Creating Credible (But Incredible) Characters

What makes you the unique individual you are? Is it your looks? Your personality? Your upbringing? Your heritage? Your hopes and fears? Your strengths and weaknesses? Your likes and dislikes? It is all of that, and more. Those are the very same characteristics make fictional characters unique and so vital that when you’re reading a book, you feel as if the story people are a part of your life.

Family and friends help make you who you are, or at least help show you who you are by the way you interact with them. In the same way, an author shows a character for who or what she is. If a character has that never-satisfied mother, that funny uncle, that supportive best friend, the author doesn’t even have to create the character, for the family and friends already have. It’s the character’s interactions that show who she is.

Enemies also make you who you are, and they make characters who they are. The stronger the enemy, the stronger the character. For example, a character who combats dragons is perceived as stronger than one who combats teddy bears. It is also a character’s enemies who help create the story because they give the story conflict, and without conflict there is no story.

And finally, how you talk makes you who you are, or at least makes people think that’s who you are. Do you talk with a lisp? Do you talk with an accent? Do you talk slowly as if savoring every word? Do you use four letter words? Do you speak softly, either because you are timid or because of passive aggressive tendencies? In that same way, dialogue shows who a character is.

The more an author knows about a character, the better she can show you who that character is. In older books, especially the classics, authors wrote page after page of character description, telling us who their characters are. Today’s readers, myself included, have no patience for such long drawn-out passages that go nowhere. We want to get right into the meat of the story. We want to learn who the character is by what she does, who she knows, and how she acts.

But first, the author needs to know who her character is.

(To help you learn more about your characters, click here: Character Questionnaire.)


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Pat Bertram is the author of More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I.

Dialogue with Pat Bertram

The Internet is such a wonderful place. Today, day five of my blog tour, I am in Florida with author Nancy J. Cohen talking about dialogue. Virtually speaking, that is. Physically, I am in Colorado, listening to leaves falling like rain. In Florida, it's a sunny day at the beach. At least I hope it is. I sure would hate to get caught in a hurricane while I'm visiting!

Yesterday someone commented that a virtual book tour seemed like a lot of work and asked if I would do it again. My first inclination was to say, "No way!" It's too much work for such seemingly meager results, yet I am meeting people out of my normal circle of connections, which is always a good thing. I am getting to talk about my books, which is fun. And it's a challenge, not just setting up the book tour, writing the articles, and promoting the tour, but figuring out how to make the same basic comment a hundred times and yet make each time seem fresh and new. So, would I do it again? I don't know. Ask me in six months when my next novel Light Bringer comes out. My goal (silly me!) is to be so well known by then that the book will just fly out of Amazon's warehouse as soon as I announce its publication. It could happen. And oh, by the way, I just bought London bridge. :)

So, please join me in Florida to dialogue about dialogue at: Nancy J. Cohen's Notes from Florida

Don't forget, my books are available in all ebook formats at Smashwords. Even better, you can download the first 30% of each book free. And speaking of free downloads, stop by Second Wind Publishing for a free sampler or two. One sampler includes the first chapters of all Second Wind's romances, the other sampler includes the first chapters of all Second Wind's mystery, adventure, maitstream novels. The first chapter of A Spark of Heavenly, More Deaths Than One, and Daughter Am I are in the Mystery Sampler.

Fleshing Out the Truth

Recently, I had the opportunity to observe a hospitalized teenager (someone I didn’t know) suffering from bulimia. It was tough to watch her eat and then regurgitate her food a few minutes later, only to slowly chew and swallow it back down again. It was even tougher to understand why this young woman looked more like a famine victim than the slender, beaming teenager she had been. (I saw a photo by her bed.) The teen seemed to have a lot of things going for her: intelligence, career goals, a loving supportive family who visited every day, and friends. She also happened to have a gorgeous face. But truly, her body was down to the bare bones. Her collar bone and vertebra protruded noticeably; her arms were merely two sticks layered in flesh.

A few weeks later, I was reading a novel as I always do before sleeping. A couple of times, when I put the book down, I thought of the emaciated teen, though I wasn’t sure why. The novel was a sci-fi thriller and none of the characters had an eating disorder. Food was scarcely mentioned in the story. But when I began to analyze the writing, I realized something was missing. Here was a book with an intriguing concept, memorable characters, and a fast pace, yet there was almost no narrative description. The story moved forward on dialogue, a trend I see more often all the time. A trend I’ve also followed.

These days, there’s a certain amount of pressure to tell a quick-paced story to hold readers’ short attention spans. The downside is that the strive for fast, thrill-a-minute reads can take a toll on one’s work. Certainly, there are readers who love the heavy-dialogue style and habitually skip narrative descriptions, and I was one of them. But I’ve begun to look at things differently. Now, I want to flesh out of my work, especially in short stories where the goal to tell a story in as few words as possible can pare a story down to the bare bones, and that’s not always a good thing. I now want to achieve a better balance between narrative and dialogue, and take time to tell a story.

Life is all about balances. And when something goes out of sinc, it reflects on the quality of life and the quality of one’s writing. Sometimes, it’s almost impossible not to succumb to pressure, whether real or imagined. And it’s really tough to look at your work and yourself as a writer, in a different way. But look we must. Painful as it might be. In the long run we’ll be better for it.

To read excerpts of Taxed to Death and Fatal Encryption visit www.debrapurdykong.com

What are some of the best writer's resources?

If you're an aspiring or published author looking for some great resources, I highly recommend the following books. Some will be genre specific as this comprises a large part of my own library.

General writing resources:

• Writer's Market (the holy grail for writers)
• The Canadian Writer's Market (ditto for Canadian writers)
• The Canadian Writer's Guide
• The Writer's Digest Guide to Manuscript Formats
• Self-Editing for Fiction Writers
• The Writer's Guide to Character Traits (excellent for building your characters)
• Characters and Viewpoint (great for improving POV) - published by Writer's Digest
• Writing Dialogue - published by Writer's Digest
• Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things
• How to Write a Children's Book and Get Published
• Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel
• Forensics for Dummies (no dead bodies included)

Book marketing books:

• What Writers Need to Know About Publishing (by Jerry D. Simmons, a great friend of mine)
• The Book Publisher's Handbook (Eric Kampmann)
• How to Sell What You Write
• Beyond the Bookstore (Brian Jud)
• Plug Your Book (Steve Weber, another friend)
• 1001 Ways to Market Your Books (John Kremer, another author friend)
• Web Site WOW (Jeniffer Thompson)

Like any craft or skill, you have to learn it first, then take the time to hone and perfect it. These books will only help you become that much better and even more attractive to an agent or publisher.

I invite my fellow writers to add to this list and share their favorite writer's resources.

All the best in your writing endeavors. :)

~Cheryl Kaye Tardif,

bestselling author of Whale Song, The River and Divine Intervention