By Anna Bell
Where do you start when you create new characters? Their personality? Their looks? Their back story?
Ever so slowly, I’m starting to think about my next series of books. I’m letting the plot and characters of my new idea protrude into my thoughts when I’m out dog walking and slowly, like coffee dripping through a percolator, the characters are building in my mind. It has been almost two years since I last created a new main character, as I’ve been writing two book series for the last four years. I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to start from scratch with a totally blank canvas.
The first hurdle I fall at is that my female characters start off with some very similar features to myself or to my friends. It’s my natural default position. Millie from Millie and the American Wedding has quite a few of my personality traits, and one of my friends said that they had to remind themselves in Don’t Tell the Groom that the main character was Penny and not me.
Creating the right personality is difficult – trying to get a balance between distinctive and likeable is tricky. I think when you’re reading a romantic comedy, you want the protagonist to be someone you’d imagine to be your friend. There’s a fine line between ‘loveable and a bit ditzy’ and ‘annoying and stupid’. The same goes for the heroes – whilst a little bit of arrogance is sometimes sexy, you want to fall in love with the hero along with the heroine, and too much arrogance can be a turn off. The problem, if you play it too safe in the likeable stakes, is that it can sometimes come across like the character is dull and unformed.
Once I’ve got the personality of a character, I then move onto the looks. This is the bit I hate as I find it difficult not to base a character’s appearance on that of someone I know. A lot of my characters seem to have unruly frizzy or curly hair at first (ahem – I wonder where I get that idea from). For me, it’s a little like my preference for reading a book before I see a film; if I do it the other way around, I can only see the actors as the characters, and not how I imagine them. Once I’ve got a real life person in my head cast as one of my characters, it’s hard to shake them off.
In the past, I’ve often jumped straight into stories and not given the personalities and physical appearance of my characters much thought until I started writing. Letting my characters develop slowly is perfect for me – it enables me to refine them and make sure I don’t fall at my usual hurdles. I’m also going to start making notes quite soon and writing character profiles to get to know them all before I start chapter one.
How do you go about creating new characters?
