Pre-digging a grave.

I watched the entire first season of The Walking Dead. It was as flat as a front lawn in surburbia.

I have often had a hard time creating characters for my stories. The story part comes very naturally to me—but when I try to place characters into that story, somehow it comes across as contrived. The characters are front-lawn flat.

Recently I've begun to consider the possibility that I have been going about writing my stories all wrong. In the process of creating a story before creating the characters, I have cornered myself. The story is doomed to be an experience of "my" perspective. "I" inevitably become the character in the story.

The characterization in The Walking Dead is extremely one-dimensional. The characters each have a single personality trait that gets flogged to death by the story surrounding them. Like my flat cornered characters, these characters feel to me like they were added to a story that already existed. Probably one of the most ambiguously interesting characters—the guy who gets bitten after pre-digging the graves of the characters who are about to die—gets killed off.

Although, I suppose part of enjoying zombie narratives comes from the one-dimensionality of the experience. In zombie stories, the difference between bad and good, dead and alive, enemy and friend, is clear-cut. When a good character dies, she is transformed into a bad character—a zombie. There is no ethical or moral dilemma to be worked through; no question of right or wrong is wrestled with.

Ambiguity in stories like The Walking Dead has a very slim chance of surviving. The heroes are well-maintained front lawns while the villains are piles of dead leaves. Anything other than that: start digging your own grave.