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Few writers working in today’s America are as well known and respected as Baltimore’s Anne Tyler. Celebrated for her humanistic, domestic, and gorgeously observed novels about Baltimore’s middle- and working-class families, Tyler is the kind of single-minded writer who has found her niche and writes it very, very well. Indeed, much of Tyler’s success as a novelist (she’s won a whole host of …
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A character’s ‘arc’ describes their internal journey over the course of a story, generally occasioned by the external events they encounter as it unfolds. If the person they are when they begin the book is where they ‘launch’ and the person they are at the end is where they ‘land’, then the path from one to the other is their ‘arc.’ Every fictional character worth their salt, from Harry Potter to …
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Everybody loves a good love triangle… as long as they’re not part of it. It’s a sad fact of human nature: other people’s drama makes us feel better about our own lives. Not only that, when things are complicated, they need to be resolved. There’s nothing a reader loves more than conflict and resolution, even if the ‘resolution’ comes in the form of shock, death, infidelity – all manner of …
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A while back, we looked at how to use the enneagram to create complex and believable characters. Personality is a complicated thing, which is one reason personality tests exist. It's also a reason why there are so many different types of personality tests. One such test is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. This self-assessment questionnaire assesses how people make decisions, making it a …
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P.D. James was arguably one of the last great crime novelists working within the distinctly British ‘gentleman detective’ genre. Her famous detective, Adam Dalgliesh, turns up in fourteen celebrated novels including Cover Her Face, Shroud for a Nightingale, and Original Sin. On top of these, she’s known for The Children of Men, a dystopian novel closer to George Orwell, J.G. Ballard, and John …
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If you’ve been immersed in the writing life for some time now, you’ve probably heard that it’s important to determine what your characters want. As a species, though, humans seem to have a hard time figuring out what we want, much less what our fictional characters want. With that in mind, let’s borrow a concept from the world of theater – the ‘super objective’ – to see if we can dig deep and find …
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