Author's Notes on: Character Building Basics
Barebones character design? YUP
I’ll come out and admit it right now. I feel like the least qualified person to talk about character building.
You see, characters are the most important thing about your narrative. Readers are much more willing to follow a well-written character through a plot they don’t care about than a character they don’t care about through a well-written plot. Ideally, you’ll have a well-written character and a plot they care about, but the point stands.
To explain why I don’t feel qualified to talk about character building, I think it’s important I talk about tabletop RPGs. As some of you know, I play and have played in quite a few campaigns with various groups of friends. Since 2018, for each of these campaigns, I’ve created a “character guide” document for my character that contains things like a basic description, their family tree, history, any relevant background, important other characters in their life, symbology I’ve used in their creation, plot hooks, etc.
I also like using playlists as well, because I was in choir for a number of years and music is still a big part of how I connect concepts in my mind. It’s fun finding music that reminds me of the character or gets me in the mindset to play them.
I do this for every character I play, capping each off with a relevant title — usually part of the lyrics of a song, or a pun, because that’s just the kind of person I am. There are varying levels of success and playtime with each character, but putting this document together is honestly really fun for me.
It provides a solid idea of who each character is and reminds me of how they think and see the world and how I should play them.
So far as I see it, that should logically extend to books too. In theory, for best practices, I should be creating even a small character guide to remind myself of any important information there is regarding a character. I should have a resource handy for myself, so I always know where I can draw on for future plot points and their view of the world.
…so yeah. If it wasn’t clear, that’s not what I do at all.
Book characters don’t get nearly the same treatment.
Whatever compels me to go that into depth about a tabletop RPG character before the first session of the game just doesn’t exist for books in the same way. My brain plays fast and loose with book characters. Most characters start out with a general vibe or color association at best.
Most of the time, I won’t have a solid idea of who the character is until I start writing. That’s somewhat true of any of my RPG characters as well — the character guide is the plan that rarely survives contact with the enemy. The second I speak as the character, all bets are off whether I’ll still be playing the same personality I intended. The difference is, with book characters, I have only the barest hint of a plan going in anyway, so I don’t have a central idea of who the character is to gravitate towards when I’m unsure how they would react.
When I design characters for books, I usually have a better idea of what the plot is than who the characters are. Before taking off with a story at top speed, there’s really only three things I decide on for characters:
A name, because it’s hard to write a character without one. Placeholders will do.
Something they want and at least a vague impression of why
Something keeping them from what they want.
The reason drafting a book takes so long for me is because I’ll go running straight in armed with only this, discover who the character is as I write, then return to the beginning and write it all over again pretending I knew who this character was the whole time.
I don’t feel qualified to talk about character creation because I get the sense this isn’t exactly how it’s meant to be done.
I don’t think every other author has a 20-page document covering their main character’s history before the book was ever drafted, but I’ve always assumed they at least had a semi-solid idea of who their character was.
Thing is, as weird as even I consider my system to be, there is a reason why it ends up being that way.
The longer I give myself to plan, the more I’ll plan. The more I’ll sit and do concept art and do an outline and talk about how the plot probably will go to my friends. The more I’ll think and think and think about it… and never write a single word.
Barebones character design isn’t great, but it helps me get writing. It helps me get started, and the more I write the stronger of an idea I’ll have as to who this character is and how they interact with the world.
Regardless of whether it’s the “right” way to do characters, as far as I’m concerned it’s the right way for me to do characters. I consider it to be a bit like switching to hands-on learning. Some people may do perfectly fine with diagrams and directions, but for me, I’ll never truly understand how something works until it’s in my hands and I can play around with it.
If I’m just as shaky about the plot as I am about the characters, I usually turn to writing prompts to set up an idea of who the characters are and why they act the way they do. Sometimes I’ll do a lot of work to get an idea of what a character is like only for a single line to suddenly change my entire perspective of them.
It’s part of the reason that writing The Cardinal Directive and Sleepless for this blog has been so interesting. I’ve had the idea for Sleepless for a very long time, whereas Cardinal is comparatively very new, and most of the world-building content was created for Cardinal specifically. I have a much more solid idea about who Sleepless’s characters are than Cardinal’s.
I’m still discovering Cardinal’s characters as their world unfurls. I knew I wanted a protagonist named Alison Kheely. I knew she was running from something and all she wanted was peace far from those that would bring the past to catch up to her. I had a vague sense of her being pragmatic, but it didn’t occur to me until later that her ability to be analytical and efficient also meant she was willing to do things others wouldn’t.
I have tried to make character guides for various book characters of mine, but even after I have a more solid idea of who they are it just doesn’t feel right. I’ve tried filling out character questionnaires online, tried world-building programs like notebook.ai, tried keeping sticky notes, and more. None of it ever came out like my tabletop character guides. The few that mimicked that style felt horribly forced and quickly became outdated as I began writing and realized the character I’d ended up with was nothing like the one I’d originally envisioned.
There’s always a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I know nothing about these characters. A feeling that I should know things like what their favorite foods are and what, or what kind of relationship they have with their parents. There’s a nagging perfectionist rattling around somewhere in my brain that insists I haven’t done enough. That I’ve never done enough.
There are definitely things I want to work on regarding this. I’d like to keep a journal or document that at least reminds me of important details about each character that I shouldn’t forget throughout the story. I also want to improve on tying characters to the world they live in so it doesn’t feel like they just popped into existence because I wanted them to.
But I think the point still stands: if it helps you to know what songs your characters sing when they think no one is looking, go for it! But if you’re like me and your brain bluescreens if you stare at a character questionnaire for too long, try just taking whatever you have down about a character and just seeing where it’ll take you. You’ll be surprised how far you can go — just remember to come back and rewrite the original parts like you totally knew the character was gonna be the way they turned out!