(March 25, 2015 at 1:42 pm)tonyc4444 Wrote: IT was a good read, but there is a bit of knowledge required in writing believable characters. As an example if I wrote an American Christian character who DIDN'T think country was important, a lot of American Christians would find that hard to accept as a believable Christian. You're right in that a story doesn't have to be logical necessarily in it's realism, after all there's no Hockey Mask wearing supernatural zombie running around taking axes to the face either, but the characters surrounding that ARE important or the story falls flat.
Of course. In crafting a character, making that character representative of all members of a given group is not realistic. If the atheist in your story is a gnostic atheist who has a touch of irrationality, what of it? Even though that doesn't represent a large proportion of atheists, people like that do exist, and as you likely know, writing fiction is writing about individuals, not mass demographics. Trying to reflect all the different shades of atheism in one or two characters is like trying to represent the average family in a story -- how do you get 2.36 children?
So while it will no doubt be useful to you, this thread, you likely already know you'll need to decide what type of atheist your character is and go with it.
Good luck with your project. Hope it turns out a good read.
