Reading and Writing—Two Essentials for a Happy Writer!

This week Edge Author Dave Cousins asks how much does the ability to write, depend on your dedication as a reader.

Finding time to write alongside the demands of a family and a job—even if that job is being a writer—can be a balancing act. Before I was fortunate enough to be published and had to squeeze writing time into early starts, late nights, train journeys and lunch breaks, I sometimes found that I didn't have time to read. Free time was so scare, it seemed more important to spend it creating my own stories rather than reading somebody else's. I eventually found that logic to be somewhat flawed – in my case at least. Now I firmly agree with Stephen King, who said, “If you don’t have time to read, then you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

It may look like I'm taking it easy with a book.
In reality this is an intensive training workout!

Over the years I’ve noticed that when I’m not reading every day, my writing flows less freely. An obvious analogy would be the sporting one: that reading is an important part of maintaining a level of writing fitness, like an athlete training every day. When I’m reading a lot, my writing feels natural, instinctive – fitter, if you like. Or as The King puts it: “Constant reading will pull you into a place where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness.” For me, it’s about filling my subconscious with words and stories – the rhythm of sentences and paragraphs, the pace of a well spun yarn.

“Every successful writer I know is also a great reader.” – Robert Cormier

When I started to write, I worried that my own stories, or rather my voice, would start to sound like whatever I was reading, but that didn’t happen. Instead, I find that reading somebody else's words helps to clear my head, and stops me thinking about my own for a while, so I'm fresher when I return.

But what about you? Here at the Edge we are always interested to hear other people’s experience. How does reading sit alongside your writing? Does it help? Does it interfere? Does it matter what you read? Leave a comment in the box below and let us know. Thanks.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of posts you might enjoy by fellow Edge authors on a similar theme:

Reading For My Writing by Miriam Halahmy

Writing Tips Part 6 by Sara Grant

Dave Cousins is the author (and sometimes illustrator!) of a number of award-winning books for young people. Visit www.davecousins.net for more info.

Writing Tips 2 by Dave Cousins — 15 Ways to Write a Story!

Welcome to Part Two of the EDGE WRITING TIPS series. Each week, a different Edge author will be sharing a few nuggets of writing wisdom. We hope you find them useful! 

This week, Dave Cousins shares his tips for 15 ways to write a story …

If you would like a copy of 15 Ways to Write a Story! for your own reference, or to use with students, the file can be downloaded for FREE as a Powerpoint or multi-page PDF here.

If you have any specific writing questions, let us know in the comments below and one of us will get back to you as soon as we can. 

Thanks and happy word wrangling! 

Writing Tips from the Edge—Dave Cousins' 8 Rules of Research.

Yesterday evening I sent off the final files for my new Charlie Merrick book; on Monday, I start work on the second draft of my next teen novel. The story and characters have been buzzing around in my head while I finished the illustrations for Charlie, so I'm really excited at the prospect of spending more time with them. There is however a slight caveat—now I know the skeleton of the story, this draft will need some research. For me, research sometimes feels like ‘homework’, and it’s frustrating when a ‘fact’ gets in the way of a good story! At the same time, inaccuracies and inconsistency can push the reader out of a story, so it's important we spend the time to get it right. 

     Therefore, as a reminder to myself as much as anything, I decided to put together a few thoughts about research. 'Rules' might be pushing it a bit, but I couldn't resist the chance for some alliteration in the title!

1. GETTING CAUGHT UP IN THE WEB

The spark for my second novel, Waiting forGonzo, was to explore the impact of a teenage pregnancy from the point of view of the girl’s younger brother. The story takes place over nine months and is loosely structured around the pregnancy, which meant I had to keep a close eye on key moments on that timeline—hospital scan dates; changing symptoms; at what point the ‘bump’ starts to show, and so on. All this information was readily available online.

