What do you do?
Posted by Keziah Hill on 14 Aug 2007 | Tagged as: Chit Chat
At the Romance Writers’ of Australia annual conference, Jenny Cruise and Anne Stuart were our guest speakers. They were fantastic. I had a light bulb moment in Anne Stuart’s workshop on writing Dark Contemporary romance. If you’ve read Anne’s Ice series you know she likes a dark hero. She very successfully gets into the mind of a hero as he contemplates murdering the heroine. But she’s able to redeem him in the end.
One of the techniques she uses to deepen the characterization of her heroes is to think of five things they would never do. Then she makes them do them.
What do questions do you ask your hero or heroine to make them fuller characters?
p.s for some cute pics of our conference, check out the Argh Ink blog and Notes from a Drama Queen
This is one of Donald Maass’s suggestions that I don’t get. Why do we make a character do something he wouldn’t normally do? Isn’t this going against his character? Or manipulating him? Can someone explain?
Linda
August 15th, 2007 at 10:54 amI think it has to do with revealing the dark and desperate bits of a character that can make them more human and sometimes more conflicted. I take it to mean that the 5 things are things that the character may never want to do, but may be driven to do through compulsion or desperation. For example, you may be happily going on, developing the character of your heroine and she’s flat. Too happy, too good, not conflicted. Make her do something that such a one dimensional character would never do, like abandon her elderly mother. Sounds like a terrible thing to do, but it makes the character interesting because she’s probably got a reason that will redeem her in the end. Hopefully the reader will keep reading to find out what it is.
August 15th, 2007 at 6:26 pmDarlene - that’s a good point. When we write a story, the whole premise is that the characters are taken out of their comfort zones and put in situations where they have to do things they wouldn’t normally do, right? I don’t know if these list making things are useful or not. I don’t find them to be… I just spend too much time making lists instead of writing. And for them to work, you’d have to come up with something really pertinent to the plot. So for each new situation, you’d have to think of five things the character wouldn’t do. Otherwise it’s rather pointless. For example, my current hero would never go to a karaoki bar…but that has NOTHING to do with the plot. They are in the wilderness in Peru. I guess the bottom line is to dig deep into the character, whether or not you make lists.
August 21st, 2007 at 2:49 amI’m new to the writing world. My first manuscript is with my agent waiting to be “discovered.” But I agree with Gail. It’s not so much a list of things, but the choices that the character makes. In my story, the character normally makes the right choice. But when faced with a certain situation, she makes a bad decision which is out of character for her. Then she does it again and several more times, until she finally realizes what she’s done. I’ve tried the “list” route and found it doesn’t work for me. Maybe it will on a different project. I’m always willing to try something different!
August 21st, 2007 at 5:11 am