Slowly Revealing a Character
I read the article What Agents Hate the other day. It talks about things agents hate to see in the first chapter. One of the things is a backstory or an information dump. That, I am afraid, is one of the things I struggle with. It is my nature to want people to understand where I am coming from with what I say. Even with this post, I told you about the article I read. I could have just gone into what I have to say, but I gave you the backstory first. Fictional characters should be like a carving. We begin with a simple blob that has an uninteresting shape. Slowly, we reveal details about this blob until it isn’t a blob any more, but the shape of a person, or an animal or something else. The worst thing we can do with writing about a character is to simply state what he is. Let’s look at an example. The ball flew high into the air and out over left field. The left fielder watched it and ran back toward the fence. The ball hit the glove and then the player hit the chain link fence. The ...