Day 182: Characters

I've written about my approach to characters before, but it's since evolved a little. I still include a focus on goals and planning, but I've realized since I last wrote about this that I can plan out a character's whole life if I want to, but it rarely if ever actually gets me any closer to the character themselves. Knowing their goals and motivations and flaws is one thing, but knowing how they live to achieve those goals, how they have to overcome their flaws (or fail to do so) is very different. I have a lot of trouble putting all of this stuff I 'know' about my characters together into a coherent individual. Today I want to talk about some techniques I've been using to take my characters from a jumble of facts to rounded people.

To start with, I've been using this trick I learned at some point (I can't remember where exactly, maybe from Stephen King's 'On Writing') and it's actually really simple. Just write a page or two from the perspective of the character in question. It doesn't have to be about the story or anything, just their thoughts. Wherever it takes you is best, and can tell you a lot about where this character is in your mind. Are they as they are at the end of your story? At the beginning? Somewhere in between? This experiment gets really interesting if you do it a few times throughout different stages of the book. The character will evolve before your eyes. It's kinda freaky actually. I try to do this for any major characters. If I was really a try hard I might do this for every character no matter how small. They're all people after all, with each their own story. It might not be the focus of the book, but they still have them.

Once I've done this process with a few characters, I try to write a scene with two or more of them. Again, not an important scene to the story (though any of this writing might one day become a part of the book), but something that gets into the dynamic between the characters. Maybe at the beginning of the novel they just met, and at the end they're old friends, or not so much friends anymore. The downside to this tactic and the previous is that it requires quite a bit of writing that will probably never make it into the novel. No way around it really, if you don't like this then there's always the next trick ...

Make a character's backstory so confusing that it's compelling. I use this one sparingly, but some people are huge fans of this technique. George Lucas comes to mind. Yoda for example never had a homeworld or a backstory at all when Lucas introduced him. He just came up with a little green fella who is a Jedi Master and went with it. He lives in a mysterious swamp because ... reasons. Ah, I know, what if he's in exile? 'From what?' Well who cares, what kind of stupid question is that? Fine, fine, we'll just say he was another victim of that 'Clone Wars' thing I came up with for Vader, no problem.

In case you think I'm kidding.

That's about all I've got. Characters are tough but by using the above techniques I've been able to largely shunt all that processing into my subconscious. It's kinda like a dream, where nobody ever feels like less than a whole person. I generate the person every so often and then suddenly they seem a lot richer when I write the scenes they're in. The details hidden under the hood shine through a little more because they're fresh in the mind.

Or just put all that subconscious processing on the reader and hope it works out, no biggie.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley