The Write Focus

4:21 / Transgressions / Discovering Characters

We’ve almost finished our Discovering Characters series. In the last episode, we presented how characters can be developed to reveal their growth or decline or their alterations.

In this episode, we present the dark side of characters: the Transgressions.

Only a couple of episodes remain in this series then we’re off on a Summer Challenge. For now, on with the episode.

Timings

• 0:39 Intro for Transgressions
• 1:10 Aristotle’s Tragic Hero (5 elements)
• 6:25 Examples: Macbeth, The Bookshop, Ophelia
• 12:30 Sevens
• 15:37 Writer / Protagonist / Antagonist
• 19:33 Closing

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is Discovering Characters. We’re bookcasting!

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook.
• Templates from the Discovering Characters series are also there.

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)

Discovering Characters  can be purchased at these links:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y7LYK19

https://books2read.com/u/3RJrZB

Discovering Your Writing, a bundle of four writing craft books, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08691892S

View the Trailer: https://youtu.be/hTVQn92kNBk

4:20 / Progressions / Discovering Characters

From the beginning of this Discovering Characters series, we’ve built our primaries from the ground up with templates and interviews We’ve looked at our individual primaries, the protagonists and antagonists, as well as our secondary characters and their relationships with our primaries.

The best characters are not static but change, whether they grow or decline. That’s today’s focus: Progressions.

Timings

• 0:39 Intro
• 1:14 Sliding Scales
• 1:39 Progressions
• 1:47 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (with a bit on PTSD)
• 8:58 Examples: 2 by Jane Austen & 1 by Jack London
• 12:07 Closing

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is Discovering Characters. We’re bookcasting!

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook.
• Templates from the Discovering Characters series are also there.

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)

Discovering Characters  can be purchased at these links:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y7LYK19

https://books2read.com/u/3RJrZB

Discovering Your Writing, a bundle of four writing craft books, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08691892S

View the Trailer: https://youtu.be/hTVQn92kNBk

4:19 / Character Lessons from Myths / Discovering Characters

We’ve reached the last major section of Discovering Characters, which is Décor or Special Touches for Characters and the Sliding Scales.

We begin with Lessons from Myths, primarily Greek mythology, that huge melting pot of myths.

Here in modern times we can barely see the distinctions in cultures that compose the myths. Time has blurred those distinctions for us, and now we look back and think one culture when it is many. The myth of Medea alone offers the collision of four different cultures.

This episode takes an extended look at something I developed after years of teaching mythology. It combines the traits of the Epic Hero with archetypes into what I called the Greek Heroic Pattern. We’ll look at the best example of the GHP from classical antiquity then offer 7 others that more from ancient times to our modern ones.

The addition of the Greek Heroic Pattern and 7 protagonists through time will have this episode running longer than usual (TOTAL RUN TIME = 34:39)

TIMINGS

• 0:39 Introduction
• 1:52 Special Touches for Characters / Lessons from Myths
• 4:47 Sacrifices that Protagonists have to make
• 6:10 Deities & Fighting against Deities
• 7:53 Heroes of Greek Myth
• 11:05 Intro to the Greek Heroic Pattern ~ 9 areas
• 15:13 Perseus in the GHP (Hollywood ruins a good protagonist)
• 19:52 7 Protagonists = Orpheus, Psyche, Arthur, “Invictus” persona, Darcy, Aragorn, and Iron Man
• 32:50 Closing

 

Direct Link to the Blog https://thewritefocus.blogspot.com/2023/03/character-lessons-from-myths.html

Discovering Characters can be purchased at these links:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y7LYK19

https://books2read.com/u/3RJrZB

Discovering Your Writing, a bundle of four writing craft books, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08691892S

View the Trailer: https://youtu.be/hTVQn92kNBk

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is Discovering Characters. We’re bookcasting!

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook.
• Templates from the Discovering Characters series are also there.

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)

4:18 / Mentors / Discovering Characters

Yoda. Q. Nanny McPhee. Spock. Gandalf. JARVIS. Dumbledore. Mary Poppins. Merlins.

All mentors.

A mentor is a wise elder who teaches, provide gifts, motivates and plants seeds. They are wise, mysterious, a little deranged, and incredibly awe-inspiring. They can be much-loved … or dark and dangerous. They can provides gifts willingly … or present challenges difficult to overcome.

Mentors can act for or against the protagonist, wish him/her well or curse to oblivion, and know the answer yet give wrong directions. Whatever their goal and motivations, mentors have four functions in story even as they improve our plots OR DESTROY THEM.

