“You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader.”
― Nancy Kress, Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting Dynamic Characters and Effective Viewpoints
Creating characters is easy. Developing them is the hard part. Here’s a sneak peek into what a writer has to do in order to create the characters you read about in our books.
https://youtu.be/B_GVgbykf8A
Regardless of the genre, a writer’s goal is to create believable characters that you will love, hate, get annoyed by, and want to meet.
In Deadly Sins 1 and 2, I had a few objectives in mind:
- Use a flash fiction writing approach
- Allow my characters to tell me who they are
- Give readers a taste of who my characters are before HUSH is released later this year.
- Entertain readers
Flash fiction writing forces a writer to think lean and mean about her word choices. If one word will do, then that’s better than two. This approach also has the benefit of revealing character traits to the writer, when that writer is more of a pantser. It’s a way of fleshing out your main people.
As I wrote each story for Deadly Sins 1 and 2, characters popped up that I didn’t realize would become important when writing HUSH. Murphy, Clive Dixon, Katrina, and Eddy all fall into this category. These people are integral to the Dezeray Jackson novels. Two characters aren’t products of my flash fiction approach: Haithem Nazari and Scott James. Both of these characters made debut appearances in my never released first novel for Dezeray Jackson. (That novel is likely to remain a file on my computer.) I liked Haithem, but he needed more je ne sais quoi (though I know what that it, now) and Scott James’ character completely changed because it became clearer to me that he had an important part to play in HUSH.
For me, the only way I can know my characters is to write a short story that involves them. I need to see how they interact with other characters. For example, the way Dez interacts with Murphy, versus how she communicates with Scott James, is evident in the language she uses with them, and her level of irritation or acceptance of their habits. They both get under her skin, but for different reasons, and she’s more tolerant of Scott — initially.
I thought I knew everything about Dez. Writing a series of flash fiction stories made me realize that she likes big, fearless dogs (she never had one in the first never-to-be-released novel), has a fondness for weapons, has zero tolerance for over-bearing men, loves pizza, drops f-bombs just about every time Murphy shows up, and more.
Overall, my characters are people you’d meet walking down the street. You don’t know everything about them at first blush, but as you observe them, you get to know them. Or, at least you think you do. How often do we know all there is to know about a person? The minute I know everything about Dez, is the day I’ll stop writing about her.