@ 00DAD: I’m getting back to you about the character points. I’ve never read anything by Nicholas Sparks nor have I seen the complete films based on his work, but I know they have been very popular precisely because viewers get emotionally engaged with the characters. I say that because I did watch portions of The Notebook and was moved by what I saw. It wasn’t simply a cheesy romance, a dumb “chick flick” or a romantic comedy. It showed people dealing with the emotional turmoil that comes from an affair of the heart.
With film and television there are many visual cues which capture an audience’s attention and set the emotional tone for the movie or program. The camera does so much of the work, as Katherine Hepburn once told a young Anthony Hopkins during the filming of The Lion in Winter. When those visual cues and gestures and auditory elements such as tone of voice, timing and visible emotions are combined with solid writing, the result is unforgettable.
Stand-alone writing presents a different challenge for the author must create real characters as opposed to simply giving readers “talking heads.” The writer must show and not merely tell. Dialogue is one method to do this, getting inside the character’s head is another, and the interactions with other characters and the setting is a third.
Done correctly, the results are real people who spring out of the page and impact the reader. Characters don’t necessarily have to be deeply realized to do this. One needs only to read the romances of Danielle Steele to see how true that is; but when skill is used in their creation, the characters live on long after the last page is turned and can then pass into the stuff of lore and legend.
Quendi