We were trying to explain to our friend Jill that when we discuss her here, it’s not really her. She’s become a character. Same as the husband. And the mother. Sure, they come off as real people, but we’ve exaggerated, molded, changed, revisioned them to suit our personal needs, much as we do when we sit down to have those mental arguments we could never carry off in real life. We see the people in our world as something more than they are and they become, in a way, fictional to us (our friend Jim is the exception — everything we have and do say about him is absolutely true, but he is that rare exception).
Over at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, Sarah turned the reins over to Robert Ferrigno (to whom we must apologize, we know he wasn’t green on TV), and ended up not only with a great posting on creating characters, but a cool example of her blog’s name. Ferrigno started the process, and a variety of other authors have joined in to discuss characterization. It’s a little like a master class and free-for-all. Ferrigno’s new book is The Wake Up, and he’s coming to a bookstore near you.
