To begin I have to admit I’m not a big horror fan but I heard the buzz about the show; how good it is and decided to give it a shot. I now know what all the fuss is about and I’m a fan of the T.V. program but as a writer what can the show teach me about writing. In my three-part blog I’m going to write about what I believe makes this show a hit and what I’ve taken away to use in my fiction writing.
You can find tons of about how fleshing out a well-rounded character is crucial to a good story and that’s true, but if you make a well fleshed out character that grows, especially if he/she grows from the conflict occurring in the plot, now you have a great story. The cast and writers of The Walking Dead do an excellent job of portraying who their characters are and provide plenty of reasons of why you care about what happens to them. I think the gripping drama of the piece is displayed in how you see the characters grow. The people we see in season four are not the same people we learned about in season one. The conflict has changed them.
Now that I’ve thrown character growth out there just how do you go about making your people grow? The ingredients of any story are a strong protagonist, an antagonist to put in our heroes way and conflict. If you’re an American reading this, you know we love our happy endings, but to facilitate change in your main character he has to fail. If you think about it how much did you learn when everything was going perfectly compared to when everything seemed to be falling apart? As people we learn from our mistakes, or we should be learning from them and using our life experiences to mature. The same should occur in our writings and I hope great things happen because of it. That’s one thing we see over and over again in The Walking Dead; forcing you to feel their pain and watching them change. Sometimes it’s for the better, but oft-times it’s for the worse, but always staying true to the characters. Now that’s great writing.
That’s it for now. If you agree, disagree or just have something to get off your chest, please leave a comment.
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keithbmartin 