Hi friends,

A fellow writer from our Midday Writing Group asked me: How do we embody characters we write who are going through things we might not have experienced?

Often, we write what we know. Our characters are influenced by the people in our lives with little tweaks—an uncle with anger issues, a sibling stuck in a toxic relationship, a cousin we only hear from on holidays. Then, we take our own experiences, everything we read, and everything we know about the world and its messiness, and mold characters that readers would swear are either about them or someone they know.

At its core, what we do when we write characters isn’t just create them. We observe them form on the page, listening to the patterns that define them: a phrase they say, things that make them happy or sad, what they’re protective of. These things create the characters that, when we introduce challenges or incidents to them, we instinctively know how they would react.

But how do you get there? How do you get to the point where a character feels like a living, breathing entity you can make assumptions about? A lot, a lot, of writing. Most of the time, it’s not a light switch where something happens and the character comes to life for us (although that does happen occasionally). However, things that have helped me in the past are:

• Journaling from the character’s perspective using prompts (The 90-Day Novel is really helpful with that)
• Friends’ feedback (other people can usually point out inconsistencies with characters and help align them)
• Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.

💎 New From Me

Here is a video I published on helpful time to make writing part of our daily routine in 2025:

🔖 Quote I’m pondering

“All great works and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.”

— Albert Camus

Source: The 90-Day Novel

📸 Through My Lens

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Thank you for reading!

Mohamed