Describing your POV character

Carrying on a bit further from last week: Describing your point-of-view character can be tricky. If you’re in omniscient viewpoint, you may not need to; even when the omniscient narrator has an unusual voice and decided opinions, he/she isn’t a character in the story whose physical description

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Questionnaires and Decisions

I ran across one of those character-creation sheets the other day, the ones with 200 questions that are supposed to create your unique and wonderful protagonist. As usual, my immediate reaction was severely negative, which got me thinking about why. The first problem I have with these

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Do I have to…

I’ve seen quite a few new writers come near to wrecking their work by trying to follow well-intentioned advice about what must go in a story. Oddly enough, the two most common pieces of story-wrecking advice are diametrically opposed. The first is: “Your main character must change

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Nothing is the same everywhere

This morning, I woke up to a good 3” or more of wet snow in my driveway. I shrugged and gave myself an extra ten minutes to get to they gym for my workout. I didn’t bother to shovel; I just backed out onto the street (which

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What drives the story

“What drives your story, plot or characters?” There are a bunch of problems with this question. First off, what drives the story isn’t an either-or dichotomy; it’s a continuum that runs from the total-action-with-cardboard-characters tale at one end to the nothing-but-character-introspection story at the other end, with

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The Worst Possible Thing

“Ask yourself what the worst possible thing is that you can do to your characters” is an often-repeated piece of advice that is a lot less helpful than it looks. If you follow it literally, about 99% of the time the answer is going to be “torture

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What type of character?

Characters are the heart of a story; practically everyone says so. There are reams of writing advice covering how to come up with great characters, how to make them “round”, how to make them grow and change over the course of a book, and so on. Much

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