Choose Your Camp: Why Characters Are Your Story Core

Camp NaNoWriMo begins in April! In the spirit of friendly camp competition (and inspired by one of our favorite scenes in Scott Westerfeld’s Afterworlds), we asked our friends to Choose Your Camp. Today, Sharon Cullen, Wrimo and author of His Saving Grace, shares a final argument for Camp Character:

When I was told I had to pick a camp, it was a no-brainer for me. Camp Character all the way, baby! I didn’t even have to think about it. In my mind characters are the driving force behind any timeless story. I don’t care what genre or what time period we’re talking about, it’s the characters we connect with.

When I was trying to decide what to write about I started thinking of my favorite movies. I picked a few and tried to place them in different settings and time periods. You know what? Setting didn’t matter. Time period didn’t matter…

Let’s take The Breakfast Club as one example. The movie is about high school kids forced to spend a Saturday together in detention. There’s the brain, the punk, the princess, the athlete and the psycho—all different stereotypes, taken out of their comfort zones and friendship circles, forced to face their own prejudices and beliefs. And they discover they all have more in common than they thought.

What if you took those characters and placed them in today’s high schools? Or you took similar characters with similar backgrounds and forced them together in a historical novel?

The story wouldn’t change at its core because it’s about the characters’ journeys—the characters’ thoughts and feelings, their paths to self discovery.

Let’s try a different movie. Grease. An oldie but a goodie. It was filmed in the ‘70s but takes place in the ‘50s. The story is about Danny, a leather wearing hood, and Sandy, a goody two shoes girl. Both from different social spectrums and completely different backgrounds. They like each other but it’s not “cool” for them to like each other. 

What if that movie took place now? Oh, wait. It did in the ‘80s with Pretty in Pink. What if that movie took place in a historical time period? Oh, wait. Romeo and Juliet.

These story types are timeless because of the characters. Because you identify with the characters’ dilemma—their forbidden love. You root for them to get together because you love the characters.

Characters are who we, as readers, connect to. You can have a brilliant plot, you can create a diverse, wonderful world to put your characters in, but if your reader can’t connect to your characters, then the story is lost.

When I first started writing I knew I wanted to write emotionally packed stories. I wanted my readers to cry and laugh with my characters. That can’t happen if you don’t have a character that a reader can connect to.

My latest release (written as a NaNoWriMo novel in 2013 and published in 2014) is about a hero with a brain injury acquired in the Crimean War. The story obviously takes place in 19th century Victorian England but it’s a story that could easily take place in the 21st century because it’s about characters fighting to find a new normal after such a devastating injury.

Without characters you have no story.

So Camp Character wins, right?

Sharon Cullen is published in historical romance, romantic suspense, paranormal romance and contemporary romance. Her 2013 NaNoWriMo novel, His Saving Grace, was published in December 2014 and her 2014 NaNoWriMo novel, Sutherland’s Secret, will be published in 2016. She lives in southwest Ohio with her brood although her dream is to someday retire to St. Maarten and live on the beach. 

Top photo background by Flickr user ettiz.