Know thine characters

OK, so I am up really late on a Monday night (I can do that these days and not miss a beat) - and I have this desire to blog about writing characters. There are quite a few things that I could say about that, but some of the highlights will do for this post today.

Here they are: Make your characters different from one another and make them stand out for who they are. No one likes vanilla people on paper. Know their history. Where did they come from? What sorts of things do they detest? Give them a horrible past and tell us every juicy detail by their actions.

No, don't just TELL us, show us how they are affected by it. Share something happy about them with us, and make us smile. Make us laugh, and we will read your book to the very end. Make everything about their past matter, and throw in secrets. Readers LOVE secrets!

When your characters talk, make them all sound different. I know this is a little like making them different from above, but it is still not the exact same thing. We all talk differently. Accents, speech patterns all differ and make us individuals. Do that for the paper people too.

And, I guess that is all for now. I am thinking way too hard for after midnight, but that's how I roll. I just need to roll myself over to the laptop and do more edits on my latest WIP and then everything in my writing life would be on track.

Hope your Thursday flies by (we all know what comes after Thursday and isn't that super!) and if you have time today, go sit alone in a coffeeshop or a cafe and listen to the people who fill our world.

They all make wonderful book characters with their different loves and hates, with their horrible pasts, and their happy stories. If we could create from the world around us, what a magnificient lot of pages we could make!

 

Wise old owl