Tag: creating characters

Make me laugh! #MFRWauthor

CharactersOver the years of reading, I’ve fallen in love with angsty characters (ooo-la-la, Mr. Darcy!), sweet characters (Donald in Finding Camlann), quirky characters (Don in The Rosie Project), and any number of alpha males (any of the SEALS in Suzanne Brockmann’s books). But the character that will steal my heart for real, is the one who shows humor. That goes for male or female. If a character makes me laugh, that’s most often a 5-star read for me.

I love good banter. Whether characters hate each other or feel that first Banter and humor in dialoguespark of electricity, if they also share a great back and forth in their dialogue, I consider that a winner. Sarah Ney has written a series called How to Date a Douchebag, and all of them contain great banter, Her books make me laugh—and a few have made me tear up. Spectacular interaction. In fact, while writing this post I started reading one of the books in the series again. So, if you’ll excuse me, I plan to add a little humor to my afternoon.

Read the next blog in the blog hop by going here.

Dee

Burning Bridges by Anne Krist
One Woman Only
Only a Good Man Will Do
Naval Maneuvers

Creating a character #MFRWauthor

Create a characterI used to think that creating a character for a book would be easy. After all, we all know a bunch of people. Just make a character like one of them. But the people we know are already true, full people (though I have to admit, I know a lot of people who could use a little more work). To take a concept, a thought of a person you want to play a part in your story involves developing every single facet of personality, appearance, habits, quirks. It can be daunting! Consider the difference between buying a house that needs to have the walls painted to starting from ground zero and building the whole house from scratch.

I use a couple of techniques to create characters. First, I generally think about the character for a while. It can be any length of time, from a week to a year. By the time I start, I have a good idea of who the character is going to be. Then I use a character sheet I found in a plotting book a long time ago. It helps me see the character as more than two dimensional. The character sheet forces me to think about physical characteristics like hair and eye color, tattoos, piercings, and such. I also fill in things like hometown, siblings, general background material, internal and external goals, what they want, and what they never want to do.

I love the character sheet! But I have found that even the sheet can Charactersbe a little short of what it takes to make a character real. Kayelle Allen provides character interviews for authors who post on the Romance Lives Forever blog and I love them. Interviewing the character and really thinking about the answers make the hero or heroine come to life as a person. Such a great help!

What do you do to make your characters real? And as a reader, what do you notice most about characters?

Read the next blog in the blog hop by going here.

Dee
Burning Bridges by Anne Krist: old letters put the lie to Sara’s life. Now, mending her past mistakes while crossing burning bridges will be the hardest thing she’s ever done.

One Woman Only
Only a Good Man Will Do
Naval Maneuvers

Who is Creative? #MFRWauthor

Unique ideaDictionary.com (yes, nothing but the finest resources for me!) defines creativity as: “the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination.” Thesaurus.com (you aren’t surprised, are you?) gives synonyms like cleverness, genius, originality, vision, inventiveness. So this topic of creativity is wide open. It can cover things like Michelangelo “seeing” David in that piece of marble to a gardener creating a kangaroo topiary. Or the visionary drawings of Leonardo to a kid making a building out of Legos. Or, more suited to our creativity, the works of J.R.R. Tolkien to the first person who committed “Twinkle, twinkle, little star…” to paper.

Aren’t we all creative in some way? I have a good friend who doesn’t write Cupcakebut she makes some of the most beautiful jewelry. I might eat a simple cupcake, but I love watching chefs like Bronwen Weber and Duff Goldman create pastry magic on TV.

How many people-watch in the mall? But then, how many take their observations and write a book about the old man half asleep on the bench or the mother hustling the crying toddler toward the exit just before dinner time? Not many. That’s us. We see what everyone else sees and then write it into something extraordinary. That’s a real talent. That’s creativity.

How to explain creativity? I don’t know. My mother-in-law had a knack for making a beautiful garden. The colors complimented each other, her designs—which often changed from year to year, depending on her whim—Gardendrew you in and made you want to explore what was just around the side of the house. Me? I can’t grow a cactus in a pot. On the other hand, grocery lists were her idea of “writing.” We saw things from different perspectives.

I think creativity comes down to that—seeing the world from unique perspectives. God and nature gave us the sight. It’s up to us to use that sight in the best ways we can in order to improve the world.

Read the next blog in the blog hop by going here.

Dee
Only a Good Man Will Do: Seriously ambitious man seeks woman to encourage his goals, support his (hopeful) position as Headmaster of Westover Academy, and be purer than Caesar’s wife. Good luck with that!

Naval Maneuvers: When a woman requires an earth-shattering crush of pleasure to carry her away, she can’t do better than to call on the US Navy. Sorry, Marines!

To clone or not to clone…? #MFRWauthor

A friend as characterBy cloning here, I mean using traits of friends or family as part of your characters’ personalities. It’s a touchy thing, for sure!

I wrote a blog post years ago about five of us friends working at a company in New Jersey. I felt so close to these women—they were work sisters. One of the group died of cancer at a very young age and I wrote about how I’d first met them (they were already a working team when I joined). My first impressions were of “a blonde,” a “woman with big hair and pictures painted on her nails,” and “an aloof woman who I thought hated me.” That was exactly how I pictured them when we first met. I didn’t know them. I didn’t yet know how smart, caring, beautiful they all were, inside and out. That wasn’t the point of the blog post, either, but when they read it and responded, I had to see the post from their perspective. One woman wrote and asked was her hair really that big? Another asked “So I guess I’m the aloof one?” I felt terrible!

Now granted, a blog post isn’t the same as using friends as a basis for a book character, but the result can be the same. I have a friend whose friends asked her to make them characters in one of her books. She used different Angry friend names but some physical and personality features as secondary characters, and two out of three were angry over how she’d portrayed them. They didn’t like the parts in the book she assigned them, didn’t like how she portrayed their personalities, didn’t like… Well, you get the picture.

Another friend told me that she based a cheater and womanizer on a former boyfriend and that he would recognize himself immediately. I advised her against going that route! No need making enemies on purpose when life throws enough roadblocks our way to begin with.

In Passionate Destiny, I broke that rule. I used a former boss as the basis for Margaret. If he read the book (which I’m certain he did not), he would have recognized himself in a skinny minute. The difference is, he would have laughed! He was the nicest man in the world, but he did have a snobbish side and he wasn’t afraid to show it. That’s what I drew on for Margaret as she moved from a professorship at a New Jersey college to rural Virginia, where people have to pump their own gas and folks chat at the grocery check-out counter. So maybe the trick in having characters resemble friends or family is to be sure they have the temperament to laugh at themselves.

Creating charactersWe all view people around us—their looks, their quirks, their actions—as fodder for rich characterization for our books. We can’t help it! But when it comes to those closest to us, maybe have a talk about what you have planned before writing.

Read the next blog in the blog hop by going here.

Dee
Only a Good Man Will Do: Seriously ambitious man seeks woman to encourage his goals, support his (hopeful) position as Headmaster of Westover Academy, and be purer than Caesar’s wife. Good luck with that!

Naval Maneuvers: When a woman requires an earth-shattering crush of pleasure to carry her away, she can’t do better than to call on the US Navy. Sorry, Marines!