Character Fiction 101: Table of Contents
This is an archived post, originally published on Be the Story (bethestory.com).
I’m working on an ebook, entitled Character Fiction 101: How to Write Fictional Characters and Character Stories. I plan to give the ebook away for free, for a number of reasons that I lay out in the book’s introduction— Mostly because I long to see more online authors turn out high-quality character stories. Many of the stories I read hit-and-miss at best. I’m hoping that authors will explore the ideas I’m overviewing in this book and that they’ll integrate them more fully into their stories.
Yeah, maybe that’s a little egotistical. But these are the principles and characteristics that I personally value in a character story. They define what I consider “good” fiction. Naturally, I’d be overjoyed if more authors only wrote like me. (Eh. What’y’a gonna do?)
BTW, I also plan to release the book in print, probably at a nominal price-point, because the book is only an overview (probably about 100 pages) of an exceedingly deep subject area, as deep as the human psyche.
Much of the content of this book comes originally from this blog and from research I’ve collected during my years as a character author. Of course, I still need to revise what’s already written and flesh out what isn’t yet. I’m hoping to have that done sometime next week, working at breakneck speed. (But please don’t hold your breath, because there are a dozen things that could go wrong.)
UPDATE: Early April, and I’ve discovered it’s going to be weeks before I finish, because I’m extending the content, in some cases by an order of magnitude. But in the meantime, I’m posting extracts from the new content on this blog.
For now, I have managed to put together an outline for the book, which I’m including below in the form of an extended Table of Contents.
Keep writing! -TimK