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Write Your Novel
Step by Step
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Thousands of writers use StoryWeaver to build their story’s world, characters, plot, theme,
and genre.
Thousands of writers use Dramatica to find and refine their story’s structure and to find and fix holes and missteps.
- 200 Interactive Story Cards guide you from concept to completion, step by step.
- Help Buttons with Writing Tips, Example Stories, Hints, and Tricks.
- Work on multiple stories at once.
- Jot down creative notes from anywhere in StoryWeaver.
- Placeholder: Pick up writing where you left off.
- Develop multiple levels of detail for your plot and characters.
- Intuitive navigation path helps you follow your Muse.
- Works on any device: desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, Windows, Macintosh, iOs, Android & Chrome
- Patented Story Engine cross- references your dramatic choices to create a structure map.
- AI style narrative model finds holes, missteps and suggests how to fix & fill them.
- Automatically generates a timeline from your story’s structural map.
- Offers three levels of detail depending on the complexity of your story.
- Includes hundreds of examples, tips, tricks, and techniques.
- Comes with more than sixty structural maps for classic and popular novels, movies and stage plays.
~ Step 14 ~
Unusual Characters
In the previous step you added to your cast list some characters who would not raise an eyebrow if they showed up in your story’s world.
Now, let yourself go a bit (but just a bit) and list a number of characters that might seem somewhat out of place but would still be fairly easily explainable in such a story as yours.
Example:
In our example story of a small town in the old west, these “unusual characters” might include:
A troupe of traveling acrobats
Ulysses S. Grant
A Prussian Duke
A bird watcher
You may be wondering why you’d want to have such odd characters in an otherwise normal story. The reason is to prevent your story from being too normal.
Neither reader nor publisher will want to waste time or money on a book that is just a rehash of the same tired material they’ve read over and over again.
What they are looking for is something with a unique personality – something that sets itself apart from the usual run of the mill.
Adding one or two somewhat unexpected characters to a story can liven up the cast and make it seem original, rather than derivative.
Once again, you won’t be married to all these characters. They are just a gene pool from which to select your actual cast in a later step.
So, add to your list some slightly odd, offbeat, unexpected or quirky characters – no one too unusual, mind you – just folks who would not immediately come to mind in a story such as yours but could be explained with a little effort – folks to add a little color and interest to your story.
In the next step we’ll pull out all the stops!
