A few days ago on Facebook, a writer in one of the writing groups I’m in posted a question about a minority character in her book. My first thought was why would anyone be offended by the mere presence of a Chinese character? So I opened up the comments. And, well… Let’s just say diversity in…
Whew! We’re almost to the finish line in our series. Can you believe it? Today we’re talking about a topic that I think gets overlooked – writing youthful characters accurately, especially in non-YA or children’s stories. I was an elementary teacher for more than a decade, and part of that was studying child development. We…
I’ve been a little nervous about today’s post in our series since M day. You guys responded so well to that and one or two of you said something to this effect: I can’t want to see what you have for the W post. All right. Let’s do this. *cracks knuckles* I posted about women characters…
What the frick does underwear have to do with writing a story? you may be asking. On S day we talked about stereotypes. Today’s post in our series is a strategy for avoiding accidental stereotypes: knowing thy characters. Inside and out. What their jobs, hobbies, favorite foods, preferred music, and maybe kinky tendencies are. Because the…
Holy title alliteration, Batman! Still, stereotyping stuff strips stories of satisfying substance. And now I’ve accidentally summarized the post in an alliterated sentence. I guess you can all go home. Kidding. Sit down. Stereotypes are overgeneralized ideas, and they are serious enough that if you google “narrative stereotypes” you get academic articles in the top…
Ah, yes. We’ve reached one of my very favorite writing topics in our series. *cracks knuckles and wiggles fingers* I love point of view (POV from here on) so much I’ve written about it here and here and here and probably to a lesser extent in other posts. What can I say? POV gets me fired…
Hey, we’re officially halfway through our A-Z series already! I hope you’re still having fun, because I am. Today we’re talking character names. Naming a character seems like it should be easy, but sometimes it takes a lot of Google searching and resulting ads for baby stuff because the interwebs decided that searching for names…
Next up in our series, we’re talking about characters that make up a large subgroup of our cast: men (guess what the topic is for W). Women characters get a lot of airplay in the blogosphere, and rightfully so. I’m also discussing men because – and this may come as a shock to some of you –…
Today in our series, we’re stepping away from editing stuff and back into story creation – specifically, we’re spending time with our characters because we like them. Or maybe it’s because we tolerate living with them for the course of a story, as long as everything else in the story makes it worthwhile. Sometimes I hear…
We’re officially a third of the way through our Story Stuff series. I hope you’re enjoying reading the posts as much as I am writing them (which is a lot). Today we talk about the other side of what we started on E day – that was external motivation, so today is . . . internal…
Allison Maruska 