May/June 2014

Dear Readers,

I hope your garden is doing as well as mine. With these warmer days and spring showers have helped all my seeds display great promise.

In the meantime, the seeds of new stories are also germinating, but I've discovered something. My plots are pretty good, but without great characters, they fall flat. So, I have taken a course, done some reading, and searched the web for help in making my characters three-dimensional and engaging.

The most important thing is to make sure you have the right point of view character. QueryTracker helps us with that in this blog post. Then, when filling out your cast, you need to make sure your secondary characters are easy for the reader to distinguish from each other. I found this great post to help me along the way.

The most important thing is to make sure the writer really understands each character. Toward that end, there are many websites that offer character charts or questionnaires, including Annie Neugebauer,PearlTrees, EpiGuide, Eclectics, and many more. They are similar to each other; each asking the writer to fill in a lot of information about each character, knowing that most of it will likely never make it into the story. The point is for the author to really know the character--to get inside his or her skin and figure out what makes each one tick. Then it's easier to make the characters behavior match up to their personalities.

But there's so much more to writing interesting characters. I've discovered that many believe all character types we use today have their origin in ancient myths. They Probably the best source for modern readers about this is Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. But they're everywhere. James N. Frey's book,How to Write Damn Good Fiction Using the Power of Myth, helps writers incorporate mythic figures into stories of all genres.

But really great characters are not defined solely by a mythic role. They have multi-dimensional personalities. How do we find personality traits that fit together nicely to make credible characters? It turns out there are lots of ways to do this. One is to use Myers-Briggs Personality Types. These are used a lot in academic counseling to help students find careers that suit their personalities, but it can also help us make consistent, believable characters.

Another way to make consistent characters is using "enneagrams." The theory behind these is that everyone fits within one of nine personality types (with perhaps a little overlap from the types on either side). There's a handy chart outlining these types on Wikipedia After filling out your character questionnaires above, you can even give him or her an enneagram test. By then you'll know your character inside and out--and that will help your reader understand them, too!

Happy reading and writing, everyone.

Mixed Up Words of the Month:

Whoa vs. Woe

Whoa is used as a command to slow down or stop, especially to a horse. It can also be used as an exclamation to indicate surprise or call attention to oneself.

Woe indicates distress or sorrow, as in "a tale of woe." It can also be used for things that cause such distress or sorrow.

Putting them together: After hearing about only half of the woes of his grandfather's war experiences, the grandson said, "Whoa, Grandad. That's too much for me."