We've entered Week #2 of the Plan Your Novel course, where we ask the writers to go deep in drafting their characters.

That got me thinking about what I see is one of the biggest challenges for writers at the start of the planning process and even follows them into the manuscript. That is, their details are not specific enough.

Funny thing about specific details in fiction. Writers often resist them. Some writers tell me they want their work to apply to anyone and so want to keep the details general.

Funny thing about details. The more specific you are the more a reader can step into them, feel them, and therefore become your main character.

As Lisa Cron says in her book, Wired for Story, "We don't think in the abstract; we think in specific images."

Scientists has shown that we have mirror neurons and, as Cron says, "allow us to feel what other experience almost as if it were happening to us... We mirror fictional characters too." We create a mental simulation of what is happening in the story. All the more reason to get specific, tangible, and visceral in our planning and our writing.

Let's dive deeper and share some examples.

My favorite tool in breaking down fiction and in designing your characters into tiny bits we can manipulate is thinking in terms of nouns and verbs and in terms of the five senses. Today we'll focus on nouns.

Nouns
Say your main character is a nurse. That's a good start, but let's get more specific. What kind of nurse? Let's decide she's a psychiatric nurse who works the night shift at a psychiatric hospital for long-term patients in the woods north of Seattle.

Your Turn: What is your character's profession, and how can you get detailed about that?

You can also think more specifically in terms of what's important to your character, like how they measure the passage of time. More character planning tips here.


For example, my main character in A Cupcake Christmas is a baker. Her whole world is filtered through her focus on her business and on cooking and baking, ingredients. She recounts getting to know her newest hire, Florian, by noticing the customer she serves and what she serves them:


"In between a small cap and three muffin cupcakes to a tourist in an oversized sweatshirt, the Golden Gate Bridge plastered across his chest, she found out his name: Florian MacMillian, and between four large lattes and ten savory breakfast cupcakes to four of her regular clients, men and women in their well-tailored business suits, he told her he was from Alaska and needed a job for December he could sink his teeth into to round out his resume."


Your Turn: What's important to your character at the start of the story and how does that affect how they count time?


Also, how does what's important to your main character -- their goal and their view of the world and themselves -- get filtered through how they perceive the world?


Next week I'll cover verbs and the five senses in building your character in specific and sensorial ways so that your reader can step into them and become them.


Hit reply and share how you're getting specific with your characters.

♥

Best,
Beth