This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the Helping Writers

Become Authors Podcast.

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode,

Eight ways to avoid cardboard characters

and plot contrivances while you're at it.

The plot was contrived and the characters were cardboard.

Ouch.

That's about as bad as it can get when it comes to negative story reviews.

It's also perhaps one of the most common complaints audiences have about stories.

Certainly it's one that irritates me the most.

Here's the thing though.

Cardboard characters often cause plot contrivances and vice versa.

Once you realize this this it can become a little easier

to figure out how to identify and avoid cardboard characters and plot contrivances

in your own fiction. This episode was inspired by two different

Western romance novelists I read recently. Neither was perfect, but one I really enjoyed, and the other, although better than many, almost

invariably compromised her stories with this dreaded tandem of cardboard characters and

plot contrivances.

What I recognized was that her characters weren't cardboard until the plot grew contrived, and vice versa

the plot didn't feel contrived until the characters stopped

exhibiting dimensionality in their choices and actions.

Genre stories that follow tight conventions such as romance and mystery are often those I see struggling most with this equation.

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