Everyone is a customer for somebody or a supplier to somebody. — W. Edwards Deming
It’s easy to think of a grocery store as just a place where you go to get food, but your grocery store is also a customer. You may be making mad dash to score some BBQ (or ketchup flavoured if you live in Canada) potato chips and think that you are the customer. But remember, you’re also someone they are buying. Stores leverage their customers (and their data) for their own purposes.
OK, now let’s think of your WIP as both a customer and a seller. You’re offering your reader a story, your characters a life on the page, and you’re setting a time and place in your make-believe world. That seems straight-forward enough. But what are you buying — from each of them or from the world outside your page?
There is an interaction between the reader and writer. Between characters. Remember that in life, we are influenced by and influence the other people around us.
Pick a major and a minor character and write a scene that moves them past one-way interactions and into a more complex understanding of each other. How does it change both of them? How does it change how you think of them? What impact does each have on the other from that point forward?
At the recent Surrey International Writers Conference literary agent Donald Maas gave a workshop where he challenged participants to write the scene where your character’s understanding of another character suddenly changed. When they realized what they thought they knew about that other person wasn’t the entire story.