Writing Your Character

Toady was our Saturday Writers Group that meets in St. Peters, Missouri.  The special speaker, Claudia Shelton, spoke on what you need to know about the characters you are writing.  The following are the notes I took during the meeting.  They are not organized very neatly, simply written up as she spoke.  So there are a few parts that seem to repeat where she went back and delved deeper and so forth, but hopefully some of her hints and tips will help you in your writing too.  Enjoy!  If you'd like to visit our writing group or join us, we usually meet the last Saturday of the month.  Here is the link:

http://www.saturdaywriters.org/

Claudia Shelton—speaker.  A romantic suspense author.  She has attended many workshops, each time taking away what she likes and making it her own.  She suggests in this day and age it is good to be a hybrid author due to the ever changing nature of the publishing world.

What helps her in her writing:

Character:  You need to know your character. 

What is character?  -- The way someone thinks, feels, and behaves.  The set of qualities and motivation.

(motivation—the reason they do something or that will make them want to do something).

Your character background:  you should know this going into your writing.  If you get half way through your writing and suddenly plop something down unexpectedly or change the character suddenly, then it will simply confuse your reader.  

Do your research.  Men and women look at the same thing and see it differently.  Like shopping for a house—a man may want a garage and a woman may be more interested in a deck, but they both want the same thing (a house on the lake). 

How does your character speak?  Long meandering sentences without breath?  Or short, succinct, choppy answers. 

New Boyfriend Effect—when you are working on a story and are at the hard, editing part, but you suddenly have an idea for the next story and it’s amazing and awesome and you can’t wait to write it….and you want to stop what you are doing to do that.

What is your setting?  What is the character’s background? 

Every story has a person in it.  Thus, characters are important. 

Things you want to know but may not include directly in your story in words:

Family status:  rick, poor, etc.; city or country; public or private school; athletic or reader; military or professional career; watching sports or playing sports.

How does their past affect them now?  What did they used to do but have given up, and what made them stop this?  How does it affect them now in how they respond to things or act on things?

Panster—someone who writes flying by the seat of their pants, no outline, just writes. 

After character, you need to know your story:  suspense, romance, etc.   

What was the character doing a minute before they met…

Life changes—they run into each other.  Where do you go from here?

Deep POV when you are so involved in a character while writing, you write something you didn’t expect or think about, just fit with your character.  If you write Deep POV, the reader will be pulled in to the story similarly. 

Basics of character:  what they look like, hair color, careers, what they achieve.  How they speak: dialect, drawl, laid back, slow or fast/hyper speaking; What do they watch or play?  Do they have hobbies? Play cards, pitch washers?  Do they dance?  What kind of music do they like?  What do they drink, water, soda, beer, whiskey, Cosmopolitan? 

Book Bible:  a notebook or post it notes or some way of writing down important information about each character.  You do not want to get half way through your book and suddenly the blue eyed girl has brown eyes. 

Though you aren’t supposed to stereotype, sometimes that is a way of conveying to the reader what your character is like.  Just don’t dwell on the stereotype. 

Hopes and dreams:  what are your characters hopes and dreams?  Are they hopeful or disdainful as it will never happen?  Realistic or out of scope?

You need to know your character going into the book.  If they faint at the sight of blood, then they probably aren’t going to suddenly be putting a tourniquet on a bullet wound. 

Black moment:  when a person has a decision to make to be involved or not involved; a moment of change where characters make that decision.  How does the change affect the character?

No matter the genre, the writing should flow, there should be peaks and valleys. 

POV—point of view.  When you write from a particular character’s point of view, you can tell your reader things about the character that other characters won’t know. 

Keep the reader turning the page.  Hooks at the end of each chapter.

Use a critique group; brainstorm.

How to have POV from various characters.  SCENE BREAKS or chapters.  Head hopping is only good if you are famous like Nora Roberts.  Otherwise, you need a scene break or chapter break before you can change the POV.  You can have parallel time line with various characters, but no head hopping.

Minor characters and red herrings.  Usually need at least 3 in a book.  For instance, a mailman delivering mail.  Don’t need to build his character.  Unless you are using him as red herring.  Then maybe he comes every day, build it, throughout the writing…He rings the bell and hand delivers.  Then the girl is murdered.  He might have done it.  It was odd he hand-delivered instead of putting it in the mailbox.  He had opportunity.

Short story you must deliver details faster but without doing an information dump. 

Flat vs. Round characters---yes, classics such as Dickens had flat characters (they don’t change).  But the modern world, most characters, and some of them will become classics, are round.  When you become famous, you can write however you want but for lesser known writers, you should stick to the current line of round characters (that change somewhere in the book).