Character deaths in stories can range from heart-grabbingly tragic to eye-rollingly stupid.
So how do you make sure that the characters in your stories will pluck at heartstrings instead of funny bones?
Let’s find out!
Category: Characters
What the heck is an unreliable narrator?
Shouldn’t, of all people in a story, we be able to trust the person telling the story to us?
Not necessarily.
Sometimes writers try to make their characters interesting by giving them a “gray” morality.
But what exactly is gray morality? And how can we use it to create good characters?
Let’s find out!
Sometimes when you’re writing a story, your characters can all seem to blend and congeal together. Their opinions, reactions, and personality start to become indistinguishable from each other.
But don’t let that happen! Different characters with different perspectives and attitudes are exactly what make stories great.
If you want to make sure that your characters are coming through strong, clear, and different from each other, then there’s an easy way to test it out: write a conversation between them using dialogue only.
For the vast majority of stories, the main character doesn’t die at the end.
So then why do we fear for the character’s death anyway? And how can we make sure we do it to readers of our own stories?
Let’s find out!
Creating a compelling character that embodies traits you like is easy. You can make them the underdrog, struggling against oppression, and overcoming conflict to eventually emerge victorious.
But what about the villains? The antagonists that you hate? How can you make sure that they don’t come across as a cardboard-cutout-plot-point who exists for no other reason than to get in the way of your protagonist?
The answer is simple: make them human.
It can be hard to create a realistic, three-dimensional character. It’s all too easy to accidentally slip up and have your characters just be one-dimensional vessels for the plot.
But no one wants to read about a walking cliche or someone without fears, hopes, and dreams.
Thankfully there’s an easy way to make sure your characters don’t end up that way, by asking them some questions!
Coming up with a name for a character in your story is like choosing a name for your child… only harder.
When you come up with a name for your kid, they don’t have a personality yet. No matter what name you pick, they’ll “grow into” it.
However, characters in stories already have personalities, and having the wrong name for your character can cause a mess. For example, writing a story about a modern-day high school where kids are named “Pigwilliam” and “Starex” isn’t going to fly, and neither will having an evil villain whose name is “Flower” (unless you’re trying to be funny).
So how do you create the perfect name? I’m glad you asked!
When we’re writing a story, we have to often bring in new characters. But doing so can be a bit of a challenge.
There’s a fine line between spending too much time describing a new character vs. too little. Not to mention the fact that you have to do it in an interesting way; no one wants to just read a list of characters traits and then move on with the plot.
With that in mind, here’s four general rules that can be helpful for introducing a character:
For the last stream’s exercise, we tried something new: interviewing a character to get to know them better.
When writing a story, it’s all to easy to fall into the trap of writing two-dimensional characters. If you have a fun idea for a plot, then you may get so caught up in progressing it forward that the characters are just cardboard cutouts.
In order to make them feel more human, it’s important to get to know them better. Then you can use that information to influence how you write them to make them feel more realistic. And the best way to get to know someone: interviewing them.
So for the exercise, we had chat vote for a character to interview. They ended up choosing the Twitter bird.
Here’s what we came up with: