Your characters are smarter than you

A hundred or more tips on character development, author Barbara Esstman told Maryland Writers Association members in Annapolis included that characters are not talking heads; shut them up. Take your character grocery shopping. Make her accent have a rhythm. Make him react to other people and creatures around him. [image error]

She surely helped everyone. From her tips, I learned that I had made progress, having let my characters be themselves in my novels. I was grateful to her for all the tips I didn’t know and many examples in literature from Madame Bovary to Dead Poet’s Society, and even in Vietnam books like Veteran’s Day: A Vietnam Memoir by Rod Kane, which may help me with my fourth novel, she suggested.

[image error]Read Esstman if you are into the genre. Her characters are vivid and believable. Why not? She knows what I know now: characters are smarter than you.