Writing Advice - Characters

First, a disclaimer. I'm not published, so take anything I say with a heavy helping of salt. In the same vein, though, what works for one person doesn't always work for another, so even if I were published and famous (haha), the things I said were good wouldn't necessarily be good for everyone. I'm hesitant enough to post this anyway, because I feel it does sound a tad pretentious for someone that's simply a wannabe to tell others how they should be doing it.

But enough of that.

Characters, for me, tend to make or break a story. I can't care about a story if I can't care about the characters in it.

Characters aren't made, they just exist. I know that sounds bad, because you're going to say that they're fictional and so someone has to make them up. Yes, to a point. I have my main characters, Nicholas, Stephen, and the rest. But I didn't sit down and say "this is what they're like". Let me tell you what I DID do, way back when, to the extent that I can remember.

I didn't start out by saying Nicholas was going to be good/bad, kind/cruel, or any of it. I started with, I wanted him to be poor, a father with strong political opinions, and working for the government, and I think that's about the extent that I started with.

His PERSONALITY, wasn't something that I intentionally created. I just started writing stories about him. I still have most of them here on my laptop. They're not very good stories, but they helped to make him a character. He's a father, and he wants to be a good one. To be a good father, he feels that he needs to be able to feed and clothe his children. When he cannot do this well, enough, it makes him extremely frustrated. It makes him angry at the government that is denying him the money that he feels he is entitled to. What do people do when they're angry about a situation, or with a group of people? They want to change the situation, using whatever means possible. For Nicholas, this ultimately means going against the government.

You can't GIVE your characters a personality. Or rather, you can, but don't expect them to be believable or likeable or for them to be any more than cardboard cut-outs. They'll be patchwork quilts of the things that you wanted to make them. And what's worse, as you write more and more, it will become painfully obvious that they're NOT what you intended them to be. Because as you gain talent as a writer, these things just start to come naturally. So you'll be saying "Princess Fairydust is vain but self-confident" and what your story will show is that Princess Fairydust is actually neither vain nor self-confident, and then you lose your readers.

My characters all live in my head. Every last one of them, major and minor, the ones from the last rewrite and the ones that dropped out several rewrites ago. They're all still there, because they're all real people to me. I could imagine walking down the hall of my dorm and running into them. I wouldn't necessarily WANT to, but they're just as real to me as flesh-and-blood people are to me.

I don't just think about my characters when I'm writing. I think about them all the time. I could be in the store picking up some soup and suddenly think about something Nicholas or Stephen might say. Their lives are NOT restricted to the story that I write. They exist outside of it. They are bigger than the story.

The story exists because of them, they don't exist because of the story.

Major characters don't ever exist because of a story. A story exists because of the major characters. That's something else that you don't seem to get. Characters come first, a plot follows naturally after you've got characters. That's why I have about 20 short stories on my computer, none of which are even very relevant now, but all of which helped to create the personality of my characters. Once they're real people, certain plots just become self-evident and you couldn't force a plot on them any more than you could radically alter the direction of my life just by telling me so.

And yes, you might say there is a difference because I write with characters in "the real world" and if you're a fantasy writer. I say, that doesn't matter a whit. They still need to be real. I wrote a fantasy for Nano. I don't think that it's particularly good, but I still did it the same way that I started writing the novel-from-hell. I picked my main characters, gave them a sentence-long biography, and then started writing short stories about them.

Put characters in situations and find ways to get them out of them. That's how you "build their personality". Sure, other writers might have a better way of doing it. But what I do know is that just "giving" your characters qualities, is NOT going to work. It just isn't. It's not going to give you characters that anyone can relate to, that anyone can believe in.