*I started writing this post months ago and then life got hectic before I could finish it. Today someone asked me about my creative process and it reminded me that this post was waiting for me to complete it.
Earlier this year a friend of mine who is also an author asked me a rather straightforward question: How do you create your characters?
I’ve been writing with the goal of publishing for over a decade now. I’ve written 7 complete manuscripts and two novellas since 2015 (several of those manuscripts have been through complete re-writes more than once). I’ve written and published short-stories in several publications. I’ve been told my strength as a writer is the realness of my characters and that my dialogue sounds like real dialogue. But my friend’s question stumped me.
My initial response was: Oh, well, they kind of create themselves. And then they won’t go away until I put them on the page.
This initial response is mostly true. But it’s glossing over a whole hell of a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes. It ignores the back-burner work that happens with every character I create, and the hours upon hours of work that went into creating the foundation that ‘back-burner work’ now uses without me having to think about it.
How do I really create my characters?
It depends on the project.
Ha! I know, that’s annoying. But let’s start there because what people are usually looking for when they ask questions like this are tricks and tips they can use for themselves. And those tips and tricks (read hard work, y’all) vary depending on the project you’re writing. More specifically, they varies by your approach to writing.
Where my projects start
When I began writing, I was a fast and loose panters. Plots were great, when they eventually found me. But I always started with some vague concept (vibes) and at least one character in my head who wouldn’t go away. As I fleshed out that character (and did so much writing that didn’t end up in the final project), I found the plot (also know as what that nagging character is doing other than just existing on the page).
My early manuscripts are not good. But they’re done. And they were critical for me to grow as a writer and get better. Every single project is a chance to grow, learn, and evolve as a storyteller. More on that later.
I was writing my second full manuscript when I moved half way across the country and decided that I needed a writing community (everything I read online said that was super important for getting feedback on stories and for staying sane during the journey towards publishing). So I signed up for writing conferences and I joined a twice monthly critique group. I learned that pantsing is cool and all, but it (for me) results in finished projects that require so much editing. I typically wrote 2x the word count of what I needed simply because I had to rewrite so much of the manuscript during the editing phase.
At that point, I began to force myself to plot. For the first few projects my plotting was bare bones and basically an outline. To this day, my plotting isn’t the gloriously in-depth, full researched masterpieces I’ve seen from some plotters, but it is far more than I used to use.
Okay, so what about characters!?
For every character I write, I want to know the following:
- Motivation
- What they want
- What happens when they get this
- What happens if they don’t get this
- What they need
- What happens when they don’t get this
- What happens when they realize the need
- What happens when they get this (if they do)
- What they want
- What their arc is going to be
- Where they start
- Where they end up
- What it looks like (emotionally) along the way
- Defining past (why they’re the way they are at the start of the story)
- The Emotional Wound Thesaurus is a helpful tool for fleshing this out
- What sets them off
- What breaks them
- What makes them happy
- Defining relationships
I don’t go into every project with the above written down. In fact, I don’t go into every project knowing all of the above from the start. But I should know it all by the time I’m done with my first revision. In fact, often times some of these questions are answered while I’m writing the first draft, and other times they’re answered while I’m working through a plot problem on my first round of revisions (and usually this is because I forgot to answer the question at the start, or I answered it but it turns out I was wrong).
There isn’t one good and/or correct way to answer these questions, but in answering these questions, you are creating a character that feels real. Even if that character is a fantastical creature no one would ever expect to meet on the street–the reader will still feel like ‘yeah, maybe I could meet this person and understand them’.
Basically, you’ve got to psychoanalyze your characters.
To be clear, I don’t do this for all of the characters on the page. I do this for my main characters (including the antagonist) and at least some of the secondary characters.
So we’ve got questions to ask a character, but how do you get the character to start with?
Like I said, the project matters. Let’s apply the above to the various starting points for the project. You could be starting with 1) vibes and character or 2) a plot and no characters to do the things. Or you could land somewhere between those two extremes.
You’ve got vibes and at least the basis of a character…
Last year I was walking through the woods in Maine with some friends and we were all quiet as we soaked in the beautiful lushness around us. But it was also September edging into October, and fall was turning the leaves. We’d flown into Boston and were going on a road trip of the east coast that was going not land us back in Salem before we left. My brain was full on vibes. Haunted vibes. Forest vibes. Mystery. Maybe danger. But ultimately safety and family and friends and discovering one’s self.
And from those vibes, I developed an image in my head for the opening scene of a new project.
Here’s where I started: woman running through creepy woods. Trips & falls. Sees a person in the lake. That person pulls her through into another world.
Have you got questions? I know I did. Who is this woman? Why is she running. What’s the time period? Where is the forest and the lake? Is it our world? Who is the person who pulls her though? Does this really happen or is she hallucinating?
My brain was off with so many questions to answer, which got the cogs moving. I could offer up an answer to any of those and see what it did to the very basic premise I’d started with. Each detail lends itself to more questions, and the answers to those questions stack to build enough of a character framework for you to interrogate with the questions listed above.
