Character Development for Writers
Character Development for Writers Who's voice is it anyway? (c)2004 Caterina Christakos When writing your stories, many of you have written to me asking how to keep your character's from sounding wooden or alike. Here is a simple method that I have developed. 1) Create a written or artistic sketch of each character. Imagine exactly what they will look like, sound like and which emotions really resound within them. Post each character sketch on a board by your computer. 2) While writing your story look up every half hour and see if what you have written is true to your characters. 3) After you are done writing divide up the dialogue into seperate pages for each character. This is a bit of a process but thanks to the cut and paste features on your computer it will still take you half the time, it normally would have. 4) Does the dialogue for each character match up? Would your character say that, react that way? 5) Compare the dialogue of your characters. Do any two sound too much alike? 6) Revise accordingly. If you do this consistantly, your characters will never sound tired and will always be true to themselves in tone, word and deed.
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