I don’t know about you, but I’ve been waiting for this section for a long time!

Meet Your Character

This week, we’re going to go through some exercises to learn about your character.

We’ll be doing multiple character weeks because I’m a character-based writer and this stuff matters to me a LOT. A lot. Alotalot.

A lot.

For now, though, we’re going to start off simply, and using a method that’s probably going to drive you nuts before we’re done with the NaNoWriMo prep lessons.

We’re going to ask questions.

Characters

We will be discussing OTHER characters in later lessons. For now, we will focus on your primary protagonist. If you have multiple protagonists, sidekicks, antagonists, henchmen, political figures, and random homeless children in your book – please shelve them for now. I promise we’ll come back to them later. Your protagonist needs to be the best, most polished character in your book because they are the person you’re asking your readers to care about.

I promise I won’t forget the rest of the cast in later lessons. =]

Blueprints

We are still in roughneck mode, here. When you answer these questions, do so with the full knowledge that you can and will change anything that needs changing later. This is blueprinting, not construction – if you decide you don’t like the location of a bathroom on a blueprint, you can easily change it at any time before the toilet is installed.

Don’t feel hemmed in by your answers to these questions, just answer them to the best of your ability for now and move on.

Today’s Questions

• Male or Female?

Often, this is determined by writer preference. For example, I am more comfortable writing female characters than male ones. Note that I do NOT believe that your own gender should determine the gender of your character. Male authors write female characters just as well (or as terribly) as female authors do. The opposite also holds true.

I ask that question first because it gives me a hook; something to ground myself with and hold on to while I ask the rest of the questions.

Remember all that worldbuilding we’ve been doing? Here’s where it comes in handy. The next questions are NOT the character’s name, height, hair and eye color, weight, age, or (heaven help me, I’ve read books where this was the main “characterization”) wardrobe.

• Where, in the world that you have (in some cases painstakingly) built, does your character live at the start of your story?

Note that you don’t have to know what your story is yet. A better way of phrasing the question may be “where does your character live when we meet them” or “where does your character live before SOMETHING CHANGES and the story begins?”. Story is based around change, but in order for change to matter, you need to have a baseline for “normal” or “before the change”.

• What happened to your character before the start of the story?

Again, you don’t need to know what your story is yet. I promise that we’ll work on the story and make sure the character weaves into it neatly at a later date, but first we need to throw the switch and breathe some life into this protagonist of yours.

Today’s Example

In Stained, my preliminary concept was for a character with a magic power. Based on my worldbuilding rules, this means she was born into one of the mountain societies. Following the society rules that I set out for magic folk in that world, if she had a normal childhood, she would have been drafted into the military as soon as her eye color changed, before age 10.

Do I want her to have that normal childhood? At the moment, I’m not sure.

Daydreaming

My favorite writing tool isn’t spreadsheets, questions, paper, pens, or computers; it’s my imagination. I do my best work when I’m daydreaming.

One of my daydreaming sessions fleshed out a possible alternate childhood for her, where she didn’t get drafted into the military. Instead, after a horrifying home experience that left her family dead, she lived on the streets, scavenging and hiding her face from the military so she wouldn’t get picked up.

How do I choose which one I want? Right now, I don’t. I write them BOTH down. The second option is obviously more interesting and conflicty, but it’s also more cliche’d and eye-rolly. Additionally, if the fact that she avoided the military and lived off the streets (and the skills she would need to survive that way) DOESN’T HELP THE STORY, then it’s useless. If it doesn’t help the story, then it’s just a gimmick, and any reader would be justified in throwing the book against the wall in disgust.

Right now, I don’t know what my story is, so I’m keeping both doors open.

For me, that means I’ve got extra homework this week, because I will flesh out TWO pasts for my character instead of just one.

Homework

This week’s homework is to ask the questions above and really think about your character’s life. How was she born? Where are her parents? What education did he have? What skills did he learn?

Remember, your character is growing up in the world that you’ve created for him. His past should be fully tied to the world, and his experiences, values, and skills will reflect that.

Take some time to imagine your character’s life, from birth to story’s beginning. Would he have filched apples from noble’s orchard as a child? Maybe he fell out of the tree and broke his arm during an escape. Did he get caught? How was his arm healed?

This apple episode will almost certainly NOT make it into the novel, but it will serve to cement your character in your mind. Maybe your character would NEVER stoop to filching apples. Maybe she was the daughter of the noble who owned the orchard, and this was the first time she realized that there were poor, starving boys out on the street who might steal apples even with the threat of having their hand cut off as punishment for thievery.

Are your character’s parents still alive and around? Did they grow up in a big family? Brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles? How did people treat the character when she was a toddler? How about a pre-teen? Or a teenager?

Is your character a virgin? Why or why not?

Spend some time watching your protagonist grow up in your imagination.

Share

If you feel like it, write a silly little event from your character’s childhood and share it. The apple tree incident above, for example. We’re still blueprinting and I know that planning uses different areas of the brain than writing does, but that’s no reason we can’t have a little fun with this.