{"id":3192,"date":"2018-04-16T11:30:19","date_gmt":"2018-04-16T18:30:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/storymind.com\/blog\/?p=3192"},"modified":"2018-04-16T11:30:19","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T18:30:19","slug":"writing-con-men-shady-businessmen-and-seedy-politicians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/blog\/writing-con-men-shady-businessmen-and-seedy-politicians\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing Con Men, Shady Businessmen, and Seedy Politicians"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Characters, as with real people such as con men, shady businessmen, and seedy politicians, will often use statistics to paint a false, yet plausible, picture.<\/p>\n<p>For example, one such character might state that 12% of all high-school dropouts were beaten by their parents. What he doesn&#8217;t say is that 12% of high school graduates were also beaten by their parents.<\/p>\n<p>By not providing statistics for the whole group, there is no comparative, and a causal relationship between beatings and dropping out is inferred.<\/p>\n<p>To build your characters, read the news, see these techniques used in life and then apply that in fiction to believably drive your story forward .<\/p>\n<p>Melanie Anne Phillips &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/storymind.com\">Storymind.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p id=\"obi_random_banners_posts\" class=\"obi_random_banners_posts\"><a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Man-Made-First-Hour-Event-ebook\/dp\/B09WYXMFBV\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/storymind.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/Screenshot-2023-11-27-3.58.58-PM.png\" class=\"aligncenter\"><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Characters, as with real people such as con men, shady businessmen, and seedy politicians, will often use statistics to paint a false, yet plausible, picture. For example, one such character might state that 12% of all high-school dropouts were beaten by their parents. What he doesn&#8217;t say is that 12% of high school graduates were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-storytelling-tips"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p36xpN-Pu","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3192"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3193,"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3192\/revisions\/3193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storymind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}