Give characters a skill that they are so good at, they would be considered an expert.
— www.10minutenovelists.com/top10tuesday-top-20-things-to-give-your-characters-that-will-make-them-more-vivid
Expertise gives a character weight before they say a word. Watch someone move with total fluency through a task most people fumble, and you instantly believe they have a history, a discipline, a self that exists outside the plot's demands. It also hands you free storytelling tools: expertise creates vocabulary, instincts, and blind spots you can mine for tension. Picture a quiet delivery driver who happens to be a master lock-picker — suddenly every locked door in your story is a live wire. The caution: don't let the skill become the whole character. If every scene exists to showcase how good they are, you've built a demonstration, not a person. Let the expertise sit alongside ordinary flaws and unrelated interests, so competence feels like one thread in a fuller life, not the entire fabric.
Comments