Unsurprisingly, major characters are the ones who are the subjects of much writing advice on characterization. They’re the ones readers are most likely to notice and remember, because they are onstage the most and have the most impact on the protagonist and the plot. In an ensemble-cast
Read more →First, a small announcement: Amazon has my Lyra novels on their Kindle monthly deal for $3.99 for the whole month of February, so if you don’t have them in e-book and want them, this is a reasonably good time to pick them up. On to the post.
Read more →Minor characters are the second rung up from walk-ons. They occupy many of the same niches as walk-ons – cab driver, waitperson, store clerk, army private, city guard, maintenance worker – but they’re not just there in the background. They interact with the central characters in more
Read more →Most stories involve more than one character. Even classic castaway Man-against-Nature stories, like Robinson Crusoe and Gary Paulsen’s Hatchett, include the protagonist interacting with other characters at the beginning and end of the story. Characters get grouped into several categories. First are the protagonist and viewpoint characters,
Read more →Last week I was looking at web sites and found yet another one that advocated “Never, EVER use any adjectives or adverbs!” It went so far as to advocate going through one’s work and deleting all of them. So I decided to test that technique to see
Read more →There’s a joke I heard once, about a man who prayed fervently for forty years that God would let him win the lottery. Finally one night as he was offering his prayer once again, a voice came out of the air above him and said, “Look, I
Read more →New year, new year’s resolutions. There are recommendations all over the web about how to make resolutions, which ones to make, and how to keep them for longer than a week. Googling “new year’s resolutions for fiction writers” got me four million hits. So I took a
Read more →First, some housekeeping. December 23 is the last day to register for my online worldbuilding workshop at Odyssey, if you are interested. I will be taking next week off for the holidays, so no more blog posts until the new year. Now the question: I’m having a
Read more →Science fiction is often described as “the literature of ideas,” as if no other kind of writing includes any, this in spite of the fact that the first question every professional writer, regardless of genre, gets thoroughly sick of is “Where do you get your ideas?” The
Read more →A while back, Kin asked “What reason (other than simple laziness) would necessitate a mere patch, plug, or ignore of plot holes in a story?” “Necessitate” is the key word here, because in writing, necessity is in the eye of the author and/or reader. There are never
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