Just quickly want to say thank you to those who took the time to vote last week or comment.
I posted the same poll on my Facebook account, and a few more favoured Magic is Real.
I'm still on the fence, but in the meantime, I'm writing up all the characters' synopsis from each of the stories.
It's a great way to know who your characters are - everything that motivates them, their dark little secrets, their favourite piece of music, and what makes them get out of bed in the morning. Whether any of this information makes it onto the page, it doesn’t matter as long as you know who this person is as you write about them. This really helps me as my characters sometimes have a mind of their own, and trying to get them back to the story when they react to something is a pain.
I was lucky recently to attend an online workshop hosted by Carmilla Voiez, a British horror and fantasy writer. I’ll admit I’ve not read her work, something I will remedy, but she took the character development to another level, and it has inspired me to do the same as I delve further into my own. Her advice was not just adding in the little details like what they own, but also what their moral code and their super objective is - that force deep inside that makes them act the way they do, even if they are not even aware of it. For her, it's the characters and their actions which drive the story and create the theme.
I’ve always added a rundown of who mine are, but never to this level of detail. I guess, having sat on my first novel for so many years, I subconsciously grew to know them.
"I know the dark secrets locked in your room, of all the dreams and nightmares your life has seen, screaming terrors hounding your mind’s eye night after night." Extract from my poetry book Scattered on Rocky Ground.
This deep-dive into character development has certainly changed how I’m thinking about my new ones and the stories I want to write. I’m hoping it will help. While I’ve been told my characters are believable (Heart of A’dara), I don’t know who these new ones are yet. I can picture them and run dialogues in my head, but I certainly don’t want them all being another carbon copy of a previous one, just in a different setting.
Lots of prep work to do, and on top of that - the research into them. As I’ve started developing them, odd quirks and likes have popped up in areas I’m not familiar with - books I don’t read favoured by one, places in the world they’ve lived I’ve never been (who are these people and why have these details appeared on the page as I type??) So, lots of background research to do and again, maybe hardly any of these details will appear in the story - I just need to know who they are and why they do what they do - then I can write their tale and all their little secrets - that I might keep safe, maybe.
I feel like I’m so bad with character development. I have characters in mind but I need to get to know them more. Is the webinar you took available again? Or was it a one time thing? Thanks!