My latest Dead Darlings blog post is now live:
My Novel Incubator instructors loved to tell us to kill our characters. Most of us came into class with drafts bloated with characters who served no purpose, so it was sound advice.
During revision, I created a giant diagram of all my novel characters and mapped their connections to one another with red, yellow, and green lines to indicate their interpersonal tension. I even cast the characters. The casting of characters was simply a matter of procrastination. All of this effort was, really. But the character map was helpful because I could see tangible evidence of character bloat. But that cast of characters in the diagram showed me something more important than that.
That cool typewriter image:
by Joelk75
