Learning to Write XXII

There is still more to be said about character. There is always more to be said about it. In the last couple of posts we have looked briefly at some aspects of character and how these are brought about. We touched on caricature and on how some figures in a narrative are merely there to [...]



Learning to Write XVI

There is no novel without character. You can have all of the other ingredients, plot, thematic content, pace, action, style, psychology, tension and poetry, but if your characters aren’t credible and if they don’t live with each other then you don’t have a novel.
Characters are what hold the different parts of your narrative together and [...]






About Writing:

To publish a work of novel length, one must find...some means of satisfying the ordinary reader's first requirement for any piece of writing longer than fifteen pages, the sense that things are moving, getting somewhere, flowing forward. The common reader demands some reason to keep turning the pages. Two things can keep the . . . reader going: argument or story. John Gardner, On Becoming A Novelist

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