Character (re)Discovery

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My characters make me happy. I find character creation both a bane and a blessing. A bane because my own vanity comes out in full force; at least initially, my main characters are almost always too perfect. If I try to write a stoic, that character is too distant, too alien to be relatable. A blessing because characters are my driving force as a writer.

I am taking a break from the rough draft that has occupied the last several months. It had become an excuse to avoid the story that I should be working on: the novel that, after several drafts, I completely scrapped and rewrote.

A while back, I wrote about the struggle to find my main character’s voice in the new version.

In all the many drafts of the first version, I’d imagined my main character as a stoic. In general (at least for me), this is a poor choice for main characters – particularly female, as cultural and societal expectations of women require a level of emotional availability – because it makes them more difficult to relate to. This is not (yet) a talent I have in my skill set.

However, that stoic personality was wildly inconsistent with the trickster elements that were and are integral to the story.

When I began the rough draft of the new version, having switched to a first-person point of view, I floundered. I realized I didn’t know her. When my critique group read it, every single one of them picked up on that confusion. If the writer can’t pinpoint her character, the readers can’t either.

Now that I’m revising, the character emerging is wonderful and surprising. She is nothing like I had previously imagined and her character arc will be the greater for it. The trickster element that I imagined but never quite executed is present in all her glory. These new discoveries make her more complex and likable; she has become so much more fun to write.

All I did was slightly alter her choices and take my time to build up the side characters in the first chapter to be more complex and three dimensional. The rest just happened on its own.

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