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V.E. Schwab's advice for creating memorable characters - works for both protagonists and villains

source post: X

This is really good advice.

It also ties neatly into the simplest version of the formula for getting people emotionally engaged with your characters: or how to build the moment in which your character starts moving from their initial state to the state in which they'll start changing their own lives.

First, you figure out the one important thing the character believes that they're wrong about. There's usually a core misperception that they haven't examined. Once they're forced to engage with it, it'll start to change everything about their perception of the world they're inhabiting and/or the people in it.

Then, as V.E. says, you identify the character's great desire and their great fear: the thing that character wants more than anything, and the thing or situation that terrifies them, and that they'll go to any lengths to avoid.

And having identified these two objects or situations, you build a situation in which the two forces will be in close, direct opposition to one another... then drop the character down in between them, and squeeze. Those two opposing forces become the jaws of a vise... and you crank the vise more and more tightly closed until the character has no choice but to acknowledge those opposing forces, and start (even in a small way) to deal with the pressure being exerted and push their way through.

This does not have to be, initially, a great climactic moment. In fact, it works better if it's not. It's more effective if your character has a brief low-intensity brush with these conditions-in-conflict early on. That way, when your big resolution scene comes along about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way along through the story arc, you'll have set up a resonance between that earlier hint or intimation of what's to come, and the really big blowoff. Your readers will recognize the resonance—the throb of tension between the two occurrences, like the vibration of a plucked string—and will find satisfaction both in the true resolution having been partially telegraphed earlier, and in how it's now being experienced and resolved in full.

This approach also allows you to set up more minor resonances between the realization of the conflict and its final resolution. These can serve to bind the structure of the work more closely together: to make it look (and be) less like a series of loosely strung-together plot events, and more like a unified whole, in which ripples of story business flow backwards and forwards, interpenetrating and influencing one another, and hinting at the big one to come.

But none of this can happen until the paired and opposing what-do-they-most-desire, what-do-they-most-fear axes have been defined. So that's a subject it's smart to spend some while thinking about (and for all your characters, not just the major ones), to be sure you're getting it right.

It's not unusual to get the wrong answers, or merely superficial ones, while you're still working out what's actually going on with the characters. So take your time. Eventually you'll find a set of answers that feel unquestionably right... and you can then nail those down in your notes and get on with making the kind of "good trouble" for your characters that will see them made complete.

Writing tool for your fight scenes.

people bitching about the usage of "too modern" words in fantasy or historical fiction is sometimes justified, but ultimately I think it's a waste of time because

• all words exist within a specific time frame and it's pointless to avoid the fact that you're writing with the language of your own time
• which words are actually "newer" than other words is sometimes wildly unintuitive

according to the dates given in the Oxford English Dictionary, if you wrote a book set in 1897, you could have your characters say "fuckable," (1889) "sexy" (1896) "uncomfy" (1868) "hellacious" (1847) "dude" (1877) "all righty" (1877) and "heck" (1887), but not "wiggly" (1932) "moronic" (1910) "uptight" (1934) "lowbrow" (1901) "fifty-fifty" (1913) "burp" (1932) "bagel" (1898) or use the word "rewrite" as a noun (1901)

Some more words where the date of their first known usage just Doesn't Sound Right:

• hangry, as in the portmanteau of 'hungry' and 'angry' (1912)
• dildo (1590)
• yucky (1970)
• grungy (1965)
• freebie (1925)
• shitty (1768)
• boost (1815)
• boss (1856)
• TGIF, as in Thank God It's Friday (1941)
• yay (1963)

Fucked up (1863) is much older than fuck you (1943) but older still is the now-obscure fucked out (1862) which means what it sounds like—exhausted from too much sex.

#caring too much about pedantic little details being realistic is poison for writing #just don't do it (peer-reviewed tags by @bleakspo)

some of the best writing advice I’ve ever received: always put the punch line at the end of the sentence.

it doesn’t have to be a “punch line” as in the end of a joke. It could be the part that punches you in the gut. The most exciting, juicy, shocking info goes at the end of the sentence. Two different examples that show the difference it makes:

doing it wrong:

She saw her brother’s dead body when she caught the smell of something rotting, thought it was coming from the fridge, and followed it into the kitchen.

doing it right:

Catching the smell of something rotten wafting from the kitchen—probably from the fridge, she thought—she followed the smell into the kitchen, and saw her brother’s dead body.

