Of Idiosyncracies, Formidable Personalities and Specifics

Describing an experience or person as bad or terrible will not suffice in fiction writing.

Writing that the foster parents in a novel are mean or horrible does not flesh out the unique idiosyncrasies of their formidable personalities.

Let us turn to the context of the orphan in a less than ideal foster home.

Harry Potter is an orphan who attends a school that teaches magic and the occult. His major antagonists are the dark forces of human nature as visited through a series of characters and who also killed his parents.

The protagonist, Antwone Fisher (Fish) of the memoir, Finding Fish, lives in America.

His major nemesis, who is no less formidable than those of Harry Potter is a foster mother haunted by her own demons of self-hatred that she copes with by denigrating others, most particularly and unfortunately the foster children she has promised and receives money to care for.

Both Harry and Fish are orphans struggling to find their places in the world. And while the protagonists of both stories achieve their goals, the routes by which they accomplish this bear vast differences.

The journeys they trod towards the ends of the means by which the fight to survive stand rooted in the unique situations. The roots of those situations hold qualities specific to the contexts of the stories that spin out of them.

What are the specifics of the situation in which your central character finds her or himself?

How do those specifics shape the nature of the story, the meat of the path towards achieving their goals?

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Please note:

This is the last post for www.anjuellefloyd.com in 2009.

I will be on hiatus during December 2009 for site maintenance and upgrade.

I will return with new post on Monday, January 4, 2010.

Until then visit me at anjuelle floyd–the writing life

Have  a wonderful and safe Holiday Season.

I look forward to your comments in the New Year.