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Beginning with Character

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
In a separate post I talked about how I am beginning to plan my next novel, A Child of Great Promise. Here I will talk about character.

Once I had that title, the obvious question was, what sort of child? I moved pretty quickly through this. Any child who is identified by adults as showing promise is going to suffer pressure. I had my own share of childhood reports that I was not performing up to my potential, so I had some sympathy with this character.

I made a decision at the start that the child would be female and would be roughly at the age of puberty or a year or so later. The choice of gender was purely arbitrary--I had not yet written a female lead. The choice of age was fairly easy. Teenage years are ones of natural rebellion, but also I needed to have a character with enough years on her to have learned some things and to have had some experiences that shaped her. So, fourteen or so. I've kicked around with names, but for now she is Falaise.

Closely tied to her character is the other part of that title. I also had to figure out what is the promise. It was not to be a prophecy--I have another story on the stove that deals with prophecies. No, this is simply, the child shows potential. Great things are expected of her. Those had to be magical things. I'm still not sure how specific to be about that.

The one thing I'm sure of is, she disappoints. She is lazy, truculent, haphazard. She has become increasingly troublesome and rebellious. But Falaise is hardest on herself. She expects far greater things of herself than she has demonstrated. Outwardly she blames pretty much everyone and everything around her, but inwardly she fears it is herself who falls short. So she keeps everyone at arm's length, lest they discover the horrible truth about her.

The other part of character is backstory. That part is still sliding around. Maybe she is well-born and is doing the medieval equivalent of bouncing from one private school to another. Or, maybe she was given to wizards (or elves) as an infant, under mysterious circumstances. So far, it doesn't matter, though I'm sure it will.

And that's just the main character! I need secondary characters, including the villain, each of which needs the usual: backstory, goals, motives, relationship to Falaise, relationship to villain, role in the plot. But I really felt I needed to understand the essence of Falaise first. She's the Child. She is the one with Promise.

Planners, do you have a particular approach to developing characters? How many characters do you need to have in place before you write Chapter One?
 

Heliotrope

Staff
Article Team
Yep.

With mine I knew I need a single child, who didn't have a mother, who lived with a single dad in modern day New York. I knew it was going to be a heist story, so I had to think about that.

For me character is king. Character drives the entire plot. So a character needs to be fresh for me to be interested in the story.

Because she was the typical "single child with no mother growing up with a single dad" character I knew I didn't want to fall into old cliches. Often when we see these characters they are 'at-risk' or trouble makers, they hate their dad, they miss their mother etc. I decided to purposely see if I could do the opposite. So I did make her lower socioeconomic... because of the nature of her dad, but I chose to make her smart. Really smart. A-student smart. It gave in a nice inner conflict already, she is smart, good student, hard worker, but has very little chance of being successful because her home life is a bit of a mess so often she makes choices to protect her dad when she would rather be successful at school.

Another cliche I was tired of was the "lazy/angry single dad." So I made sure my character had a really nice, sweet relationship with her dad, and together the two of them look out for each other against their crazy landlady. I wanted them to be comrades instead of the enemies you so often see in YA.

Finally, my character is a real go-getter. I was tired of the snarky, sarcastic, I hate everything and everyone my life sucks sort of character, so I made her the opposite. She has a lot to live for. She cares about her family and her friends. She likes her school. She is supposed to be doing a speech competition to win a summer internship with the New York Times. She shows a promising future as a photographic journalist. She picks to talk about the living conditions of Syrian refugees when other kids are talking about how annoying their siblings are.

This way she has a lot to lose if she gets caught doing a museum heist with a busker. She's not the street-hardened pocket thief we so often see in these sorts of scenarios (that I was so sick of).

I use three act story structure, so by Chapter One I like to at least hint at every main character in the story, even if it is just their shadow. I don't include them all as players in the first chapter, but they are all hinted at.

For example, my first chapter starts with Andy and her dad in their apartment watching the news. They have all the lights off and the drapes closed because the landlady is pounding at their door and they are pretending they aren't home. On the news a newscaster is showing a leading story: One of the security guards for the Museum of Natural history was seen running from the museum in the middle of the night, holding something hidden under his shirt. The photo was taken by a camera phone. Behind him there are two dark figures who can't be made out. The museum curator speaks a few words.

My MC recognizes the running man as the father of her best friend, Mona.

Bam. In the first chapter I have managed to hint at almost all the key players in the entire novel.
 

Peat

Sage
If I'm outlining fully, then I have something about every character I expect to use before I start writing.

If I'm doing a skeletal outline, then I only have the major characters and villains, and maybe an idea that there'll be a support character of some sort there.

Minor characters I like to come up with one sort of quirk to add to the stereotype, even if its a stereotypical quirk. I may or may not do that at the outlining stage.

