Two new articles from Fiction Factor

[ostarella]

http://www.fictionfactor.com


Create Effective Goals to Write Your Novel by Lee Masterson

http://www.fictionfactor.com/articles/goal-setting.html


Minor Characters in Your Story - Do You Really Need Them? by Mervyn Love

http://www.fictionfactor.com/guests/minorcharacters.html

Comments

[beckyblack]

Good articles! The goals one is very timely, and already made me change the wording on one of my resolution to positive not negative.

I like the one about minor characters. I had LOADS of characters in my NaNo2007 story and so had to be careful about that sort of thing. One appeared in the draft and I had all sorts of plans for her, that just never happened. So in the edited one I cut her from the one scene I'd put her in, and instead used another minor character who in the draft only showed up much later. The second version worked much better because the character I used instead presented more of a threat to the POV character in the scene, setting her up to consider the next person through the door to be her saviour, and it set up a conflict that I paid off later. A big improvement!