M. Do You Love Your Characters?

When we had the Question and Answer session at the kids school the other day we were asked several great questions. One that made me think was; how do you create the people in your story?


We thought about it for a minute and then answered together in turns. The best way that I can describe it is that you need to love them like you would your own child. You create them, you mold them, even more then your own children.

Your kids have free will and can truly decide to choose their own path, but your characters will only follow the path you set before them. They will face the blockades that you set up. When they hurt, you hurt. You really have to love the characters in the stories that you write to make them come to life. Life in the absence of love is worthless. Everybody loves something and knows what love can feel like.

Channel true love into the heart of your characters and words on a page will take form and gasps of breath.

M. Your real life and your real fiction

Today I was doing some reading and editing of the original MS and as I was reading through, I started to think of the characters in it.  There are quite a few, if not all, that resemble the people I know in an uncanny way.  Most of their personalities are similar to the people in my life and the ones around me.  The way they carry themselves and converse with each other is vaguely familiar and for some even the way they look.

I started to think of the Wizard of Oz and Dorothy coming home to her little farm house.  All of the characters in her story had matched with people that were in her real life.  And in one way or another the fictional characters matched the ones in her real world.  Do we all do that when we think of our own fictions?  Do we find a way to incorporate the people around us and influence us when we write our own stories?

M. Characters You Create

Writing is one of the most difficult tasks/hobbies that I have ever taken on.  It is grueling and mostly thankless.  So far all I have done is entertain myself, which for now has been good enough, but I have a thirst to be published.  I am starting to fall in love with the characters that are coming to life on the pages as if I know them.  They each have their own personality and quirks that make them unique.  Generally I like most of them and wouldn't want to see any harm come to them.

I think back to when I read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and how J K Rowlings had to kill off one of the characters.  In an interview she had stated that she had become extremely upset and even cried doing it.  I never understood that until now.  I couldn't imagine taking one of the characters that I created and just killing them.  I would be heartbroken.

M. Characters vs. Plot

What makes a great novel?  Is it the plot that doesn't let up and carries you through the book until you reach the end only wishing and praying that it will continue.  Or is it possibly the characters in the story its self?  Do you fall in love with the charaters to the point that when the author does something to them or causes them pain it causes you some sort of pain.  What does it for you?  Is it some of both and is there a balance that has to be in a book for you to keep from becoming too bored?