Thoughts About Story Characters

A lot of ideas, presented rather sketchily, about how to create characters for a story.

Sayonara, Patricia Highsmith

Diary 8/8 to 8/10/22: Simone Weil; Demonic DVD; "Creativity is mine!"; a dream; feeling unmotivated; exercise plans; downloading audio files; this diary; "duende"

Quotes from Albert Camus, and “A Sign”

Diary 8/6 to 8/7/22: Hemlock Club; Minority Report; whining about buses; efficiency and time; better DVDs; Dr. Suglia's blog; Highsmith at HC; and so on.

“A Flea and a Fly in a Flue…”

Diary 7/18 to 7/22/22: Torey Hayden; thermometer from Wal-Mart; Camus's Notebooks and boredom; ancient Egypt; Lost in Austen; at war with the fleas; sun exposure and hunger; favorite music; an enviable life.

“Daily Waste of Daily Powers,” Highsmith Quotes, etc.

Diary 5/20 to 5/23/22: Patricia Highsmith quotes; Chris Hedges; a dream; stopping caring; disgraceful eating; neuroscientist quote; fiction writing "my calling"; my best reading and writing; wilted cilantro; Jif recall; Australian climate and election.

Believable Fantasy, Surprise Gifts, and Good Movies

Diary, 5/17 to 5/20/22: Ghostbusters: Afterlife; better fantasies; fabulous Turandot; McAfee woes; Natalie Belikova artwork gift; praising Highsmith; turn inward; Hitchcock and Chomsky.

Swept Away: Diary 3/21 to 3/22/22

Books that sweep me away; inspired by Middlemarch; a scam avoided; inspired by Greta Thunberg; a dream; blog activity up; George Lakoff and metaphors.

Astronomy for the Writer

Including the moon in your story? Get the science right, right here!

Jill Bolte Taylor: Diary, 11/1 to 11/4/21

Self-mastery; play and writing; Black Widow, Office Killer (with Carol Kane), Strange Girls, and other DVDs; Hallmark nonsense; four brains in our heads.

Writers and Characters: Diary, 7/7 to 7/11/21

Two ways to think about characters; Hesse's Steppenwolf; writers being silly; quotes from Graves & Hodge concluded; Dunst as Marie Antoinette; Nicolas Cage movies; Hemlock Club meeting and novel.

Novelizing: Diary 6/13 to 6/14/21

Writing prompts; Cioran quote and words as blunt instruments; Sophie's World; failing memory again; two bad movies.

Hemlock Novel 2: Diary, 6/13/21

Theorizing and sputtering about the Hemlock Club novel and how to learn to write. I need a car to go to Yosemite. Not much else.

Breakthrough: Diary 6/8 to 6/10/21

How books saved my writing soul; plus whining about WordPress; and Eve Arden, Camus's Stranger, In the Fade, so, lots of potatoes ending with a burst of excitement.

Creating Characters: Diary, 6/9/21

How to create a fictional character? Lots of questions, maybe no answers. Includes a bit of psychology. This morning's struggle.

Failure of Creativity: Diary, 6/5 to 6/7/21

A dream; failure of creativity; my stupidity; Twitter squabble; pit of despair?; Blade movies; feeling drained and confused.

Save the Cat! Diary, 6/3 to 6/4/21

Save the Cat! Writes a Novel; a hard issue in writing; WordPress not great; bad movies; Austen's Persuasion.

False Memories: Diary, 5/9/21

Irritated at being irritated; stimulating the memory of readers; the days of Nog; addicted to soft living; books on how to write; writing longhand & keeping going; thoughts of a new novel try; and synchronicity.

“She was angry.”

Stronger and more vivid writing requires a variety of tools or models of expression. Here’s a partial catalogue of models, based on the example sentence, “She was angry.”