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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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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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Fiction has always been a place to explore socially critical, taboo, even transgressive ideas. Sensory extravagance and eroticism go all the way back through literary history, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writers like the Marquis de Sade, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Franz Kafka brought the themes of sexual deviancy, social isolation, and proto-nihilism into the canon. From there, …
[Read more...] about Writing Transgressive Fiction? Here’s What You Need To Know
Though many know her for her dramatic suicide, Virginia Woolf was a champion of literary modernism who adapted the close psychological approach favored by Russian novelists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pioneering stream-of-consciousness narration that she married with a superb sense of style, restraint, and inimitable observational chops. As you might expect, there’s a …
[Read more...] about 5 Ways Virginia Woolf Can Help You Improve Your Writing
Naming characters is a mercurial task. Sometimes, characters arrive in your mind wearing a name badge. Sometimes, their name is so hidden that you get the impression they’re only joining your story to lay low. Generally, experimentation is the answer, but I’m not here today to give you tips on where to find names. That’s something we covered in The Definitive Guide To Naming Your Characters, …
[Read more...] about 6 Things Authors Forget When Naming Their Characters
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