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?

~Cecelia Dowdy~