Tag Archives: Charles Dickens

When people die who were never born

Before we go on, please know that this post contains spoilers, specifically relating to The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens. If you haven’t already consumed as much of that novel as you want to, then stop here! After this … Continue reading

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finding another career for Charles Dickens

The word novelist is a generic one, comprising many and various species of writers before one gets down to the actual individual practitioners. For the kinds of book-length fiction fall along a wide spectrum. A natural way to categorize novelists … Continue reading

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creating characters, part 6: choosing a character arc

In the first 5 parts of this series we looked at the early stages of the process of creating a fictional character, which got us to combining a few archetypes to form the nucleus or chassis of the character. Now … Continue reading

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creating characters in epic fiction, part 2

Character creation is one of the most difficult and demanding tasks in the art of storytelling. Some people have a talent for it—I think Charles Dickens was one of these—while the rest of us have to stretch out a thinner … Continue reading

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not only public libraries have stacks

Ever since late adolescence I have maintained a reading stack: a stack of books that are all more or less on the go at the same time. When I was in my early 20s, my two roommates, semifacetiously, made a … Continue reading

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