My Characters are Characters

The cat's stopped hanging out on the changing table. Then she started cleeping in the crib. Once that stopped, she began to sleep in the stroller. Well, we now keep the stroller collapsed in the car so now she sleeps in the nursery rocking chair. And that would be fine, except that I've been sitting there a lot lately as Drew goes through a Momma's Boy phase where I either have to be in his direct line of sight, looking at him as well or I have to be holding him. Since I'm going back to work in less than two weeks (more on this later), I don't mind. And today I'm going to try to start sitting at my desk and writing--in the boy's line of sight of course--and see if that will work. That should make Addy happy. She seems to really like the rocking chair, and I'm very happy that she's not hanging out in the crib anymore.

But on to that writing stuff I hope to do. I was plugging along just fine in SoD until I brought the first ten pages to my critique group. Well, I have to be honest, I was coming up against a block in the new stuff too. The group gave me great comments, and I finally figured out how to adjust the opening to ease the reader into backstory and character introductions without a ton of confusion. So I wrote a new scene and now I need to rewrite one scene from another POV. Then I can get back to the brand new stuff. But in order to do the rewrite and move forward, I knew that I needed to get a better grip on my characters' motivations. That would help solidify their actions later in the book and just generally make me feel less like I was pulling everything from Drew's diaper pail.

I chose to unravel character motivations and a few pesky backstory questions by doing that "talk to your character" thing. I've never been good at this. In fact, it only really worked once for me while I was writing The Masque. In that case, I grilled my character as if I were a psychiatrist asking her why she had chosen to start a bar brawl. I decided to give it a try with my SoD POV characters and see what happened. I began each "session" with the quesiton "What do you want most in life?" And then each session took on its own flavor as the characters answered. I'm of two minds about the success of this. The first is a "yay me" attitude. I mean, I've obviously created some great characters if they actually answer me in their own voice and can influence the tenor of an exercise like this with their personality. The second is a profound desire to stay off the shrink's couch myself. Do I really want to know what the success of this sort of exercise means for my already questionable sanity?

Seriously, this was a great tool for me. I learned a lot about characters I already thought I had well pegged. I realized that I still have trouble delving into my heroes, but my heroines and villains are easy as pie. And I also figured out that my hero is going to be much easier to deal with once he meets the heroine. She's going to drive him so crazy, that he'll want someone to talk to. And I'll be waiting to catch every word. And it's OK until they meet because he's getting his ass chased all over the world by the bad guys, so he doesn't have much to do beyond react for the first part of the book. Plenty of conflict there, even if I don't know what makes him tick, or if I don't believe that he's as simple as he's telling me right now. I also got a better handle on later events with this exercise.

I've still got two more characters to put on the couch, and I'm looking forward to what they're going to tell me. And I'm going to conveniently forget any rational concerns about my mental well-being. I'll save that for my memoirs after I sell my fiftieth novel. :)