![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Writing about Writing - Day 9
9 Jun 2010 10:35 am9. How do you get ideas for your characters? Describe the process of creating them.
What comes first, the chicken or the egg? That's the way I feel about how characters occur to me. I cannot think of an instance where a character idea came to me that was devoid of any kind of situation or context. I often have what I think of as a "flash," in which a person plus action/setting stamps itself on my brain in vivid detail.
Sometimes, I have only to turn my attention to the person and their personality and past and possible future come pouring out. Other times, I have to ask the questions: "who are you?" "what are you doing here?" "what do you want?" to help form the character in my mind. A third type of creation comes after an idea. Meaning, a what-if or an event occurs to me, and I have to ask what kind of characters belong with those circumstances. So process really depends on how fully formed the characters and their needs are at the beginning. Perhaps unsurprisingly, characters and their more-or-less complete story arcs occur to me a LOT more easily now that I've been writing for a while.
Under the cut, I've detailed what came first character or plot for each of my WIPs and planned future novels.
( Read more... )
What comes first, the chicken or the egg? That's the way I feel about how characters occur to me. I cannot think of an instance where a character idea came to me that was devoid of any kind of situation or context. I often have what I think of as a "flash," in which a person plus action/setting stamps itself on my brain in vivid detail.
Sometimes, I have only to turn my attention to the person and their personality and past and possible future come pouring out. Other times, I have to ask the questions: "who are you?" "what are you doing here?" "what do you want?" to help form the character in my mind. A third type of creation comes after an idea. Meaning, a what-if or an event occurs to me, and I have to ask what kind of characters belong with those circumstances. So process really depends on how fully formed the characters and their needs are at the beginning. Perhaps unsurprisingly, characters and their more-or-less complete story arcs occur to me a LOT more easily now that I've been writing for a while.
Under the cut, I've detailed what came first character or plot for each of my WIPs and planned future novels.
( Read more... )
