Please help out by adding any spare characters you might have hanging about, or observed, for every poor starving would-be like myself looking for inspiration. I'll start with two and try remember to add they come to me. -------- Felicity Swallow. A name on door near my workshop. -------- The football verbaliser. Sitting next to me as I watch Arsenal v Leeds. For an hour and a half he has muttered sweetly under his breath, like a monk reciting scripture. That's not so interesting, lots of fans do that. But. One, he is consistent and constant and has never raised his voice above a prayer. Two, whilst he is commenting on the match every now and then, mostly he is calculating football futures. "City wins three, Leeds go down, muffled muffled two oh, equal on points, Everton to beat muffled, ten points to muffled..." For the whole game. I'm having whole futures painted out for me while I watch. --------
John Arcturus Emerald, investigator in unnatural things. He may or may not be a cat. He has uncovered the alien sabotage plot against the Large Hadron Collider that became known as CERN weasels 1 and 2, but his alerts to humankind were largely ignored.
Most of the time, I add characters when there is a need. They are just assets of the story, after all, so it'd be strange for me to think of a character before a story. I mean... isn't that what it would take to have a spare character? Actually, that's a lie. My first book was like that — I thought of the character and then the story. It ended up making things very complicated because I had to build a story around a character, rather than characters around an idea developed into a story. Why was this a problem, then? It's because the story is the foundation for me which is constructed and developed from an initial idea, you build it on with characters, events, conflict, places, concepts and such. Not that this notion is necessarily universal, of course, it's just what works for me. Did my initial method result in spare characters then? Actually, yeah, one of them was just kind of there for no particular reason. The story and its outcome would be the same without him, so giving him a place and meaning was especially difficult when I was revising later drafts. It was uh... a nightmare. It's like having a dude in a TV show who's just kind of standing there, adding nothing. It's super awkward and I knew that. Not what you were asking for, I know, but I felt like sharing this information.
I generally toss my spare characters into the big jar along with my spare change. I'll check later today and see who is languishing therein.
Baltrina Vidund (Science Fiction Character) Schooled in social engineering, she is capable of manipulating the masses and inflicting legal damage on your opponents. Need someone removed without murder? Accuse them of pedophilia... after Baltrina's team has filled all their data drives with explicit material. Need someone murdered by the masses? Accuse them of heresy with deep fake videos of them doing... heretical things. Baltrina will unleash campaings of social murder on your enemies unlike any they have ever suffered. She is witty, she is gritty, and she shows no pity. When the chaos calms, the damage has already been done, leaving broken opponents, and Baltrina quickly descends into the shadows from where she came. Hire her services today! No guarantees, no refunds, black market contracts may vary.
Something like that. But its cheap to think up a character... (David Hornstronk, a rigger and arborist who recently moved into rigging for natural history shows but finds the downtime and lack of other back-slapping, high energy, horseplay-ing alpha males on set a bit hard to deal with. He is terrified of mosquitoes and always surprising everyone by preferring port and lemonade on a night out. He fantasises about becoming a shibari guru, but his actual sexual tastes are embarrassingly tame.) ... Whereas its a hell of a ball ache to write them a story. Someone should stand for election on that.
Dnuesha Sasux Sjernov is an easily distracted Villain; he rarely follows through with part two of his plans and starts something else that catches his eye. He is often looked down on by other evil villains bc he is so flighty. But he doesn't care. He is rich and cares little for fame. He is mostly bored.
Harris, a student working at a boarding house over the summer. She gets kind of distracted checking a guy into his room --- too many side glances and smiling with the eyes --- and forgets to tell him when breakfast starts. Not that it matters; next morning the chef never turns up any way.
