The secret to good fiction isn’t plot. It isn’t setting. It’s the characters. It’s characters we want; characters we love. Characters we fall in love with. Characters that break our hearts. A good, solid character can make the most trite, contrived story feel fresh and new. A good character can save a bad story. A bad story can’t save a good character. But how? That’s the question. It’s always the question. How? I’ve written much on creating compelling characters (and suspect

All things serve the story. Easy to say, hard to put into practice. As writers, we’re all in love with every word we grunt-and-push out of the glob of meat between our ears. We dote on them as though they were children, for that’s what they are. Writing is creative, and creativity is an act of birth. You’re bringing something into the world that wasn’t there before. Something that is made up of equal parts of yourself and the experiences you’ve suffered. Every word of dialogu