Have you heard the old saying, “I love him/her, flaws and all”? We all have flawed people in our lives that we love, right? Because we all have flaws. In order to write good stories, we need to make sure that our characters have flaws too.

Do my characters have flaws?

I had to stop and really think about that. When I made my character sketches, I don’t remember thinking about what their flaws were. Now I have to go back and do that because none of us want to read about perfect people.

In my Hood River Valley Mystery/Thriller series, Detective Liz Ellisen is the main character.  She is strong, courageous, smart, kind, friendly, did I mention smart? When I try and come up with flaws for her, the only thing I can think of off the top of my head is that she jumps into dangerous situations without thinking about the consequences. That makes her a good cop, but is it enough of a flaw to keep the reader reading? She’s also stubborn and won’t give up on an investigation until she solves the crime.

Spoiler alert here. If you don’t want to know, don’t read this paragraph! Liz has been through a lot. In the first book in the series, My Sister’s Keeper, her father and sister were both murdered, and she found out her husband was cheating on her with her best friend. Liz is strong. She mourned her family members, grieved for her marriage and friendship and moved on. There is a character in the series that Liz really, really doesn’t like. She often judges this character’s actions before she knows what’s going on. Liz is a great friend and she defends her friendships. She doesn’t, however, defend fools and there are a couple people in her life that fall into that category.

I recently read Mad Mabel. What a great bunch of characters. They were all flawed, even the 7-year-old girl. If you haven’t read it, it’s a great induction into flawed characters. But we can’t all write Mad Mabel. Someone has already written it, but we can learn from it and other stories with great characters.

I love writing about flawed characters. In my first book, The Truth Will Set You Free, a young woman is looking for her birth family. She traces her birth mother to a small town and a community that will do anything to protect their secrets and lies. This story has a dual timeline. It’s told through the daughter’s point of view, present day, and the mother’s point of view, thirty years earlier.

As much as I loved the main character, I loved writing about her mother even more. She was flawed, but she was a product of her upbringing and the way the town had treated her when she was a teenager.

In My Sister’s Keeper, I loved writing about cult leader, Jeremiah Swanson because he was bigger than life and extremely flawed.

And so it goes. Flawed characters are fun to write about and fun to read.

Did you watch the movie, The Blind Side? I loved Sandra Bullock’s character. She took in a young African American boy who didn’t have a home and gave him one. She did everything she could for that boy. And he came to love her, even calling her Mama. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend watching it if for nothing else, watch it for the character development.

One of my favorite books on building characters is Fiction is Folks by Robert Newton Peck. This book has been around for a while, but it’s great for understanding how to write compelling characters.

We’ve all read books where the characters are so well drawn that we feel we know them. We’ve also all read books, at least I have, where I get to the end of the story and realize it has a great story line, but the characters are interchangeable. This is especially true for crime fiction. Sometimes the author concentrates so hard on the plot that they forget to build strong characters. And you’re left feeling flat because the story didn’t touch your emotions.

The only way to write great stories is to write great characters. It doesn’t matter what genre you write, breath life into your characters. Your readers will thank you for it. They will read your book and come back for more.

by donalee Moulton

We’ve been talking about the editing process. We started at 30,000 feet looking at the big picture. Now we’re on terra firma.

In my book The Thong Principle: Saying What You Mean and Meaning What You Say, I discuss the various types of editing – and why they are all essential. For many of us, however, editing is synonymous with copyediting.

When you’ve finished the first draft of a book, a weight is lifted. Some writers do a dance of joy. But even as we celebrate an important milestone, we remind ourselves that there is more work to be done. The book needs to be read – line by line – for consistency, conciseness, and clarity. That is the heart of copyediting.

Copyediting is like minor surgery. The impact can be significant, but structural changes and in-depth revisions are not necessary (or have already been done).  This type of editing, the most common for most of what we write, involves editing a document for style, flow, and clarity. It also requires ensuring a consistent tone and pacing. Publishers often call it line editing.

Editors Canada offers the following overview for stylistic editing, or line editing. For many writers, this is what they’re doing when they are copyediting. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what we call it as long as we do it.

Stylistic Editing

Editing to clarify meaning, ensure coherence and flow, and refine the language. It includes:

• eliminating jargon, clichés, and euphemisms
• establishing or maintaining the language level appropriate for the intended audience, medium, and purpose
• adjusting the length and structure of sentences and paragraphs
• establishing or maintaining tone, mood, style, and authorial voice or level of formality

What’s a Copyeditor To Do

Here are six areas of focus to help ensure your writing resonates with your audience and achieves your purpose.  When you look closely at these elements, you sharpen the writing and the plot. Readers are more likely to be carried along by your words. There will be no head scratching and no rereading to make the meaning is clear.

Check for:

ONE: CLARITY
Look to see if you are using:

• Long sentences that could confuse readers
• Big words readers could stumble over
• Uncommon words that will furrow their brows
• A tone that distracts or conflicts with the content

Bottom line: Make sure the meaning of what you write can’t be misinterpreted.

TWO: TRANSITIONS

• Between sentences
• Between paragraphs
• Movement in time, place, subject

Transitions aren’t usually complex. They flow naturally moving readers through prose with short, everyday words like “however,” “so,” and “then.”