TIMINGS

• 0:39 Intro
• 3:25 Beginnings
• 6:30 4 Functions of the Mentor
• 9:51 Good & Bad
• 13:42 Mentors and Plots
• 15:00 Closing

Total Run Time = 16:39

 

Direct Link to the Blog https://thewritefocus.blogspot.com/2023/03/mentors-discovering-characters.html

Discovering Characters  can be purchased at these links:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y7LYK19

https://books2read.com/u/3RJrZB

Discovering Your Writing, a bundle of four writing craft books, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08691892S

View the Trailer: https://youtu.be/hTVQn92kNBk

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is Discovering Characters. We’re bookcasting!

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook.
• Templates from the Discovering Characters series are also there.

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)

4:19 / Tests from Enemies / Discovering Characters

Conflict moves stories.

The protagonist faces the conflict, battling with it and dealing with it. Whether our focus is Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, George R.R. Martin or Dean Koontz, the swiftest action-adventure or the highest literary fiction, the protagonist battles a conflict-creator.

The antagonist creates the deepest and longest conflict, yet other characters can also be conflict-creators, even if that character is not evil. These characters offer tests for our primary character.

One such character is the Love Interest. That’s a curious addition to an episode on Enemies. I’ll explain at the end of the episode.

For now, we have the Tests that come from Active Enemies of the Protagonist.

TIMINGS

• 0:39 Intro
• 1:41 Opening
• 3:28 1^st Test
• 6:43 2^nd Test, in 2 forms
• 9:35 3^rd Test
• 11:40 4^th Test, with 2 choices
• 15:43 Love Interest
• 18:32 Closing

Total Run Time = 20:11

Discovering Characters can be purchased at these links:

• https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y7LYK19
• https://books2read.com/u/3RJrZB

Discovering Your Writing, a bundle of four writing craft books, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08691892S

• View the Trailer: https://youtu.be/hTVQn92kNBk

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is Discovering Characters. We’re bookcasting!

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook.
• Templates from the Discovering Characters series are also there.

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)

4:16 / Allies and More / Discovering Characters

While Teams actively engage with the primary characters and the story’s conflict, many other characters will populate stories.

Whether in a short story, a simple anecdote in nonfiction, or in novels and epics, these other characters flesh out the skeleton of our writing. Allies, Foils, Love Interests, Blocking Figures, and more all participate in the conflict, driving it forward or directing the protagonist or antagonist.

In this episode, we present five of the key types of Allies and More.

 

CONTENTS

• 0:39 Intro
• 1:22 Allies, Enemies, and More
• 4:16 Allies for the Protagonist
• 5:07 Ally
• 7:04 Foil
• 10:06 Neither Ally nor Enemy
• 10:53 Herald
• 12:31 Blocking Figure
• 14:10 Idol
• 16:11 Trickster
• 17:30 Closing

Total Run Time = 19:08

 

Discovering Characters  can be purchased at these links:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y7LYK19

https://books2read.com/u/3RJrZB

Discovering Your Writing, a bundle of four writing craft books, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08691892S

View the Trailer: https://youtu.be/hTVQn92kNBk

 

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is Discovering Characters. We’re bookcasting!

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook.
• Templates from the Discovering Characters series are also there.

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)

4:15 /Team Roles / Discovering Characters

For writers, teams offer greater opportunities than a single protagonist or antagonist.

We are not limited to character’s perspective throughout the writing. We can have two who alternate or a group of characters whose diverse perspectives open a wider opportunity for conflict and tension.

Writers can have a lot of fun with teams. We can build a book or a series around a team. We can follow a single protagonist and the team through a series OR have a single protagonist with a changing team OR have alternate team members serve as the protagonist.

Teams give options … and every writers love options.

CONTENTS

• 0:38 Intro to Team Roles
• 2:36 Basics of Teams (*My apologies for my poor attempt at 4 Chinese art terms.)
• 6:46 4 Team Members ~ Alpha / Beta / Gamma / Delta
• 9:09 Team Members in Conflict
• 12:04 Conflict Reactions of Team Members
• 16:10 3 Leadership Styles
• 18:03 10 Team Roles ~ the Skeleton
• 20:55 Peck vs. Pack
• 21:57 Peck
• 24:13 Self-Selection of a Group
• 25:10 Pack
• 26:36 Closing

LINKS

Flow by Cyrus Molavi https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Classic-Achieve-Happiness-Introduction/dp/0712657592

Discovering Characters  can be purchased at these links:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y7LYK19

https://books2read.com/u/3RJrZB

Discovering Your Writing, a bundle of four writing craft books, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08691892S

View the Trailer: https://youtu.be/hTVQn92kNBk

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus.

