Tell me if you've been in this situation before:
You are writing a plot-heavy scene, and you're aware that you have to slow things down and have a character-heavy scene. Then you know you have to write a plot-scene again, and then after that another character-scene.
But things aren't feeling quite ... right.
What do you do?
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Tropes, without context, don’t help our understanding of stories as much as many people think they do.
In this essay, I explore the reasoning behind this perspective, and the many flaws it introduces.
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For many of us, the first nucleus of a story idea is a character that springs to mind as if from nowhere. We might have a mental image all in a flash: how they look, how they talk, what they yearn for, and how they dream. Or we might just have a vague impression of a type of character we want to try, and we flesh them out from there…
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