Well, I didn't get any suggestions for topics to cover, so tonight, I'll just talk about something that's very important to me when I write: characters!
Now, I'm not going to tell you how to write characters, or how to create better characters. Because that's just pretentious, and that would be assuming that you write exactly the way I do. I just want to go over a few things to keep in mind when creating and writing with your character.
While the plot sometimes dictates what will happen to your characters, it's important that your characters not turn into plot devices themselves. When your cast is nothing but a tool of the story itself, it makes them flat and dull, and your readers can't relate to them. And I know that when I read a story, if I can't relate to any of the characters on any level, I put it down right away.
So the first and most important thing to do when creating a character is to know everything you can about that character. A lot of you just went "Well, duh," but it bears saying. I have several different kinds of character questionnaires that I enjoy filling out for my characters, and they really help hammer out all the little details.
Once you have those little details worked out, you don't necessarily have to work all of them into the story. But those things will come through on their own, and will add a lot of life to the character. And, of course, the more you know about the character, the more you love them. If you don't love your characters to an embarrassing extent, the reader probably won't get invested in them.
And, of course, there's the matter of dialogue. I'll probably give dialogue a workshop of its own, but dialogue is an important aspect of characters, too. One of the biggest things that puts me off in fiction is when all the characters sound the same when they talk.
When writing dialogue for one of your characters, always keep in mind who the character is. For an extreme example, say you had an aristocrat character talking to a common laborer. There are many ways to make the aristocrat's speech sound proper: grander vocabulary, not as many contractions, a more verbose way of expressing himself, and a lack of verbal shortcuts ("going to" rather than "gonna," for example.)
On the other hand, the laborer might be more to the point; maybe he's not educated enough to be very eloquent, or maybe he's too tired from a day of hard work. He might also have some sort of regional accent. In this case, the only thing you have to remember is to keep it consistent. If your character drops the 'g' on the end of 'ing' words, make sure you know whether the character always drops it, or whether he only does when he's excited/talking fast/etc.
Of course, sometimes, after you've created a character, you may find yourself at a loss for what to do with them. After thinking on it, you might think that it's a great idea to kill the character off. Death is a part of life, after all. That creates a lot of drama, right?
Except for the fact that, unless the death is organic to the story and plot, you might bypass drama directly and go straight into melodrama. The same goes for any huge trauma you inflict on your character. Now, inflicting a healthy amount of trauma on a character is what writing is all about. (At least, that's what I believe!) And in certain types of plots, like adventure stories, these sorts of events are more commonplace.
But an author has to proceed with caution when it comes to events like death, terminal illness, crippling injuries, breakups, and... well, you get the idea. Of course, any of the above can happen in a story, and be done very effectively. But when the author puts their characters through this simply because they're bored with that character, or think that the body count should be higher, the reader will notice. And we once again come back to the fact that, if you don't care about your characters enough to respect their story, the reader won't, either.
When it comes to breakups specifically, I have this quote from my teacher that I really agree with: "It's much more interesting to see the hoops people jump through to stay together." Genuine relationships between flesh and blood characters can be the heart of the story, and tell you a lot about those characters. If you have a character you don't know what to do with, pair him or her with another character and watch what happens. You might find out something new about that character.
This Sunday, I'm going to try something a little different with the prompts and do a character workshop with everyone. Look forward to it!
