Characters drive our stories. Readers will stop reading if they don’t like who they read about. Plot can take you so far but many an amazingly plotted story has fallen flat when the characters can’t shoulder it.

We’ve been talking about movies some this week. Just think of a movie that had a decent plot, but was only a so-so movie or plain outright stunk because either the characters had no depth or the actor(s) didn’t portray the character’s depth. Did anyone see The Lake House? Kind of an interesting premise, if you ignore the chronological difficulties and suspend belief a bit, but wow… Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves just stank those characters right up, worse than a bunch of smelly pirates away at sea too long with nothing but rum for bathing.

Now, I know that some of the responsibilities in movies fall on the shoulders of directors/producers etc. However, let’s keep this simple for my analogy. (Hey, I’m a pirate, what I say goes. Do I hear mutiny? Simmer down, wenches.)

Is our job as writer any different than the job of an actor? We have a person (or people technically) in mind that we have to express and if we don’t do our job correctly, the reader won’t really “know” that person. Or worse, they won’t care about them, just like we don’t care about movies with poorly acted characters.

After yesterday’s writing exercise and how much fun we had with it, I thought we could continue to stretch our writing muscles again today.

Think about a character you’re currently writing. Then answer these questions about them.
1. How does your character take their coffee? Why?
2. Name one smell that your character can’t stand and why?
3. What is one object your character would never part with and why?
4. What is your character’s greatest fear? Explain.

Here’s my example….
1. Cory, my heroine, would take her coffee with no cream but a lot of sugar. She’s no nonsense, but secretly sweet.
2. Smell: Cory hates the smell of lavender. She thinks it’s a strong, fussy smelling flower.
3. Cory would never part with her manuscripts. She’s translating Pindar’s Odes from Greek.
4. Cory’s greatest fear is that love really is the most important thing in a marriage. Because if that is true, in order to be happy she will need to turn over a bit of control of her life to someone else.

Dig in! If you’re not a writer, or you don’t have the time today, or you just aren’t ready to tackle your characters’ idiosyncrasies yet, let’s talk about characters in books or movies that just fell flat and therefore made the whole experience painful. Why do you think they stunk so badly?