In order to learn enough about your protagonist to effectively write about him you need to conduct a follow up interview that focuses on details you need to develop the story. This follow up may interview look short, but should take longer than the initial interview. The two questions you need to answer are:

• What major weakness undermines your protagonist’s strong personality traits?
  • The protagonist needs to be likable so avoid weaknesses that will make people permanently loathe him.
• What monstrous problem does the protagonist have to overcome?
  • The problem should prey on the weakness. The final struggle to overcome the weakness should be part of the victory of the story.
  • Remember to never let the protagonist know he is going to succeed in overcoming this weakness. Let him face a complex set of problems that require his strong personality traits to overcome the issues. Ultimately the sacrifice of his weakness should be required for him to triumph.

Your secondary characters should only have one fundamental problem to solve. Do not try to get to know your secondary characters as well as your protagonist. If you do you will be tempted to develop too many complex characters which will result in a convoluted plot.

Feel free to sign up with or upload your story to Review Fuse, our community will tell you how well your characters have been developed and give you great ideas about how to further improve your story.

Jacob

In order to understand your characters, you need to dive into their minds and pasts. I recommend mentally sitting down with your characters one at a time in order to find out the following information about each of them. Listen to your characters’ answers and watch their reactions to the questions, as reactions can often be more telling than answers.

• Name
• Age
• Hair color
• Eye color
• Height
• Favorite color
• Worst and best physical feature
• Glasses, contacts, or have perfect vision
• Hobbies and interests
• Collections
• Neat or sloppy
• Talents
• Most embarrassing moment
• Heroes
• Relationship with parents
• Vices
• Strong personality traits
• The major goal for the character in your story and why is it important
• Events from the character’s past make this goal so significant
• What your character’s life is like right now, including family situation, motivations, job, etc…

Everything about your character is worth writing down. Unusual details from character interviews have a strange way of showing up in stories, so take time to get to know your characters before you try to write an epic adventure about them.

Jacob

Have you ever noticed it is easier to write about people you know then the ones you have made up? If not, try to answer these questions about the latest fictional character in your writing as well as a friend you know very well.

1. What would the person do if someone wanted to pick a fight with him/her

2. What would the person do if someone was flirting with him/her

3. What would the person do if offered money to rob a bank

A writer needs to know his characters as well as he knows his closest friends to write compelling, realistic, and strong characters. Many authors write pages and pages of character background information for each and every character, no matter how insignificant they may be. Most of this information will never appear in their final work, but with it the author doesn’t have to think twice about what choice her characters will make when they face decisions. The choices a character make are a product of the life they have lived and the beliefs they have, without knowing this you can’t know what choices they will make.

Ask yourself the following questions about your current main character.

1. What drives your character to be good/bad/apathetic? What is their driving force?

2. What was your character’s favorite childhood memory? What was the worst?

3. Who was your character’s favorite childhood friend?

If you don’t know the answer to these simple questions, you don’t yet know your character. Once you know your characters your story will practically write itself with you standing on the side watching your characters react how you knew they would.

Steve

Recently we have had questions and comments about our clean content policy that I would like to address. Please note that this policy is only enforced in the general Review Fuse community. Private groups are allowed to form and enforce their own content polices. Review Fuse does prohibit pornographic and illegal material in public and private groups.

When we started working on Review Fuse we had to make a decision of what material we wanted to allow to appear on our website. Some choices were cut and dry, such as the following statement from our terms and conditions that prohibits anything that is “unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, pornographic, libelous, invasive of another’s privacy, or harms minors in any way; that harasses, degrades, intimidates or is hateful toward an individual or group of individuals on the basis of religion, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, age, or disability.”

Other decisions, such as what is considered inappropriate language, were much more difficult to decide on. The overall deciding factor was that we wanted people age 13 and up to be comfortable using our site. In accordance, each member is given the right to filter out profanity when they are reading the story. This will replace profane words with replacement strings such as “*****”. While we do not wish to censor the work of our members, we do however, have to make sure we censor what appears on Review Fuse so our members will feel comfortable using the site.

Also, with that in mind, we adopted a clean content policy that we compare to PG-13 rating for movies. This is an overall guiding principle in that we do not provide a list of aspects that may or may not appear in the submitted work. The decision of whether or not a community flagged work is appropriate is left to the sole discretion of Review Fuse and it’s employees.

Do you have any questions about our clean content policy? What are your thoughts on letting the member choose to review/read an edited version of your work?

steve

We have read your suggestions from your emails and your comments to our blog post and have decided to allow the creation of personal writing groups. We are quite excited about this feature which will allow everyone to get exactly what they are looking for from a writing group. This will also allow writing groups, for whom it is hard to meet regularly, to move online for those weeks they can’t seem to get their schedules to match.

Just as we asked for your suggestions on what features to work on, we would also like your help on making sure we implement those features correctly. We have put together the following list of important aspects of personal writing groups.

• Groups may be public or private. Private groups will require a password to join and will not be visible on the list of writing groups. Public groups will have the option to allow all to join or to require each member to be approved by the group owner. The group owner will be able to remove members at anytime.
• When you submit an item for review, you will be able to choose where to submit the item. If you choose to submit to a personal writing group, then all your review assignments will come from work in that group and all your reviews will come from that group as well.
• The group owner can specify how many review assignments are required. For example, a group owner may say that for every submission the member will do and receive 1 review.
• Group owners are allowed to specify a title and description that will be visible to our members looking for writing groups to join.

