Being a Better Writer: Who or What Do Your Characters Trust?

I'm back, and figured you guys would like a link to this week's post.

Welcome back, writers! I hope you enjoyed the last few weeks with their looks at some of Being a Better Writer‘s top posts. And, even if you’d read them before, you found some new insights or knowledge as you passed through their paragraphs. Or at least, had a fun time guessing what the most popular BaBW posts on the site (at least through the last five years) were as each Monday rolled around.

But now we’re back with our regularly scheduled content. Well, inasmuch as there is a schedule outside of “Being a Better Writer goes up on Mondays.” That, and a list of content. But I digress …

We’re back, and diving right in with a reader-requested topic concerning character trust.

Now, a few of you might be raising your eyebrows, but I thought this was an interesting topic to write about. Specifically, this is a character concept, whether that character is a young schoolteacher with dreams of brilliant students (who trusts the system, or perhaps the students) or a government that is an entity attempting to gain the trust of its subjects/citizens/peasantry/there-are-a-lot-of-government-types-out-there, this is an attribute that may be quite helpful in both figuring out aspects of your character, but also be something that can drive a lot of plot if used properly.

So hit the jump, and let’s talk about trust.

Continue reading →

Comments

[Georg]

FYI: This is a *HUGE* issue in writing, and I'm really wondering why Larry and Steve at The Writer Dojo podcast haven't covered it in the last hundred episodes (or they did and I missed it, which is possible)

I hate to gush on Lois McMaster Bujold too much, but the first book in the Miles Vorkosigan series Shards of Honor is an excellent primer on how a writer can balance trust, love, honor, and duty in just a few chapters, and rip your heart out in the process. You get two characters described almost at once, both of whom are in terrible emotional pain, and unable to trust anybody but each other in the end.

“The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present — they are real.”