     Something to bear in mind when doing internet research—if you are writing a book based in the UK, make sure the information is from a UK website, as treatment methods and procedure can vary in different countries. For UK medical matters, the NHS website (www.nhs.uk) is a good place to start, offering a huge database of symptoms, treatments and a Health Encyclopaedia.

     There is probably some time-honoured rule stating that the best research comes from first hand experience, and I wouldn’t argue with that. But sometimes, it’s simply not possible. For example, finding out what it actually feels like during the different stages of pregnancy was going to be tricky for me! Instead, I talked to my wife and other female friends; I read pregnancy magazines and borrowed a stack of books from the library.

     When faced with a mouth-watering pile of research material, it’s tempting to spend weeks scouring every page of every book to ensure you don’t miss a single shiny nugget of information. STOP! You have a story to write. Having fallen into this trap myself many times, I now use the following strategy:

1. Start with a quick scan through all your materials—use Post-it notes to flag any pages that look useful, but resist the temptation to start reading and taking notes. 

2. From this initial overview, select just two or three core volumes on which to base your research. Read these in depth and make notes.

3. It’s likely you’ll still have gaps, but now, you can search your remaining resources for the specific pieces of information you are missing and ignore areas you have already covered in you core research.

I find that this technique saves time, and stops me covering the same ground with multiple sources.

     My pregnancy research quickly established that people’s experiences vary dramatically. I collected many fascinating, and often very funny, accounts of what it’s like to be pregnant. Unfortunately, most of these never made it into the book. It’s always hard to leave out gems you’ve uncovered, but you have to be ruthless—if it doesn’t help the story, it shouldn’t go in. You can always include these extras in a blog post, or in a DVD style bonus features section at the end of the book, or on your website.

2. CHECKING YOUR WOUNDS

A number of characters in Waiting for Gonzo have accidents. Again the NHS website was a good place to check symptoms and treatment. However, you can lose a lot of time searching the web. A good tip is to set a timer, so you don’t spend hours chasing a link.

     I was lucky enough to find a friendly doctor via Twitter who has been kind enough to check my stories for medical accuracy. This is invaluable when it comes to details and specific questions you’ll struggle to answer online. For example, knowing the questions an A&E doctor would ask; who else would be present at a consultation, and so on.

     Watching realistic hospital dramas in films and TV can be useful in this regard too. It also means you can watch TV and honestly claim to be working! For example, a number of scenes in Waiting for Gonzo take place in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Due to the nature of the work they do, I was unable to visit one, but I did find a documentary series about a baby care unit on BBC iPlayer. The programmes revealed huge amounts of information about what goes on, who is likely to be around, what staff wear and how they talk. I was also able to hear what the location sounded like too, something I wouldn’t have got from photos alone. It was the next best thing to actually being there and gave a real feel for the location which helped immensely when it came to writing the scenes. I then sent the pages to a friend who works in a NICU to make sure I hadn’t made any errors.

3. CHICKENS AND EGGS

For me, stories always start with a spark for a character or situation. Usually I get a burst of ideas about where the story could go, but if I don’t know enough about the subject, I’ll do some research as the results will inform what can happen. As soon as I feel I know enough (not everything, just enough), I do a first draft—writing what works for the story and not being afraid to add details that may be inaccurate. This draft will usually reveal further gaps in my knowledge, so I’ll do more research to fill these, and also check any stuff I made up. This process repeats over numerous drafts until the story is close to completion, at which point I recheck my facts and if possible get an expert to read what I have written to make sure the story rings true.

4. THE IMMERSION TECHNIQUE

While working on a book, I cover the walls above my desk with information I collect—location photos; character castings; words and phrases that capture the mood or key ideas of the story; reminder notes and, with Waiting for Gonzo, the timeline with all the relevant dates and plot points.

     I also gather the research photos for my current project into a screen saver folder on my computer. This means that when I’m not actually typing, the machine starts displaying reminders of my locations, characters etc. It’s a great way to stay immersed in the story world, and because the slideshow chooses images at random, it sometimes throws up an aspect I’d forgotten about, which in the past has triggered a helpful idea.

