Congratulations Thomas! I'm so happy for you!

Another great post! Thanks Accord 🙂

This thread has been very interesting. As I read I was wondering which characters have proven most memorable to me - over time:) Leo Lionni's Frederick. Was he extraordinary? That is exactly the word for him. But the other characters that come to mind, though I don't recall their names, I think of as ordinary. So some authors must have done extraordinary jobs of making the ordinary of great consequence. Or perhaps the pressures faced by my favorite ordinary characters are the extraordinary element of themselves? In the book I'm working on, the ordinary of the protagonist is the problem which keeps him from the ordinary the heavenly Father created him for. It will take an extraordinary situation- several actually, to reveal his plight to him. And then? Hmm. Yep. I guess Mr. Card is right. My protagonist becomes extraordinary by choosing a different ordinary. I need to think about these things more. Thanks for posting, suspensewriter and friends.

Awesome!

Walking away from that blank wall is one form of answering the resistance Absolutely God has a word for that wall but it can be hard to turn away in favor of a second approach can't it?

Echoing "yes!" to the quarantine opportunity, even though it actually means more work for me to have a person home who is usually not for much of the day. Pressfield's article is a nice reminder. I want to finish my rough draft by the time my host country lets us back out to try to find normal.

Or an obscuring of the real threat so that the heroine's energy of fear and strategy was placed toward the face of antagonism instead of its real power and that resulted in a significant loss for the heroine.

The book I'm working on now got longer when my hero needed to stop for lunch so that he wouldn't get home too soon - in which case I would have had to write another bazaar scene which I didn't want to do. I crossed his path with a contact who knew a part of his father's life that he had never heard and which is pertinent to the story. So if you have a secondary theme and can clarify opposing viewpoints over a meal, that might give you some more words. Maybe build up the possibility of an antagonistic significant other to heighten the stakes?? You've got this, Zee!

Count Fosco, from The Woman In White, 1859. The heroine is just about his equal in intelligence, although she is immediately deceived by him. But it becomes clearer and clearer that he is actually the evil behind the immediate antagonist as he is exploiting the antagonist. Also, Collins chose to portray Count Fosco as very obese and cultured instead of as a lean rough villain which was the usual villain at the time apparently.

Yall are fantastic. What a rich source of tips and encouragement! Step by step. Thank you

I don't recall names well enough for your request. I suppose that a good villain could be less than his own ideal and then find hope of being equal or better than that ideal and then scheme to make a name for himself as the ideal, but an external test, maybe even his own scheme, proves the internal deadly potential. E.g., something similar to Man in the Garden.

I'm proud of American soldiers' service and sacrifice on foreign soils for the sake of the freedom of others to learn about the value of freedom !!! Amazing

Wonderful! Congratulations!

Many Muslims I have met are deists. God has a hundred names but they will never meet Him as a person in Islam. Even paradise is simply a "garden of earthly delights" without interaction with God.

hard knock