Real characters, part 2 of 2

When your character speaks, listen

Introduction

Last week, we talked about getting to know your characters and peeling back the five layers: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and motivation.

Today, we’ll cover several ways to do this. You might do all or some of these, or just one that works for you. You might take all this in and develop your own unique process to get to know your characters.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Or maybe you already have a process that works for you that we don’t cover here. If so, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

The methods we’ll cover today:

• Let your characters speak

• Keep a character notebook (mentioned last week, but we’ll talk about it more)

• Write the character’s backstory

• Interview your character

• Love your character

Let your characters speak (and listen to them)

Sometimes a character shows up in my head uninvited, so I sit down and start typing as fast as I can while the character tells me her life story. I may not even know what the novel’s story is until 10,000 words or more, but eventually it starts to come out.

By then, I know my character inside and out.

Whether that works for anyone else or not, I have no idea. It’s how it happens for me sometimes. It feels a bit like method acting at times—I’m no longer the writer, but I become the character. I channel the character. I hear his voice in my head and I take dictation, writing down everything he says.

Much of the early writing will never make it into the final draft of the manuscript, but everything I learn about that character in this process feeds the writing.

This might happen more naturally if you’re writing in first-person because you’re writing through the character. If you’re writing in third-person, you’re writing about the character rather than through the character, so it can be more distancing.

If there’s distance between author and character, the gap between character and reader will be even greater.

How do you close that gap?