True understanding of people comes about when we can see the world through their eyes, and feel their feelings as though they are our own. This quality of empathy is fundamental to the author’s skill. Without it a novelist can create only flat characters. With limited empathy a novelist will have a limited range: to create only realistic characters of a certain type, namely people like the novelist.
Nigel Watts, Writing a Novel – and getting it published
Managing your Character well means maintaining coherence and consistency with your blog entries and site pages, and to do so, you need to let your Character live inside your mind and heart, which means: sharing your mind with his/hers, feel what he/she feels, try to view his/her world with his/her eyes (through yours). That is what Nigel Watts calls empathy: by allowing your Character live inside your mind, you will be able to give him/her realness, and therefore make your fictional person an all-round Character, not a flat, predictable one.
Once you’ve mastered this “art”, you will notice that managing your Character’s life and his/her website will come out as easy as drinking water.
A few tips to make it ever easier:
- write a blog entry as soon as you feel your Character “pushing” you to write from the inside; if you can’t, not it down on a piece of paper, so you don’t forget it, and you can write it later when you have time. Never let momentary inspiration expire!
- As you write in your Character’s shoes, don’t think of yourself; give your Character free expression. Once you’re done with it, you can be back to YOURself and re-read what your Character “wrote”; you’ll see him/her come alive.
You can follow these tips whether you’re managing one Character or more than one. In the latter case, though, I suggest you NOT to multitask, as it can get tiring for a newbie, and the precious empathy might get lost.