Straight talk from the sisters about blood, sweat and ink
While I would argue that a woman can play any character, hero, villain, mentor, the Queen might be considered the most dynamic of the female archetypes. Queens are by nature powerful and public, making them ideal protagonists or antagonists. I had a hard time picking my top queens, but here are three of my favorites. …
Continue reading “Casting Call: Queens, The Archetype of Female Power”
Villains come in as many shapes and sizes as their hero counterparts. The best pairs complement each other. The protagonist’s strengths and virtues contrast against the antagonist’s negative traits. When you take this relationship down to the most basic level, villains all want something and that something is going to cause havoc for the protagonist …
Continue reading “Casting Call: 3 Villains, It’s Good to be Bad”
I’m taking a break this week from my Brain Triggers series and returning to the ever-popular Casting Call series. Today I have four characters, each selected from my strange bedfellows category. For the most part these characters fall into a romantic subgroup. Twisted though they may be, these common archetypes work for characters of either …
Continue reading “Casting Call: 4 Archetypes of Lovers With Baggage”
Nothing elevates the quintessential protagonist like the perfect sidekick. These secondary characters help showcase the protagonist’s positive and negative traits by contrasting them against the sidekick’s own traits. The bond between these two characters is often a vulnerable relationship. Our good friends always know our darkest history, the secrets we never share with outsiders. At …
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As part of my ongoing posts on understanding character archetypes, here are my next three examples to study. Last week’s entry was for the Hero, the Leader and the Mentor, for those catching up, it might help to read that post first. The next three characters are predominantly used for the protagonist in a story; …
Continue reading “Casting Call: 3 More Great Character Archetypes”
As I mentioned in my last post, The Dos and Don’t of Character Chemistry, I love to write stories with huge casts. As a historian, coming up with characters is easy for me, I always start the process with real historical figures, twisting and combining traits from different ones until my characters take shape. Unfortunately, …
Continue reading “Casting Call: 3 Fictional Character Archetypes”
Welcome to day one of the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. Cue the cheering! Heather and I are so excited to be participating again. Today we start the Write On Sisters 3, 2, 1 … BLASTOFF to Stellar Writing series with A for Antagonist. Much like space travel, writing the antagonist is venturing into the …
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I’m obsessed with the meet-cute. If you don’t know what a meet-cute is, it’s those quirky, funny and/or sexy ways two people meet for the first time. This is most often used for a romantic meeting, but it also works for future friends. Most people know the term meet-cute from the movie The Holiday, but …
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As writers we often find ourselves at various stages with our work. Here are three popular stages and three posts from us to help you find a way through the challenges each stage creates. Stage 1: Just getting started? It is the hardest part. Lucky for all of us Heather has three great ways to …
Continue reading “9 Tips for Various Stages of Your Novel”
The WriteOnSisters completed the A-Z Challenge 3 years running. In 2014 it was a catch-all of writing topics, in 2015 it was BLASTOFF! to Stellar Writing full of simple 3-step tips to improve your writing, and in 2016 it was Masterplots Theater outlining a ton of different archetypal plots and how to master them. Below is …
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