Timothy Knutson
asked
David Wong:
You have written three of my all time favorite books, and I think a huge part of why I love them so much is the characters, both main and secondary. Even just the characters who tend to wander in for a chapter seem fleshed out and funny. I was wondering how much backstory you personally imagine for your characters that doesn't make it into the book? Do you know their whole lives as you write them?
David Wong
I don't have their whole life story in mind, but I try to get to a place where if you put a gun to my head, I could come up with the rest of their story - meaning I feel like I understand them enough that I could fill it in. The guiding principle from the start has been that everybody sees themselves as the main character of their own story - they may not think of themselves as heroic, the biggest jerk you know might just think of himself as a "survivor", someone who gets by in a world in which everything is stacked against him. Everyone is fighting their own battle. So if I write a rough version of a scene in which one of the "extras" is just an archetype, I try to go back on the second pass and really say, let's make this a human being. This guy dresses like a cowboy, why does he do that? How does he see himself? How would he react in an emergency? And like I said if you tied me down and forced me to come up with a biography for the guy I could work backward and say, "Well, probably grew up with both parents, played sports in high school, probably had brothers but was the oldest..."
And for you aspiring writers out there, here's a tip. If you watch people closely in your everyday life, you'll constantly get little hints about their life that really triggers your imagination - the middle-age real estate agent who has a faded tattoo on her chest that she tries to keep hidden but you glimpse it when she bends over, the mechanic who on his desk has a souvenir he brought back from India. Throw those little things in there - you see them in real life, they should be in your book, too. No, you don't have to explain them. You don't get those explanations in real life. They're just hints that your side characters have a life that has nothing to do with your story. Always imply that they're living out their own story, because they are.
And for you aspiring writers out there, here's a tip. If you watch people closely in your everyday life, you'll constantly get little hints about their life that really triggers your imagination - the middle-age real estate agent who has a faded tattoo on her chest that she tries to keep hidden but you glimpse it when she bends over, the mechanic who on his desk has a souvenir he brought back from India. Throw those little things in there - you see them in real life, they should be in your book, too. No, you don't have to explain them. You don't get those explanations in real life. They're just hints that your side characters have a life that has nothing to do with your story. Always imply that they're living out their own story, because they are.
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