Right now’s visitor put up is by creator Jonelle Patrick, creator of The Final Tea Bowl Thief.

Ingesting downside, unhealthy childhood, dust poor—practically all of literature’s most attention-grabbing characters have some form of private problem to beat. It’s, in spite of everything, the best strategy to get inside readers’ hearts and begin them cheering for a personality from web page one.

However what about characters with extra severe bodily challenges? Or psychological points that may’t be “cured” or ignored?

Sure. However—no shock—few writers dare to attempt, as a result of nice reward additionally comes with nice threat. There are the plain thin-ice problems with writing a personality whose every day expertise is so completely different from your personal, however it additionally requires dedication. Even essentially the most mundane duties carried out by your character require that they modify themselves to a world not designed for them. That may be laborious to maintain up for 350 pages, not to mention a sequence.

However that is the stuff of which compelling novels are made, so begin by asking your self these three questions.

1. What can your character do this abnormal individuals can’t?

Once I began writing The Final Tea Bowl Thief, I wasn’t asking myself if one of many fundamental characters ought to be blind. I used to be asking what lacking Japanese artwork object would possibly encourage a centuries-long hunt, with the facility to vary the lifetime of whoever finds it. A calligraphy scroll? Nah, too fragile. A Buddha statue? Too awkwardly formed and laborious to cover. What a few tea bowl? Yeah, what about a type of super-expensive items of pottery designed for tea ceremony?

Seems, what makes a tea ceremony bowl priceless somewhat than simply fairly is the expertise it delivers whereas consuming the tea. Okay, good, the principle character could be an artist who’s not merely centered on how a tea bowl seems to be. Actually, what a pleasure it might be to jot down one who’s exquisitely conscious of how a tea bowl feels in his palms, the way it focuses the scent of the matcha, how sipping from it makes the angel choirs sing!

However wait, how can an artist not be centered on how his work seems to be? Except…he can’t be. What if he’s blind? However how can an artist be blind?

And therein lies the story that grew to become the center of The Final Tea Bowl Thief. The character’s lack of a capability that the remainder of us depend on not solely formed the sort of individual he was, it freed a personality with the coaching and expertise to turn into a serious artist from a boring, predictable lifetime of following in his father’s footsteps. It put him on a path to a life that was not solely way more attention-grabbing to jot down and examine, it modified different characters’ lives within the parallel timeline, centuries later.

Which leads us to query quantity two:

2. How can your character’s variations be a expertise that provides them the facility to see distinctive options as a substitute of a roadblock that must be overcome?

Nita Prose’s fundamental character in The Maid is pleased with being the best possible at a job most readers would possibly assume is beneath her. However she’s slightly too neurodivergent to be snug doing any job that depends on studying social cues for achievement. As her incapacity to sense that she’s being arrange and lied to ratchets up readers’ nervousness, her job as a cleaner offers her an inside view of what goes on behind closed resort doorways, and her perpetually analytical mind-set factors to a offender dismissed by extra common investigators.

In the identical manner {that a} blind potter could be delicate to issues a sighted individual experiences far much less acutely, Nita Prose’s maid notices particulars that abnormal individuals take as a right, and puzzles out the answer with out the assumptions and prejudices that cloud others’ judgment.

Which brings us to the third query.

3. How does your character work together with the world in ways in which shock and delight?

Nothing pleases readers greater than being proven one thing acquainted in an entire new manner. And characters with main variations do expertise the world in new and other ways. It’s enjoyable to learn and is usually a pleasure to jot down.

The Final Tea Bowl Thief’s potter, for instance, is in love with essentially the most stunning girl on the earth. He is aware of this for a truth as a result of her voice is so pretty, and he or she smells like flowers after the rain. Ordinarily, a mere artist’s son would don’t have any an opportunity to win a high-ranking samurai’s daughter, however he has a bonus over different potential suitors as a result of he’s not handicapped by the present of sight. They care far an excessive amount of that she was disfigured by hearth when she was a baby, so that they’re blind to the sweetness that solely he can see.

For those who’d prefer to attempt supercharging your creativity by giving a personality an even bigger problem than a martini dependancy or a imply mother, do that: Dig out that unfinished manuscript you simply couldn’t promote. Which character would change in essentially the most attention-grabbing (and helpful) methods in the event that they have been neurodivergent or dealing with an ongoing bodily problem? Now rewrite the primary chapter the place they seem and see the place it takes you. You is perhaps stunned.

Jonelle Patrick is the creator of 5 novels set in Japan and has been writing about Japanese life, tradition and journey since 2003. Her new thriller, The Samurai’s Octopus, is out April 21, 2026.