I’m hesitating a little bit about this blog post, because I feel like as soon as I post it somebody will jab me with a spork while saying, “Really, K? REALLY? YOU know how to write well-rounded characters?”
I mean, it’s not like I have a process for it. I used to stumble on these templates, where you get to type in stuff like “He has purple-hair and subtle elf-ears” and then later you have to figure out what the fuck “subtle elf-ears” meant so you could insert it into your narrative. I mean, to be perfectly, perfectly honest, I always have to double-back to remember the colour of Enosh’s eyes (which are…I don’t know, yellow, brown? Chestnut?).
I can also be a bit lazy with faces. When I’m starting out a book, they all look the same in my head. Really. Well, you know, I guess they kind of have a hair colour thing going on. But it takes a long, long time for me to figure out what they actually look like.
As for backgrounds? Forget about it. When a character first jumps onto my page, I have no idea who he or she is, where they come from, what they like to eat, etc. Whenever I hear other writers smugly talk about how they know these things before they even write that first word, like you know, their character is so clear that it’s like they came out of a dream, I want to punch them in the face.
I write characters like I discover friends.
When I meet someone, I don’t know anything about them. Within the first couple of conversations, I get a vague idea of what they’re doing there, or why we’re talking, but that’s about it. I also get an impression of their face, but if we parted ways then and there and I see them again years later, I wouldn’t be able to remember it.
It’s the little things–the nuances–that make up a character and make them come alive. And you cannot do this on a whim. Characters are more than their looks or their background, more than the number of siblings they had growing up or the occupation of their parents.
When I’m aware that I’ll be spending more time with a character–which is not always a conscious decision, on my part–I try to examine the events that have already occurred. Were they telling the truth about why they were there? If so, why? If not, why? I can’t truly write a character without examining their hopes and dreams, which always leads me to their past and how that brought them to the present.
I also do not force personalities.
I think people cannot be people in a bubble…we are the result of a base personality that is honed by the many interactions with everyone around us. So I have an idea of how the character should be: quiet, thoughtful, ambitious, cautious…and then see how they interact with already-established personalities.
Being open to this idea means that I’m always surprised by my characters. A quiet, gentle farmboy, Camden, turns out to have deep frustrations. A warlord, Yeshin, is shattered by a tragedy, but finds ways to cope. Many of these revelations occur during conversations with other characters. A question is posed to them, and they respond in a way that I haven’t considered before. This also provides me an avenue with which to pursue future stories, which is why I’m into epic fantasy…in no other genre is it okay, and even expected, to leap from so many different point of views.
This falls into my philosophy as a storyteller, wherein I don’t take credit for orchestrating what is actually happening on the page. I simply lay things out and follow leads. Many things are obvious, if you just learn to observe: a character that is frightened of change probably led a sheltered childhood. Someone prone to anger might have been abused. If these backgrounds don’t contribute to the story, I don’t expound on it, but I do let it colour the way these characters respond to things.
So there you go: my very confusing, not-usually-what-you-see-in-a-writing-book way of writing characters. Have at it with the spork.
If things had gone differently, and he had more courage and asked Maira before Arell did, would Cal have been his? Does thinking like that ever made a difference in this world?
-Jaeth’s Eye
Discover a crazy cast of characters in The Agartes Epilogues, including the boy who rode a turtle, the token whore with a heart of gold, the rice merchant, the boy with the split personality, an extremely sarcastic mage, and Bartleby, the dog…
*raises spork*
*lowers it again* Ehhhhh… That’s actually a really good way to go about characters. Discovering a character as you write gives them more nuance than locking them into an initial set of stats.