Writers Workshop: Building Believable Characters

Honey over at Stories to Share is starting a Writers Workshop and I'm all fired up about it. If you haven't yet visited Honey and/or want to participate, please stop by her blog HERE, she's a wonderful writer and a super nice blogger. (:

In her post, Honey provides two really nice examples of characterization. One taken from Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and the second, her own characterization of the main character in her book. Please go check it out!

I also wanted to add another example of character description based primarily on physical appearance. It's an excerpt of the bounty hunter Stephanie Plum in Seven Up, by Janet Evanovich:

I wasn't sure what one wore to the Pit, but slut hair seemed like a good idea, so I did the hot roller and teasing thing. This increased my height from five foot seven inches to five foot ten.  I tarted myself up with a lot of makeup, added a short black spandex skirt and four-inch heels, and I felt very kick-ass. I grabbed my leather jacket and took the car keys from the kitchen counter. Hold on. These weren't car keys. They were motorcycle keys. Shit! I'd never get my hair in the helmet. 

That was, fun wasn't it? Not only did I great strong mental image of this woman but I also have good idea of her personality type based on this short paragraph. And according to Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint by Nancy Kress, the success of the above description stems from its ability to accomplish three main points:

     -provides a strong visual image
     -uses details to imply personality traits and/or personal background
     -the description intrigues us about what will happen next

So now here's my challenge (copied from Honey's post) :

     Exercise: Do a character sketch. I found this website, click on the word here, with some great suggestions for building characters. 

I'm going to do this by pulling out an excerpt from my wip. It's an early description of Edessa Scottwood, my main character as she sees herself in a mirror.

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My face was ashen white, my cheeks hollow and purplish shadows hung tightly beneath my eyes. My hair was a wiry mass that had been cropped short even by boys standards. My mind flashed back to almost a week ago during one of my destructive and hysterical breakdowns. My emotional pain had me toying with the idea of slitting my wrists, but I ended up hacking away at my hair instead. What a mess, Edessa. I couldn't help looking over the rest of my naked body and frankly, it too didn't look much better than the rest. I had lost most of my womanly curves and looked more like a dry, over stretched rubber band. I tried straighten out my back and moaned as it set in three different places. And as I scrutinized the rest of my haggard body in the mirror, I realized the only thing I did recognize were the color of my eyes, still the same shade of green. 

Why do I care what I look like anyway? The words suddenly growled inside my head. I tried to kill myself only yesterday, so does it really matter if I look like Hell? Interesting word choice, I thought. Hell…

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Well, I can't imagine what you all must be thinking right about now, lol. But it was either this excerpt or the one about the naked guy swimming in the lake. Aren't you glad I chose this one? Come to think of it, looks like I have a lot of naked people in my wip. (o_O) But seriously, I do I would really like to hear some of your thoughts, what works and what doesn't. I appreciate any and all critiques. (:  

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