Building A Better Hero
The one thing I did when I went back to revise Wooing Miss Whatley (which I’ve just republished as A Rake’s Reward), was to rebuild my characters into more likeable people. To be honest, they—well, really my heroine—was a pretty awful person (I think I might have mentioned that in a previous post). So I thought I’d go over what I did to make my characters more likeable, since I’m beginning to do the same thing with the characters I my new WIP, Falling.
We all know that to have sympathetic characters, someone who we can understand and empathize with, there are those basic rules. They need to have at least two of the following characteristics:
Be in jeopardy, or have a threat of jeopardy
Be funny
Be powerful
Be likeable
Have some misfortune
Sara, the heroine in Rake, had a misfortune (her family is poor because Reath had won the family’s estate in a game of cards) and… That was it. She was not in jeopardy, she wasn’t funny or powerful and she certainly wasn’t likeable. She clearly needed work.
I gave her a sense of humor—even better, I gave her the ability to laugh at herself. She needed to be nice. She is strongly opinionated (as a result of her upbringing), but has an unfortunate tendency to blurt out her opinions at inopportune moments and to the wrong people—but then she’ll realize what she’s done wrong and apologize for it and not do it again (she’s smart too).
I also gave her flaws, which immediately makes her someone real, someone we can all relate to (how often have you said the wrong thing to the wrong person and then kicked yourself for it afterward? If I had a dime for every time I’ve done that I’d be a very wealthy person).
I turned someone who wasn’t nice or relatable into a fully developed, sympathetic, character—someone whose story you could care about.
I also did some minor fixes to Reath, the hero, taking him off the hook for having kept Sara’s family’s estate for ten years instead of giving it right back, which would have been the right thing to do. I blamed that awful behavior on his father and even added some more nastiness to Reath Senior, which, in turn, made my hero look like an even nicer person.
Now, as I’m preparing to delve back in to writing Falling, I’m starting to do something similar to these characters. I’m searching for clues as to who the hero and heroine are because, frankly, the first time I started writing this book, the hero and heroine are merely blank foils for my interesting plot. Neither of them have very distinct or interesting characters. That’s about to change.
The heroine, Erin, is the youngest of seven children. I’m sure you know how that would affect someone! Can you imagine the chaos in such a household—seven strong, outgoing, closely spaced children? And then put on top of that that she’s destined to be the most powerful magical person (Vallen) in the world. It might just make her parents more inclined to put pressure on her to do well in school and, well, in everything that she does. Naturally, if her parents expect her to be perfect, she can expect no less of herself.
Already I’m building a deep, three dimensional person here.
I consider what she would be like as a friend. How she would live as an adult. What she would do in a crisis, how she would react. These are all important things I need to know about Erin, because they all determine how she’ll behave throughout the story.
I’ll then do the same thing for my hero, who, naturally, had a completely different sort of life growing up and has had significant life-altering experiences. He’s got his own flaws (think superman complex) as well as good points and he’ll be as interesting and well-fleshed out as Erin with his own distinctive voice (he’s a lawyer, it’s a strong one).
I’m building my characters.
What do you do to build your characters, or do they just pop out of your brain fully formed?
And don’t forget to pick up your copy of A Rake’s Reward for 99 cents while that price
lasts–I’ll be raising it to its normal price of 3.99 next week! Click here to read the first chapter.
