How My Characters Come To Life

I have recently had fun building out two new character for the next Arbor Clan book. It was one of those instances where the characters emerged as I was writing Hunting The Arbors. They just sort of pop into existence. Since I’m a heavily dedicated plotter, these moments always sort of surprise me. I’m left blinking at the and asking “where did you come from?” I was also just reading about character creation and had been asked about how I build my characters so I thought it would be a fun topic to talk about. Because really, building characters is fun.

There are loosely five steps a character goes through before they fully come to life for me. I say loosely because it doesn’t always happen in this order and often I’m drifting between steps in the early stages.

1. The first step, and where all my characters begin, is with an idea.

Haha, of course. That’s the whole point of needing a character, right?

Right. But let me explain.

The idea that starts the building process can be a mood, a hurt, or a personality trait. It can come to me from listening to a song I’m feeling particularly attached to, or reading something I’m exceptionally pulled into. Or a show, a movie, a dream, or even because something in the current WIP has created this new idea and needs a character to fill it.

Some examples to help explain what this looks like.

Zayne Hawthorne is a warlock you meet in Hunting The Arbors. His idea came to me in 2019 from the song “Under Your Scars” by Godsmack. That mutual hurt and the healing that can come from a partner understanding and not making you try to cover them up is the idea that started this troubled warlock.

2. The next step is Percolation.

Yup, I just sit on the idea. I think on it, exploring how I want to express this idea, what sort of character matches and how I can most accurately re-create that feeling of the idea. Sometimes, additional ideas start collecting together, some old, some new. But the idea is to let it cook. This steps works best when you don’t try to force the answers. Be inspired by the clandestine and let the idea grow.

3. This is one of my favorite steps. You’ll know the character is finished simmering when you can start to visualize them. At this point, they are old enough to start playing with others. They may not have an eye or hair color, you may not know if they are tall or short. You might not even know the details of their past, but you have a vague shape of a male or female character with the specific ideas you’ve come up with attached to them. Letting they play with other characters is where a lot of these things start to develop. A personality and voice begin to distinguish them from other characters.

Often, this is where you will also start to see their habits and quirks develop. This is actually the idea place to explore them, however, I have had a quirk or two show up while I was writing the first draft. An example would be Prince Ealdun in my current WIP. It wasn’t until the first draft that I learned he stress cleans as well as has a problem with changing the plan in the middle of it.

It does not matter if you send them on their play-dates with your own characters or others. I actually encourage letting your characters go to Hogwarts, through the stones, or to befuddle a genius detective who struggles to believe your character has real magic.

There is a caveat to that. Inspiration from other authors is great, but make sure that anything that resonates as true to your character is NOT someone else’s work. If your character goes to play at Hogwarts and suddenly Voldemort is his enemy as well as Harry’s, make sure you change Voldemort enough that you’re villain might remind people of Voldemort, but could never mistaken as the same person.

This step also comes with a warning: as this character develops, the ideas for new characters are likely to sprout. Maybe this character needs friends. Maybe parallel concepts equally call to you and a different version of this character is born, facing different hurts and challenges. Maybe an idea they encounter is the seed to a whole new characters and story line that might not even interact with the original character.

Write them all down. You never know what you will want to come back to.

4. I have a lot of fun at this stage too. After they have spent time with other characters and have developed into their own person, I like to make a mood board for them. By this time, I know what they look like, I know what their personality is, I know their history (broad strokes), and I can start assigning things to them.

This stage is more strategic and less daydream. I’m building a reference page for them for when I write. It’s going to show me their hair, eyes, face, scars, personality, magic talents, weapons of choice (if they get one), everything I need at a glance to jog my memory while writing.

Believe it or not, there is actually quite a bit of “research” that goes into this stage. (I put research in “air quotes” because I’m not looking for every last fact.) As a fantasy writer, there are a lot of world rules I stick to, but there’s also a lot that I just need it to be feasibly and match the idea I’m going for. If there is a cultural aspect, I try to imitate the things that make it feel authentic, but usually make up my own legends. The characters I recently built are Erik Arbor and Min-jae Kim Arbor. Min-jae is going to have Korean heritage (though be mostly American raised) and I wanted him to have a more Korean type weapon. But Erik is his mentor, a Viking from hundreds of years ago. I had to do some looking around to see if that would even be plausible.Time for a slight side tangent. There’s a lot of controversy about AI right now. Some I agree with, like not letting it write the words of my story and not uploading the manuscript I worked so hard on. But does it do GREAT internet research for you? yes. It’s a great tool for asking “Would a hundreds of year old viking be able to teach a flunked K-pop idol how to fight with a Moon Blade?” (The answer is yes, by the way. ) It was not only able to tell me IF, but how the fighting style would develop. (SUPER useful when I start to choreograph fight scenes!)

Now remember, this is just about building a character. Who do you want them to be? Their arc, archetype, and weaving them into the plot comes in the next step.

5. This last part is usually what people think about when building a character. This is where I begin to pick out their wounds, create details of their family history, get a sketch of their arc for the plot and begin to weave them into the story.

This is also where I begin to fill out some form of character sheet. I’m picking their positive and negative trails. I already have an idea of what they should be from their personality but this is where I begin to pick things to either help them or hurt them through their arc.

I also like to assign the things they keep in their pockets, their rooms, their closets, etc. As people, we tend to collect things that have meaning or use to us. By knowing what those are in advance, it helps when writing when a character needs to pull these out. When it’s planned, it feels less like a magic pocket of item generation and holding and more like something that was always there.

When you are to deciding what things are in their pockets and what socks they wear on a given day, then congratulations!! You have built a character!

Mood Board for Zayne Hawthorne