Writing Wednesday—How Do You Come Up With Characters?
2 September 2009
The short answer to this is: I don’t know. If you’re satisfied with that, you may stop reading now.
If not, here’s my attempts to answer.
How I come up with characters is often similar to how I come up with ideas. I’ve talked somewhere about how full books come to me in snatches. Like the one I’m working on now, my first “snatch” of the idea occurred as McKenna and I were leaving the grocery store. I spotted a vanity plate that said, “Buffy.”
My basic thought process was this: Oh, like Ryan Buffington (A boyfriend in 8th grade.) Huh, what if Ryan was here? It’d probably be kind of weird to see him again. I wonder what would have happened if Ryan moved in 8th grade, and I never met Ben. What if I carried a torch for him for those years he was gone, only to have him randomly return to school junior year or something? And then he’d be really surprised that I still liked him … and he’d probably think I was pretty crazy.
By itself, this is barely an opening scene. It has to be pieced together with other “snatches” to become a full book. And characters are the same way.
Like the first thing I knew about Skylar was that I didn’t want her to be anything like me. I’d tried that a few times, writing about quieter girls, and they were just too me. It didn’t work. So I made Skylar the opposite of everything I felt I was. I wrote a draft this way and then realized Skylar had almost no motivation for being the total snot I’d created. And my guess is that she needs motivation to be snotty same as I need motivation to be not-snotty. So I worked on finding motivation for Skylar.
Usually I spend the first draft figuring out what makes my characters tick. Lots of people have created “character worksheets” in which they interview their characters. I know that works for a lot of writers, but for me all that’s worked is spending time with my characters. Pushing them into situations that challenge them. (Poor Skylar really got worked over as I tried to figure her out.)
The fabulous thing about writing primarily teenage characters it that it’s a time in life where all of us are trying to figure out who we are and where we fit into the world. So for me, it’s been very natural that as I discover things about my character, they’re discovering them about themselves as well.
The only other insight I have to share about characters is that they need to have a past. (I’m speaking primarily to aspiring writers at the moment.) One of the biggest things that makes characters read flat is how they seemingly appeared in the world on page one of the book. It’s not enough to just say that Jane and Sally have been best friends since the first grade, the readers need to be able to feel that. They need a history as complicated as yours would be if you were still close with your elementary buds. And this isn’t just something newbies do. I’ve read published books where I’m like, “Okay … why doesn’t this girl have any friends? She’s lived in this town her whole life, she doesn’t have a single friend?” Sigh.
Okay, that’s all for today’s installment of Writing Wednesday.
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