The man in the milk bottle mask!

5. ALL IN THE NAME OF RESEARCH

The most unusual piece of research I’ve ever undertaken was for the Nyctal masks worn by Oz and Ryan at Fight Camp in Waiting for Gonzo. I researched mask making on the internet, and then adapted one for the creature I had invented for the story. But I had to check it would work, so found myself actually making a mask from a plastic milk bottle. Then I wore it round the house for an hour—just to see how it felt. Did it smell? Get sweaty quickly? What could I see and hear while I was wearing it? Information that really helped when writing the scene.

6. LOCATION SCOUTING

I like to invent place names for my stories, but my imaginary locations are usually based on somewhere real. Crawdale in Waiting for Gonzo is a mixture of North Yorkshire and Mid West Wales. I treat this research like scouting for film locations, and take lots of photos and video—walking Oz’s route home from school for example.

Researching Oz's walk home in Wales.

     Video is useful because you capture sounds too — birds, traffic, a nearby stream, the crunch of feet on gravel. I try to look around and focus in on things I might want to include later. I’ll often dictate notes out loud as I’m recording, which draws funny looks from people, but is useful for capturing details that won’t be on the film—the fact my knees ached from the steepness of the hill; the way the wind felt like it was trying to tear my clothes! Months later I can watch these location videos before writing a scene, and it takes me right back there.

     Google Maps Street View is great for checking routes and what places look like without actually visiting! The 360° feature means you can literally look around and take screenshots—almost as good as being there with a camera in your hand. Of course you don’t get the full sense of a location, but it’s a superb way to visit places quickly and cheaply!

7. YOU'LL NEED A COAT ON TODAY …

Stories often take place in a non-specified time of year, but make sure you don’t forget crucial calendar events that would register in your character’s lives. For example, Waiting for Gonzo took place over 40 weeks, which meant I had to acknowledge Halloween and Christmas. I find that these events often provide a setting for a scene, or even a useful plot-point. Anchoring your story to real calendar events can give it a strong sense of reality.

     I also find it useful to keep in mind what time of year my story is taking place. Knowing whether an evening scene happens on a dark winter’s night, or a balmy summer’s evening will affect the mood and how the events unfold. For example, a car’s headlights dazzle your heroine and cause her to crash her bike. But it’s a summer evening and still light—you’ll need to rethink the cause of the accident. www.timeanddate.com is useful for finding out what time it gets dark at a particular time of year. (Click on the Sun&Moon tab and enter the month, year and location.) It’s a detail, but getting it wrong can pull the reader out of the world you have created. Plus, taking a moment to consider these things before starting a scene can really draw you into the moment and inject greater depth into your writing.

     A few years ago I started keeping a weather diary—daily notes on what the light was like; how the trees looked; how cold it was and what people were wearing. Now, I’m not suggesting you should include ‘weather reports’ in every scene—unless it is crucial to your story, of course—but deciding what conditions are like will inform how your characters feel and what could happen to them.

8. AND FINALLY …

Research can be great fun, it can bring our characters to life and inform what happens in our stories, it can provide us with settings so real, our readers will be able to smell the air as they turn the page. But don’t get lost in its maze of magical mysteries—research is there to support our stories, not the other way around.

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I hope some of the above will be of interest. I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on research. Why not leave a comment below with your top research tip.

Dave Cousins is the author of a number of award-winning books for teenagers and children. For a more information, sounds and videos, visit davecousins.net

The Inspiration for my new crime mystery Chasing the Dark – by guest author, Sam Hepburn

This week, we are delighted to welcome Sam Hepburn as our guest author at the Edge. Her new novel Chasing the Dark is out now! Over to you, Sam …

Inspiration is such a strange and slippery thing. For me, the seeds of a story seem to take root when a memory from the distant past is triggered by something that catches my attention in the present. That is exactly how this scrap of paper came to spark the plot for my new book Chasing the Dark.

