Interviewing characters is like having tea with the voices in my head.
You hear their voices all the time, don’t you? It’s a writer’s curse to hear that whisper in the shower or at 3 am after you worked all day. I decided to begin my writing journey before I put a word down for the books. I started with the people who were going to be in it.
When I first started writing as a teen, my specialty was creating conflicting characters.
I considered character development secondary to the story–character conflicts resulted. Now, this wasn’t the difference between a character driven story and a plot driven story–nothing so advanced. I didn’t find characters as engaging as plot so I focus on the fun and not the hard work. Hard work could have made those early efforts succeed. Conflicting characters bogged me down.
A tactic I discovered too late is this:
Make a bible of your character’s personalities and the big pieces of their description or appearance if they will be found in more than one place.
Sure, I researched the science I wanted to incorporate, I watched videos of combat so I could describe it, I did all the mental work but I didn’t record any of it. I let it all come out organically in the text. This creates character conflicts that jammed up my line by line edit later–example: character has blue eyes in chapter 1 and brown eyes in chapter 10 (and this is only a minor conflict).
That’s my secret. Interview your characters but, also, write down their answers.
My rule is that if the character will appear in more than one place in the book or in another book in the series, they need a profile completed. They need a reference photo to use for describing them each and every time and a consistent profile for reference.
Describe things the same way every time by using an unchanging reference.
Conflicts killed more than one manuscript for me because I created so many issues for myself with descriptions of location, explanation of magical concepts, and character appearance that I got bogged down and discouraged. How could I be a good writer if I created so many contradictions? Correcting them would take almost as much time as rewriting the book.
Keeping textual conflicts to a minimum
Writers helping writers has an incredible series of books that do just that. They give you the tools–actual psychological building blocks–for creating characters that live and breathe for you reader. The trick, it turns out, is to carefully tease out all of their motives and challenges. To make this picture in my mind complete, I interviewed them each with a list of questions and typed out the answers in first person.
I am the monster, the criminal, and the anarchist. My dear, I am either the darkness my world needs or the light it doesn’t understand. This is what is meant by NECESSARY EVIL.
INTERVIEW WITH S.V. BY L.M.J 05/2019
This technique resulted in writer gold.
Interviewing characters i never connected with, suddenly made them clear to me. Trying to imagine for longer than one line of dialogue what the character would say or think–in character, always–gave me insight and made them Real to me. A Real character I interviewed was stronger, more detailed, and more believable than one I hadn’t. Second only to the WHW books, this technique cleaned up my writing habits and made the people in my book… well, People.
I grew up writing books from the story up. It had never occurred to me to write them from the character and the magic system up. These changes resulted in an entire series of books that I’m eager to write.
I care about the interviewed characters and I want to know what happens to them. Here’s hoping they get the chance to tell me.
Now this either means my writing brain is as big as my thinking brain…. or i have completely gone off the deep end and started talking to the voices in my head (but they have such great ideas!!). Of course, I’m still sane here years later so we know it was just my imagination. Thankfully. Part of me is a lot happier knowing the villains I created are just in my mind. 🙂
With love and gratitude,
LMJ