~Making Your Characters Real People~
Lots of articles come out about “knowing your character”, but this is the best concrete example I’ve seen of a simple, effective technique.
Originally posted on Christina L. Rozelle:
Recently, a friend of mine confessed to having a bit of trouble with one of her characters. This one was more complex than most of her others, and at first he seemed to elude her. Why is this the case for some characters?
In my opinion, these are the ones that are begging you to dig deeper. Just like in real life, some people are very surface-level, what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of people. You could easily write about them in first-person if you wanted to without much prodding at all.
But then, there are those like Logan’s character, Keith, (in her upcoming novel, Stockholm Sexy), whose ‘personhood’ isn’t fully visible on the surface level. In first drafts of Stockholm Sexy, Keith’s character was flat and boring, but not because he was a boring character. He’s quite the opposite.
When Logan came to me and asked my opinion on fleshing him…
View original 855 more words
