I’ve been working on little bits of my young adult novel, and have been having fun really digging into language again. I have this habit of connecting words (in my own head) when I’m going about my day and I managed to work that into a section of my book today. I’ve given my main character a lot of the weird, little things that I do in an attempt to make her dimensional, memorable.
Here’s the section I’m working on. (Backstory: she’s 17-years old and currently homeless, so she’s squatting in a shed on the edge of a farm in Alberta with a black cat that she rescued named Crow.)
Just like the three Wednesdays before, I stuffed a few shirts and a few pairs of underwear into my gym bag to wash in the gym shower. It’s strange how anything can become routine, part of life. The patterns I was developing: volunteering at the foodbank on Tuesdays to eat, the gym each Wednesday to shower, parking in the ditch behind the pines, caring for Crow, was all starting to feel normal—a new life. And if I followed the routine, planned out each movement and didn’t get too comfortable, I’d be okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. This was all temporary. Temp-erature. Temp-ting. Temp-erate rainforest. At-tempt. I was attempting to make this temporary. That was comforting. Everything was connected. You could string anything together.
Outside of traditional methods of characterization (description, dialogue, scene, etc.), how do you make your characters come to life? If you happen to be looking, one of the most useful writing guides that I have found to help with character work is Jack Hodgins’ text A Passion For Narrative.