Characters, whether good or bad, need to be known before they can come alive on a page. Having been writing some of my characters for nearly ten years, I started to wonder I could become more familiar with them and how to inject three dimensions into the cupboard cut outs that sometimes fall into my prose.
I was lucky last weekend to attend a workshop on how to write scripts at Edinburgh International Book Festival. The workshop taken by Nicola McCartney, who is an author and script writer and I am still inspired by everything that we covered during the session.
The workshop excited me because it reminded me of the focus on drama, rather than description and that all characters, whether they are your heros or only is in the book for two chapters, it is important to understand their goal and the conflicts surrounding their journey towards their goals. There are four different levels of conflict
1. Inner
2. Interpersonal
3. Horizontal (your character's social group and rules to how to live their lives)
4. Vertical (those out with the controls of your character, i.e. time)
Allowing your characters space and time to go through these levels, brings depth to their presence in the book. They say that when you write short stories you shouldn't introduce any elements to the plot if it isn't necessary. This is true of any piece of writing, if it is not relevant to the story, why share?
Only then do your characters really start to work within a story that the plot can develop in a way that is both believable and spell-binding to your readers and helps them believe that the characters they are reading about could end up walking the streets where they live.
