Bringing characters to life

Hello Reader,

Greetings from a very cold Scottish Midlands!

I’m still buzzing from last night’s webinar on when a novel is editor-ready (you can grab the recording below).

There’s something about being on the spot that gives me an adrenaline rush. I don’t get this so much with online teaching, where I’m managing a dynamic rather than the spotlight being solely on me.

I lost my voice briefly around ten minutes in (cringe!) but it returned.

Occasional newsletter for cultural anthropologists

First up, I know I have a few anthropologists and academics on this list, so if you’d rather just receive occasional emails (one every four to six weeks) from me about topics relevant for cultural anthropology and publishing, and not the weekly fiction update, then just reply to this email, and I'll move you over to the other list. (If you want to stay here, too, let me know!)

Bringing characters to life

A year ago, I shared a few chapters from my YA novel-in-progress with a writing tutor. I was struggling with characterization, and he said something that stayed with me: "Many published authors can really feel their characters; they’ve really come to life in their imagination."

Fast forward to last week and an editor colleague, Shannon Scott of Sage Editing, shared a great post about the illusion of independent agency.

Now, if you want to read an academic article about the link between fiction writers and imaginary friends, then here it is.

This process has been slowly occurring in the background for me, but Shannon’s post encouraged me to think back to my childhood, when I would regularly play pretend with characters from books I loved.

What I think I needed here was permission to think and play fantasy like that again!

So if you’re stuck on your characterization, and you’ve already fleshed out the character details and key features of their personality, then have a go at asking them questions and simply spending time with them. Go into town or to work and see how they walk, where they want to go, how they speak to you, etc.

And you might surprise yourself – I found this led me to completely rewrite how my protagonist speaks – they now dictate to me what they’d say in each scene.

This is definitely an interesting phenomenon for psychologists to explore, too. But that would be a topic for another week.

Have you experienced something similar? I'm fascinated to learn from how other authors experience their characters.

Yesterdays's webinar

Yesterday I cohosted a free webinar with Claire Cronshaw of Cherry Edits.

The webinar is called Is Your Novel Editor-Ready? You can now access the recording by clicking on the link.

Finally, there's just over ten days now until the Storytelling for Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers course starts. If you've been on the fence over whether to take it, check out the webinar recording first.

Hope to see you some of you there!

Take care,

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Andrew Hodges from The Narrative Craft

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