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Writing good characters and using characterization properly can be hard. Here are all of our articles on the topic.
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 …
[Read more...] about What You Need To Know About Writing A Great Love Triangle
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 …
[Read more...] about How To Use Myers-Briggs Types To Help Your Characters Make Decisions
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 …
[Read more...] about 5 Ways P.D. James Can Help You Improve Your Writing
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 …
[Read more...] about How To Identify A Character’s Super Objective (And Why It Matters)
Do you remember story-mapping in grade school? I can picture it now: my bubbly, gel-pen lettering (man, I thought my handwriting was beautiful) inside a few dozen circles, spidered together with linking lines and connecting thoughts. When we got to high school, or college at the latest, our courses became too ‘serious’ for such time-consuming doodles. But maybe instead of junking this process …
[Read more...] about How To Create An Effective Mind Map For Your Book
We live in divisive times. As boundaries between ethnicities, nationalities, social classes, sexualities, and genders are chipped away, the old norms of personal, national, sexual, ethnic, and economic identification and organization must be reevaluated. This is, unsurprisingly, a messy, dramatic, sometimes unpleasant, but ultimately necessary process, and the results impact everything – including …
[Read more...] about What’s A Sensitivity Reader, And Do You Need One?
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