Do you find yourself occasionally writing phrases such as, “As Monica boobed boobily across the room…”? Is the primary topic of conversation among your female characters always men? Do they have no agency of their own and simply go with whatever the male characters decide? Do they exist merely as plot devices (e.g. woman is raped, man gets mad, man makes story happen)? Is the first thing your male characters notice about them always related to their appearance? Is the first thing you notice about your female characters always their appearance? If you answered yes to any of those questions, then this guide is for you. Don’t worry, it’s not that difficult. Take it from me…someone who actually lived in a …
Villains Are Made, Not Born – by J.M. Robison
Today at Erindor Press, I’m happy to bring you a guest post by J.M. Robison. It’s a great take on how to bring more depth to your villain’s personality and how to avoid some of the pitfalls well-known authors have fallen into. Enjoy! – Nat The inspiration for this blog post comes from The Wizard’s First Rule by Terry Goodkind. It came about at the part where character X is kidnapped by Mistress A. Mistress A declares she will “train” X by inflicting massive pain upon him. Like any logical person, X asks her,“And what is the purpose of my training, Mistress A?” To which she replies: “To teach you the meaning of pain. To teach you that your life is no longer …
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3 Pillars of Character Development – A.J. Flowers WordPress Connection
While work continues on Necromancer Falling (still on track for a spring release! Yay!!), I periodically stumble upon articles I think will be of interest to our community. This article, “3 Pillars of Character Development” is one such article. And it ends by recommending a book you’ve seen me talk about here! I’m particularly fond of “Pillar 3″… (my version of “and what happened next will both shock and delight you!” 🙂 ) 3 Pillars of Character Development – Achieving Complex and Real Characters While any novel will likely struggle with enough Character Complexity, I find that novels with high-worldbuilding el… Source: 3 Pillars of Character Development – A.J. Flowers WordPress Connection
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How Do You Find a Character’s Voice?
Finding a character’s voice and personality comes easily to some, and with difficulty to others. In fact, even for those of us who don’t struggle with this issue, some characters are just more enigmatic than others. So what can you do? In a couple of #writetip auto-tweets that I send out periodically (we’ll debate the merits of auto-tweeting later) I mention a process of interviewing your characters to get at the heart of that person’s character traits. I’ve received an enormous response to those tweets asking me to go into some detail, so I decided to write today’s blog entry on that subject. In the past, I’ve taken a number of approaches to this problem that usually wind up being …
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The Basics: So You Want To Write A Novel
Where Do I Begin? If you’ve landed here, you’ve got a good head start. I’m going to make a couple of assumptions about you, if that’s ok: You’re an avid reader. You want to write a book-length work of fiction (i.e. you want to write a novel). You’ve never done this before, or you’ve had a lot of starts/stops in your past. You’re willing to dedicate the next several months…perhaps years…of your life to telling a single story. You have no idea where to begin. You may think I’m a mind reader now. But the simple truth is that I’ve just described most of us. And by “us” I’m referring to pretty much anyone who has ever taken the first …
