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Also, the location app, no?

Great tip. Easy to fake and lull the reader into thinking you're the absolute expert in (fake world).

I said something similar on your previous Workshop video, but the way I approach stories, I view characters and settings as different aspects of the same general thing. Of course there are exceptions, because there always are. But in most stories, the characters are going to be a product of the world they live in. If you're writing a story set in Houston, Texas for example, it'd be odd if everyone spoke with Brummie accents, with no explanation. Not saying it can't work, but... it'd be a choice. As such, when I'm developing a story, there's a constant back-and-forth between setting and character. Whichever one I begin with, I reverse engineer the story to fit around that and flesh things out.

Nice points. Saruman couldn't have wreaked believable world shattering terror from the castle of a fairy princess. If everything in a story has the job of furthering the tale, then location must do its part, too. Passive voice should also have no place in a powerfully written story, but I couldn't decide between "a fairy princess' castle" and "a fairy princess's castle." I could have settled on a whole herd of them with joint title and used "a fairy princesses's castle" but I hate to put that much wear and tear on my S key. So, the castle of a fairy princess, passive as it may be, will have to do. Looking forward to Location, Location, and Location, Location, To Be Announced.

You might need a little heater in there!

Location: Washington, D.C. Date: January 20, 2025 Characters and Plot: I'll let you take it from there....

Thank you William. Im writing a story for my own benefit based in Crewe. "Crewe?" my wife asked. She said no one will ever want to read about Crewe. She's right of course, but my character used to work in the railway sheds and moans now about modern life. I love learning about the way the carriages were build. I'm also writing another story based in the Caribbean to do with Slavery. Every day is a school day. My wife think I'm weird. So my locations allow me to learn about it rather than provide a good location.

I got this on your recommendation!

The Walsall / Warsaw bit had me guffawing loud enough to wake the cat!

A good example of AI hallucination when it describes your desk as a “mess” 😊

If I sent you my book I wrote in a file could you do me a ebook and a printable book please and how much do you charge

Love that monitor

I've turned mine off on all my devices. I've got my own intelligence. Use it or lose it.

Try omitting the word “minutes”. So “Set the timer for five”.

Until Apple Intelligence gets more intelligent, I'll count on William Intelligence. Sure bet.

At the moment, I simply see Apple Intelligence as an interesting preview of what is to come in future. I find some of it rather overzealous, including summarising simple, short or informal emails with automatically-generated jargon that is more time-consuming or opaque than the original emails. An email saying "OK, see you soon" can easily be turned into "Email from John Smith explaining that he will see you very soon and thank you": ok, not a real-world example but a flavour of what I'm receiving from Notifications on my Mac. I've also had notification summaries on my iPhone that explain a group of news stories in very odd ways that obscure the simple headlines from the original notifications. Then I have to click on the summary to show the original notifications 'hidden' behind the summary to make sense of them. In that way, Apple Intelligence over-eggs the pudding and gets in the way. I guess this will be fine-tuned over time.

I think it’s awful at the moment. Siri seems to have become more stupid and keeps asking me if i would like to talk to his more intelligent friend ChatGPT. I like the writing tools and proofreading but it’s very American and when i ask it to rewrite something it loses all of me in the rewrite. My voice is gone. I think it’ll be brilliant eventually but i worry it will turn writing into something young people don’t need to do any more. Try asking it to write a short story about something. It can do it. Give it a few pointers and its away. All the AI apps can do it. And if you look at newspapers you don’t even have to read an article any more because it will summarise the whole thing.

Guilty as charged. I confess. I prefer writing biographies; my current novel has about 17,000 words for just seven characters, but I've only written 12,000 out of a target 90,000 for the story. The problem is, I prefer to poke around into their backstories, giving them troubled childhoods, traumas and emotional scars. It's much more fun than work.

I have two templates that I use for descriptions of characters in my novel, one for major characters and one for minor characters. For minor characters I have a Character Sketch template with only ten descriptions. For major characters I have Character Profile template with three sections, Appearance, Background, and Personality, and each section contains 7-13 descriptions. This system seems to work well for me. I don't have to spend much time working up a sketch for a minor character, but for a major character, there are enough descriptors in my profiles that I can keep track of everything important that I know about my character. Love your writer's workshop videos. I never miss one. I recommended you for an writer's conference that I attend, annually, here in my town. Would love to know what it would take to get you to cross the pond and come to Central Washington state as a lecturer.

