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 [...]

5 Ways to Keep Characters Consistent

When you write something as long as a novel, how do you make sure the character stays in character? When you revise, there are several ways to check.
Creating Consistent Characters

Create a Bible for your character. It doesn’t have to be complicated, but have one file, or a couple note cards that list characteristics. [...]

Improving Character Description With Body Language

Characters Who Move
According to Mehrabian, 55% of communication depends on body language, 38% on tone-of-voice, and 7% on the words used. That’s bad news for novelists because we don’t have direct access to the body language as we work with our fictional characters – they are just words on a page. Adding body language [...]

Character names and nicknames

This is part of a series, 15 Days to a Stronger Character
Names and Nicknames: Echo Character Traits
Let’s start with the basics. What do you call this character? What difference does a name make to effective characterization?
I recently heard of an inner city family whose oldest child is named Chris and the second oldest [...]