The Word Cloud

What gives you that 'Eureka' feeling that you've made a significant advance in knowing one or more of your characters?

Here's a couple of mine from the last few days (I should make it clear, I'm starting a new novel and forcing myself not to work on the plot till the characters are developed - a new and interesting experience!)

I have photos of my four main characters (Thanks for the Casting Directory tip, Kim!)

After an hour of diligent internet searching for job descriptions, I managed to move from "Val works in a path lab at the hospital, errr, I think, but I don't know what jobs there are" to "Val is a clinical microbiologist who works part time while the kids are at school."

I pinpointed why my character Clive was only impotent with one woman in his life, and why that ironically is why his current relationship is going downhill (despite his equipment functioning correctly).

That'll do for now!

Feel free to share any eureka moments

Isn't it great when a plan comes together? I'm really chuffed that you found the tip useful.

I first got to know what really made my protagonist tick, (I decided to write him as a widowed lawyer; and just in case you are interested Phil, I have him played by Callum Blue), when I had to think of how his wife may have died. Okay, I thought, let's say it was from breast cancer. How would this affect him on a really basic level? Ooo, if he had found the lump on his poor departed wife himself, perhaps this may give him a fear of touching breasts altogether lest the whole awful experience replay itself. So no intimacy allowed beyond kissing.

Up to reaching that point, I never really knew him. Now everything became suddenly clear as to how he may interact with women, whether he was even bothered about a relationship and how he would actually handle becoming intimate with 'the one' that he was now meant to be with.

Problem solved. That part of the play practically wrote itself.

I often think it's the odd details that give you that sudden tumble of insight. I had a character once who, I said, 'looked like a pianist'. He wasn't a pianist (though he could play when he had a piano, which was almost never in this particular book). He was an engineer. But if there was one note that sounded throughout my characterisation of this chap, it was that he looked like a pianist.

It's not always the little things though. I had a prostitute character once whose keynote was that she was a truth-teller and a truth-seeker. She couldn't collude with falsehood. Not wouldn't: couldn't. Her lover/husband was a truth-avoider in certain critical respects, so that gave their relationship a conflictual element that resolved only when he sorted himself out. Again, though, that single note sounded throughout this woman's character. Once I had that, I had her.