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Great Expectations for Great Characters

Have you ever named fish after your characters? Added them to your ‘contacts’ on your phone (the characters, not the fish, ha ha.) Are they your friends or enemies? What if you met them in a dark alley? Or what one question would you ask your character? Do they have a Facebook page? Do they Tweet?

Believe me, you can go really overboard with this thought process: delving into the mind of your character until they become actual people to you, but usually characters (many of mine) suffer from being too flat. I’m preaching to myself when I say, Hey, if you’re gonna do this writing thing, don’t waste time on flat characters. Give them life. Make them real.

What are their quirks or habits? What makes them different from others? ‘Interview’ your character until you find out everything you can about them. At this point, you are ready to start writing their story. Just like how an investigative reporter researches the facts before sending the story to print, it pays to investigate and research your character.

Have you sketched your character or found their photos in magazines or catalogs? You may find you need to describe them more fully. I’ve even heard of writers creating collages that represent their books to inspire them. A picture tells a thousand words, right?

Some friends and I participate in a long-established writers contest every Labor Day (for the last three years anyway.) It’s called The 3-Day Novel Contest— a brutal exercise where you pack as much writing as you can into only three days. It’s incredibly fun, but horribly excruciating as you can imagine. But at the end you have a complete novel. Of course, the average length in three days is only about 20,000 words, so it will need expanding, but the story is there. No, I haven’t won…yet (ha ha), but I highly recommend the experience. It’s especially fun because our friends invite us to stay with them, so we can suffer together and take breaks, whining and asking ourselves “Why do we do this?”

I told you about this gruelling opportunity to tell you this: The rules of the contest say you can’t write even a word of the book before 12:00 am on the first day, but you can outline, sketch, research, etc as much as you’d like. If you enter the contest knowing your character inside and out, then you will produce more words because you won’t have to stop and figure things out as you go. It really forces me to create the character before I type a single word.

Whether your characters are saints or villains, have great expectations for them!