People ask how I come up with my characters.
People ask how I come up with my worlds.
Here is one tool that I use for both.
The 30 Day Character Interview: I answer only one question per day for each character because it gives me plenty of time to think, for the characters and worlds to marinate in the back of my mind while I do other things.
Today would normally be a day when I post a bit of flash fiction for you to enjoy, but I chose to post that on Monday and you can read it here. Today I want to talk about something that’s been popping up a lot in recent days.
The discrediting of minorities. I’m not sure what it is about this week that has made it so much more prominent in my social media streams,
I’m going to be talking in depth about a character from the anime Yuri On Ice. If you haven’t seen it, I strongly recommend it. It is the cure for what ails most things in this world. You can watch for free (with ads) at CrunchyRoll
It would be easy to talk about Katsuki Yuuri’s character development, and plenty of others have. Viktor Nikiforov is also well discussed.
I love a good unreliable narrator. I know, I’m weird that way. My classmates way back in high school made that perfectly clear.
The first time I realized that a narrator didn’t have to tell the truth – even about their own story – the world just opened up. We were reading Tim O’Brian’s The Things They Carried. It had just come out and my teacher was unusually excited about it. When we got to the first “inaccuracy” most of my classmates just assumed the author didn’t do enough research.
For me, writing is my break. Most of the time, anyway. I retreat from pretty much everything else that I have to do into my writing. The stories are where I make the world make sense.
So what happens when I don’t want to write?
Something like that has happened to to me. I’ve been struggling to get my characters to do pretty much anything. It’s not like writer’s block. I have plenty of ideas and my characters are talking to me.
I’m a pantser when it comes to writing my stories. That is I just write them and figure out all the plot points and such after the fact. This works fairly well for me as my subconscious is much better at storytelling than my conscious mind.
Most of the time it works out great. Every once in a while it is a disastrous mess.
Recently I discovered that I had completely missed an important theme in a novel.
