About Characters, And The New One I'm Writing About

If you're going to tell a story, you're going to have to have someone interesting to talk about.

That would be probably the First Law in dealing with characters in fiction, if I were so inclined to try my hand at creating my own version of On Writing. I'm not planning on that - even though this blog could be seen as a limited attempt to do that - but I do believe in the statement on top. Throughout the years, the more and more people I have met, the more I've noticed that a good number of them are too limited as humans to be truly compelling. It's all very good to stay true to life, but to make people want to pick up your story, you have to make it about people who will attract readers' fascination. To be frank, those characters have to be compelling for the sake of the author, because you'll be stuck with them for hours and hours as you try to tell their story.

When I started writing, I tended to write main characters that had very clear parallels to me. Every MC is like that to some e…