Cassie Beebe, author of fascinating, moral complex, compelling romance novels, kindly agreed to help me out with a guest post while I deal with Macron’s declaration that we can all work from home and educate our children at the same time because we are French!!! Happily, not only did Cassie step into the breach, she wrote an article chock full of new ideas for how to create characters that I intend to immediately steal – I suggest you do the same. Cassie’s latest novel, Moving On, is available on amazon by clicking this link.

Without further ado, here is Cassie herself. I’m off to 16personalities.com (you’ll know what I mean in a minute)

So you want to write rich, captivating characters, eh? Well, boy, have I got some tips for you!

Characters have always been an aspect of storytelling that has come naturally to me. They live in my mind, roaming free, living their lives and being themselves, and my job is simply to reflect that accurately on the page. But for my most recent novel, Moving On, things were different.

When I first began the writing process of this book, I had a surprisingly difficult time. The words weren’t flowing as naturally as they had in previous works, and I knew that the source of my mental block was the simple fact that I didn’t know these characters. They hadn’t become full, deep individuals in my head yet, and given that that usually happens naturally for me, I had no idea how to force them to develop. So I did something I had never done before: I made in-depth character sheets for each of my main characters and prominent side characters. I learned a lot through this process, and I’d love to share some of my discoveries with you. Hopefully these tips can help enrich your characters as well.