Please let us know what you think about these features and if you have any additional ideas of things that would be important for you.

steve

Our site for facilitating peer-to-peer reviews recently got a review of it’s own in The 2009 Internet Directory: Web 2.0 Edition.

This book was co-authored by our good friend Mikal Belicove, who is a freelance writer, ghost blogger, and corporate communications and business management consultant. Mikal has the envious job of not only getting to work from home, but also getting to sit at a desk in front of a window with a great view of the ocean.

Back in June, I was in Laguna Beach visiting Mikal, and I told him about Review Fuse and showed him some early mockups and concepts of the site. He loved the idea and said it was just the type of site that should be included in his new book–which he just happened to be sending to his publisher that weekend. After peppering me with several questions, he wrote up a new entry for Review Fuse.

Check out our review as well as all the other great sites that were hand-picked and reviewed by Mikal and his co-authors in The 2009 Internet Directory: Web 2.0 Edition available now at Amazon.com.

Mikal and I at the beach near his house. Probably talking about Review Fuse

Clark

My favorite example of writing that is both intellectually and emotionally engaging comes from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. At the end of the novel, Sydney Carton calmly walks to the guillotine, willingly laying down his life for Charles Darnay. While walking to his death Sydney ponders the squandered life he has lead, how the Darnay’s gave him a family, and how by dying he is giving the Darnay’s back their family. As he pictures the happy future he is giving the Darnay family he calmly and solemnly remarks: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have even known.” This ending forces me to reconsider the entire story, the life and character Sydney Carton, and makes me want to read it again to better understand the complex dynamics of the book. How can we emulate this type of writing in our story’s?

Jacob

It’s been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, the words you choose to describe that picture to someone who has never seen it can fill that person with either enthusiasm and excitement or indifference and apathy. The movie below demonstrates the different reactions of people to the same message stated in two different ways. As you watch, pay attention to the subtitles, and see if you can identify the reason(s) for the second message’s success.

The original sign stated the problem, “I am blind”, and the solution, “have compassion.” By directly stating the problem and the solution, those passing by did not have a chance to emotionally or intellectually get involved with this beggar’s plight. Instead, the sign gave people an easy “yes” or “no” response. The words on the sign were typical of those used on most beggars’ signs—easily devised without much creativity—and, as a result, the words were just as easily ignored.

The Good Samaritan depicted in this film was able to help the panhandler reverse his fortunes by finding a different, more emotional way to say the same thing the panhandler had said. The reworked sign said “Today is a beautiful day, and I cannot see it.” This first phrase forced those passing by to stop thinking about the stresses and concerns in their lives and to consider the beautiful day in a new light. The second phrase appealed to their emotions, as they realized that the man with the sign could not enjoy the beautiful day they were experiencing, due to blindness. In contrast to the panhandler’s original sign, the words on this sign were creative, well thought out, and almost impossible to ignore.

One of the keys to effective creative writing is to involve your audience in identifying the problem and developing a solution to the problem. By thinking carefully about the words you use to describe a situation, you can invoke a powerful emotional response from your audience as your readers are allowed to discover a situation for themselves, feel for the characters in the story, and think about what they would do to resolve the problem if they faced it themselves. Such emotions help the reader to feel connected to the characters in the story, as well as personally invested in the outcome. Because the reader is personally invested in thinking through potential outcomes, the reader becomes much more absorbed in the story than he or she would be if he or she was, instead, blatantly told what the problem and its solution are.

Jacob

After you have received a peer review, please take one or two minutes to rate it. Rating the reviews you receive provides valuable feedback to your reviewers, which helps them learn how to improve their future reviews. The feedback about reviews also provides important information to our system about which reviewers give great, average and poor reviews. Our peer matching software uses the feedback you provide to match you more closely with your peers.

To rate a review go to the “Read Reviews” tab of your story and click the “Rate or Comment on this Review” link, as shown below. Once you’ve clicked on the link, you can use our short questionnaire, as shown in below, to provide feedback and comments about the review you received.

Rate or Comment on this Review

Short Questionnaire

Jacob

An oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines opposite or contradictory words, terms, phrases or ideas to create a rhetorical or paradoxical effect. For example, the word “oxymoron” was created by combining the Greek words “oxy”, meaning “sharp”, with “moros”, meaning “dull,” making the word oxymoron an oxymoron.

Oxymorons should be used to draw attention to contradiction. Notable authors, like William Shakespeare, filled their works with oxymorons like “damned saint”, “honorable villain” and “loyal deceit” to help readers capture the depth and character of their stories. The absurd descriptions oxymorons create often add humor and emphasize that the subjects they refer to are not real.  Examples include:

• Jumbo shrimp
• Meatless hamburger
• Fun run
• Working vacation
• Roaring silence
• The living dead
• Virtual real estate
• Genuine imitation
• Tight slacks

Oxymorons improve writing in a variety of ways by evoking fresh and vigorous images in your reader’s mind.

Do you want to have your writing critiqued? Join our writing group and let us help you.

Jacob