Characters are the heart and soul of your story.
They are what the reader connects with. If you want your readers to “burn with the bliss and suffer the sorrow*” of your story’s events, you need to present them with characters who really engage their sympathy, their love, their hatred.
Characters who came alive.
First thing you need to know when you sit down to write is: who is the main character?
The answer to this is: The main character is the person who does the thing.
Whoever does the main action, makes the main thing happen, commits the pivotal act—that is who your story is about.
So if it isn’t your main character or characters, you either must change the action of the story so that it is your main character(s) or rewrite to make the person who is doing the pivotal act the star of the story.
Once you have your main character(s), how do you bring your main characters and your secondary characters to life?
The Secret Is In The Shading:
Imagine that you and I are standing in front of an easel upon which an artist has drawn a circle. It’s just a circle. We tilt our head left and right, but there’s nothing else there.
One line. Round.
Flat.
Then, the artist comes forward. He squints slightly to the left, as if envisioning the light source. Then he picks up his charcoal pencil and adds shading. A darker bit around the curve. A lighter bit a little farther up and down.
And, voila! Suddenly, our circle has become a sphere, a ball fairly bouncing off the page!
Shading is a marvelous thing. A simple trick. Once you know how to do it, your pictures need never look flat again.
Ah, you say, sighing, as you look at the curve of the charcoal beach ball, if only it were that simple to make three-dimensional characters.
The good news is: it is!
So, how is it done? Like with art, it is easy to explain but takes practice to accomplish. The principle, however, is simple.
What transforms a circle into a ball is the contrast between the whiteness of the paper and the darkness of the shading. Put simply: contrast is what makes drawings 3-D To make a character leap off the page, the same thing is needed—contrast.
I learned this trick from New York literary agent Donald Maass. We will talk more about what Maass said below.
Character Dimensions:
Characters come in three types: one-dimensional, two-dimensional, and three-dimensional.
One-dimensional characters just act and talk. They aren’t really different from each other.
Two-dimensional characters have specific identifying characteristics and are clearly identifiable as these characters, but they never act outside these limits. They can be really good characters, but they are limited. (Think of the Peanuts. Charlie Brown is a loveable character, but he’s never going to hit the ball.)
Three-dimension characters seem to have an independent life of their own. They seem to move and breathe.
The key to 3-D characters is to have contrasting qualities or goals. By this I mean that the cheerful character occasionally gets sad, or the character that longs to wander also loves his garden at home. The goal of travel and the goal of being at home are opposites and can’t both be accomplished at the same time, this give the character a natural conflict.
Why is character dimension important?
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