Friday, December 29, 2006

Creative Characters Part 2

On my last post, I mentioned using dialects as a way of adding a bit of depth and color to a character. I've used another way of fleshing out the quirks of a character and this tactic nearly made delete the entire chapter.

OCD. People, in real life, have this. Characters, in fiction, can have this. It's a major pain to write, but I think in Purposed Chaos (no publisher yet) it pulled it off well. I have a character who has developed a problem with 1's, 4's, and 7's. His actions, sitting down with two cups of coffee, washing his hands twice, etc turned out to be easy to handle. His dialog, on the other hand, was painfully difficult. I couldn't let any of his dialog contain 1, 4, or 7 words or any combination of words that would end in 1, 4, or 7. So, no 11's, 14's or 17's. Teens in general were avoided because they start with a 1.

It made the character quirky and it served a purpose in the story, but it was rather difficult. If you have the patience for something like this and the eye to notice when you stray from the OCD, I highly recommend it.

4 comments:

Tami P said...

Yeah that's a great way to add character. It doesn't even have to be something as complex as that. Every individual has their 'quirks' and keeping true to them makes characters 'live' in the story.

Tami P said...

you've been tagged, (and turn off that danged captcha thingie will you? It always takes me at least two trys to get my comments on.)

IM Cupnjava said...

Oh, I've been tagged? That's right. What's the captcha thing?

Tami P said...

The captcha thing are those danged word verification thingies... get rid of them... plllleeeeaaaassseeeeeeeeeee.

Oh, and you did the five things, I forgot I tagged you on that a while back... there's another one on my blog now... get to it.