I found this photo on Flickr. Entitled “The Problem with Character-Driven Stories,” the photo had an amusing story to go along with it.

As the story goes, there was a writer who was auditioning characters for her next novel. Characters lined up all the way out the writer’s waiting room and around the corner. And most of them, unfortunately, were about the same as all the others. Here’s an example that exemplifies what I’m talking about:

A character named Jean entered, sat down.

“Okay, then, Jean,” said the writer. “Tell me about yourself.”

“I’m 24. I have medium-long mousey-blonde hair. I drink vodka and Coke. I’m pretty boring.”

“And you’d like to be in a story?”

“Yes, please.”

If 90% of everything is crap, that rule certainly applies to television. Most of what I see of current television series leaves me woefully unsatisfied, and even a little pissed off. Then, this past weekend, my parents introduced me to In Plain Sight, a show that a friend of mine called “a mid-grade crime procedural.” Interesting take, as I had a significantly more positive reaction.

I’ve only just gotten through season 1 and into season 2 on NetFlix Watch Instantly, in addition to the few season-3 episodes I saw on Sunday. Based on what I’ve seen, this show stands out, in my view, from other crime procedurals. Because it integrates character and plot more deeply than the typical TV crime drama, for a much more powerful result. And In Plain Sight provides an opportunity to talk about Critical Fandom.

They say ideas are a dime a dozen, even character ideas. Many experienced authors don’t even think about it anymore; they don’t remember when they were just starting out, facing a blank page, without any idea how to make their characters full and interesting. Because when it comes right down to it, if you want ideas for your fictional characters should be like, you can just look at the people around you. I tend to write down character ideas, as they occur to me, in an idea journal, which I can then go back to for inspiration when I’m when I’m writing a story. All authors at some level base their fictional characters on what they observe of real-life people.

But it takes more than just throwing character ideas at the page, if you want to end up with an actual story. Character ideas may give you zany and quirky, but if you want your characters to have depth, you have to make them feel like real, full-fledged people. In other words, you need characters that have a story to tell.

PJ Kaiser suggested—probably because I’ve been doing weekly "#FridayFlash Favorites" posts—that I write about what catches my attention in a flash story, and what turns me off.

I thought that was a pretty kewl idea, and I further decided to link to last week’s #FridayFlash stories (because they’re still fresh in my mind) in order to demonstrate each point. As it turns out, this post has grown long enough to span over two days. So I’ll go through the first 3 turn-ons (and 5 turn-offs) today, and finish up tomorrow.

(Maybe I’ll post another follow up next week, the short version, just a checklist without the explanation. That’ll be far fewer words, but you’ll probably need to read the long version to understand what I’m talking about.)

Having sifted through about 100 stories a week since I started these posts, I’m probably qualified at least to venture an opinion. On top of that, I (usually) know what I like, and (usually) know how to write what I like—which also comes with experience—so I know why I like it.

Even so, my opinions are just that: opinions. The more experience I gain as a writer and author, the more I realize that there’s no right or wrong when it comes to creative expression. (Us indie authors, that’s our rightful motto, you know.) There’s only what you like (or dislike) and what you like (or dislike) about it. So as you go down the following list of positives and negatives—especially if I linked to your story to exemplify one of the negatives—if you think I’m full of BS… well, you’re probably right.

In general, I look for pretty much the same in flash as I look for in any story. The only difference between flash and longer stories is that flash fiction is, uh, shorter. Therefore, the best flash stories respect the length and use it to effect. Other than that, I admire the same qualities in flash that excite me about short stories, novellas, novels, movies, TV episodes, graphic novels, …

I love character stories. In fact, I rarely enjoy a story unless it has a character-driven component.

So I was naturally surprised that I so enjoyed Al Bruno’s latest #FridayFlash story. It’s not really a character story, per se. Or is it?

I actually have a different take on that now, different than last week. I think it is a character story, but not in the traditional sense.

Entitled “Breaking the Girl,” here’s the story’s basic outline—

One of the more recent—and to me, interesting—psychological models is the APET model, introduced by UK psychologists Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell. Their goal was to help improve upon cognitive psychotherapy by overcoming its limitations. But from a writer’s perspective, the APET model reflects much of the wisdom regarding human nature that storytellers have known for ages. And it builds on this wisdom with the latest discoveries from the fields of psychology and neurophysiology. This lets us writers see a more complete picture of what’s going on inside the heads of our characters, and therefore we can write them better.

This episode I’d like to call “The Crunchy Shell and the Creamy Middle,” but I don’t think anyone would be able to figure out what I was talking about. Stories use two types of conflict: internal and external. Internal conflicts are resolved by something changing inside the character, whereas external conflicts are resolved in the world around outside the character. When these two work together, the result can be dazzling. And when they don’t, the result can be devastating.

Spoilers! Spoilers! Spoilers! This episode contains spoilers for Gilmore Girls season 4 episode 8, “Die, Jerk…” and for Philip Pullman’s novel The Golden Compass, as well as for the Roswell episode “Ch Ch Changes.”