Writing Excuses Transcripts

Writing Excuses 9.3: Character Perception vs. Narrative Perception with Nancy Fulda

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2014/01/19/writing-excuses-9-3-character-perception-vs-narrative-perception-with-nancy-fulda/

Key points: Characters and the narrative do not always agree. For example, historical characters may have biases that modern readers and narrators disagree with. Be careful about sliding into didactic storytelling. One approach is to make sure the story is not about the bias. Sometimes it's just that characters have pieces of information that are wrong. You can use this to indicate what the characters don't know, but often you need to hang a flag on this. Author's notes, footnotes, and afterwords do not mean you don't need to be careful in the writing. Listen to feedback.
( Do you really believe that? )
[Brandon] Exactly. We are out of time. This is a very useful podcast. But I'm going to require... Howard! You're grimacing. Give us a writing prompt.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Okay. Take something that you believe to be false. That you completely understand to be false. Write a character who has the absolute opposite belief. Do it in such a way that you take actual umbrage at the idiocy of your character. Now find ways to hang flags on that so that you're not mad at yourself as an author.
[Brandon] All right.
[Nancy] Also, make it so that at the end of the book, you almost understand why your character believes that.
[Howard] So Nancy wants you to actually write a whole book with this prompt. It's on. She has thrown it down.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.