: Re: Problems with character development? I'm 1/4 through my first novel, with a pretty solid 12 page outline of the whole thing. After years of reading books about story structure, I think I have

@Lee1909368

I think one of the problems with character development in novels is the author's liberty to spend periods of time explaining a character's motivation to a reader without the character actually having to say or do anything. A chapter that has the ostensible position in time and space of someone sitting in a chair, reflecting on a dramatic problem, is something that crops up from time to time. That reflective period can info dump a whole heap of incidents in summary and leave the character in a position where the next things they say and do are obvious to everyone.

The problem with that is that doing this is dry and it restricts the things that you need to have the character do in order to establish character through action. It also means that you miss opportunities to flesh out character through interaction and action.

There is nothing wrong with having a character make a seemingly bizarre action that they later have to explain, possibly to another character. Also it is possible that characters don't always agree with each other's motivations. These nuances of character are what flesh out the interactions and make each character grow and deepen.

I lucked into character development boot camp, I did a film-making course where I wrote a lot of scripts. They weren't great scripts but they taught me the nuts and bolts of what do when you can't just gear-shift into "exposition mode" and have a slow beat of characters reflecting on their own pasts.

If a story can get by with out that kind of thing it will be richer for it. It is a path that should only be taken when absolutely necessary. Always explain exactly as little to the reader as you need to in the moment to keep them reading the next few paragraphs. Info dumping is the gentle story killer, smothering under the guise of explaining.

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: Re: Problems with character development? I'm 1/4 through my first novel, with a pretty solid 12 page outline of the whole thing. After years of reading books about story structure, I think I have

More posts by @Lee1909368

: Should a long flashback be written in first or third person? In my novel there will be a chapter-length flashback as one character relates a story from his past. The rest of the novel is

: Would a paid-for review from Kirkus give me real insight into quality of my manuscript? As an amateur writer who has just finished my first manuscript, I want a qualified, non-biased, and thorough

: Learning storywriting for videogames - Handling deep nonlinearities A recent question asked for pointers for writing for games, and the gist of the answers was that it's not very unlike writing

: How to have a character be nameless for the first few paragraphs of a book? Let me first explain what is going in in the beginning of the story: My main character belongs to a tribal culture

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