You've got Character

Eph 4:[23] And be renewed in the spirit of your mind;[24] And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.
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Well we’re on our way. Like linking lego’s together we’re building our characters. Like an erector set, all the pieces are going together and fitting nice and tight, but we still have a few screws loose.

Now we need to tighten up the bolts and make the character unique. I was thinking of this today. Dean Koontz likes to give a lot of his characters, too many to mention, green eyes. I think, “It is not every day that you see a dazzling emerald green eyed person pass you by.” Koontz thinks it is unique enough to use it all the time but dang Mr. Koontz, it is getting old!

In his Odd Thomas series, Odd (the main character) has blue eyes that when closely looked at, and when the sun bounces off of them in a certain way, have a purple hue. Now that is odd! Unique. But you can’t give tons of characters purple eyes now can you?
By the way, that is an excellent book, a must read!

This is where we’re at. We know that there has to be something unique when we have a character in mind. Sometimes it can be a big nose with black framed eyeglasses, or it can be a skull tattoo across the mans face! Or maybe it is an unusual piercing, like in the fingernail or something. Whatever the case, you need something that is going to make the reader want to come back to this character and by making them unique in many ways, is almost a sure fire hit; one that will keep your reader reading and keep them coming back for more.

The characters are going to carry the story, so if they aren’t unique or stand-outish, you better get back to the drawing board. The setting might help a bit but it is the antagonist and protagonists that are going to melt the tale together and form the building of your dreams, all out of out of the erector set that you started with as just a bunch of pieces laying on the floor. :-)

My friends and new writer’s at f2k are well on their way to constructing the masterpiece of their dreams. I’ll find the holes, weed out the inconsistencies, pluck away a ton of adverbs, scrape a ‘but’ here and there, never overlook the over-use of the word AND, then we’ll revise the tale until it is whole and maybe, just maybe they’ll get a submission out of it.

And maybe I too will get some writing done. This is looking like a good start to Twenty 10 to me! May it be for all of you, too.