Welcome to day . . . *sings alphabet in head while counting* . . . seven of our A-Z series. Today is all about growth, specifically in characters, otherwise known as the arc. Simply put, a character’s growth arc is how he changes from the beginning to the end of the story. This post outlines…
Are we digging the alphabetic layout of the A to Z challenge? Sure, it’s a little Sesame Street, but we may end up with something comprehensive by the end. 😉 Anyway, welcome to day 5, where we’ll be discussing external motivation. People (and characters) can be motivated for a number of reasons. We eat because…
In the first day of our series, we talked about something every good protagonist needs: agency. Today, we’ll talk about something else many can’t do without: best friends. Or coworkers, or spouses, or roommates . . . you get the idea. The sidekicks. In Young Adult novels, the best friend is an important character –…
Welcome to the first Blogging from A to Z challenge post! We start our series with the reason most stories exist – character agency. Great, now my characters need an agent too. Not so, aspiring writer (and for the record, you may not need one either, but we’ll save that for a different post). Simply…
Last night, I started outlining a new story. There are two POV characters. One is Beth, an English woman whose story occurs in 1981. The other is Sonia, an American woman (I haven’t figured out which city yet) living in the present day. I know basic details for each character. Beth – English, a primary…
Have you guys seen Doctor Strange yet? The fam and I saw it yesterday, and it completely blew me away. I rarely see movies more than once in the theater, but I think this one deserves another viewing – maybe in 3D – just to comprehend the stuff I missed the first time. I’m not…
Last night, I finally got the chance to watch the Season 7 premier of The Walking Dead. I made the mistake of watching it right before I went to bed. It took a while to fall asleep. Like, a couple of hours. Because man. That was rough. Anyway, I’ll be using specific details from that…
I saw this pic on Twitter, shared by @TheUnNovelist. This could be the best part about writing – you get to walk around in someone else’s skin for a while (and I don’t mean that in a creepy Silence of the Lambs kind of way). Want to see life through the eyes of a child? Or…
Last week, I participated in J. A. Allen‘s Sunday Scribble Challenge, wherein we write a brief entry in response to a prompt. This was last week’s prompt: Two sentences isn’t much space, unless you write a bunch of clauses with commas, and those aren’t my style. So I had to rely on something else to…
A few weeks ago, in the post about setting, I shared with you a mnemonic I used with my students to help them remember the important parts of a story: Cows See Pretty Sunflowers. Cows = Characters See = Setting Pretty = Problem Sunflowers = Solution All these things are necessary to have a good story.…
Allison Maruska 