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How much should you build your characters in a novel?  Should you take thirty pages to describe you central character as well as his girlfriend or wife if he has one? 

When I worked on my first novel, I really thought I had good characterizations for my male and female leads; publishers did not think so.  I made Felix, the male, to be a milquetoast type while Gina was flamboyant and outgoing.  Felix cared more about which tie he wore when he stood in front of his students at the university where he taught than he did about whether his socks matched.  Gina, on the other hand, was petite yet strong, could carry a conversation with anyone she might meet and the two—rather than clashing—seemed to hit it off from their first meeting which was strictly by chance.

Being the son of a preacher, I was rather reluctant to have any intimacy between the leads or even hint there might be something going on between the sheets when they weren’t solving the crisis in which they found themselves involved.   I used a storyboard to keep track of my characters and each time I introduced a new character, I gave only surface hints as to any backgrounds they had.

The plot seemed plausible to me at the time I was submitting to one publishing house after another:  abduction of cabinet members and substituting them with clones who answered to a Chinese authority.  Granted, I wanted to tell the story of how Felix got involved in this thriller and that plot stood in the way of building strong characters that would be remembered years after my book was published.  I still have the original manuscript in its original box that I typed more than thirty years ago; it gathers dust in one of my closets.

There are many ways in which to develop characters whether you use the direct approach or indirect approach as I call them.  The direct approach is straight on from the outset and centers more around the way the characters looks and acts and less about his or her thinking processes.  The indirect approach is developed either through back stories on the characters or the impression that one character has of the other.  Both can be time consuming because there comes a point when you have actually written more about the character than the plot itself.  You must—to a certain point—live the lives of the characters to make them real.  Their habits, their backgrounds, even the clothes they wear and how they wear them.

Could it be as simple as writing, “He looks like Cary Grant or Gary Cooper.”?  “She’s Greta Garbo to a tee.”? There must be something memorable about your characters that make your reader return day after day to finish reading what you’ve carefully penned to paper.   Character flaws or habits are also a good way to introduce and perpetuate characters.  He has a nervous tic; she has a dimple in her chin.  Something declarative and descriptive at the same time.

Good luck with your characters.  Make them strong and easy to remember; your characterizations can make the difference between a book that gets put on the back shelf and one that makes the Best Seller list.

Poet and professional critic George Thompson is a regular contributor to Wicked Wordsmith.

Let’s start with a definition of at least the first two items in the title of this article.  Gerunds are verbs without a subject such as I, you, he, she, it, we, you (plural), and they.  The verb itself is changed from the root form, for example, “run,” to running, or adding –ed to the end of the verb.  Participles are also verbs without a subject changed also changed to end in ing or ed. 

I’ll add a third modifier known as the infinitive.  This is the root form of a verb, i.e., run with the word “to” directly before the verb.  Example:  to run, to smoke, to talk and so on.  When there is a need to make an infinitive negative, the infinitive remains together (to run, to smoke, etc.) and the word not or never is placed before the infinitive.  Many writers, speakers and others make the very easy mistake of placing the negative word in the middle:  To not speak, to not smoke.  The proper format is not to speak, never to smoke, etc.

There is one more modifier that often is left hanging at the end of a question and most of us are guilty of doing this.  It is a preposition and it seems more logical to say, “What are you talking about?" instead of the proper grammar technique:  “About what are you talking?”

These faux pas appear all the time in writing and speaking.  And, we seem more on the verge of accepting these grammatical errors as being okay to say or write.  Times are changing and mannerisms of speaking are as well.  These errors, however, have still not been accepted as the “general” rule of thumb for speaking and writing correctly.  However, any of these can be used in a manner to define a character in a poem, article, short story or even a novel.  None of these are unacceptable in building a character with its own style of talking and can be quite effective if the writer knows how to use these to her or his advantage.

Recapping, gerunds, participles, infinitives and dangling modifiers all have a particular place in grammar and can be very effective if used correctly.

Let’s explore just a bit further.  Gerunds, participles and infinitives modify nouns and verbs.  We have all been taught that words or phrases that modify nouns are called adjectives.  Words or phrases that modify verbs are called adverbs.  So these three types of phrases can be used in various ways and make a sentence more interesting, fleshing out the basic sentence with more meaning and descriptors.

Now, let’s put all this into practice.  I chosen the short sentence I finished the race to add modifiers and make the sentence more meaningful.  Faring very poorly, I finished the race, making a vow not to smoke ever again. Faring very poorly, I finished the race, dropping by the side of the tent.  Not to speak out would be a sin (gotcha!).  Not to speak out in the last sentence is a gerund used as a noun, the subject of the sentence.

Go have fun playing around with these modifiers and see what you come up with when working on that next article or a characterization in your novel.

George Thompson is a poet and regular contributor to Wicked Wordsmith.