Supporting characters need more flesh. I like to know how they interact with the theme for one thing. They start as stereotypes, but I try to have something that contradicts it a little (even if it a stereotypical contradiction). I like to know a few unnecessary things about them. And I like there to be something memorable there. Many books are, imo, carried by their support characters.

Villains I do loosely at a level between Supporting Character and Main Character. I should do them a lot more firmly at that level.

Main characters... I want to know what's special about them, first and foremost. I want to know what about them it is that readers are going to love. *pause* At least, that should be where I start. What I really do is think of a grab bag of similar-ish characters and people (deliberately stretching similarity in some cases), then start stealing ideas and traits and mashing them together and comparing them to the theme. Which works to a point. Back story, arc, personal theme, they'll all pop into my head at some point. Sometimes I'll nick a character from an uncompleted idea.

Something I am big on is knowing how the major characters relate to each other. If I want them to hate each other, there needs to be a reason. Or maybe there's already a reason for them to hate each other and I need to recognise it. Its very hard to recognise which is chicken and which is egg sometimes. Maybe they'll fall in love - why?
 

cydare

Minstrel
I have a problem where I over-focus on the characters before writing. This leaves me with too many characters, many of which I'd planned out in detail but can't include much of (or at all) if I want the story to flow. Because the story is always shifting, I also have to deal with major characters who change drastically from how I'd imagined them. New events cause them to take a different, more natural turn than what I had planned originally...which wouldn't be a bad thing if I didn't have so much trouble letting go and adjusting. I'm trying to work on this in a side project I have going on. I'm winging all the characters and letting them develop on the page.

I also end up constantly dealing with characters who change my plot. As I'm writing, it often becomes clear that keeping them in character means they wouldn't do that one thing that pushes the story along, or they'd do that other thing that throws it in a whole other direction. This I don't mind too much, though it does throw detailed planning out the window.
 

Peat

Sage
One final thing that I somehow forgot about until reminded by a friend's blog post today -

Voice

I think character voice is huge in terms of making a memorable distinct character, particularly if you're doing Close Third or First. This goes double if you want to make the character in any way a source of humour. The ability to make spot on observations in their own voice is really great for quotes.

Again, I tend to do a lot of, uh, 'paying homage' here in terms of looking for models and then tweaking it to suit my needs. My current WIP is First Person; the MC owes a fair bit to Dresden, Sparhawk and Sam Vimes.
 

Caged Maiden

Staff
Article Team
Ooh, what a wonderful topic! I've written a few children, but I admit I've never given it much thought. I mean about their background or why I chose a child specifically.

In one novel, I picked a 14 year old girl because it was important that she be in that awkward and rebellious phase of life, but that she be mature enough to understand love, adult relationships, and the sort of responsibilities and duty that we often feel as adults. I couldn't make her too young or too old, because during the story, she has to make hard decisions for the first time in her life. But the support characters, her family, are from previous books. When I began writing that book, I had a history already set up. So, that's not really fair to the question.

I wrote two teen boys, both in Steampunk stories. One is a street kid and a mechanic, and the other is a navigator on a magical airship. Neither of them have backgrounds, really, but I wrote their first few chapters.

With the street kid, I gave him a setting: he lives in a house with other boys from the street, under the management of a man who provides their food and comfort items like cigarettes and booze. Nothing other than that exists in his background, but it felt like enough to give him a chapter. The character has a girl he's running with, and their relationship is what i hope people will be interested in watching, as I let his background remain intentionally in the shadows.

With the navigator, the situation is different. He has a background, but I don't bring it into the first couple chapters. Mostly because I'm only sure of a few details. The captain of the ship took the boy aboard over a year ago, when the boy got caught stealing from the captain. Rather than hand him over to guards to be executed, he took him and gave him a job and a life. There's a young woman on the airship, the mechanic, and he's got a huge crush on her. Problem is, he's 13 and she's 21. I wrote a sample of these characters as an entry to Phil's Diversity Challenge, and I think it was at least partly successful. But yeah, I realized I don't have much of a story, what I have is a weird little pile of characters and nothing for them to do.

Writing young characters has some tricky points. I always worry about how to portray them as POV characters.
 
I just find out who the protagonist is going to be, what the general plot is, and then throw them into wherever the starting point needs to be. The protagonist is usually what I start with.
 
For my WIP, I started with some basic idea of what roles I needed characters for. In my outline, I filled those roles with stereotyped characters. I tried writing the story from a single POV, but the story failed miserably, according to beta readers. They didn't put it in those words. :)

Seeing that I needed to know more about my supporting characters, I wrote scenes from their POVs. Many of these scenes will not survive the final edit of the book. But the characters are no longer caricatures. I learned their desires, needs, and motives, and all those now inform my writing of scenes that include or impact those characters.

For future books, I plan to do this exercise for supporting characters, to write scenes from their POVs, even if I don't plan to include those scenes in the book. I find this exercise essential for me to really understand my characters.
 
