Saturday, October 8, 2011

Extremes Are Easy

The advice when planning out your characters is to know them thoroughly. Know them better than the audience does. Know things about them that may not even appear in your story, but are part of their character (which would affect how and why they do the things they do).

This is good advice, but not always easy. People are complicated and it takes a lot of mental energy to build one from scratch.

Sometimes the simplest way to go is to make your characters extreme. Extremes are easy. Somebody who is all good all the time will be pretty predictable. Same thing for people who are always lazy or permanently trouble making.

If you are wanting to start getting into serious planning for your writing - where characters are from, how they got where they are, how they would react to situations - start by working on extreme characters. You can still make them interesting, even if they are somewhat predictable.

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