Let your character talk not simply for plot or exposition, but to create the person for the reader. Then she starts to live. Talk alone can create a character and a story.
To establish a particular atmosphere, mood, or tone, you must pay attention to your readers’ short memory for sensation. If the atmosphere is to be foreboding, you must forebode on every page. If it is to be cold, you must chill, not once or twice, but until your readers are shivering. Remember tha…
Great writers have understood that if you create a fresh, individual character or a vivid, moving experience you suggest all human experience—all that has gone before and that is yet to come. The more specific and individuated a character is—like Flaubert’s Emma Bovary or Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus or…
Anti-heroes afflicted with passivity are a problem. Victims can be main characters, but if they are passive, always acted upon rather than acting, they get tiresome. Readers tend to be first irritated and then bored by someone who just lets things happen to him time after time. The very narrative s…
If you make your character witty, or perceptive, or peculiarly thoughtful, readers realize that he may behave erratically but something worthwhile is underneath. If you let readers understand the circumstances that created his personality, so that his vices or crimes are understood as reactions to …
