Character development writing tips

Creating Characters in Springtime

Spring equinox

I’ve forgotten to count the atmospheric rivers that have gushed across the San Francisco Bay Area, but the incredible deluge seems to have sparked a lot of literary ideas for me. When the 50 mph winds are bending trees sideways and sinkholes are appearing in the roads, it’s a subtle hint that you have nowhere better to go than your writing desk. I’ve cradled my laptop many of these dark, rainy mornings. I’m feeling a low rumble of energy, the heading-into-spring burst of vitality that soon will pop leaves out of the soil and bare branches. I’m channeling that raw power into one of the hardest tricks in writing fiction: creating believable, interesting new characters.

Creating Characters

It’s a heady process, creating characters. Letting new people emerge from my mind’s recesses makes me dizzy, teetering downstairs for a fresh cup of coffee to return and invite new people to emerge from my brain. Do they come from a realm somewhere between sleep and daydreaming? Who knows. For me, it’s all about a person with a problem, one they’ve created for themselves. 

Once you locate a character with a driving internal problem, you can flesh him or her out as a whole person. Lisa Cron is the essential writer on this. Her essay on how a character’s misbelief drives the plot gave me the ability to deeply dive into my emergging characters. How they fail to understand their own journey–that’s a story. For more ideas about how to write characters, check out my page of Resources for Writers.

Whether a writer feels they all come from within, from the vast ocean of the subconscious, or are channeled from somewhere mysteriously beyond it, the process of a character’s unfolding is magical. Often they come fully formed, complete with a history and personality, even with a certain appearance. I suspect it’s a combination of my subconscious (since some of my characters remind me of my relatives) and a psychic source of information that’s well above my pay grade, and to which I sometimes gain brief access.

Let the surprises come

Creating a new character feels like bumping into someone at a party and discovering they invented glue or danced with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. People are full of surprising experiences, and characters can emerge out of thin air like rabbits from magicians’ hats. Currently, I have prestidigitated these imaginary people for a new story:

a prescient blonde child
a minor criminal trying to invent a new scam
an toy-animal-knitting amateur sleuth
a pregnant psychic.

A new book in the works means creating characters. Even if some are repeat characters, they have to have changed. I like starting off spring full of surprises, like a fish that’s a teapot. Like clouds that seem to pen a story across the sky. By the way, the new novel will be a mystery. Like the process of inventing its population.

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