out what aspects she needs to pull from her friends.
And then on top of that, we realized because of the genre we’re writing in, we have to do a romantic relationship. It’s the best thing to do to get the readers that we want, and it fit in. So then we had to bring in those aspects, which was interesting because we have a slower burn relationship that takes over a couple of books. That’s fun to write.
Crys: I liked the focus that you’re having on that strong friendship group. And I know we both really Fate: The Winx Saga or whatever terrible name it inherited from its originating media. But in both like the Harry Potter, Ron, Hermione, and Winx, you had the main character become fast friends with at least one person.
And I think the thing that makes us love friend groups so much is when people move from somewhat antagonistic relationships with each other initially, and then learn more about each other and move into that friendship relationship. That’s just such a powerful mini arc there that people really grasp on to, readers really respond to.
JP: Yeah, that’s actually, that’s the kind of relationships that one of the characters in the story that I want to write that’s more of I dunno what you call it, slice of life, urban fantasy, where we have this one character who is still in college and they ended up meeting this like jock male character. And I have the dynamics set up there that they don’t like each other, that they almost butt heads, but they have to work together. And they have to learn that they’re not their stereotypes and that they have something together that they can work through.
And it’s really fun thinking that through because like the only way that I’m developing that is thinking about the relationships that I’ve had with others and the misrepresentation or misunderstandings, and really playing with those pieces to develop those barriers that just keep breaking.
Crys: Yeah. I love that.
My question for our listeners is the same one we’ve asked ourselves today. How do you write believable character relationships? So let us know in the comments or on Patreon. We are about to go record our business episode of this card prompt, which will be: how do you deal with an author business relationship that goes sour?
Thank you so much for joining us this week and every week, and we hope that you’ll go on over to Patreon to check out these business episodes.
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