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In this article we’ll examine the introduction of the character Rose in the latest Star Wars film – The Last Jedi – and see how the writers create an interesting, sympathetic character with a few deft strokes. The Star Wars franchise has had its ups and downs – the original movies created some of the…

We all know that a good story needs a good antagonist – someone to push the hero to their very limits. But have you considered that you might need multiple villains? Note – as an analysis, this article necessarily contains multiple spoilers for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. If this is going to be…

Cameo characters are minor characters who only have a very small part to play in your story, usually to facilitate the plot or demonstrate some aspect of another, more major, character’s personality. If you’re a dedicated novelist, you’ll usually write a great deal of detail and back story about all your major characters, including history,…

In most cases, you will be telling your story from the point of views of your characters. Some novels stay with a single character viewpoint for the whole story, others will jump about between different people. But a useful technique for fleshing out your plot and building up a three dimensional world with living, breathing…

There are many, many, books on creating decent characters, and we’re going to try to summarise character creation in a few brief study notes, so please keep in mind the limitations of what we’re doing here. We’ve distilled a few key points, rules of thumb and techniques but there is more – so much more.…

The names of your characters matter a great deal. There are unusual names which are now so imprinted on particular characters that it seems impossible to separate the two, such as Heathcliff, Hannibal, Simba and Cinderella. Each of these names reflects the character and the themes of their story. Heathcliff is literally ‘heath’ and ‘cliff’…