Creating 3D Characters
By James Henry Frazar
Report from the San Gabriel Writers' Guild meeting held May 5, 2016, in Georgetown
   Author Sylvia Dickey Smith spoke to the group about creating three-dimensional characters in our writing. She said 3D implies depth: color and smell as well as use of all the other senses. You want more than a two dimensional Flat Stanley, as an example.
   So what's a Flat Stanley?
   The Flat Stanley Project is designed to connect your child, student or classroom with other children or classrooms participating in the Project by sending out "flat" visitors, created by the children, through the mail. Kids then talk about, track, and write about their flat character's journey and adventures. Okay, enough of a digression.    Just as a page is flat, we don't want our characters in our stories to be flat. Readers will more likely identify with 3D characters.
   Carl Jung said honest writing cannot be separated from the writer. So writers should put themselves into the story. If you try to create a new character who is not you (or a part of you), the character will be flat.
   The character is the most important thing in your story. Characters go beyond plot, conflict, and structure. A good character makes the reader want to read the story. Because your reader will identify with the character. If the reader can't identify with the character, they will lose interest in the story.
   Conflict needs to grow out of the character. Their yearnings and longings express their emotions and that is where the conflict grows from.
   Writers: your character can't plunge into unresolved goals and expect the reader to stay with the story.
   Through the story, the reader discovers the character's goals. As writers, we need to communicate those goals to the reader quickly in the beginning.
   As a writer, you discover information about your character by discovering yourself (since you are the character or at least part of you is the character.)
   Believable motivation comes from the character's emotion and back story.
   The characters we write have yearnings. We need to describe the sensory feelings from the character to describe their emotions. We have to identify their feelings – what emotions they are feeling. To do that we need to use the senses.
   Our characters are no different than we are. We give birth to our characters and they act on yearnings as we would.
   As we write our characters, we need to know what they like. What smells turns the character off. We need to flesh out our characters. When they smell something, what emotion is conjured. Do they like that emotion or not. Power of senses adds to the scene. This lets your reader more than see and hear, it lets them smell and taste.
   We draw on our own experiences to flesh out the character.
   We need to use those experiences subtly. It's the iceberg principle. We see 10 percent of the iceberg above the water. But you know there is 90 percent of the iceberg below the water level. You don't have to put that 90 percent in the book, but as a writer, you need to know it.
   You need a list of features about your character and his/her emotions.
   Emotions are: surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, happiness, and contentment. Your POV character needs to experience all of these.
   You need to force your character to experience all of these. That will guide you to discover their temperament. Our characters must experience the world just the same as we do.
   Take the time to create the scene. Say the kitchen is hot without telling the reader it is hot.
   Writing is sensory, check for details.
   Describe what your character sees and then what your character feels about what they see. They see the cake, but also how much do they want it? What's the color of the room? Is it cold or warm? Do they smell something? Is it pleasant to does it smell bad?
   What do you see and hear in a scene? If you don't see or hear it and put that in your book, neither will your readers.
   Go to the place in your emotions and take your readers there.
   We don't use smell and color enough in our descriptions.
   Color does things to us.
   For instance, red stimulates and warns us. Viewing red raises you blood pressure and heart rate.
   Yellow is stimulating, yet stubborn and negative. Yellow is good when you need to recall something.
   Green in peaceful.
   Orange makes you hungry.
   Use your childhood experiences.
   When we are willing to look at our shadow side and fit it in a character, we can have the character work through it and healing comes to ourselves. How about that? Writing is therapy.