This month the Round Robin blog hop topic is: Breathing Life into your Characters.
I gave my post the title I did because that's what all authors do--we create people out of thin air. I hope that my characters are real to my readers. With as much time as I spend in the heads of my people, I feel like I know them intimately. And they depend on me to allow them to live in the minds of the readers who enjoy their stories. Win-win for all of us! (In fact, I deal with that idea in my upcoming story of a romance novelist's romance, complicated by her characters who feel free to comment on her life in her mind, and insist she write them the way they want to be written.)
But how do I do this? In a number of ways. As an author, I can take inspiration for a new character from anywhere. I might see someone walking down the street and wonder about them--or catch a glimpse of a face or a physique in media of any kind. Though women are not supposed to be as visually-oriented as men are, I'm always attracted to sexy men. And they can be any race or age. What's sexy to me is confidence. I'm attracted to men who seem as if they believe in themselves, and would welcome having an equally confident woman as their mate. I create my male characters to be someone I'd fall in love with. I create my female characters as someone I'd like to be, living a life I'd enjoy.
I gave my post the title I did because that's what all authors do--we create people out of thin air. I hope that my characters are real to my readers. With as much time as I spend in the heads of my people, I feel like I know them intimately. And they depend on me to allow them to live in the minds of the readers who enjoy their stories. Win-win for all of us! (In fact, I deal with that idea in my upcoming story of a romance novelist's romance, complicated by her characters who feel free to comment on her life in her mind, and insist she write them the way they want to be written.)
But how do I do this? In a number of ways. As an author, I can take inspiration for a new character from anywhere. I might see someone walking down the street and wonder about them--or catch a glimpse of a face or a physique in media of any kind. Though women are not supposed to be as visually-oriented as men are, I'm always attracted to sexy men. And they can be any race or age. What's sexy to me is confidence. I'm attracted to men who seem as if they believe in themselves, and would welcome having an equally confident woman as their mate. I create my male characters to be someone I'd fall in love with. I create my female characters as someone I'd like to be, living a life I'd enjoy.
This isn't one of my books, but one by an author whose books are auto-buy for me. I'm embarrassed to say that I originally wanted to read this book just because the man on the cover is so sexy! I didn't even notice the horns on his head until I started reading it. I was too lost in his blue eyes and stubble that I itched to touch. The fact that the story was engrossing helped me recover from my shame over my shallowness--LOL. And I was fine imagining what the heroine in the story looked like. After all, in a romance, the reader should identify with one of the characters in a love story--and want to be with the other one.
Click for buy links. Besides modeling my characters on an actual physical image of a person, how else do I create them? By giving them experiences that I, or someone else I know, have actually had. For this book of mine, I used a number of anecdotes from my early life, BH (before my HEA husband.) I've changed them, of course, and imagined the story. But the essential character of the heroine is me in a past life. How does that disclaimer go? Names and places have been changed to protect the innocent--though in my books, especially this one, there isn't much innocent about my lead characters! They know what, or whom, they want, and they pursue their desires ardently.
I've done this in other books as well. One woman I know lost her husband to a terrible disease. She isn't a nurse, but she helped him face death bravely, even though they were getting divorced. I used that as a plot point in one of my books. I have a WIP that I'm working on that includes a story about what happened to a woman I know who had made the decision early on, to bring up her child bi-lingual. The father's mother was dismayed, leading to family trouble. That's only one detail out of many that helped me to create a heroine who is tri-lingual.
In my Reyes Family Romances, I write the saga of a large Hispanic family, and the romances had by the various members of the family, pursuing their own HEA. When I need for them to speak español, I've sent emails to a professor I know who taught my Conversational Spanish class, and asked him what someone might say in a certain situation. I was surprised when he told me that with a heroine named Catalina, while her siblings who are more Americanized might call her Cat, her parents, and certainly her grandparents who came from Mexico, would instead call her Cata.
I've done this in other books as well. One woman I know lost her husband to a terrible disease. She isn't a nurse, but she helped him face death bravely, even though they were getting divorced. I used that as a plot point in one of my books. I have a WIP that I'm working on that includes a story about what happened to a woman I know who had made the decision early on, to bring up her child bi-lingual. The father's mother was dismayed, leading to family trouble. That's only one detail out of many that helped me to create a heroine who is tri-lingual.
In my Reyes Family Romances, I write the saga of a large Hispanic family, and the romances had by the various members of the family, pursuing their own HEA. When I need for them to speak español, I've sent emails to a professor I know who taught my Conversational Spanish class, and asked him what someone might say in a certain situation. I was surprised when he told me that with a heroine named Catalina, while her siblings who are more Americanized might call her Cat, her parents, and certainly her grandparents who came from Mexico, would instead call her Cata.
Click for buy links. Not only are physical descriptions and realistic anecdotes from a life required, but there must also be emotions that the reader can imagine feeling themselves. How better to do that than to think of times when you felt that emotion, and channel it into your characters? So when writing my 2nd chance at love story, I mined my own memories of what it felt like to be a teenager, wondering if anyone would ever find me attractive. I remembered what it was like to feel that bi-polar emotional turmoil that has you thrilled at what life has to offer one minute-- and the next instant feeling as if no one has ever suffered as much as you.
And since I write romance, I inhabit both people in a relationship, while I write their story. In a very real sense, a little bit of me is in every heroine I write. And I fall in love with each hero I create. My husband, who reads all of my books, doesn't mind as long as I only cheat on him with my book boyfriends. Though he has joked that no man has to ask anymore, what it is that makes any woman happy. All he has to do is read a romance novel--especially one that woman wrote!
* * * *
So now that you've read my blog, hop along to the others, to find out what they have to say about this subject!
Anne Stenhouse http://annestenhousenovelist.wordpress.com
Judith Copek http://lynx-sis.blogspot.com/
Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/
Diane Bator https://dbator.blogspot.com/
Dr. Bob Rich https://wp.me/p3Xihq-2TY
Marci Baun http://www.marcibaun.com/blog/
Victoria Chatham http://www.victoriachatham.com
A.J. Maguire http://ajmaguire.wordpress.com/
Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
http://www.Skye-writer.com/
Helena Fairfax http://www.helenafairfax.com/blog
And since I write romance, I inhabit both people in a relationship, while I write their story. In a very real sense, a little bit of me is in every heroine I write. And I fall in love with each hero I create. My husband, who reads all of my books, doesn't mind as long as I only cheat on him with my book boyfriends. Though he has joked that no man has to ask anymore, what it is that makes any woman happy. All he has to do is read a romance novel--especially one that woman wrote!
* * * *
So now that you've read my blog, hop along to the others, to find out what they have to say about this subject!
Anne Stenhouse http://annestenhousenovelist.wordpress.com
Judith Copek http://lynx-sis.blogspot.com/
Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/
Diane Bator https://dbator.blogspot.com/
Dr. Bob Rich https://wp.me/p3Xihq-2TY
Marci Baun http://www.marcibaun.com/blog/
Victoria Chatham http://www.victoriachatham.com
A.J. Maguire http://ajmaguire.wordpress.com/
Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
http://www.Skye-writer.com/
Helena Fairfax http://www.helenafairfax.com/blog
