Posts by Tom Au
Primary characters would normally include the protagonist, antagonist, and maybe one or two "fellow travelers" of these. Secondary characters would consist of non-trivial characters that are not pr...
For instance, in my high school novel, I have the main characters attend a football game, the Homecoming Dance, the basketball game, other dances, the Prom, etc. Then I have the characters react to...
I start my Revolutionary War novel on August 21, 1780, when "boy meets girl." Specifically, the hero is rescued from British captivity by a bunch of guerrillas. One of these guerrillas takes him ho...
Here is the latest version of this question, except that I believe that I have identified a key issue. Someone who read Chapters 1-3 of one of my novels (and then stopped), asked me, "why is there ...
I would advise against it. In a historical novel, you do not want to "tamper" with history. That is, you do not want to create a character close enough to a historical figure to be able to re-write...
My experience is that "real people" don't make good characters in their original form. Many of my fictitious characters are idealized versions of real ones. They are decidedly better than their ori...
From the sound of it, you are creating what I call a catalyst character. The dictionary definitions for this term are: 1. Chemistry. a substance that causes or accelerates a chemical reaction...
A reader of one of my works told me, "It was very interesting, the last two thirds of it anyway." Her fear was that I might lose my readers in the first one-third of the work. The above work was a...
I would take my cue from the (handful of) real women that joined armies. Most of them do it to save their countries, not for fun. She wasn't exactly a "princess," but Joan of Arc was a medieval gi...
"Cinderella" is a story with a heroine and villains, but the villains don't die in the story. That's because while the villains are "bad," they aren't so to the point of killing someone (unlike th...
Your physically weak character doesn't need to do the "actual" torturing. All she needs to do is to direct her assistants, "stick this instrument in there," and "twist it that way," etc. What she m...
I would have a third party explain the situation. This character, M, says, "we can't get L and S on the same webchat because L won't talk to S since the day." Readers will be clued that there is "...
In the U.S., "defamation" basically consists of an alleging (false) claims that can be taken as facts. This does not cover wishes or fantasies. So "I wish I could sleep with Jane Doe" (a famous a...
To take off on Lauren Ipsum's short, but excellent answer, you have three choices: 1) Re-write your current story so that your "cool" character is a key, perhaps main, character whose importance i...
You have adopted a complicated, "elite" format, with a surprising "twist" ending to the scene. I'm not sure that you were successful, but you made your point. You had two interlocking themes, the ...
In my work, my goal is to show that the hero is a better fit for the heroine, than the two men she married (or agreed to marry) before him. The first husband uses his influence to get the woman a ...
To answer your stated question, one can protect one's work by "registering" it with Writers Guild of America for $20 online. But there is a fundamental reason why agents won't steal your work: Bec...
Put aside the character for a moment, and ask yourself how you want the story to end. Then work backwards to your character. If she is, in fact, your main character, she will have, or develop, a go...
Writing in the third person present tense, you want to depict "flashback" scenes or other past scenes in the past tense. That's fine. In fact, it clearly separates what was in the past from what'...
Mark Twain did this with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In "Tom Sawyer," Huckleberry Finn was the number two character after Tom. After they discovered $12,000 of gold together (a quarter of a m...
You need enough post climax action to resolve the major outstanding issues, and "close the loops." The climax only tells you that the story will end well (or not). You don't want to leave the reade...
It seems like you are not a "mean and dark type." Then you have to base those characters on people who are, instead of having them sound like you. One way is to pattern those characters on a frien...
An "idea" is not copyrightable, only its expression is. "Bad faith" is an idea that is as old as time, that Satre "popularized," but did not invent. What is attributable to him is an exposition ...
It's understandable that your character doesn't know many things about the world when he leaves his village. That's where he came from after all. But he should know "a lot more" by the end of the ...
I refer to the old fable that if you set enough monkeys at enough keyboards for a long enough period of time, they will (through random typing), reproduce the "Complete Works of Shakespeare," or an...
