Emotional factors that inspire readers to love a character: pain, jeopardy, struggle, and injustice.
Character Virutes: Capability and "The Good-Guyness"
Yesterday I talked about character flaws. Today I’ll talk about character virtues. While a character can have any number of virtues, there are a few that are nearly universally essential. These break down into two categories: Capability and Good-Guyness. Capability If your character is capable, he can get things done. The main virtues in this…
Be Bad!
I’ve been thinking a lot about character lately, and it seems to me that I’ve arrived at a Great and Important Truth: We love characters not for their virtues, but for their flaws. Imagine if you will a light beaming down from heaven and illuminating the world around you, while simultaneously an angelic chorus lifts…
Burn Down List
There are any number of scenes to write and revise before this book is done, but here is a list of some of the other tasks awaiting completion: Create map of 1928 landmarks Research Eastern religions Research 1920’s gangsters It should be a good amount of work. But that’s all right; it should be a…
Mission Statement
The purpose of this blog is to give me a place to record my thoughts about my current writing project, and about writing in general. My thoughts on the subject range far and wide, and it’ll be good to have one place where they all come together.