Recent content by aliciarasley

It's a real conundrum. We want our characters to be "sympathetic"-- someone the reader cares about and roots for. But paradoxically, sometimes the more we TRY to make them good and admirable, the more saintly they become, the less the reader likes them. It might be envy, or resentment, or an...

Fiction, like nature, is all about change. So in a story, heroism requires more than being perfectly heroic, and even more than committing heroic acts. It also requires the ability to change under pressure, to grow into someone better even if it hurts. In the same way, creating a heroic...

Nobody's perfect, especially our characters! After all, they need room to change. In fact, the imperfect protagonist makes the three-dimensional story possible by making "character change" propel the events. The character moving through the external plot is a story of only two dimensions. The...

Villains are a lot like heroes: They are active, powerful, dynamic, and capable of change. They're just, you know, bad. And you have to give your villains a little love to make them a worthy opponent for your actual heroic characters. In this interactive workshop, we'll discuss a few...