Tag: characters

9 Tips for Various Stages of Your Novel

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 …
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Casting Call: Queens, The Archetype of Female Power

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. …
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Casting Call: 3 Villains, It’s Good to be Bad

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 …
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Casting Call: 4 Archetypes of Lovers With Baggage

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 …
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Casting Call: 7 Sidekick Archetypes

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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Casting Call: 3 More Great Character Archetypes

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; …
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Casting Call: 3 Fictional 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, …
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Character Chemistry: 6 Dos and Don’ts for Getting a Group Together.

We’ve all had this experience, we hear about a new book, movie or TV show and it resonates with us. We know we’re going to love it. We count down the days to the release. During the waiting agony, we talk the ears off anyone who stands still long enough, eagerness dripping from every gushing …
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The World Does Not Need Another Novel. Does It?

Sometimes, rarely, I enter competitions. I’ve won two: a state of the art camera for a wildlife poster I designed, and the other a novel for randomly throwing my name into a hat. The camera got stolen, but I still have the novel–Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil, which I haven’t read yet. You may remember that …
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