Writing Mental Health Well

So much about writing good characters comes from allowing them to be complicated individuals. This article about writing characters with mental illness points out that most depictions of mental illness are stereotypes and often factually incorrect. Don’t do that. Complex individuals

Why Smart Characters Make Dumb Mistakes

Why writers as “gods” of their stories have to cause bad things to happen to good characters and how to do it.

How to Craft Compelling Characters

A good overview of the things you should think about in creating characters and some of the questions to ask yourself and your characters.

Using Theory of Mind – Controlled Multiple Personalities of Writers

Theory of Mind = “the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one’s own.”

“I am not my characters.”

Kat Howard writes a haunting piece on how she is not her characters but that her knowledge of other creators has changed how she is able to view their work. The last paragraph has really stuck with me.