Hey Writer Person

Hey Writer Person ✍️ Character Building

@veechiedza asked about character building, and this is such a great topic, it's hard to cover in a single post, but let's hit some broad strokes and maybe we'll do a part two if we need more.

"How do you build character?" What's the WORST answer to this question? The one we hear again and again and decide we just don't have enough magic writer juice to make happen? The worst answer is: "they just came to me, fully formed."

A writer may feel this is true, because the last two years plus of editing and rewriting and criticism-taking is a blur of defeat, failure, despair and finally excitement. A LOT HAPPENED between page one and publication, and it's hard to answer in a question. Kinda like asking a mom, how'd you raise such a nice, successful kid? *Shrug* just kinda happened. Lies. LOTS OF STUFF HAPPENED and it's hard to pinpoint the specific antique brass key that finally unlocked the door to awesome.

And I think that's because they didn't use a pdf (or if they did, their "authorishness" won't allow them to admit as much). The internet is full of excellent free character building pdfs. Give it a search. You'll find something and there is no shame in it AT ALL. If a worksheet helps u flesh out your characters, perfect, get it done. 

But if you're not a worksheet person (I'm not, feels too organized and neat and I collapse beneath organization, which is not to say there's anything wrong with organization, I'm just explaining why I can never find matching socks), you can start your story without knowing who your main character is. Well, you have to know something. You have to have a blank canvas of a person to throw paint at -- he/her/they and a problem. That's it. There is nothing wrong with not knowing their eye colour or how they take their coffee. As you write, as the story unfolds, those things will present themselves. And I don't mean they'll present themselves like a voice from the clouds. I mean, you have to hunt for the pieces. Let's say the crime scene your MC is investigating is in a library, and you think  it might be interesting if they find a copy of SOMETHING splattered in the victim's blood that is important to the MC. Pick a book. Any book. Let's say Little Women. Ok. Why does your MC stop on a copy of blood soaked Little Women? Maybe because they read it with their sisters as a child and now they are estranged from those sisters and it haunts them. Maybe their sister is dead. Or maybe it was the copy they left a message in for a blind date back when they were in college. What are the odds this book would be here, with the victim?  Maybe Little Women was the book her grandmother gave her just before she died.

The situation your character finds themselves in can dictate who they are. But you have to look for the opportunities in a given scene, and develop them. Please understand, going in with a whole plan of who your character is before you even write the first word of your story is a very good and helpful way to write. It will save u a lot of headaches. But you don't HAVE to. You can get to know your character as you write. But as you discover new things, you have to keep going back to the beginning and thread those things through. So let's say in the library scene, we discover our MC read Little Women with their estranged sisters as kids. But this is page 50. So go back to that scene on page 10, where your MC is coming home from a long hard day of work and just finished getting lectured by the chief, job threatened, and is having a sad meal alone because they have sacrificed family for work (we're dealing in cliches but this is an example, just go with me). Now that you know she's got this Little Women thing with estranged sisters, maybe she checks her phone messages to discover a message from the youngest sister shyly checking in. Maybe shes asking if your MC has heard from the oldest? How does your MC feel about either of them? Now go back to page 50 and keep going. And this is the process the whole way to the end. One step forward two steps back. But eventually, around the 3/4 mark, you know so much about your character that you don't have to go back nearly as much. You build momentum. And eventually when someone asks how you built them, it will all be such a blur you can say "it just kinda happened" .