Saying goodbye to your characters

 I have completed my last edit of my Christmas novel CHRISTMAS ROMANCE AT WINDFALL LODGE which I have written under my "Romance Writer" name Peggy O'Mahony.  It is time to say goodbye to these characters that I have been involved with since I started some months ago. I always get attached to them, their hopes and dreams and romances.

There are novels which I read over and over again - all of Jane Austen's with the exception of Northanger Abbey, for instance, just for the sheer pleasure of meeting those characters again, even if I know the story and the dialogue by heart!

I have just finished Ali Knight's novel BEFORE I FIND YOU.  A whirlwind story - I need something lighter for my next read so have picked EXCITING TIMES by Naoise Dolan. I have to read something. However, gone are the days when I ploughed through an indifferent novel just because books were "special" and you didn't discard them lightly. With so many talented writers out there, I feel it is a waste of time to read just for the sake of it.

But I digress. What makes a character - in anyone's novel - likeable? Hard to say, isn't it? They have to resonate with you in some way, even if they are not "good". The people in my novels just show up in my head when I am working on the plot. In my last Christmas novel, one character was not planned at all - see if you can guess which one - she insisted in insinuating herself into the story!

CHRISTMAS ROMANCE AT WINDFALL LODGE will be available from Amazon in October. Here is a preview of the cover. I hope you'll like the story.

GetDown to Writing Tip No. 4

Now that you've got your characters, their names and what makes them tick all sorted and you know how the story is going to develop, it's time to take the plunge and start writing.

Where to start? Every author starting off a story has sat down to a blank page. The good news is that you can start at the beginning, in the middle or do the ending first. What you have to do is to make the story interesting to your readers.
If you area a seat-of-the-pants writer, you'll write a couple of pages to start off the story : Red Riding Hood walking through the woods on her way to her grandmother's. Sounds pretty dull, doesn't it?  What if she feels she's being followed? Or she hasn't heard from her grandmother in a while, which is uncharacteristic. There's a rustling in the bushes, last summer's leaves crackle underfoot, a bird calls in the distance signalling that it has been disturbed by something. Now you're on the way to getting a bit of tension.
If you are a planner, then you will have outlined your chapters, so now you have to write what you planned. The same applies as for the seat-of-the-pants writer. You have to draw in your readers and make them wonder what is going to happen next.
More importantly, you have to make them care enough about Red Riding Hood to want to know how things work out.  I have read or tried reading to be more exact, stories with excellent plots but where the main character was so lifeless that I couldn't have cared less what happened to them.
Develop your characters, this is vitally important.  You can fudge the plot any way you like, but characters are what drives the engine.
So now you have written the first three pages or so. Tomorrow you may look at these and clap a hand to your forehead: what was I thinking?  Don't worry, this is all part of the process. Every writer worth their salt has to delete, change, add to everything they write. This gets easier as you go along, by the way.
So, off you go. Write and then write some more. Don't look back, you can change just about anything. You might find half way through Chapter Ten that another character steps out of the shadows, one that you hadn't actually planned on. This happened to me while writing my Christmas novella (Christmas at Castledarra available on Amazon around the middle of October) and I had to re-write chunks of the story.
The golden rule is that the story can be anything you want it to be. Give it your best, always. And enjoy every minute of its creation.
In my final tip on writing I will discuss getting published.