Designing a Character

A Strong Cast Makes or Breaks the Story.
 I suppose every author eventually figures out their own process for developing characters. It’s such an important part of writing fiction. Here is a closer look at my journey to discovering my process.
 I have this small note mounted above my desk. It reads: Characters drive the story. Conflict makes them interesting. Show don’t tell.
 When I first started writing Bag of Lies, I knew the characters would make or break my story, but I wasn’t sure how I was going to design them. I guess I approached the process like many amateur writers who don’t know what they’re doing. I started with several vague ideas and went from there. 
 I needed a villain: someone dark and sinister. I needed a hero. He had to be likable, someone my readers could connect with. But I also wanted him to be believable as a person. He needed a few character flaws to make him feel more human. I tried pulling these details from thin air, but I quickly realized I needed a more concrete way of doing this. 
 After several weeks of researching how other authors develop characters and exploring which methods might work for me, I settled on a process. Here is what I figured out. 
 I was struggling so much with a blank slate. I had to start with a structure. First I selected one or two people I knew. I thought I might use them as a starting point to create a fictional character. They needed to have similar personalities and mannerisms. I then merged the two into a single personality that could represent a bare-bones structure that I could then build on. I didn’t limit myself to people I knew in real life. I quickly started identifying characters from movies and books that had made an impression on me and started blending them into the mix. I was careful not to duplicate a specific fictional character. They needed to be my own. But like a cook in a kitchen, I started pulling ingredients from shelves and cupboards. 
 About 4 chapters into my first draft, I hit a breakthrough that made a huge difference. Up until that point, anytime I needed to add a physical detail to a character into a specific paragraph, I just randomly made it up as I wrote. Then I’d have to spend all this time going back to what I had already written to make certain that none of my details conflicted with each other. “Wait a minute. Did Michael have blue eyes? Or were they brown?”
 Many of you may already know, but in case you didn’t, I’m a photographer, digital artist, and painter. So the idea hit me. What if I create a visual representation of my characters? 
When I need a specific detail, I could just look at that character’s portrait and describe what they look like. I could match these character drawings to their personality profiles, and suddenly I have a fleshed-out fictional character. Suddenly they came to life for me. I wasn’t guessing or making things up as I went along. 
 So I stopped writing for a few weeks and started creating a cast of character portraits. One had red hair, another black. One was bald, another fat. Each drawing held something unique that caused them to stand out from the others. Then I started pairing them up with personalities and mannerisms. I was really getting somewhere. 
 The final touch was like putting the icing on a cake. One afternoon the epiphany fell from the sky. Each of them needed their own identifiable quirk: some kind of mannerism, speech pattern, or characteristic to set them apart. This element would make the characters memorable and able to stand on their own while part of an ensemble. 
 All of these little steps made such a huge difference for me. By the time I jumped back into finishing the first draft of the manuscript, I was already falling in love with these wonderful characters. It didn’t take long for them to take on a life of their own. Again and again, I found myself asking, “So what would Flint do here?” “How would Ichabod handle this?” Before I knew it, the entire novel went in a direction I had not expected. It was a much better story when I stepped back and let the characters do what they wanted to do. It sounds crazy, but once I created the characters and got out of the way, they did most of the work. The novel turned out so much better than I’d hoped for. I knew the concept was interesting and it would make a good book. But who knew it would turn out to be such a page-turner. Of course, my editor and proofreading team also helped polish my book into an even more amazing epic adventure.