Where do you find your character spark?

Discussion in 'Character Development' started by Megs33, Feb 7, 2017.

  1. Thomas Babel

    Thomas Babel Member

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    Get drunk and write. ;) Edit later.
     
  2. Alastair James Cunningham

    Alastair James Cunningham New Member

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    In my method of character development in terms of looking for a strong technique to start off, I think the best way to develop them is to make one a reflection of your inner person. I've done that with my protagonist who is very much his own character (as he is in his own situation that I cannot ever be found in, and he develops in a way that reflects on my traits and how I develop the story and the world of the story. I thought of who I am, and who I want to be, and I started of by making my Protagonist a reflection of who I am, who I want to be & what I wish I could do; and later developing certain traits of his character into the story when I got the gist of what I wanted.

    I hope it helps you in your endeavour; I found it helpful when starting out in character development.
     
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  3. LostThePlot

    LostThePlot Naysmith Contributor

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    I 100% agree with this. Every character is a reflection of the author. And that's a good thing. That's something you should embrace. It's how you can make every character sympathetic, even absolutely monstrous ones. You just put a little flash of something you know and that you understand into them. Maybe you have to exaggerate that a bit to characterize a murderer but you'll make someone so much more real if you play from things that you've really felt; fantasizing about killing your boss or being so angry you very nearly lashed out at someone. Working it from something that you know on a visceral level is how you get something that feels like a real person.

    I am a big beardy guy who writes teenage girls; not something I can say I directly experienced. But I know what it's like to be a teenager; wanting to be a grown up but not quite being ready, the constant fight between wanting to fit in and wanting to be unique; the angst and eunni and all that stuff that is almost universal. And that's where I write from with them. They all have these parts to them of being lonely and feeling misunderstood and that drives them to (in order) pretend to have cancer, enter the world of beauty pageants, join a travelling circus and join a bike gang. All of them have very clear parts of me in them, some real pain in them that they are trying to make sense of. They have different lives and personalities but they share an emotional core that I really get.

    Cancer-girl feels like no-one knows the real her and thinks people only pay attention to her because they think she has cancer. Pageant-princess starts out thinking that she can just go and win a pageant no problems because the girls there are clearly a bit weird and a bit crazy but as she as she meets the obsessive, lonely, hyper-competitive, prematurely sexualised pageant girls she find (to her distress) that she's exactly like them; her friends really don't get her and she'll cheat and lie and do whatever it takes to win just like the other pageant girls. Circus girl is a loner and an orphan who lives in her own head, just getting by the best she can living with this violent drunken foster dad, counting the days until she can just leave and never look back but tortured by the fact that she'll leave her foster mum and brother behind when she does. Biker girl grew up around the bikers and loves their whole schtick but as she's grown up she's looking for how to really express herself; not totally leaving that world behind but not just doing that either, she needs to find herself and someone who gets her.

    All of this is stuff that I have a real kinship for and, if you had to pick one, the me character in all my stories are these girls. Sad and lonely and with stuff that they just can't talk about, but still strong and determined to be themselves even when that's incredibly painful for them. And in the end they find their happiness by being themselves and growing up enough to figure out that just being themselves is good enough and people will love them for them.

    When people ask me why I write I like to tell them 'because I can fix my characters' and while a bit glib that's kinda true. My characters share a lot of me but in a book I can make sure they find happiness; that when they are themselves people will love them still. And that's all stuff that comes right out of me; my all consuming fear of rejection and failure. In my books my girls can get past them in a way that I kinda still can't. And within that lies a spark of something that really brings them to life.

    Putting a spark of yourself into characters is what will really bring them to life; fears and hopes and dreams that strike a chord and speak to you. That's what lets you get inside characters that overtly you have no connection to; it gives them a core of universal humanity that really makes them work as people.

    To make this more practical, just write what you know. Not the obvious stuff. But when you think why then just let yourself run with what immediately feels obvious to you. Why does she keep lying? Well, why would I keep lying. That's all it takes.

    Yeah I agree with this, at least in principle. I do most of my writing high. Always have. Helps keep me really focused and makes me much more emotionally open, to the point that I am often writing in tears. I can write sober, sort of, but I can't do it in the same way. I can't focus the same way and I don't have the same immediately emotional response to things. Normally I'm too critical and too rational and don't just feel what I want from a scene.

    Not that I would suggest a drug addiction is the key to good writing; I'm a manic depressive with a bunch of other problems (see above) but in general don't be afraid of just letting yourself write what feels good or important or sad in the moment and coming back later. Just let yourself write it and see where you end up. Editing isn't hard. If you happen upon something that you didn't expect give yourself permission to explore it. Writing is a marathon not a sprint, you have the time to just follow an inclination.

    However you do it; let your characters surprise you. Get into a flow and just keep going until you've got it down how you like it. Even if you don't know how it fits, that doesn't matter, explore the character in a way that feels genuine. That's much much more important to writing good characters than sticking to the plan for the story structure.
     
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  4. Miscellaneous Worker

    Miscellaneous Worker Member

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    Writing goals: set the limits of writing sober to those of writing high.
     
  5. LostThePlot

    LostThePlot Naysmith Contributor

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    Honestly I don't even try to write sober. If something occurs to me that I want to write then I will but outside of that I just don't bother trying to make myself. I'm not kidding about how bad my focus is. I turn into the worst kind of not-quite-writer who writes a line, stops to check the news, comes back, writes a line, decides maybe I want something else on the in background, spends half an hour picking what I want on, then come back and maybe write some more. And it's frustrating to the point that trying to do it is a waste of time, honestly. Only when I have nothing else to do (specifically while travelling) can I just sit and write without pharmaceutical intervention and even then it's definitely not my best work. I throw up the occasional nice phrase and useful idea but no matter what I have to come back and re-write it. I just don't have the same kind of investment in what I'm writing.

    Fortunately this isn't that big of a worry for me because I get through so much on my writing days that it just doesn't matter. I get high and write every about every third day and my average output is about ten thousand words, sometimes up to fifteen and at that rate even though I over-write a lot I can put out a completed first draft in less than six weeks, and completed manuscripts about eight weeks later. And at that rate it's just not that big of a deal. It's been about four years and I have put out nine book length projects; the only thing that's slowed me down was trying to write two different trilogies of books as my first projects. That seemed like a good idea at the time, with characters I liked and worlds I knew well, but in practice going from editing the previous book to jumping right back into the same exact characters with nothing in the middle eventually took its toll and in both cases I didn't have a clear idea for the third book either.

    Still, my output has been pretty good and actually I've found that making an effort to write every day works against me. If I try to keep working on the same project I'll have to re-read and re-write what I wrote before anyway and pushing myself often makes me feel I deserve a day off. Working on a different project gets me excited about that project not the one I'm actually working on. Especially how I work (write a book, edit the book before that, write another one, edit the first one) and how editing is my problem most of the time I need to stay focused in editing and not start getting into a new and exciting project because that's how you end up leaving unedited projects forever and not finishing them.

    Obviously everyone work differently and particularly has different lives. I have the freedom to work on my own terms most of the time and to just put aside days where I do nothing but write and that works great for me. I doubt most people can just pick a random week day to drink poppy-tea and write heartrenching romance, but I can and that's what works. I have no problems whatsoever coming up with ideas or writing very large amounts like that. And the rest of the time I can write stuff or not, or edit a bit, or not, and just not worry because when I'm writing I get so very much done. If you're a normal human being who has to write in their evenings or at weekends then yeah I totally get trying to write as much as you possibly can but that's just not a big deal to me.
     

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