“The best characters are so vivid that readers refuse to accept they don’t exist outside the pages of a book.”
I’ve been working on writing a novel for the majority of this year. The little nugget of an idea that I started with in January has morphed into a beast. While completing NaNoWriMo last month, I got to know my main character a bit better. I gave her some pretty major problems to overcome and some incredibly shitty life circumstances to deal with. But I still need to go a little deeper, so I picked up a copy of Jordan Rosenfeld’s book Writing the Intimate Character: Mastering Point of View and Characterization in Fiction to help me out. I’ve only just started but I can already tell that it will be helpful. I really like her use of examples from published novels, so instead of just reading definitions and advice you can see for yourself what she’s talking about.
What are you reading?