▣ Expanding your Character
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In this writing I'm fresh back from a writing convention with a lot of new ideas. I hope they will help others as well.
Expanding your Character
I just returned from the Bouchercon Mystery Writer’s conference in
A literary agent, Donald Maass spoke to us and had some very good ideas which I’ll try to incorporate into my current manuscript. He wasn’t telling us how to get an agent. He was telling us how to write a better manuscript and especially what to do in that all important first five pages. He called it writing a break out novel. That would be a novel that stands out from the others and is uniquely good.
He asked us to visualize the protagonist in our current work in progress. He then asked us to think of a person who is a hero to us personally. We were asked the following questions about that person:
What makes that person a hero?
What do they do, or what did they do to achieve hero status in your eyes?
When did this happen?
What else was going on around you?
How did the things this person did change what you did from then onward?
Can your protagonist have this quality at least some of the time?
How can the protagonist show this quality in the first five pages?
“After we answer all these questions,” he said, “We’ll have an idea of how to make the reader care about our protagonist.”
Even if the protagonist is a dark character he has to have some good that shows and proves that he’s human; this is somewhere inside him. Find that spark of good. Show that he’s human, interesting, quirky, laughable, rueful or sad. Look at what he needs to do to change. You need to open the character’s heart enough to get a feel for him. This needs to be in the first five pages.
If we are resistant to finding the depth of the character, the point where we resist may be a compass to where our own vulnerabilities lie. Although it’s normal not to want to identify with a bad character, we should be able to dig deep and find that spark of good. Doing so may also help the writer to come to terms with areas of pain and weakness in himself.