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I’m planning on treating this topic as a mini way of making sure that we all can get a fair idea of everything about characters from the super easy things, to the hard things that we all struggle with. (If you don’t, then goodness. Please teach me.)

Pretty much, the first thing I wanted to talk about is going back to the very basics of what a character is doing in your story.

A powerful thing I was told a while back was that if you couldn’t justify why a character was in your plot, then they shouldn’t be there. If they have no clear role, and just are there, then it is best for you to ditch them and spend those words on something else. Thinking over a few different books I’ve read, I can say that The Stormlight Archive (it has a massive cast) uses every single one of those characters. It’s insane. Then, other books like Percy Jackson, also make use of all of their characters in that smaller cast setting.

So this raises the question: “What is a character doing in your story?”

I actually want this topic to create discussion, and I’d love to hear from you guys. What do you think is a character’s purpose?

This week is a discussion week, but next week, I plan that we can do a lesson on character motive, and hopefully that will be a practical, more hands-on writing lesson. **fingerguns*

Chat about it, Parimis! What do you think makes a character belong in a story?

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