Writer’s Toolbox: Minor Characters, Part 6 (First Draft)

I really should have parceled these out, one a week. Unfortunately, when I do that kind of thing, I start revising too much, or I forget to finish the damned thing. Last one 🙂 What’s the difference between major and minor characters? Not a whole lot. The main character contains the story conflict; the major

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Writer’s Toolbox: Minor Characters, Part 5 (First Draft)

How to make a minor character that symbolizes an element in the story. This one’s tricky. Nebulous. I’m grasping at straws… Maybe I’m just splitting hairs with this last category here, but I want to differentiate between theme and story element. If a theme is a mini-moral, a minor building block of the “so what,”

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Writer’s Toolbox: Minor Characters, Part 4 (First Draft)

How to make minor characters that establish setting. Setting isn’t just buildings, weather, and stuff–it’s characters, too. Setting establishes: Place and time (in our example, a modern-day college town) Mood (an ordinary college town–not Miskatonic U.) Theme* (education is a part of real life, not separate from it) The setting should go back to the

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Writer’s Toolbox: Minor Characters, Part 3 (First Draft)

How to make minor characters that show off the main character. Back to the “so what.” Out of the “so what” comes the main conflict–stories are about drama, which is based on conflict. –The main, story conflict isn’t the same thing as the plot conflict. The story conflict is on a level of “Good vs.

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