Periods are where you stop to process the sentence. Put the dead body at the start of the sentence and by the time you reach the end of the sentence, you’ve piled a whole kitchen and a weird fridge smell on top of it, and THEN you have to process the body, and it’s buried so much it barely has an impact. Put the dead body at the end, and it’s like an emotional exclamation point. Everything’s normal and then BAM, her brother’s dead.

This rule doesn’t just apply to sentences: structuring lists or paragraphs like this, by putting the important info at the end, increases their punch too. It’s why in tropes like Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking or Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick, the odd item out comes at the end of the list.

Subverting this rule can also be used to manipulate reader’s emotional reactions or tell them how shocking they SHOULD find a piece of information in the context of a story. For example, a more conventional sentence that follows this rule:

She opened the pantry door, looking for a jar of grape jelly, but the view of the shelves was blocked by a ghost.

Oh! There’s a ghost! That’s shocking! Probably the character in our sentence doesn’t even care about the jelly anymore because the spirit of a dead person has suddenly appeared inside her pantry, and that’s obviously a much higher priority. But, subvert the rule:

She opened the pantry door, found a ghost blocking her view of the shelves, and couldn’t see past it to where the grape jelly was supposed to be.

Because the ghost is in the middle of the sentence, it’s presented like it’s a mere shelf-blocking pest, and thus less important than the REAL goal of this sentence: the grape jelly. The ghost is diminished, and now you get the impression that the character is probably not too surprised by ghosts in her pantry. Maybe it lives there. Maybe she sees a dozen ghosts a day. In any case, it’s not a big deal. Even though both sentences convey the exact same information, they set up the reader to regard the presence of ghosts very differently in this story.

Violence: A Writer’s Guide:  This is not about writing technique. It is an introduction to the world of violence. To the parts that people don’t understand. The parts that books and movies get wrong. Not just the mechanics, but how people who live in a violent world think and feel about what they do and what they see done.

Hurting Your Characters: HURTING YOUR CHARACTERS discusses the immediate effect of trauma on the body, its physiologic response, including the types of nerve fibers and the sensations they convey, and how injuries feel to the character. This book also presents a simplified overview of the expected recovery times for the injuries discussed in young, otherwise healthy individuals.

Body Trauma: A writer’s guide to wounds and injuries. Body Trauma explains what happens to body organs and bones maimed by accident or intent and the small window of opportunity for emergency treatment. Research what happens in a hospital operating room and the personnel who initiate treatment. Use these facts to bring added realism to your stories and novels.

10 B.S. Medical Tropes that Need to Die TODAY…and What to Do Instead: Written by a paramedic and writer with a decade of experience, 10 BS Medical Tropes covers exactly that: clichéd and inaccurate tropes that not only ruin books, they have the potential to hurt real people in the real world. 

Maim Your Characters: How Injuries Work in Fiction: Increase Realism. Raise the Stakes. Tell Better Stories. Maim Your Characters is the definitive guide to using wounds and injuries to their greatest effect in your story. Learn not only the six critical parts of an injury plot, but more importantly, how to make sure that the injury you’re inflicting matters. 

Blood on the Page: This handy resource is a must-have guide for writers whose characters live on the edge of danger. If you like easy-to-follow tools, expert opinions from someone with firsthand knowledge, and you don’t mind a bit of fictional bodily harm, then you’ll love Samantha Keel’s invaluable handbook

Hey, random writing tip: Instead of having something be a ridiculously unlikely coincidence, you can make the thing happen due to who this particular character is as a person. Instead of getting stuck on "there's no logical reason to why that would happen", try to bend it into a case of "something like this would never happen to anybody but this specific fucker." Something that makes your reader chuckle and roll their eyes, going "well of course you would."

Why would the timid shy nerd be at a huge sketchy downtown black market bazaar? Well, she's got this beetle colony she's raising that needs a very specific kind of leaf for nest material, and there only place to get it is this one guy at the bazaar that sells that stuff. Why would the most femininely flamboyant guy ever known just happen to have downright encyclopedic knowledge about professional boxing? Well, there was this one time when he was down bad for this guy who was an aspiring professional boxer...

I know it sounds stupidly obvious when written out like this, but when you're up close to your writing, it's hard to see the forest for the trees. Some time ago I finished reading a book, where the whole plot hinges on character A, who is 100% certain that character B is dead, personally getting up and coming down from the top rooms of a castle, to the gates, at 3 am, to come look at some drunk who claims to be this guy who died 17 years ago. Why would A do that, if he's sure that B is dead?

