Pushing and Pulling Your Characters into Place - Carol Wedeven

The 'devil is in the details' - if you'll pardon the expression - and Pushing and Pulling Your Characters into Place, a presentation given by Carol Wedeven, focused on creating fictional characters, utilizing a layering of descriptive details within the narrative text. Wedeven focused on the process writers must go through to craft their characters, and talked about several different ways to establish a "closeness' with characters, in order to lend depth and credibility to a story.

Wedeven started the presentation with a visual exercise, showing several different photographs on an overhead projector. She guided the audience through multiple layers of details in the pictures, showing how perspectives changed when different parts of the photos were examined closer. She extended this to writing characters, stating that adding layers of details to characters allows writers to 'get into' their characters' heads and lives, allowing them to write more powerfully with vibrant characters.

How can a writer achieve this? According to Wedeven, word selection is key in bringing characters closer. Generic, indeterminate words like 'that' or 'it' connote ideas of something far away, indistinct. The more specific and detailed the words are, the 'closer' the characters become, more fleshed out and fully realized. Using gender labels, occupations, colors, physical and emotional descriptions all help a writer achieve this.

Wedeven showed a progression from non-specific to specific on a dry-erase board, creating detailed characters from the starting point of 'it', adding different descriptive adjectives and nouns that further defined the characters. The goal, as Wedeven demonstrated on the board, is for all writers to have their characters "arrive", to progress from indeterminate figures to specific characters. 'It' or 'that' suddenly has a name, color, vivid descriptions, emotional traits, occupations, and an identity.

In writing a novel, there's no hard and fast rule about how many main characters to have, but Wedeven pointed out that for characters to be primary, in the foreground, more details are needed to bring a secondary character from the background into the foreground and make him/her a primary character. This is something that can take place over the length of the novel, and gives the reader a sense of growth and change within their characters. It can also be used in the reverse order, allowing characters to diminish in importance as the needs of the story dictates, and it can be played out over several paragraphs between characters when they come closer to each other throughout the dynamics of the story.

When asked if it is important to plan out characters beforehand, Wedeven answered that this is vital: even though everyone may go about it differently, writers must be close to and know their characters before they begin. The results may be surprising and characters may change unexpectedly as the writing progresses, but writers must have a baseline on their characters to start with.

Wedeven also demonstrated several ways to do this besides the dry-erase board, using text, visual, auditory and olfactory clues to create mental images. She then illustrated several different textual examples of what happened to a piece of writing when gender neutral pronouns and common nouns were replaced with gender specific nouns, and then eventually specific and proper nouns.

Wedeven closed with the exhortation that we can become closer to the characters we create when we become closer to God in our lives; because by doing so we are experiencing a true, profound intimacy that will inevitably carry over into our writing.

Carol Wedeven: Teacher, speaker, artist, musician, conference director, children's author, freelance business and education editor who has written curriculum, articles, short stories, fillers, and poetry. Carol is currently working on a biography of Julie Henning.