On our last Friday night walk Mark and I were discussing Book 9, which is coming along very nicely. He told me of one character in a chapter I am about to read, a receptionist who appeared to be due for the cutting room floor, just a bit of filler while the chapter took shape.
As we spoke about her, I could hear the character growing and becoming real to us both. She was someone with a background, a reason to be, a personality. We then found more of a reason for her to remain in the book. She could be pivotal in the discovery of a plot point further on. She lived!
She is now firmly in the book, going from a ‘has been’ to a ‘character’ in the space of 10 minutes.
It made us wonder if a character can be created that the writer and plotting team don’t believe in. We looked back over our previous ‘bit-part’ characters and realised all of them could, and some did, turn into ‘real people’. All were believable and necessarily so. If Mark and I could not believe in the people populating Seagrave, then he could not write believably about them.
And off we go again, wonderful and intriguing ‘rabbit holes’ that distract us from the serious business happening in Seagrave.
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