What's in a character?

Characters are like recipes, you add a little too much of something and they fall flat.  Of course, it can go the other way as well.  If your character is too boring or mundane, no one will care.  What's worse, you won't care - and as an author you HAVE to care.  Characters are our children, we raise them from the pages we write, we nurture their faults and even their thoughts, hoping to make them someone everyone wants to love, hate, and more importantly, remember.

So what makes a character worth remembering?  Looks, thoughtfulness, sincerity, attitude, familiarity?

One of my new favorite series, Beautiful Creatures, is being turned into a movie that comes out in February.  And let me  tell you, if there's one thing they better get right is the characters.  Beautiful Creatures was so brilliantly written that it made you feel as if you lived in the south - no, that's not even right - it made you feel as if you were raised in the south.

 

But there's one character that I can't wait to see on the big screen - Amma.  Let me tell you, Amma is the kind of woman you'd expect from a book set in the south.  Everything about her, especially the way she interacts with the main character reminds not only him, but you the reader, that she is in charge - and if you were to forget that, well all she'd have to do is grab hold of "the menace", her wooden spoon and the menace would gladly remind you who was in charge.

It's the simplest of things that makes Amma a character that I, and other readers, learned to love. The way she cooked when she was upset, the way she looked at the main character when she was about to come unglued on him, everything about her made you think she was real.

This is what we, as authors, have to do.  We have to breath life into people that don't even exist.  We have to give them personalities, hobbies, annoyances, habits - we have to give them life.

And then....

We have to make sure their life story is worth telling.