Establishing Characters in Your Story
Tying the who to the why to keep readers reading
At the risk of extending the metaphor from the last post a bit too far, think about what it is like to sit at dinner next to someone who offers very little in the way of meaningful conversation. When we encounter someone who answers a question with one or two-word answers or doesn’t offer enough details to keep the conversation moving, we turn to the person on the other side, hoping for a better dinner partner.
The same is true of characters in your story. When we encounter a character in your novel, we want to know who they are, what makes them tick and most importantly, we want to know why they are in the story. We want to see how they are relevant to the plot and feel as if they aren’t wasting our precious time.
Let’s look at an example. The Husband’s Secret opens with Cecilia sitting at her kitchen table contemplating a letter she found while looking for a piece of the Berlin Wall. In the first fifteen pages, we learn that Cecilia is “the most decisive person she knows,” and that she is a woman with close relationships, some of which, she values more than others. We learn she is meticulous because “she cleaned the droplets of water in the kitchen sink with a paper towel until it shone.” We know that she is a practicing Catholic who has given up…
