This chapter was quite enlightening, as it answered a number of questions I had and resolved a great deal of annoyance I had attributed to characterizing when writing. In fact, most of my issue with writing comes from feeling as though is flattened a character that I had intended to be round, or wanting to give every character a deep and humanizing backstory. To read that this was avoidable and unnecessary (respectively), gave me much more drive to write, and clarified my “amorphous” idea. Perhaps the most useful knowledge that I read was in the section ‘The Beat of Desire’. Before I had not necessarily identified the purpose of having a character when I wrote. I had mostly considered my characters as vectors of storytelling— nuisances that hindered my creative process by needing things like facial features, hair, parents, and favorite foods. Understanding that plot is driven by the characters desire has clarified both my writing process and my general understanding of narrative immensely, as I’m now no longer confounded by the presence of characters and their intricacies— but rather motivated by them. Prior to reading this chapter I had a relatively exciting idea for a plot, but I continually got bored thinking of it because the purpose of the story seemed lacking, flat, and generally malnourished. Now that I have the desire of the character figured out (or at least brainstormed) I have much more story-telling velocity to push the plot forward and reinvigorate into a narrative purpose.
