Surprised by Characters

I have done it. I’ve signed up for NaNoWriMo. A beautiful friend of mine said, "Why are you not signing up?" And that question just basically stumped me, so I did it. I’m not a coward anymore (well, in this one tiny area, baby steps) 

Freedom.

Yay for beautiful friends :)

So, I’m writing this story and I’ve got a vague notion of where it is heading but the details that are emerging are surprising me. I’ve had two characters pop into the story quite suddenly that I didn’t anticipate. That was quite a remarkable experience. My husband thinks I’m slowly going around the bend and if I start talking about my characters as if they are real people then he’ll truly think I’ve lost it.

However, to make believable characters a writer must imagine them as real. It’s quite an interesting process trying to create a character that is believable as a real person and not just a two dimensional character. It’s like in the movie ‘Inception’ Leonardo di Caprio’s character knows that the woman who appears to him is not real because she’s not as complex as his wife was in real life, she’s not as inconsistent or deep. She morphed into a two-dimensional character and was not believable anymore, even though he wanted her to be.

Real people act in ways that sometimes aren’t easily explainable. We hurt people because we were hurt or we fall madly in love with someone who our best friend just can’t stand. And for the life of us we have the hardest time communicating the simplest concept because the person who we are speaking to continually misunderstands us. We all see things through these amazing lenses that are built since our earliest impressions and memories and grow with each experience, which is so different from everyone else’s. (Woot woot, for taking Sociology and Anthro at Uni)

Of course, all of this background stuff is what the writer needs to know and not necessarily what ends up in the book. Readers can tell if a writer knows what the main character will eat for breakfast, even though it’s never mentioned in the book.