Welcome to my writing pages! The main focus of this website is to offer writing tips, prompts, and inspiration to writers, no matter what their genre or skill level. You’ll also find information on my published works and the ones in progress. My schedule for posting is:

Monday Sparks: Writing prompts to fan your creative flame.

Thursdays – Writing tips based on a monthly theme

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Creating a Home for the Protagonist of Your Novel

This month’s theme is all about writing and exploring settings for your novel, and creating a home for the protagonist of your novel is critically important to it. But wait, you say. My novel is a thriller in which the hero never goes near his home. He races from his office in D.C. to locations around the world with the finale on top of the Great Pyramid of Giza and wrapping up loose ends in Cairo.

Keep reading. “Home” comes in many flavors and working it into your novel will add depth, characters, and plot points.

What to Find at a Home Base

If you write a series, a home base can provide a lot of material for your novels. The home base for my young amateur detective Rae Riley is the alpaca farm where she lives with her dad, grandmother, and three half-brothers. What makes this home base so important to Rae?

Her people. In the prequel short story, “A Rose from the Ashes”, Rae is looking for her father. Her mother has died of cancer, and she has no family. Rae tries to solve who attempted to murder her mother when she was pregnant with Rae in an effort to find her father. She risks everything to find her people, so her family is precious to her.
Safety. Because these are her people, Rae can retreat here when she needs a refuge to think about the case, test theories with her dad and grandma, or just destress.

Because her home base is so important, threatening it gives me a powerful plot point. When the crack marksman Colonel Sebastian Moran shoots through a window of 221 B Baker Street to kill Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure of the Empty House”, it means something more when he attacks him in his home than if he shot him walking along the Thames.

In the Nero Wolfe mystery series, eccentric detective Nero Wolfe charges exorbitant fees to maintain his luxurious lifestyle in an old brownstone in New York City. One of his hobbies is orchids. He raises ten thousand plants in greenhouses on the top floor of his home. Wolfe rarely leaves his home to solve cases, relying on his assistant to do the leg work, so the brownstone is a crucial setting to the series. When master criminal Arnold Zeck in The Second Confession decides to issue a warning to Wolfe to stop an investigation, he goes for the brownstone. He machine-guns the greenhouses from across the street.

Threatening the home base can inspire plot points like:

Protagonist feels vulnerable.
Protagonists fears for her people.
Protagonist gives in to fear and lets threat control her.
Protagonist becomes more firmly resolved to defy threat.

What if your protagonist has no home?

No problem. A motivation for your protagonist can be either to find a home that he has always longed for and never had. Or he has lost a wonderful home and either wants to find a new one, reclaim the old one, or exact revenge on those who took it. Any of these ideas can power a novel and do so effectively because home means so much to readers. It’s a universal concept that any reader can identify with.

Back to our hero of the thriller. How do you work a home into the novel? Perhaps the first attack by the villain is at his office. His people are attacked. If he’s an agent of the government, then home can be his country and he wants to protect the life he knows.

What are other ways to use creating a home for your protagonist to develop the plot of your novel?

Here are more tips on writing settings in a novel.

March 5, 2026 0

What is Your Favorite Literary Home?

This month, I’ll be writing about creating and developing settings in your novel. I’m writing a post on how to develop a home base for your protagonist, so I’m asking: what is your favorite literary home? I’m torn between 221 Baker Street, a hobbit hole in the Shire, and the alpaca farm in Ohio where my teen detective Rae Riley lives with her father, grandmother, and brothers. If you could make a home in any book, where would it be?

If you need inspiration, here are writing prompts for settings.

March 2, 2026 2

Dig Deeper to Write a Compelling Antagonist for Your Novel

Just like you have to investigate the history and psyche of your protagonist, you need to dig deeper to create a compelling antagonist for your novel. The biggest mistake I think rookie writers make when writing the antagonist, especially if he’s a villain, is …

He’s mean because he’s mean.

There is no more reason behind the antagonist’s dastardly actions than the writer needs him to do dastardly things. But that kind of shallow writing won’t create a compelling antagonist.

Build the antagonist like the protagonist.

Do you know her likes and dislikes? What personality type does he fit? Understanding your antagonist as well as your protagonist will make him come alive on the page. Below are a few points to keep in mind as you do your digging.

