Give Your Characters Dimension, or How do You Eat a Grapefruit?, a Post by R. Clint Peters

I recently revisited some of the reviews I’d received of my novels.  One review was enlightening.

The reviewer wrote:  “The author has great plots, wonderful conflicts,  that kept me on the edge of my seat, but the characters are stick figures.  When a character walks into the kitchen, give them depth.  What are they eating?  Why did they walk to the kitchen?  Many times the author puts two characters in a location only to give them an opportunity for dialog.  Most of the time I am in the kitchen, I am feeding my face.  Talk comes after I have satisfied my hunger.”

I thought about the comments for several minutes.  In “Characters, Viewpoint, and Emotion”, Nancy Kress talks about developing the details of character’s environment as well as the details of the character.  This allows the reader to become more inimately involved with the primary characters.

In the following scene from “Murder By Suicide”, I initially had Frank and Donna simply walk into the dining room, sit down, and start talking.  I think the changes work much better.

John, Doug, and O2 were occupying three of the twelve chairs positioned around the dining table when Donna and I walked into the dining room. In the center of the four-foot by ten-foot table were two coffee pots on warming stations, a stack of dinner plates sitting next to three canisters of silverware, and a napkin dispenser. Along one wall of the room was a three station warming table. Next to the warming table was a large serving pan approximately twelve inches deep, half filled with ice. Two containers of milk and several citrus had been partially submerged in the ice. On the serving station adjacent to the milk were stacks of cereal bowls, coffee cups and saucers, a container of individual creamers, and a small ceramic holder for sugar packets. Donna walked to the ice, retrieved a grapefruit, placed it in a cereal bowl, walked to the table, sat down, and began to peal the citrus.

Doug watched Donna eat her grapefruit for several seconds, and then looked at me and said, “You look like you saw a ghost in the shower, Frank.”

Please submit a comment or two about what you think.  If The Author’s Club had a working Peer-to-Peer Review Group, I’d submit the manuscript to them.

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