Muse and Mischief

While our greatest stories resonate in our memories for their epic scale or moral lessons, none of them would have reached the heights they did without great characters. No, really. Without someone for the reader to connect to the events of story would bear little difference to a history textbook, a dry one at that. 

Characters are what helps the words sing out to readers and earn their investment into what is woven through the pages. Creating characters is one of my favorite parts about being an author. 

I think I found my love of creating people back in high school. I had created characters for my amateur attempts at making a comic book before then, but it wasn’t until my sophomore year of high school when I was introduced to Vampire: The Masquerade. 

This blew my mind. I was entranced by the concept of creating a person from nothing and giving them a history, talents, and flaws. I loved making characters and then making my own stories for games. 

Years later in my early twenties when I got into screenwriting, I picked up a book by Linda Seger called Creating Unforgettable Characters. I love that book. I have read it cover to cover at least ten times, and it is always a different experience. Kind of like you can never step in the same river twice, but instead of the book changing it’s me. 

In the mid 2010s I discovered K.M. Weiland’s podcast and bought her book Creating Character Arcs which helped me really understand how to create a foundation for characters beyond their history and general traits. 

I use what I learned from Seger and Weiland when I create any of my characters, including Corrie, the main character for my novella When the Candles Burn. I want to give a brief walk through of how I made her character. As with a lot of characters Corrie started off as a wisp of an idea. I knew I wanted her to be a trans woman because as a trans woman I felt I was in a strong position to tell that story well with not as much research needed. 

I wanted her to have a professional life so I gave her a corporate job where she is out to her coworkers. I wanted her to feel a little lost in her life so she is recently-ish divorced. What I didn’t want was to have it be a cliché situation, so she and her ex-wife have a healthy friendship.

I wanted Corrie to have experience in being a parent which creates some tension with her desire to be seen as a mom. She needed something else, so I made her an artist, painter to be exact. She got her first degree in art, which sets us up to learn more about who she is as a person that got her into the corporate world. 

So, I had a decent sense of who she is now. I had her be in her early 40s, a parent, divorced from a healthy relationship, corporate girl boss with an artistic side, and a trans woman who came out late in life. Then I set about figuring out what made her tick. I need to find, what is called different things by different people, but K.M. Weilland calls it, the Ghost.

The Ghost is something from the character’s past that shapes how they are in the present day. It isn’t always traumatic but can be. For Corrie I wanted it to be something I was familiar with. So, I made her an adult orphan who started losing her parents in her mid 20s. With her being a late in life trans woman this meant that her parents never saw her as Corrie so she would forever be denied that chance at acceptance. This loss heavily impacts who she is and how she moves through life in the story and her character arc. 

That is just a glimpse into my process for creating a character, which also includes a lot of research, because I don’t know everything. It is time consuming and sometimes drives me a little crazy trying to get all the puzzle pieces together. But when they finally all fit, such a great rush. 

The best part of putting all this work in is that sometimes the character takes over while I’m writing and leads me in a direction that is truer to them than what I had planned out. I am addicted to that feeling…which is probably why I’ve never tried cocaine. 

Characters do more than carry the story to its conclusion. They also carry us as readers to help lift us higher than where we were before, whether that is by enlightenment or catharsis. The really great characters take us somewhere amazing that we won’t soon forget. Who are your favorite characters? Which one has the best journey?