I start brief too, with just basic descriptors like name, age, and or two relevant facts then let the character’s ‘biography’ emerge with the story. It’s like meeting someone and learning bits about them and their life with each encounter - except I don’t jot them down in a notepad for later reference.

Great tutorial. I love the pixelmator pro to auto close documents. As someone who uses tons of excel sheets and the ability to auto close windows, this will make Keyboard Maestro worth it. Thank you!

I detest fiction that describes the clouds in the sky, but I like having a pretty thorough bio of the protagonist. I like understanding the person who the author is ramming down my throat for the next few hundred pages. It's possible that just from the bio I may decide to toss the book in the dumper. But what I'll usually do is skip ahead to various places and read a little to see how this person thinks, speaks, and acts, before I decide to abort the book or not. If the author doesn't give me a background of the main character within the first chapter, I will really feel like the author is shoving a beast up my nose and doesn't want me to know it right away.

I've been experimenting with a bit of scriptwriting recently. I think a short but very specific idea about them is enough. Like you, I feel like I work better if I've left room for the rest to come out in the actual writing. One I was pleased with last week: "the type who'd buy a house next to a pub then complain about the noise".

I am not recommending this to anyone, because you have to find what works for you. I create a Csst of Characters in my starting template with the main characters names, ages, relationships. I accumulate their attributes as I assign them in the manuscript, things like outfits, preferences, physical traits. I add new characters as they appear. I like to have a photo of the character or the actor I would choose to play them. And, I have a model in my head, someone I know, a character from literature, theater, film or TV to start with. Each base character is modified as I write. So, the profile of each character grows or evolves as needed as the story develops.

For me, characterization and worldbuilding are different aspects of the same thing. So I develop stories with a sort of reciprocal loop. Sometimes a concept is birthed from an idea for a character, sometimes an interesting setting or premise comes first. It doesn't matter, as long as it's interesting. Then one feeds into the other, endlessly, until the story and characters are fleshed out (as necessary). But a lot of that can be done in the course of the writing. So do it that way, and you're not just avoiding the work of writing. And doing things that way... the depth varies. Generally I agree with you. But there are occasions where I need to get into deep detail about a character or a setting. The deciding factor is always _Is this important to the story? Is it interesting?_ Typically, I don't care what a character's favorite TV show is, or any of that-unless it shows up in the story for a good reason. Maybe that's a "quirk" of the character. Big fan of giving important characters a "thing." For example, maybe a character's favorite show is a mystery/detective show. Something in the vain of _Columbo, Monk, Murder She Wrote,_ whatever. Make something up. But that detail is only interesting if it serves a narrative purpose. This popped into my mind because I thought, _"Maybe it'd be funny if there's a character who obsessively watches mystery/detective shows, but in their actual life they're comically inept at solving anything. They can figure out who the killer in the tv show is in under five minutes. But in real life, they have their thermostat set to 28° C year round, but still have no idea why their gas bill is so high every month."_ The TL:DR version: Small details about a character or the setting don't matter... unless they do.

Totally agree with keeping it short and memorable, after all do we remember all that detail about people we know in real life ? It also limits the interpretation of the character by others. For example - some people like arrogant, in your face, others compare them with toothache. Incidentally I see Sally as being in HR and having to talk with a trade union rep.

Loved the "doesn't like you" characterization. I was in a conversation the other day and mentioned someone I knew who "always goes on cruises for vacation" and the person I was talking to to said "Perfect! I and see her perfectly." We were talking about people who are adventurous or not so much. I wonder if coming up with a sharp, concise descriptive phrase like that gets more directly at the character than a whole list of attributes! It also allows some flexibility in character development (as in "WHY doesn't she like you?" or WHY does she only go on cruises?")

Thank you. I write myself a short bio of a character more about what he/she wants out of life and dislikes. I then find a photo of a person the personality I think fits and look at it whilst writing.

