Building Character(s)

AI Generated image of a character escaping from a book.

Creating believable, relatable characters may be the hardest part of storytelling. Anyone can come up with crazy plot twists. I ask my dogs all the time, and if they are too busy sniffing each other's butts to help, I ask my brothers. (Writer's Note: I literally mean anyone can do it.) Building characters, on the other hand, is hard work.

Each character has to have a backstory. To be real, they have to have their own life, one that began before the story and continues (hopefully!) afterwards. This is not just main characters but the entire supporting cast. Not necessarily the person who waits on you for breakfast (unless you ask them out) or the janitor cleaning up while a character is working late, but if they impact the action of the story, they must be three dimensional. Each person in the story needs to be an individual. It sounds simple enough, but you would be surprised at how easy it is to fall into worn out tropes and short cuts as a way to build characters. If you are lucky, you have beta readers who will lovingly and directly point these out to you so that the people who are paying money for your book don't have to. (Writer's note: If your readers are telling you what's wrong with your characters in this book, they won't care to read about the characters in your next book.)

In my novel, Love, a novel of grief & desire, I have two sisters, Becca and Sandy, who are important supporting characters with their own story lines. They had to be uniquely their own person, while still sharing that undeniable family connection. They may know each other well enough to communicate with looks and code words, but they have to deal with the loss of their mom very differently or they don't feel like flesh and blood people.

Which is one of the reasons why this administration come across so weirdly. They don't feel like real people, but rather poorly written villains in an absurdist drama. They all are striving for a snarky, relevant, smarter-than-the-rest of the world tone, but it just comes across as whining. You know what I mean? They sound like thirteen-year-olds who have just discovered that the world does not revolve around them no matter how much they demand that it should. I cannot respect someone who whines all they time. I can't respect an administration where everyone whines all the time.

I heard some students give a passionate defense of higher education this weekend. They spoke with passion and purpose and poise. Listening to them, I thought they were demonstrating more leadership than anyone in Washington (or Columbus for that matter.) They gave me hope.

We cannot abide cruelty.

Win a free Kindle edition of Love: a novel of grief and desire: I work with Reader's Favorite on the Kindle book giveaway. If you go to https://readersfavorite.com/book-giveaway/love/1 you can sign up for the monthly giveaway. You can scroll through the list of giveaways (over 500 each month) or sort the list by title or author to find Love: a novel of grief and desire and put your name in for this month's drawing. Good luck!