fat, forties, and still fighting
In case you’ve stumbled onto this via the Internet and don’t know me at all, you need to know two things about me: I have been a Star Wars fan since I was five years old, sitting in the backseat of my parents’ car watching A New Hope at the drive-in in 1977. And I’ve been in love with Luke Skywalker for about that long. (Spoilers for The Last Jedi.)
Whew. Okay. So you have your germ of an idea, and you hopefully have some characters. Now what? Now you start sort of trying to fit them together. At this point, you probably don’t have a full plotline in your head. Or at least, you may not realize that you do.
If you want to write about a woman being hunted and held captive and falling in love (or at least in lust) with her captor for the love of all that’s holy, don’t put it into a real historical context.
Characters are usually one of the first things that come to me when I’m working on a story. They’re one of the things I started with a natural ability to do–which means when I needed to take the next step to improve my characterization, I had no idea how the hell to do that, because it had all been instinctual up to that point.
