Storytime

Last weekend I had the great opportunity to attend a workshop with Kate Cuthbert from Escape Publishing.  She was a great speaker, full of information and eager to share her knowledge. She got us thinking about our works in progress, and then she made us write about our characters. Now, at the moment, I'm working away on my novel. I'm on second draft but have just done a major time shift, and rejigged scenes etc but after this workshop I realised I know nothing about my characters. Paper cutouts...shadowy figures that do what I want them to do. (Mind you, every now and then, one or more of them do tend to go a bit wild and apparently do whatever they please). The more exercises we did, the more I came to realise, how much more work I need to do on my characters. Not necessarily for what they do in the book, but for what they do out of the book. Interestingly I thought I knew my characters...but when Kate asked some in-depth questions, not necessarily to...