December 18, 2011 – 6:55 am
One of the most frustrating things that happens to writers is having a batch of characters worked into just the right spot for the plot to take off…and discovering that they won’t do whatever is supposed to come next.
When you want your characters to go left, and they want to go right, there are three things [...]
November 9, 2011 – 6:20 am
One of the things that bites even experienced writers from time to time is giving insufficient consideration to the ways their characters react to things. (Me blogging about this has nothing to do with the fact that I just turned in the copyedit for The Far West and ended up deleting or rephrasing about twenty [...]
September 28, 2011 – 6:27 am
Characterization is one of the things I had a hard time getting a handle on. In my early books, I was doing it all by instinct - which was all well and good (I still do it pretty much by instinct), except that I hadn’t thought about characterization, about what goes into it or how [...]
August 21, 2011 – 6:54 am
Years ago, before I was ever published, I was at a convention where Gordy Dickson was answering writing questions for a mob of would-be hopefuls. And somebody asked the “how do I write deep characters?” question, and I was kind of disappointed in the answer, because it was all basic stuff I already knew. I [...]
August 17, 2011 – 6:49 am
Matt G. asked: The burning question for me is character depth. How can you encourage the readers to identify with your characters? How can you add “depth” to characters - so the reader is rooting for them?
This is a fairly difficult question to answer, largely because it’s something that took me a long time to [...]
There are four really, really important things to remember about characters:
Characters are people. (Yes, even if they’re aliens or elves or talking rabbits.)
People, and therefore characters, are all the same.
People, and therefore characters, are all different.
Most important of all: Every person, and therefore every character, is an individual.
Taking these assertions in order: Characters are people [...]
I’ve talked more than once about the Big Three - plot, characterization, and setting. They started off as the earliest writing advice I recall getting (and I wish I could remember the name of the writer who told me that, so I could credit him properly), as the three things one can do in a [...]
Back in high school, I read a lot of mystery novels, many of which were police procedurals, and I got the basic triumvirate for figuring out who was the killer pounded into my brain: Means, motive, and opportunity. They actually apply to any villain undertaking any dastardly deed: the villain always needs a way to [...]
Yesterday, while bemoaning my lack of blog post topics to my walking buddy over our post-walk stop at the coffee shop (she gets coffee; I get tea), I had a revelation. (OK, not a big heavenly-choirs, life-changing sort of revelation, just a tiny hey-I-can-turn-that-into-a-blog-post revelation, but I’ll take what I can get.) She was listing [...]
February 16, 2011 – 6:30 am
“I don’t CARE what happens to these people.” - Dorothy J. Heydt
Stories are, at bottom, about people (or people-analogs, like anthropomorphized talking animals). But more than that, they’re about people or people-analogs that the reader cares about. Hooks and cliffhangers, opening in medias res, lots of fast-paced action, brilliant worldbuilding, intricate plots - all these [...]