Be true to your characters
Beach Boys, Be true To Your School
Once upon a time, someone wrote a trilogy. Many believe it should have been left alone as a trilogy. But the author decided (or agreed) to write just one more book to kind of finish up the story and tie up all the loose ends.
So there it was, the fourth book in the series. Personally, I didn’t read past the first book, but Taylor and Olivia read all four in the series and I received the full report. It seems that even though the author answered a lot of questions that arose during the first three books, many things didn’t sit right with scores of people.
Setting aside that some people didn’t like how the story ultimately ended, and others complained that the author went against rules–albeit supernatural rules–established in the first three books, the issue I see is that the characters were, well…out of character.
I think many of the complaints people had with how the final book was written and the ultimate outcome, would possibly have been non-existent had the author stayed true to the characters. The personalities and character traits had been established, grounded and confirmed repeatedly throughout the first three books. When it was time to tie up the story, the complaint is that the author had the characters doing and saying things that would have been unthinkable in the earlier books.
We’re doing our best to maintain character continuity in our book. We’ve drawn up character descriptions (made easy with our novel-writing software), in some cases very detailed, to keep us on the right track. Don’t misinterpret this, our characters learn and grow like regular people. They also learn and grow supernaturally in keeping with the ground rules we’ve already established within the story.
Our ending will shock, but we don’t plan to introduce any out-of-character surprises at the end. That would be lame. And we’re not lame.