Some characters’ stories come to us fully formed; others need to be teased out. I explored this very briefly in part 1 of this series, when I looked at inspiration. I see inspiration as linked to a vast interrelated web of pathways which characters follow as they pursue their story lines. The pathways crisscross, intersect, meet, part ways, meander, or go straight, forming a rich landscape of story we can enter and exit at any point – a landscape from which all individual characters’ stories emerge. For any character’s story to emerge from that complex web, we need to identify three basic structural elements that allow us, as writers or storytellers, to tell those characters’ stories.
