By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
My daughter has been horseback riding on
the weekends for years now. I love that she loves it, I love the way she excels
at it. I love that it’s an outdoor
activity in a digital, indoor age. The
barns are interesting places and the people who hang out in barns are very
different from the people I’m ordinarily around, so that’s very
stimulating. And, of course, the horses
are gorgeous.
But I really just didn’t get the whole horse thing. My daughter would talk about the horses while
we were at the barn and continue talking about them during the week. There was lots of personification going
on...in my mind, anyway. “Dusty worries
about the jumps when they’re in different locations than usual. That’s why he kept trying to look at them as
we were cantering around the ring. I had to really make sure he was looking
straight ahead,” she’d say. And I’d nod
and ask more about Dusty’s proclivities and his outlook on the world, and
think, “What a creative child I have!”
Because I’d look at Dusty, the largest horse in the barn, and all I got
out of it was… “My Lord, what a massive animal that is.” And hope she always stayed on the horse.
I’m perfectly capable of telling people
what’s on my dog’s mind and my cats’ minds, but I couldn’t get into the horses’
heads at all. Until my daughter started
riding Sweet Pea a month or so ago. That
was when I started getting into horses.
Sweet Pea was curious. My daughter would be trying to tack her up
and the horse would hear someone coming and crane her head to peer around and
see who was there with this intelligent, interested, curious look on her
face. She attentively watches the pasture, when she has a view to it, to
spy on her horse buddies. Actually, I
guess Sweet Pea is more nosy than
curious.
With characters, we’re doing the same
thing. We’re trying to find some way for
readers to connect with them. How can we
bring them to life, especially if they only have a minor role in a book
(protagonists, hopefully, we’ve got nailed).
How do we keep our book’s characters from becoming just another horse in
the stable?
I like to start out simple and then build
from there…maybe even in the edits if I don’t have the character
fully-developed as I’m writing him.
Having something small to build around…like Sweet Pea’s nosiness…is helpful
when you’re starting out on a new book.
At this point and after over a dozen
books, I look for ways to keep characters and plots fresh. I know writers who’ve written upwards of
sixty or eighty books and I marvel at their ability to keep their books from getting
stale or exploring the same types of characters or subject matter. Sometimes when I’m brainstorming, it’s almost
as though my brain is trying to follow on the same course…I’ll immediately come
up with something I’ve done before (even if it’s a few books ago) and dig
deeper.
Sometimes, I need a prompt. Get me started with a direction that’s
different from the well-worn track I’m trying to steer down again. At that point, going to a site like the Inspiration for Writers site,
can help to just jumpstart your own process.
There are lists
of character traits there that can just help get your imagination in
gear. The site Read, Write, Think , a resource for
teachers, also has a
nice sample list.
Sometimes I’ll go on sites like Pinterest…and be careful there, because that place is a major time-suck. Set a
timer. But you can see so many pictures
of different types of people there that it can help break you out of any
particular pattern that your brain is bent on repeating. People's appearances
in the pictures suggest different types of personalities.
My standby is ‘collecting people’ out in
public. Just being at the library gives
you the opportunity to see many different types of people—and attitude and
personality tends to show itself easily, even to casual observers (especially
after you do this kind of collecting through the years).
Most of us have written amalgams of
different people we know—family, friends, co-workers, acquaintances. After a while, though, unless we get out and
meet more people, we’ll have run through
all the folks we know. At least…I have.
:) I didn’t know that many people, even
starting out. But making amalgams can be helpful for a while.
You can also twist it around and build a
character from what they want most.
Because sometimes, what someone wants most suggests certain traits about
them. If what someone wants most is
money, for instance…it's easy to dream up particular traits for them. What if it’s respect, power, love,
friendship, shelter, faith?
What if you dump a bunch of
challenges/problems on some of these characters? How they react to that and deal with it will
indicate some of their traits…traits that can also be shown in other parts of
their life and relationships with others in the story.
So…lots of different ways of doing
this. And this is just getting us
started…the next drafts we can add to the skeleton first draft and fill them
out even more. The whole point is just
to make the characters stand out from each other to readers and make it more
likely that readers will foster connections with them and relate to them and
just plain get them like I finally got
Sweet Pea.
How do you set your characters apart from
each other and provide them with unique traits and personalities?