Being a Better Writer: Character Competence · 1:01am March 19th
Welcome back writers, to more Being a Better Writer! As this post was written well in advance and scheduled to go up while I in theory am boarding an airplane with a secure door plug, I have no news to speak of. Save a reminder that if you’re a Patreon Supporter, to go vote for the next project after Axtara 2!
But yes, this post cannot predict future news, so instead of waxing on what’s going on, we’re just going to dive right into today’s topic, which is a sort-of request.
Why sort-of? The topic itself came from an excellent comment left by reader georgfelis on a previous Being a Better Writer installment. A few weeks ago, when we spoke of uncertain characters, this poster left a great comment (which you can read here) taking the post one step further and creating a four-way graph, with “certain/uncertain” on one axis, and competent/incompetent on the other. They offered examples of different well-known characters representing each corner of the graph, as well as examples of how those characters were used, and suggested I augment the original post in some fashion with that excellent addition.
I’ll admit, I definitely considered it. This post was almost that breakdown. Save that when I sat down to look harder at it, I realized I’d just be repeating what had already been stated in a satisfactory fashion. Hence why I’m linking to the comment above. If you read the original post but didn’t see georgfelis’ comment on it, I’d suggest reading it. It’s a really good addition to how you think about certainty in your stories.
But it did raise a great subject as well, that being character competence. So rather than restating georgfelis’ words on the matter, I thought I’d dedicate a post to the other axis of that comment and talk about how competent our characters may or may not be.
So hit both jumps, the comment link above and the link to the rest of the post, and let’s talk about how competent your characters are.
