My Author's Blog

Do you have...Character?

         Hello out there, I hope you are enjoying reading this as much as I have been enjoying posting. :) Well, onto today's topic, character, actually that should be Character(s).
 
 
         As an Author I know how easy it is to end up tangled in the plot line of your story. Fighting to make the plot line make sense, keep everything consistant, and to make it grab the interest of the reader. While these things are very important to a story(I am obviously talking about fiction for the most part here), there is an element to your story that is much more important, an element we sometimes don't think about. But, it is probably one of the most important elements to any story....the characters(especially the main character).
 
 
         While a blurb about plot might get someone to read your book, its their interest in your major characters that will keep them turning each page to find out what happens to them. It is easy sometimes, at least I find it so, to write about your character in a rought draft and not really tell people alot about them and almost not realize it. Why is this? Probably because for most writers the character is alive and running about in our imaginations. We can see them in full living color, talking to ther other characters, acting on the plot we have entangled them in, and sometimes, even talking to us! So its easy to to subconciously forget that we need to show them the reader. We have to make them believable, and more importantly the reader should be able to identify with them in some way. That dosn't mean that the ready has to 'like' them, but sympathetic helps.
 
 
         Some of the best ways I have found to do this, both by experimenting in my own writings, and reading what others have done, is to give them little personality quirks, little habbits subtely written in to the text. Everyone of us all have little quirks to our personality, therefore why shouldn't the characters we write about. Now this can be tricky, because you don't want it to stick out like a sore thumb, but to flow into the story in some way. Perhaps our main character, let's say her name is Sarah, has a habbit of twisting her hair when she's nervous. Or perhaps Sarah laughs when she is nervous, I have a friend who laughs uncontrollably, loud and maniacallyt that, when she is nervous.
 
 
         Try and think of some of your own habbits or quirks, or those of the people you know. sometimes giving a character some little, almost unnoticable, little habbit will really breath life into them for the reader.
 
 
As always, I welcome your own thoughts, comments, or examples on this. Until next time.
 
 
RD Williams
[e-mail]