A good character makes a story, don’t you agree? And there are some that stick with us through the ages. Sometimes you can’t even remember their names years after you’ve read the book, but they still stick to your memory like that kid who always had his pencil sticking out to see if he could accidentally stab someone on their way to sharpen their pencil. What was his deal, anyway?
What characters have stuck to your memory?
For me it’s the sister from Leon Uris’s Trinity who had such a sad, lonely ending missing out on true love due to her fear of sex and whether it was a sin or not. Or the crippled sister in The Poisonwood Bible who helps us sort through what actually happened and who her sisters had become …and how regrets correcting her crippled legs later on in life because she thinks it was connected to her ability to think in a sideways manner.
But then there are the characters who now have become household names like Anne Frank and Harry Potter and it’s hard to distinguish if we remember them because we actually love them or because they are part of our culture.
And finally there are the childhood reads that impact us because we read them just at the time that our minds were really awakening to the strange horrors of this world like Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird or Dallas from The Outsiders.
(I remember a character described as small framed with long black hair, the blackest of eyes like the desert night and red, full lips from a book I read in middle school. A book whose title I can’t remember.)
Was it the description of them or the sad way they ended their story or the different way they thought? What about them struck you enough to stick to your brain?
It’s an interesting thought to ponder. What’s also interesting is all the characters that never did leave an impact!
Exploring your fictional characters
I like exploring my characters even when I’m done writing their story. Ana, from Coffee Stains, was on my mind for years as I wrote her story, put it away and then took it back out again. Every person is complicated and fictional characters are no different. Ana is someone who has high hopes and dreams but found herself moving along an entirely different path than what she wished for. She abdicated her dreams for the dreams of the boy she was with, and soon found herself stagnating in life. Maybe even feeling like she went backwards.
Coffee Stains is the story of how she finds a new way to get back on the path of her dream to graduate from the university, only things don’t go quite as planned, yet again. I really loved writing her character, watching how she grew through each revision. The first few drafts she was a bit overly dramatic for my taste, and …immature. I wanted her to grow more, without it feeling like a pie shoved into the reader’s face.
I’m not sure if Ana will be a character that people remember throughout the decades after they read her. Her impact is yet to be seen as her story just came out. But I wrote her with the thoughts in mind that her story, her thoughts and her decisions be impactful.
If you’re a write, do you write with the hope that your character will stick in people’s heads long after they’re done reading the book?
You can read the first chapter of Ana’s story here. Of you can buy your copy of the book here.