Romance novelist Claire Boston is a guest on my blog today as part of her blog tour, and she’s going to talk about creating fantastic characters with particular reference to her new novel, All that Sparkles, part of The Texan Quartet.

Claire was a voracious reader as a child, devouring anything by Enid Blyton as well as series such as Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, The Baby-sitters Club and Sweet Valley High. Then one school holidays when she’d run out of books to read, her mum handed her ‘Hot Ice’ by Nora Roberts and she instantly fell in love with romance novels.
The love of reading soon turned to a love of writing and Claire struggled to keep within the 1500 word limit set by her teachers for any creative writing assignments. When she finally decided to become serious about her stories, she joined Romance Writers of Australia, found her wonderful critique group and hasn’t looked back.
When Claire’s not reading or writing she can be found in the garden attempting to grow vegetables, or racing around a vintage motocross track. If she can convince anyone to play with her, she also enjoys cards and board games.
Claire lives in Western Australia, just south of Perth, with her husband, who loves even her most annoying quirks, and her grubby, but adorable Australian bulldog.

Welcome, Claire!

Creating characters that talk back to you

by Claire Boston
It’s my belief that characters are at the very centre of any story. Without good characters, the reader won’t care enough to read on, no matter how good the plot might be. So when it comes to crafting characters my process has grown over time.
When I first began writing I started with the obvious – name and physical appearance:
– Hair length, colour
– Eye colour
– Height
– Weight
– Age
I added in their occupation, maybe a little about the family background and got to work. Needless to say my characters didn’t leap off the page for my early stories.
Then someone recommended Goal, Motivation & Conflict by Debra Dixon. It’s a really easy read and I have gone on to recommend it to many others. I learnt my characters had to want something, there had to be a reason why they wanted it and there had to be something stopping them getting it. So the character’s goal, motivation and conflict were added to my character profile.
This helped me immensely and my characters definitely came to life, but last year I discovered Cherry Adair’s Writers Bible. This is a 59 page document that she uses to plot all her stories and is available from her website. She has ten pages dedicated to character development, which absolutely fascinated me. The questions she asks about her characters are in depth and comprehensive. Now, not all of it is relevant to my writing, but I’ve taken the bits I like and I’ve added it to my character profiles. I won’t go into detail about the questions because it’s copyrighted information, but I believe it has helped me shape my characters. (Oh and if you’re a plotter, you might love her 16 pages of plotting that’s also in the Writers Bible)
I really love to get involved with my characters and find out what makes them tick. Imogen and Christian in All that Sparkles were so much fun as was Imogen’s father, Remy. I know my characters have come to life when I’m writing dialogue and one of them says something and I think, “I didn’t know that about you.” Or they talk back to you and tell you they’re not going to do what you want them to do. (I don’t think I’m mad, as I’ve had other authors say that their characters talk to them as well!)
One of the reasons that All that Sparkles is part of The Texan Quartet is because I couldn’t bear to leave my characters behind and I had to find out what happened next with them. I hope you enjoy meeting Imogen and Christian as much as I did. You can let me know what you thought by contacting me:
www.claireboston.com
Twitter @clairebauthor
www.facebook.com/clairebostonauthor

You can buy All that Sparkles http://bit.ly/1EkAGL5

More about All that Sparkles:

Imogen Fontaine is living every girl’s dream.

She is a fashion designer for her family’s haute couture label, lives in a mansion, has a great circle of friends and is the apple of her father’s eye. Everything is perfect.

Until the day that Christian, the boy at the center of her childhood heartbreak, walks back into her life.

From there her life starts to unravel, as long-kept secrets are revealed. Imogen learns that her past was built on lies and betrayal, shattering the illusion of her perfect existence. She must seek out the truth if she has any hope of forging a new path for herself and discovering true freedom.

But can she convince Christian that there is a place for him in her new life?