Give Your Character a Reason to Live!

Finding a cause for your main character(s) is relatively easy. Simply take an inventory of your life or the life of your better half to find a cause. I would focus on yourself or your better half though. The reason for that is life shows us that it’s pretty close to impossible to identify with an experience we’ve never had.

I can’t pretend to know what it’s like for someone else to have a life-threatening disease or to have climbed Mount Everest if I never have but if your spouse has had an experience it is easier for you as the writer to gain a better understanding of that experience because of the closeness in marriage. If you’re not married not to worry.

I’m sure you have plenty of life stories of your own to tell.

In the graphic novel Haven and upcoming prose novel, Haven of Dante, the main character is suffers an atrocity close to the beginning of the story. (If you’d like to know what it is then by all means, buy the book.) This closely relates with something that my sweet wife experienced many years ago so I put it in there to show that despite the ugly card of life that was dealt to Haven she can still make good choices for her life.In Jupiter Chronicles, I used the fact that I grew up without a father to encourage others to let go of their anger.

There’s the cause.

For you it can be something different. Perhaps you were adopted and would like to share what it was like to find out that that your parents are not your biological ones. Add that experience to a character and have them show the world that they don’t need to be biological parents to really love you. Although we hate to suffer through the ills of life (and that’s only human), I don’t believe that we suffer hardship for no reason at all. This may just be me but I think that we suffer hardship so that we can encourage others through theirs and identify.

The key word there is identify.

Without identification our encouragement is shallow and can sometimes be seen as insulting. Use the hardships that you’ve experienced to encourage others through your characters and through the written word.

Give your characters a reason to live and a purpose. Send them out to encourage others.

You never know who you might reach.

Chat soon,

~L