Basic building blocks of character:
Character arc: What does your character want more than anything?
"Stories should start on the day everything changes for the main character." -Judy Blume
What is your character's deepest fear?
How will your character face his/her greatest fear?
Use benchmarks. If a character is in a similar situation at the beginning and at the end, show that a character reacts different. It is a way to concretely show that the character will react differently.
Diamond Structure of character building--four different aspects of a character: Spine, Supporting traits, fatal flaw, and a shadow.
Don't forget to add flavor to your characters! Give your character a past.
Through the course of the book, the character must work through fear and conflict to get what they really want.
Sympathy is what turns type into character.
This session gave me an idea on how to bring alive a character -- Claiborne Tuck -- that I had put aside. Now I know what Claiborne fears most, and it is such a simple, yet powerful thing. But, it closes the pain of his original loss.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Alexandra, for this insight which enables me to continue with Claiborne Tuck's story.
Daniel Rousseau