Because he's a Warrior Guy from a culture of Loyalty And Honour, and hearing that someone's got the audacity to go about claiming to be his long-lost brother in battle, there is no other option than to immediately personally go down there to beat the ever-loving shit out of this guy. Who then turns out to actually be character B, after all.

Zoom In, Don’t Glaze Over: How to Describe Appearance Without Losing the Plot

You’ve met her before. The girl with “flowing ebony hair,” “emerald eyes,” and “lips like rose petals.” Or him, with “chiseled jawlines,” “stormy gray eyes,” and “shoulders like a Greek statue.”

We don’t know them.

We’ve just met their tropes.

Describing physical appearance is one of the trickiest — and most overdone — parts of character writing. It’s tempting to reach for shorthand: hair color, eye color, maybe a quick body scan. But if we want a reader to see someone — to feel the charge in the air when they enter a room — we need to stop writing mannequins and start writing people.

So let’s get granular. Here’s how to write physical appearance in a way that’s textured, meaningful, and deeply character-driven.

1. Hair: It’s About Story, Texture, and Care

Hair says a lot — not just about genetics, but about choices. Does your character tame it? Let it run wild? Is it dyed, greying, braided, buzzed, or piled on top of her head in a hurry?

Good hair description considers:

• Texture (fine, coiled, wiry, limp, soft)
• Context (windblown, sweat-damp, scorched by bleach)
• Emotion (does she twist it when nervous? Is he ashamed of losing it?)

Flat: “Her long brown hair framed her face.”

Better: “Her ponytail was too tight, the kind that whispered of control issues and caffeine-fueled 4 a.m. library shifts.”

You don’t need to romanticise it. You need to make it feel real.

2. Eyes: Less Color, More Connection

We get it: her eyes are violet. Cool. But that doesn’t tell us much.

Instead of focusing solely on eye color, think about:

• What the eyes do (do they dart, linger, harden?)
• What others feel under them (seen, judged, safe?)
• The surrounding features (dark circles, crow’s feet, smudged mascara)

Flat: “His piercing blue eyes locked on hers.”

Better: “His gaze was the kind that looked through you — like it had already weighed your worth and moved on.”

You’re not describing a passport photo. You’re describing what it feels like to be seen by them.

3. Facial Features: Use Contrast and Texture

Faces are not symmetrical ovals with random features. They’re full of tension, softness, age, emotion, and life.

Things to look for:

• Asymmetry and character (a crooked nose, a scar)
• Expression patterns (smiling without the eyes, habitual frowns)
• Evidence of lifestyle (laugh lines, sun spots, stress acne)

Flat: “She had a delicate face.”

Better: “There was something unfinished about her face — as if her cheekbones hadn’t quite agreed on where to settle, and her mouth always seemed on the verge of disagreement.”

Let the face be a map of experience.

4. Bodies: Movement > Measurement

Forget dress sizes and six packs. Think about how bodies occupy space. How do they move? What are they hiding or showing? How do they wear their clothes — or how do the clothes wear them?

Ask:

• What do others notice first? (a presence, a posture, a sound?)
• How does their body express emotion? (do they go rigid, fold inwards, puff up?)

Flat: “He was tall and muscular.”

Better: “He had the kind of height that made ceilings nervous — but he moved like he was trying not to take up too much space.”

Describing someone’s body isn’t about cataloguing. It’s about showing how they exist in the world.

5. Let Emotion Tint the Lens

Who’s doing the describing? A lover? An enemy? A tired narrator? The emotional lens will shape what’s noticed and how it’s described.

• In love: The chipped tooth becomes charming.
• In rivalry: The smirk becomes smug.
• In mourning: The face becomes blurred with memory.

Same person. Different lens. Different description.

6. Specificity is Your Superpower

Generic description = generic character. One well-chosen detail creates intimacy. Let us feel the scratch of their scarf, the clink of her earrings, the smudge of ink on their fingertips.

Examples:

“He had a habit of adjusting his collar when he lied — always clockwise, always twice.”

“Her nail polish was always chipped, but never accidentally.”

Make the reader feel like they’re the only one close enough to notice.

Describing appearance isn’t just about what your character looks like. It’s about what their appearance says — about how they move through the world, how others see them, and how they see themselves.

