Creating Characters
One of the best parts about writing is creating the characters that populate my stories. I love the process of bringing each new character to life.I’ve developed a character worksheet that I fill out for each main character before I begin writing their story. The four-page worksheet is SUPER detailed and includes physical descriptions, personality, family history, fears, favorite things, and much, much more.
In addition to my character worksheet, I also find online images of movie stars or models who best fit my characters’ descriptions. While the pictures never totally fit, I love to have something I can refer back to as I write to help me visualize and describe the characters more uniquely.
While I try to get to know everything possible about my main characters before I write, invariably those characters reveal more as I start telling their story. They often surprise me with parts of them or their past that I didn’t know existed.
In fact, my characters become so vivid, if a stranger were to walk by and listen to me talking about them, they’d hear my earnestness and passion and believe I was describing real people. (And then when they learned I was talking about fictional characters, they’d promptly think I was crazy!) (Not that it’s ever happened before, eh-hem.)
For my upcoming time-crossing release, Come Back to Me, I especially had fun writing the characters. The heroine, Marian Creighton, is a modern-day research scientist for a pharmaceutical company who has lost her mother to a genetic disease and is now losing her sister. And the hero, William Durham, is a medieval knight, who has been fighting in the Hundred Year’s War over in France for ten years and has come back to his home in Canterbury, England for a short break.
Both characters are complex with lots of baggage. Add in the time travel element, and the characters became even more complex, especially when they collide and sparks begin to fly!
To give you a taste of the characters, here are the images I found for them as well as a few interesting things about them. Also take a look at the trailer that my publisher made! Isn’t it great?
So, what do YOU think brings a character to life? Have you had any favorite characters recently who seemed to jump off the page?
