characterization Archives

If you’re writing a story, you’ll need secondary characters to flesh out the world you’re building. Otherwise, it’s a pretty dull world. You need sidekicks! Sidekicks are indispensable for asking or answering questions of your heroes. At the very least, they give your main characters someone to interact with. Are there differences between sidekicks, ensembles, and partners? Do you need them if …

You can never read the same story twice. Some of us complain about returning to earlier favorites only to find they’ve been rendered unreadable by visits from an imaginary being called “the Suck Fairy.” The Suck Fairy brings to our attention the unfortunate assumptions our favorite authors made as they created their fictional worlds: the racism implicit in Tarzan’s superiority over Black Africa…

Fact and fiction. As a writer of historical novels, I find it endlessly intriguing to play with how to entwine the two. History has always fascinated me—I find the grand tapestry of the past is woven with so many richly colorful and textured threads that help us understand the present. And so, I’ve always enjoyed adding real historical events and real historical figures to my stories, though, f…

As writers we always hear, “Write what you know.” In light of that truth, it is important that any person writing about Native Americans know the people and the culture they are writing about. It is important to know the current situation of the Native American people one is choosing to write about. It is also important to recognize that some things cannot, or should not, be written about given…

Tropes, characters, and story What do you think of when you hear the word trope? Do you think of a story building block? Or an overused concept? These days, we hear about tropes often, but the meaning is less specific. Some writers love them, while others loathe them. One constant is that tropes are a storytelling staple stemming from fairy and folk tales. Tropes are valuable storytelling build…

In January 2020, the novel American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins hit bookstores after months of positive reviews and being selected to Oprah’s Book Club. Then Latinx critics called out the book detailing a Mexican bookseller crossing the U.S. border to escape a drug cartel as perpetuating harmful stereotypes. Cummins is not Mexican, although claims Puerto Rican heritage, and critics repeated what th…