"Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page."—Eudora WeltyThis is part of the magic of writing. One of the addictive parts. Agree?
It's all better with friends.
I have to totally agree with you, Peg. When I'm working on a writing project, and I am truly getting into the characters, they take on a life of their own. It becomes an exciting pleasure to see what they are going to do next. I also find, that if I don't have the right name for a character, he or she falls flat. She is just a stick figure, very sterile. It is not until I find the characters true name that he or she jumps off the page.
ReplyDeleteAgain, complete agreement! Isn't it weird that something as simple as a character's name can trigger everything? In my second novel, which was rewritten from a women's fiction into a police procedural (go figure) the names of my married couple went from Robert and Vickie Johnson to Chase and Bond Waters.
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