There are a number of compliments that make my head swell.
“You sure wrecked a good night’s sleep.”
“When is your next book coming out?”
“That character really got into me. I can’t get him/her out of my mind.”
That last one led me to ponder: what makes a good character? What makes a believable character? What makes readers tell me, “Those characters are so real, I feel like I could just bump into them at the grocery store of the feed store and have a good chat.”?
In a dissection, I determined that what makes a character real is what makes a person real. I asked myself what I know about the people around me. Here is the list of five characteristics that I compiled.
1. Physical appearance. Just as I know that Myrna has red hair, and Rob has different color eyes, I know that Buster McCann is blond, blue-eyed, six-foot-eight and built like a two-story brick outhouse. I know that Zeb Weller has blue eyes, curly dark hair, and a big salt and pepper moustache that takes up the lower half of his face. He’s six-foot-one and weighs a mighty one-sixty soaking wet. His dad describes him as a five-pound pencil with a ten-pound moustache. Miss Stella Jane Elliot is five-foot-one and slender with long, brown hair and deep brown eyes.
2. A good side. Everyone has a good side. It may be a mile wide. It may be a sliver, but everyone has a good side.
3. A bad side. Likewise, even a saint possesses a modicum of nasty.
4. A quirk. This can be anything, but everybody has one. Fear of spiders. Kite collection. A limp. A lisp. A disability. A scar.
5. Religion or lack thereof. Think of your close friends and family. Do you know if they go to church? Regularly or occasionally or never? Which church?
An interviewer once asked me if I were Mormon because some of my characters are. I’m not. But I have read the Bible and the Book of Mormon, and I have a lot of friends who are Mormons, Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, and others, and all of them are willing to tell me what they believe and what (they think) the other groups believe. All of it makes great fodder for stories.
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