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Artwork for Two Writers, No Hook
Two Writers, No Hook · Yesterday · 48 min

Where We Get Our Characters From

Recorded 2026-09-21 We start talking about a heart balloon that unhelpfully is out of frame. It's the first day of fall and we talk about birthdays briefly. I start reporting with Michael telling me why he skims my newsletter. Then I do a dump of my very productive two weeks, including a bunch of non-writing stuff. Michael has sent his manuscript to an editor, is putting finishing touches on his website, aiming to have it finished by the end of October. He woke up early the day before, sat down, and wound up writing 5,000 words of a new story. This after about a week of downtime not being sure what to do next. Michael gives me an overview of the opening of his story and I ask him what the spark was that got him started on it. We talk about Michael's writing pace, which is a fast start and then slower as he gets to the ending. Since we're both consuming Harlan Coben's latest book, Plot Twist, I contrast that with Coben's pace which is to start fast and pick up the rate exponentially as he approaches the end. Michael's Goals: finish his website, continue writing his new story, hoping to get feedback from his editor by the end of this month(ish). We digress into how there are lots of authors who talk about the writing process, but not about editing. My goals carry over from the last episode, get through the second draft of my novel. On to where we get our inspiration from. My characters, at least in my current novel, are synthetic. I might lift a characteristic from someone I know, but none of my friends would think I modelled a character on them. Michael tends to take a set of attributes from people he knows, so there is a larger set of similarities between his characters and real people. I contradict myself, because I have another novel on the back burner that's a fictionalization of real life experiences, and there the problem is to alter the characteristics of real people so that they become distinct characters in the book. This leads into a discussion of the challenges of letting people you know read your drafts, and how you tend to not get the kind of feedback you are looking for. For our next episode, how we manage dialog vs. exposition.

0:00-48:06
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Recorded 2026-09-21

We start talking about a heart balloon that unhelpfully is out of frame. It's the first day of fall and we talk about birthdays briefly.

I start reporting with Michael telling me why he skims my newsletter. Then I do a dump of my very productive two weeks, including a bunch of non-writing stuff. Michael has sent his manuscript to an editor, is putting finishing touches on his website, aiming to have it finished by the end of October. He woke up early the day before, sat down, and wound up writing 5,000 words of a new story. This after about a week of downtime not being sure what to do next.

Michael gives me an overview of the opening of his story and I ask him what the spark was that got him started on it.

We talk about Michael's writing pace, which is a fast start and then slower as he gets to the ending. Since we're both consuming Harlan Coben's latest book, Plot Twist, I contrast that with Coben's pace which is to start fast and pick up the rate exponentially as he approaches the end.

Michael's Goals: finish his website, continue writing his new story, hoping to get feedback from his editor by the end of this month(ish). We digress into how there are lots of authors who talk about the writing process, but not about editing. My goals carry over from the last episode, get through the second draft of my novel.

On to where we get our inspiration from. My characters, at least in my current novel, are synthetic. I might lift a characteristic from someone I know, but none of my friends would think I modelled a character on them. Michael tends to take a set of attributes from people he knows, so there is a larger set of similarities between his characters and real people. I contradict myself, because I have another novel on the back burner that's a fictionalization of real life experiences, and there the problem is to alter the characteristics of real people so that they become distinct characters in the book.

This leads into a discussion of the challenges of letting people you know read your drafts, and how you tend to not get the kind of feedback you are looking for.

For our next episode, how we manage dialog vs. exposition.

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