Notes is the title we cannot change in WriteItNow, this edition, so we make this folder where we put many of our lists for easy reference. As in the Character Elements List we see in part on the right screen you are given instructions in how to use the list. Here it says that while reviewing this generic writing list you can make similar lists for each of your main characters, at least.

You don’t have to do any of the list suggestions. Yet know if you don’t, you are missing out on an accepted convention or device in top novel or play writing. ‘Make characters bigger than life’ is then adapted to your characters. You make a list of character elements for each of your characters, and keep in mind to make these characteristics bigger than life. Maybe you do add a few ‘smaller than life’ characteristics for contrast. Yet greatness moves us more than smallness.

This is again what makes The Writer’s Interface unique. It is full of writing craft lists that you can add to. You also should transcribe each characteristic you choose to use into another list for each of your characters. Thus when you need to describe a character in action you can refer to the list you have devised and make actions and conversations that fit this character’s list of characteristics. A character is not a person, someone you know. A character is a bundle of characteristics that have pattern and cause and effect. Fiction is not life. Life is not fiction. Fiction is function. The images of people and other things represent functions, actions at work creating unique combinations of experience. Want to know how someone is loved? In your fiction go through the functions of loving someone in a fiction role-play. Imagine what fun it is for actors and actresses to rehearse over and over their functional roles, like making love or screaming at someone, until they get good at it.

Get good at what you do by doing it.

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