Characters are fundamental to nearly all stories. Whatever happens, happens to somebody or is made to happen by somebody, or both. Even when the characters in a story are not human, as in Watership Down, they tend to be anthropomophized. Most readers remember appealing and interesting characters
Read more →When I was in high school, one of the rituals that came along during senior year was called something like Career Inventory Day, when you spent the morning taking a battery of tests that was supposed to tell you what career you were most likely to be
Read more →Here is where we start going through the three “boring first chapter” problems and ways to fix them…and a few ways not to fix them. First up is the most basic and obvious problem: “The reader doesn’t care about the hero(ine) yet.” This is kind of a
Read more →One of the first challenges a new writer faces is that of showing characters who are different from the writer in a convincing and realistic manner. Everybody knows this if they think about writing at all; most beginner-advice books talk about it. And most make one of
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