Activity

@j-a-penrose
What are three things you know about characters?
1. Characters drive the plot- actions don’t just happen in a vacuum.
2. Characters should be individual persons with tangible wants and beliefs- not just philosophical ideas (unless you’re Dostoevsky, of course).
3. Characters can make or break a work of fiction.
What are three things you’d like to know about characters?
1. How to deeply consider my characters and dig down to their motives, ghosts, lie/truth.
2. How does one write a convincing bad guy well? Not a “Well-intentioned extremist”, not an anti-villain, but a bad guy?
3. Correspondingly, how does one write a truly virtuous character well?
What do you believe the crafting of characters has to do with powerful writing?
I believe characters when properly developed allow us to engage with worldviews, philosophies, motives, rationales, and the like by giving them human form; thus the battle between two characters is no longer merely about the conflict between two individuals, but the representative struggle between two opposing ideas of truth; and in the fiction we’re writing, the conflict in an individual between God’s truth or satan’s lies.
On a scale of 1-10 (1 being appalling, 10 being stunning) how well do you think you write characters?
5-7ish.