| For Writers: For Writers: How to Develop Your Characters & Other Important Components of Your Story (1/3) |
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The single most important aspect of writing fiction is properly developing your characters. This is particularly important for longer works of fiction, such as novels; however, even in a short story character development is central, as it is through your characters’ thoughts, speech, and actions that your story is told. Your characters must be real to your readers; they must be believable. Without proper character development, no other element of your story will be able to come through, and even a very stimulating, engaging plot will be lost. What’s more, regardless of how stimulating your plot is, it is your characters that will stay with your audience even after they have finished reading your story. Building your characters should go well beyond telling your readers what color hair they have, how nice and big their breasts are, or how hard their cock is, etc. Your readers should feel like the characters in your story can make their own judgments, form their own opinions, etc. They should believe that the characters in your story are really speaking to and interacting with each other. Your readers should feel like they know personally, or can relate to personally, all or one of your characters. So, to begin, the first step in writing your story is simple cognition, basically the notion that a story exists somewhere in your mind. Then, you have to come up with a setting. The third step, when you fully form your characters, is the most important, and then after that you can explore your plot, technique, and story structure. Finally, you begin actually laying our your story on paper. Your story will consist of plot, setting, characters, dialogue, point of view, theme, and style. It is dialogue that will make your fiction characters real to your readers. However, unnecessary dialogue can slow down a story and take away from it, as can overuse of dialogue. Dialogue should be used to more fully reveal your characters to the audience, as well as to help advance the story. It should not be used just for the sake of hearing characters talk. First person point of view is when the main character is telling the story him or herself. The use of “I” is an indicator of this, and a story told from this perspective can at times be very limiting, as readers’ opinions of other characters is heavily influenced by the main character’s, or narrator’s, own feelings. However, a story told from this point of view also creates an extreme amount of intimacy, which is both appropriate and beneficial depending on what your, the author’s, main objectives may be. A third person point of view can be either objective, meaning the narrator simply describes spoken dialogue and actions but cannot reveal thoughts and feelings, or omniscient, meaning the narrator can reveal thoughts and feelings of all the characters, as well as reveal their spoken dialogue and actions. Going back to the third step, in any story there are several different kinds of characters: protagonists, antagonists, sidekicks, romance interests, informed bystanders, complications, assistants, and clowns, just to name a few. However, in writing erotic fiction the presence of each of these types of characters is not necessary, but they are important to keep in mind, as they can often add a little something extra to your story. Also, you can make one of your characters a sidekick, a clown, a complication, etc. Rather than just two people who are sexually attracted to each other, it may be fun to sometimes typecast your characters and let your plot form accordingly. For example, say you want to write a |
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