Authentic Characters

My favorite activity is conjuring characters and creating them on the page for use of literary character depth. I map their attributes. I feel it is necessary to discover their personalities so my readers can uncover their secrets and not so secrets.

I love creating a journal for all the main characters to help me get their tone of voice down. I make sure that I use different lingo and styles of speech for each character. Writing in my journal is one of my favorite activities, therefore, I acquired this ability and utilized this in my journals.

I’m a publisher of three young adult fiction novels. With every single one I created both a journal and scrapbook for all my main characters. My favorite part of writing is creating unique but real characters with deep layers. One way I do this is planning my characters' quirks, faults and unique qualities before I even start writing a single word.

I create an idea in my head before planning it onto the page. I use content from magazines and other sources in order to give them engaging personalities to make them feel authentic to the reader. The fleshing out of the character in this way gives them a depth that gives them reason and makes them actionable entities. This avoids the trap of ending up with limited passive characters.

Rendering them in this passion broadens their sense of realism and enhances my ability to tell the story. I maximize detail in order to lend them a three-dimensional personification. This leaves me with actual characters who appear to possess maximal detail to become believable on the page.

The scrapbook and journals for the main characters I create helps me enter this imaginary world of my own creation. It assists me in making the people in my story real to the readers. I love to entertain and tell believable stories. Since I was a kid, I have loved to tell stories.

One of my professors at the University of Utah told me once that no matter what story arc you create you need to have 90 percent realism and 10 percent fantasy or in my case maybe not so real romance.

Realism in romance is not an easy feat. As a young forty-year-old, I interview and talk with those of a younger age to get a feel for the slang and what is popular for this later generation. As a passion of mine, I mostly write young adult novels with a romance angle, but I must include real life issues that teens face.

To honor my friend and others who have experienced terrifying dating violence. I want the writing to do it justice. I strive to show the pain and fear the people who could relate to me would know.

Not only is creating the scene valuable as I pick the right schools and houses for my characters to include in my scrapbook or journals.

I feel it necessary to include both the characters flaws and strengths and all the gray that is between. I even do this to the characters who play the role of antagonists.

The three-dimensional aspect of the characters gives them a more relatable personification.

To scrapbook and journal are my favorite part of the writing process as it yields the most possibility.

When I enter this world, I can find myself in a timeless state of meditation and contentment and my writing can flow. I sit by my tree writing in my many character journals or on my desk doing my scrapbook. The process I go through is one of the funnier aspects of writing for me.