When you try to explain your story to someone who doesn’t understand the craft, you end up with very unhelpful positive encouragement. I don’t say that because encouragement is not pleasant and useful in bolstering your confidence, but it certainly won’t help you improve your story. Thank God for the fortitude of other writers who are willing to ask the hard questions and make your story better through positive critique.

Are you going to cover moving from ‘low’ to ‘high’ concept, Randy. Please?

I’m going to be away from my computer for two weeks. My turn to go to a writers conference - Conflux 4 - sounds like a plumbing disease. It’s for writers of SpecFic and it’s in Canberra, a four hour flight and four hour train ride for me.

No doubt I’ll come back equally elated!

Can hardly wait for the “concept” module of this blog.

Have a safe trip home.

Randy has great advice on building characters in the snowflake lecture and Fic 101. Probably 201 also, I haven’t done that course yet. [I’m waiting till they tell me I can move up to the Sophomore class. I can’t wait. This time around, I’ll pay more attention in class and not pick fights out behind the school.]

The point in the character lesson about determining your characters core values was an ‘aha!’ moment. That’s where you put your character in the hot seat and the hard questions.

I’m blessed to have an amazing number of gifted writers right in my very small church. We started a group a number of years ago and through (and in spite of) many changes in that church, we’ve remained good and helpful friends and colleagues. So we’re within an e-mail or telephone or even face-to-face contact at a moment’s notice. Invaluable.

Can characters themselves be high concept, something unusual? Or is something high concept integrated with plot/character/mileu? Or is it simply the premise, the idea?

And how in the world do you know if it is high concept or not? Because it has that special spark that makes you grin like a cheshire cat? Because no one else has done it? (And how do you know no one else has ever done it with all those stories floating around out there?)

As a relative beginner I don’t know much, but I feel that without solid characters for readers to care about they aren’t going to stay with the story long enough to figure out if I have a concept, let alone a higher one.

Maybe I’m being selfish since I’ve listened to tapes of John Olson teaching on higher concept…speaking of tapes, did you find out if CD’s are going to be available of the conference?

I just hope you got all that metal out of your head before you went through the airport metal detectors!

Here is my dilema. I have given myself my 20th migraine doing character charts - really, truly, simply I can’t do it. I dread it. It’s the lurking monster in the night for me. But can a writer create believable characters through story alone?

When I try and map out my characters, analyze them, they cease to be real to me. Real people to me are always a mystery, a puzzle to solve and appreciate. But in charting, half the details I try to record on my characters are blatantly wrong, different from the story and then I get confused - who are these people, why do they look different in real light versus story light and which is the right one?

But I know who they are in story and don’t worry about it during writing. Am I doomed to 2-dimensional characters here???

There’s nothing like spending time with other writers. It always stokes me with ideas. My crit group will be meeting in January (we meet once a year because we live so scattered) and this year, we’re going to bring a question or a dilema, brainstorm it, break to do some writing and come back to read what we wrote and get immediate feedback. A writer’s heaven! I can’t wait.

I’m interested in a tape/CD of John’s classes, too.