Improve Your Characters

So, you’ve thought up the perfect story and you have a character whispering in your ear when you’re trying to sleep at night.  He or she is fascinating, fun, exciting – or melancholy, morbid and deranged – whatever the personality of your character, they’re begging to be written about.  Maybe you’ve told a few friends or family members about this person, maybe your lead character is your secret, but now you want to describe them, capture their voice on the page and put them in your story or novel.

Here’s the thing: a lot of writers have fantastic lead characters but they don’t know what to do with them.  These poor potential literary heroes and heroines are left languishing as they peer through old photographs or sit looking out the window.  I’ve always said to people who show me their work that they should make their characters DO something – excellent advice I myself received from editor Kent Bruyneel.  Make your characters leave the room, he said, or have an argument, or go to the store.  Anything to get them moving.

I’ve thought about this for years and so when I slipped in to hear new author Richard Newsome talking about his novel The Billionaire’s Curse, I was excited to hear him say: PUT YOUR CHARACTERS UNDER PRESSURE.

He’s completely right – the way to make your characters feel real and to bring your story alive is to put more and more pressure on your beloved protagonist so that they have to ACT and RE-ACT, making them into the person they will become at the end of the story.  Putting a character under pressure reveals who they really are – when they’re faced with a terrible decision, what do they do?  This shows the reader who that character really is.

Newsome has artfully summed up an essential way to make a story more compelling and he’s let us into the secret of writing better characters.  So try it – take his advice and put on the pressure (remember, it doesn’t have to be a melodramatic moment for it to be life-changing – that depends on the sort of writer you are).