Sketching

I’m still working on character sketches for Next Time. It’s been an enlightening experience.

I’ve completed sketches on all the major characters, including the family and friends of the narrator. Let me give an example of how this has gone.

In the book, the main character’s sister is married and has three children with her husband, who I portrayed in the draft as somewhat hostile to his wife’s family. When I wrote it I knew he was a jerk, but didn’t know why. What happened in the past to cause him to act that way? Was it something they did? Or was he a jerk to everyone?

As I started filling in the blanks in his character sketch, I placed his hometown just outside one of the bigger towns I used in the book. He became a high school jock who parlayed his skill into a scholarship, which he then lost with two season-ending injuries in a row.

Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere.

Add in a dose of resentment for having to drop out and work a blue collar job, coming from a town considered inferior to its larger neighbor, no hobbies other than fantasy football and playing pool at the local bar with his buddies, and now I’m getting a sense of why he’s surly at family gatherings. He doesn’t want to be there.

I don’t have to write a book about this guy to figure out his character, but fleshing him out so I know reasons behind his actions is incredibly worthwhile.

What do I do with this additional background on a minor character? Do I add a page or two of exposition to explain it all? No way. I throw in snatches of conversation, comments, and stray moments, which all add up to layers of character development.

I don’t have to fully flesh him, or many of the other characters in the book, into major characters with deep backgrounds. It’s not that kind of book or series. What I’ll be doing instead is giving the reader enough information to round out the characters in their own mind. And to do that, they have to be rounded out in my own.