When I start a new story, I tend to write and rewrite the first few chapters a lot. This is my way of figuring out my characters, especially my main character. But even though you are in the protag's mind, you have to keep your secondary characters in theirs while you write out of another POV.
My CP pointed this out in my current edit of Demon Spawn. And it had been pointed out in Leprechaun by a different CP. I had infused my protag's verbiage into the secondary character's vocabulary.
Here is a little mantra to chant:
**When in one character's POV, the writer must make certain the secondary characters stay in their POV through their dialogue and actions.**
Most people would snort, mumble 'amateur' under their breath and move on. But to really make a good book outstanding, the writer must remember this advice, otherwise your characters will sound alike and everyone will be flat.
I just finished judging RWA's Golden Heart contest and I found two that I really liked, BUT less than a week later, I couldn't even begin to tell you what either one of them was about! Though the plot and story were good enough for me to score it very well, the characters were forgettable.
A few years ago, I judged a contest entry, historical romance with a little paranormal, that I vividly remember. And do you want to know the interesting thing about this? It wasn't the hero or heroine that I remember, it is the heroine's aunt. To this day, I can still envision the woman, so much so that I wanted her to have her own HEA (happily ever after) as a secondary romantic sub-plot! Yes, I did suggest it to the author. :-)
How the author deals with the secondary characters will kick the book up a notch on the editorial radar. Do I know this for certain? No, but it does make for a better book, doesn't it?
What do you think?
Write on!
I absolutely agree! In my wip, my secondary characters were more interesting than the main characters, and I had to stop last week to work on my protags. I'm re-reading Donald Maass's Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook and he says something like "don't be afraid to make your characters big."
ReplyDeleteI'm sure he phrased it completely different, but that was the message I got. lOL
In the first story I ever wrote, the heroine's father totally took over the story! And the hero? He lost out to a "throw-away" mysterious man who ran onto the page and swept my heroine off her feet.
ReplyDeleteSigh. That one was never finished. The characters were running wild!
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