Susan, as you know, I'm a humongous fan of characters with voices.

But you don't think there needs to be a road for them to travel? Would a corollary be in order?

It's all about the journey?

Oh, definitely, but you said, "one line." And caught me on a week where I've been reading contest entry after contest entry with oodles of plot, but wooden, lifeless characters composed of stereotypes straight out of Romance Central Casting.

So maybe I'd amend it to, "Before you worry about the journey, make sure the travelers are worthy of your readers' attention."

"Everyone has a story. It's up to you to find it."

I think this is where erika's one-liner fits in -- if you've got a compelling character, finding the story he or she needs to tell, or journey to take, is the important thing.

But I also believe that most characters become interesting if they're on the right journey, so there's that, too.

Heh. Yep - I'm doing a sort of cross-stitching of how writers take on their inspiration.

I mean, I'm getting fascinated by the wide range of answers, that really aren't that wide-ranging at all. For me, it's really dead simple: I'm pure Lewis Carroll. Start at the beginning and go on until you reach the end. I am all about the "Once upon a time..."

So it fascinates me to get the quickie distillations, and to try and parse them. Like Susan, I'm fierce about characters the reader will care about, but I've never in my life created a character and then created a journey for them. Mine tend to happen simultaneously.

I've never in my life created a character and then created a journey for them

Pretty much it's look at the road, see who's walking it.

Pretty much it's look at the road, see who's walking it.

And don't be afraid of the curves.

Nic asked me to post his. His is a one-word distillation: "Listen."

I've never in my life created a character and then created a journey for them

I have. Or, kind of. Writing romance, for me, involves following some of the rules. So usually, actually, I do it backwards. In other words, What if two people who never thought they'd see each other again find themselves trapped at a house party together for a weekend? And then I try to figure out who those people are, why they never thought they'd see each other again, and what happens now that they have.

With romance, at least, there are always those genre conventions hanging over you -- there has to be a solvable conflict, hero and heroine each have to have an internal conflict, too, there has to be a happy ending, hero and heroine can't cheat on other, et cetera. Again, just for me, it puts on a leash on how I come up with my plots and characters.

I've never in my life created a character and then created a journey for them. Mine tend to happen simultaneously.

In a way I have, with Anna. I got to liking her so much as a secondary character in Lucy's story that I thought, "I can't just leave her as Sebastian's wife for the next 50 years. She deserves better. OK, it's easy enough to kill him off. Then what happens?"

But in general, yeah, it happens simultaneously. It's just that nothing frustrates me more than characters who are wooden and dull or are pure stereotypes.

I think I frequently start from character...or at least this time I did. Allyson-my-character just sort of tapped me and said "Hey!" Although initially the character as I conceived her was very different from how she ended up. Much more troubled, and much less like me(isn't it ironic?) But my timetable got a little MarySueish or something...this woman would have had to be fucking up almost non-stop from the age of twenty to get where I stuck her at thirty, and she couldn't do that or we wouldn't trust her judgement. And it also struck me as ridiculous to hang around rehab hospitals learning their disability experience when I already have one. Hello?