Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Pro-Tip From Lucienne Diver
I’m pleased to have author and agent Lucienne Diver in the Pro-Tip seat this week. She’s a literary agent with The Knight Agency with twenty-three years of experience in the areas of fantasy, science fiction, mystery, romance and young adult fiction. She’s also author of the Vamped young adult series and the Latter-Day Olympians urban fantasy series.
Plot vs. Character?
Plot and character are both vital to your writing, BUT you can have the greatest plot in the world and no one will read your work if your point of view character isn’t compelling.
On the flipside, if your main character is intriguing and original with a voice all his, her or their own, you can truly invest your readers in what’s going on and keep them turning the pages to make sure everything turns out okay for your protagonist. A unique, dimensional antagonist is equally important. People are complex; your characters should be no less.
I guarantee that if you come up with amazing characters, you won’t settle for ho-hum things for them to do. Interesting characters will have interesting goals and real stakes. This is what really drives your story.
In 2014, following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Hope Nicholson and Rachel Richey published Nelvana of the Northern Lights, a trade paperback reprinting all the appearances of the eponymous Canadian super-heroine from the 1940s. IDW gave the book a wider release in hardcover and paperback later that year. It contains over 300 pages of comics written and drawn by Nelvana’s creator Adrian Dingle, mostly in black and white, along with forewords by the editors, an introduction by Dr. Benjamin Woo (Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Carleton University), and an afterword by Michael Hirsh (an artist and animator who founded a well-known animation studio named for Nelvana). It’s a nice package, designed by Ramón Pérez, a past winner of the Eisner, Harvey, and Shuster Awards.
