Midweek links- characters

Characters are the people animals or objects that stuff happens to in your book. Yep sorry I just stated the obvious.

(Note this mid week links might be pretty short since I'm doing it while I'm on vacation and because as soon as I get back I have a two day long meeting I need to do)

Donald Maas in Fire in your Fiction has the first section of his book dedicated to characters, a protagonist verses a hero. A hero has MUCH higher stakes. And he has great chapter on secondary characters, go check it out.

YA highway has a few good links about characters.
The bad boy-- why we love them oh so much
Parents in YA-- why can't anyone have a happy family?
5 protags in YA- The 5 big ones.
Character description---- THIS ONE IS AWESOME and exactly what I needed, who cares about anyone else.

Mary Kole asks What Makes a Character?

Querytraker.net Blog gives a GREAT character interview sheet. If you don't know what these are, it helps the writer dive in deeper in the character's mind and get to know them better. It also gets it all out on paper which you can use as a resource later. This is on my to do list before I start my next set of revisions.

Another interview sheet comes here, from writer's digest.

Here's a great one that Lynda uses (I got it from her blog yesterday)


Oh Mr Bradford, what wisdom do you have for us this week? Do you control your characters or do they control you... A great question when it comes to writing.

Words of wisdom from me-- well there's really words from Meghan but stolen by me.
Be kind to your characters, they are people too, imaginary people, but people none the less. You've created a world in your novel and you've got to populate it with SOMETHING. Don't just kill off a character because you're in a bad mood. It's not fair to you, the characters or your readers.


I'm sort of running low on ideas. What would you like next weeks midweek links to be about?
Let me know in the comments.