I'm Minion Foggedy and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff. Today I have two segments to get

you ready for National Novel Writing Month in November. We'll talk about how to create

great characters, and even if you're not a novelist, these tips will help you read with

more insight, and then we'll talk about how to format a character's thoughts, should

you use italics, quotation marks, or something else.

This piece is by Jessica Kim from Readsy.com. Let's say you finally got some time to

yourself, and now you're choosing between two books for your next read. The first recounts

a thrown succession with a standard murder mystery plot. The second stars a young hesitant

prince who struggles to know whether he should avenge the murder of his father by killing

his uncle. Which would intrigue you more? Both share a core concept, but Hamlet also gives

you a protagonist who's juggling a complex set of practical and psychological conflicts.

Someone whose personal journey has grabbed people for centuries. If you get your character

creation right, your character too can help your book become a genre classic. Here are

six steps to show you how to achieve a fully realized, memorable character.

First, to build a character who's worth telling a story about, you need to first establish

two things. Your character's current goal and the motivations to reach that goal. A character's

goal is simple. It's the specific and actionable thing that a character wants over the course

of your story. That's what will drive your plot forward as your character takes actions

to fulfill their goal. A character's motivations, meanwhile, infuse the goal with meaning. If

you're struggling to nail down these motivations, ask yourself the W questions that will help

spell out your in order to. Why, for instance, does your character want what they want? What

...