Writing News
This week I completed exercises #10, #11, and #12 in the Writing The Breakout Novel Workbook. Number 10 was Creating Secondary Characters in which I was supposed to make my secondary characters more memorable, and I did all of the exercises but the material I came up with just didn’t work for those characters and didn’t end up going into the manuscript. A good exercise though. Number eleven was a long chapter and double exercise concerning antagonists. I learned a couple of new things about my antagonist and his minions and made a few changes which was nice. Then on to #12 which was Enriching Your Cast and was the final exercise in the “Character” section of the book. For this chapter you were supposed to combine the rolls of some characters and try taking some characters completely out of the picture because you had given their jobs to others. This didn’t work out so well for me. When I did this chapter for my last manuscript it was an enormous eye-opening experience as I had several vicious thugs menacing my protagonist along the way and I ended up rolling them all up into one big mean bad guy and it made the whole thing much better. Well…I did so much character work ahead of time and all of my secondary characters had so much intricate backstory that I just couldn’t combine any roles at all without ruining the plot. So I pretty much had to leave it as is, but still, a good exercise.
