Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Piercing Depths and Unfolding Realms


While in a drugged stupor I have not been able to write. Everything I attempted came out broken up and dense, bleak minds mingling on black seas of infinity. In Zarahemla, Gadiantons carouse and defame, mocking as drums throb and dancers gyrate within THE IRON ROD.

See, none of that made sense.

Anyhow I have given the rewrites a lot of thought and have been determining that people care about books that make them think and feel. Granted I am not coming up with this as a revelation of anything unheard before by any means, just what has been going on while the chest feels like it has four arrow holes. I will be doing a rewrite about wounds based off this.

While doing my rewrites I am going to work on expanding the depth of some of my lesser characters for the sake of dramatic breaks (and or) breathers between the action and warfare. I want to give the sense that despite the travails going on around them, people have the same wants and needs as they ever have, regardless of the bloody revolutions at hand.

Any thoughts from anyone out there on what makes you care about characters beyond identifying with them, what other attributes engender interest? I read somewhere recently that the character has to be kind, but I don't know if kindness makes me want to follow a character by itself, per-se, so what else? If none of this made sense, then I plead that I am still high on painkillers.

3 comments:

Melanie Goldmund said...

I'm thinking back to several characters that I fell in love with, and wondering what exactly it was about them that caught my interest. I think one attribute is that the characters all desired something that they couldn't have (or not yet) and their yearning resonated with me. I'm less likely to sympathize with characters whose only desire is for power, but I can definitely feel the pain of their unrequited love, for instance, or their attempts to fit in somewhere. Just a thought.

Hope you feel better soon!

nephite blood spartan heart said...

Thanks for the feedback.
Just when I thought I was starting to feel better and wean myself off the Lortab-I feel worse this morning. Its gonna take time.

When it comes to just a desire for power thats closer to Gadiantons motivation but even then thats a pretty cardboard Gadianton, i am confident that I have something deeper for even the bad guys.

Tamara Hart Heiner said...

Hmm. What makes me like a character? I guess a lot of it is relatability and admirability. If they have feelings like I do, react the same as me, hurt the same as me. If they also do things better than I would, acting honorably.

But a lot of it is in the feelings. Even if I don't like them, if I can feel what they feel, know where they're coming from, get hooked in their lives, then I like them.