On Character-Building

I'm using my blog to actually write a blog post instead of a story. Unprecedented!

So this whole thing was sparked by a question on my CuriousCat from a friend of mine: "What inspired you to write such deep and nuanced characters? I genuinely would want all of them to be my friends, they feel like real people with real problems but they're also fun. I'd love to hear more about your character creation process :)"

The answer turned out to be... really long, and I talk a bit about how I create and write characters, so I figured that might be a fun thing to put here. So if you're interested in that, here you go!



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My character creation process isn't so much a process as it is sort of an organic mess. When I'm coming up with a POV or major character, I generally don't have anything more than a few personality traits in mind for them from the start, which always get built upon in a snowbally sort of way the more I write that character. For example, here's what I started with for Mari: Extremely outgoing, exhibitionist, has a pregnancy kink, likes linguistics.

In the first story I wrote with her, she was a side character, and those traits were all that she really needed for the story to work, so that was all she was at that point... But then I started writing another story from her perspective, and when we're in her head, she has to be more than a friendly exhibitionist who likes big tummies. So okay, what's the conflict for this story? She can't make rent. Why not? Hmm, well, let's just draw from personal experience and say that she's a broke college student who can't make ends meet on part-time pay while also attending college. Well, why would she have started a degree when she doesn't have any money? Let's say that she was getting money from her dad, but he cut her off. Why would he have done that? Mari really likes showing off her titties and also kissing girls, so maybe he's got an issue with that. If he's got an issue with her being pan, then maybe it could just be because he's super Catholic. Hey, what if Mari ended up being an atheist? That would certainly put a lot of fuel on that fire and could lead to an estrangement.

So from that one starting plot point (Mari can't pay rent) I've got this entire chunk of her background in mind to work off of, and now that I've got that, it can inform her behavior and character in other stories as well. I happen to know who wrote this CuriousCat question (she was subtle enough that I wasn't sure at first and had to ask her, so good job there! Very sneaky) and she's read the draft of that story, but other people reading this who follow me might notice that the story I just described hasn't actually been posted yet. You might notice that those background influences pretty heavily shaped Mari's character in Quiet in the Library, though, which was written after I had already done all that brainstorming.

On the other hand, sometimes my characters are shaped almost entirely by the plot of the story that they're in. Hannah, for instance, was created specifically for Quiet in the Library, and her personality and background changed pretty significantly based solely around what I wanted to happen in that particular story. For example: she was originally going to be married, but the story worked better with her being single, so I changed that.

Another example is... pretty much every character in Amplevine's revenge. That story was very plot-driven, at least for me, and that plot heavily shaped the personalities of basically every character in it. Amplevine is a complete knob who feels entitled to control other people and their bodies because I wanted to write a story about a woman asserting control over what happens to her body against a powerful person who wants to deny her that. He's also pretty damn one-dimensional, because that story didn't really need a complex or sympathetic villain - it just needed a dickhead so that you feel good about it when he fails. Synnøva is rich mostly so that I could use that aspect of her character to talk about the class disparity in Branturhem (worldbuilding!) in part two of the story. She's also smart, because... Well, that one's mostly because I just really like writing clever, assertive women.

So yeah, I guess a tl;dr answer to the question "What's your process for building characters?" is that I just build them up by writing them. Either they're shaped by what I need them to be for the plot to work, or I just start with a characteristic and figure out what would logically lead to that being an aspect of their character, which leads to building up a background that I can use as a resource to build other aspects of their character.