Creating characters who are genuinely interesting = putting in the time and energy it takes to write their “back story.”
Characters are like real people: they have likes, dislikes, hopes, anxieties, dreams and phobias. They have families, friends, and life experiences which shaped their thinking, beliefs, instincts, reactions, and motivations.
Real people are a wonderful, messy, walking mass of contradictions, and believable characters are the same.
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One of the earliest and least-expected decisions I faced as an indie author was identifying a genre for Tracker (Book 1). I assumed the answer would be simplicity itself.
Well, duh. Sci-fi, Sherlock. It’s not rocket science. Yeah … except when some people hear “sci-fi,” what pops to mind is something resembling this pulp fiction-era artwork.
Um, well — ahem … Pulp fiction art is retro-cool, but it doesn’t adequately represent the wide range of stories in the genre.
Science fiction is a subcategory of what’s known as “speculative fiction.” Within the sci-fi genre itself, there are a surprising number of subgenres. And, to further muddy the waters, “cross-genre” writing is also alive and well.
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