How To Build A Flesh And Blood Character
If you’re like me, when you have an idea for a character you go into serious planning mode. You might fill a notebook, use character questionnaires, worksheets, and other tools to uncover their inner layers. Or if you’re a pantser, you may decide to start writing a discovery draft to find out who they are and what the story is about as you go. Plan or pants, we all must end up with the same thing: a character who is rounded, credible, and unique.
How To Fix Flat, Two-Dimensional Characters
When people say that a character is “flat” or “two-dimensional,” they’re typically just saying that the character isn’t interesting. And uninteresting characters are a plague on a story. Let’s look at a few techniques to make characters interesting, round, and three-dimensional.
7 Considerations for Characters
Characters are important in every story, and we don’t want to create “stick figures” for key characters. Here are seven things to consider when creating yours. Of all the topics on how to write, I suspect more books have been written on how to create solid characters than on anything else. So there are a […]
When Considering Character Traits . . .
Character traits can be vital when it comes to writing a great story. As readers read, they are constantly making judgments, and one thing they are critical of is characters. Does he or she work as a protagonist? Is a love interest likable? Does the guide character guide well? In a story I was once reading, a protagonist […]
Touching Your Audience Deeply through Viewpoint
My friend James Dashner has his movie The Scorch Trials out this week, and the audiences are loving it overall, but I suspect that if you listen in to the viewers as they come out of the theatre, you will hear the comment over and over, “The book was better.” I was just talking a […]
When to Focus on Your World
An ad for a popular screenwriting class recently stated, “A great screenplay starts with character,” so their latest offering was on creating great characters. But that’s not how many writers start.You see, a great character has to come from someplace, has to interact with his environment, his world. If you’re writing contemporary mainstream stories, you […]
Be Double-Minded
The Apostle James warned that “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” For characters, being double-minded is a good thing. A “double-minded” person has the quality of duality. That means that he is unstable, and the reader can never be quite sure what he will do under certain circumstances. Given this, the character’s […]
