Living and Breathing: How to Make Your Characters Come Alive

By Joelle Steele

Learn to create and develop fictional characters who are living and breathing people, multi-dimensional and believable, whether based on real people or larger-than-life creations from your very own vivid imagination. Readers want characters who are like real people. Learn how to make your characters come alive. Included are tips for creating family backgrounds and family histories for a character, examples of many character traits, use of dialect and dialogue, sample character sketches, and some Q&A material taken from the author's classes and workshops.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joelle Steele
• Release date: Apr 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781940388113

Joelle Steele

Joelle Steele writes mystery and ghost novels and non-fiction books about face & ear ID, handwriting forgery, art, astrology, cat care, genealogy, and horticulture. And, she is a legal writer of contract templates for small business. She has extensive published credits and has worked as a writer, editor, and publisher since 1973.

Book preview

Living & Breathing:

How to Make Your Characters Come Alive

by Joelle Steele

Copyright Joelle Steele 2014

Published by Many Hats Publications/Joelle Steele Enterprises Publishing at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Characters or People?

Preface

Chapter 1: What's In A Name?

Chapter 2: Psychology 101

Chapter 3: Heroes And Villains

Chapter 4: Motivation

Chapter 5: Philosophy 101

Chapter 6: Genetics And Genealogy

Chapter 7: Culture And Economics

Chapter 8: Five Foot Two, Eyes Of Blue

Chapter 9: Dressing For Success

Chapter 10: A Matter Of Habit

Chapter 11: Speak Up

Chapter 12: Home Sweet Home

Chapter 13: Wheels

Chapter 14: Spare Time

Chapter 15: The Ladder To Success And The Road To Ruin

Chapter 16: You've Got To Have Friends

Chapter 17: Character Sketches

Questions And Answers

Other Books by Joelle Steele

About the Author

Characters or People?

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature. – Ernest Hemingway

Preface

Over the past thirty years or so, I have edited at least one hundred novels, most of them written by first-time authors. As a content editor, I occasionally note grammatical-type errors, but mainly my job is to make sure that things such as plots and subplots wrap up, that dialogue is used well, that there is consistency in viewpoint, and that the characters are fully developed. I always give authors a list of things they could do to improve their manuscripts, and at the top of most lists is a suggestion that they flesh out their characters and make them real.

Every novel deserves to have characters who are living and breathing people, people who can elicit a response from the reader, whether that emotion is hate, anger, fear, empathy, love, or awe. But when a character isn't real and doesn't evoke an image the reader can identify as that of a human being, a novel can fall flat on its face despite the most compelling story lines. In most cases, when the principal character has not been fully developed, I personally tend to get bored and put the book down after a couple chapters, usually permanently. Unfortunately, I can't do the same when I'm editing, but there are many times when I wish I could.

I usually recommend that writers learn to develop their characters by reading the works of authors who are adept at developing theirs. There are many, but two always spring to mind: Charles Dickens and Stephen King. Both create numerous memorable characters within each book they write, and they often do so within the space of a few carefully written paragraphs.

Since I write a lot of short stories and novels myself, I decided to write some guidelines that might help authors create living and breathing characters. For several years, those guidelines were nothing more than a little three-page handout that I gave to authors after I had finished editing their manuscripts. But there was a little more that I wanted to say, and after awhile, it grew into the little ebook you now hold in your hands. I hope the brief character sketches, family trees, maps, suggestions, and examples that follow will help trigger your imagination so that you can go on to discover many new and exciting ways to make your characters come alive.

I offer my thanks to my editors, Gretchen Wilding and the late Lille Gardner, who helped me put this little book together.

Joelle Steele

April 2014

Chapter 1: What's In A Name?

When parents name a child, they are bestowing what will become an important part of that child's personality. The same happens when an author dubs a character. Like it or not, names have personalities of their own, and some come with a family ancestor or ancestry attached, perhaps something a child may be urged to live up to along the way.

You can name a character to suit your own knowledge of the person you are creating, or what you know about how that person will fit into the story. Not every character will be lucky enough to be dubbed Indiana Jones, but some care should still be exercised in selecting a suitable name. Take a look at these names from some bestsellers:

Scarlett O'Hara

Dirk Pitt

Jane Eyre

Ebeneezer Scrooge

James Bond

Capt. Jean Luc Picard

Hercule Poirot

Capt. James T. Kirk

Holden Caulfield

Jay Gatsby

David Copperfield

Uriah Heep

Harry Potter

Bilbo Baggins

Sherlock Holmes

Hannibal Lecter

Huckleberry Finn

Lestat de Lioncourt

Robinson Crusoe

Pip (Philip Pirrip)

Don Quixote

Lady Chatterly

Dorian Gray

Ichabod Crane

Atticus Finch

Pick up a dictionary of baby names and think about how your hero will be perceived if you name him Max versus Henry? Duncan versus Arnie? Rick versus Gabriel? Same goes for your heroine – Katherine versus Kitty? Maggie versus Bobbi? Lydia versus Heather? And what about your villains; they need suitable names too. Most would probably agree that Larry has less potential to be evil than does Drake, and Robert sounds like he would be less mentally