THREE: CONCRETENESS

• Facts and figures
• Specific language
• Action verbs
• Active voice

Readers want us to paint a picture for them – one they can see and one they can believe in.

FOUR: REPETITIVENESS

• Are specific ideas repeated unnecessarily?
• Are words used more than once in sentences? In paragraphs?

Tip: Avoid summarizing. Readers don’t require it, and it slows them down.

FIVE: COMPLETENESS

• Are the 5Ws and how answered?
• Are there any unanswered questions when there shouldn’t be?

Have you emphasized the most important question: Why?

SIX: FLOW

• Does the content make sense
• Do the words move smoothly

Find out for yourself.  Read your writing out loud.

Being a writer has a lot of perks. One of them is everyone around thinks of you as rather a wizard. There’s something magical about writing to those who don’t. And here you are, making up all this stuff that goes on for chapters and chapters. Then wham! You have a novel, complete sentences and all. Impressive stuff.

There is a drawback, however. Whatever we write, we try to do it to the best of our ability. That works fine for a novel, short story, eulogy, or speech about water rights. When it comes to how many quarts of milk we need or should we have spaghetti or fish for dinner, it’s another matter. Just how eloquent should you be on a grocery list? But we try. How we try. We can’t let our readers down, even if they are only the cats, who in my case, think I’m overrated, anyway.

Speaking of quarts of milk, that reminds me of the writer, Scott Turow. I remember him giving an interview years ago and telling a wonderful story. His wife asked him to write a note to the milkman about cancelling a future delivery. Remember when we had those? People who delivered one thing to your home at no extra monthly cost to you? Now, of course, there is Safeway, Nob Hill, and Walmart delivering the whole kit and kaboodle for a fee. From bathing suits to prescriptions to food.  One Stop Shopping without having to stop and shop. Sometimes the milk is warm, the eggs are cracked, and they’ve thrown in baby wipes which I didn’t order, but nobody’s perfect.

But I digress. Back to Scott Turow, his wife, and the milkman. After an hour, his wife appeared at Turow’s desk and seized the scratched-out paper he labored upon. She sat down and scribbled, hold the milk on Thursday. Thanks. Then she got up and taped it to the front door.

As Mr. Turow was speaking to a room full of writers, his story not only got a big guffaw, but a round of applause. Nobody knows better than we do how the search for the perfect word becomes all encompassing. And how long it takes to find that word matters not. We are writers and that’s our job.

I tell people repeatedly when I give a lecture or speak to a book club, that what we do isn’t smoke and mirrors. It’s like tennis. The more you practice, the better you get. Yes, you have to have a certain amount of talent, but what it really takes is hard work, tenacity, and joy.

Joy is a definite perk. No matter what’s going on in the world out there or in my world at home, when I sit down to write, I am taken to a place I want to be.

Hmmm. In a way, that is magical.

Which is a shame because my to-be-read pile is growing every day, filled with intriguing titles, but I’m working on book seven in my PIP Inc. Mysteries series which means no reading until it’s finished. You might wonder why I can’t read when I write. I’m a very undisciplined writer so it’s not like I sit at my computer tapping away all day long. Why, then, can’t I read when I take a break from writing?

I consider my particular writing and reading impairment as the result of being a good realtor for almost twenty-five years. Realtors are taught to mimic clients talking speed, body language especially use of hands, emotions, and language as much as possible. Classes are taught in how to do those things. I dropped out after the first class because I’m a natural mime, always have been. That helped me as a real estate agent and probably has helped in other situations, too, but as a writer it’s a problem for me.

Many cozy mysteries are written in first person. I don’t do that. I write in third person. But if I’m reading a good cozy written in first person, I start to slip into that style of writing which makes a mess of the POV and my manuscript in progress.

There are other distractions, too. Dialogue is a potential problem. After fifty pages of another writer’s dialogue, my characters begin to mimic their phraseology and start to take on their use of language. Mime time again.

My storyline suffers when I read while writing. I do a short psychological profile and background history for most of my characters before they head for their places on my pages. I do use a timeline because I need to know who knew what when or I get lost having, for example, a clue about when a character who had taken her hearing aids out in a noisy restaurant, put them back in (critically important in What Lucy Heard, for example) and why her dinner companion didn’t know she had.

My outlines are a lot more flexible, though. Before starting a book, I know who the killer is, how and why the murder victim was killed, how the story will begin and how it will end, and have characters I want to introduce to move the story forward, but there’s a great deal of flexibility in how all those pieces come together. If I read while writing, the mimic in me invariably spots a clever plot twist in the work I’m reading and wants to incorporate it in what I’m writing, which as you can imagine, makes a mess of my plot. I do wonder if it’s just me or if other writers have the same problems?

Until my book is finished and off to the editor, I’m sorry Nicole, Vinnie, Mary, Robin, Valerie, Claire, Genevive, Richard, and Verlin. Your books will have to wait a bit longer to be read, but I do know how important reviews are so I promise to leave one as soon as I finish reading your book.  It’s the least I can do for keeping you waiting while I write.