The premise of most stories includes some type of a fish-out-of-water situation. If it didn’t, and the characters stayed safely tucked away in their comfort zones, it wouldn’t make for an interesting story. Although sometimes other elements, events, or even characters intrude into their world and make it uncomfortable, very often a character is forced…
Tone can be one of the hardest things to master, especially in the first draft of a novel. There’s a fine line between oppressing your reader with needless darkness and adding so much humor that the story seems irreverent. But between those two extremes is the perfect tone, offering enough meaning and impact to create…
Literature is full of characters with traumatic pasts. Whether a family member is dead, they grew up in an abusive environment, or they’ve been exiled from their home, every character seems to have some variety of trauma. Avatar: The Last Airbender is no exception. Katara’s mom was murdered in front of her, Zuko’s father maimed…
There are two important dimensions to character relationships. We already looked at one in an article on Age of Ultron, and how you create a group of characters that feels like family by allowing the entire group to interact and play off each other. It’s important to have scenes with your group of characters when…
A meet-cute is critical to any fictional romance, especially a young adult one. It’s the magical moment when your two characters meet for the first time. It’s the scene that gives a reader that first impression of their relationship, and will determine how shippable they are. And whether or not the actual character’s first impressions…
Some character arcs are more dramatic than others. They’re the redemption arcs that you’ll never forget. The ones with choices so difficult that you wonder if you’d ever be able to make a choice like that, too. The moments when the characters fail, and it almost crushes you, and then they finally turn and make…
Have you ever read a story that feels too dark? Rather than offering goodness or even a clear message about the world, maybe the story was just filled with hopeless event after hopeless event. Maybe it didn’t offer anything aside from an interesting plot or characters, and even those were corrupted by evil and darkness….
At this point, you’ve probably heard the complaints around modern protagonists and characters in general. Most characters seem to be on a grayscale morally — they make decisions typically only reserved for villains. They have been described as morally broken. Many have complained that there are so few examples of good morality in modern storytelling….
We wrote a whole article last year about how writers can generate suspense even when their audience knows exactly what happens next. But while stories where life and death hang in the balance can generate suspense even when the readers know what happens next, many stories are scattered with far less important, much smaller twists…
One of the best ways to make your character relatable is to give them flaws. They make your characters seem more human and give them something to change by the end of the story. Without them, it is impossible to make drastic character arcs (which Mara talked about last week) and difficult to make your…