How the Pros Deepen Colourful Character Traits with Criminal Motivations in Fiction Writing
“Fiction allows us to do something that nothing else quite does. It allows us to enter fully into the lives of other human beings… The fake characters we read about will evaporate like the morning dew, but the real ones, the true ones, will haunt us for the rest of our days.”
― Katherine Patterson
“Look seeker, if you love a character, you give them pain, ruin their lives, make them suffer. Maybe even throw in a heroic death!”
― Varric Tethras
There’s nothing like a fictional story of suffering and unmet want. It makes us sit up all night long turning pages.
If a character immediately gets what they want, then that character is simple, lacks problems, and is probably one of these people who sees the world in black and white, right and wrong, good and bad terms.
It’s a boring character who has no dimensionality. We won’t stay up all night to find out how life is so sweet and simple for them.
We will keep turning pages for a character that is always on the edge of not-quite-winning, but could, if only …
We read fiction to discover that other people, albeit fictional people, are quite similar to ourselves — they are a jigsaw puzzle of…
