Good afternoon. In this second round we will talk about the most important part of creative writing, the characters of a story.
Why the most important? Because the plot IS the characters. Mainly they are the ones waving the plot.
You will surely ask: “Doesn’t the writer write the plot?”
You definitely must have heard of interviews from writers saying that “from a certain point on, the book wrote itself”.
A successful plot that excites the author, making him return to the first draft over and over again is that the characters drive the pen of the author and not the opposite. Let me also clarify that I am referring only to fictional text and not historical, political or academic writing.
Our conversation about characters will be extensive and will occupy much of our time. On the one hand this is good because you will have a very good understanding of the matter because the goal is for you to learn how to create convincing characters.
Creative writing texts and university course materials refer to two kinds of characters, the round ones and the flat ones.
The round ones are usually described by course materials as three dimensional and complex, with many traits to their psychological synthesis.
Flat characters are usually predictable and tend to be repetitive, without being analyzed extensively by the writer about their psychological synthesis, the way they think and act, showing only a few sides of them.
The most important thing of all is to succeed in creating lively, vibrant people that will stay in the readers’ minds each time they close the book and not uninteresting caricatures. That will be your success.
Next time we’ll talk about where to draw characters from and how we can create characters out of nowhere.