Characters

To any story there has to be characters.  The problem I encountered is the two dimensionality that happens to characters.  What I mean by two dimensionality is the lack of depth.  So much so that they seem like paper cutouts.  My main character and the villain I hated because they were so two dimensional, and this just happened. I really wanted to relate to my characters.  So I had to do some back stories on these.

I wrote out a paragraph on each depicting what they hated and liked.  This gave some ways of responding to other characters and the environment.  This exercise helped me to know how to think about characters.  Funny thing is that afterwards, it was easier to write the story because the characters in my brain acted almost on their own...... :-o

Michael Angelo is said to free his sculptures from the rock they were in.  Meaning he looked at the rock with a sculpture already in there and just freed it.  In much the same way, freeing characters by defining them is remarkable.  You can put two characters in a room and just watch the conversation as you write it.  It seems that characters do the work.

In Viewing Creation: Encounter, I had an international crew all with their own personalities.  And then the aliens had their own background as well.  Since I got them defined I found that the interactions came naturally and the things I had to keep in mind were the circumstances they were in.

Funny things about characters though.  Anything can be a character, from a person to an inanimate object like a chair or a ship.  Characters have attributes that define them so the sky is the limit (and sometimes beyond).  Their attributes can be anything you can imagine as well.  You could have a duck trapped in a cat's body if you wish.  Sounds like a setup for a comedy.  And I think that is a wonderful thing.  Let the childhood imagination take flight.