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Tag Archives: writing good characters
This Weekend’s Classes: Beginnings & Endings (Saturday) and Character Building Workshop (Sunday)
I’ve still got room in this weekend’s classes, Beginnings & Endings (Saturday morning) and the Character Building workshop (Sunday morning). In the first, I’m going to talk about a number of things, including how to use your beginning to create … Continue reading
Posted in teaching
Tagged online writing classes, writing beginnings, writing endings, writing good characters
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You Should Read This: The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
Not the movie. No, that was an okay movie, but this book? It’s pure gold. It’s beautiful. It’s enchanting. You should read it.
Fantasy Books I Love: P.C. Hodgell’s Kencryath Series
A bajillion years ago, when you could send the Science Fiction Book Club $.11 and get 11 books back, I signed up, receiving a fabulous armful particularly valuable back in the days when the Internet was just kicking off. One … Continue reading
Shaping Stories With Characters: How Characters Affect Your Plot
We’re currently covering characters in the Writing F&SF class, so I thought I’d pull out a little from my notes.
Some simplistic stories have characters that seem like placeholders, as though any individual could fit into that slot. Fairy tales, for instance, tend to have generic characters: the princess, the prince, the witch. One delightful strategy for working with them, in fact, is to pick a character and flesh them out to the point where they shape the story.
Characters need to do this. They need to influence the story and make it one that could only happen to them.
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Class Notes – Week Two
We talked last week about story shapes and arcs as well as what gets set up in the beginning of a story. This week we talked about characters and dialogue, and how the first shapes the story. One of the … Continue reading
Posted in teaching
Tagged cynthia ward, dialogue, nisi shawl, online workshop, terry bisson, writing good characters, writing the other
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