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Characters Like Me? Nope.
Some of you may have noticed that I didn’t post last week. It was a tough week. I spent most of it sleepless, working third shift, sitting by Mom’s hospital bedside (again sleepless) and crying my...
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A few more thoughts on characters
There’s nothing like creating and getting to know your characters. It’s exciting and confusing and generally great fun. Yesterday Diana Pharaoh Francis posted briefly on her LiveJournal about her...
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Befriending Your Characters
How do we make our characters work? What is the secret to creating believable, compelling characters who will capture our readers’ hearts and make our stories more than a set of plot points? I’m of...
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The Character Portrait vs. the Character Sketch
In the comments prompted by Stuart’s excellent post on developing characters in small spaces, I noted that while I admire authors who can introduce a character with a minimum of verbiage (as Stuart did...
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On Writing: Character Development — Secret, Wall, Loss, Desire
I’ll start with the usual MW caveat, though I wonder if I even need to bother. In talking about any aspect of writing we have to remember that there is no single right way to do anything. This is...
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On Writing and Creativity: Who Are Our Characters?
[Warning: This post touches on an emotional political issue in order to illustrate a point. I do NOT want the comments on this post to devolve into political debate. This is ultimately a post about...
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Chris Marie Green — on character
The Character with No Name A huge thanks to Faith Hunter for inviting me to be here during January. :) I’m excited to hang out with you all, discussing writerly things with writerly people. Since I’m...
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Stephen Leigh, on Seven Strategies for Characterization, part I
In my creative writing classes, I generally break fiction into four basic components: Character, Setting, Plot, and Theme. I spend more time on characterization than the others, honestly, since I...
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Stephen Leigh, on Seven Strategies for Characterization, part II
In the first installment, I covered the first two strategies: 1) the Physical Details, and 2) Show vs. Tell. We’ll pick up from there… Strategy 3: Dialogue I think, for me, that this may be the Big...
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Stephen Leigh, on Seven Strategies for Characterization, part III
5: Research I flat-out love research, as I find it inevitably sparks new ideas for a story or novel. If you’re writing in the ‘Here & Now,’ it’s not quite as necessary, but unless you do exactly...
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Brandy Schillace: On Character Building (One Donut Shop at a Time)
I have a great affinity for donut shops…But not because I am especially fond of pastries. It has more to do with the reality of such places. Here, the mundane becomes concrete and tangible: the...
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Committing Series: Characters
I mentioned in my last post that character story arcs are extremely important to me as a writer. I want my characters to change: I want them to start somewhere and end someplace else. It can be a...
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Character Inspiration
Today’s Question: where does the inspiration come from for the characters that writers create? Yourself Write what you know. That’s pretty common advice, and something that many writers do, even when...
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