Writing Compelling Characters (The great blogging experiment)

Sorry I'm a little late to the party today, but it's also not too late for others to join The Great Blogging Experiment, HERE, along with the other 182 of us so far.

We're all blogging about how to write compelling characters to see how many different perspectives we can squeeze out of one topic. In an effort to maintain scientific integrity, I haven't read any other posts yet, but I look forward to doing so!

Now, for my contribution:

Method Characterization

There are many concrete things you can do to improve character development, not the least of which is to throw your protag into an amazing story and make her/him face lots of challenges. What I’d like to get at (or try to, at least) is the magic part of characterization…that elusive thing, like a wonderful writing voice, that you know when you read it but you can’t quite explain it.

Here are a few ways I try to capture the magic:

1.             1. Acting 101. Even if you never took this class in college (Everyone should, BTW. It’s a blast.), you’ve probably heard an actor say, “What is my motivation here?” You, as the author, should know what’s driving each character, even if other characters and the readers never find out what’s really up with them. Because if you know, then each character will say and do things that are true to them, and it will come across as authentic.

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      2. Also Acting 101. And similar to the last point. Know each character’s backstory even if they never come out in the book. Think of each character as an iceberg where only small portions come out of the water. Only, unlike a real iceberg, sometimes the tiny portion that shows can give us glimpses or even full views of what hides under the water.

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           3. Again, from Acting 101. Live in the moment with your characters. Gestures, clothes and facial expressions that personify the character can come out when visualizing the scene as you write. It can also make IM and dialogue more authentic.

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      4. Fall in love with your characters. I have one character who wears hemp-style bracelets. Every time I would see someone wearing them in public I’d get the warm fuzzies, thinking about Riley. That love will come through on the page.

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      5. Finally, let your characters take the lead when they want to. A guy character in my WIP (who I haven’t written yet), keeps showing up at the door (in my mind) holding a video game controller. I kept fighting it at first, saying to myself, he’s an alien from a non-violent planet. He cannot be playing shoot-em-up video games. But he kept insisting, so I followed his lead, and now I know why he plays video games. Those moments, though few and far between for me, are when the real magic happens.