What’s In A Character?

I summarize that there are two kinds of writers: the character driven writer and the plot driven writer. And of course, if you want to write a strong story, you will need both elements. But usually the writer is driven more by one or the other of these aspects.                                                                                                                                                   I consider myself a character driven writer.                                                                                                                                                                                                                 As a writer of children’s fantasy/adventures books, one of my favorite things in creating a story is the forming and molding of my characters.                                                                                                                                                                                               Once I have characters who feel like long-time friends to me, the story writing just seems to come about because of the character’s personalities, and hence, the plot seems to come easily because of who those characters are.                                                                                                                                                                                          When writing children’s book, everything from character description to plotting has to be written tightly–in showing and not telling. The author has no room for long meandering explanations.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            So how does a writer get quality characterization into the story?                                                                                                                                                                                  When I start thinking about a new story idea, I first start by creating the characters who will appear in the story. I give each character pages and pages of attributes: likes, dislikes, values system, quirky ways, personalized sayings, emotions, flaws. Then they get fleshed out with physical appearance and the perfect name. All these things eventually will that character to life.                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Once I know the character inside and out, that’s when I start to write the story–the plot.
Of course, not all of this character information will be used. It’s time to pick out the strongest characteristics of each character and work with those.
Distinguishing features and attitudes in these characters is what makes the characters very real to the reader. For examples:
Snarls, the dragon in my series, The Pen Pieyu Adventures, has a fire breathing problem—his fire breathing doesn’t work when he wants it to, and it works
fine whenever he doesn’t need it to. His fire breathing problem leads to some hilarious situations. He also is very witty and his comments stand out.

The main character, Petra, is nine years old and strong headed, yet kind and respectful. She stands up for herself and often questions unrealistic conventional thinking of her kingdom,which in turn starts everybody in the palace wondering if there could be different and better ways to do things. She also has a good saying when questioning the old ways of thinking: “Where in the entire kingdom did you get that idea?”

The king, Petra’s father, tries to be very authoritative, but as situations unfold he is often muddled up by the rules he has himself written in the royal rule book. This makes him contemplate Petra’s new ideas and question the silliness of his rules.
All the characters in the stories are well rounded even though some of them have very small parts.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      The royal councilman has a very small role in these stories, but every time he is introduced he is twirling around in some kind of panic; either he’s misplaced the royal rule book yet again, opened it to the wrong page, or he’s nervous he’ll make the king mad in some other way. These small, personalized details of a character become important to help the reader quickly identify that character in the next scene.
So by working on your characters first, your plotting may just become easier.
For more information on this series and dragon books for children, visit the author’s website: http://www.dragonsbook.com