Oh, Monday… with your false enthusiasm and wearisome clichés of toil resumed.

Prescription: coffee, with a healthy shot of cynicism and defiance!

The writer links this week are chock full of advice on characters and a writer’s personal approach to writing.  On to the links!

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♥ Becky Levine scoffs at the limitations of “Write What You Know.”

♥ Juliette Wade at Talk to YoUniverse explains how to identify the character holding your story together. 

Lydia Sharp at The Sharp Angle
♥ asks if your fiction has a fingerprint,
♥ explores the accidental details that make a character real, and
♥ discusses the 23rd of the 52 Qualities of the Prosperous Writer: Vision.

Cassandra Jade dishes up a buffet of goodness, including:
♥ the importance of character mannerisms,
♥ the five reasons she will read your writer blog,
♥ another look at Bowl of Oranges’ hilarious ways to annoy a rookie writer,
♥ what makes even a derivative plot interesting, and
♥ how to clarify your plot by reducing it to a single sentence.

By the way, if you’d like to try reducing a famous book to a single sentence (Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Herbert’s Dune, Russo’s Empire Falls, or McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove), visit my One-Sentence Summary Contest!

Finally, here is an intriguing interview in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer with The Magicians author Lev Grossman.