October 22, 2012

Rain Rain Go Away

Let me start by saying... when it rains, it pours.

The last two months have been terrible, but since I'm certain everything I could write about it could be topped by someone else's trials, I'm just going to keep my mouth shut.

Instead, I wanted to get back into blogging with a quick post on THREE DIMENSIONAL CHARACTERS.

I have tried for a long time to put up a facade that I am a writer and not a Vulcan/nerdy math/science kind of person so it's always harder for me to make believable characters than to fix plot issues.

While creating character charts for my current novel, I asked myself the following question:

Is there a character from another book that would do a better job "acting" if given the role as the MC?

My first thought was that this would be an easy experiment and that I was going to find that my favorite characters were the protagonists of my favorite books. 

Not so.

 As it turns out, I'm pretty willing to overlook two-dimensional characters as long as there is a page-turning plot, and so I had a hard time creating a list of characters I would enjoy reading about in ANY setting.

Once I found a winner, the question now becomes:

How would the story be different if [Han Solo/Princess Leia] were replaced as the MCs?

Keeping the answer in mind, my goal is to make my characters lovable in any setting and not just the one I originally wrote for them to star in.

Please add your own tips in the comments! I really appreciate them all!