Blogging as Fictional Characters

A new way to develop greater depth in your characters

3 min readAug 10, 2021

Any of you who read my Medium poems and articles on a semi-regular basis have noticed that I sometimes mention my novel-in-progress, currently titled Burnt-Over Memories. I had planned to spend more time working on it this Fall and spending less time on Medium.

I certainly don’t write on Medium for the money. My monthly earnings have been abysmal.

But I love all of my co-writers on Medium, especially the ones where we look for each other’s posts, read them, clap generously, and often leave friendly, helpful, and often insightful comments. I like you, gang.

But a likely solution has appeared. I can combine at least some of my Medium posts with ‘out-takes’ from my novel. I’ll explain more below.

One log-line I use to describe my novel is: “When photographer Cece Watts travels to rural Upstate New York to investigate the missing parts of her family’s history, she finds her surroundings are as strange as her family’s origins.”

There is a twist in the story that most of the female members of her family are either psychic, telekinetic, telesensory, or have other traits that most people find strange or scary. Cece has never met any of these relatives before, plus she has never been told anything about her family’s origins.

One theme of the novel, not the plot, is that what most people consider extrasensory, or at least extraordinary actions by people with these traits are in fact ultra-natural. In this context, I define ultra-natural as extremely natural.

In other words, all of us possess the innate abilities to be aware of other people’s thoughts, for example. We don’t understand these human traits because we have removed ourselves from the natural states we were born on Earth with.

That last paragraph may have been confusing.