A Few Thoughts on Characters

Welcome to the Write for a Reason podcast. My name is Janet Wilson; I'm a publisher of Christian fiction for young people with Dernier Publishing. If you are a Christian, and new to writing stories for kids and teens, stay tuned for encouragement, creative writing tips and actionable strategies you can implement immediately to become a better writer, and get your books out into the world.

Characters are a very important part of your novel - if you don't get these right, you could lose your readers.

But how many characters do you need? How many is too many? How old should they be? What is a 'guide' - and should you include one?

 Listen to this podcast and be inspired!

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Welcome to the Write for Reason podcast. My name is Janet Wilson. I'm a publisher of Christian fiction for young people with Dernier Publishing. If you're a Christian and new to writing stories for kids and teens, stay tuned for encouragement, creative writing tips, and actionable strategies you can implement immediately to become a better writer. Today I want to take a little bit of time to talk to you about characters. Now your characters are probably the most or certainly one of the very most important parts of your story because if your readers are engaging with your characters, they are very likely to carry on reading the book and enjoy it to the very last word. If they're rooting for them, if they like them, if they want them to win through the scenario, whatever it is that you've put in your story. So here's the first tip that I have for you today. Don't have too many characters. So you will have your protagonist or possibly a group protagonist if you've got three or four children, teenagers who are doing something specific. You'll probably have one main character within that group, but then you will have some secondary characters. You might have parents or other friends, you may have people from the youth club that they belong to, so there will be other characters around their secondary characters, who mostly will be named and will pop into the story every now and then. You may have a kind of a guide figure, so somebody perhaps a youth club leader or a grandparent or perhaps a teacher. In Eleanor Watkins' beautiful stories, The Beach Bank Girls, there's Sadie who is the youth club leader for the girls to talk to. So they often go and talk to Sadie if they they're in trouble with something or they're struggling with an issue, and Sadie often notices and she kind of draws alongside them. She's not there all the time, she pops in occasionally, and she's a great figure. There will also be some extras, so you'll have people who are just like passing by or the whole classroom of children or whatever it happens to be. So how many characters is too many characters is a question that I'm often asked. And honestly, what I can say to you is don't have any characters that you don't need. This is the big takeaway from this podcast. If you don't need them, don't have them. For example, if your protagonist has several siblings, it's going to be difficult for your reader to remember who they all are, who is which age, which one's the baby, which one's the older one, which one does what, which one has ginger hair. If you just have one sibling, it will be a lot simpler. So if you don't need a whole bunch of siblings for your story, don't have them. This will help you to keep up the pace, it will help your reader to be fully engaged, it will help you as you write to because you haven't got so many characters to get to know along the way. Your protagonist of course should be somebody who is around the same age or a little bit older than your intended readers, because they would need to be an inspiring character for your readers. They want to be somebody that they will look up to. They will probably be some kind of hero with a floor, so they may certainly not look like a hero in the beginning, but they will somehow win through. That's the way stories work. These are the stories that inspire us, that we love. The last thing I want to say about characters is that you will probably have an antagonist, not necessarily, but there probably will be somebody who is trying to put the spokes in the works of your protagonist getting through to their final goal, in whatever way that is. Your antagonist may need some minions, some friends to work along with them, but if they don't, don't have them. If they do, just keep them to a minimum. As I said before, it will keep up the pace of your story and engage your readers and you're always moving forward in the best way possible without having lots of kind of side issues and things that are not necessary. It will help you because you won't have so much to describe, so many people to describe. It will help your readers if there aren't too many characters. I think we've all read books where we start to wonder who's that character again? Especially if they don't pop up very often. That would be really helpful if they weren't there, or if you could perhaps combine two or three characters into one. So you've just got one neighbour rather than three or four neighbours. You've got one sibling rather than three or four siblings. You've got one or two friends rather than seven or eight of them. So I hope this has been a little helpful episode for you. Why not look over your work in progress and see if you think perhaps you do have too many characters? Pray about it of course as well. Right, that's all for now, so I'll see you again next time. If you'd like lots more free creative writing tips, hop on over to rightforreason.com and you'll find lots of things there. We have a membership group, we'd love for you to join us, and I have the Right for a Reason Academy. So if you want to dig deeper into your writing, that is the course for you. So don't forget, today is a gift to use wisely. If you've been called to write, someone is waiting for your story.