Character Building

Originally posted: 5-6-2010

You can’t write a novel without spending some time on character building.  I’ve been doing some of that recently for the next installment of my Samuel Branch Series.  Everyone has a take on how to do this successfully and mine is pretty organic.  When I start out, I usually just have a vague sketch of what I want a character to be like.  I try to define what they’re major quirks and strengths are and then I write from there.  I didn’t always handle it this way.  I used to spend a lot of time thinking about the characters, building major histories for them, only to find out I was going to scrap about 90% of what I thought was true because it didn’t accommodate how the characters needed to behave in the story.  I tend to think that this is an important point.  The characters are ultimately there to serve the story, not the other way around.  If you find yourself altering major elements in your plot, to the detriment of the story, you’re probably trying to write around the character.

This does not mean, of course, that you’re characters can be inconsistent.  They need to behave in a way that makes sense, not only in terms of the story, but in terms of what they have done before.  For example, if you have your major villain/antagonist acting in a way that is contrary to all prior behavior, there had better be an exceptionally good reason for it.  The same is true for your hero/protagonist.  I’ll come back to this a little more in an upcoming post on plotting.  The point here is that it’s a lot easier to modify a character (and have it make sense) than it is to modify a story arc on the fly.