Road Trip Wednesday- friends with your characters

Road Trip Wednesday


If you went to school with your characters, would you be friends?


It depends on the characters and the novel.  For how to Pwn nOObz I would have been friends Colin and Dave.

Colin is a music obsessed kid who's also smart in a pretentious way.  But he's snarky too, which is why I like him and I'd put up with my own big brain envy.

Dave is a comic book geek, fiercely loyal and all around AWESOME.  Yeah, he was my friends in high school.


But most of my characters I don't know if I'd be friends with.  They are either in a league way out of my own and I'd feel inferior to or they're too much like me and NOTHING annoys me more than people who are too much like me. 

ON THE OTHER HAND...

I write to explore people, people who are VASTLY different from me, who live in worlds who mirror my own but are still alien to me.

I write to escape my real mundane world, I write because I have a story to tell, I write because I own it to the characters in my head to tell their stories.

In someways I am friends with ALL my characters, because they're my imaginary friends.  They keep me entertained when I'm driving or cleaning my house. 

So would you be friends with your characters with they are 3-D and in the real world? 

Better yet, have you ever met your characters in REAL LIFE?  I met a guy who looked exactly like Colin would like when he hits 25.  It was super weird.

Who is your favorite child?

On Writing Thursdays

Your characters are like your children, right?  There's no doubt in any one's mind that J.K R LOVED Harry and the rest of her magically cast.  Watching them grow up, I became highly attached to them, I can't image how hard it was for her to stop playing with them in her head.

I've written four books.  Two books were about the same characters.  I could go into the whole back story about how that cluster happened, but that's not what this post is about.  It's about characters.

In every book I write, I have characters I LUV.  99% of the time it's not the main characters.

Don't give me Buffy and Angel, give me Xander and Willow or better yet, Giles and Oz.
Don't give me Scully and Mulder, give me the 3 Lone Gunman.
Don't give me Bella and Edward give me Alice and Seth. <--yep Seth..my all time FAVORITE character in the twilight books, because he sits in a how full of vampires and eats lunch there.  4th book. Read it.

Minor characters is VITAL to the story and 78.974% of the time more interesting.  (BTW in case it doesn't need to be said, I'm making up my stats)
Not only do they have to deal with all the crap the main character has to deal with, because let's face it, they tend to be in the scenes when sh*t goes down anyway, but they also have to put up with the MAIN CHARACTER.

Let's face this fact too, the main character has some pretty deep flaws and can be kinda annoying.  Bella, I'm looking in your direction.  But I''m willing to put up with it because Alice likes her.  And I like Alice.

 The minor characters tend to have the best lines, call out the MC's when needed and sometimes do something so heroic you can't help but fall in love with them.

In my book, recently renamed, How to Pwn Noobz and Become a Rock Star, my favorite character is Dave.  I love him so much I gave him the house I grew up in.

On the other hand there are characters I don't know as well.  There's a character in How to Pwn Noobz, who has been around since the first draft of the first book and I still don't know him very well.   He's kinda like that friend you have that you're sort of indifferent to.  They have a car, and they don't really annoy you very much but you could take them or leave them.  For me that's Jason.  He's  important to the plot and needs to be in the story,  but I'm not as emotionally attached to him as others.

What about you?  Do you have favorite children/characters?  Do you have character's you don't know or like as much?

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.