Characters Need to Talk to You

 FRIDAY FORUM

Last weekend cj and I attended Carolyn Haines’s Daddy’s Girl Weekend for writers and readers. From pirate costumed participants, ghost tours, and treasure hunts to serious discussions of the art of writing, not a minute of the weekend was wasted. Carolyn's new cookbook to benefit Good Fortune Farm Refuge is jam-packed with wonderful recipes which we tasted throughout the weekend. Buy one and save an animal.

I made new friends and had the privilege of hanging out with some well-published authors, an agent, and several publishers. My head is still reeling with new ideas I want to incorporate into my writing.

I was especially thrilled when my belief that characters are the key to the story was supported repeatedly. While I know that is self-aggrandizement at its height, it’s what I believe and teach in my character development classes.

Holly McClure, well-known agent with Sullivan & Maxx Literary Agency, pointed out that characters need to talk to the author. We need to know our characters better than we know ourselves to bring them to life on the page.

Listening to the authors who have successful book series (proof positive they created good characters) and others with numerous publications under their belt — Carolyn Haines, Dean James, Sue Walker, Holly McClure, John Floyd, David Sheffield, Cynthia Walker—it was obvious that characters and a reader’s connection to them is pivotal to the success of a book.

The bottom line: take the time to develop your characters. Dig out those character sheets you got at a conference or read about in a book on character development and fill them out. That will get you started. Then bring them to life with psychological and sociological information.

I teach my creative writing students that a character is developed through profiling: physical, psychological, and sociological. We are all the sum of our experiences, our looks, our surroundings. Our personalities develop through our experiences/choices/ desires/decisions.

Think your characters are blah?

Create something they hate or love: people, place, or thing, then expose them to it.

Give them a tic. Who can forget Inspector Jacques Clouseau in Pink Panther movies? His clumsiness kept us laughing. Add to that the eye tic of the commissioner when Clouseau created  another disaster and you have memorable characters. Want to go to the dark side? Hannibal Lecter and his fetishes will take you there. Check out R. B. Chesterton’s The Darkling.

Make them vulnerable. How will your characters get what they want or need from where they are starting? Examples: True Grit (youth). Rocky (loser). Argo (impossible). Steel Magnolias (disease). Great Expectations (poor). The Language of Flowers (stranded).

The most fully developed, deeply motivated characters are always the most compelling, no matter how ordinary they might be. Think Mrs. Dalloway, Jane Eyre, A Gathering of Old Men.

Flesh them out now, and your readers will thank you later.

Kudos to cj who sat on the mystery writers panel!  Mahala 

Carolyn Haines on Daddy's Girls Weekend

Today, we are excited to have Carolyn Haines, prolific author of over fifty published books to grace the pages of Lyrical Pens. Carolyn, Southern to the core, an animal lover and avid participant in rescuing animals, a professor at the University of South Alabama, an author well known to the New York Times best seller list, and the creative mind behind the wildly popular Bones series complete with houseghost, is a wonderful friend to writers. She won the coveted Harper Lee Award in 2010 and writes in multiple genres, including the popular Sarah Booth Delaney mystery (Bones) series and her sinister books written under the pseudonym, R. B. Chesterton.                            

March 4, 2014

If you haven’t sent in your registration for the hilariously serious Daddy’s Girls Weekend, do it now. You don’t want to miss this wonderful opportunity to meet and greet authors, agents, and readers!

Now let's turn out attention to what Carolyn Haines has to share.

Daddy’s Girls Weekend, our annual writers/readers conference, is just around the corner. I got off the phone a few minutes ago with Ben LeRoy, the editor and publisher at Tyrus Books, which is part of F&W Media. We were making plans for the conference (Ben is one of our loyal presenters), which will be held April 3-6 at the Battle House Hotel in Mobile.

Madcap weekend blend of fun and publishing information/business. And this year we have a wonderful slate of writers/industry professionals, some new and some who have supported the weekend for the past three years.

Readers and Writers Invited: When the idea for the conference was first born, I knew we would be walking a fine line—one that was helpful to writers, but one that also included readers. I think the speakers who have come to the weekend in the past did a fine job of straddling that fence. And this year will be no exception.

