Nowadays, lamenting that everybody else seems to live in a separate reality is a not unknown pastime of the sane (assuming I do not presume too much by lumping myself into that sum). Whoever you are, you’ve probably run across
As last week laid out, Henty has a standard protagonist, and that standard protagonist seems a bit Mary-Sue-ish. He’s not got much vice, he’s really good at what he does, and he sits at the right hand of so many
G.A. Henty wrote about a hundred books with the same protagonist. He did not, to be clear, write a series of that length; his longest series is three books long, and indeed he only wrote three series to my memory.
Despite what our first instinct might be, we must recognize that more much we like characters and how good they are really doesn’t correlate very well. Of course, we’re none too fond of Puppy Kicker McEvilface, and certain evils just
At various points in the writing process, it behooves all of us to sit down and ask some pointed questions about what we’re doing, where the story’s been, and where it’s going. Indeed, these questions are vital not just to
About a decade ago, I found a book in a used bookstore about ‘literary foils’. As I didn’t know what a literary foil was, all I got from skimming the textbook (I didn’t buy it) was that some short stories
People are incredibly, ridiculously complex. Our characters? Not so much, not in comparison. The most complex character has perhaps a few years of cumulative thought-history in his author’s mind; he’s made out of generalizations and half-rejected ideas and a unique
(Part One) – (Part Two) Character description doesn’t stop with the character. We’ve looked at tone and how important details are and how expectations work, but that’s all been focused on the character and the character’s role. Character description has
(Part One) Think of the last really good novel you read. For me, I’m nearing the end of my third or fourth read-through of That Hideous Strength. Think about how different characters are introduced and described. It varies, does it
Describing characters seems really easy until you actually try to do it well. On the one hand, we can put the entire description (three paragraphs, each slightly under a page long) at the front, which would get everything on the