The characters in a story should be generally consistent, but to make them interesting, they must also be able to surprise readers. When developing the characters in your fiction story, apply the following tips to make them more memorable.

Drives and Desires

Characters that are driven toward satisfying some desire or achieving a particular goal tend to be intriguing to readers. There are bound to be obstacles and conflict on the journey to fulfillment, and readers enjoy having a front row seat from which to witness the turmoil likely to ensue. When a character is compelled by a driving need and will do anything to meet that need, despite challenges along the way, readers also feel compelled to tag along for the ride.

Be Vulnerable

While a character with huge ambition and an uncanny ability to easily overstep any obstacle might be impressive, he or she is not nearly as interesting as one with vulnerabilities. When a character’s vulnerable side is exposed, readers perk up. Some will identify with that weakness; perhaps even empathize with that character. Readers will likely want to know how much of an impact that vulnerability will have on the character throughout the story. They’ll also want to see if your character overcomes the challenges associated with it.

Keep Secrets

To make things interesting, let your main characters keep a few secrets. Having a big secret often means that a primary character stands to lose something big should that secret ever get out. The secret could be something from the past. Maybe it turns out that your main character, new in town and still trying to be accepted, served time for a felony years ago and will do anything to keep others from finding out. Perhaps you have a character hiding an addiction. Whatever the secret, it should provide your character with a motive for behaving a particular way. 

Introduce Contradictions

Just as secrets can be interesting, so can contradictions. One-dimensional characters will leave readers bored, but introduce a contradiction in their personality and things get interesting. Suppose you have a cranky character. Try showing his compassionate side in an unexpected moment. Perhaps you’ve created an intense introvert who keeps to herself, but is later discovered to be a stripper. See? Contradictions make things memorable.

When your characters are memorable, readers will become invested in finding out what happens to them. When that happens, readers will feel compelled to follow your characters to the end of the story.

Becoming a published author is the dream of many writers, but one that often goes unrealized. In the world of a writer, rejection is everywhere. If the thought of securing a literary agent to represent your work leaves you feeling woozy and you fear never landing a contract with a traditional publisher, you might consider self-publishing. Years ago, publishing your own book was not a possibility, but it is now and there are several advantages to doing so.

Greater Royalties

There is the potential to earn a lot more money on each book sale with self-publishing. Traditional publishing companies typically pay authors about 15-20% of net earnings for a published title. The publisher takes a bigger cut for providing a host of services, including editing, layout and design, printing, and marketing. There are always fees for self-publishing, but authors keep more of the profits for themselves than with traditional publishing.

Complete Control

Publishing your book yourself allows you to retain complete control. As the author and publisher, you have the final say regarding every aspect of the book. You decide which edits to implement and what the design layout will look like. You select the title and book cover and you even set the price at which you want to sell your book. The marketing strategy is also yours to decide.

Instant Publication

Once an author has done his or her part writing and revising a book for a traditional publisher, it will still be several months before the final book is available for sale. Time is needed to design a cover, finalize the interior layout, and set the book for printing or digital format. Additionally, the publisher might already have several books in line to be completed before even beginning the design and layout process for your book. Self-publishing eliminates the long wait. Writers can practically publish their books as soon as they are written when they self-publish.

Guaranteed Publication

When you choose to self-publish you are guaranteed to be a published author. You can purchase an ISBN for your title so that your book can be sold in bookstores and through marketplaces like Amazon. It is even possible to publish digital books directly through Amazon and have them available for sale almost immediately. Once that happens, you are officially a published author.

For writers dreaming of seeing their books in print, in either hardcopy or digital format, self-publishing is a realistic way of achieving this. In addition to guaranteed publication, self-publishing offers several other benefits. In the case of earning greater royalties, for instance, self-publishing can even be considered advantageous over traditional publishing.

Writers are communicators who have the time to craft their message. Yet, no matter how many times they go through their work after they finish writing, they miss typos and other mistakes. In the era of speedier production and widespread Internet usage, typos have become more common. The results may be affecting other modes of communication as well, because typos have become more acceptable, according to the Forbes magazine article, Fall Of The Grammar Snobs: How Typos Became Okay.

Publications are churning out work so quickly that proofreading has suffered. Even the New York Times and other well-known newspapers have not escaped publishing glaring typos. While established names and informal social media communications do not suffer monetary harm, eliminating noticeable mistakes is crucial for many businesses.