Exciting Speakers:  If you’re interested in learning more about the broad range of professionals who will attend, check it out at www.daddysgirlsweekend.com  We are also offering manuscript evaluations by professionals and sessions with energy worker/writer/artist DeWitt Lobrano. Holly McClure, a wonderful agent I’ve known for many years, will take pitches.

Day Rate for those who work on Friday and can’t attend the whole conference. Or for those who really just want to play, there’s a costume party at Grand Central Bar and Grill on Dauphin and a treasure hunt on Saturday in the downtown area.

Value:  People sometimes ask me “what is the value of a conference?” First of all, there is so much to learn about writing and publishing. I’ve been writing for a long time, and last year I went to the World Horror Association conference in New Orleans. I learned a ton of new things and met a bunch of great new writers. (I met Greg Herren there! Like me, Greg writes horror and mysteries. He also edits and does a lot of other wonderful stuff. He is one of our presenters and a Big Daddy candidate.)

Conferences offer a chance to meet industry professionals face to face. Personal contact is very important. If you have a chance to speak to an editor or agent, you have cracked open a door into the world of publishing. It’s often said about many other businesses that it isn’t what you know, but who you know. This also applies, to some degree, to this crazy world of stories and books. A face-to-face in any business is a powerful thing.

Making New Friends is another plus. I met some great people at WHA that I would never have met anywhere else. My writing community is far flung.  I know some terrific writers in Mobile and this region. But by going to conferences, I have met people who share my love of fiction and my passion for writing from all over the globe. This gives me community, and even solitary writers need that.

Living in the Deep South can be a drawback in some ways when participating in an industry that has been mostly focused in New York. Even if a writer went to New York hoping to meet industry professionals, it would be very hard to do. But these same professionals are at conferences with the goal of finding new writers. They are hunting for a great new story or voice, and conferences are the place to make it happen. 

Focus:  Conferences allow for writers to spend time with others who share their focus. I teach at the University of South Alabama. I’m encouraging my students to attend DG Weekend (or any other conferences they can get to) because exposure to different writers who are willing to share their knowledge and stories broadens that learning experience.

The best thing you can do for yourself today is register for Daddy's Girl Weekend (rates are sinfully low) and check out everything Carolyn at  www.carolynhaines.com.  One thing is for sure, if you attend the conference, you will meet Carolyn Haines and a world of other good writers, agents, readers, and maybe a ghost or two.  See you there.    Mahala
 

DEADLY STAR is available for pre-order

Now, I've something more to celebrate!  DEADLY STAR is available on Amazon.com for pre-order in Kindle format.

http://www.amazon.com/Deadly-Star-Crimson-Romance-ebook/dp/B00B2B0X9O/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1360098034&sr=1-5&keywords=Deadly+Star

I've been spending hours trying to put together a DEADLY STAR business card and rack card.  I'm fairly experienced at creating these things but doing it on-line in someone else's template has frustrated me. I'd get one of the sides done, then it would disappear if I tried to go back and adjust a font style or color. I can't tell you how many times I re-created the same image. I gave up last night about midnight. I'll go back at it tomorrow or the next day when I've had a chance to cool down.

On another front, Carolyn Haines invited me to participate in a "new authors panel" at her Daddy's Girls Weekend writers and readers conference in April. I'l be part of a Q and A with three other new Mobile authors. I'm looking forward to that...join us if you're able. You can check out the particulars at www.daddysgirlsweekend.com

Carolyn's latest book is THE DARKLING, written under her pseudonym of R.B. Chesterton. It's coming out in April.

I'm back at work on an as-yet unnamed thriller/romance. (I've changed the presumptive title three times already, so now it's XXX.) It's a completed manuscript, and I'm in one of many edit cycles. When I get this edit done, the next steps will be to have it beta read and another edit before I submit it anywhere. If I can get it done in a timely fashion, I'm thinking I'll try Crimson Romance again. They only have two options...yes or no...and neither one would hurt my feelings. (hah!)

I have another work-in-progress (five chapters in), and I'm excited about this one. It's a story about a newly minted private investigator who's set up shop in Mobile, Alabama. She's not only a new PI, she's a yankee new to the Gulf Coast. Lots of opportunity for conflict there...plus there's an off-screen murder.

Okay, back to the stories.

You-all guys keep on keeping on, and I'll try to do the same.

cj