Now that the early promotional fever is somewhat over, I can focus on writing about my writing. It sounds recursive, but then it is not. Indeed, at this point, you may be asking yourselves what else can this site offer other than simple news about the book’s progress. Well, it will not be as hectic as Dedoimedo, but it sure will offer useful, witty articles on the topic of writing now and then, entirely from my personal and biased perspective. And the first one is on characters.

In books, you get characters – your chief protagonists, your arch-enemies, miscellaneous and secondary names used to flesh out the story and add color to the setting, all kinds. As one, they are the fruit of your imagination. And your imagination only has so much in store before it starts recycling. I am not talking about the character variety yet, or how to avoid the pitfalls of the alter ego, which we will discuss separate, I want to give you my angle on the creation of my heroes and heroines, how they go from an idea into a template into a real, living and breathing persons on books’ pages.

Some people begin with the character’s mission or nature. For example, they envision someone as a criminal and then build around the job code. Others perhaps aim for looks; give this or that distinctive visual trait to their protagonist and fuse the personality on top of it. You may also want to look for cultural nuances or flaws, all of which supposedly give uniqueness to your cast.

What I normally do is try to avoid having too much color. In real life, people rarely stand out in the crowd. If you sit down for a coffee in a nice little shop somewhere and then spend an hour in an anthropological study of the people passing by, you will notice that few of them have any special traits. You will not be able to tell almost anything about their intelligence, their passions, their fetishes, their evil. Sure, some will be exceptionally ugly, others will look stupid, now and then you might see someone worth a second glance, but the dirty little secrets of their souls will not be plain written on their faces. The same thing in books. Your villain character does not necessarily have to have a glass eye or a hook instead of a hand or keep humans as pets. That’s too trivial, even childish. In fact, you do not even have to have a villain. Likewise, heroes do not have to be breathtakingly beautiful. Most people are not. Most people are not anything, period. They are just people, selfish, greedy, confused, petty, human.

After deciding on how plain or mundane they will look, I aim for consistency. Your characters may be the average Joes and Janes when it comes to modelling, but you still need to know what they look like at the end of the day. To that end, I try to avoid making up faces, especially when there are so many readily available around us. I use real people for my heroes. In fact, every character has a detailed page with every little thing written down, including height, age, eye and hair colors, physical or personality traits, inventory, notable events or milestones that happen to them throughout the book, etc. This way, I can make sure I do not forget what they are supposed to do and when. And if I do forget what they might look like, I can refer to their help pages, so to speak, and know immediately all about them. Some people like to say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and in this case, it is quite true.

That would be all for now. We will talk again about character variety in a few days.

Stay tuned.