Up this week is The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones. This book has been around since 1996 (first publised in the UK, now available from Penguin the US through their Firebird imprint) and has been justly lauded and reviewed LOTS of places, so I’ll be brief.
The Guide is arranged as an A-Z [...]
Entries Tagged as 'character development'
writer’s bookshelf: the tough guide to fantasyland
November 10th, 2009 · No Comments
Tags: book review · character development · plot · storytelling
Just for fun (or if you’re really stuck): the Fantasy Name Generator
May 18th, 2009 · No Comments
If you are really, truly, very bad at naming characters, and you write fantasy fiction, here at last is help: the Fantasy Name Generator.
I wish I could think of the author who did this, but I was reading about someone (whose writing I respect and whose invented names generally went well with her characters – [...]
Tags: character development
Saving yourself from (your own) stereotyped characters
July 3rd, 2008 · 1 Comment
A few months back, I ran across a huge controversy about The Stolen Word, a short story by Lisa Mantchev, which was published in Fantasy Magazine and immediately came under criticism for its portrayal of “peddlers,” which many readers took to be thinly disguised Roma (aka Gypsies) or Tinkers (a distinct racial group in Ireland [...]
Tags: character development · editing and revising · generating ideas
