And as much as your characters can be your imaginary friends, I feel like the reader in your head can be one, too.

it’s always easier to invest in someone who doesn’t entirely fit in, and who might see the injustices everyone else chooses to ignore.

I often find that when a character isn’t clicking, it’s because I’m avoiding the biggest pain points,

Because you can shape every aspect of a story, you can use perspective and irony to expose the true awfulness of a situation—or to provide hope for another way. You can pull back and show the big picture, the long view, through narrative choices that reveal all the stuff that the main character isn’t seeing. You can provide context through

Oftentimes, character growth comes down to one of the following: A character couldn’t do a thing before, and now they can. Or they were not willing to do a thing before, but now they’re willing.

Sometimes a lifeless character just needs another element to make them uncomfortable.

It’s amazing how often a character just needs a foil, or someone to bounce off, to start going through some changes.

And each scene is a little story unto itself, in which the characters have a problem or a conflict, and they grapple with it.

Cheap epiphanies are worthless, and any problem or conflict that gets solved too easily probably wasn’t that big a deal to begin with. Not that we need to see people suffer endlessly, but they at least need to wrestle with whatever dilemma they’re facing. The more major the characters, the more we need to see them earn any change of heart or