Of Characters

As I scan about for things to read and stuff to learn, I felt compelled to click the little link advertising "Sara's 10 Basic Writing Tips"(via AW forums). Most likely, like many tips, they're half-useful, yet always appreciated, of course. This one, however, I couldn't resist keeping my eyes on a certain line.

things like, "James is going to kill his brother in the next scene. Be sure to leave the knife on the buffett," or “John wants to kiss Ellen. Make sure they get some alone time.”

And suddenly I realized what was so fascinating about the whole character thingie. I was writing my synopsis, like I said I would, and worked on really fleshing out the characters portrayed in the story (in retrospect, I didn't manage that well, and decided in the end to cut off two out of four). After discussing some minor issues in my head over and over, I found that the least I had to do was to quite simply flesh out some motives, and plant some basic ideas in their heads to propel the discussion I was building. And then again, I never thought these characters would serve more than empty shells to keep two sides of an argument running.

Yet when I was authoring my outline, and thinking about the application of different concepts into the story itself, I found it impossible to not at least work a bit into the different characters. I've only three or four as of yet, but I would've had no idea where to go with the story had I not the varying motives of the characters (I'm still quite uncertain, actually). 

So even as I write this story, the outline of the next is vaguely forming in my head. It's a suspenseful, minimalistic, character-heavy short story, that's vaguely written around - lo and behold - a political discussion this time around. Again, I doubt the result is going to be that fantastic, judging from my previous texts, but at least I recognize the fact that I am getting my head around the entire issue. It's getting quite interesting.