Mischievous and chaotic, the trickster is a character archetype that recurs throughout mythology, folklore, literature and pop culture. This is, in part, thanks to its boundless flexibility: tricksters can be good, evil or amoral; hero or villain; help or hindrance; spiteful or angelic; comic-relief, obstacle, gatekeeper, sidekick and/or henchperson. Despite this ambiguity of role, essayist Paul
Despite what Isabel Briggs Myers has taught us, real people’s personalities can usually be difficult to fit comfortably into neat little categories. People can be both introverted and extroverted, and go from being supremely self-confident to shrinking violets depending on their situation. The task of imbuing something as complex and unique as a personality onto
Exposition is one of those horrible parts of writing that you have to get exactly right. Too much or too little and the reader will notice straightaway, rolling their eyes at your inability to explain things directly. It’s an unfair reaction, especially when there are so many things to explain. ‘Exposition’ is the part of
In part 1 of this guide to writing a thrilling argument, I touched on character motivation, reader interest, and the central truth that an argument follows almost all the same rules as a fight scene. We paused on the idea that your characters should want to win, and they may rush past lesser arguments to
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