The initial idea I had for my WIP was simple. I wanted a story about revenge. So I needed a villain and I needed a protag who would be seeking revenge.

But at the same time, I didn't want this to be a typical revenge tale, the sort where a fully developed adult has suffered a tragedy years earlier (e.g., loss of wife & children) and is seeking revenge in a controlled, meticulous manner. I wanted the revenge to be a powerful motivator for the protag, all-consuming, but sloppy. So I chose a younger protag, just shy of 20 years old, who has dreamt and planned his revenge for about 12 years, but in the way children and teens have fantastical and unrealistic aspirations. He has certainly prepared, having learned an odd and creepy magic from his guardian during all those years, but steps beyond that have been fantasy—until very recently, when a situation occurs that finally opens up a pathway.

He's a solo operator, without friends and a support network of any kind when the story opens, although the recent event has thrown him into the company of a relatively minor government official who wants to benefit as much from his special abilities as he want to benefit from that official's endeavors. I.e., the official has a key for opening up this character's chance to kill the villain. So they are basically using each other and have no ties beyond that.

The villain needed to be someone worthy of being the target of an all-consuming revenge. He's a psychopath in his late twenties who, as a teen, raped and killed the aforementioned avenger's mother 12 years earlier. He's also the heir to an expansionist kingdom and has his own obsessions, killing his mother the Queen and expanding his magical abilities through discovery of the powerful source of magic in that kingdom.

I feel reasonably good about these two characters. But the problem I ran into was the fact that both of these characters are obsessive personalities, exceedingly focused on their objectives in pathological ways. They each have other quirks, and I find them to be immensely interesting, but I felt that writing from either POV would be boring. If every thought surrounds the obsession....well, how boring. I tend to dislike main POVs that are neurotic, anyway. No doubt, any character will have a variety of thoughts, but I didn't think these two would have a lot of germane thoughts beyond their goals; i.e., I couldn't rely on a miscellany ("Oh, this apple tart is better than I expected!") simply to open up the POVs.

Also, I find such obsessiveness to be inherently mysterious in real life. At least, whenever I've met people who seem extremely focused on something that doesn't interest me, I find that obsession to be somewhat mysterious. So I thought that maybe these two characters would be more interesting if left mysterious, i.e. if they were viewed from the outside by other characters. No doubt the two would have extreme influence over the story, but I didn't need to be constantly inside their heads.

So I had to turn to other characters to find my POV's. I had already been developing these other characters for fleshing out the story. As I considered them one by one, I still couldn't settle on a main POV. I liked the idea of using the villain's "sidekick" for a POV character; he's also creepy, but at least his thought processes are not focused on a single irrational obsession. But he couldn't be the main POV. Others fell into the same category. Interesting as POV characters, potentially, but not for carrying the whole novel.

So I had to create a couple new characters who would intimately tie into the plot/events and who would have/develop important connections to the avenger and villain. One is a 14-year-old commoner and possible orphan (mother died in childbirth but father disappeared a few years before the opening of the novel), and the other is a princess of a neighboring kingdom betrothed to the villain in an arranged marriage. (The arrangement ties into the inciting events.) A third POV is a character I'd already created, the younger brother of the villain.

The thing about these three characters is that they are far more rational than the avenger and villain, but they are also less "powerful" vis-à-vis events, or influential, at least at first.

But all that said, I'm still picking my way through a first draft, so I don't know whether I might introduce another POV. I might even insert some scenes using the avenger and villain as POV characters.
 
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Addendum: It occurs to me that this importance of choosing POV might be an issue running parallel with the issue of choosing characters for a novel, from the beginning—but maybe it's a little separate? A special consideration? For my WIP, my initial plans, when I first had an inkling for the story, were to use that avenger character as the main and perhaps only POV character. But that plan went out the door fairly quickly. My process wasn't 100% rational in this regard, at first. I just realized that, yes, he had to be the main protag, but no, I couldn't even force myself to open the book writing from his perspective for a single scene; so how could I write a book's worth of scenes from his POV? It just wasn't going to happen; I'd be staring at a blank page forever. That set my mind to thinking....For awhile I thought my idea was crap and the novel wouldn't happen because how can I have a main character whose POV bored me so much? And yet he was so cool, so interesting, so important to the story.

I'm tempted to start a new thread on "How do you choose which character will be a POV character?" A lot of the times, this is almost a non-issue, since MC, protag, and POV are all the same character. I thought that's what my WIP would be at first. But it's not.
 
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C

Chessie

Guest
I'm not necessarily attached to character. Sometimes I mix and match a character from one story and put them in another. What I care the most about is the story's message. The characters are just smaller versions of that message. Heroes I choose purseposefully. The supporting cast I create on the fly. This is why I favor scenes where there are more than 2 characters present. It's like acting. :D
 
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