Zoom in on the details that matter. Skip the clichés. Let each description carry weight, story, and emotion. Because you’re not building paper dolls. You’re building people.

Emotional Walls Your Character Has Built (And What Might Finally Break Them)

(How your character defends their soft core and what could shatter it) Because protection becomes prison real fast.

✶ Sarcasm as armor. (Break it with someone who laughs gently, not mockingly.)
✶ Hyper-independence. (Break it with someone who shows up even when they’re told not to.)
✶ Stoicism. (Break it with a safe space to fall apart.)
✶ Flirting to avoid intimacy. (Break it with real vulnerability they didn’t see coming.)
✶ Ghosting everyone. (Break it with someone who won’t take silence as an answer.)
✶ Lying for convenience. (Break it with someone who sees through them but stays anyway.)
✶ Avoiding touch. (Break it with accidental, gentle contact that feels like home.)
✶ Oversharing meaningless things to hide real depth. (Break it with someone who asks the second question.)
✶ Overworking. (Break it with forced stillness and the terrifying sound of their own thoughts.)
✶ Pretending not to care. (Break it with a loss they can’t fake their way through.)
✶ Avoiding mirrors. (Break it with a quiet compliment that hits too hard.)
✶ Turning every conversation into a joke. (Break it with someone who doesn’t laugh.)
✶ Being everyone’s helper. (Break it when someone asks what they need, and waits for an answer.)
✶ Constantly saying “I’m fine.” (Break it when they finally scream that they’re not.)
✶ Running. Always running. (Break it with someone who doesn’t chase, but doesn’t leave, either.)
✶ Intellectualizing every feeling. (Break it with raw, messy emotion they can’t logic away.)
✶ Trying to be the strong one. (Break it when someone sees the weight they’re carrying, and offers to help.)
✶ Hiding behind success. (Break it when they succeed and still feel empty.)
✶ Avoiding conflict at all costs. (Break it when silence causes more pain than the truth.)
✶ Focusing on everyone else’s healing but their own. (Break it when they hit emotional burnout.)

They should add "On Horseback" option to Google Maps. For writers.

"Hevoslinja" (Trans-Horse) is a European art project started in 2014 by Finnish artist Eero Yli-Vakkuri - according to his own words 'skilless in riding and afraid of animals' at the start.

The aim of the project was to travel 270 km / 168 miles between Helsinki and Turku in Finland, and to highlight the possibility of horse travel in modern society. Since then they've took to promoting horseback efforts in urban landscapes with several European collaborators and artists.

Yli-Vakkuri and collaborators first spent eight months practicing riding to become safely self-sufficient in saddle, and bought a Finnhorse gelding Toivottu Poika ('Awaited Son'). The route followed, as closely as possible, the old coastal royal country road of the premodern era, Kuninkaantie/Suuri Rantatie, and took 9 days.

Toivottu Poika is a very average example of his breed, standing at some 155 cm / 15.1 hh tall. The Finnhorse is a relative of for example the North-Norwegian Lyngshest breed, the Icelandic horse, the Swedish Gotlandsruss pony and the Estonian landrace horse and Tori horse breed. It is a mid-sized light draught and trotter, a sensibly realistic mediaeval country travel horse equivalent.

For more hardcore short-term treks, looking into competitive endurance riding can be helpful. Mongol Derby might be one of the most intense races, as it recreates the Chinggis Khan era postal system of swapping horses continuously over a 1000 km / 620 mile route.

By only including skilled endurance riders, keeping up a constant fast speed and swapping horses every 40 km / 25 mil, the Mongol Derby route only takes 10 days even though it's several times the length of the Trans-Horse project. This is the speed of highly organised imperial messengers with the supporting cultural infrastructure, professional marathon runners where Yli-Vakkuri and Toivottu poika were leisure hikers.

The Mongolian landrace horse is a very distant relative of the breeds above, but much lighter and smaller than the agriculturally focused modern Finnhorse - typicaly standing at 142 cm / 14 hh at most. (This would've also been common for Finnhorses before the 19th century.) What really differentiates them from Western breeds, however, is the way they're trained and raised in semi-feral herds, and it's said that while the rider may decide where the pair is headed, the horse is the one to decide how to get there.

also it's not quite google maps, but there is a lovely site called Viabundus!

