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Falling In Love With Your Characters

Happy Wednesday All,

How often when we're writing and editing do we get to a point where we need a break because we've stopped caring about our characters?

We get to a point sometimes where we'd just as soon see them all fall into a pit and stay there.

Not good!

If we don't care about characters and stories then how can we expect readers to care?

What happened to me was, I worked on a manuscript and got annoyed, and started thinking my hero and heroine could fall off a cliff.

Yikes and painful!

I ended up taking a bit of a break from said manuscript and when I came back to the editing and working on it, I found out that I was falling back in love with the characters and the story.

Ahh, how lovely!

It's like what Nathan Bransford wrote in his blog post called The Nine Circles of Writing Hell we think our story is nifty and wonderful until something happens, then we get distracted by another story idea or whatever comes up.

Sometimes we need a little break. Then when we come back, we can look for some reason to love our stories and characters again.

Because, really, don't we want our readers to care about our characters and why should they if we don't?

I wish you all happy writing and much falling in love with your stories and characters :-)

Have A Winsome Wednesday!

Comments

Regina Quentin said…
Hey Bethany, glad to see you're doing well! I took a super long break from all I was working on and have come back refreshed. It has given me a little bit or perspective and now I'm working mainly on my nonfiction. Only thing is, story ideas pop in my head and try to distract me. I've made up my mind to finish the project I'm currently working on (about free online marketing tools) before I pursue any other ideas.
Bethany said…
Regina,

Hey! It's great to see you back in cyberspace!

You keep those ideas flowing--and any new one that pops up, just write it down and put it aside--you don't want to lose a good idea!

Thanks for coming by.

Happy writing :-)

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