Coming To Life...

I’ve been working on my next book for several months now.  I’ll be honest, it’s been a daunting task and for one reason alone:  My characters—though I know what I want them to look like, and how I want them to act—they haven’t really come all the way to life yet.  My mind knows who they are, but the page has yet to really recognize their greatness.  To be clear, I don’t usually just throw a character together and make them up as I go.  Okay, maybe I do for some characters that have a minimal part in to play in the story, but I put a lot of thought into my main characters.  They have extensive back stories, even if their entire story doesn’t get told in my book, (or at least in the book I’m working on) they come from somewhere and had a life before I began writing them.  There is a point in my writing process—and it is usually about the half-way to two-thirds point into the book—when the character begins to take on, not just the life that I had envisioned for them, but they actually take on a life of their own.  They begin to have feelings and wants and needs that I didn’t even realize that they had.  This is the turning point of the writing process for me.  This is when my flame for the story is reignited, and everything begins to pull together.  Writing the book is no longer a discouraging task that I need to push myself to complete and force into existence—it’s something I can barely pull myself away from because the words are falling off my fingertips onto the page.  It’s as if the lives of the characters are going to keep moving forward—the story is going continue to be told even if I step away from the laptop for a few hours.  They’ve become real and believable.  This is the reason that I write.  To create the life on the page; to let other people experience that life and to question that life.  To be honest, I get a rush from it.  Really… I will get up and pace around the room just to calm down sometimes.  Today is the day that I’ve reached that point.  It’s all downhill from here.  If you’re writing a story, I hope all of your characters make you feel this way—I know I can’t be the only one.  I’ll see you all on the other side!  Keep reading!