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3 Types of Character Arcs: Choose the Best for Your Novel

3 Types of Character Arcs: Choose the Best for Your Novel
How Does Your Character Change? You know your character must change somehow over the course of your novel. But how? And more than that, how do you sync the changes with the external plot? The middle of a novel can suffer from the dreaded “sagging middle” and it’s mainly because you don’t have a firm handle on the character’s inner arc and how it meshes with external events. I’ve found three approaches to the inner arc, each trying to laying out how the character changes. Hero’s Journey: Quest for Inner Change In the Hero’s Journey, laid out so well in Christopher Vogler’s book, The Writer’s Journey, a character receives a Call to Adventure that takes him/her out of the normal and ordinary world into a world where they must quest for something. Melanie as an Example So, we’ve got Melanie who wants more than anything else to get her mother’s approval, but can’t because her mom’s a chef and Melanie can’t cook worth a flip. Iron Sharpens Iron – Friendships Back to Melanie: Flawed Way of Coping

Creating Stunning Character Arcs, Pt. 2: The Lie Your Character Believes People hate change. We may sit around and wish our lives were different, but when the rubber really starts streaking the tarmac, we usually find ourselves wishing we could just hang out here in our safe and familiar haunts. Characters are no different. They resist change just as staunchly as any of us—which is a good thing. Out of resistance comes conflict; out of conflict comes plot. A good way to conceive of movie stories, like Die Hard and Love, Actually, is to think of the visible story as the metaphor for the invisible story. In other words, the plot is all about the character’s inner journey, whether the connection is immediately evident or not. The Change Arc, at its simplest manifestation, is all about the protagonist’s changing priorities. One of the most common mistakes made by authors of every level of experience is to create a problem for their Main Character that has nothing to do with the story at large. The Lie the Character Believes What Is the Lie? Might makes right. 1.

How to Write a Character Sketch: Learning More About Your Characters’ Motivations and Personalities Regardless of the type of writing you are doing, knowing who your characters are and knowing them well will add greatly to your work. Understanding your characters’ personalities through a character sketch helps you to understand where they are coming from and what motivates them. This, in turn, helps you understand what drives all of the action in your work, and the clearer this is, the easier your audiences will be able to connect with your writing. But how do you go about writing a character sketch? There are numerous ways to go about it. Interview Your Characters Perhaps the most straightforward way of getting to know who your characters are and what drives them is by asking them outright in an interview. It may seem like a very obvious or banal exercise, but even minor details will help you understand who your character is. Write a Character Monologue Another fantastic and highly effective way of getting to know your character is by writing a monologue as your character.

Monomyth Joseph Campbell's monomyth, or the hero's journey, is a basic pattern that its proponents argue is found in many narratives from around the world. This widely distributed pattern was described by Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).[1] Campbell, an enthusiast of novelist James Joyce, borrowed the term monomyth from Joyce's Finnegans Wake.[2] Campbell held that numerous myths from disparate times and regions share fundamental structures and stages, which he summarized in The Hero with a Thousand Faces: A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.[3] A chart outlining the Hero's Journey. Summary[edit] In a monomyth, the hero begins in the ordinary world, and receives a call to enter an unknown world of strange powers and events. The 17 Stages of the Monomyth[edit]

Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writing | Margaret Langstaff As you know I in the habit of publishing “writing rules” from various well-known writers as I stumble over them on the web. They won’t write your books for you, but they are food for thought. For what it’s worth here are Stephen King’s. They are more discursive that some, but contain some pearls. Happy writing! 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. This list was posted on Open Culture ( on March 16th, 2014. Like this: Like Loading... A lifelong critical reader with literary tastes, a novelist, short story writer, essayist, book critic and so on for many years...A consultant to publishers, providing manuscript critiques, a friend and supporter of others, admittedly a small group but my kind of people, interested in literary things and of writers who aspire to writing not just books (or poems, stories, novels, plays etc.) but literature.

How to Create Good Personalities for Your Characters Edit Article Sample Character DescriptionsCreating Personalities for Your Own Characters Edited by Secretive, Julia Maureen, Flickety, Ben Rubenstein and 19 others You're on a plane to a distant country to visit some weird old relatives you are somehow related to. In your hands, you hold a book that your friend recommended. Ad Steps Sample Character Descriptions Creating Personalities for Your Own Characters 1Start with a simple profile including these categories: Name, Age, Gender, and Occupation. 6Continue developing characters until your story is finished. Tips Keep the characters true to themselves. Warnings Don't copy off other characters in different, already well known books, such as Harry Potter.

Reverse Dictionary <div id="needs_javascript"><center><b>Note: OneLook Thesaurus requires JavaScript.</b><br /><img src="/img/a.gif?q=omg_a_user_without_js"> If you have disabled JavaScript in your browser, please <a href=" it for this site</a> or use the <a href="/?w=entersearchhere&loc=revfp_legacy">old version of the reverse dictionary</a> here.</p><p></center><div> How do I use OneLook's thesaurus / reverse dictionary? This tool lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. What are some examples? What are patterns? I'm only looking for synonyms! For some kinds of searches only the first result or the first few results are likely to be useful. Filters Your search can be refined in various ways using the filters that appear in the "Filter by..." menu on the results page. How does it work? Other ways to access this service: Is this available in any language other than English? OneLook is a service of Datamuse.

10 of My Favorite Writing Craft Sites The writing journey is all about discovering what works best of for each of us as individual, and very unique, writers. Learning from others is valuable in helping us glean tips and fit together the puzzle pieces that will form our own writing processes. Today, I’d like to share with you ten of the sites that inspire, educate, and help me refine my process—plus, they’re run by a bunch of super awesome folks! 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

How to Write a Character From Start to Finish The best fiction is about a character who changes in some significant way. The selfish brute learns to put others first. The woman marrying for money decides to marry for love. The career ladder climber learns to cut back on his hours to enjoy his family. The bitter old crone learns to let others in. We love to see characters transformed. —by Jeff Gerke Most of the time, main characters in fiction are changing for the better. But there’s also room for characters who change for the worse. Perhaps most intriguing of all is a “bad” character who flirts for a while with the idea of being good, but then decides that his true self is on the dark side of the street. Of course, not every story has to be about a character who changes. Whether your protagonist ultimately turns toward or away from the light will be up to you, but we’ll look at ways to send her on a journey in which she’s transformed. The Inner Journey The heart of this system is your main character’s inner journey. The Nexus

The Seven Basic Plots I recently finished chunking through Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots (subtitled, ‘Why we tell stories’). It would be not entirely accurate to say I read the whole thing, all 705 large pages, each with very small print - I skimmed over large sections of it, which is easy to do as it contains hundreds of descriptions of the plots of stories and it is possible to get at Booker’s ideas without reading all of them. For anyone wishing to attempt to read this book, I recommend only reading plot summaries of stories you already know. It saves a lot of time. This book has received a lot of negative reviews, largely because Booker bases his entire treatise on Jungian psychology without noticing that the world at large no longer holds Jung in very high esteem. However, once you accept that this is where Booker is writing from, his ideas are reasonable and potentially useful. What follows are the skeletons of his ‘seven basic plots’. The Basic Meta-plot Meta-plot structure: Rags to Riches

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