Becoming a drama queen

Being a quiet introvert, in real life I've always found drama queens intensely irritating.  You know the kind of person I mean.  It's the rampant extrovert at the heart of every party, who just has to tell you how awful/awesome their life has been for the last few days.

The smallest thing in their, often in truth very ordinary, lives is blown up into a huge drama.  They're the ones who always have to suffer more than anyone else.  If you say you've had a bad cold they will immediately enter into a contest with you to prove that their bad cold was ten times worse than yours.

As I've grown older, and I hope a little wiser, I've realised that most of what they say is bullshit.  They'll spend their days telling you in great detail what they've been doing, but if you dig a little deeper, start to examine what they've achieved with their frantic whirling, in truth it's often very little.

I've got to the point where my bullshit filter cuts out most of this stuff now.  Which is fine for real life, but sometimes it leaves me with a problem when I'm writing.  I've had feedback several times which says that my characters don't have enough of an emotional response to what's going on in their lives.  I've  been told they're dealing too calmly with whatever challenge or awful situation that's just been dumped on them.

That comes from my own personality.  My way of dealing with the crap in the world is to stoically bear if.  I know I'll come through the other end eventually.  That works well in my life, but not in my stories.

Because stories are larger than life, and so do the characters who populate them have to be.  For me, that means I have to make a conscious effort to up their pain and their trauma.  I have to make sure they suffer much more publically than I would in real life,

But it's a balancing act.  That last thing I'd want to do is to turn my characters into something like the drama queens I've known in real life.  That would soon turn my readers off.  No, what I need is a balance.  Just enough pain, just enough emotional reaction to the situation.  After all, I want them to stay a strong character.  I don't want them to collapse in a gibberring heap under the challenge I've given them.  And finding that point of balance is still very much a work in progress for me.