Speed Dating ... Lit Style.

Today I'm posting about how characterization is like speed dating over at ADR3NALIN3. I actually cheated a little and used a prior post from this blog (just polished it up a bit). If you're curious which post it was, hope over and have a look-see.

I also want to give a shout out to my pal David Kazzie, who did an interview here a while back about going Indie with his book Jackpot, even though he has an agent. It really paid off for him because his book took off recently -- going from dead to the Top 100 and actually getting to #34 in the Paid store overall last week.

Want to know his secret to success? Hop over to this post and find out how he did it..

Have a great rest of the week, and hope to see you next week for a few writing tips and some Splintered updates!

Wherein a shoe has a soul...

Lately, upon realizing how many of my stories have secondary "characters" that are inanimate objects, I started pondering how often writers do this, giving life and breath to objects--maybe without even being aware of it.

Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is a perfect example, where the house itself becomes a character in the book. Ms. Bronte flawlessly wove personality into the surroundings by using melancholy and unnerving descriptions so that the house and setting emanate actual emotions: anger, hatred and jealousy.

Here's a quote taken from an online essay: “Wuthering Heights ... suffers from a kind of malnutrition: its thorns have become barren, its firs stunted, everything seems to crave for the ‘alms of the sun’ that sustain life.”

Throughout Ms. Bronte's story, the characters fall into despair, madness, and unrequited love: a self-fulfilling prophecy mirroring the home's ugliness and dilapidation. The proper literary term for this is objective correlative (thank you, Mary, for the terminology and the linkage!).

In one of my historical love stories, there's a pair of 16th century Italian shoes which harbors a gypsy curse and has an amusing yet creepy tendency to move about without a wearer. The heroine is drawn to the shoes, almost to the point of obsession. They hold a mystical power over her, even without her realizing they also hold the secret of her lost past.

Another example is my gothic literary love story, where a flower which embodies a man's spirit becomes an active participant in the intensely emotional relationship between the ghost and the flower's keeper, a young deaf woman.

Even in my SPLINTERED MS, worn-out and mutilated toys play too big of a role to be considered mere objects.

Anytime an "inanimate thing" serves as a game player or mirrors the characters and their arcs, it evolves to more than just a prop. It takes an active role in the plot, a role that without which, the story wouldn't survive. Thus it becomes -- for lack of a better description -- a character. Within the confines of the story, it develops a soul.

Looking back on your stories or WIPs, can you find any objects that could be considered pivotal characters?