Typos Cause Online Businesses to Lose Sales

In the article, Spelling mistakes ‘cost millions’ in lost online sales, the BBC reported that Charles Duncombe, an online entrepreneur, said that an analysis of website figures revealed that even one spelling mistake reduces online sales by half. Spelling is important for the credibility of a website, and online businesses, he said, have about six seconds to capture a potential customer’s attention and trust.

Customers who are concerned about credibility are most prone to being put off by spelling errors. As more businesses go online, the importance of the accuracy of website content cannot be underestimated. However, it is not only online businesses that suffer from such errors. A Daily News article titled, New York suffers in an era of error: Typos in signs are a scourge of the city, pointed out that spelling errors are widespread in New York and elsewhere. Such errors can make things worse, as these flaws have a viral effect.

There is a Scientific Reason Writers Miss Typos

Tom Stafford, a psychologist at the University of Sheffield in U.K., said in the Wired article, What’s Up With That: Why It’s So Hard to Catch Your Own Typos, that when writers proofread their own work, their eyes skim over errors because their mind gets in the way and makes the eyes miss what is actually there. Because writers know what they intend to convey, their eyes read one thing, but their brains translates it into what it should be. Hence, even experienced columnists and journalists are prone to such errors.

The Public Editor of the Toronto Star said, in the article titled, Typos won’t go away, no matter how we try: Public Editor, that he was also prone to such errors because he is a speed-reader and he uses a two-finger typing style.

Even though familiarity trips up many writers, they can help proofreaders and editors by reading over their content slowly and by spell checking and grammar checking their work prior to submitting it for publication. People who write frequently have used various tricks to reduce the amount of errors they make, such as reading their text backwards. Nonetheless, proofreaders and editors are more necessary today because of the new dynamics of communication in our era.

Until 2016, despite writing more than 300 novels and selling more than 200 million books in France, Frédéric Dard’s books were not available in English translations. This is unlike the speedy translation of young French author Leila Slimani’s novels.

In 2016, the Vertigo crime imprint of Pushkin Press published “Bird in a Cage” and followed it with ”The Wicked Go to Hell,” and “Crush.” These are the first major publications of Dard’s psychological thrillers in the “novels of the night” or noir category.

Why Dard May Have Been Ignored Before

The books’ editor, Daniel Seton, said in an article in The Guardian that publishers may have thought Dard’s invented slang was untranslatable. But his noir novels are beautifully written and do not use that slang heavily.

As a fan, Seton is very happy to bring Dard to an English-speaking audience. He also thinks publication comes at an appropriate time because the market is publishing more psychological thrillers.

A Penchant for Pseudonyms and Style Similar to Georges Simenon

Seton describes Dard’s style as being similar to that of Georges Simenon. Unlike Simenon, many of Dard’s books were written under 17 aliases, including the name of San Antonio, his Parisian secret police superintendent character. No one knows why he wrote under pseudonyms or how many there were. Only 17 are confirmed, so far.

Although Simenon preferred a third-person narrator, Dard preferred tales seen through the eyes of the protagonist or the villain. Both preferred gritty, unremarkable settings. David Bellos, a Princeton professor of French and another Dard fan, translated “Bird in a Cage.” Bellos told Boyd Tonkin in an article published by The Economist’s 1843 magazine that Dard and Simenon use language with “extraordinary efficiency.” The reader reads their fast-paced novels quickly.

Imperfect Protagonists and Cinematic Plots

Dard’s protagonists tend to be flawed characters; the prolific writer who also composed screenplays and scripts wrote plots that would be easy to use in films. If the Dard books sell well, the San Antonio character alone can provide aficionados with plenty of material as there are 173 books about his adventures.

Born near Lyon, Dard preferred writing in the settings of nondescript semi-industrial small towns. The industrial landscape is more native to his Belgian- born mentor, who was born in the city of Liege. The San Antonio novels offer filmmakers plenty of material.

Writers who want to try their hand at noir crime fiction should check out why Dard has devoted fans. Reading is an essential part of the making of a writer, so aspiring authors should take advantage of a revealing glimpse of a master.

