Character Development

Recorded 2026-06-15 I jump into progress reporting because I have very little progress to report. My frustration is palpable. Michael shares that he's felt the same way several times with his current work. Michael has edited nine chapters. He's cut 470 words from his novel. We talk about working on other projects in order to keep the flow going, reading other people's works for inspiration, how we hone our prose, and how a contest judge can either get or miss what we're doing. This takes us into a discussion of themes on our work, themes in literature, and the varied ways a reader can react to our stories. We cycle back to progress when editing and how a negative word count is good, and the pains in cutting prose we like to make the overall work better. We move on to this week's topic: Character Development. I talk about how a character develops as the work progresses. We talk about writing character biographies to establish who they are and how specific we are when defining our characters, in terms of physical descriptions. Michael talks about creating characters that mirror his own. Next episode: Killing our Darlings