Can not liking one of your characters be stalling your story? I’d never really thought about that question until one of my students e-mailed me and said she felt it was the reason that her writing output was down. There’s no easy or right, yes or no, response. While I do think you…
The Hi Susan e-mails are piling up so I thought I’d answer one today. Jenny asked the following- Is it okay to use real people as characters in your story? While you want all your characters to be appear as close to real life people as possible, portraying someone that a real life person could recognize as…
Have you ever thought about creating a character board? Here’s guest blogger Victoria Jayne to tell you all about them…. If you don’t already know, one of the cool things about Thursdays is #ThursdayAesthetic on Twitter. This hashtag is great for writers because it gives us the opportunity to share our visual inspirations with the…
Welcome to today’s guest blogger, Merrilee Robson whose post focuses on the characters we create… A magazine editor recently commented that a secondary character in one of my short stories didn’t seem very upset about the death of another character. My first reaction was, “Well, of course she’s upset. Her best friend just died!” But…
The class I’m teaching on creating great characters is coming to a close but it reminded me of one thing that all writers should do to create realistic characters and that’s people watch. I’ll be the first to admit that by nature I like to observe people. Maybe it’s my background in psychology (could…
One of the first questions I ask students is; what do you remember most about your favorite books? I always know that at least 99 % are going to tell me about a character they fell in love with, cheered for, and turned the pages just to see what happened to them. Don’t get me wrong,…
