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May 2010
#12: Judging Minor Characters
Defining Minor Characters
Once the protagonist and antagonist are identified, minor characters are everyone else in the story from the protagonist's sidekick to the owner of the weapon shop who only has one scene.
Minor character have the same issues as your major characters. You need to make sure you know their backgrounds, how they would react, what makes them tick. The major difference is the less time the minor character spend in the story so the less you have to tell the reader.
#12: Plot: Build Your Plot
Writing Tutorial #11 does not describe you as a writer. In fact, you get cold chills considering "winging it." You need everything worked out before you start writing. This is a technique created by Frederick C. Davis that I found in The Mystery Writer's Handbook. He describes it in detail using the brainstorming of his novel Drag the Dark featuring Schuyler Cole and Lucas Speare of the Cole Detective Agency.
#11: Pronouns
"A pronoun is a word used in place of one or more nouns." (Warriner's 5) But don't write the pronouns off. Just think how monotonous writing would be if we always had to call things by their proper names or had to show possessions with a prepositional phrase starting with "of" not to mention asking questions and avoiding repetition would get a lot harder without pronouns.
#11: Hard Look at the Antagonist
Identify Your Villain
The next step in revision is to take a hard look at your villain or antagonist. Note that I use the singular—“villain” or “antagonist.” If you have more than one, you may be diffusing the impact of the character’s villainy by spreading it. Stein on Writing Page 280
By going step by step, we have discovered a major matter that needs correcting and will impact the entire story.
#11: Plot: Outline or Not
This is going to sound completely against everything I have told you previously in these tutorials: the story does not have to have a written outline.
"But you said write everything down!"
