Meeting Your Characters For the First Time
Discovering who you're writing about
Recently I’ve been thinking about characters. I consider myself a character-driven writer, yet characters always come to me after plot. When I get a new idea for a story, it’s almost always the overarching conflict that comes to me first — in the case of Project Puzzle that was a puzzle-solving competition with an inheritance at stake; for Project Home it’s a brother going missing.
From there, I tease out the idea and figure out who is driving the story. That’s when I meet my characters.
Except, I don’t really meet them at that point. While I’m planning and brainstorming, I’m deciding on the character — I’m creating them so they can serve the plot. It isn’t until I start drafting that I actually get to know them. That’s when they start to tell me who they really are.
Character evolution in Project Puzzle
When I started planning Project Puzzle, I knew who the murderer was and who their victim was. However, halfway through drafting, I changed both. Why?
The murderer
While I wrote, I realised that my intended murderer was too obvious. They had their own important role in the story, but making them the murderer undid other elements of the plot. One of the other characters was also evolving in a way that gave them murder-y vibes. They seemed exactly the kind of person for the job. So I finished the draft with them as the murderer and smoothed the idea out in revisions.
The victim
When it came to the victim, I realised that I had given two characters the opposite personality. The character who was supposed to get killed was no longer someone I wanted to kill off. They were too complex and intriguing and fun to write about. The person who was not the intended victim had the personality I wanted for the victim. So I changed their fates, and I’m so glad I did.
I consider drafting the point at which I meet my characters for the first time.
Until I begin drafting, my characters and I are acquaintances. I don’t mind not knowing my characters when I start drafting, because while I write, they’ll speak to me. They’ll tell me who they are and they’ll guide their story.
If you met your character for the first time…
Since pondering character evolution and the fact that who they are in a notebook is not who they are in the draft, I’ve wondered what it would be like to meet them.
If I met these characters, what would I get to know about them immediately?
Which things wouldn’t I learn about them until they really knew and trusted me?
What conversations would I have with them?
So, imagine you meet your character in a cafe or a bar, on the bus or in the park… how well would you get to know them?
If you attempted to make conversation, how would they react? Would their response be open or closed?
What details would they be willing to share with you at first?
What topics could you comfortably discuss with them, if any?
What would your first impression of them be?
What would they be wearing or doing? What would this say about them?
Are there any topics of conversation they would avoid?
What three words would you use to describe them?
Sometimes, pulling our character out of the story and looking at them in our real world can make us see them in a different light. It makes us realise who they really are outside the context of the story and away from all the other characters.
So, if you want to meet your characters, try the above exercise!