Patricia Wrede

You find out about them based on what other people say about them (“He’s a jerk!” Chris told her), based on how other people react to them (She scowled and stiffened as he came up), based on what you see them do (On his way out the door, he casually kicked the dog), based on what they say and how they say it (“Move,” he snarled and shoved past her), and based on what you know (or think you know) about their past and their motives (“Don’t mind him,” Greg said. “He just found out that his daughter is in the hospital with rabies”).

Choreographing an action scene can be done in a bunch of ways. You can get a bunch of friends together and actually role-play the whole thing (which I find a bit extreme, but which I know has been done to very good effect by a number of writers). Or you can act out the whole scene yourself, playing all the parts in turn

You can get some action figures and play out the movement of the scene.

You can get some action figures and play out the movement of the scene. Or you can diagram it on paper, like a series of football plays, with circles and crosses and little arrows to show who is supposed to be moving where, and maybe asterisks to show thrusts or punches and figure eights to show tripping over barrels, or whatever diagram codes you come up with.

Storyboarding (drawing a series of sketches to illustrate the action) works well for some artistically inclined writers (and even for some who can only draw stick figures).

If you need the traitor to be captured, you stack the deck in favor of the heroes.

If you need the traitor to be captured, you stack the deck in favor of the heroes.

Dialogue is one of the bedrock necessities in about ninety-nine percent of fiction.

For instance, if your story takes place in San Diego, but one of the characters grew up in Wisconsin, that character had better have seen snow and know about the wind chill factor. You don’t have to mention those details specifically unless they’re important to the story, but that Wisconsin-raised character had better not look ignorant or surprised if the subject of snow comes up.)

Or you can just look at different speech patterns in real life. Take the same sentence of dialogue/information and rephrase it in as many different ways as you can: