Character Development! Not that easy!
I'm right now starting a new book in a new series.
And I love my heroine. She's a blacksmith. She worked with her father and brother, both blacksmiths, but wasn't in charge.
Now they're dead.
She's grieving.
And she lives in a small frontier town with one and only one blacksmith. The town needs her.
And she witnessed her family's murders in a stage coach robbery, was left for dead, survived, can't remember a thing and is targeted for death.
All that. Grief. Weird manly career. And targeted for death...and I don't feel like I've made her a three dimensional character yet, somehow.
It's annoying.
So I'm asking myself WHAT makes a character seem real. Yeah, that's right, after 68 books, I'm trying to figure it out.
I know this: To make someone likeable, make someone like them.
That's like Character Development 101.
But she has people who like her.
And give her a quirk.
Um, a pretty young woman being the town blacksmith isn't quirky?
Give her a conflict to prevent her falling in love. Maybe I haven't done that yet. Maybe being in mourning isn't enough.
As I type, as I unfold the story, as I unload action and danger on my heroine, how do I make her come alive.
Or maybe I already did it make her come alive? I just don't know.
It's common for me to just start writing and to finally get to the bottom of a character through that. But I'm getting close to twenty thousand words. It's TIME Mary. C'mon.
Oh, her mother died when she was a child, guiding her to spend time with her father and have no real interest in womanly things.
Oh, we're in Wyoming in 1870, so women have the right to vote, make her enamored of the suffraget movement to, possibly, a degree the hero finds off-putting.
Why oh why doesn't this woman come to life for me?
What do you do, in your writing to make a character alive? To make her three-dimensional? I'd love to talk about that in the comments. Maybe it'll wake something up in me.
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