What the Characters Said and Did

“Favor character interaction over setting.”    – Recent advice from a colleague

What this fellow meant was spend your time – the space on your pages – on character relationships, not on descriptions of setting. I agree with him. It is comparatively easy to write about place. To write of characters locking horns is much more complex. But this is where the story is. No one walks away from a story blown away by how the author described a woodland prairie. In fact, when a novel starts with a description of such a thing all most readers what is for the story to start.

Give enough setting to satisfy the reader (where and when – as plainly and unadorned as possible), then give them characters.

Characters are what they came to you for.

Characters are what they will remember years from now.

A hundred stories from now what the characters said and did are what will become part of your reader’s psyche.*

*By the way, your readers will not likely remember your name. They will struggle to remember who wrote that book with that character in it that they named their first kid after.