I found it lying in the street when I was trying to come up with the plot for a crime mystery. I can’t even remember where I was at the time but it made such an impression on me that I took it home, pinned it to the notice board beside my desk and looked at it all the time I was thinking about the plot.

The little boy is smiling at the camera, happily leaning back in his mother’s arms and obviously feeling safe and secure. His mum however, is looking off into the distance. Is she thinking about the future or the past? Has someone or something caught her attention? You get the feeling that these two are alone in the world, so perhaps she is a single mum. If you look more closely you can see that the image has been created from two separate pictures put together with a ragged white rip passing between the two figures. While the little boy is surrounded by warm red bricks and the homely clutter of garden chairs, the mother is cut off by a bleak cold wall, as if he has a future and she does not.

The boy also appears to be mixed race, which resonated with me because I am the child of a white English mother and an absent African father, a combination that is commonplace nowadays but pretty rare when I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s. This is a picture of me and my mother taken when I must have been about two.

So I was interested in exploring the strengths and tensions within a modern single parent family with a missing African father and the more I looked at the image on my notice board the more it began to shape the back story of Joe Slattery, the fourteen year old hero of Chasing the Dark.

All he knows about his father is that he was a Kenyan student who went back to Nairobi before Joe was born. His mum Sadie has struggled to bring him up, earning a precarious living by singing in pubs and clubs and performing at weddings. They live on a rundown housing estate in North London and although they have their problems their bond is extremely close. Joe’s whole world is therefore ripped apart when his mum is killed in a hit and run car crash alongside a well-known investigative journalist. Since Sadie never accepted lifts from strangers, the only conclusion Joe can draw is that for some reason the journalist had met her by arrangement before driving her home. Joe is overwhelmed by a burning desire to know what that reason was and as he struggles with his grief he begins a desperate chase through a dangerous world of secrets, lies and conspiracy.

Part of that conspiracy was inspired by a documentary I made for the BBC nearly twenty years ago, called “The Picasso Files”, all about the files that the Soviet Secret Service had kept on the artist Pablo Picasso during the cold war. It gave me a fascinating insight into the way the KGB ran their spying operations. The KGB archive in Moscow sent me a huge box of photocopied files in Russian which I sent off to a translator. When the translations came back I realised that some of the pages had nothing to do with Picasso and had quite obviously been misfiled. To be honest, what was on them was really unexciting but I have always wondered what would happen if a few pages that were still top secret accidentally found their way into the hands of a reporter. Then, a couple of years ago, I read that the government in Ukraine were opening up some of their KGB archive to the public. When I discovered that former Soviet spies were panicking because top secret files really were falling into the hands of journalists I knew I’d found the key to the mystery at the heart of Chasing the Dark.

Chasing the Dark is out now, published by Chicken House.

Find out more about Sam Hepburn at www.samhepburnbooks.com

Thanks to Sam for being this week's guest at the Edge.

An Edge Too Far? – by Guest Author Cathy MacPhail

This week we are delighted to welcome best-selling author Cathy MacPhail as our guest at The Edge …

A boy witnesses a man tumbling to his death from the top of a tower block, and landing with a Splat!

This is how my next book, Mosi’s War begins. Well, you’ve got to hook them from the beginning, haven’t you? 

From then on there are machete fights, riots, murder, a bit of slicing and dicing, cannibalism … oh, and a vampire … did I mention a vampire? All in the name of gritty realism.

But this is a book about a young African asylum seeker who harbours a terrible secret, and who then sees, right there in the Glasgow estate where he lives, someone from his past, someone who terrifies him. So in order for it to be truthful, it had to be violent.

But that’s the dilemma about writing young adult fiction, especially when, like me, you write for the younger adult age group. 

Just how truthful, how graphic, should you be?

I know there is a debate at the moment about just what subjects you can tackle in young adult fiction. And the answer seems to be, you can tackle anything you want, it is the way you handle the subject that matters.

