Thursday's Links to Writing & Marketing Blog Posts

3 DIMENSIONS OF CHARACTER – A REVIEW OF LARRY BROOKS’ CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT TECHNIQUE

By: The Fictorians

We’re talking a lot about character this month, as well we should. Great characters are critical components for great stories. We need to understand our characters, their relationships, and then we need to reveal the truth about our characters with a deft hand, weaving in back story and inner demons.

It can prove a daunting process, and sometimes it’s hard to know how to approach working with our characters to maximize their effectiveness. At times, it’s like looking at a hidden 3d image, like the one at the top of this article. Can you see the hidden image? It takes effort and practice to train your eye to see what’s right there.

Same with building great characters.

There are lots of opinions and articles and books on the subject, including this month’s Fictorians posts. One resource I highly recommend is Orson Scott Card’s book Characters &Viewpoint.

Another, which I found extremely helpful, is Larry Brooks’ Three Dimensions of Character. This is available as a standalone ebook, but is also incorporated in Larry’s best-selling book Story Engineering.

The brilliance of this approach is that it explains complex character building in a direct, understandable way that makes it accessible to every writer. Larry provides a toolbox to assist authors in crafting great characters, and knowing what is required to do so. He teaches, in essence, how to see the hidden image by removing some of the vague, mysterious elements from the process, which I found refreshing and extremely helpful.

I won’t explain the entire system. This short article won’t do it justice, but I will review the core concepts to illustrate the power of it.

Characters have three distinct dimensions that authors need to understand and define, and which they can then apply for greatest effect.

Dimension1: Personality . . .

Read the full article HERE!

~*~

If you missed my writing & marketing tweets and retweets yesterday, here they are again:

1. How Can We Show a Character’s Internal Journey? | Jami Gold, Paranormal Author http://ow.ly/xkZqs
2. Author, Jody Hedlund: 4 Ways to Hook Your Readers & Keep Them Wanting More http://ow.ly/xkZxA
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18. 3 Dimensions of Character – A Review of Larry Brooks’ Character Development Technique - The Fictorians http://ow.ly/xl2ko
19. Literary vs. Genre Fiction – What’s All the Fuss About? - The Fictorians http://ow.ly/xl48n
20. Self-Publishing Secrets: 5 Free Amazon Services That Will Help You Sell More Books http://ow.ly/xl4lp
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Happy writing and running, Kathy