Making people up.

Character creation is one of my favorite things about writing fiction.

It’s a two-part process, really. First comes the inspiration, then comes the development.

Inspiration is easy enough. I need a person — either a main character to do all the things, or someone to support or thwart the main character.

I usually get a quick flash of someone, something basic and simple. He/she is about this old, married or dating or single, this tall and looks like this or this, and wants to help/hurt the main character or IS the main character because of X. In just a moment or two I have a usable sketch of someone to add in to the story where they need to go.

That’s the inspiration part.

Next comes development. That part starts before I start writing, and depending on the character’s role in the story, it can keep happening as I write, as I edit, and sometimes even as I work on plotting sequels, new parts of these people slowly come clearer. If I just need someone for Ian to feed on or Alexa to argue with, the sketch is plenty good. A few added details might help me flesh out their behavior, but otherwise, someone who reminds me of someone I know is good enough.

The supporting characters — and the main villains — take more work. The inspiration part is great, but I need more.

I need to know about how old the character is, how they grew up, if they have siblings, their relationship with their parents and grandparents, if they’re religious, and if so, what religion and how devout, if they have pets or even like animals, what they do for hobbies in their down time, what they do for work, if they still work, what their home looks like, what kind of schooling they might have, how they dress, how they talk, what kind of friends/lovers/enemies they have and how they met them or how they lost them. I have to get inside my imaginary peoples’ heads and really get to know them. I like to know how they take their coffee if they drink it, what kind of wine they might like if they drink it, what their favorite movie is, if their handwriting is sloppy or tidy, how they might feel about the climate crisis.

A ton of this information will never make it into the actual books, because really, what does a character’s wine preference have to do with whether they’re going to kill the main character or have sex with her? If they’re having drinks and the main character would notice what kind of wine they order, then it might come up. A fight to the death doesn’t exactly lead to a nice glass of merlot later. But knowing whether the character drinks wine and what kind they like (or a hundred other silly little details) helps me flesh them out and makes it easier for me to predict how they would act and react in different situations.

Another favorite exercise of mine is imagining character cross-over between stories. What would Alexa and Ian have to say to each other? Probably not much; Alexa would be a little too uncomfortable to talk to Ian, and Ian would be able to sense Alexa’s discomfort and maybe try too hard to put her at ease. What about Malthiar and Monique? Malthiar would probably have a ton of inappropriate questions for Monique, who would feel weird and awkward around him and not want to answer, which would make Malthiar peevish and more likely to pick on her just to get a response, which would make Monique more uneasy.

I also like imagining meeting my characters, and whether or not we would actually get along. I think Ian and I would be good friends, but I don’t think Alexa and I have a ton in common. Malthiar and I would probably have a good time together, and I’d be terrified to meet Specter. Of course, Specter would eat me rather than meet me at all ever, so, yeah. No thanks.

I definitely put a good dose of people that I know into my characters, too. Some of my characters’ personalities are aspects of me, my experiences and anecdotes, my wants and dislikes and quirks. I love when people tell me their stories or anecdotes, because I absolutely store them away to use for my characters later. Part of the reason I decided Kent worked at a circus with elephants in his younger vampire days is because a friend of mine worked with elephants at the Renaissance Festival for five years, and his stories were great. Some of my characters are my friends and family, sometimes that annoying woman who wouldn’t quit demanding to speak to the manager at work.

And yes, I do take aspects of people I know and put them into my villains. Although, I’ll be honest, it’s less cathartic for me and more just to make the villains believable. World domination is all well and good for video game or cartoon villains, but a real villain thinks they have your best interests in mind and won’t keep their nose out of your business — like that annoying relative at Thanksgiving. And not all of my villains die in my stories — I’ve learned that bad people might go away, but they pretty much never learn to change their ways, and they just go around doing what they do to other people. It seems insincere to kill all the baddies all the time. Of course some of them need to die, but never all of them.

Something I’ve noticed about being a writer — being observant when it comes to people is super important. Quirks and mannerisms, the way people behave versus how they think of themselves, the things they say as opposed to what they actually do. Writing believable characters has everything to do with noticing how real people are, rather than just using tropes and cliches.

For example, I knew several girls in high school who longed to be “manic pixie dream girls” — the love interest trope in so many rom-coms. They didn’t have much in the way of dreams for themselves, they flitted from idea to idea, art project to art project, and tried to be there for the people around them while not being too serious themselves. All of them had emotional break-downs and had to learn to be real people, instead of some sort of light-hearted, soulless cliche. It’s a cute trope, but in real life, it has nasty consequences. To write believable characters, I need to be more privy to real life people, and not cliches.

I’ll tell you what though — when you put your heart and soul into making imaginary people, and try to make them as true to life as possible, sometimes they walk off and do things you didn’t expect. I find this both very frustrating and very gratifying. Frustrating because it can totally kill my plot and force me to have to re-think my entire sequence of events.

Gratifying because it means that subconsciously, I have grasped who this person really is, and how a person like this would actually behave in real life, instead of how I consciously expect them to act. And it nearly always adds to the story in ways I couldn’t have expected or planned. I’ve never had a character walk off and do something weird that I needed to somehow rein in — it’s always added a knot to the story that makes everything a little more interesting and complicated.

At any rate, building a person to fill a character hole is a lot more involved and complex than just “age, gender, eye color, height.” Even if that person just interacts with the main characters for a few minutes, I need to know a decent amount about them.

But it’s totally one of my favorite things.