Characters That Walk Off the Page

If you've read my books, it's probably no surprise to you that I love my characters. All of my stories are heavily driven by the people I’m fortunate enough to spend so much creative time with. They become my best friends while drafting, and I have been known to have conversations with them when I'm folding laundry or washing dishes or shovelling.

So I figured I'd talk a bit about how they come about, for anyone getting started and feeling like their characters are staying strangers.

First off, full disclosure, a lot of my character dev is instinctual. They have a habit of walking fully fledged into my brain, so I only have a bit of work to do to draw out some of the details. And a lot of what I learn/becomes character canon is based on moments that happen while I write, not planned in advance

(See: Trace's preference of cinnamon over chocolate, and Alyssa's judgement for same)

The first thing I tend to notice about a character is their attitude. Sometimes it's just a vibe (laid back, I tense, perky, feisty), and sometimes it's more specific (Venn with her bloody daggers and her wolfish grin). I believe this is the sort of thing you can hone with practice, but it does mean opening yourself up to imaginary friends and seeing where they take you. 

Once I have that initial glimpse, I tend to move them around like a character builder in a video game, trying to figure out what sort of situation they'd find themselves in. Do they stumble into trouble (Jeff, Alyssa), or start it themselves (Venn), or maybe their purpose is to stand between trouble and the world (Kat, Naya). Are they more likely to try to back away from responsibility (Allegra) or be nosy and push forward (Daphne)?

How are they with the people around them? More lone wolf (Kat, Venn, Gabe) or more community-oriented (Daphne, Alyssa, Naya). In this, I do tend to have a type... Any guesses which way I default with the majority of my characters?

Once I have all of those vibes (never details at this stage, just vibes), I look more closely at their physical traits. Hair, eyes, habits. These are the elements you can put directly on the page that make characters stand out from each other. What self-soothing gestures are they like to show, or have they trained themselves out of them so they appear almost cold and detached? (Gabe cups the back of his neck, Alyssa plays with her hair, Venn plays with her blades).

All of these things start to bring them to life for the first draft, and from there, for me, it's a bit exploratory as I watch them navigate through the story and around the other characters. Sometimes they take me by surprise, sometimes they're stubborn and hide and it takes me a while to figure them out, but I do get there.

Then the real work begins. *I* know who they are now, but I want to make sure the reader does too. This is all in the editing.

With every pass, I draw out their voice, bring those details I noticed more firmly onto the page, make sure every scene/line of dialogue/gesture is consistent with who they are.

They can be flawed, they can be broken, they can make bad decisions, but every decision needs to fit with *who they are*. Is the bad decision they're making because of their unshakable loyalty/sense of responsibility/insatiable curiosity? Are they self aware enough to know why they made that choice, or is it only in reflection after the fact that they realize why (in my experience, the former is easier to manage. Having characters be fully aware they're making a stupid choice but rationalizing it is often easier for readers to accept than having it come off as random bad judgement.)

And from here, you dig. More internal thoughts, more focus on their emotions, their motivations, their goals. If everything comes back to that, then the reader has reason to root for them, and they're more likely to want go grab a coffee with them when the book is finished.

If you're interested in a craft book that talks about character, one of my go-tos is John Truby's Anatomy of a Story