Characters

What’s happening when I’m writing these days? Well, I’m so far into writing this series that I feel more pressure from the characters than I do from any other direction. That sounds like writer babble, but it’s really what’s happening in my situation. I am my own publishing house, agent, editor, etc. so all the usual pressure is self-imposed. Okay, on a great day, maybe some pressure might come from readers wanting more, but that’s still to come, I figure, at any scale.

Meanwhile, it’s as if my characters are looking over my shoulder as I type. Sometimes I can feel them shaking their heads, whispering things like, “Nah, I don’t think I’d have said it like that,” or “Really, that’s how you think I’d act in that situation?”

Sometimes I can imagine having a cup of coffee with one of them. I know what we’d talk about. I know how it’d go. A roadtrip with some of them might be enlightening, for that matter.

I know several of the characters so well that I could anticipate what they’d order off a menu or what they’d want to see at the movies. I know their reactions to some current events and to some of the less-well-informed mistakes I make.

All this is to say that—without going to any great effort to do so—I’ve dreamed up some well-rounded characters. I did not crack out a 10 page bible per character that documents everything about them. Some authors do that, I have heard, and I admire that for it gives them no excuses for inconsistencies in the characters. (What’s going on here? She had black hair on page 44 and now on page 223 it’s strawberry blonde?)

I can listen to their dialogue and tell which character is speaking. I can read it aloud and know on first listen whether or not I’ve gotten the diction/dialect/cadence right. Frankly, I seldom get it right in the first draft, and it’s something I want to continue to refine as I learn to wrire ever-better.