Now for an example of what I consider the floating character – this is the character who is just in my head without any context. I have no idea the setting, the time period, the amount of realism for the story, I might not even have an idea of what the character looks like. But I’ve got this person who, for example, is snarky and sarcastic but deeply intelligent. And they’re a good friend, once you’ve earned their loyalty. And I begin to think of them when things happen in my day to day life. I begin to ‘hear’ their voice – how they’d respond to what I’m encounter, or what they might do, or not do. I begin to see how they’re flawed but I still adore them. Or can’t stand them but still can’t stop thinking of them.
This is truly a character-first situation for me. I know I have this person who is slowly becoming more real to me but I don’t know what to do with them. So what do you do with them?
You play with them. You imagine them in impossible scenarios. In everyday scenarios. You put them in the room with characters from your favorite shows or books and think of what they’d do. Or, and this took me awhile to come around to, you sit down and write. You write them into a scene, doesn’t matter what it is, and you see where that takes you.
From there you might be inspired with other characters for them to play off of, or a story might start to bloom with more structure that might eventually become a plot.
Is this a ‘waste of time’ because it’s work that no one will ever see? Absolutely not. Like with anything in life, writing requires putting forth effort and doing work that no one other than you will know about. And it’s not wasted because it’s teaching you what you need to know to do that thing and potentially to do it better than before.
This is the exploration stage where you’re figured out a character, so explore. Play. Get to know them. Make them real.
You’ve got a plot…
I’m trying to recall if I’ve ever had a plot without some idea of a character to go with it, even if that’s just ‘female protagonist is going to do x’. But let’s roll with the idea that you’ve got a plot and you need someone to do those things and/or live in that world.
Ask yourself who should be going on this journey and/or telling this story.
How do you answer this?
Honestly, if you’ve got a full plot in your mind, I assume that you have some idea of who is pushing that plot forward. Even if it’s only an antagonist. If you have an antagonist, that’s a fantastic basis for developing a protagonist and other supporting cast. But say you’ve only got the vague ‘female protagonist who is going to do x (which is your plot)’.
Why is she going to do whatever it is that happens? Dig in deep on this one. Go up to the questions above and remember that many people have the reason they tell themselves (and others) that they’re doing something, and then there’s the real secret reason they’re doing it. You should know both.
Look at the world you’ve created for this plot. How does your character relate to that world? What are the challenges and limitations (here’s part of your tension)? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, look at your plot. What do you need for this plot to feel like something true and real? Who would fulfill the demands the story places on them to end up at the end. Not just anyone can destroy the ring. Not just anyone can survive the trials. Not just anyone can do a lot of things, and if your character is an ordinary person doing extraordinary things, then they’re not just anyone, are they? If they’re an ordinary person doing ordinary things, they’re still going to do them in a unique way for them. So if you’re lost in figuring out who has to be the protagonist and what makes them them, ask yourself who MUST be the protagonist?
You could also take a moment to reflect on the why of what you’re writing. What message or theme are you trying to convey. If you don’t think you have one, cool. Then why are you telling the story at all? What about this story is making you want to write? If you can figure out the essence, then you can start to pick at who is the correct character to tell this story (or follow through the story).
I’ll warn you, the plot might shift as you answer these questions. I don’t personally think that’s a bad thing. Don’t fight it. See what happens. You can always go back to the original plot if you want to (and toss that character, or shelf them for another project).
Maybe you have a more fully-mapped out plot. Say you’ve got an entire epic quest laid out for a band of heroes. You know you need six characters to go on this quest. You know what they’ll be doing (plot point A, B, C, D, E, and finally the epic Finale). But the characters feel flat. Or you’ve gone through and written them in the outline as “Hero 1, melee”, “Hero 2, grump”, “Hero 3, good with knives”, “Hero 4”, and so on.
Hero 1, melee is already a good start. Tell yourself a story about this person. Age? Gender identity? Sexual orientation? Do they have good hair? Why melee? Something happen when they were a kid and it’s now melee or nothing? What does Hero 1 think about Hero 3? Who do they go to when they’re excited about something? Who do they go to when they’re sad. Do they have a favorite move (do movies exist?)? What’s their favorite food/drink? As you flesh out Hero 1, you can find the pieces where having a foil could both help and harm the character. Awesome, dig into those.
What if I do all this and the character still falls flat?
Yeah, that’s a bummer, isn’t it? š
Okay, but seriously, sometimes I find that I have an amazing character but they’re not singing on the page. They’re just not right for that story. And that’s really the answer. You can have the most amazing, fully realized character and still read your manuscript and think, “Ooh, this isn’t working.”
So then it’s time to either take that character and find a story that works for them, or find the parts of the character that don’t work for the story and change them.
I’ll be honest, I usually do the first time. And the reason is two-fold. One, that character just is who they are now in my mind so changing them seems like I’m being disingenuous to them. I’m forcing a fit. And that’s never worked out for me (or the story). Two, the story needs someone else entirely and no amount of fine-tuning this character is going to change that.
This has never actually happened to me with my protagonist characters. It’s happened with secondary characters before. And it’s happened once with my antagonist.
So this is how I’ve created characters over the years. They do often ‘create themselves’ as a result of having practiced the above many many times. And once they’ve created themselves, I do a lot of chipping away to sculpt them into ‘real people’.
Happy creating.
A. K. Hudson 