Make sure your antagonist is a worthy opponent. In a mystery, the antagonist has to be as clever as the protagonist or the protagonist will solve the mystery on page 10. Sometimes, writers make the protagonist so powerful or accomplished that the antagonist doesn’t stand a chance. Conversely, it’s all right to make an antagonist seem unbeatable. That will make readers root for your protagonist more. Just be sure that you create a believable trajectory for the protagonist to overcome a super-powerful antagonist.
If your antagonist is a villain, don’t glamorize the villainy. This can be easy for writers to do if they get carried away with wearing the black hat. You can have fun writing the villain, but within the novel, his evil actions should be treated by the other characters for what they are: evil.
If your antagonist is a villain, her backstory should explain, not excuse, her evil actions. Star Wars fans enjoy the prequel trilogy because it gives us the backstory of one of fiction’s greatest villains, Darth Vader. While these movies provide an explanation, they don’t offer the backstory as an excuse for Darth Vader subjecting the galaxy to terror and tyranny.

When I create the villain in one of my mystery novels–the character who has committed a crime and is trying to prevent anyone from discovering it was he or she–I ask myself a few questions:

Does the antagonist have a realistic motive to justify the crime? If my antagonist murders a man for stealing his lunch money in first grade, then I don’t have a realistic motive for murder.
Is the crime spur of the moment or planned? Certain personalities might commit a serious crime in the heat of the moment. Others definitely would not. I need to understand which camp my villain belongs to.
If the crime is planned, would the villain have the resources to do it? Does she have the intelligence to plot a locked room murder? To give herself an alibi? Is she deceptive enough not to give herself away to the police? How far will she go to protect herself from exposure to the authorities?

Here are all my tips and prompts this month on writing characters.

Who are some of your favorite antagonists? If you’ve created an antagonist, what are some problems you encountered while developing this character?

February 26, 2026 1

First Impression: Protagonist or Sidekick?

I’m back again to get your first impression: protagonist or sidekick? Sidekicks and secondary characters add so much to a novel. I’ve had so much fun developing them for my Rae Riley Mysteries series. And the fun thing about writing a series is that a minor character in one novel can become a major character in another. I’ve also discovered that my protagonist, Rae Riley, can have different sidekicks depending on the mystery she’s solving. Her cousin Amber is her sidekick in my third novel, A Riddle in the Lonesome October, but she doesn’t play a role in the current novel I’m writing.

Let me know in the comments if he’s a protagonist or sidekick.

Here are more writing prompts for creating characters.

February 23, 2026 0

Three Tips for Creating an Antagonist for Your Novel

Creating an antagonist for your novel is as important as creating the protagonist or main character. Would Sherlock Holmes have achieved literary immortality if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hadn’t created the perfect nemesis in Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime? Below are three tips for creating an antagonist for your novel.

An antagonist does not have to be a villain.

Yes, you read that right. An antagonist is someone or something that prevents your protagonist for achieving the goal she is working toward in your novel. Let’s say your protagonist is a high school senior who wants to become a cop like her late father. Her mother is dead set against it because her father was killed in the line of duty. So Mom is the antagonist of the daughter without being a villain.

An antagonist does not have to be human.

If your novel is a story about how a family tries to survive on a mountainside when caught in a freak snowstorm while hiking, then nature itself is the antagonist. In a scene from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Captain Nemo and his crew from The Nautilus battle giant squids. In that scene the squids are the antagonists. If your protagonist is battling the oppression or corruption of a political system, then the characters advancing that system are the antagonists but the specific political system itself can be one too. That leads me to my next point …

Your novel can have more than one antagonist.

This concept is often used in mystery novels. A murder has taken place, so the antagonist is the murderer. But he may have a friend who is shielding him from the police. So you have a second antagonist.

My next example is a spoiler, but it’s from a very old novel, so I don’t mind divulging it.

In the novel, Too Many Women from the Nero Wolfe mystery series, a wealthy man commits two murders. He wants to prevent Nero Wolfe and his whip-smart assistant Archie Goodwin from catching him. Standard mystery antagonist. What makes this novel different is that the man’s wife is pretty sure she knows what he’s doing but says nothing because it would interfere with her luxurious lifestyle. To protect herself even further, she manipulates her husband into committing suicide. She’s antagonist #2 and I find her far more repellant than her obsessed husband.

Next week, we’ll dig deeper into creating an antagonist, just like we did when creating the protagonist.

Who are the antagonists that stand out in your experience?

February 19, 2026 1

JPC Allen Writes