Snowballing... Creating Character. The Making of George, Barnaby and Brinnie
This month, our round robin topic is creating character, which is one of my favourite subjects. Please check out my fellow bloggers below for their take on the subject! There are lots of different ways to create characters. Mine hasn't changed a lot since I started writing in the 1970s, except that now, as I drift away from those days, I have stopped automatically basing sisters and parents on my own. I also learned, quite soon, that using my own basic personality for a protagonist wouldn't work. Protagonists have to be proactive, and I like a quiet life! As well as being a writer, I am also an editor and manuscript assessor for Wordkettle, Therefore, I see a lot of characters in their prepublication state. The same stock characters get used and reused and that makes me conscious of two things. One is that I am so tired of seeing the same child... often with the same name... from multiple writers and the other that characters can't venture too far from "givens...