✨️THINK PIECE✨️CHARACTERS✨️

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 taking on a life of his own—sure, he was still a hard-headed, blunt chihuahua, but in the later half of the novel, he starts to take on more of a mentor-like role with Indigo.

This character deviation was not something I had planned for. Yet… I let Milton take the lead here. I let his personality lead the scene and I let his thoughts come forward.

This character deviation also meant I had to give up the reins a bit, which was, and is, difficult for a lot of writers. We want the story to go the way it was imagined in our minds, and when that doesn’t happen, it can often throw a writer clean off their writing. Character deviations can lead to writers block, or massive amounts of revision sometimes, and this can also be very daunting.

So where was I going with this?

Despite the idea of having a story thrown off its course by characters, characters are integral to the story. There is no story without at least one character, whether that character be a person, thing, animal, concept, thought, idea, etc.

So, in essence, you might as well write anyway—revision is inevitable, editing is inevitable, making necessary changes to your story is absolutely necessary and inevitable. So really, if characters are going to throw another wrench in between you and your completed novel, then go for it anyway!

BE led astray by your characters! You never know what you can accomplish until you team huddle with the people you’ve created to interact with within your world.

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