Quinn is looking forward to her senior year at Poe University. She has big plans to hang out with her best friend, flirt with a certain boy genius, party at her favorite dive bar and figure out what she’s going to do after graduation with her not-so-useful art major. But that’s before she meets Luke, a hot townie who’s moved back home to help take care of his dying sister. And it’s before a weird epidemic sweeps across campus, mysteriously turning people’s eyes purple.
Is it an odd side effect from a new party drug?
Is it a rogue virus developed in a campus lab?
Is it the mark of the devil?
Soon the town starts blaming the university and the student religious group becomes frighteningly aggressive in their on-campus accusations. Quinn and Luke are caught in the middle—until a tragic accident forces Luke to reveal the one part of himself he’s kept carefully hidden. That he’s so much more than the happy-go-lucky boy next door Quinn had believed him to be isn’t a surprise…but this truth might be too dangerous for her to handle.
Getting to Know Your Characters
Caitlin Sinead
Just the other day, I was confiding to other writers that I didn’t know the characters in my current project yet. They have names and histories and defined bellybuttons and other things of that nature, but I didn’t really “get” them yet, you know?
Well, this one other writer most certainly did not know. She sighed and said she hated when writers said stuff like that. She continued with something to the effect of, “They aren’t real people! You made them up! It’s impossible for you to now ‘know’ them!”
And I realized, right then in there, that I had come across as a kooky, hippie-dippie writer who must organically *sways arms, closes eyes, brazenly splits infinitives* grow to “know” her characters—characters that, BTW, aren’t even real!!!
Let me just go ahead and admit three really damaging things:
- 1. I do yoga.
- 2. I shop at Whole Foods.
- 3. I like taking long walks in the graveyard across from where I live with hot, herbal tea while wearing consignment shop dresses and flip-flops, even when it’s way too cold for consignment shop dresses and flip flops.
- 4. I like to break convention and list four things when I said I’d only list three. Ha! Just my little way of sticking it to the man.
But, despite all that, if you dropped me in different scenes and said “Okay, she’s going to respond like a Whole Foods-shopping hippie,” well, you wouldn’t always be right. Sometimes I’m cranky and I’m rearing for a spat with someone. Sometimes I laugh at insensitive jokes that I really, earnestly shouldn’t laugh at. And, depending on the geopolitical situation, I have voiced my support of military force.
But, you know, forget that. Let’s say I am a 100% navel-gazing, free-feeling intellectual who uses words like “meta” when talking about independent films. (I don’t, as a rule.) Well, what if I’m plopped in a situation with lots of other people who are also stereotypically like that. You know, say, at Whole Foods. Does everyone in those situations act exactly alike?
No. And that’s the thing about characters, and people in general. We’re complex. It’s not enough to just say here’s this character, she’s free-loving and open and says annoying, writerly things like “I don’t ‘know’ my characters yet,” so we’ve got her all figured out.
To really know a character, you have to spend time with them. You have to write multiple scenes with them, maybe even playing around with different ways they’d react until you hit on something that seems truthful. And, you have to continue thinking about these characters while away from writing. You’ll need to continue to ponder them as you walk through graveyards and drink wine at the Whole Foods Bar.
And, just so you know, no, Whole Foods did not sponsor this blog post. But, despite my hippie ways, I’d be completely willing to take their corporate money if they’d like to give it to me.
Great post, Caitlin! I completely agree. I'm at the getting-to-know-my-characters point in my new WIP now, and I find it annoying. I'm so impatient--I want to already know them.
ReplyDeleteHere's an example of knowing my characters from last year. There's a little pond on my company's campus. There was a really aggressive gander there. He'd try to attack anyone walking by to protect his lady and their eggs. The cafeteria faced the pond, so as we ate lunch, we watched how the employees reacted to the danger of the bird.
I spent one lunch going through all my characters and I *knew* exactly how each would react. Which one would give the goose a wide berth so the goose wouldn't get stressed out, which one would run by to get past the danger quickly, which one wouldn't notice a bird at all until he'd been bitten in the ankle, and which one would solve the problem with a swift kick.