We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is Discovering Characters. We’re bookcasting!

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook.
• Templates from the Discovering Characters series are also there.

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)

4:14 /3 Stages to Build a Relationships: The Tripod / Discovering Characters

Continuing Last Episode’s Focus on the Couple Bond / Relationships

Relationships of Choice are built in three stages. The bond between a couple is not driven solely by instinct or chemical pheromones. It is not mere attraction of the eyes. The links of the bond are formed by more than common association.

An enduring Relationship of Choice requires three parts, occurring in stages. It’s a Tripod, and each leg, built one after the other, becomes dependent on the other.

Contents

• 0:40 :: Introduction
• 1:20  :: The Tripod / What Creates Enduring Love?
• 2:52 :: Stage 1
• 5:30 :: 4 Steps to Attraction
• 8:24 :: Stage 2
• 11:25 :: Opposites Do Attract
• 12:28 :: Stage 3
• 14:23 :: Traps that Destroy Devotion
• 15:59 :: To Love Deeply and Well
• 17:10 :: Closing

 

LINKS

Women who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes https://www.amazon.com/Women-Who-Run-Wolves-Archetype/dp/0345409876

Discovering Characters  can be purchased at these links:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y7LYK19

https://books2read.com/u/3RJrZB

Discovering Your Writing, a bundle of four writing craft books, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08691892S

View the Trailer: https://youtu.be/hTVQn92kNBk

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is Discovering Characters. We’re bookcasting!

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook.
• Templates from the Discovering Characters series are also there.

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)

4:13 / Relationships: Contract vs.Choice

Marriage by Contract rather than Choice. Matchmakers. Divorce.

Contracted Relationships, the legal contract of the Marriage Ceremony, and the Dissolution of the Marriage Contract is the focus of this episode as we venture into the Relationship section of Discovering Characters.

Couples and the bonds that change individuals into couples are the focus of the first two episodes. Then we look at Team Roles, Allies, and more.

For now, Couples in a Contract (and the wife as chattel ... grrr).

Content

• 0:39 :: Introduction
• 1:07  :: Opening / The Couples Bond
• 2:27 :: Contract vs. Choice / Matchmakers
• 5:20 :: Relationships of Choice > Uncommon
• 5:30  :: Marriage = Property Transfer / A Legal Contract
• 8:45 :: Breaking Relationships
• 12:00 :: Closing

Discovering Characters  can be purchased at these links:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y7LYK19

https://books2read.com/u/3RJrZB

Discovering Your Writing, a bundle of four writing craft books, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08691892S

View the Trailer: https://youtu.be/hTVQn92kNBk

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is Discovering Characters. We’re bookcasting!

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook.
• Templates from the Discovering Characters series are also there.

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)

4:12 / 4 Last but not Least Primaries / Discovering Characters

In our look at Jungian archetypes for primary characters, we have four that are the most unexpected of all.

These four can become surprising protagonists. As antagonists, they seem pathetic--until we realize that we deal with these conflict-creators every day of our lives.

It’s the 4 Last but not Least Primaries.

Contents

• 0:39 Intro
• 1:12 Opening
• 1:54 Everyman / Victim
• 3:27 Lover / Stalker / Siren / Seducer
• 6:13 Innocent / Willfully Blind
• 7:47 Trickster / Fool
• 12:19 Closing

Total Run Time = 14:03

 

Discovering Characters  can be purchased at these links:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y7LYK19

https://books2read.com/u/3RJrZB

Discovering Your Writing, a bundle of four writing craft books, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08691892S

View the Trailer: https://youtu.be/hTVQn92kNBk

Thanks for listening to The Write Focus. We focus on productivity, process, craft, and tools. Our podcast is for newbies who want to become writing pros and veterans who are returning to writing after years away.

Our current focus is Discovering Characters. We’re bookcasting!

Support the podcast with a cup of coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/winkbooksr

• You can find workbooks and templates at Buy Me a Coffee. Just up is the Enter the Writing Business Workbook.
• Templates from the Discovering Characters series are also there.

For more links and resources, visit www.thewritefocus.blogspot.com  .

Write to us at winkbooks@aol.com.

If you find value in this podcast, please share with your writing friends or write a review. (We’re small beans. We don’t have the advertising budget of the big peeps. You can make a difference.)