character

25 posts

Characters I Love – Sidney Carton

Sidney Carton was one of the first characters I really loved (after Winnie the Pooh and other childhood favorites), and the one who set me on a multi-year Dickens-and-other-classics phase that lasted through middle school and high school. Charles Dickens isn’t known for his rollicking adventures or his page-turning plots. Even in the most-obsessed time of my classics phase, I struggled to get through every word of Bleak House and David Copperfield without skimming, looking for the good parts. Generally I believe the book is better than the movie, and that’s probably true in this case as well. However, sometimes […]

Characters I Love – Reepicheep

  I love Reepicheep. Reepicheep is a talking mouse who appears in three of the seven books in the Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Last Battle. Reepicheep is brave, but sometimes a little too touchy about his own dignity. Eustace, who begins The Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a horrible little pill, picks on Reepicheep unmercifully, and Reepicheep fights back, taking great pleasure in embarrassing Eustace. Perhaps because he’s small, surrounded by larger, stronger animals, he takes himself perhaps a little too seriously, unable to laugh at himself because he’s offended. Brave, […]

My Writing Process

I’ve been asked several times how my stories move from idea to polished story. Every author’s writing process is a little different. Often, every book’s process is different! However, the overall process tends to follow the same patterns, even if the details differ from book to book. Inspiration and Pre-writing A story can be inspired by nearly anything. Generally, my stories start with a scene. Sometimes it’s a conversation between characters, or a critical decision being made, or even just an impression. I’ll write out the scene, and no matter how it turns out, I’ll have questions. Who are these characters? […]

Characters I Love – Sir Percival Blakeney

I admit it. I’m a Scarlet Pimpernel fan and have been since high school. I first saw the 1982 movie (link to IMDB) (link to Amazon) starring Anthony Andrews as Sir Percy (absolutely brilliant!), Jane Seymour as Marguerite, and Ian McKellan as Chauvelin. I was hooked, and hunted down all the books I could find. The movie condenses a number of the novels, so if you read The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy, you may be a little… surprised? In any case, you don’t get the same final conclusion at the end of the novel as you do at […]

Characters I Love – Puddleglum

Puddleglum is a marsh-wiggle from C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair, part of the Chronicles of Narnia (more info on Wikipedia). He enters the story as a pessimistic wet blanket of a character (somewhat like Eeyore, actually, whom I also love!). I love his pessimistic side, even though he notes that he is uncommonly cheerful for a marsh-wiggle (one wonders what the others are like!). As Eustace, Jill, and Puddleglum search for Prince Rilian, who disappeared a decade before, they enter the Underland, the realm of the Emerald Witch. Despite the fact that Puddleglum is not particularly courageous, talented, charming, or fierce, […]