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Gather round the campfire, New Wessex. Today, we start our discussion of the yearly theme.

To kick us off, I decided to start with something juicy. Let’s each share what our biggest breakthrough has been with character development. It doesn’t matter if you don’t think you’re very good at character development, what’s one thing you’ve learned that’s made your characters a little bit better?

I’ll start us off. Possibly the biggest breakthrough I had with character development was when I switched from writing in the omniscient point of view to writing in deep third person. For those of you unfamiliar with those terms, omniscient is a third person point of view where the narrator knows everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen, and he can also see into anyone’s mind within the same scene. Animal Farm and Tom Sawyer are both omniscient stories if I am not mistaken. Deep third person is a more popular modern point of view. You stick to one character’s head per scene and instead of it feeling like the story is being narrated, you feel like you are in the character’s head. You can think of books by K.M.Wieland or Brandon Sanderson as good examples of this point of view.

What I discovered is that omniscient (which I used to write in) limits character development. The upside is that a well-told omniscient story can have a captivating narrating voice, but this comes at a cost. Lesson learned: if you care more about character development than having a strong narrative voice, write in deep third.

(Of course, you could also write in first person, but that’s beside the issue.)

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