Writing Diary Jan 2nd 2016 – Character Traits
It’s 2016- There is a lot to do.
Happy new year and welcome to a brand new writing year. Having recovered from a binge session of watching ‘Making a Murderer’ on Netflix it time to begin this year with book three planning. I wanted to talk a little about character motivation. Why do your characters do what they do and why. It is the fundamental reason why people read stories. It’s one of the more sadistic traits of a writer that makes them take their well thought out protagonist and drop them a world of shit, just so that the reader can watch them squirm their way out. There has to be internal and external obstacles for a character to overcome which I will go through in more detail when my characters begin to develop over the course of this next book. To touch on these briefly, an external obstacle is anything that stands in the way of a character reaching his or her objective. There must always been some sort of objective, whether it be trying to save the human race or overcome a internal trauma that has plagued the character and held them back. A battle is an excellent external obstacle. A character must defeat an enemy in order to survive. Simple. An internal obstacle that is preventing the character from doing that could be his or her fear of weapons or the psychological scarring received on a previous battlefield. The internal obstacles take a little more time and thought in order to convey the mindset of a character, but once it is firmly set in the minds of the reader it becomes a powerful storytelling tool. Look at Carrie Barrington’s internal obstacles in the first Agathon book. She dreams of her mothers death every night and has strange visions of an alien world she has never seen before. Her external obstacles become very clear when she starts manifesting powers that she struggles to control and hide from the rest of the colonists. She not only has to overcome these obstacles, but also move forward in dealing with the burden of battling the alien planet so that the Agathon is able to escape.
Ok more from me later it’s back to plotting in my notebook
Forward we go
Colin
