I like finding out who my characters are, but I’m not very good at picturing what they look like.

As for developing characters, I have trouble knowing exactly how much physical description to add how early on and how to integrate it smoothly into the story.

I’m also a very slow cook - it takes me forever to get the feel for where I want to go.

Having written much more non-fiction than fiction, I looking forward to hwo this topic developes.

What’s fun for me is when to build complex emotions and attributes into our characters so we know them better than the character knows themself. It gives an added element to what the character gets to discover along the path, or a bit of conflict with other characters or situations.

For example, if my main character—let’s call him Randy—is not good at remembering names and has developed a way to cope with it, but doens’t really think about it because he’s not that introspective and it just kinda developed naturally over time, then he might realize over the course of the story that his coping mechanism (which is to mentally picture a person’s name spelled out in Marvel comic style font over their head since he has a photographic memory and a fascination with comic books) makes him feel kinda weird and self-concious when he meets people because he’s aware that they look a little alarmed when he asks them how to spell their name and then stares off in a glassy-eyes trance over their head.

Once he realizes he’s been doing it so long that it has affected several areas of his life, he has to decide if he’ll try to figure out a more socially acceptable way of doing it, or just embrace who he is, go all out with it, and make it cool so everyone else will want to do it too. One of those tiny little revelation/resolution things to spice up the story.

Or not. (Was that middle paragraph all one sentence?)Sheesh. I’m switchin to decaf.

I find that seeing the physical things with my characters is easy, it’s getting down the deeper things. I can pretty well see it in my mind but to get it down onto paper in something that makes sense is hard.

You and I are dumb together! I also never considered how a physical or psychological trait can effect my characters’ emotional makeup.

I think my characters - even those I know well - will deepen even further.

Very cool.

My father was 6 feet tall when he was 13 (he stopped growing at 6′4″), and he had a lot of extra pressure to think and behave as an adult because of it, simply because people assumed he was older. Big effect on his psyche.

Even in daily doses, there’s so much to learn here!

I hope this blog eventually spirals around again to topics already covered. This morning at 5:30 I had a breakthrough in writing an author bio, but now it’s too late to share. Same thing happened with one-sentence summaries. Guess I gotta get quicker on the uptake!

Enjoy the conference!

Getting to know my characters this intimately also helps me to keep each one in his/her own voice so they don’t begin to sound alike (or like me).

As I said, really weird, but it works for me.

When writing my first book, I hit a wall. So I went for a walk with my main character and asked her how to work it out. She told me what she would do next. In a more recent manuscript, she surprised me at the end of the book when I thought she should shout the closing line, and she insisted on whispering it. OK, I know you’re supposed to go easy on the whispering, but she insisted!

Andra, we shouldn’t call ourselves dumb. We’re just slow. LOL! Nah. See the thing is my MC has a lot of inner turmoil, so I understand how that affects his moods etc, but I never really gave any thought to how his physical traits affected him. But you know, some of my physical traits affect me, so why not him.

Did, I mention how much I appreciate you Randy.

I love working on my characters’ personalities and motivations, but I find it much harder to bring them to life externally. I want to give my characters their own unique style of dialogue, way of moving, physical gestures and habits and so on but while I have a lot of resources to draw on for personality styles (and motivations come to mind fairly easily) I haven’t found anything like that for the externals.

All I can come up with is that I need to do some in-depth people watching, and fill a note-book with the gestures, speech patterns and physical attributes that I observe and sprinkle them over my characters - but is there an easier or more organic way of bringing the “outside” of my characters to life?

Talk about ego.

But really, it’s not that I think too much of myself. It’s that I’m so much into the story that I’m simply there.

Wow! Thanks for blogging after midnight for us! I am touched. Hope your class goes really well, and the name tags take the pressure off face-recognition difficulties. =)