MAKE THE
READERS CARE ABOUT YOUR CHARACTERS
Great
characters are vital to a great novel. You can write the best storyline ever,
but if your characters are flavorless and flat as cardboard your book won’t go
far.
We’ve
all had this experience. You pick up a book that looks and sounds interesting,
maybe exciting! You cozy up in your favorite reading spot with drinks and
snacks and settle in for a fun read. Five minutes later you realize the main
character is a one-dimensional bore and you don’t particularly care what
happens to him/her. What a waste of time and money!
* * *
As
an author, it’s up to you to assure the person who paid good currency for your
novel engages with your characters. Do you want the reader to love your hero?
Worry they won’t see “reality” until it’s too late? Desperately want them to
reach their goals? And what about your villain? Do you want the reader to hate
the antagonist and hope they pay for their heinous behavior in the most painful
manner? Or perhaps sympathize with them?
In
the way of a Michelin Star Chef, it’s your job to turn your characters and your
novel into a tasty, flavorful dish making the reader want to linger and relish
every word. AND return to buy your other works. Here are some hints for cooking
up a delicious novel.
The Character Ingredients: Timelines and layouts for your characters are the first
steps. Date of birth, sex, physical description, education and occupation are a
good start. As a cook, I call these the ingredients. But, without spices you
will have a bland, boring novel that will leave people unhappy and unsatisfied.
The Character Spices: The key ingredients are parents, siblings, friends and enemies…the
people who enter the character’s life and leave an imprint.
Parents…
are they educated? Loving? Uncaring? Happy? Angry? Within the same family with
the same upbringing, there will be one who is gifted with a silver tongue and
another who stutters. One who has the looks, another who’s the plain Jane/John.
One who’s athletic, one whose nose is always in a book or iPad/tablet. These
family members all leave a stamp on your character’s personality. Neighbors,
teachers, school friends and bullies will add to the ‘recipe.”
Now
it’s time to do some research into what was happening in the world when your
character was born. Did it impact your hero/villain, their parents and thus the
family dynamics? As examples: there was a recession in 1991; the Vietnam War in
60s/70s; a stock market crash in 1929; world war in 1939-40s; the assignation
of President Lincoln in 1865; the start of the Industrial Age in the late
1700s.
Whatever
you decide is part of your character’s background, do diligent research. Let’s
take the 1929 stock market crash and resulting Great Depression. Investigate
how that affected people. Families who lived in mansions and lost everything
and ended up in soup lines. People who thought suicide was the way out of their
problems. Others who picked themselves up and started over to create new and
successful lives. Don’t feel like reading? Check out all the documentary videos
on YouTube.
Next
research what was happening in the world when your character was in his/her
formative years in school and university. Same for starting her/his career.
My
current WIP takes place in 1915, San Diego, California. The protagonist is a young
woman whose parents died in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. She was fifteen
at the time. Does this loss make her afraid of emotional attachments because
they could be snatched away? Lost her faith in God? Is she coping with
abandonment issues? Fearful of loud sounds? Living life fast & furious
because life is not a sure thing?
Now
with a firm foundation (or what I call the first course), you can plot out
their goals, and the exciting or maybe terrifying obstacles they must face,
ending with an award-winning dessert…a place on the Best Seller List.
* * *
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
* * *
Research tip
for historical fiction and non-fiction authors. This particular site is a gold
mine of vintage postcards of places and events from around the world. I’ve been
able to accurately describe locations and interiors of hotels, train stations,
restaurants and how people dressed and moved about in trolleys, automobiles,
airplanes in San Diego 1915 (my WIP). I was able to see if certain streets had
been paved, that both autos and horses shared the streets and the horses left a
lot of poop. https://www.hippostcard.com/
See you next month.
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