It’s blog chain time again and I’m late. Sorry! Crazy week, but I’m here and ready to go. This round’s terrific topic comes from Abby. She asks: Where do your characters come from? And once they’ve been introduced to you, how do you get to know them?
My characters come from all over: people I know, myself, people I haven’t met yet. Sometimes I’ll just see someone and without them speaking or doing anything, I get a story in my head about them. It’s hard to shut the mind off when you write. When I freelanced for magazines, everything was a possible story. Normal conversations with friends became difficult because I’d find myself wondering if their relationship troubles were common or if that mole they were getting removed could be the start of a bigger story on cosmetic plastic surgery. I carried a notebook around with me all the time and jotted down possible pitches. With fiction, it’s similar but your brain has the ability to wander more. You can take a mental picture of a character and shelve it for later, but still your mind is always on the move. My teen male characters usually begin with a boy I had a crush on in high school or college and then evolve from there, blending the characteristics of several men into one.
As for getting to know them, I don’t do the techniques I suggest to those in the writing workshops I run. I think they’re great, and I have lots of writer friends who swear by them, but the only thing that works for me is to write. Sometimes I’ll write fifty pages before figuring out who the character truly is and then I’ll go back and revise. Other times, I’ll think I know everything about the girl/guy from page one and then thirty pages in, the character will surprise me. This is what happened with the 2nd YA I just handed in. In The Air I Breathe, I had a clear picture of the four MCs, but then fifty pages in I was stuck (this is typical for me, and it’s at about 50 pages that I start to figure out where the story is going and then go back and rework, so my usual MO). I put it away and started and finished an MG and still didn’t know how to fix TAIB and then I just wrote some scenes, let the characters do their things, let myself deviate from the climax that I thought was going to work originally. And viola. I knew what to do. The characters didn’t change dramatically–the jerk didn’t all-of-a-sudden become nice–but I was able to see more aspects of their personalities, understood better what made them act as they did, added some scenes to shape them better.
I once read somewhere that if you are surprised by your characters, then you are a poor writer. You should know what they’re doing at all times. I disagree. If we want our characters to be real, shouldn’t they surprise us once in a while?
If you missed Christine’s super creative post, check it out now! And read Sarah’s post next!
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