Blog Archives

How many characters does a story need?

Posted on Sunday, March 15, 2020 by pebblepup — Leave a comment

The answer is — it depends. It depends on the story itself. What are you trying to do. Are you writing a novel? Or a short story? In a short story, you can get by with a single character. Someone…

Tagged with: characters, fiction, fiction writing, plot development, short story, writing, Writing Techniques
Posted in Writing Techniques

Character Spirituality

Posted on Sunday, March 24, 2019 by pebblepup — Leave a comment

In the process of developing your characters, you should consider the character’s religion and spiritual leanings. Religion is important to a lot of people in this world and they may be readers. Religion can be a thorny issue. Now it…

Well Rounded Characters

Posted on Sunday, March 17, 2019 by pebblepup — Leave a comment

As readers we like our characters to be realistic. Authors need to add flaws and virtues to their characters in order to engage the reader with the story. We remember the characters who come alive best. Those characters have flaws.…

Tagged with: character development, character flaws, character strengths, character traits, characters
Posted in General Opinion, Writing Techniques

Make Your Characters A Little Weak

Posted on Sunday, March 10, 2019 by pebblepup — Leave a comment

Good character development means making your characters as believable as possible. To do that you need a mix of characteristics and traits. Make your characters beautiful and vain, homely and giving, beautiful and unassuming, ugly and evil, lovely and evil,…

Characters And Their Families

Posted on Saturday, February 23, 2019 by pebblepup — Leave a comment

As authors, we need to know everything about our characters. Most people have relationships and our characters should as well. How do your characters get on with their families? What kind of friends do they have? How do they react…

Characters at Work

Posted on Saturday, February 16, 2019 by pebblepup — Leave a comment

As authors, we want people to believe our characters are real. OK, not so much, but we do want them to be believable as people. People have jobs or careers. Our characters need jobs and careers as well. In life,…

Using An App to Create Characters

Posted on Sunday, January 20, 2019 by pebblepup — Leave a comment

There are no shortcuts in writing, but there are some jump starters. For writing itself there are prompts to catapult you into a piece. There are character development apps to help get you started with characters. These apps ask you…

Creating A Character Database

Posted on Sunday, January 13, 2019 by pebblepup — Leave a comment

I create characters for practice. I don’t throw them out, I keep them. I do short character charts on them in a word processor. Then I store them in a rough database. OK, I stick the documents in a folder…

Tagged with: Character, character development, characters, database, writing, Writing Techniques
Posted in General Opinion, Writing Techniques

Character Development

Posted on Saturday, December 29, 2018 by pebblepup — Leave a comment

Characters are an important part of a story. All stories need them. The best characters are those who feel real. Readers connect better with characters who come across as real people than they do with paper dolls. Real people have…

Tagged with: character charts, character development, characters, writing, Writing Techniques
Posted in General Opinion, Writing Techniques

Writing Preparations

Posted on Sunday, June 24, 2018 by pebblepup — Leave a comment

There are two aspects to the preparations for writing. One is physical. You can write if you are uncomfortable, but it is so much easier to write when you are comfortable. So you want your writing space to be comfortable,…

Tagged with: characters, Plot, plotting, prep, preparation, scene descriptions, scenes, sets, setting, world building, writing
Posted in General Opinion, Writing Techniques