Thank You For Noticing!

            Sometimes, I just want to reach out to a reader and say, "Thank you for noticing the effort I put into that!"  In a reader’s review of my book, TheGouge, the reviewer picked up on something which I’m not afraid to say I’m pretty proud of:

 “All of the characters acted logically and in line with their personalities, which I greatly appreciated. It’s always a pet peeve of mine when characters do dumb things just to move the plot forward, and I’m happy to say that this wasn’t an element of David’s story at all.”  

              

I’m confident I’m not the only author who tries to keep from creating characters who are illogical or out of the norm for the sake of being out of the norm, but I do spend a lot of time thinking about my character’s actions and whether or not what they do will be considered believable.  I get caught up in wondering if the first person who reads this will say, “Why is he doing that?  Why doesn’t he just do this?  If he’d just think, he could have saved the day instead of causing all this drama!”  And that’s just it.  Sometimes, like the reviewer above mentioned, a character creates a problem just so the story can happen; not just move forward, but so the story can exist in the first place.  I get that characters are allowed to make mistakes, otherwise, there might not be any reason to write the book in the first place.  For me though, that’s just not good enough.  Can't we at least inject some good reasoning into their lives for believability's sake?  It might even make for some interesting plot twists.  

I’m going to keep fighting the good fight, and strive to create plots which happen regardless of the actions of my characters, and my characters will just have to live around them!  Maybe this will work out, or maybe I'll be called out on it.  Afterall, I'm not perfect.  

 

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