When Your Characters Take Over the Story

The title for this post is something of a “Well, duh” kind of title. For a story to work well, it’s the characters who have to take over and knock the author from his perch.

 

I’ve been reading Writing Better Fiction by Harvey Stanbrough, and he says that he almost called his book Writing Better Character-Driven Fiction, until he realized it was rather redundant. “All good fiction is character-driven,” he writes. He’s not big on outlines, plotting, character sketches, erecting signposts, or anything else that might smack of planning. Instead, he says, “like real life,” he says, “authentic fiction is not planned. Like real life, authentic fiction unfolds naturally.”

 

Stanbrough has an acronym for this – WITD, or “Writing into the Dark.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

American Civil War: prize-winning new book reveals plight of underage soldiers – The National Tribune (Australia). My review of Of Age can be found here.

 

Booknotes: The War That Made America: Essays Inspired by the Scholarship of Gary W. Gallagher – Civil War Books and Authors. 

 

Our Banner in the Sky – Jon Tracey at Emerging Civil War.

 

“Imagine Mountains,” a poem on the 150^th anniversary of Robert Frost’s birth – Carey Jobe at Society of Classical Poets.

 

224 Feet of Fencing – Brian Miller at A South Roane Agrarian.