{"id":45557,"date":"2019-03-12T20:33:41","date_gmt":"2019-03-13T00:33:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/?p=45557"},"modified":"2019-03-12T20:33:41","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T00:33:41","slug":"how-to-inflate-flat-characters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/2019\/03\/12\/how-to-inflate-flat-characters\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Inflate Flat Characters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a guest post on <em>Janice Hardy&#8217;s Fiction University<\/em>,\u00a0Laurence MacNaughton offers a simple, 60-second trick for fleshing out background characters. &#8220;Too often, when I read an unpublished manuscript, I find incidental characters who seem like they were frozen in place before the story began,&#8221; MacNaughton writes. &#8220;It&#8217;s like they were just standing there, killing time, waiting for the hero to show up.&#8221; Nobody wants that.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, who wants to spend hours writing up a character that you&#8217;ll use for a few paragraphs? To save time, and your story&#8217;s momentum, McNaughton suggests a short checklist of character traits that can help flesh out an incidental character in sixty seconds or less.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.janicehardy.com\/2019\/03\/create-characters-in-60-seconds.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+janicehardy%2FPUtE+%28Fiction+University%29\">Read the full post here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a guest post on Janice Hardy&#8217;s Fiction University,\u00a0Laurence MacNaughton offers a simple, 60-second trick for fleshing out background characters. &#8220;Too often, when I read an unpublished manuscript, I find incidental characters who seem like they were frozen in place before the story began,&#8221; MacNaughton writes. &#8220;It&#8217;s like they were just standing there, killing time, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45558,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[436,468],"tags":[453],"class_list":["post-45557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-10-minute-workshop","category-fiction-101","tag-characters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45557"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45559,"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45557\/revisions\/45559"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigpulp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}