I was recently asked “How do you, personally, build characters?”
This is my answer
I murder someone I know… What I mean is, I often base characters on people or other characters that I know well, and I can reliably capture their speech cadence, mannerisms, quirks, etc. I use them as a stand in – just something to start from. Then I find that one thing that will break them … and I use it. It’s gotta be something specific to that character that absolutely destroys their world view.
For example, in my novel Into the Night and Gone, I have a character (Annie) based almost one-to-one on someone I know. And that was okay in the first few chapters, but in the second major scene I had with her, I tore her apart. This character (and the person she’s based on) has very idealistic and romantic notions of love and relationships. And so (spoilers) I gave her a perfect marriage and then forced her to deal with infidelity and divorce.
The Annie that came out of that was drastically different than the Annie that went in. Her thought process had changed, the way she talked changed, some of her mannerisms had changed, even the way she looked began to change. This character was no longer based on ANYONE. She had gained a type of “person-hood” for herself.
When I first start writing a new book, I often see my characters through rose-tinted glasses. But they don’t really come alive for me until I know them (not just “imagine them”) at their worst as well as at their best, their flaws as well as their strengths, the ways in which they are cruel and the ways in which they are kind.
If I were to put this a little more practically, I might say that my process involves starting with someone I already know, then applying a very specific type of pressure until the character reaches a point (usually a breaking point) where they stop being that other person and start becoming themselves.
It’s something like:
- What does this person believe about life?
- What would most threaten that belief?
- What are they romanticizing?
- What are they avoiding?
- What would they do if that illusion broke?
- How would that change the way they speak, move, love, resent, forgive?
So for me, building characters is less about listing traits and more about finding their breaking point. That’s the moment the character comes alive for me.
Lately I’ve been trying to formalize that process a bit, into a short character-building exercise (mostly for myself) because I’ve noticed that I can’t write when my characters feel flat. And when my characters feel flat, it’s usually because I haven’t found the real breaking point yet.