On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.

In her latest release, Writing Creativity and Soul, bestselling author Sue Monk Kidd shares the following writing advice:

The simplest, maybe even my best advice about writing characters might be this: Love them, empathize with them, participate deeply in their inner lives. You can ask all the smart questions in the world about your characters and formulate brilliant answers, but when the characters make their way from your head into your heart, they will start to feel like real people to you (which is fine as long as you know they aren’t real people).

When I finished writing The Secret Life of Bees, I missed the characters as if they were actual companions who had packed up and moved away. I’d hung out with Lily and the women in the pink house practically every day for over three years, and I loved every single one of them. When it was over, I got a little down. I dealt with the matter by getting a puppy and naming her Lily. It cured me

If you let your characters into your heart, they will feel powerfully vivid to you, and therefore, perhaps, to the reader, as well. You will miss them when the writing is over. And it’s likely the reader will miss them, too. Probably not enough to get a dog, but enough.

Source: Writing Creativity and Soul by Sue Monk Kidd, pp. 122-123