My RSS feeder brings in all kinds of writing info and tips for me each day, most of which I skim and ignore pretty quickly because I’m always in a hurry to get to the actual writing I have to do. But this morning a post from Men With Pens (cool name, hey!) caught my eye.

In their post Fiction Writing: Characters Rule the Story, I got a good reminder about a mistake I was about to make with the first chapter of my novel rewrite. Characters are more important than I’ve made them. In my plan for the new version of the first chapter, I had carefully decided that the three main characters should all be introduced somehow, but what I haven’t perhaps paid enough attention to is that they must be characters which the reader can love, and they must be real.

In particular, this bit from the Mens With Pens post rang true:

Your characters, once they’ve been let loose, lead the reader through the story much more than you ever could. You’re not there on the pages. They are. So let your characters run the show, because they’ll make or break your book. Not your plot, not your descriptions, not your scenes or settings – your characters.

The trick of how you make your readers love your characters is something that eludes me right now, but I hope I can get it half way right when I get writing. I love the characters, but how can I make others feel that way? I also struggle sometimes to make characters seem believably real. I already think that just giving them “actual” characteristics and behaviours of people you know doesn’t cut it. If a reader doesn’t believe it, it doesn’t matter that I actually know someone who does that. So I have to work on that, too. And then let the characters tell the story without me.