the last i checked, the map of roads stretches from Calais, France to Moscow, Russia west to east and from Košice, Slovakia to Tornio, Finland south to north. it doesn't cover all of Europe, for example Sweden and Norway are empty at the moment, but it is quite extensive and still being worked on! in addition to showing the old roads, you can calculate the distance and travel time from one city to another, and there are a lot of options:

and that's not all! here's a description from the site itself (emphasis mine):

"Viabundus is a freely accessible online street map of late medieval and early modern northern Europe (1350-1650). Originally conceived as the digitisation of Friedrich Bruns and Hugo Weczerka's Hansische Handelsstraßen (1962) atlas of land roads in the Hanseatic area, the Viabundus map moves beyond that. It includes among others: a database with information about settlements, towns, tolls, staple markets and other information relevant for the pre-modern traveller; a route calculator; a calendar of fairs; and additional land routes as well as water ways."

it's quite neat and also free! i hope someone else finds it as fascinating and cool as i did :)

Thank you so much for sending me this, @quandocoeli ! All very cool!

An interesting question: how much do horses help? There are situations (long-haul hikes) where they’re sort of as much of a liability as a help. They really walk at Human Speed, or close to it, and horses weirdly have less stamina over long hauls than humans do. I don’t think a lot of fantasy authors realise this. If you spend time around horses, you will realise it, though.

• Human and horse walking speeds match very nicely.
• Horses will walk for about as many hours a day as we do (about six-ish, especially if it’s day after day after day, I.e. long travel.)
• You can go at faster gaits on a horse. They trot (similar to our jogging) canter (running lightly) and gallop (running fast.) they do not do this for long trav. you might get a horse to trot on and off all day, but would not, not even a little bit, trot from the Shire to Mordor.
• If you push too hard and knacker your horse, you have to rest them.
• Quite a lot of human history, from military to economic, has been about Dragging the Horses Around.
• Anyway, a walking horse goes like 4mph. That’s on Google maps already. Pick the Walking route. It’s the same thing.

But that’s the automatic “it would take an hour for both myself and a horse, or myself ON the horse, to walk 4 miles” answer. Writers who are interested in the problem are probably picturing something slightly more plot-relevant than walking to the gas station for scratch tickets and an Arizona Iced Tea.

I was interested to know if this could connect and hold true in terms of a long-term travel - say, a LotR-esque quest over weeks and different terrains - and thanksfully, I have a relevant interest to hand. Once again, the Camino de Santiago.

today, you may complete the Camino de Santiago on foot or on horseback. There are many horse rental agencies. A reasonable middle of the road pace suggested by one is: Riding between 25-35 km for 6-7 hours a day (normal mode). Various routes include terrain like mountains and plains; they presume you’ll largely camp. You are not allowed to run the horse into the ground (they will get mad at you) and a pilgrimage should be an amble, not a march. Plus, it’s hot in Spain and there are mountains; you’re going to be mooching and drinking water to survive this six-week hike.

but like I said: a keen math-brained person will note that this is basically human walking speed. It’s also about the time walked and distance covered by the human-only hikers. This strongly suggests that experienced horse-rental long-haul pilgrims don’t break above a walk, or do so very infrequently to maintain the average speed. and certainly aren’t cantering the whole Camino.

(This is definitely a modern company being mindful of horse welfare, although pragmatic animal welfare probably doesn’t stray too far from pragmatic medieval people not wanting to kill their horse. But is also the far more immediate concern that 6 hours in a day about as long as an average human wants to be on an average horse. Like, cattle drives are the outliers.)

You’ll see that the matches up to the second post. The horse in the Finnish expedition went about 20 miles a day, which is at the top end of the human Camino pilgrim and about what a Camino horse does, but heat/hydration is a major consideration on the Camino and probably less of a worry in Finland. 20 miles a day at 4 mph is 5 hours of riding on flat perfect ground and wrinkles if you need to add hills and hydration.

As the pilgrimage has thousands of pilgrims per year and excellent travel records going back to the medieval era, it would be really interesting to work out if this is a “fast” or “slow” estimation of horseback travel by fantasy standards. Are we being nicer to horses? Did medieval horsemen make them walk 10 hours a day? Has better diet and better understanding of fitness/gear sped up humans or given us more stamina? Do roads make a difference? There are a million considerations. If any of them are helpful in your novel, there is a very well-documented horse/human walking route across Spain in which medieval records can be compared directly to 2025 forum posts - a very rich seam, if you know what your question is!

But in general, especially for long journeys over many days, human walking speed on google maps is actually a surprisingly good rule of thumb for horse walking speed.