1
Writing Group / Re: Character Help
« on: September 26, 2008, 04:13:53 PM »My only comment/suggestion would be to flesh out a bit more of the wife/husband relationship (like Nessa said), it lends more power to the loss the character is feeling if the reader is involved with it at the same time.
I agree to this one. Sometimes, characters that don't appear have very heavy influence of characters on pages; for this reason, it's important to flesh out the wife.
I remember reading Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams back in highschool. Though the father character never appears and never utters a single word, the whole family is the way they are because of this father character, whose only connection to the readers/audience is a large portrait of him in the room. I think your wife character is similar in this way.
Actually I have a similar story I am working on and that's what I learned from other critiques: the dead/missing/gone wife figure isn't quite solid, at the least to the husband character, that story sometimes seemed weak.
Perhaps you can write up a paragraph of who this wife is..when she was born, when she died, how she died, when they got married, where they got married...do they have any children, does she have any children (could be her second marriage)... I think these info may never appear in your writing but it's something true to the 'dead' person and may even come to affect the life of your character.