I’ve been sporadically working on the novel I blogged about here. One of the characters was not working for me. I’m not sure if I didn’t develop her enough or what. She’s a minor character, however, since I don’t find her presence really working, it affected the way I portrayed one of the main characters (if that makes any sense).
So, I’ve discovered what I needed to do to make the story work.
In Southern Comfort, the story I’m working on now, I removed the character whom wasn’t really working for me. I changed the story and had the heroine to be grieving for said character at the beginning of the story. This creates more conflict and is helping me to write this manuscript.
I kind of did the same thing in my story, Milk Money, when it wasn’t working. In Milk Money, Emily’s mother wasn’t really working for me, either. However, I don’t remove Emily’s mother completely. Instead, I have her away on a trip. With her gone, it was easier for me to write the story for some reason. I have her mother to come back about mid-way in the story, but I have her to leave again…two times! When I was going through the content edits for the story, the editor stated that Emily’s relationship with her mother was strange and kind of hard to follow. So during the content-edit stage, I changed the mother’s role from mother to stepmother, giving an explanation for their distant and strange relationship.
Have any of you ever had a character, either major or minor, who just was not working for your story at all? If so, what did you do to correct it? Did you delete the character (through death, or just pretend they didn’t exist at all?). Or did you re-develop the character so that he/she would work within the context of your story? Or, did you do something else to make your story flow?
I’m more of a reader than a writer. But, if a character wasn’t working for me, I’d probably get rid of him/her somehow. I feel that your characters should be close to your heart, if they’re dragging your story down, then you don’t need ’em.
If characters are weak, then you need to do something about them. You need to go back and re-develop them somehow. You can never know too many things about the characters in your novels. Killing them off, making them disappear is just lazy writing. You should fix your characters before getting rid of them. That’s how I feel.
Very interesting the way you delt with these non-working characters…..I probably would of fumed and fussed and still be in a rut….I’m going to keep your ideas in mind!
Thanks for your input!
Darby
darbyscloset at yahoo dot com
Interesting. I’ve never thought of killing one of my characters – at least not just to get rid of them. I have had characters that didn’t work of course, but so far it has just taken some introspection about what the character really should be – they are after all, whatever I want them to be, that for me is the joy of writing – I get to do whatever I want with the story. Usually when I don’t like a character it’s because they don’t have a strong enough personality. If I take the little glimmer I gave them initially, and deepen it, then it begins to come together. But in the future maybe I’ll keep my gun handy just in case! =)
Hi, Suzanne. Usually, when I get rid of characters, I very seldom kill them with a gun. I usually let them die a natural death (like heart attack or something.) In my current WIP, I have the lady to be older anyway, and I just wasn’t “feeling her” in the story. So when the story opens, she’s already died of natural causes. Her being gone makes it easier for me to write the story for some reason. I’m also having more interaction between the heroine and her two best friends, and I find those scenes more engaging than the scenes with heroine and her elderly aunt.
Celia,
Making it work is absolutely what matters. Now that I think about it, I did a similar thing in the story I have coming out – my male protagonist lived with his mother, which of course was too pathetic, so I gave her Alzheimers and his story suddenly became tender and fell right into place.