CHARACTER
“Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
Great characters pull us into a story, even if they’re just Pop and Lolly running a candy shop at Niagara Falls. Your human characters have to be fully human, though. Te villains ought to be, if not sympathetic, at least compelling, and the heroes must have flaws.
“The secret is to make them feel real,” says designer Amanda Yates, “and you do that by not overthinking it. We all have a tendency to overgeneralize and make things ideal. What you want instead is some humor wrapped into your characters, some mistakes. People mess up. There has to be a forgivable quality to your characters.”
Te Verbolten roller coaster at Busch Gardens Williamsburg has a plot—a country drive through the Black Forest that runs amok—and characters, Gerta and Guenther, a sister and brother who live in the village and work for the auto-tour place. She runs the giſt shop; he’s a mechanic. As they move through the queue, guests go into warm, cheerful Gerta’s shop and find she’s gone to Oktoberfest, but she’s leſt her TV on to welcome them and send them on to her brother’s garage. It’s a mess—stacks of suitcases, trees he’s collected from the forest—and guests hear him snoring in the back room. Gerta and Guenther disarm people, and the ride’s all the scarier because of it.
ELEMENTS OF STORY
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