A. Medlin

When I think about writing, I think a lot about character. I think it’s easy to come up with characters, to create whole new people who pilot the worlds of our imaginations. I think it’s easy to conjure up someone who is like us, or not like us, and place them into our stories. I’m not saying that creation is necessarily easy, but characters are limitless, and we can pick whichever ones we want to utilize. I think the hard part comes when our characters take on a mind of their own. Characters are largely controlled by us, the writers. We give them traits and personalities and appearances to interact with other characters and move about in the worlds we’ve conjured up. But sometimes… characters behave in ways we would not expect. Take my character Milton for instance, from DOG DOWN: Milton was originally written to be a sort of foil to Indigo, in which his personality would bring out some of the worst traits in Indigo. However, as the story progressed, Milton started ta...