Thursday, July 12, 2012

In with the new, out with the old?

I love creating new characters. I love creating a ficticious life for them to be a part of. It gets my creativity flowing and life is good. However, my husband insists that readers want to hear how characters from the previous books turn out. He is suggesting that I continue to tell their stories. For me, that isn't always easy. First off, I'm about sick of some of the characters I've created after reading the book for the eight hundredth time. Second, I find it difficult to continue a character's story after a certain point. Does everything work out for them and they live happily ever after? Is that what the reader is looking for, some sort of closure? Does the character suffer from more sadness and betrayal and need to be talked off the ledge once again? At some point, if a character can't buck up, I'd want to just push them over that ledge and be done with her or him. Is that too cruel?

I will say that I did extend a few characters from book #1 to book #2 - Nancy being one of them. I'm struggling with the idea of pushing some characters from #2 to #3. I have some new characters already formed and if I string along the old ones that might make for a confusing book with too many characters to keep track of. Maybe I'll take a poll once book #2 is published to see if anyone is interested in hearing more about a particular character's story.

If you're reading this, who do you want to hear more about from Missing Maggie?

No comments:

Post a Comment