You had questions about heroes, villains, and main characters. We have answers! Here are the questions:
How do you make planned power increases not seem like an ass-pull¹?
What do you do when your villain is more interesting/engaging than your hero?
How do you know when a character is unnecessary and needs to be removed from the story, or killed off in the story?
What tricks do you use when you want the reader to mistakenly believe a character is a hero, rather than a villain?
Which is more fun for you: creating a villain, or creating a hero?
How many side characters can you reasonably juggle in a novel?
What are the drawbacks to making your villain a POV character?
If your villain doesn’t show up until late in the story, how do you make their eventual appearance seem justified?
How do you get readers to like a character who is a jerk?
Liner Footnotes ¹ We hadn’t seen “ass-pull,” the a nouning² of the idiom “pull it out of your ass³” as a noun before. ² Bill Watterson gave us the verb form of the word “noun” indirectly in the final panel of this strip. ³ For those unfamiliar with the extraction-from-orifice idiom, it means “make it up on the spot,” with a negative connotation, suggesting that the reader can TELL that this was invented in a hurry.
Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Dan, and Howard, with special guest Charlaine Harris
Charlaine Harris joined us in front of a live audience at the GenCon Writers Symposium to talk with us about secondary characters—why they’re so important, why they can be difficult to write well, and how she brings her secondary characters to life without giving them a POV.
Take something you’ve already written. Make your protagonist a secondary character, and make a secondary character your protagonist. Tell a new story with them in those roles.
Grave Sight, by Charlaine Harris, narrated by Alyssa Bresnahan
What are our favorite techniques for managing large casts of characters, and how do our processes differ from when we’re writing small casts? What does “large” and “small” mean for us?
Liner Notes: No, Howard was not in the room. Yes, despite his absence, he was wearing both trousers and pants while he ventured into the wilds to obtain Maurice’s character sheet.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Andrew Twiss, and mastered by Alex Jackson, both of whom have more points in “perception” than most people have points.
Talking Heads! Write a scene between a married couple who has met at a coffee shop unexpectedly—neither of them are supposed to be there. Don’t use dialog tags.
Steal the Stars, by Mac Rogers, narrated as an audioplay with a full cast
How do you go about defining a character for your readers when you don’t have many words to devote to the project? What are the tricks for quickly establishing someone’s individuality within your story?
Credits: This episode was recorded by Dan Thompson, and mastered by Alex Jackson.