You want your book to be as honest as possible, but you also want your book to be accessible not only for the age group you’re writing for, but also acceptable for teachers, parents and librarians too.

Personally, I look at it is as a challenge to be overcome, rather than a problem that has to be faced. 

I think there are always ways to get round it. For instance, we all know a lot of children swear, but I wouldn’t get away with a load of swear words in my books, nor would I want to. And after all, if you were adapting your book for children’s television you wouldn’t be allowed swear words. The challenge is to depict your characters’ dialogue honestly without using any actual swear words in your story.

Overcoming that challenge is something I enjoy. We know dark things can go on in a young person’s life, but we can hint at it, without being too specific or graphic. What you leave out can be as important as what you put in.

I’ve been lucky, from the beginning I have written about dark subjects, and I have never had anyone say, that’s too dark, cut it out. In Grass, a boy witnesses a gangster blast the life out of another gangster and I’ve read that scene out at schools, even primary schools and you can hear a pin drop when I do, and never once has a teacher told me it was too graphic.

I wrote Roxy’s Baby after hearing a report on radio about a girl who had come to this country and then found out she was pregnant. People offered to look after her and she thought they were being kind. When the baby was born they told her the baby had died. Only later did she find out the horrific truth. The baby had been sold on for its organs. I had never heard anything so horrific. I knew I wanted to write that book, but how could I possibly write a book about such a horrific subject when I write for such a young market. How could I make this book accessible to my readers, and still be honest? Then I realised I could put a young girl, perhaps 14, into my story, and at fourteen I would never suspect such a horrendous truth. My fourteen year old imagination’s worst nightmare would be that they were witches, and wanted my baby for some kind of blood sacrifice, and so Roxy never finds out the truth till the very end, and neither do the readers. And once again, I have never been told at any high school not to talk about Roxy’s Baby.

So I think there are always ways round any topic, no matter how dark and edgy and gritty. Put a young person in there and see it through their eyes, see how they would deal with it at their age.

I’m so glad I was allowed the violence and blood that there is in Mosi’s War. It’s a book about a boy soldier, and the terrible things he has had to do to survive. It had to be gritty. But it’s also a book about a boy, who has had his childhood taken away from him, who has lost his belief in everything, and who, in the end, gets his faith back.

And that was the only thing I wasn’t allowed to mention … God.

It seems He was an edge too far.

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For more information visit Cathy's website and blog.

Follow her on Twitter @CathyMacphail

A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever

Waiting for Gonzo hits the shelves on March 7, but Edge author Dave Cousins wonders if his edgy credentials will be called into question …

I’m worried I could be in danger of being kicked out of (or over) the Edge! My new book jacket is yellow; it has bright red writing and a picture of a girl with a giant comedy moustache and glasses drawn on her face. You could be forgiven for thinking I’ve lost my edge.

But do you have to be dark, to be edgy?

In many ways, I felt more on the edge writing Waiting for Gonzo than I ever did during 15 Days Without a Head – a story with a much more obviously edgy subject.

From the outset, I wanted Gonzo to be funny, but the story was filled with characters battling their way through some very serious problems. Could I write with honesty and truth about these things and still make readers laugh?

I’ve always been drawn to stories that make me laugh and cry at the turn of a page. For me, humour in the face of adversity feels that little bit funnier, and the pain that comes after laughter, always takes your breath away. But as David St. Hubbins says in the film, This is Spinal Tap – “It’s a fine line between stupid and uh … clever.” A joke at the wrong time can kill the tension or just come across as irritating; equally, while attempting to reveal heart and drama in a comic moment, it’s easy to stumble and land face first in stupid!

Then there was Oz – my thirteen year old narrator – one of those characters who transformed himself and the story as I typed. He had a tendency to be loud and cocky, but was always fun to be with – misguided and thoughtless rather than malicious – I loved him, but would anybody else? From the reviews I’ve had so far, I’m glad to say that readers appear to feel the same way about Oz as I did. Laura (aka Sister Spooky) summed it up perfectly when she wrote: “Oz is very believable and if I’m honest, a bit of an arse at times, but that just made me warm to him more.”

