Connecting with the Main Character – by Rita Karnopp

Connecting with the Main Character – Creating a strong connection between your reader and the main character in your book is vital … and must be accomplished as soon as possible.  The first line of your story is the perfect opportunity to achieve this.

 

How can you make you reader care about your characters?

You could draw the reader-in through the character’s point-of-view.  This brings your reader inside the mind of your character.  His thoughts … good and bad.

When you give your characters challenges, predicaments, shortcomings, suspicions, depths, opinions, and even moods and feelings your reader will empathize with him.

Consider making your character moral and even trustworthy ... then make him face a moral dilemma … on that could hurt or threaten someone he loves.

And you must admit, creating a character with charisma, humor, manners, and even an ease about them - that makes you comfortable - well your reader can’t help but root for him – care about him – maybe even envision being in love with him - even if he does something ‘bad’ or ‘wrong.’

Always keep your reader audience in mind when writing your book.  YA should have the emotional and verbal language of a teen.  In an 1800’s historical – your characters must speak and act like men and women in that time-period. Keeping true to your genre is vital in convincing your reader your story’s authentic.

Consider this – begin your story when your character is facing a challenge or making a life-changing decision. When I started writing, the main tag for writers at that time was: “No reader waits for the action to begin.”  That has stayed with me … and it’s something all writers should keep in mind. 

When I finished reading Dean Koontz book Intensity I set it down, my heart still pumping fast, and I realized I wanted to write a book as intense at that book.  That night I started writing Atonement … and the first line is: ‘He bent her finger back – all the way back.’

I believe that is my favorite first line to any of my 19 books.  Why?  Because it got my attention from the very first line.  It set the tone and genre without paragraphs of scene setting.

• Consider this – after you write ‘the end’ … go back to the beginning and skip to chapter three and read … is it gripping?  Is it in the thick-of-things?  If the answer is a resounding YES … you have found the beginning of your book.  I’m serious.  I know you’re thinking … no way will I delete the first two chapters of my book.  But, be honest.  Is chapter three more gripping and more interesting than chapters one and two?  I’m going to bet you’re going to have to answer yes.  I’m sorry … but this does work. 
   
• We have such a tendency to want to feed the reader too much background information.  Too much scene setting.  Too many internal thoughts and the reader is just waiting for chapter three to start.

Keep in mind your story will slow to a crawl if you don’t introduce problems or challenges throughout the story.  There must be incidents even affairs that create conflicts, tensions, or situations that demand your character face his biggest fears … that have consequences.

Don’t start your story with a worn-out cliché.  Agents and editors have read it all.  Your goal is to start your story with a fresh intro … because a worn out beginning gets your book dropped in the slush pile.  We’re all tired of the cliché beginning.

What do I mean?    The phone ringing wakes a character … he groggily answers … then bolts upright – someone has been killed.  Really?

I hate the character who stands looking into a mirror and describes his own attributes and failings internally.   Spare me.

If the first sentence describes the weather … I want to scream.

If your character is introduced by her crying … I’m not sympathetic yet.  You might want me to care enough to ask why – but at the beginning – I don’t care and it’s not effective.

I hate the overused character who wakes up with amnesia or in a strange place – I’ve seen it a hundred times.

Ugh, and we all are annoyed by the writer who is staring at a blank computer screen . . . not much action happening there.

You will bore the reader as much as your character if he often stares out window and years for someone, thinks over his situation, feels betrayed, or loves her but can’t tell her, and just simple … boring reflections.  This goes back to: “No reader waits for the action to begin.” 

 

Special Memories We Use When Creating Our Characters - June Gadsby

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Creating characters for our books can be difficult, but it can also be fun. My main characters tend to create themselves long before I’ve started writing. It’s the secondary characters that give me the most fun and pleasure as I often base them on people I know – or, at least, take the most interesting or amusing characteristics from a number of them and stitch them together to form one appealing member of the cast. One of my favourite secondary characters is my grandfather, who often seems to creep into my books in one way or another. The first time I used him was in ‘When Tomorrow Comes’. He appeared as Hildie’s miner husband, Tommy Thompson. 

