{"id":150,"date":"2014-06-01T15:28:48","date_gmt":"2014-06-01T15:28:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cranswick.org.uk\/judith\/?p=150"},"modified":"2015-02-06T09:24:23","modified_gmt":"2015-02-06T09:24:23","slug":"back-to-basics-characters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/?p=150","title":{"rendered":"Back to Basics \u2013 characters"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Character<\/a><\/p>\n

A re-draft of my latest novel happened to coincide with FutureLearn Open University online course about creating characters which several members of my Writing Group are following. Always pushed for time \u2013 there are never enough days in my week \u2013 I did think twice before embarking on it, but as it was advertised as needing only 3 hours for each of the 8 weeks, I decided to give it a go. Nothing ventured … as they say!<\/p>\n

I\u2019m glad I did. Although designed for beginners, and I have five published novels under my belt (\u2019scuse the clich\u00e9), I\u2019m finding it very useful. It has made me look at things from a different perspective and reading other students\u2019 work and have them comment on yours is always a useful exercise. So far, I\u2019ve been able to use the main writing assignments to help develop characters and transfer the bulk of what I\u2019ve written straight into the current novel with a few tweaks here and there.<\/p>\n

\"4<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the things that I\u2019ve found interesting is listening to Abdulrazak Gurnah, Mich\u00e8le Roberts, Monique Roffey and Alex Garland talk about how they approach developing their characters. There are some excellent articles by people such as Josip Novakovich, a novelist who also teaches creative writing and has written books on how to write fiction.<\/p>\n

One of the problems with my Fiona Mason Mysteries novels is the inevitable last cast. As a Tour Manager for a coach company, Fiona has at least 20 passengers to look after. Although few of these characters need to be developed, I still have a larger than usual number of minor characters to deal with. The course certainly has made me look at each of them again and hopefully they are now more memorable for the reader than in the first draft. Physical description (Robert has a chinstrap beard; Gina has a lopsided hair do and Olive wears baggy hand-knitted cardigans) only goes so far. Developing their personalities (Robert is demanding, rude and argumentative; Gina a gossip with no sensitivity and the elderly Olive is devoted to Robert and can see no wrong in his extremist views) by their actions and dialogue has proved a valuable exercise.<\/p>\n

To some extent, after the main cast of half a dozen or so characters, the rest tend to be fairly stereotypical. Developing these into too fully rounded personalities will make the reader expect them to play a much larger part in the story than they do. The balance between raising the readers\u2019 expectations about a minor character and making them memorable enough not to confuse the reader when they appear some 100 pages later is a fine art. The first two novels in the series came out as paperbacks and I thought I had done much to solve the problem by including a passenger list which also had Fiona\u2019s own scribbled comments which was a mixture of physical description (Cyril \u2013 bald with a moustache; Henry \u2013 dapper 70yr old, always wears a hat) and personality (Barbara \u2013 motherly, full of Yorkshire friendliness; Vera \u2013 dotty one to watch, might get lost!). According to comments from my readers, this worked well in the paperback versions where they could flick back quickly and refresh their ideas as the novel progressed. Now my books are out as eBooks, things are not so straight forward. I\u2019m sure it\u2019s possible to check back to an earlier page and return to where you left off reading, but like majority of Kindle readers, I don\u2019t know how to do it and I can\u2019t see them bothering to find out any more than I can. This puts even more pressure on me to make my characters memorable.<\/p>\n

I have been so impressed with the course and how it is organised that I\u2019ve decided to sign up for another FutureLearn course – Forensic psychology: witness investigation. https:\/\/www.futurelearn.com\/courses\/forensic-psychology<\/a> As a crime writer, it seemed too good an opportunity to miss! It starts next week and I haven\u2019t quite worked out how I\u2019m going to knit the time to do it, especially as both courses will overlap by a couple of weeks. \u00a0But hey ho! It would be so sad to having nothing to do in my old age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A re-draft of my latest novel happened to coincide with FutureLearn Open University online course about creating characters which several members of my Writing Group are following. Always pushed for time \u2013 there are never enough days in my week \u2013 I did think twice before embarking on it, but as it was advertised as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-150","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"entry","7":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":301,"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}