I’m hoping that Waiting for Gonzo ended up on the right side of that fine line, but I’ll let you be the judge of that. As for my edge credentials? Writing often feels like a leap of faith, but I can honestly say I’ve never teetered for quite so long on the brink – surely that must count for something?

Waiting for Gonzo by Dave Cousins is published in paperback by Oxford University Press on 7 March 2013.

For further information, including details of the original soundtrack to accompany the book, visit www.davecousins.net. You can also find Dave on Twitter and Facebook.

Writing Badly by Guest Author Conrad Mason

Hello Edge readers, and thank you to the Edge for having me! I thought I'd write about one of the most important steps I took towards becoming a published author: writing badly.

It's well known that many authors get through several 'drawer novels' before they finish one that's fit to be published. I have drawer novels too, except that none of mine are longer than a few paragraphs. I've started hundreds of stories, but for years I never got further than the first page.

The trouble was that I was so determined to write beautiful prose that I never got anywhere. If you spend a quarter of an hour crafting each sentence, how can you ever finish a 300-page book? I had no idea how the professionals did it. Presumably they had some special skill that I lacked. 

Then I read a book called How To Write A Novel by John Braine. It's got some startling pieces of advice in it, some of which I've chosen to ignore ('try not to get married or permanently entangled before your novel is finished'). But overall it's the most inspiring book about writing that I have ever read (and I include On Writing by Stephen King in that – although that's also wonderful).

Here's the epiphany bit: 'With the first draft all that matters is writing the maximum number of words.'

It felt dangerously illicit – was I really allowed to obsess over word count and throw quality out of the window? I had to find out. I set myself a goal of at least 300 words a day, every day, and I kept writing. No checking back. No obsessing over details. No stopping, no matter what. There were times I lost my way, but I just carried on, writing bad sentences and even bad scenes in the knowledge that I'd go back and fix them later. The editor part of my brain was screaming at me all the way, but I ignored it. John Braine had set me free!

Of course, what I got at the end was a mess. Half-formed characters, awful prose, plotlines going nowhere... But that didn't matter because it was 50,000 words of mess. Something that I could edit, and hone, and turn into a novel.

I think the problem before was that I had been trying to write and edit at the same time – and for me, separating those two processes made all the difference. In the first draft I allowed my ideas to come tumbling out as fast as possible, no matter how incoherent they were; then in the second draft I picked them apart and put them back together again.

So to this day, if I'm ever struggling to write well, I just write badly instead. I'd rather do that than write nothing at all.

The Demon's Watch by Conrad Mason is out now in hardback, published by David Fickling Books. 

And rather well written it is too ….

Follow @conradwrites on Twitter and see The Demon's Watch trailer at www.conrad-mason.com

Notes on the Edge – by Guest Author Jane McLoughlin.

This week we are delighted to welcome Jane McLoughlin as our guest author at the Edge. 


Jane's debut YA novel At Yellow Lake hit the shelves yesterday. We recommend you hurry to your nearest bookshop and grab a copy!

Now over to Jane …




Most YA writers have a notion of “edge”. It’s where our characters live, whether or not we think of ourselves or our work as “edgy”.

If I were to come up with a definition of “edge”, I couldn’t come up with anything better than these lines from the song Common People by Pulp:

" You will never understand

How it feels to live your life

With no meaning or control

And with nowhere left to go."

This certainly sums up the world of YA as I see it. Young people, in real life as well as in fiction, often have no control. They have no (legal) way to make money, they can’t vote, school is a requirement, not an option, they are bound to their parent’s lifestyle choices. In “edgy” YA fiction these parental choices usually veer from inept to misguided to downright dangerous . So, just as in the song, characters in YA fiction often have “nowhere left to go.”

