Cruella De Vil, Darth Vader, Thanos, Lord Voldemort, the White Witch, Bellatrix Lestrange, the Joker, Hannibal Lecter, Shere Khan, Nurse Ratched—what do all these characters have in common? Not only are they the villains of the stories in which they appear, in...
Building the six-dimensional character Character development is the driving force of any good story, and yet, this is one of the most misunderstood elements of fiction writing. We’ve all heard of “flat” or “two-dimensional” characters. But how...
Last Updated on February 24, 2023 Walk through virtually any bookstore these days (though real-life bookstores are becoming few and far between), and more often than not, you’ll find science fiction and fantasy lumped together, as if they were virtually the same...
In my previous article, I introduced the idea of the character-driven vs. the plot-driven story, arguing that if the plot drives the story, that’s tantamount to the writer driving the story. And if the writer is driving the story, that means the characters...
One of the most common problems with the fantasy and science fiction manuscripts I read is that they are plot-driven rather than character-driven. What I mean is, the author appears to have come up with an interesting high concept, plotted out a series of events and...
