Character Café: The Character-Creating Power of Reimagination

Like the main event itself, NaNo Prep is always better with an incredible writing community around you. Luckily, our forums come with such a ready-made community. We’ve asked Alicia Audrey, forums moderator, to share her best character creation and development tips, straight from the Character Café:

Creating characters can bring tremendous joy to the pre-writing and writing experience. One of my favorite ways to develop character is to exaggerate a known person.

The vibrant aunt, the saucy grandmother, the irritable boss, the perfect sibling: they all give us a lot of material for a running start. There are people in our lives who, with a nudge in a certain creative direction, could suit our story lines. It can be the greatest of pleasures to reimagine the people we encounter on a daily basis, amping them up with interesting characteristics and subplots and making them barely recognizable…

Whatever our methods, once characters are developed, we need to dive deeper into them. Sometimes, even though we create them, they only reveal parts of themselves on a need-to-know basis. That’s when we have to put on our hardcore writer gear and get serious. A tape recorder, notebook, and pen are completely necessary.

Interviewing characters has become relatively popular in recent character development discussion, but the landscape of this practice is wide and varied. The answers you get depend heavily on the way the questions are asked, the person asking them, and the perceived purpose. As in job interviews, use a variety of styles—group interviews, individual interviews, and situational questions. If you’re well-versed in the character interview, here are some techniques you can add to your bag of tricks:

Make them answer questions in the third person.

Interview them as:

The judge of a competition
An ex
A lie detector test administrator
A speed dater

Force them to answer questions that seem to require background information with “yes” or “no” only. Describe their body language and thought process.

Ask them to describe characters they know well.

Ask them for first impressions of characters they don’t know.

Introduce them to situations and assess their behavior. How would they act:

at a 1980s dance party
at a religious ceremonyas the bearer of the worst possible newsif caught in a lieif they had to make an arrestif they were accused of something they didn’t doif they were in a room with people with radically opposing viewsif they were given an illegal substance

Travel back in time to when they were young.

Describe their visits from the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future.

Ask them to write their own eulogy.

Using these exploratory techniques is sure to lead you to interesting discoveries. Be sure to inhabit the mind of your character as you respond to the questions and situations presented. The authenticity of voice will become apparent, and will color the pages of your novel-to-be.

Alicia Audrey is a writer, editor, blogger, and NaNoWriMo-enthusiast living and working in The Bahamas. She is the volunteer Municipal Liaison for her NaNoWriMo region, local writers’ group coordinator, and lover of flash fiction. She is addicted to milk chocolate, black tea, Coca-Cola, apple green, and snail mail. She can usually be found on Twitter as @_AliciaAudrey.

Top photo by Flickr user Stitch.