Are You Writing About an Imperfect Character? By injecting various forms of conflict into his or her character’s personality and interweaving various strands into him/her’s story arc, you can add layers of interest that keep readers following them to all ends – an effective formula for success!
Dichotomy
Dichotomy is a literary technique that divides a subject into multiple, often opposing elements, to highlight both sides of an issue while giving readers an accurate picture of what’s taking place.
Literature often employs dichotomy in two forms – good vs evil, for instance – though other types can also create compelling stories, such as civil war versus savagery in Heart of Darkness or social division between an oppressed society and its oppressed citizens, as seen in The Color Purple.
Dichotomy comes from the Greek term dikhotomia, which translates as “equally divided, cut in half.” This concept like /h3xqzgxoc5q can also be found in astronomy and botany – for instance in ginkgo biloba trees where each leaf has two lobes that divide equally along their width.
Conflict
Conflict between protagonists in fiction stories is one of the most captivating narrative devices, adding depth and dimension to any tale – but writing successfully requires additional skills and care.
Whenever creating conflict between your heroes, it is key that both parties present legitimate points. Otherwise, one of them may come off as unlikable or unreasonable.
An effective way to launch this conflict is for your protagonists to initially clash, then gradually see each other’s point of view on an issue crucial to their story arc.
This technique can be especially helpful when writing about conflict between characters who care deeply, yet hold different values. By understanding one another better, your protagonists can grow into better people while learning each other’s perspectives and adapting accordingly.
Complexity
Dichotomy and complexity share an enticing connection: their ability to be defined in ways that make sense to mainstream science. While reductionism focuses on one unit in its interaction with its environment, complexity takes a different approach by considering multiple parts interacting nonsimply which may potentially lead to chaos, randomness, collective dynamics hierarchy or emergence.
Complex systems’ ability to be hard to comprehend often makes them challenging to characterize; as a result, trying to grasp them may prove fruitless.
Complexity theory has long grappled with identifying variations between elements within a collection. This task generally revolves around counting how many distinct regimes of relationship (or state spaces) a system displays, with their number depending on which constraints prevent elements within that regime from becoming independent of each other.
Personality
Personality describes an individual’s mental and physical attributes, qualities, ideas, aspirations goals, ambitions, aptitudes interests and social behaviour that define him or her as an individual. Psychologists use the term to refer to differences in people’s thinking and behaving styles.
Personality theories differ, but all attempt to explain what differentiates one person from another. Psychodynamic, trait and cognitive theories all seek to explain why different individuals behave in certain ways.
Freud’s psychodynamic theory was the first comprehensive theory of personality to emerge, believing that unconscious drives influenced by sexuality and aggression were driving forces behind individuals’ personalities. Carl Jung and Erikson conducted further studies which challenged Freud’s ideas.
Trait-based psychologists hold that basic dimensions such as extraversion and conscientiousness play an integral part in predicting people’s behavior, with more specific attributes such as risk-taking or sociability being broken down further to identify specific characteristics about an individual.