Are your characters introverted or extraverted?

Well, this one is easy: I have so many viewpoint characters that they cover the spectrum of introversion and extraversion, from the hermit Brick to the reserved Catherine to the flashy Ash to the life of the party Fan. I love every single one of these characters, even my villains, and playing with their different social meters is actually a lot of fun to write.

Now, I do tend to write more introverted main characters with extraverted supporting characters, which is curious considering I’m a fairly extraverted person. With Paradiso, though, I wanted there to be a broad spectrum of personality types, and the challenging part has been to balance the interactions between them. For example, Callie and Fan are almost polar opposites when it comes to how they express themselves, and they are in a lot of scenes together where their personalities simultaneously clash with and complement each other. I’m usually pretty skilled at creating realistic dialogue that pretty clearly indicates who the characters are, but I found the scenes between the sisters to be difficult to do … at least until I got into their flow. Once I got to that point, everything became so much easier, not just for Callie and Fan but the other characters, as well.

Long story short, my characters run the gamut when it comes to their ways of handling the world around them, and although it has been quite challenging to have such a large cast of diverse people, I have had so much fun writing them.