In real life he was John Peel Richardson, a hard-working miner who had fought in the First World War, when he was gassed, blown up and shell-shocked. He was sent back to England and expected to die, but he was a survivor [1]. Just a small, quiet, gentle man who liked to read westerns and didn’t go out to the pub every Sunday like the rest of the men who spent their working lives digging for coal underground. He never took a day off work and never got involved in any argument with the females in the house – his wife Polly, his daughters Ruby and Edith – and me. His well-known response to most things was: ‘I’m sayin’ nowt.’

While recuperating in the hospital during the war, having gone through the Battle of the Somme, he was shown how to crochet and I am proud to say that I have his lovely work [2] of a hundred years ago. He tried to enlist for WW2 but was too old and was thus given the job of Special Constable. He died at the age of 79 and still, to this day, my memories of him are strong. Never having known my father, John Peel aka Jack, was a father-figure to me [3]. In the book he, playing the part of Tommy, has an affair with Florrie, the next-door neighbour. I hope he will forgive me for putting a little spice into his life.

If you have interesting people in your life you can never be short of character material, but best not to show them too clearly, which I did with one of my great-aunts in ‘The Glory Girls’…but that’s another story.

Me and my grandfather.

The Importance of Historical Accuracy by Eileen O'Finlan

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During the 1990s, I worked as a Museum Assistant at the Massachusetts living history museum, Old Sturbridge Village, while earning my bachelor’s degree in history.  My three year stint in the museum’s Department of Research, Collections, and Library allowed me to hone my skills as I assisted professional research historians and curators.  It also imbued in me the desire for precise historical accuracy after I got an insider’s look at what happens when such accuracy is ignored.

An extremely famous movie director and producer who shall remain nameless, called (or rather had his staff members call) Old Sturbridge Village while he was making a movie set in the same 1830s time period as the museum.  I fielded the first call, sending it on to the appropriate curator.  As time passed, it became the talk of the New England living history museum world as others such as Mystic Seaport, Plimouth Plantation and the like received similar inquiries.  The movie was to be based on an actual event, so with all the phone calls and questions, one would have thought the film company was making every attempt to be as historically accurate as possible.

But something strange happened.  Excitement amongst curators and historians at the various museums quickly grew into frustration.  “Why bother to ask us if they’re only going to do whatever they want anyway?” became a mantra.  It seems that if the answer to a historical accuracy question wasn’t the one hoped for, it was discarded in favor of what the famous director “felt” it should be.

When the movie was finally released, I went to see it with a close friend and research historian.  We attempted not to annoy the people around us by keeping our dragon sighs of despair to a minimum, but we exchanged eye-rolling glances throughout.  While the basis of the story remained true to the actual incident, important reasons behind its occurrence were omitted. Despite the fact that beards were completely out of fashion with American men during that time period, almost every man in the movie had one for the simple reason that the director “felt” they should.  In one important scene a judge wrestling with his conscience enters an ornate Roman Catholic cathedral and prays aloud in Latin.  No and no.  Catholicism was barely tolerated in New England at the time.  There were very few Catholic churches and certainly no grand cathedrals.  Despite the fact that Mass was still celebrated in Latin, people did not offer their personal, anguished prayers in the ceremonial language. 

The list of inaccuracies goes on and on.  There was even a pivotal character who never existed in real life.  That’s fine except for the fact that the movie was touted to be historically accurate to the point where elementary school texts based on it were created to teach this incident in history classes – texts which included the fictitious character.

I understand that most of the movie’s audience probably had no idea that the background history was inaccurate, nor did it spoil their enjoyment of the movie.  Still, whether they knew it or not, they left the theater with several erroneous ideas regarding 1830s New England as well as of an actual event in U.S. history. 

This experience left me with a firm promise to myself that my own historical fiction be meticulously researched and accurately presented.  I am grateful to all the historical fiction authors who do the exacting and often tedious work of disciplined research so their readers can immerse themselves in another time period without the distraction of inane anachronisms.  The reader may never know what the author worked so hard to weave throughout a fantastic story, but that behind-the-scenes work is what makes historical fiction such a rich and delicious treat.  The reader gets a great tale along with some painlessly gained historical knowledge all in one.  What a gift!