Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Welcome to Writers Talkback. If you are a new user, your account will have to be approved manually to prevent spam. Please bear with us in the meantime
Comments
Place three groups of cards or pieces of paper face down, having writen on them:
1. Name/Girl or boy
2. Status eg office girl/boy, police officer, new mum etc
3. Scene-where are they?
Writer choses one from each pile and writes story based on these three key words.
Also, first person account using suggestions: eg, a letter in the post,a happy occasion, my funniest moment etc
Great fun and good writing comes out from it. Hope this helps.
If you can find actions that the reader will sympathise with, they will understand the person much more. Take for example, Miss Haversham (Great expectations).
Milhouse.
perhaps you could try showing the character's description through their actions.
For example:
Kren's tangled long locks flailed wildly in the wind. His ancient and wrinkled brow arched down into a frown as he squinted into the rain. etc,etc.
That's the kind of thing I'd do, but then I've never been a big fan of first person perspective.
Nailbomb.
Welcome to Talkback, anyway.
Are we talking about a writing engine here? something that finds potential faults and floors in a manuscript?
I know such programs are out there, but isn't that a little like cheating, or is it just help?
It's like someone that endlessly goes through their manuscript with a thesaurus, endlessly searching for new words. Maybe they should learn their craft better in the first place.
I used to be guilty of such a crime. since I have changed the habbit, my writing has com on leaps and bounds because I no longer rely on technology.
Milhouse
To my mind, there is no need to invent characters from zero, since the average writer knows so many people inside out anyway. And some of them are so much larger than life. You know the ones: the eccentrics, the loud-mouths, the holier-than-thous, the yes-men, the shrinking violets, the people who feel they run the whole works. There are so many types, and if we know them very well, we can imagine with very little effort how they would react in any given situation. Or how they would act if they were a serial killer, even.
Did Dickens know a Uriah Heep, for example, or did he know some obsequious individual and then DOUBLE it? This is a useful principle, I find, when searching for characters. It wouldnt surprise me to discover that every writer with tremendous characters started from the people they knew. The important thing is for the character, once created, to remain consistent.
Id like to reply to Nailbomb in your thread. By the way, thats not a nice name wanna change it? No offence but gosh!
Your example stops short of showing character description through actions, if you examine it closely; it involves appearance details only and falls, I fear, into the category of telling not showing. Kren sounds an intriguing character, so the description is appealing to me, but what comes next? I must know the answer to the question: What does he DO? How does he ACT? And the extension to this is: What does he SAY in various situations? I want to see Kren in action.
Sorry.
Milhouse.
Undertaker, overtaken.
Not mine, alas.
"Here lies the body of Thomas Pound
Who was lost at sea and never found"
Here lies the body of Jonathan Day
Who died defending his right of way,
He was right, dead right
As he sped along
But he's just as dead
As if he was wrong.
Now that SHOWS character.