central character

Of Agape, Climax, and Transubstantiation…

With the passing of crisis come celebration, perhaps a love scene. Survival or resurrection from death provides the central character a wider scope of consciousness.

Personal concerns no longer drive the protagonist. Those of the community dominate her or his thoughts and actions instead. Agape love now influences their choices and behavior.

Personal suffering has yielded a greater respect and understanding of those aches and pains that affect, and beset the collective. From this emerges empathy guided by the wish to heal.

Of Agape, Climax, and Transubstantiation… Read More »

Of Crises, Experience and Goals…

Surviving a crisis bestows special knowledge garnered and held by few.

It also grants admittance into various orders of wisdom yielded by experience.

Every novel or story a writer crafts tells the life of a certain crisis, and chronicles a central character’s survival of that crisis. The process of writing that novel flows out of an upheaval, the completion of which involves many obstacles that reach a crescendo of conflict and tension.

Of Crises, Experience and Goals… Read More »

Of Intermediate Regions, Hunger and Thirst…

There stands an intermediate region in the life and structure of a novel, that place between crossing the border of the opening and beginning and entering into a series of actions that lead to the penultimate center of the journey.

It lies between the edge of that vast new world of survival that constitutes the protagonist’s path of growth and transformation, the steps she or he makes towards achieving their goal. It is a land filled obstacles of varied sorts, and the ultimate crisis that manifests profound change.

This area operates much like the night before that big game, the minutes ticking up to giving one’s debut concert. For writers this can function much like reading one’s novel for those last times wherein we institute final edits towards bringing the work to its brightest hue

Of Intermediate Regions, Hunger and Thirst… Read More »

Of Clarity and Understanding, Guide and Map, Epiphany and Plot…

Reaching that point where the protagonist has made the change, we, as writers feel differently.

We see the world of our novel from another level.

Ideally we come to hold those dimensions of personality regarding our central character(s) come in greater clarity and understanding.

And yet this is also a place where we can get to know ourselves better as individuals, not simply as persons who write.

Of Clarity and Understanding, Guide and Map, Epiphany and Plot… Read More »