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If you’ve been following our blog closely (and if not, why not?), you’ll remember our recent post on using the Myers-Briggs personality types to build your characters and influence the decisions they make in your plot. Now, that’s all well and good, but Myers-Briggs is just one of dozens of personality tests designed to sort people into different groups or types. Far, far older than Myers-Briggs …
[Read more...] about How Blood, Phlegm, and Bile Can Produce Compelling Characters
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 …
[Read more...] about 5 Ways Anne Tyler Can Help You Improve Your Writing
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 …
[Read more...] about Why Do Different Characters Need Different Arcs?
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
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)
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