Khaled Hosseini’s fourth and newest book is inspired by Alan Kurdi, the young child whose lifeless body was found on a Turkish beach. “Sea Prayer” is a short, illustrated book for readers of all ages and follows a virtual reality show of the same title that was scripted by Hosseini.

Acclaimed Novelist and UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador

Khaled Hosseini, a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Goodwill Ambassador since 2006, will donate his earnings from this book to the UNHCR and his own charitable foundation, the Khaled Hosseini Foundation. “Sea Prayer” takes the form of a letter from a father to his sleeping son. Its press release quotes Hosseini’s statement that his book “is an attempt to pay tribute to the millions of families” that “have been splintered and forced from home by war and persecution.”

Hosseini himself is one of many who have fled their homes “in the midst of a displacement crisis of enormous proportions,” a crisis that is the source of inspiration for his latest creation.

From an Afghan Setting to Other Venues

When his debut novel, “The Kite Runner,” was published in 2003, Khaled Hosseini burst onto the literary scene as a distinctive voice bringing foreign characters to distant audiences. Hosseini writes powerful stories, and his new novel is at least as memorable as the others.

Hosseini followed “The Kite Runner” with “A Thousand Splendid Suns” and “And the Mountains Echoed.” Each of his first three novels had an Afghan character or storyline. This time the father of two writes from the perspective of a father and what Hosseini imagines he would feel in such circumstances.

Although he is a refugee, Hosseini was studying in Paris where his diplomat father was based when the Soviet invasion caused his father to seek asylum abroad. Consequently he had a more luxurious route than the harrowing journey Syrian refugees and other refugee victims of war experienced.

Nonetheless, just three years after the publication of “The Kite Runner,” its author became a Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, revealing his commitment to the cause of refugees.

The “Sea Prayer” is a good book to read to your own children or to use to teach school children about the subject of refugees. For prospective children’s literature writers, it offers a fine example of addressing the subject for audiences of all ages. It is fortunate that a writer of this caliber is taking this message to a wide audience.

If you have never heard of Astrid Lindgren, you should correct that gap, especially if you aspire to be a children’s book author. To get started you may want to see “Becoming Astrid,” the recently made movie about the beloved children’s book author. If you visit Stockholm, include a trip to Junibacken, the children’s museum, which has a storybook train that takes visitors through some of her stories.

Lindgren’s Widespread Popularity

Astrid Lindgren’s books have been embraced by readers in more than 100 countries and have sold more than 144 million copies. Her books have been translated into 85 languages. She is best known for her Pippi Longstocking and Karlsson-on-the-Roof book series.

Pippi Longstocking, the Brothers Lionheart, Emil of Lönneberga, and Ronia the Robber’s Daughter are among Lindgren’s characters whose first rapt audience were her children and their friends. Her daughter imaginatively created “Pippi Longstocking” as a name and then asked her mother to tell her a story about this character.

The first book about Pippi was published in 1945. Pippi was a groundbreaking character because she was strong, smart, and more intelligent than adults.

An Unconventional Outlook Created Enduring Classics

As a 17-year-old in 1920, Lindgren applied for a trainee journalist position, an unusual career for a female at the time, confirming her reputation in her small town for being unconventional. She did not become an author until she was in her forties.

In the letter accompanying her original manuscript to the publisher, Astrid Lindgren described her first character, Pippi Longstocking, as “a small übermensch in the form of a child, living in a perfectly normal environment.” A Der Spiegel article about the author,

“Wartime Diaries Reveal the True Astrid Lindgren,” revealed this description.

Her personality, education, reading, children, and World War II all influenced Astrid Lindgren’s books for children. She was a prodigious reader. The Der Spiegel article mentions that Lindgren had said that “Hunger,” a novel by Knut Hamsun, was a source of her inspiration. Bertrand Russell, A.S. Neill, and Alfred Adler appear to have influenced her as well.

In her letter to the publisher she pointedly wrote:

“Bertrand Russell wrote that childhood is dominated by the desire to become an adult, or rather the will to power. According to Russell, a normal child dwells on fantasies that relate to the will to power. I don’t know if Bertrand Russell is right. Judging by the practically pathological popularity Pippi Longstocking has enjoyed over the course of two years among my own children and their friends of the same age, I am inclined to believe him.”

Before she started writing stories, she read many to her young children. Astrid Lindgren’s life and books reveal that becoming a children’s literature author can be inspired by many influences.