Friday, June 26, 2020

Writing Challenging Characters


What do you do when your muse delivers characters that require you to stretch beyond your comfort zone? Don’t panic. Open yourself to the possibilities.

I write fantasy romance. One would think that’s challenge enough, creating worlds from literally the soil upward. But I can handle that. All it takes is imagination fused with relevant life experiences.
For instance, I’ve never lived as a cursed warrior in a land populated by beast-men, but I have experienced a high mountain meadow in spring, ridden horses, and learned about panning for gems from my father’s Alaskan experience. I’ve never fended off danger with swords, but I’ve travelled the UK, hefted swords to learn about balance, and explored tumble-down castles.

None of that, however, made writing these three characters from BLOODSTONE any less challenging.


#1: The Shadow Man

Mirianna and her father fell into place, but my hero, the Shadow Man, refused to tell me his real name. I wrote a third of the book before he reluctantly revealed it. That resistance was clue to his character. Being an ‘into-the-mist’ writer, I had to keep writing to discover the truth.

The Shadow Man wants to be left alone. But beneath this stated goal is a deeper need: he’s lonely. When the opportunity comes to relieve his loneliness with a blind boy servant, he impulsively acts against his stated goal. Conflict ensues. His neatly ordered life, miserable as it has been, falls apart despite repeated attempts to maintain his solitude. What he thinks he wants and what he needs are at odds, and that’s just his internal conflict.

Add a woman so determined to protect her aging father she embarks on a dangerous journey, an old enemy seeking power, and a—possibly—magical lion shadowing his every step, and my hero has more than enough conflict. By first draft’s end, he had dug up and faced every ugly truth preventing him from being the man he ought to be, the man he’d chosen to bury (that real name).

Whew!

#2: The lion

I’ve never lived with a mountain lion, but I’ve lived with cats. However, even I didn’t know when I started writing who or what this lion would be. (Remember that seat-of-the-pants thing?) She appeared with various characters at critical moments, and I had to let her gradually reveal how she was connected. Additional challenge: she has no point of view, so I couldn’t get into her head like I could my hero. (He was just stubborn; she was downright enigmatic.) So, write a mountain lion-like cat into a fantasy when you have no idea why she’s there, except she was in the very first scene from which this book sprang, and you have the idea of this challenge.

#3: Gareth

I’ve worn corrective lenses since childhood, but I’m in no way as severely visually limited as Gareth. Thinking of sensations, sounds, and smells as his primary means of interpreting the world forced me to expand my means of description. I also had to remember he was 13, not an adult. Writing him was a definite challenge, but also extremely satisfying.

Conclusion: Don’t be afraid to write what you don’t know. Fuse a bit of imagination with a fragment of authentic experience and even the seemingly impossible can become satisfying and convincing fiction…if you’re up to the challenge. You just might be on your way to your best book ever.

P.S. BLOODSTONE e-book is now on sale for 99-cents through July 3: Kindle ; Nook 

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