Blog
Updates and behind-the-scenes notes from Charlie Forêt.
Filter by tag : CharacterPOV
The New Character Template
The Character Template: Build a Character You Can Come Back To Every writer has a graveyard of half-finished character sheets. Mine used to live in Word documents named things like char_notes_FINAL_v3.docx. The template was fine. The problem was everything around it: no consisten…
The 14-Chapter Silence: Writing Trauma Without Putting It on the Page
Content Warning: This post discusses the craft of writing sexual assault aftermath in fiction. Here is a scene I chose not to write. It would have been the scene where everything that shapes Elara’s subsequent behavior in Technomancer actually happened — the event that explains h…
Six Voices, Zero Tags: Why Character Voice is Constraints, Not Personality
There’s a test I run on every POV chapter in Technomancer: strip the chapter heading and ask whether the reader can still tell who’s talking. If the answer is no — if the voice could belong to any of the six point-of-view characters — the chapter isn’t ready. Not because the pros…
Both Ages at Once: Writing a Narrator Who Is Simultaneously 65 and 15
There are two ways to fail this particular craft problem, and they both destroy reader trust in different directions. Paul Taylor in Another Past is sixty-five years old — a physicist who died in a lab explosion and woke up fourteen years old in 1979. He has the full memory and e…