She started off with the good stuff. She always does. It's a good story. She liked the concept. It held her interest. But... and this is when I braced myself. "Your main character," she said. "Well, I couldn't really get a sense of who she is. When you read a book you should be able to visualize the characters and even when I was done reading I couldn't picture her. And she was kind of flat."
As far as the visualization I had to agree with her. While all of the other characters were described my main character lacked their similar description. Now the book is a first person point of view and instead of falling into the category of where the main character describes herself in the mirror I randomly made references to her appearance. Obviously it wasn't enough. Going back and reading the first three chapters I agree with my mom completely. I usually do.
I don't know about any of you but my biggest fear when writing is creating characters that are no more than cardboard cutouts. I want my characters to jump off the page and make the reader feel as if they know them. So when my mom told me my main character was flat I immediately started going over her personality traits in my mind and thinking how I could amp it up to make her more real.
It is my first draft though, and first drafts are your starting point. Now I just need to go back and inject my main character with personality and find subtle ways to describe her without having her stand in front of a mirror and run down all her imperfections. To me this is the fun part. You spend so much time with your characters and you want the reader to be able to see them as you do. As a friend of mine said, when she called me while reading this particular WIP, "Oh that makes sense but not every reader is going to have the luxury to be able to pick up the phone and call the writer in the middle of the day and ask." The reader is not dumb but they are not mind readers either. Sometimes while in the middle of writing I forget that. Luckily I have people who point these things out to me. And when I finish the first revision I am going to annoy my critique partner, Kelley (Hi!) and ask if she will do me the favor of ripping it apart.
I want to know that I am not alone. Am I the only person who fears creating less than stellar characters that fall flat? Do you find it difficult to describe your main character when the story is in 1st person? And how many drafts do you typically go through before declaring your manuscript as finished? Would love to hear what everyone has to say.
Hopefully by Monday I will have a review of The Hunger Games up. For some reason I'm having a hard time getting into it, but it seems like it's picking up now.