To me, this is one of the great challenges (and joys) of writing YA. How do we create a believable world where powerless characters can take control? How do we find realistic ways for the voiceless to express themselves and for the defenceless to fight back?

But it’s the first line from that stanza that challenges me the most: “You will never understand how it feels...”

As a middle-aged, middle class woman, this hurts, because the truth is that I don’t understand. I look at the problems faced by the characters I’m writing about and, for the most part, I have never had their experiences, have never been even half as vulnerable or exposed.

Jane McLoughlin

OK, bad and scary things have happened to me in my life (and, like an actor, I use my emotional memory of these situations very often) but I’ve never been abandoned or let-down by my family, I’ve never been without the support of stable and loving people. YA characters, including ones that I have created, are often left to fend completely for themselves, and this something I can only, as yet, imagine.

So, as a writer, there is a limit to my “edge” and I have to acknowledge that.

Another great line from Common People is “everybody hates a tourist” and I worry about that sometimes, too. (All right, so I worry about a lot of foolish things). But isn’t that what all writers are to an extent? Just day trippers? Whatever we write about, whatever dangers we create for our characters, aren’t we able to turn off the laptop, make a cup of tea, tweet about the day’s word count?

The answer to this is yes, of course we are. For YA writers this is particularly problematic—the edgy world of the teenager is often far from the more rounded, secure worlds that adult writers generally inhabit. But, as writers, we still have to go to the edge—even while acknowledging that it is only our edge, not the edge. We have to be unafraid to visit some dark places, to take some creative risks, to follow our characters into the turbulent water of our own painful memories. And even if we can’t, as the the song says, understand what it’s like to be powerless, at least we must to try to remember. And if we can’t remember?

Then we’ll have to do what writers do best—imagine the edge, and head towards it.


At Yellow Lake by Jane McLoughlin is out now in paperback, published by Frances Lincoln. Visit your local bookshop or click here to buy a copy.

Keep up to date with Jane's latest news via her blog.

Caring For Awkward Characters – by Guest Author Nik Perring

This week we are delighted to welcome Nik Perring as our guest author at the Edge. Nik is the co-author of Freaks! and the author of Not So Perfect.

For me, Story is all about characters. A story is, in my opinion, what happens to the people in it. They shape it, by their actions and their circumstances and how they react to them. You can’t have a story without characters. 

So, as an extension of that, I think it’s fair to say that you can’t have a good story (however you qualify that) without having a good main character, or ensemble. And how do decide who your characters are going to be? Well, that’s the difficult bit, isn’t it, especially when we don’t find out who they really are until we’ve seen how they’ve reacted to the troubles that are put in front of them in our stories. 

For me, the best characters are the ones we can see a bit of ourselves in. Empathising is important – we have to care, one way or another, about what happens to the people we’re reading about - but what can be equally important is recognising the traits we might wish we didn’t have, or the ones we dislike to see in others. And I’m not really talking about the broad character types – the bullies, the tyrants, the liars – though they can all make for being exceptionally interesting – I’m talking about subtler things. I’m talking about things like insecurity and selfishness, about vulnerability and not quite understanding the world as, it would appear, the rest of the world does. I’m talking about the characters who struggle, who worry, who might be anxious or uncomfortable, or awkward or just plain weird. 

I’m talking about the things that make the characters real, that make them human in the same ways we are, and that’s what makes us care what happens to them. Because, really, that awkwardness, that sense of not quite fitting in – it’s something I think we’ve all felt to some degree at some point in our lives – and that’s what makes us, us. 

But it’s not just about empathy, nor is it only about honesty. It’s so much more than that – it’s about opportunity. As I said earlier, if our characters are interesting and good, then there’s a good chance our stories will be too.

Nik Perring is the co-author of Freaks! published by The Friday Project (HarperCollins) and the author of Not So Perfect (Roast Books). 

He blogs at http://nikperring.com and tweets as @nikperring, and his characters tend to be very awkward and very weird indeed.