So building a sympathetic character on the page is a lot like being a sympathetic character in real life. This sympathetic character is basically the opposite of a butt-hole.

There’s this great post on the SocialSelf blog that talks about what makes people likable and what keeps people from being likeable. And writers can learn from this, really.

The big things that make people likeable in real life are like a top ten list of awesome:

1. Be funny
2. Be a good listener
3. Don’t judge
4. Be authentic
5. Be warm and friendly immediately
6. Show people that you like them
7. Smile
8. Be humble, but also confident
9. Keep your promises
10. Know people’s names
11. Ask questions that aren’t yes or no answers.

They even have a bar graph about it.

When we’re writing, it’s hard to make a character listen to the reader or make eye contact with the reader, which scores high, but we can show them listening to other people, being kind to other characters instead of being all self-self-self and me-me-me all the time.

And you can make the character funny if that’s who they are. If you think back to ancient Buffy the Vampire Slayer shows, the characters were a bit much sometimes, right? Buffy especially, but they became likeable and fun because they were funny and they tried super hard to keep their promises and be there for each other.

But just as importantly, that blog has ways that people sabotage their likability in real life.

What are those ways?

1. Humble bragging
2. Name dropping
3. Gossiping
4. Oversharing on social media

Now, for a book character, humble bragging and gossiping can happen in dialogue and be annoying and off-putting. But oversharing can happen, too, in a first-person narrative, right? You can tell too much, so much, that it feels like the action isn’t happening and that will distance the reader.

When it comes to keeping those unlikable aspects off that page, it gets a little bit trickier because you have to keep the reader interested enough in what happens to the character to keep reading. That's all about likability.

This is why I talk about those super objectives and desire lines a lot. If you can give your character a yearning/a goal in each scene and chapter (sometimes it’s more pronounced that other times), then the reader will wonder if the character will get it. This helps to get the reader involved and gives you a little more time to build up the connection with the character. That's because the readers want to know what happens and if the character will get their goal/yearning/want. That gives you more time to make them care about the character.

But to make them really care about what happens, you have to make them care about the character and to do that, it can help to let the reader see the character’s wound, that defect, that thing that haunts them. You want to see them in a moment of weakness or vulnerability or loneliness.

Smelling buttholes is great but you don't want to be one! - Mr. Murphy quote of the day.

BLUE LYNZ PRIZE FOR POETRY

The annual Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry awards $2000 plus publication for a full-length poetry collection. The Prize is awarded for an unpublished, full-length volume of poems by a U.S. author, which includes foreign nationals living and writing in the U.S. and U.S. citizens living abroad. Lynx House Press has been publishing fine poetry and prose since 1975. Our titles are distributed by the University of Washington Press.

Top Prize:

$2,000

A lot of writers that I work with have a problem. The problem is that they want to be a writer, but before they come to me? They don’t write.

Here’s the thing. For a lot of us, we have to make time to be a writer. That’s just how our brains and process work. There are some writers who manage to get 10 days of alone time and writer time and they power through a book in that time, but most of us aren’t that wealthy or that lucky.

That means to be a writer, we have to create the habit of writing.

This is where James Clear’s method comes into play. This guy has built an empire around helping people create habits. And he believes there are four steps to creating a habit.

• Cue
• Craving
• Response
• Reward

This man has a ton of books and information all over the internet and bookshelves about this, but very basically, what he defines each as is:

The Cue

This triggers your brain to do the behavior.

He writes: “It is a bit of information that predicts a reward. Our prehistoric ancestors were paying attention to cues that signaled the location of primary rewards like food, water, and sex. Today, we spend most of our time learning cues that predict secondary rewards like money and fame, power and status, praise and approval, love and friendship, or a sense of personal satisfaction.”

The Craving

This is the motivation, the force, the desire, the reason to act.

He writes: “What you crave is not the habit itself but the change in state it delivers. You do not crave smoking a cigarette, you crave the feeling of relief it provides. You are not motivated by brushing your teeth but rather by the feeling of a clean mouth. You do not want to turn on the television, you want to be entertained.”

The Response

This is the habit. It might be sitting at your desk at 8 p.m. every night and writing. It might be writing 250 words during lunch or waiting to pick up your kid from swim practice. It’s the habit.

“Whether a response occurs depends on how motivated you are and how much friction is associated with the behavior. If a particular action requires more physical or mental effort than you are willing to expend, then you won’t do it. Your response also depends on your ability. It sounds simple, but a habit can occur only if you are capable of doing it. If you want to dunk a basketball but can’t jump high enough to reach the hoop, well, you’re out of luck,” he writes.

The Reward

These are things that satisfy our craving.

He writes, “Rewards are the end goal of every habit. . . .We chase rewards because they serve two purposes: (1) they satisfy us and (2) they teach us.”

So, we sit down and write every day and eventually we get a book. That’s super simplified, but whatever.

There’s also that second part about how they teach us, right?

Clear writes, “Rewards teach us which actions are worth remembering in the future. Your brain is a reward detector. As you go about your life, your sensory nervous system is continuously monitoring which actions satisfy your desires and deliver pleasure. Feelings of pleasure and disappointment are part of the feedback mechanism that helps your brain distinguish useful actions from useless ones. Rewards close the feedback loop and complete the habit cycle.”

So, to build a habit, he says, to change your behavior, you want to think of each step (he calls them laws) to do the behaviors. The keys, he said are these (all direct from the post linked above and below):

It's pretty cool stuff, and you should probably check out his book or site if you're into this system and it rings true for you.

But for writers, especially,

We found a topic! It ended up mostly being about poop and creepiness and three-foot tall humanoids.

https://www.ranker.com/list/creepy-forest-ranger-stories/amandasedlakhevener