Creative Writing - Is Your Character Religious - Better Get That Religion Correct

One interesting thing about creative writing is that you can use stereotypes and say things that you can't say in public due to our politically correct world. However, you need to make sure that the stereotypes you use are correct, and in the case of developing a character of a certain religious background, you need to understand that religion so you don't mess it up. There are a couple reasons why this is critical; some of your readers may be of that religion, or a literary critic could be of that religion.

If you mess that up, they will never live it down, and take you to task. Perhaps, it is for this reason that as a writer I have reference books on writing that I keep next my desk. One book I'd like to recommend to you was written by Martin Roth who is a Hollywood screenwriter and he wrote most of the episodes for Hawaii 50; the name of the book is "The Fiction Writers Silent Partner," and it is a book I highly recommend.

We all know the basics such as Hindus don't eat cow meat, and Muslims don't eat pork or drink alcohol. We also know the devout Catholics still eat fish on Fridays, but can you name one single religious activity of a Jehovah's Witness? Well then, you need to learn if you're going to have a character who happens to be a JW. Let's say your character is in the Jehovah's Witness' Pioneer Program, are you aware of the types of activities, that they are involved with? Do you know what type of jobs they're allowed to take and how many hours they are allowed to work?

What if one of your characters comes from an Amish family, can you describe how they grew up, what their family life was like, or how they got along without modern amenities? Or what it was like to ride a bicycle and drive a buggy everywhere around town? Are you seeing what I'm trying to get at, the reality is you need to know if you're going to develop your characters correctly, and if any of your characters have any religious background. Since about 80% of the population does, at some point or another you're going to need to know this information. So please consider this.

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Creative Writing Character Development - Where is Your Character From?

If you write a good deal of fiction, and you are a creative writer, then you know that character development is one of the most important things. When you are describing your character you need to explain to the reader where the character is from, and you must make it believable. This is difficult if you've never been to the area, or if you don't know the history of the area. That's why you need to do your research, and when I say research and not talking about Wikipedia, I'm talking about real research.

After retirement, I spent seven years going to every single city in the United States, and I finally visited at least every city in the US with a population of 10,000 or greater. In doing so I got to know the cities, towns, and metro-areas. I sat in coffee shops, I talked to people, I went to museums, and as I did so I would look up on the Internet is much as I could about the town, mostly due my own curiosity. Imagine my dismay reading a novel, when I see mistakes in it, and that happens way too often - I believe it is due to laziness of writers not to do their homework properly.

If you're going to choose a set of characters that are from various locations, but you've never been to those regions then you really need to stop and do your research, because believe it or not especially in this day and age of the Internet, your novel will spider under the names of the cities where your characters are from, because that's how search engines work. That means there will be individuals from those areas where you say your main characters are from, who actually live there.

This is because they will be searching something on the Internet, and the results will have the name of their city in their search, and they will find your work, or novel. Perhaps, they will buy your digital book. If you make a mistake about the history of their city you have immediately lost the reader, and they probably won't buy another one of your novels, because the one they read last became unbelievable and because you don't know what you're talking about. Where your characters are from is very important in creative writing, and you need to get the story straight. Please consider all this.

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Creative Writing - Does Your Character Come from a Perfect Family - Is That Believable?

Whenever you are trying to develop characters for a creative writing project, anything over the size of a very short story, you're going to need to pencil out exactly who that character is before you start. As you get better and better at creative writing, or writing novels, you will be able to keep most of this in your head for the major characters, and eventually you'll get to know the characters so well in your own head, that you can make a series of books without making mistakes.

Until then however it is recommended that you have a sheet of paper with all the particulars of each character, and you can add to this as you go, but it's good to have it all written down ahead of time. One of the most important things is to have a history or background of the character. Where they came from, and what type of family they grew up in. Was it a Mormon family, was it a Catholic family, was it a farm family, or was it a family of a long line of military soldiers, and officers?

These sorts of things run deep in families, and they help define who the individual is, what they are about, and it helps predict what they might do in the future. Your characters must be believable, and there will be reasons why they do the things they do based on how they grew up, and the events in their life, and early family.

One thing I've noticed as I review other author's works is I often see the author explaining the family as the perfect Ozzie and Harriet family, or similar to the Happy Days or the Walton's. That's all fine and good, but is it believable, if you are to develop a character which is quite dynamic, or quite moody, or does something very sinister, it may not make sense that they came from the perfect family, your reader is not going to buy it. Indeed I hope you will please consider what I've said here today, and think on it as you develop your own characters for your next creative writing project.

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Creative Writing - What Happens When Your Character is More Creative Than You?

As a very prolific writer myself, I've often been asked by other writers to look over their manuscripts. Usually it's a close acquaintance which asks for assistance and they want me to let them know if anything jumps out at me. They want to make sure that as a critical reader I can spot the flaws in their continuity, in their characters, in their plot, or storyline. Then they want me to be quite frank and honest with them about where they've made mistakes, or where they can improve.

Now then, normally I don't like doing this because it's easy to hurt the author's feelings, but a creative writer must be able to take it in stride, or they're just never going to get a publisher to accept their work. And even if they do get their book gets published, it won't get very good reviews, and their feelings are going to get hurt in public, rather than in private. Not long ago, I was helping out an individual and I noted that they were quite creative in their own right, but they were writing a story, it was a novel, about a brilliant creative person.

Indeed, I could tell that they were trying to put themselves into the main character - however, the main character was literally at the Leonardo da Vinci plateau of creativity, innovation, and genius. They were struggling because they couldn't get into the character they were trying to write, and they were writing about themselves. I had to explain to them that although they were very creative in their own right, the character they had chosen is more creative than they are out in this real world.

And what I explained was that they needed to consider a multi-dimensional reality, where all the possibilities of everyone's life were playing out somewhere else in the universe. And if there was someone just like them, actually it was them, but they were in a different world and in that different world there were slightly different circumstances in how they were brought up, what they learned, what their hobbies were, and how they became to be this great inventor, innovator, and creative designer.

I was asking them to step outside themselves, and not re-create their character but hold themselves out of the character so they can adequately describe what was going on. I also suggested they go read a several books, one of them was "Profiles of Genius" and the other two were books on the biography of Benjamin Franklin, and the biography of Tesla.

Not many creative writer authors do a very good job of describing brilliant creative innovators, especially the ones that are at the top of the food chain and at the genus level. It's not that it can't be done, but it gets rather difficult if you try to make that main character one with your current reality. Please consider all this.

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