Chunking Method Part 3: Heroes & Villains

Chunking Method Part 3: Heroes & Villains Posted by CreateSpaceBlogger Oct 26, 2011 Carrying on with our topic of utilizing the chunking method to write a book, let's set aside the storyline for today and focus on characters, specifically your focal-point characters. Traditionally, these individuals are referred to as your hero and your villain, or your protagonist and antagonist. Now, throughout the history of literature, virtually every angle has been taken when it comes to the hero and the villain. For our purposes, let's focus on a simple model, bad guy versus good guy. Your chunking assignment for this element of your book is to not only flesh out each character, but also their relationship. Personally, I prefer when the hero and villain are more similar than different. That somehow makes the relationship scarier and more interesting to me. To that end, you might try writing a character sketch of each of them from the point of view of the other. What do they despise about each other? What do they see as each other's weaknesses and strengths? What do they admire about each other? These are notes that may never make it to your book, but they can give you a better sense of how the hero and villain will interact with each other within the confines of your story. When the character sketches are complete, take the beginning and ending elements we worked on last week and reshape them to sync up with your new character sketches. Remember, we're taking a nonlinear approach to the construction of this novel. Such a tactic will require you to rewrite a little more on the frontend than usual, but it should save you major rewrites on the backend. Once your focal-point characters are done, move on to the other main and secondary characters. Again, you might try having both your hero and villain describe them for you. Why are they important to the story? How will they serve the story? If physical attributes are important to you, flesh them out with this exercise. Next week, we'll talk about the inciting incident where our hero and villain meet. -Richard Richard Ridley is an award-winning author and paid CreateSpace contributor. You may also be interested in... Chunking Method Part 2: The Opening & Closing Use the Chunking Method to Write Your Book