K3 asked Sebastien de Castell:

This is one I've been having trouble with: what do you do when your character does not fit into your story? My world is perfect and the religious system is perfect, the event (based off of world war 1) is a religious war, the technology and culture, everything's falling into place except for my characters. Has this ever happened for you and how did you deal with it?

Sebastien de Castell I'll do my best to answer your question, but the truth is that I almost always start with a character in a tough situation and then build the world around them. I ask the question, "what world or events would create the most problems for this character and therefore let me explore the themes I care about?" Another way of putting it is that I metaphorically start with a character in a dark cave and give them a flashlight. Every time they move that flashlight beam I want it to illuminate something that in turn illuminates them--their drives and needs and essence.

Now, in your situation I'd ask myself instead, "given this war I'm writing about, who would be the most screwed person in the world?"

Here's an example: let's say I want to write about our own contemporary world but where magic starts working--the spells in books suddenly start to actually do things. Who would be the most screwed person in this world? The temptation might be to write about someone who now has magic but isn't sure what to do with it or gets involved in some magical war, but that's not the "most screwed person in the world" (to me, anyway.) So what character might I want to write about?

Well, what about a New Age Wiccan who's spent the last twenty years teaching people magic and rituals--none of which really produced physical results but nonetheless she's been a sort of guru for a lot of people. Now magic is starting to work in a concrete way except it's not working for her. So her career is over and people figure she's always been a fraud, her social relationships are breaking down because she can't help but resent her friends and family being able to do what she can't, and her own deepest sense of identity is ruined. What does she do next? How does she deal with her situation? What if she's now threatened by a former student she once kicked out of her group? Would she start going down darker and darker roads trying to find some magic that worked for her?

Assuming that's the character I want as the centre of my story, I then build up other characters around her--people who would challenge her to look at the problem in different ways. What character might try to force her to just "accept it and move one?" Which one might push her to try black magic spells? I look for people who will tempt her, seduce her, challenge her...etc in different ways until she will ultimately be forced to confront who she is at the deepest level of her being.

If I were writing about a war, I might explore the idea of a character who suddenly learns that the entire war was set off by something he did (imagine the guy who was ordered to kill Arch-Duke Ferdinand before WWI--what if he'd been just following orders, trying to do something vital to help his own people, only to discover his actions sparked terrible events?) Maybe someone finds out his identity and plans to make him the most infamous man in the world--bad enough for our assassin, but it will mean his entire extended family will likely be targets for revenge killings. What he does next tells us who he is.

Hope that's of some help!

Best of luck,

Sebastien

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