Writer
Today while driving I listened to the most recent episode of Writing Excuses, one of my favorite writing podcasts. The episode was titled Three Pronged Character Development, and you NEED to listen to it.
Recently, I listed opening a book with a nameless character as one of the 5 Reasons I Put Your Book Down. In comments, I was asked to elaborate a little more for the benefit of those who are wondering why it’s such a big deal. I attempted to answer in comments, but (in classic form) my answer grew a bit …
I recently listened to an older episode of the (brilliant) podcast Writing Excuses on the subject of Character Quirks. About halfway through the podcast, there was a bit of confusion when the contributors realized that they all had different interpretations of what a character quirk actually is. This bites us a lot when talking about writing–there’s no firm authority defining all the …
For me, villains are the most difficult characters to write. I find that I have to spend alot more time developing their character and carefully editing their dialogue than I do any of my other characters, hero/heroine included. It’s difficult to nail down a convincing “evil”. The world is filled with cardboard villain cutouts.. people who want to take over …
Meeting new people can be awkward. It’s as simple as that. While writing fiction, sometimes we’re faced with the dilemma of introducing very different people under unusual circumstances. Some time ago, I had a conversation with a friend who needed to do just that–but was drawing a blank on how to go about it. Here’s what we came up with:
One of the questions I come across the most on writing forums is ‘How do you name your characters?’ Naming can be especially challenging when writing fantasy and science-fiction, because often you’re creating names for a society or culture that doesn’t actually exist. There are a lot of name generators around the web (which can occasionally spit out something suitable), but …
There are a few things that really make me groan and roll my eyes when reading a novel. One of them is the “creation story”. I’ve been reading fantasy since my age was in the single digits, and if I read “In the beginning…” one more time, I think I really might just shoot myself. Or, at the very least, …
I’ve heard writing fiction described as “socially acceptable schizophrenia”. As writers, we attempt to create entire people out of whole cloth–each of them separate, unique individuals. This can be quite a feat, and here are a few tricks I’ve learned that help me keep my multiple personalities separate. 1. Give your characters a theme song. The human brain loves to …
Sometimes it can be difficult to create a vivid, memorable characters who are all individuals in their own right. A cast of characters that comes from a single brain is going to feature the writer’s own personal preferences and bias–and this repetition can easily make each character seem very much like the last. We often look at characters in a …