3 Ways to Define the Essence of Our Character
A character’s essence is about more than just unique characters, but what is their essence? These 3 perspectives on character essence teach us about our characters.
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Make Characters Unique with Layering
Somewhere along our learning curve as writers, we’re likely to come across the skill of layering. Layering can help us create unique characters, no matter how stereotypical or tropey they might be on the surface.
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How Do We Create Realistic Villains? — Guest: Kassandra Lamb
The antagonist in our story might be a love interest or truly evil or anything in between. When our story requires a villain, we might struggle to avoid clichés. Kassandra Lamb shares her insights into psychopaths, sociopaths, and other bad guys.
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How to Create a Redeemable Villain — Guest: Becca Puglisi
We all love a “good” villain, but sometimes we want our bad guy to see the light and find redemption (or at least start on that path). Becca Puglisi is here to show us how with four paths to redemption for our villain.
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One Simple Trick to Avoid an Opening Page Infodump
It’s hard to get our opening pages just right because we have to grab readers’ attention, introduce our characters and the story world, hint at a problem, etc. With everything we want to get across to the reader, we might dump too much information. How can we avoid info dumping or confusing readers at the beginning of our story?
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The Most Important Question in Storytelling: “Why?”
A common problem—even in traditionally published books—is Missing Motivations. A character’s goal can feel irrelevant if readers don’t understand why they have that goal. Or a character might seem stupid or unlikable if readers don’t know why they’re acting a certain way.
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Balancing Elements: How Can We Know the Right Amount?
I’ve offered several posts here about balancing various elements of our story, but there’s still room for debate because we have to find the right balance for our voice, genre, tone, and style—for our story. That means there is no perfect amount of backstory or description or emotion.
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Backstory: When Is It Necessary?
We often think about the purpose of backstory in terms of “what do readers need to know?” But with that perspective, it’s too easy to include too much backstory. Instead, we might be better off if we think about backstory from the perspective of what the story needs.
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Backstory: Finding the Right Balance — Guest: Janice Hardy
Today, Janice Hardy shares her revision advice on how to include the right amount of backstory. Too much slows the pace, and too little can leave readers confused. Her tips help us avoid the issue of slow pacing, learn how to hide backstory, and identify when we need more.
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Character Arc Development: Is There a Best Approach?
There are almost an infinite number of ways we can develop our story. As long as we end up with a finished book, our process works. And just like the variety found in the overall writing processes we might use, we have many options for how to come up with our protagonist’s arc as well.
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