Woo! It arrived!
Inside this violently yellow package is a tightly-wrapped bundle of ten acrylic slabs. Yes, it’s heavy. About 50lbs. The delivery fella wasn’t sure I could carry it but luckily I lift weights. All that exercise has gotta be good for something!
Will it be 10 longswords? Will it be 20 short swords? Or perhaps 30 daggers? It could be a mix of all three!
Stay tuned to find out what’s coming next from the Adamant Studio…
A friend of mine found this excellent article on developing good, fully-fleshed-out characters.
Science fiction and fantasy are built on cool ideas and fascinating worlds — but those things are only as good as the people who live around and inside them. How do you create compelling fictional characters? It’s a huge challenge. But here are some tips that might make it easier.
There’s no silver bullet or easy formula for creating characters who live and breathe inside your head (and hopefully other people’s heads, too). If there were, we’d all be using it and it wouldn’t be such a nightmare. I struggle with this all the time — I’ll have a story reach an eighth or ninth draft before I realize that a major character is still basically a scrap of paper, carried along through the story on the wind. And after years of grappling with this issue, I’ve come up with some things can help me to imagine the character as a real, separate individual instead of a function of the plot or story.
Note: this essay is adapted from a mini-lecture I gave at Clarion West a couple weeks ago. Thanks to everyone there who asked questions and gave feedback on it. (And this is a good place to plug Clarion West, which is an amazing writing program that you should all support and apply to. I had such an incredible experience there, and felt privileged to hang out with the next generation of mind-blowing SF writers.) Continue reading “10 Tips and Tricks for Creating Memorable Characters”
Here’s a lovely post from one of my favourite tumblrs that I just couldn’t resist sharing. I often have the opposite problem: knowing my villain better than my hero, but I know that’s not always the case.
Here is a writing exercise to help you get to know your characters better and give them more depth:
Perhaps you know your character well. Perhaps you don’t. Either way, our emotions and our reactions to them say a lot about who we are especially when those feelings are particularly potent. Take this list of strong emotions and consider what could possibly trigger each of them in your character:
Write a short scene for each of these emotions. What makes your character feel this way? How do they react? What happens to their body? To their thoughts? Remember that emotions tend to be complex things and are often linked together. Does a particular feeling lead to another? (Example: Does the character get angry when they feel frightened?) What do they decide to do? If it’s a negative emotion, how do they cope?
Can you think of any other emotions that might be provocative? Feel free to leave comments and, as always, make good art!
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