Dialogue Talk

Doing the character checklist this week, I realized that I hadn’t written much about dialogue. Oh, I have a couple times.

Character Checklist

Character Checklist

EXTERNALS
Name or Nickname: Does the character’s name evoke something about him or her? Does it resonate in the story?
Character Roles and Jobs. Have you fully explored the possibilities of family and community roles? Are they working at cliche jobs or fascinating jobs?

Develop Sympathy with Character Traits 9

Use Character Traits to Make Your Character Sympathetic
Yesterday, we looked at 9 character traits that can be used to develop sympathy for your character. Today, we’ll look at using those traits in your story. It’s not enough just to tell yourself, or write on a checklist, that your character has these traits and is, therefore, [...]

9 Traits of Sympathetic Characters

Creating Sympathetic Characters, Part I
I am working on characters in my VNovel. Apparently, I generate initial sympathy for my protag, but at some point, the reader loses the connection to him. So, there’s work to do. Here are things I’m looking at.
9 Character qualities that generate support
Help Your Readers Identify with Your Characters. We tend [...]

Separate POV chapters

More Than One POV? Split to Revise
My current draft of my WIP novel has two point of view characters. I’ve just copied each POV into its own separate file to revise and edit.

Voice. The main reason for this is to work on getting a consistent voice for each point of view. When they are intertwined, [...]

Character prompts

Random Prompts for Character Development
Last year, I bought Natalie Goldberg’s book, Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir. A friend saw Goldberg present at a bookstore about this book and was impressed, so I bit.
Now, I’m not much into writing a memoir. My life has been pretty average. But I’ve kept this [...]

Character and Plot

I’ve been working on my plot this week – which means I’ve been working on character.
I’ve been struck again by how interwoven these two are. We artificially separate them out to talk about them, but in practice, you can’t work on plot without considering character.

Conflict. For example, when I tried to decide on what conflict [...]

character development

4 Stages of Character Development
When you write a first draft, there are really two novels at that point. There’s the one on the paper and there’s the one in your head and they are not the same.
I know this. But I’m experiencing it again as I’m working through this revision. In order to put on [...]

boring characters in novels

I’m worried. :-/
Are my characters boring?
One-Note Characters
One common difficulty is to create characters with a wide range of emotions. Yes, your character may be chronically sad or mad; but

motivation

Answering the WHY? question
It’s the WHY question that is plaguing me right now.
Why does my character want to participate in this project?
Why does she want this so much that she will