Interesting to hear your viewpoint on this. A lot of writing software has very detailed templates for characters. If I spent all the time filling in these, I wouldn't get around to the story they are in. Thanks for your work. Informative as ever.

Thanks so much for writing this. As a newbie author I was heading down the road of writing reams and reams of rubbish to flesh out my characters before writing the story. I gave up. I just couldn't be bothered. I ended up writing, and then just going, "yeah, I'll need to go back and re-write some characters, particularly at the dialogue level, when I'm done.". I just found it so freaking excruciatingly boring to write stuff about characters, particularly before they were really formed in my mind. I guess it may have helped if I did,. but I don't think I can write them in isolation to the story, and that hadn't yet developed in my mind. I found it useful to have a character sheet and put any weird stuff in there as I go - but that's about it. If they are left handed at the start and right at the finish - and it matters, it's good to be consistent. That said, the part B method 'write reams about you r character, now go and do it on everyone else on earth' really rammed home the point about how bloody stupid it's possible to get with this stuff. I hope you meant it as a joke, because that's how I took it. There's probably some poor schlepp out there going 'that's what I do...'

What I have always found, is that starting with a capsule biography, perhaps a little longer than your three line description, is the place where I begin. After that, the characters tend to begin to tell me their background as I write. So, for example, One of my characters is Space Commander Buzz Williams. He is what Flash Gordon would look like at 50 to 55. That was enough to begin. As I wrote, however, his backstory began to fill in. At that point, I should have begun writing it all down. For example, I know that the Battle of Yaris Run was very important. I don’t yet know all the details of that battle, but I do know it’s there.

The idea of character bios makes me want to drill a hole in my head. I'm with you, simple concise and find the character through action. One thing I saw which was useful was to think of characters as Mr. Men. What would their name be? (Mr. Greedy, Little Miss Spiteful, Mr. Insensitive etc.) That's who they are. If you know they're vain, you can base all their likes/dislikes/favourite Take That singer based on their primary flaw. Mr. Greedy's favourite room in the house? The kitchen. Little Miss Spiteful's worst fear? A school reunion. Or something.

The fact that you start every video with "writers like you and me" is just the most generous and nicest thing you could do. When I hear it, I believe it.

I started watching your channel last year and really enjoy it. After watching this video, I realize there are a couple that I haven't seen so I will be going back and viewing them shortly. Keep up the great work!

Super helpful, thank you so much!

I love a video that makes me laugh out loud in the first 30 seconds.

Do you ever use the note field in OmniFocus to capture notes regarding your projects?

😂 Just had a giggle and showed this to colleagues at work

I ordered an m3 MacBook Air 512gb to write my short stories on. I will be picking it up today! It will be my portable scrivener box.

The character biography video sounds interesting. I certainly have opinions on that, but I'll wait to see what you have to say about it first.

Good show! Enjoyed all of 2024, and now anticipate what you will do in 2025.

A terrific countdown! I myself wrote on a Mac and an iPad all throughout 2024 - and I also did two video-chats with, of all people, YOU! Great fun!

This series is most helpful. Better, each one leaves me with a clear impression of how much I have to learn along with encouragement. Vitality and reality in one shot. Nice. I'd elaborate but I have more writing to do than time this evening. Somewhere in the aether, an imperious clock begins a countdown. With haste, I open my word processor.

This is a pitch to a publisher - isn’t this what literary agents are for? I suppose I come to this from personal perspective of how I would pitch the unpitchale?

Trying to get interest from a publisher on what amounts to a cold call sounds impossible, something like dropping a bale of hay from 50,000 feet and hoping to get it to the right horse. Is there a way to get into the writer’s community so that introductions may be possible before sending something in?

Interesting. Back in the early 2000's, most of my Email pitches were fairly short. I put my pitch in, give a few links to published online articles of mine, thanked them for their time, and pressed the send button. I wasn't terse, but I kept things very short out of respect for their time. It seemed to be very effectiven at the time.

I have used AI to write emails but always end up editing them due to them literally having no soul. I enjoyed this but luckily Im not going to be putting a pitch to anyone. The stories I write will be for me and only me. Keep up the good work William, I am a big fan.

Pegs are very useful. Pegs have helped me get a previously ignored pitch accepted more than once.